The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
Yes, if we're talking about maximum personal evil, I think there are far better candidates among the Nazis. Joseph Mengele or Amon Göth being the names that immediately come to mind. Both very intelligent men by all accounts, and fit into both categories 1 and 2 -- that is, they did evil because they enjoyed it, but they also were working towards other ends.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
The DJI company was banned, but also all new models of non-American UAS (drone) parts. There's a lot of drone parts that American companies simply don't make, or don't make except for a few small companies who do it for the defense industry only. Transmitters and receivers, flight controllers, servos, and motors. Motors probably don't need FCC certification, servos are general-use items, but flight controllers and transmitters are pretty drone-specific.
Yes agreed. I'm shocked we haven't seen a jailbroken LLM finetuned on chemistry textbooks and old anarchist-explosive making books developed for the purpose of democratizing energetic creation and particularly blasting cap development.
The problem isn't the knowledge; you can get that anywhere. The problem is
1) Getting precursor chemicals.
and
2) Not blowing yourself up making the stuff.
Number 2 is probably the larger. Electronics is easy, chemistry (especially explosives chemistry) requires a lot of washing and temperature control (often cooling and heating at the same time, as with nitroglycerin) and very careful control of impurities (e.g. if you're making an azide propellant, it doesn't take much lead getting mixed in to end up with a primary explosive. Which might be a good thing, but only if you intend it). Anyone using AI starting from zero is either going to (most likely) produce nothing or just blow themselves up.
Once you've made the stuff, putting it into a useful form is an art of its own, but a bit less fraught.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Unless of course the buses are driving "voters" from polling station to polling station to vote at each one. But that's more a US city thing than Brazilian.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
The policies that Trump has that would drive immigrants away are not the policies of the prior Republican administrations who still lost the immigrant vote by supermajorities.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
But really lousy at stealing elections. By the vote totals, he didn't need the extra two hours, but the re-opening of voting (not extension, since the decree didn't go out until the polls closed) removed all plausible deniability. He still succeeded, but it was a total bodge job.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Building a drone is both simple AND easy and legally safe, compared to building a gun. And there's no need to jailbreak mass produced consumer drones because there's no jail to break in most cases.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
FPV drones are for most intents and purposes illegal to fly (you can technically do so with a spotter keeping it in line of sight, or with a hard to obtain license). However, there's no law against building one, and the FAA has not nearly enough enforcement capacity to do anything about it if you do fly it. Rigging them to drop things is legal, though actually dropping something from it isn't, but again, no enforcement capacity. The Trump administration banned many drone parts using the FCC, but this too is unlikely to actually have any effect. The limit remains getting the grenades.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Jordan Salinas proved you wrong.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Parkland involved one cowardly retirement-age School Resource Officer, whereas Uvalde involved a bunch of worse-than-cowardly full-fledged cops. Much easier to dismiss the former as an aberration.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
The Columbine shooting doesn't fit much of this, despite having been originally reported as doing so.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Why do people engage in culture war though?
Because you may not be interested in the culture war, but the culture war is interested in you. Consider the example of a male tech employee seeing the proposal being mooted that "any male tech employee accused of sexual harassment against a woman should simply be fired, because it will be easier on them to find a job than it would on the woman to deal with the investigation". Does this seem like a wise thing for him to simply let pass by?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
And most of all for modern "anti-fascism" and the entire culture war, Dolores Umbridge is considered a villain.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
At least in the TV series, Jon Snow's "going off to train and grow" was his time north of the wall.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6d ago
Some people have freedom sans responsibility, others responsibilities and very limited freedom; this is a part of anarcho-tyranny.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6d ago
Google NYC, but they took some pains to keep them segregated from the (symbolically) unwashed mostly-male SWEs.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6d ago
It's in It's a Wonderful Life (but note George is no neophyte; he actually has done things) and probably some but not all of the Superman origin stories, but Peter Parker refusing to stop a robber who later kills Uncle Ben is Spider Man's defining moment, and is definitely not about him being already wonderful.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6d ago
Yes, the Alien queen is most definitely female. Not sure about the facehuggers and chestbursters. I'm sure there's a description of the Xenomorph's lifecycle somewhere on the web....
Ah, here. Doesn't look like sex would apply to the facehugger, it's basically disposable. It doesn't appear there are any males in the genetic sense, canonically.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6d ago
2010s feminists didn't want tech companies to staff their teams with skinny blondes either.
Oddly enough, skinny blondes were fairly common among the female tech employees in the office I was in. Mostly data scientists from Eastern Europe.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6d ago
We don't know what happens after Cinderella marries the Prince, but you actually could make a Karate Kid type story out of that, with her stepmother and stepsisters unwittingly playing the role of Mr. Miyagi in making her competent through adversity. But of course, that's not IN the story.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6d ago
No. Most superhero fiction is about men who are ridiculously competent and powerful... but alas have enemies to match. And in the origin stories, they tend to have to become wonderful people. Peter Parker has to make a moral error which kills his Uncle Ben in order to learn. Superman has had more origin stories than I can count, but in many of them as a boy he uses his powers selfishly and has to be corrected. Batman's origin story is creating himself from nothing but money and his butler after the death of his parents.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6d ago
And to be honest, I always thought Asimov just sucked at characterization in general. His characters are mostly hooks to hang a plot on.
Asimov was known for a very spare, plot driven writing style which literary types absolutely hate. But as many have pointed out, he did characterization just fine...,as long as you count robots as characters. His most character driven story is probably the novelette "The Bicentennial Man", but even the short stories had memorable characters like Nestor-10.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
7d ago
As has been said before, “If freedom entails responsibility, most people don’t want to have anything to do with it.” They’ll argue for their privileges more than they ever will their rights, but there are no rights without duties and there are no duties without rights.
99 times out of 100, someone making this argument is looking to saddle someone with duties without rights. Perhaps the duties come now and the rights come in some forbidden future, or perhaps the duties by nature circumscribe the rights to near-nothing. It's an anti-freedom argument.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
7d ago
"Toxic masculinity" is (IMO) intentional equivocation. The phrase "toxic masculinity" can either refer to a particular subclass of masculinity, or it can be describing all masculinity as "toxic", in the way of a poetic epithet. Academics pretend to mean the former, but it is clear that the phrase is intended to assert the latter.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8d ago
Jessica Fletcher? OK, maybe it's only me who'd want to punch her at least three times an episode.
Black Widow from the Avengers. Any number of "La Femme Nikita" type characters would work. They all do tend to be portrayed more sympathetically than House, though House is an extreme among male characters. So it probably can be done, but it's harder to do.
We've largely set up our society so the incentives are such that criminal action is punished and beneficial action is rewarded. Crime does not, in fact, typically pay. And the smarter you are, the better you are at figuring this out. So we'd expect there to be anticorrelation of IQ and crime just for that. We also expect that high-IQ people who do commit crimes tend to commit those for which the risk/reward ratio is much better than for low-IQ people, and I think we see that too.
Exacerbating this is that criminal action is punished more and beneficial action rewarded more for smarter people. Any sort of crime (though some categories more than others) can put you in a category where you are unable to use your intelligence to make money legally, for instance, because you will be denied jobs, licenses, etc. And of course the better jobs tend to only be available for smarter people in the first place. So not only do smart people evaluate the incentives better, they have stronger incentives against crime.
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