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.
4d ago
I haven't looked into this but, uh, define "drone components". I used to be a hobbyist quadrotor pilot and assembled my own quadrotors from off the shelf parts and kits. I simply do not see how the government could possibly prevent me from doing that with the authority it has.
UAS Critical Components: For the purpose of this determination, the term “UAS critical components” includes but is not limited to the following UAS components and any associated software:
- Data transmission devices
- Communications systems
- Flight controllers
- Ground control stations and UAS controllers
- Navigation systems
- Sensors and Cameras
- Batteries and Battery Management Systems
- Motors
Whether it includes all these if they aren't claimed to be part of a UAS is yet to be seen. But it would be hard to claim flight controllers or ground control stations aren't. A car controller isn't very useful for an aircraft.
The FCC has authority over anything that emits radio waves, but in order to use the FCC to ban drones you would need to ban, essentially, all RC vehicle controllers (totally eliminating the entire RC car, aircraft, and quadrotor hobbies) and wireless video transmitters (eliminating every single thing where people want to watch a camera on a screen without wires).
Yes, and I expect eliminating the RC aircraft hobby is intentional; like I said, they want to reduce the amount of possibly-innocent flying objects.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
A state pension means that the government is taking from taxpayers and paying the old.
A "pension" in the US is deferred compensation, generally the term implies a defined benefits plan. Once you've been employed for the requisite period, the employer (whether public or private) is obliged to make the payments when you get old. At a cash accounting level this is the same as taking from the taxpayers and paying the old, but it's a matter of paying a debt owed, not a subsidy.
This is complicated by the way some of the public pensions were attained -- union delivers votes to politicians in exchange for pension benefits -- which taints the process, but barring things like that, a pension is an obligation owed the former employee.
In most other Anglophone countries what the US calls "social security" is called a "pension".
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
We're very bad at dealing with repeated objectively horrible decision making at the individual level.
There's a mechanism that's good at that; call it the "invisible iron fist". But we do our best to prevent it from operating.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Geofencing is practical with participating manufacturers and users; you could use it to keep every fool who just got back from Best Buy with a new drone from flying it over the nearby airport, military base, whatever. It doesn't do anything against intentional bad actors, because the geofencing can be removed (as it often was when DJI was doing it) or if they manage to lock that down completely the flight controller completely replaced with one you can run open-source software on (as many do). And there is even a flight controller which can accept open source software which is (allegedly, I wouldn't be surprised if it's fraud) made in the US, so the recent ban wouldn't even make bad actors smuggle.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002)
They basically just re-passed the same law struck down here, and have been avoiding scrutiny by only charging people who were already incentivized to plea bargain. Apparently the idea is that if the law is around for a long time before it gets seriously challenged again (in a virtual child porn case not involving anything else), the courts will forget all about Ashcroft and convict. Might work.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Hence the scare quotes around "solved". Though I think they actually have thought of that; they are trying to reduce the attack surface and make the bad actors more visible by eliminating the majority of the innocent actors with the same technology. That way they know anyone with a drone (who isn't on their good-boy list) is bad.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
People aren't getting most of their premiums back. The healthcare system is getting most of the premiums rather than the insurance system, and it's not showing up as profit, but rather being paid to support the health care bureaucracy.
ETA: And sometimes the same entity is on both sides of the transaction, as @yunyun333 points out.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
If I’m an American citizen (only) and want to become a diplomat or a military submarine captain or a central banker, I pretty much have to work for the government. Making it so that if you want to be a doctor, you (mostly) have to work for the government is no different.
Yes, if you want to become a diplomat (in a non-shithole country, anyway) it's good to have contributed a lot to the party in power. Like I said, corruption. Not sure how that's responsive to my issue, which is that your "negotiation" will consist of politicians negotiating doctor's reps with other people's money.
The politicians in single payer systems often stand up against paying doctors more because they know that if they do they have to pay all public sector workers more
They actually don't have to pay all public sector workers more. But if they did... eh, it's not their money.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
The Trump Administration has "solved" the drone problem another way. They've abused an FCC regulation and banned all new model drones and drone components that aren't made in the US. Since there are currently no domestic civilian drones, nor as far as I know transmitters or receivers or motors, this "solves" the problem. US-manufactured drones with a fully US supply chain will be cost-prohibitive for anyone who isn't using them to replace a helicopter. And domestic companies can be leaned on by the DoD and DHS to track their customers and keep quantities limited.
In the future, a little child I know will have no idea what’s behind the smirk when I snatch their little drone out of the air, or why I insist on putting a jolly roger sticker onto it.
In the future, the little child won't have a drone. As for the jolly roger sticker, I thought about buying some to put on my model helicopters where the FAA ID should go, but I didn't bother.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
I think you mean to say that cities are fertility shredders.
They're called IQ shredders (by those who do) because the smart people move to the city and don't reproduce there, thus providing selection against IQ on a population basis.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
I've been "prescribing" smoking and lead for obesity for many years now. Perhaps eventually the powers-that-be will be desperate enough to try it. Probably not in my lifetime. (And I hate the stink of cigarettes anyway, and they DO kill you, so maybe work on that? I'm not sure if vapes work as well though, someone should do a study)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
The Obamacare plans in New Jersey are so bad that there's a lot of self-pay involved. The problem is you can't just self-pay it all (or self-pay and buy catastrophic coverage). You still have to pay the sky-high premiums for basically nothing.
But Democrats are dead-set against any rollback of universal, comprehensive, coverage with no real underwriting, and the Republicans don't care enough. And no one but evil libertarians wants to let anyone die because they can't afford treatment, even if that treatment is hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. So the only solution available is the only solution that was ever available, which is more socialism. With the usual failing result, but that doesn't make it go away, it's a positive feedback loop.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
Single payer will stop medical development and reduce care quality while not reducing costs at all.
whereas the US under a single payer system would probably still have the highest medicine pay of any major country, it just wouldn’t be so much higher because one central employer could negotiate centrally
When it's single payer it's not really negotiating any more. It's lobbying... and corruption. The common pattern with such monopolies is the union or association negotiates not with the government itself but the politicians. The politicians are happy to pay for favors for themselves with government money. Since there's a concentrated benefit (the union/association members, who are generally politically popular) and distributed cost (taxpayers), the union/association wins every time.
This won't occur with things like drug development because those companies are very unpopular; they can offer money but won't have enough to offer in terms of votes compared to the populist who says he's going to fix the prices of new drugs. And since the regulatory framework obviously isn't going away, drugs will be as expensive or more to develop. The US is now basically subsidizing the result of the world in drug development because of this. If the US goes to single payer, no one will be paying, so drug development will simply cease. The same will go for other expensive new treatments.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
What will the future of the US healthcare system look like?
Single payer, with the costs (paid by taxes) ballooning like they now do in the US, the waiting times ballooning like they do in Canada, and British-style dental care. Good news is we'll probably reduce old-people medical care with essentially-mandatory US MAID. And drug development will probably be cut back. The problem is that socialism is a one-way street; it's easy to get more but it tends to take an existential crisis to move it back. And there's always a constituency for more socialism -- anyone who wants more of what someone else has, or is perceived to have.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
Nicotine may be bad for fertility-per-sex-act, but I'll bet smoking is good for sex-act-per-unit-time. And drinking is good for increasing number of sex acts (up to a point, whiskey dick helps no one) and skipping contraception.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
As a society, we desperately need to re-taboo drinking, smoking, toking, and adultery.
At least all but toking are positively associated with the creation of children. (Maybe toking too)
We should take a precautionary approach to new compounds rather than the "generally recognized as safe" approach.
A precautionary approach means stagnation and ultimately being defeated by those who do not take it.
We should re-segregate society so that married men and women are no longer exposed to temptations outside of the home. (Which includes gender-segregated social circles, workplaces, and social media.)
So people who get married are required to lose half their social circle? Since if we have segregation BEFORE marriage, it's going to be a bit hard to make marriages come about.
You're going after the wrong problems. It isn't smoking, drinking, or adultery which is holding down TFR. Probably isn't estrogenic compounds either. TFR was higher before prohibition when the saloon culture existed, and higher during the 50s-70s when people smoked like chimneys.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
It's a reference the the aphorism (often attributed to Oscar Wilde) that you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies. The idea is that if this fraud upsets right-wing people, Tim Walz will gain as a result, because for most of the voters of Minnesota, having those people as enemies is a positive good.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
Stranger Things has been circling the drain for many seasons. It did its woke turn several seasons ago by making Robin a lesbian, which made Will's Big Gay Reveal anticlimactic. The best line in the finale is a repeat of young Will saying "I just want this to be over" shortly after the climax; he speaks for much of the audience, I suspect.
Keep in mind that the Duffer Brothers are younger than the characters they created; they are not Generation Xers; they're early millennials, born in 1984. This was not a story made out of nostalgia for a time period they remembered -- rather, only a time period they'd heard of. To the actual class of '89, Heather has Two Mommies was a joke; to the Duffer brothers, it was assigned reading. The show started out more as nostalgia for Spielberg movies rather than the time period itself.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
Punishing people for taking part in an armed conflict is a war crime.
Certainly it is not. In fact, one of the most well-defined crimes in the US Constitution is just that. I imagine the British have similar crimes.
She can be punished for things she has done, she can't be collectively punished for crimes committed by her faction in a war.
She can be punished for joining that faction.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6d ago
Too many to count; the issue is that, like face guy's proposals, you'll reject them because they involve some measure of browbeating prescribed to non-men.
The usual dodge here is "Both have to change. Now, let's start with the men..."
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6d ago
Male writers tend much more towards smaller age gaps between men and women, and try to avoid power differentials; female writers definitely do not. It is extremely rare for a male author to have a male character date his students, proteges, trainees, etc.
I'm pretty sure this reflects only on what is acceptable in the publishing industry.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6d ago
If literally any solution that inconveniences or upsets women is a nonstarter then it's not getting solved until we hit an actual crisis point.
Yes. But the precondition seems to be true and as South Korea shows, any crisis point is far off.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6d ago
Yes, but as far as I'm concerned that's all a loss. Execution is brutal and should appear brutal. The question for jurors when prosecuting someone for a capital crime should indeed be something like "Am I OK with the state cutting this guy's head off". Similarly, for the execution to provide sufficient substitute for the private retribution it replaces, it should be brutal if the brutality is justified.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6d ago
I was thinking firing squads would be reserved for military executions.
These things CAN be produced domestically, but it can't be done economically, so there won't be large numbers of hobbyists any more. It is also likely the DHS and DoD expect to be able to lean on any domestic manufacturers to refuse to produce these, or to nerf them in some way.
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