VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3hr ago
Grey's anatomy
Christian Grey is the title character of Fifty Shades of Grey, not Anatomy.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
It is done occasionally at smaller scales. Although the example that comes to mind is the NYC building that partially collapsed over the summer while they were trying to do so; obviously not all roses.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Unless you attach the outer end to the pole, or use some unusually stiff cloth, it will partially unwrap like you see in the example here. But not impossible, I suppose.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Worth noting that, AFAIK, none of them consider themselves "trans" either: the eligibility rules here don't purely exist to handle transgender athletes.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
The American flag, at least, is prominently blue on top with white stars when hung on a vertical pole like this. Flipping it would make the top section red-and-white striped, and look IMO completely wrong.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
An increasing number of sports bodies, at least at the world level, are adopting genotype-based eligibility rules, maybe with some theoretical exceptions that are probably impossible in practice.
I've seen at least a few people argue "let the sports bodies decide", only to change course once those bodies disagreed with them, but maybe many have quietly accepted those decisions.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
property tax revenue from rental properties and second homes, which don't get the homestead exemption.
For long-term rentals, this presumably does get passed on as increased rent. It could be acceptable policy, I suppose, but I would describe that as "actually live there" too. Perhaps the incentive here to buy a home is fine, but worth considering directly.
Passing it on to Airbnbs sounds fine, though.
If we're embracing "brute-force utilitarianism", we might as well shuck anything other than heteronormativity from school curricula anyway. Why should we care about the concerns of small minorities? The greater good is at stake!
We shouldn't do so, obviously.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
connotations of literal pedophilia,
I don't think it outweighs the rest of the argument, but it seems relevant that certain parts of the mainstream center-right remain deeply uneasy about the comfort of the Pride folks with, for lack of a better term, age gap relationships within their communities. To their credit, they did largely kick out NAMBLA, but stories like Milo's are not exactly uncommon.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
They also won't let kids of 17 and 11 share a tent these days, for similar reasons.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
The term "Nintendo hard" usually refers to games from the early 90s. Nintendo makes a lot of more approachable titles these days (although some of the completionist features remain quite hard).
I have mixed feelings on difficulty changes.
I wouldn't have had the vocabulary to describe it 20 years ago, but I think the uncanny valley element might still have been there. I can only claim a casual familiarity with figure drawing references like Loomis, but the proportions are very male. Waist-to-shoulders, arm length, hand size seem wrong, for example.
But it's not inconceivable that it's just an artist that has different ideal proportions (there is variance: see Reubens), maybe on the basis of their surroundings, or that the classic texts aren't being taught. There is a decent variance within the population, too: serious women's rugby players look different than gymnasts or runners.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
He would definitely be an exception, sure. Looking closer, there were maybe a few others as well.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Finished Seveneves. Still only a "meh". Last third felt like a worldbuilding exercise without a clear point. The events of the first few pages never really got a satisfactory conclusion, and past a certain point just stopped getting mentioned. Also it's really long, and didn't need 800+ pages.
Starting As I Lay Dying, not far enough to have an opinion yet.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
No scout troop for males only.
Last I checked, for the troop level, units are still single-gender. I think they were trying a true co-ed troop concept recently, but decided against it. There are some pairs of boy/girl troops that meet at the same place and interact quite a bit, but at least around here it's less than half of them, I think. There are also all-girl units. From talking to some friends who are leaders, starting a girls unit can be difficult just because of the number of people you need to commit to regular involvement (IIRC 5 registered adult leaders and at least one female leader present at all activities with female youth).
The other levels like Cub Scouts are co-ed, as is Venturing (which has been for a long time). The Cub Scouts are mostly too young to care about it, and other than having a lot more girls present at larger events, it seems a lot like it did when I was a kid.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
I use "God willing" in English occasionally. The meaning "except if prohibited by Providence" is otherwise a bit difficult to phrase.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
I'm not going to claim to be an expert on this, but all the descriptions I've read have given me the understanding that it was about religion only in the "deeper cultural substrate" sense, although not completely decoupled from the actual churches.
I recall someone here referencing a joke about whether a victim was "a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist". Similarly, the Unionists didn't always seem keen to listen to, well, the Union side, of which the Queen was head of state.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
Control software for cold gas thrusters that can be throttled arbitrarily up and down is probably easy by comparison.
It's not clear from the video, but it'd be interesting to see whether they're regulating the high-pressure air to a constant thrust, or just accepting that thrust varies as the tank empties. The former loses efficiency and adds weight, but the latter has a lot of added "fun" in the controls math.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
It’s about a much deeper cultural substrate. It’s about much deeper questions of identity and belonging.
This sounds like The Troubles: it's often described as "Protestant v. Catholic", but the Pope and the Queen (literally the heads of the most prominent churches involved) were loudly not supporters of the conflict. But still the conflict persisted.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
So how do we get from here to a point where it isn't?
The fundamental flaw with Rules Based Order today is that it lacks a trusted, fair arbiter to enforce it. Team America, World Police is maybe the closest you we've gotten to it, and almost anyone is going to be able to point out the flaws in that model (they may disagree on specific incidents, but not on the overall conclusion). You'd need to get buy-in and perceived legitimacy in how you make and enforce the rules. And those aren't easy questions: which government has legitimate sovereignty over certain regions or peoples (many such cases)? Who gets independence and who gets subrogated to another state? What sorts of international trade should be allowed, or not — how do you feel about whaling? Carbon emissions? WMD programs? Superintelligence? What army enforces the rules against willful violations?
None of these are easy questions, and I don't propose wholesale answers to them here. But existing attempts at frameworks other than "One Liberal Nation Rules the Waves" [1] have treated these as unimportant or easily settled, devolving into Mean Girls clubs (foreign intervention is okay when we do it) or ineffective stages for international grandstanding (see the UN). One man's terrorist might be another's freedom fighter: how do you convince everyone there you can fairly decide? I certainly don't have a good answer for you to any of these.
- While it has its flaws, I will point to Anglo-American hegemony deciding to end the open slave trade largely by fiat on the basis of internal philosophical debate to be one example of how this isn't always bad.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
While I listen to some of what they say, I expect that the average Rationalist is about as rational as the average Objectivist is objective. Which is to say not worthy of much trust on its own. I listen to Rand stans sometimes too, but never blindly.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
Does anyone today other than the US, Russia, and China? Aerial refueling can extend multirole fighter ranges (Israel v. Iran for example), but it's not the most effective from what I can tell.
Airplanes from 1939 stand little chance today, except in quantities: I doubt even today's USAF could fully suppress a few thousand-bomber raids. Nobody has that number of missiles that I'm aware of.
I see where you're going, but most, maybe even all human progress seems a function of rejecting the status quo because of its maybe-not-yet-evident problems. Most technology exists to solve problems we previously just accepted, or didn't even consider to exist (problem: I can't fly like a bird). Not sure where I'd draw the line, though.
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