gattsuru
1yr ago
(Ohio) Canadian geese fear nothing, not even death.
They're really annoying.
Up until 2023, Minnesota statutes restricted abortion under the viability standard, generally understood to be 20-28 weeks, with a not-especially-clear exception for health-and-life-of-mother. There was actually some weird legal status for the law due to an older federal court decision floating around, but the official story is that abortion providers weren't doing those types of abortions and the state enforcement pointedly wasn't going to go asking about it.
In January 2023, the PRO Act was passed. While this did not overturn the previous law on abortion, it did create a statutory right to terminate pregnancies that prohibited enforcement of any restrictions outside of that specific section. I don't know if anyone's been able to litigate the difference in court, but my understanding is that this has largely been understood to effectively allow abortion regardless of trimester.
A separate law passed in May 2023 did... a lot of random things, some abortion-related, including formally repealing the older abortion restrictions; after this point there are no situations where abortion itself was banned. It also modified an older born-alive statute:
Recognition;
medicalcare.
A born aliveAn infantas a result of an abortionwho is born alive shall be fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law. All reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice, including the compilation of appropriate medical records, shall be taken by the responsible medical personnel topreserve the life and health of the born alive infantcare for the infant who is born alive.
Ostensibly, this was meant to remove some politically loaded text -- the born alive statutes were very much a pro-life slogan -- but the strict reading removes a lot of requirements for medical practitioners to actively keep the infant alive, rather than ameliorating pain. But to social conservatives, that's basically just letting the child die of exposure: while the mother may (often) be no more interested in keeping the child, all the safety and medical concerns for the mother are kinda done with by that point, and no small portion are within (and sometimes well within) the ability of modern medicine to keep alive.
There's a perspective where the point of abortion is more about whether a mother is stuck having had a child, where someone who has an elective abortion in the late-third or early-second trimester wants to kill the fetus when it turns out to just keep on living, but... uh, it's generally one seen as politically suicidal to spell it out. (And a highly social conservative framing).
The prevalence of third-trimester (and late second-trimester) abortions that do not involve a nonviable infant or a dire threat to the life of the mother are... controversial. There's a lot of progressives that claim it literally never happens, but that's pretty clearly absolutely not true. Social cons often point to the Guttmacher Institute-driven research that said "... data suggest that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment", but this includes a lot of late-second-trimester abortions and Guttmacher is really not great about allowing general access to anonymized data to narrow it down further. It's rare as a total of all abortion, but depending on source and where you split the categories you can get anywhere from a substantial minority to a slim majority of late-term abortions.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Fair, but too crazy to believe has included the idea that a sitting President would hesitate to call Benghazi a terror attack.
The 'transgender' stuff was a recent CNN expose, and the 'babies' pretty explicitly bit about this (and that's the spin claim!). Edit: and this
gattsuru
1yr ago
I may be able to save you a flight.
gattsuru
1yr ago
That'd be nice if true, but I'm not sure if it is. Vance gave a speech mentioning the immigration itself in early July, and Moreno was not long behind him. Right-wing and especially local media have been focused on it for at least two months.
It's not even the first version of the 'big jump in immigrants compared to local population', if somewhat higher in size, nor the first time it isn't happening turned into its happening and good. It's just that normally the path is local media covers it at all, Red Tribe media talks up some of the actual issues, and then Blue Tribe media has a nice whitewash, no one actually cares except if they're stuck listening to NPR while driving.
That's not a normative thing -- if these claims are false, that is bad! -- but it points to some Bad Incentives. And I'm not sure they can be meaningfully shown to be false, even if they are.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm... very skeptical that anyone providing either pictures of a Springfield park (or drainage ditch) with a few ducks, or without a duck, would change anyone's minds, here. Even the photo of a guy (tbf, with unknown immigration status) with some geese on their way to be spatchcocked (tbf, in Columbus, OH, about an hour and a half drive away) just gets the twitterati suggesting who knows where it could have come from.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Unfortunately, most studies specifically looking at heterosexual anal intercourse are either explicitly or implicitly about Vulnerable Populations, which leaves little reason to trust it can be meaningfully compared with the typical study of gay intercourse. Or they just use gay numbers directly for estimates.
There's mechanical and social reasons that it could be riskier for bottoming men (guys on average like it rougher, the prostate exists) or women (less likely to stretch themselves recreationally, selection effects on partners), but it's probably not a knowable number, and my gut check is that it's probably not an orders of magnitude difference.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yes, and this is a lower-bound, both because it's older information and because it's almost certainly incomplete.
gattsuru
1yr ago
To be fair, a lot of people, including (especially) many reporters are pretty unfamiliar with the broader set of categories of immigration law and status, and Haiti is kinda in the nexus of a bunch of different things. But yeah, there's a lot of tendency for pro-immigration writers to conflate descriptive and normative statements.
gattsuru
1yr ago
A large portion of Haitians are under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), with almost all recent immigrants under the humanitarian parole programs (either CHNV or HFRP), rather than asylum parole or parole-with-conditions programs, which makes things... complicated. There are a few ways for someone under these categories to be present illegally, either due to failing background checks or fraud on the part of their sponsors, but it's very unlikely that even a significant portion will be found here illegally.
((And even of those who were originally entered illegally, after ten years 1229(b) kicks in -- that was a big unspoken part of the recent Campos-Chaves v. Garland case.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
Fair. It's a little closer than Dayton to Cincinnati, but there are distinct cultures from Cleveland to Akron to Canton.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Springfield's city government estimated around 12-15k immigrants "in Clark County", on the FAQ, though it hasn't been updated in a while. Clark County as a whole has closer to 110k citizens, though a large portion of those not in Springfield proper are closer to Dayton or Columbus. 20k immigrants is a lot more plausible than you'd expect, especially if you start to include people who get dropped there and then migrate to other nearby towns, and given the extent that the Biden administration doesn't really care how disruptive it is.
Ohio wildfowl are a mess, both geese and ducks, not helped by the recent very dry conditions. You'd get in trouble with the feds for taking a baseball club to 'em, but you would be really hard pressed to run out, and at least no one credible is alleging that there's an entire army trying to depopulate the wildfowl rather than a few bad actors doing it.
The cat video going around is in reference to a (presumably not-mentally-well) lady in Canton, Ohio (aka Cleveland), about two hours drive northeast of Springfield. Her public defender suggests that she's not a recent immigrant and may even be a citizen, but not seeing a ton of confirmation on that.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Really cheap snap backs can be especially annoying to pull, but usually the concern in those cases is about scratches or cutting/stabbing yourself. The backs are really not supposed to take that much force to pop off to start with; if it could be bent with just a jeweler's screwdriver that sounds more like a manufacturing problem.
You can get specialty tools for it ("bench knife" or "watch case knife" for the traditionalists, but I don't recommend them; pry tools are safer and even vice-style ones exist if you're worried), but I've usually been able to work fine with normal electronics repair kit screwdrivers.
You want as wide of a flathead tip as you can get, while still fitting under the notch (or pry tool, or whatever). If it's really tight, using a plastic spadger or guitar pick around the edges while prying up from the notch can help a lot, but you don't want to try to dig anywhere closer to the center of the watch than that notch, and trying to slide metal around the edge will scratch stuff to hell.
There are special presses for pressing back on snapbacks (or you can even use button presses), but I've never found them particularly useful myself. Grab a hardcover book or softwood lumber, put the watch face-down on a clean and slip-resistant surface such as a mousepad. Start by pressing evenly from the top, and then give a little side to side pressure. It doesn't take that rigid of a shape and shouldn't take much force; I've seen people do it with a plastic level before.
Square notches along the back would point toward a twist-off threaded back, so the HF case opener tool should be the right one. There are different sizes and shapes of notch for threaded watch backs (and different configurations for even- versus odd- numbered notches), but that HF standard tool comes with a pretty wide variety that covers basically everything I've seen. Like above, these are better used with the face of the watch being pressed down into a clean slip-resistant surface, or you can get (or make with a few wood pieces) jigs to hold them in place so the watch doesn't spin while you're trying to unscrew the backplate. There are other variants of the tool if you know the notch type and count (and some weirder things like stress-ball tools that work great for cross-threaded backs), but most of them are worse to use in practice, so I don't really recommend.
gattsuru
1yr ago
It depends really heavily on the type of watch. Cheap watches usually don't even need kits, just a thin flathead jeweler's screwdriver or spadger to get the back plate off, or maybe a single weird screwdriver bit. Higher-end watches can be trickier: the most annoying tend to use either a threaded backplate that can require really annoying tools. But if you're only doing it once every few years, there are some cheap kits (not endorsed) that will handle almost all common watch types, albeit not very conveniently. If you know you have a screw-in caseback, getting a proper tool for that (with a handle and everything!) is a better bet than buying a kit.
For battery size, ideally look up the manual. Otherwise, just take it apart, check it, and order it. The size will be printed somewhere for almost all batteries, or you can just use a set of calipers to measure. The most common size is 1216 (12.5mmx1.6mm), but there's a lot of size charts, and you can get plastic digital calipers from Harbor Freight or the like for dirt cheap. Don't try to memorize the numbers, there's charts available. Do get the cheap plastic calipers; watch batteries have enough internal resistance and limited enough ampacity you're not going to light the house on fire, but it's still a stupid way to warp calipers.
Do keep to a compatible voltage: coin cells come in 1.5V, 3v, and 3.7v (nominal) voltages; using a lower voltage than the original usually won't work, while higher voltages may damage the electronics. Almost all modern watches use 1.5v silver-oxides (SR or SG prefix). While that's compatible with alkaline low-voltage (LR/AG prefix), zinc (PR/Z prefix) and and mercury (MR, no longer manufactured), silver-oxides are cheap and generally ideal for watches, especially mechanical watches. Lithium (CR/BR prefix), Lithium rechargable (LiR), and titanium (CTL prefix) are all higher voltage, and while lithium-titanium (MT) are technically the right nominal voltage they're basically never useful in watches due to high self-discharge and low total capacity. Again, battery type should be in the manual, and printed on the top of the battery.
For mechanical watches, the most common designs only use the crown to hold the balance wheel in place (or disengage it). There are designs where it will disable the motor or disengage the battery entirely, though. It might save some power, but I wouldn't swear on it being a big gain, since self-discharge makes up a pretty sizable part of watch battery life anyway. For digital watches, it will never disable the main circuit, because otherwise you can't set the time.
Big cautions I'll give:
- It is possible to damage the watch or even yourself. Usually just a matter of scratches on the sides, but I've seen people crack faceplates or pry out major mechanisms they misidentified as batteries. Stabbing yourself while trying to pry a backplate off is embarrassing, too.
- You don't and shouldn't touch them, but there's a ton of tiny parts involved. Most of them will be pretty well-secured, still, don't shake the thing or drop of off a table. Reassembly is a nightmare if you're lucky, and virtually impossible if you aren't (eg, balance springs are hilariously easy to bend or fold).
- Expect to see some loss in waterproofing for any previously water resistant watches. There's ways to work around it, some as simple as using some clear nail polish on the edge of the backplate, but it's definitely a thing.
- There is other maintenance that better watch shops will do, and that are harder for casuals to do. Watch lubrication is An Effort, and no mall shop is going to do, but even getting a couple of the bigger gears is useful for longevity... if it's done right. Same for a general-purpose cleaning. If you're just looking to have a watch you can use, rather than a heirloom, it's probably not worth learning, but be aware it is a thing. If you do want a heirloom, that guy has good info for everything from maintenance to serious repair, and he's good for better understanding mechanical watch functionality, but is vast overkill for just swapping a battery.
gattsuru
1yr ago
It's been a long time since I read the The Collapse of British Power, but I thought most of the wartime manufacturing criticism focused on pre-WWI, where British on shore manufacturing was an absolute mess of tiny shops with no serious production capabilities. By the 1920s, the Barnett highlights the development of national manufacturing as a turnaround (if with US and continental assistance) from an area where engines, steel, and basic mechanisms couldn't be produced at all. For WWII, the problem is instead political and peacetime economics, with the UK waiting until years after the last minute to start re-arming and then finding itself slow to build the tools to build the tools to get back up to parity, as well as struggling entirely to modernize aircraft work (though I remember Barnett kinda glossed over a lot of interwar British aviation work).
((There was, to return to the topic, some criticism of Churchill in the book... but more under his Treasury policies.))
To some extent, yes, both countries hard major problems moving to mass manufacturing, in different ways. Barnett highlighted some extremely powerful mills and lathes that interwar Britain had to import from Germany, as part of Britain's general issues bringing together general-purpose.... but even where 1930s Germany had as many lathes-per-metalworking-employee as the US they were largely manual work
gattsuru
1yr ago
The two problems are a) it's not clear mass automation is getting there, and b) it's very far from clear that whatever's causing the fertility drop will stop at after a few or even few dozen halvings of the human population. Especially if you think there's some critical number of humans necessary to keep that automation infrastructure working, there's a lot of ways this pathway goes that don't have directions out.
((I'll ignore the financial clusterfuck, since tbh even with saner fertility numbers it's still gonna be a clusterfuck.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
When it comes to mechanization, he gives the US and Australia pre-WWII, which basically just means the US. I don't know for post-1938, since Tooze doesn't get into the numbers for that and I've had trouble finding any serious efforts to pull apart the results of policy from the results of everything with wheels getting blown up. Much of the productivity difference beyond that is more prosaic: German agriculture focused more than the typical country on staple crops than cash crops or animal products, run by small and often inefficient farms, which had major labor shortages, while dependent on external feedstocks of fertilizers and vulnerable to bad weather.
But Tooze's argument is more:
What is more surprising, from our early twenty-first-century perspective, is Germany's marked inferiority relative to Britain. According to Clark, Britain not only had a higher per capita income than Germany; he believed that despite the much smaller size of the British population, the British economy was still somewhat larger than that of Germany. This conclusion has been modified by more recent calculations. We now believe that the German economy in the 1930s was slightly larger. However, the claim that per capita incomes in Germany were substantially lower than in Britain has proved robust. This difference was clearly not attributable to any qualitative difference in the productivity of British and German manufacturing. In virtually every industrial sector, German and British firms were closely matched. What dragged Germany down was its large and highly inefficient agricultural sector and the substantial tail of small shops and workshops in the craft and service sectors. In the 1930s productivity per head in German agriculture was only half that in German industry, at a time when more than 9 million people were still employed in farming.
The comparison is unfair, and Tooze knows it's unfair -- the British economy shrunk its agricultural sector by having someone else do it, in a way that post-WWI and pre-Nazi Germany wasn't going to be allowed to do. But it's the argument he makes.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The Toozian argument is that, before WWII, a large portion of the German economy remained focused on 'conventional' production, matters like textiles, farm labor, mining, etc, while more advanced or complicated technologies were either unavailable or made up smaller portions of the full sector. The Nazis were very much able to exploit this; despite often tragicomedic levels of incompetence, there were so many low-hanging fruit in a country with a lot of industrial technology but not anywhere near as much industrial economy that they could pick winners.
Tooze focuses a lot on textiles as one particular example: in 1933, the German textile industry was a vast part of both German labor force and total import balance sheet, but it was also not especially advanced or unusually automated by the standards of its time. Nazi policy squeezed the entire sector hard (Tooze has a chart showing nearly a 15% drop in total employment in the sector), and at the same time pushed the remainder toward more emphasis on synthetic fibers and final productions, mostly a side effect of their autarky policies.
Similarly, while agriculture was a massive portion of the German economy in 1933, with just over a quarter of the working populace, much of these people were just barely above sustenance farming on tiny parcels of land, while agricultural automation and electrification had stalled badly post-WWI. Germany had pioneered artificial nitric acid and ammonium nitrate during WWI (and the Haber process was a good part of how Germany had been able to fight as long as it did), but there was no German 'green revolution'; these technologies were focused almost entirely into the military, industrial, and transportation sectors.
((To its credit, this lack of focus on agricultural automation and efficient use of labor is probably why some local populaces in conquered territories were supposed to be useful after invasion... as, uh... 'not-quite-voluntary labor'. So not much credit.))
By 1938, the urban areas and military matters had been heavily revamped, but large sectors were basket cases, both urban and otherwise -- Tooze highlights the extent that rural agriculture was often overlooked in the buildup with a lengthy segue about Nazi ponderings to encourage farm labor that, after politics hit, turned into a counterproductive tax on the dairy farms somehow. And while Tooze doesn't focus on it, a lot of the Nazi policies emphasizing centralized control of the electricity infrastructure pushed toward urbanization and against agricultural automation.
((That said, I do think Tooze's argument overlooks the extent this was a choice. Tooze says:
But to see [settlement inside German territories] as a fundamental solution to Germany's problems was [perceived by Hitler as] a dangerous illusion. It was one more instance of the liberal fallacy that Germany could prosper through an ever more intensive utilization of its national resources.
But, to borrow from Hellsing Abridged, if you call heads, it matters what face the coin falls. The liberal fallacy about utilization of national resources not only ended up working in Mexico, it ended up working in no small part thanks to pre-Nazi German technology!))
gattsuru
1yr ago
“Meaning that he could no longer fulfill that job because of a lack of trust, I feel pretty comfortable that we’re in an okay place. I feel certain we’re in an okay place legally, no issues on that.”...
“Let me just say that she lost yesterday fairly overwhelmingly. Up to a week ago, Jon would articulate that they were under the impression, he in particular – speaking to his sister – that they were gonna win. So there is something redeeming in the fact that that was rejected clearly by the people of Missouri where she was running for office,” noting Valentina Gomez’s sixth place finish in an eight-candidate field.
[I'll caveat that this is just from a quick browse: I absolutely don't find Cooper interesting enough to read at length.]
If you trust this transcript:
Germany, look, they put themselves into a position, and Adolf Hitler is chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the east in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead. There you have letters as early as July, August, 1941, from commandants of these makeshift camps that they're setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people they're rounding up. So its two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched, and they're writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, we cant feed these people.
We don't have the food to feed these people. And one of them actually says, rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn't it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now? And so this is like two months into the invasion. Right? And my view on this, I argue with my zionist interlocutors about this all the time with regard to the current war in Gaza. Look, man, maybe you, as the Germans, you felt like you had to invade to the east. Maybe you thought that Stalin was such a threat or that if he launched a surprise attack and seized the oil fields in Romania, that you would now not have the fuel to actually respond and you'd be crippled and all of Europe would be under threat. And whatever it was, whatever it was, that, like, maybe you thought you had to do that, but at the end of the day, you launched that war with no plan to care for the millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war that were going to come under your control, and millions of people died because of that. You can look at it and say, well, yeah.
I don't think it's a SecureSignals level thing -- he does recognize the whole 'and then the Germans started 'humanely killing' them' -- but it's definitely not limited to prisoners of war, and it's pretty heavily in contradiction with the Standard History Generalplan Ost where Einsatzgruppen were already a policy in Poland back when the USSR and Nazis were allies, and simply brought East.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Hm. If the PVC sheets give you too many issues, I'd heard of prototypes for fursuit cooling vests use vacuum sealing or sous vide bags. They're not going to be as puncture-resistant as PVC, but if it ends up being too heavy or too annoying to form, may be worth trying.
There's a 'copycat' theory that certain types of murderers (and a few other classes of bad actors) tend to attract other bad actors, intentionally or unintentionally, by their works, and as a result making publicly available. These followers are inevitably not-mentally-well to some extent, but the resonance gives them a way to formalize that and point it at their own interpretation of a 'class' of overlapping targets.
This is part of why I don't write shooters' names, whenever possible, instead identifying the location or target; it's also the charitable explanation for companies like LinkedIn purging spree shooter accounts. I'm skeptical that it applies for these sort of narrow details -- the shooter here comes across as a loser -- but I don't have a good mental model for the sorta crazy people that turn into serial killer fans, and it definitely has widespread adherents across the political aisles, many of whom directly evangelize to the victims of shootings and to judges around them.
Less charitably, there was a theory (or more often insinuation) that the shooter had been motivated by severe mistreatment by an employee or student at the school, on the level of assault or sexual assault rather than deadnaming. Progressives assumed that the writings were being hidden to obscure that; conservatives that they were being hidden to avoid exculpating the victims.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Some of Stargate SG-1's problems were also wanting to become Voyager of all things, rather than Battlestar Galactica. Some extent of that was probably inevitable as power inflation started giving the US military access to spaceships, superweapons, (those stupid zats), Jackson ascending so often it turned into a punch line, and so on, but a lot of the entire Ori plotline was trying so hard to be MagicBullshitBorg following in the tracks of Seven of Nine, without understanding why that worked (and so many other interpersonal melodrama bits of Voyager didn't work!).
For machinists, as with the specific company here, specifically it's also just extremely unpleasant work -- loud, repetitive, lots of metal shavings and cutting fluid, just the wrong mix of boring and extremely dangerous, sometimes in really subtle ways.
For a while the pay made up for it when machinists could pull the sort of wages that 'skilled trades' like HVAC or assembly could (though even then, it wasn't popular), but right now the industry is pretty badly squeezed; if you aren't aggressively chasing pay and jumping up from operator roles, you're probably gonna be closer to a McDonald's worker than a specialized-skill one. And in turn, leaving the operator or setup roles to a true machinist seat requires a very broad set of problem-solving skills that... well, it isn't the same as IQ, and it's definitely not the same as college-readiness, but it's the sort of skillset where you have a lot of other options. Boosting pay would be the normal solution, but (excluding spheres where Made In America is mandatory) there's just not that much slack in the market, nor space for improved employee productivity.
There's a certain type of person that excels at it, because it's indoor work, not always on your feet, and kinda nice from a feeling productive bit, but there's not a ton of that type of person that wouldn't be better doing something else.
((Though I'd caveat the skills problem is more complicated. It's not just that the lower wage workers are nuts, though some are, but that we've spent nearly forty years putting massive selection pressures against conscientious people learning a lot of the physical skills necessary for these classes of jobs. I've seen engineering college graduates that don't know how to use Allen wrenches properly, or know the names for Phillips-head versus Torx, or how to use a proper set of wirestrippers. Not everyone who does has facial tattoos, to borrow a turn of phrase, but it's a serious dichotomy.))
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