pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
No bio...
User ID: 278
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
10mo ago
My hope is that adoption of e-bikes will improve the behavior of cyclists as well, as it seems like the most annoying behaviors are driven by their desire to never lose momentum and especially never to come to a complete stop.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
The motte version of CICO, which could be described as "any caloric input that isn't output is necessarily stored"
No, the motte is "it would violate the laws of thermodynamics to gain weight without consuming an energy-equivalent number of calories." CICO people don't deny that some people have metabolisms that permit them to consume excess calories without gaining weight. They only claim that someone who claims to have gained fat while restricting calories below that threshold is lying.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
They seem to be coming around though!
https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1906727995307381025
Summary: TracingWoodgrains ran a poll for both left and right respondents, asking if they'd rather have their opposite running the world vs. China.
For left respondents, China won handily, opposite for right-responders. Obvious selection bias and all, but troubling. The days of substantial fifth-columnism may be returning.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
This is the most important point. You can't appeal to a "Rules-based order" by handwaving the rules, which explicitly do not guarantee Ukraine's territory against Russian perfidy.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
To me the most parsimonious explanation is that there are details that are relatively probable but highly embarrassing to the federal government. For example, if Oswald did indeed start shooting, but that it was an accidental discharge from a Secret Service agent (possibly still alive) which blew Kennedy's head off and killed him.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
#2 jogged my memory of some insane ads for the Marines I remember from when I was a kid. They leaned hard into the challenge but with a fantasy element as well. To a teenage boy, it made being a Marine the coolest-looking occupation imaginable.
Chess is one I remember vividly, and especially the one with the lava monster in the battle arena, which today I learned is called Contest of Honor. Even as a kid I knew it was ridiculous but it still stirred something visceral in my naive little heart.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
7mo ago
One thing that might be likely is for him to get to appoint a SCOTUS justice. Sotomayor could and probably should retire and let Biden appoint her replacement while the Democrats control the White House and Senate, since there's no telling how long it might be before they control both again. A quality pick would be a good legacy.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
7mo ago
I think it's worth noting that levels of fluoride in the water much higher than the recommended dosage are unlikely to be caused by intentionally dosing the water, and more likely to be caused by naturally high occurrencee of fluoride in the source water supply. So, if this were a scandal, the scandal would primarily not be the dosing of low levels of fluoride for dental health, but the laxity of the water safety regulations.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
It seems that you are leaving off the very first paragraph of Section 1505, which precedes the one you posted. It reads:
Whoever, with intent to avoid, evade, prevent, or obstruct compliance, in whole or in part, with any civil investigative demand duly and properly made under the Antitrust Civil Process Act, willfully withholds, misrepresents, removes from any place, conceals, covers up, destroys, mutilates, alters, or by other means falsifies any documentary material, answers to written interrogatories, or oral testimony, which is the subject of such demand; or attempts to do so or solicits another to do so; or
It would seem to me that if they can establish the alleged facts, it clearly fits under "removes from any place, conceals, covers up". It does not contain the required element of corruption which you wrote about, just "intent to avoid, evade, prevent, or obstruct compliance".
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
Just to add perspective since I was alive and watching the news during the Clinton drama, there were a variety of objections in increasing importance:
- He cheated on his wife
- He cheated on his wife with an intern over whom he was the clear superior
- He did the above in the Oval Office which is a government workplace
- He did all of the above, and then lied about to the public and Congress
- He did all of the above, and then lied about it in a sworn deposition
Characterizing the reaction to Clinton as being primarily about the sanctity of marriage is, I think, not remotely reasonable.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
Given that he was an El Salvadoran national, where else could he be removed to? Are there other countries stepping up to accept deportees on El Salvador's behalf? If the answer is a legal catch-22 where he gets to stay despite being eligible for deportation, then I have no choice but to reject the legitimacy of the process that produces that outcome.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
Again, we can do any of these things.
This is the part that is wrong. We actually can't do any of these things, at least not to any degree of scale and competence. There are too many veto points, too many interest groups, and too many fief-building bureaucrats for anything that requires coordination beyond an executive order. And, there is insufficient faith in competent government execution and trust in expertise even if these things were not true, such that it would probably fail from lack of good-faith cooperation anyways.
That doesn't mean that tariffs are better than nothing. I appreciate Althouse's dictum that better than nothing is a high bar. But for all the people who cry that we have to do something, well, this is something and it can be done.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
Winding back a bit to option A, to put things into perspective, what we’re presently doing is pretty much what led to WW2. Chamberlain and the rest of the west were in a stance of appeasement. By not actually fighting evil, we let it grow. Just as appeasement emboldened Hitler to push further, letting Russia keep gains now might signal to Putin—and others—that aggression pays.
On the other hand, forming a complicated web of alliances, security guarantees, and geopolitical networks is somewhat the thing that escalated into WWI. It's worth considering that making security guarantees allows the opponent to decide when to trigger a large scale conflict.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
5mo ago
On balance I think it did
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
Once it becomes clear that this is a long war, and that support for Ukraine is going to start coming out of the budget rather than existing idle resources, the goal is to maintain a leading role while dumping the economic cost on Europe. So say, first quietly and then loudly, that the US is happy to continue helping Ukraine, but after some reasonable period of time (3-6 months) they are not going to do so for free. Then follow through - based on the above analysis the Europeans will grumble, but pay up. The US should chip in enough to retain a seat at the table - say 10-20% of the cost.
This is the part that seems like the lynchpin to me. Suppose that the Europeans reasonably believe, as they have for 50 years now, that they can call America's bluff here and either not pony up, or only pony up for things that are not useful to the war effort like expanded benefits for servicemembers? Are we willing to back that up by writing off Europe? Is Europe able to hold us hostage by putting a knife to their own throats?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
The hell of it is I wouldn't even be that opposed to a legitimate US aid organization that is run competently and efficiently. I would support at least the amount of funding that USAID gets of I were persuaded that it was doing tangible good of an equivalent value. What sickens me is money taken under such noble pretenses and used to fund wickedness, graft, corruption, and even ops against the republic itself. This government has rightfully lost the trust of a large part of the population, and should reap the wages of sin.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
9mo ago
Nuclear power as it is currently available to us does not provide enough energy returned on energy invested for it to be a viable option even without the costs of dealing with waste.
Compared to what? As far as I know it easily beats under reasonable operating assumptions almost everything except for fossil fuels. Are you talking about energy return on investment or financial return on investment? The cost of uranium that France paid has nothing to do with EROI. But in any case, the cost of uranium is, at this time, a miniscule cost of nuclear plant operation. The current high cost of nuclear plant operation has much more to do with deliberate regulatory sabotage than the inherent cost of the technology. There are, as we speak, newer, safer, more efficient reactors that have been designed and even passed through the arduous DOE approval process such as the AP1000 - not hypothetical in the least - but the high cost of legal construction delays and regulatory uncertainty makes commitment to construction very difficult and until very recently the DOE has been extremely reluctant to approve almost any experimental or prototype reactors, often on the grounds that the technology was not proven and so the risks could not be quantified - an obviously self-fulfilling state of affairs. They are being deployed in other more pragmatic countries. That said, I personally thing the prevailing LWR uranium cycle is terribly inefficient and a technological dead end, but it still generates an incredible amount of power.
That has started to change and in addition to the small modular reactors that are nearing market availability, serious followup to the molten salt reactor research that was done in the 1960's may finally be moving forward. However, I don't anticipate this will change many peoples' minds about whether they oppose nuclear power - it will just change the reasons. And sadly, the U.S. is playing from far behind other countries, especially China, in terms of building and testing experimental and prototype reactors. I don't doubt that many other countries will be deploying Chinese reactors, which we will of course refuse to do out of sheer pig-headedness and because we still have lots of fossil fuels to consume, and all the while people will be claiming that nuclear power just isn't practical enough.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
26d ago
Agreed. Forcing cities into receivership that puts state legislatures into an oversight role can only help Republicans. Even in Illinois, the Democrats don't control the state as strongly as they control Cook county.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
I mean, plenty of Asians preferred living in the US (where they were a minority) to living in Asia, because by and large, being an ethnic minority is not that bad a deal in the US.
I think there's a reasonable fear that the "being an ethnic minority is not that bad a deal in the US" is only the case because of the unusual and ahistoric forbearance of the existing ethnic majority. There's a disquieting dearth of places friendly to ethnic minorities that are not run by white people.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
7mo ago
You might think so, but as far as I can tell, Trump did absolutely nothing to protect free speech or slow down cancel culture.
Rescinding the Dear Colleague letter, for example
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
11mo ago
I agree, I think there's a much likelier chance that Biden is very upset at what happened and is just not being very cooperative with the people who engineered his ouster
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
11mo ago
I think they tried to do it in a way that saved face, by demanding a bunch of conditions that they didn't think Trump would agree to. But he called their bluff, and they were stuck.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
12d ago
👉👌
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
27d ago
And because American liberals secretly want stern dad John Wayne to reassert reality and normality after their radicals go too far and temper those radicals a bit while leaving the hands of liberals clean and letting them chafe against the repressions of normality
I just can't unsee in my mind Col. Nathan R. Jessup: "You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall." Of course, that's fiction, and as the ur-conservative in an Aaron Sorkin film, he of course went to prison. But I agree it does point to something real, and unfortunately for liberals their institutional hegemony put them in a position to purge enough of these types from positions of power and influence such that they are gone, probably permanently. And now they need to either surrender, or pick up a rifle and stand a post.
"Safe,
lethallegal, and rare." I've been fooled by this before.That is to say, I believe you and believe your earnestness, but I just cannot conceive of how you would stop cultural slide on this without a solid Chesterton fence.
More options
Context Copy link