pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
No bio...
User ID: 278
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4d ago
The counterpoint would be that training missions aren't especially lethal, there's just a lot of them.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3d ago
Sure, but so does everybody else.
pusher_robot
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2d ago
Right, a rice reserve hardly seems any sillier than the U.S. Strategic Cheese Reserve.
pusher_robot
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1d ago
Anyone use SAS direct attached storage at home? I want to retire a Synology used as bulk storage for my server, since it maxes at 4 Gbps ethernet. I could go with a cheap USB 3.1 gen2 10Gbps SATA enclosure, but it looks like I could get an enclosure with SAS backplane and connect the disks via SAS to SATA breakout cables, and supposedly, this will allow SAS disks to be used. I'm a little skeptical since I've never used the SATA breakout cables in this way, but since this would increase disk bandwidth by about an order of magnitude over USB I am thinking about trying it.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2d ago
I don't think so. Those concepts still have pretty clear meaning and can be applied to the output of AI as well as humans. What this line of argument is disputing is the (often unstated) conclusion: "therefore, AI is not valuable." But this doesn't follow. Humans distort information, accidentally or maliciously, make errors, hallucinate, and are generally somewhat unreliable, but their output still has value. An AI can share all of those same characteristics and still be very valuable as an information processing agent.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
16d ago
Then who makes money from the food industry.
When margins are low but volume is high you can still make good money. But in a commodity market, economic forces will generally push average profit margin to $0, so it's not surprising that margins are usually low and sometimes negative.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2d ago
How do you know?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
23d ago
I don't think they are especially angry, but older liberal women especially seem to have an unfortunate tendency to speak publicly as though they are talking to children and struggling to make themselves understood, rather than struggling to persuade. Maybe this is a factor of mistake theory vs. conflict theory, but I think it really annoys people, like trying to make yourself understood to a foreigner by speaking English, louder and slower.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
8d ago
Case in point: https://kirkbangstad.substack.com/p/the-case-for-shutting-down-minocquas
One of our state political cranks (a FIB, natch) has vowed to shut down the community's Fourth of July parade because he doesn't think they deserve one.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
18d ago
I'm amazed that hardly anyone has mentioned what I think has to be the top practical reason to own a truck: they're the only vehicle class capable of towing more than trivial amount. That's why the pickup truck is practically indispensable to the suburban class (at least, here in benighted flyover country).
If you have have ambitions of boating, camping, jet skiing, four wheeling, motorcycling, or snowmobiling, then having a vehicle amply capable of towing the trailers or self contained mobile structures used for these activities is a prerequisite. And if you need a truck for towing anyways, might as well get one that can serve as a commuter and haul family and friends too. This is why the beds keep shrinking and the engines keep embiggening: the utility of the bed for cargo is secondary in most cases to its utility as traction motor.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
11d ago
You might better have used the term "understandable" rather than "fair". By calling it a "fair response" you are invoking the connotation of "fair" as "just, right, natural" which strongly implies that you believe that socialism is the correct outcome.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
23d ago
They've already demonstrated bad faith by maliciously not enforcing the law in just the prior administration. We would need some kind of signal that they were serious about departing from this practice, or any statutory promises about future enforcement are worthless.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
22d ago
👉👌
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
14d ago
None of that is necessary to keep a car at home.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
25d ago
The stats are what they are. Do you reject this information, or doubt its accuracy? I'm in that category, AMA.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
27d ago
They can't (legally) vote, but they do count towards apportionment.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
11d ago
The central units are generic and easy to get, cost only a little more than a nice portable unit, and the sweepers generally conform to one of only a couple standard types. The rest is just plastic tubes and wall ports. Biggest advantage is that the central unit can exhaust to outside, so heavy filtration is not needed to reduce fine particles and dust, and the power of even a low end central unit can't be matched by any kind of portable vacuum cleaner. The central unit typically has a collection bin you can remove and empty, like a shop-vac.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
11d ago
I own a 100-year old house myself, but my friend who has built new strongly recommends installing central vacuum lines during construction.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo 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
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.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
I've been thinking about whether there are some plausible underlying causes to the sort of political and social chaos that has blessed our recent times and whether there are some things that can be done to improve the health of the civic body. It seems to me that perhaps the biggest problem we face is demoralization.
What is the source of this demoralization? I'd guess there are several. The first is the fruition of a generational demoralization campaign run by the left against America. This started mainly as comintern agitprop and Soviet psyops, and has been gradually adopted across left-progressive institutions, including, critically, higher education. This is the source of a wide variety of anti-American memes, from America being a dystopian late-stage-capitalism hellscape, to America being the most racist and bigoted nation which owes its existence to slavery and can never be free of its guilt, to American bullying and anticommunism being the root cause of suffering and oppression the world over. Centrists who wonder how public perception of their economic well-being is so divergent from what the statistics show, need only watch and internalize that damned Newsroom speech.
There's also the role of the media to consider, which, aside from being heavily leftist to begin with, also has a completely separate set of incentives to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They owe much of their existence to people obsessively following the news out of anxiety and panic. Beyond even pandering to prurient "if it bleeds, it leads" elevation of the worst kind of daily grotesqueries, there are multiple cataclysmic "end times" narratives that almost every event can be linked to, from climate collapse to the rise of fascism to race war.
Then there are the entirely self-inflicted wounds. In multiple ways and in multiple places, incompetence is tolerated, failure is rewarded, and sloth is celebrated. While institutions may see their own self-preservation as an accomplishment entirely worthy to justify their own existence, outsiders do not. The conduct of the GWOT was bad, the handling of Covid was bad, the administration of local urban governments is egregiously terrible. That these things go not just unpunished but unfixed is corrosive to public confidence. When even public art is instituted not to enliven the spirit but to deaden it, loss of hope should not be surprising!
The symptoms of demoralization manifest in ways that will seem familiar to us, I think. As people lose faith in institutions, they will become angry, fearful, and paranoid. They will choose the defect option across more and more choices. Demoralization increases time-sensitivity, when the future is discounted as likely to be worse than the present. Socially, people become alienated and transfer that dissatisfaction to their own lives. Fertility decrease is, in my opinion, downstream of this as well. Internationally, isolationism and collapse in confidence is the inevitable result. Why would any decent person who has internalized that their nation and their society is fundamentally believe in actions taken by that government on their behalf?
So what can be done to reverse this demoralization? To a certain extent I am afraid there is no putting this genie back in the bottle, save for a sufficiently grave external threat. Certainly academics would never agree to not criticize America, no should they. Freedom of speech grants everyone the right to air their grievances. But would it not be a worthy effort, on the eve of our semiquincentennial, to counter this with praise? This would perhaps have to come from the government itself, and patriotic propaganda risks a slide into jingoism, but is it not, after all, a valid function of the government to advocate on its own behalf? We once did this as a necessity against the creep of communism, but since the fall of the Berlin Wall, efforts perhaps seemed unnecessary.
Some great works would also be helpful. Literal moonshots, Manhattan programs, monumental bridges and dams, mind-bending radio telescopes and supercolliders - these all seem like relics of a previous time. Even now when we decide we want to do something spectacular and potentially society-altering, like a HSR line or a solar megaproject, it fizzles out in a mire of bureaucratic planning, lawsuits, and safetyism. Wouldn't it be inspiring to set out to something amazing and complete it on-time and on-budget? Once people realize that such a thing is possible, might they not start supporting many more such works?
Sorry if this all seems melodramatic. I freely admit that it's not something I've researched and am confident has a factual basis. It just seems to me that what's missing in most of the discussion of our problems is hopefulness and confidence that the future will be better than the present and much better than the past. In the same way that many economic indicators are, at bottom, about confidence in the future, I think many social indicators are as well.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
Firstly the choice to want an EV in the first place is purely virtue signalling - nobody I know ever justified it with anything other than highfalutin saving-the-planet rhetoric
This really is way out of date. For a lot of people in cities and suburbs, 99% of driving tasks are within a hundred miles or so of home and an EV provides lower TCO, the more so the more miles you drive. It especially makes sense for a family that already has an ICE car to use for road trips. I am even aware of militia-adjacent preppers that are high on EVs due to being able to fully sustain them off the grid.
I personally will probably want to replace my 2012 Fusion at some point in the next few years and am waffling between EV or ICE. I don't tend to drive a lot of miles so TCO is probably a wash unless gas prices go way up, but the raw performance of electric and idea of being able to "refuel" in my own garage is really appealing. Having to charge on road trips is the biggest downside.
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
1mo ago
If it is indeed hopeless, than we can at long last dispense with the concept of building anything for the future. Loot what you can, while you can.
It does count as tax revenue, so to the extent you care at all about deficits and debt, that's at least helpful.
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