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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1746 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 7, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Coyotes are pretty well-hated and oft-culled because of their attacks on pets and livestock, though, and there's also the 'dingos ate ma baby' option of simple incompetence. That said, if you really want to go nuts on coyote conspiracies, the degree that coyote populations have exploded and the individual coyotes themselves have gotten much smarter in <10 generations is a real fun question.

For fun conspiracies I actually believe:

  • Piggate wasn't real. For all it Took Down A National Government, Cameron was already a political dead man walking before the drop, and it was just a really convenient way to force him out without actually engaging with the political controversies that had undermined his party. The same behavior is totally consistent with an already-unpopular prime minister getting smeared by a schmuck he'd pissed off badly enough, and then found that none of his 'friends' were willing to pay the political capital to back him up.
  • There was a coverup one direction or the other for the Bloomberg Supermicro thing: either a lot of people who could prove it were told not to do so at the risk of destabilizing international relationships, or a lot of people who could disprove it were told not to do so lest they destabilize US financial markets (and get blackballed). I'm not very confident on this one, but it's just such a weird goddamn story.
  • A number of serious industrial or transportation sector accidents were really Reinvented Suicide As A Group Activity, but various incident analysis groups have instead used them for purposes ranging from getting unrelated political goals to deflecting from local political or social problems to just shaking down foreign businesses for cash. There's been a handful of these situations where jurisdiction friction has lead to them getting 'caught' -- aviation is particularly prone to it, with SilkAir 185, EgyptAir 990, and the recent Air India 171 -- but I think they're far more common than anyone wants to admit or even mention publicly, especially since there's a risk that publicizing them could incentivize further or larger attacks of the same kind. Basically, most large countries have a bunch of CEAF 5735 in a thousand different fields. The SL-1 incident is the safest one to mention, but there's some electrical and chemical processing examples from the tens to hundreds of deaths.
  • A lot of 'advocacy organizations' related to industry regulations are wholly-owned government groups, and are explicitly-but-nonpublicly threatening to bring the weight of those government orgs to bear if targeted companies don't agree. Yeah, boring, almost too obvious to be worth mentioning for the obvious cases, between Ofcom and NCOSE existing, and X Twitter's recent fine in the UK. But there's a lot of these orgs running at <100 person levels regulating through smoke-filled backroom deals; a lot of what's 'weird' about the modern era is just the ability of those orgs to impact companies with large impacts but not the large scales of pre-internet companies.

group activity

Is that…Trek?

advocacy organizations

Not exactly unusual—didn’t Scott write about ADA enforcement in these terms? The main limiting factor is the difficulty of bringing a case. Technology has to have reduced that cost, so a given org can target smaller companies.

I dislike this class of law for other reasons, but I think we’re seeing a difference in degree, not in kind.

Is that…Trek?

Nextwave (cw: sound, mild profanity)! Only Warren Ellis comic I can unconditionally recommend. Very short series, sadly.

Not exactly unusual—didn’t Scott write about ADA enforcement in these terms? The main limiting factor is the difficulty of bringing a case. Technology has to have reduced that cost, so a given org can target smaller companies.

I think so, but I can't find it now. The ADA (and the Texas abortion pill thing) are laws or at least regulations on the books, even if they're probably getting stretched to their breaking points. A lot of this stuff isn't a strict rule, or even necessarily written down anywhere, so much as it's just Understood at ultimately one-on-one scales. Sometimes that's unavoidable: in aviation, I think you could get five opinions from three DERs if you bring up flutter analysis. But it ends up in a world where a lot of things are theoretically allowed, and you can even find people doing them quite publicly, but also prohibited.

Old news, but I just ran across it when it went viral again recently and the Bloomberg story reminds me of it:

"How many similar devices with hidden functionalities might be lurking in your home, just waiting to be discovered?"

Exploitable systems are so much easier to create than secure systems that it's hard to attribute even actual proven exploitability to malice! Aside from the software issues in that discussion, consider the hardware. Fifty years ago, if something you brought into your business had a tiny secret microphone, that would have been proof-positive that someone with major signals-intelligence chops was trying to bug you. Today, it just means that the fastest way to create a special-purpose electronic device is to just grab some general-purpose computer board and flash it with your own special-purpose software, and of course your general-purpose-computer designer threw in a 3.5-cent-each MEMS microphone because why not?

That said, if you really want to go nuts on coyote conspiracies, the degree that coyote populations have exploded and the individual coyotes themselves have gotten much smarter in <10 generations is a real fun question.

Shoot, baby. I'm pro coyote, because A) I think they're neat, B) My school team was the Coyotes, C) my wife's grandmother used "Coyote" as a racial slur to refer to me.

This is interesting, as I was never under the impression that Cameron stood down as a result of Piggate. He nailed his colours to the mast on where he stood on the Euroscepticism issue and put it to a referendum to settle the matter definitively, gambling that most Brits broadly shared his view. The gamble didn't pay off, and that was that.

Yeah, that's probably a more honest engagement with the events. I've just seen a lot of people say it was a big important deal that tells us about falling modern standards, so it really bugs me that it's just such a mess.

Funnily enough you just reminded me that I dressed up as Cameron for Halloween '15, with a papier-machê pig's head attached to my waist. Annoyingly, several people at the party I went to thought I was dressing up as "the guy from Black Mirror", which I hadn't even seen at the time.

... I'm almost afraid to ask, but did you have the pig's head facing in, or out?

In. There was also a papier-machê member protruding from my fly going into the pig's mouth.

That's an impressive amount of effort for a Halloween costume, and some remarkably unobservant partygoers.

Yep - Piggate was eminently survivable, and did more damage to the people pushing it than it did to Hameron. It was hilarious, but everyone including Corbyn knew that it was nothing more than that. The source was an unsourced allegation in a book by a bitter donor who hadn't received the peerage he thought he'd bought and paid for.

Brexit, on the other hand, was total political self-destruction.

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