domain:mattlakeman.org
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
10hr ago
The Scots are going to say that their whisky industry was thrown under the bus.
They shouldn't cry too hard, the recent India-UK trade agreement drastically slashed tariffs on British liquors, and given the ridiculous demand for those in India (so many people clamor to have me fill up my luggage with scotch for them)..
This is mostly a joke. I'm sure the US market is larger and obviously wealthier.
HalloweenSnarry
10hr ago
So, the difference is pretty much down to how much a state is considered to be contiguous/coterminous with its people, rather than being in a separate and implicitly-adversarial relationship?
sun_the_second
10hr ago
Is there a tool for this? I'm wondering if embedding pictures like this would be banned if it became more common.
Barfknuckle
10hr ago
So I take it this game got good eventually? Is it worth playing without DLC? I got it when it was new and I had a worthless radar that only let me see things in front of me with a clear line of sight, my lancemates were total bumblefucks who tended to shoot each other, enemies were appearing out of thin air, etc.
yunyun333
10hr ago
I skimmed it but I'm a dilettante. It really is quite a fascinating field.
I agree that if you're willing to approach it with faith, then a lot of it is unclear enough for faith to hold up.
Shrike
10hr ago
Has any other con artist in history ever produced something comparable?
This brings to mind Brígido Lara who (going off of Wikipedia, here, which is itself going off of the word of a self-reported fraudster, so – grain of salt, here) supposedly created tens of thousands of pieces of fraudulent Mesoamerican art, to the degree that it's possible he created more fraudulent Totonac artifacts than there are authentic pieces in circulation, although it seems like it would be hard to tell since his creations were apparently indistinguishable from the originals.
As an aside, can I say that I find this entire conversation really funny given Motte lore? Obviously Christian Mottizens would love to convert you to orthodox Christianity but I'm sure there's also got to be an underlying concern about turning you into a furry by mistake.
HBS Battletech
Small lasers are daggers and highly mobile mechs with lots of support hardpoints are rogues. An ER SLAS++ off the black market hits as hard as a stock large laser but generates like half as much heat and still only weighs half a ton. If they didn't have piss-squirt range they'd be the best weapons in the game by miles.
What you do is you put four of them sumbitches on an SLDF Phoenix Hawk with max armor and jets, fill the five standard energy hardpoints with say those MLAS++ with the extra 10 damage, and stuff the rest of it with double heat sinks. With the +20% damage from the vectored thrust kits you're looking at like a 400 damage alpha coming off a jump.
Then you just scoot it around the edge of a battle and dare the enemy to either chase it and turn their backs to the rest of your oncoming lance, or ignore it while it rips their guts out from behind one by one. You just drop in directly behind them like "nothin personnel kid" and blow their rear CT out through their front CT.
It's an absolute monster, on par with a dooded up SLDF Marauder or Atlas II.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11hr ago
I've had my first significant, positive interaction with AI.
I needed a plugin for blender, bought it off an online shop, went to install it and got a big spew of error codes in Blender's console. I spent thirty minutes blind-googling error codes and various rephrasings of "why doesn't [plugin] install", to no avail. As frustration mounted, I noticed one search had popped up an abbreviated AI answer in the header, and from testimonials here and from coworkers I figured I had nothing to lose, and started feeding the error codes to the AI instead. It correctly diagnosed the problem on the first shot, and within about twenty minutes of feeding it successive results, had the problem sorted and the plugin installed. Given the nature of the problem and the solution, I'm pretty confident I would not have been able to figure it out in daily slices of a late-night hour or two after getting the kids to bed and the chores handled, before simply losing motivation and moving on to something else. AI straight-up saved my butt.
Sharp escalation in the India Pakistan conflict over the last hour. Ballistic missiles seem to have been fired, and confirmed reports of explosions in Islamabad and Rawalpindi.
UPDATE: Pakistan acknowledges that three military bases were attacked, preparing response
UDATE: the situation is deteriorating rapidly. I’m hearing absolutely wild rumors about the targets that are being hit. Supposedly a massive cyberattack has just taken out 70 percent of India’s power grid.
UPDATE: The Pakistani Prime Minister has convened a meeting of the National Command Authority. It’s probably just saber-rattling, but this is the group that would give authorization for the use of nuclear weapons.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
11hr ago
My word choices are once again not optimal. What I meant was, if there was a bishop of rome, and also a different person whos the head over all the churches, christs vicar on earth etc., the way the pope is for the catholics now, would that be fine?
urquan
I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness.
11hr ago
Reunion could take place in this context if, on the one hand, the East would cease to oppose as heretical the developments that took place in the West in the second millennium and would accept the Catholic Church as legitimate and orthodox in the form she had acquired in the course of that development, while on the other hand, the West would recognize the Church of the East as orthodox in the form she has always had.
At the same time, this leaves seriously open whether reunion is possible at all, because if "the West would recognize the Church of the East as orthodox in the form she has always had," then the West would be saying that active, persistent, and stubborn denial of the dogma of Papal infallibility over a century, and of other Catholic dogmas for centuries, has no consequences and requires no renunciation. In other words, it means they're not dogmas!
When dogmas are defined, they're not "suggestions." They're not even "firm teachings," or "infallible teachings." They are solemn declarations that someone who denies this is anathema, accursed, cut off, removed from communion with the Church. The classical ecumenical dogmatic language, "Let them be anathema," comes from St. Paul's declaration that opens Galatians:
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel— not that there is another gospel, but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, If any one is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed.
So to say that something is a dogma is, in Biblical and ecclesiastical idiom, to say that all who dissent are "deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ," and "turning to a different gospel!" It is a solemn declaration of unmistakable error, and it cannot be relativized -- only affirmed or denied.
Ratzinger seems to be wanting to do a very Ratzinger thing here: to assert the possibility of reform without reform, even to the point of saying dogma can be held -- or not -- so long as you say someone else can believe it's dogma. It's a functional denial of dogma that doesn't actually want to admit that it is.
Conservative Catholics love talking about Pope Benedict as a "defender of dogma," but the man was, abundantly, a modernist. Just a rather conservative one. And I don't say that as an insult -- I love Pope Benedict, and I prefer his vision of modernist-conservative Catholicism to traditional, pre-conciliar Catholicism -- but because everyone has to be clear what's at stake.
Like much of the post-conciliar Church, Ratzinger's views reflect, essentially, institutional intertia in the guise of teaching authority: we cannot say we were mistaken about our dogmas, because that would scandalize the faithful and call into question our entire history, and so we say, with one side of our mouth the Immaculate Conception is dogma! and with the other the Orthodox East, which steadfastly denies that this is a dogma, is perfectly and entirely prepared for communion with us! But both of these things cannot be true. You can't have your bread and eat it too.
My view is that Catholicism has gone halfway -- opened the door to unity on the basis of the first millennium -- without committing, as did Pope Paul VI, when he called the Catholic ecumenical councils of the second millennium "general councils of the West" -- which seems to demote them to the status of the Councils of Toledo, rather than infallible councils. Yet Christ asks that we give him everything, like he himself gave up everything so that: "those who believe in me... may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee," in the priestly words of Jesus in John 17.
I think the real obstacle to unity isn't so much the two Marian dogmas, provided that the Assumption is considered to be a doctrine of the Dormition as well -- and the Orthodox, not that I speak for them, would probably say that the Immaculate Conception can be accepted as a pious belief, so long as it is asserted as a plausible explanation for the moral perfection and grace-full-ness of the Mother of God rather than a fixed, infallible doctrine, and thus open to critique made in the spirit of charity (as even Thomas Aquinas did).
In other words, the pre-1850s landscape could have been a much more fruitful place for ecumenical dialogue. If Vatican II had happened early, in place of Vatican I, we would live in a very different world. But I believe the Vatican Councils destroy each other, like matter and dark matter, and in so doing they also bring to heel the legitimate power of the Vatican -- which should be great indeed, but always in line with tradition, and with the charism of persuasion in the spirit of truth and not "ordinary and universal magisterial teaching" requiring "religious submission of will and intellect."
Takacs did post about how unsafe they felt about attending the con, which is pretty absurd given that the reason they were invited in the first place was to shower praise on them for being the LGBT+ author invited to a panel, and the offence cited was a simple and understandable mistake not meant maliciously. They were the one who blew it up into a minor controversy, and we're seeing the similar reactions of the easily offended playing out still today.
Normal person: "Oh hey, there's a small mistake in my bio, I'm "she" not "he"
Takacs: "I am so threatened and unsafe! This is blatant open exclusion!"
I would very much appreciate a public apology from @worldcon2018 for rewriting my bio to change my name and my gender.
I have never, ever used "he" pronouns.
After many similar exclusionary actions, this is the last straw, I am honestly not sure I can safely attend.
HereAndGone
11hr ago
Yeah, if I wasn't Catholic, I'd be some version of Tibetan Buddhism (there are some practices not a million miles away from practices in Catholicism). But in reality, if I wasn't Catholic, I'd be straight-up atheist, no replacement Christianity or other religion for me - if belief goes, it goes completely.
HereAndGone
12hr ago
TLM which was (inexplicably) contentious.
I think there were several reasons at work:
(1) We've got the Novus Ordo now, we have changed the liturgy, stop trying to hold back time and work within the new framework in your local parish (the majority moderate set)
(2) Are these guys more of those crazy schismatics? Because they're sounding an awful lot like those crazy schismatics (due to some of the commentary around/by the trads being very similar to the Rad-Trads who were a bit too adjacent to the "we defied the Pope way back when for not being sufficiently orthodox, now funnily enough we're ordaining lesbian priestesses ourselves" splinters)
(3) Will we never have progress? Just when we thought we were finally going to catch up to the Protestants and get with the times and dump all those dusty old doctrines, these hold-outs are making us look bad! (the very liberal/Spirit of Vatican II crowd)
HereAndGone
12hr ago
This is level of feigned obliviousness I haven't seen since the last time Snopes beclowned itself.
You do know this guy is editor of a satirical magazine/website? That makes jokes and pokes fun in the religious context?
If I'm gonna have steam pouring out my ears about a humour site dissing the Church, there's bigger targets I'd go after right this minute.
HereAndGone
12hr ago
You mean getting a bill passed to solidify either “DMV respects common names” or “DMV entitled to do what they want”, so that either way we're not stuck squinting at a 1982 court case and trying to guess whether a lawsuit is warranted?
Yeah. Right now it seems to be "this section of the code says A, that section says B, who gets to juggle the hot potato?" Either go to court so a judge makes a ruling or the state legislature clears this up. What is happening right now is ripe for all kinds of problems.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
12hr ago
Other expensive imported whiskey- Black
I would be shocked to see a black dude drinking Red Spot or Yamazaki 12. Are you thinking cognac rather than whiskey?
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
Italy was Erdo’s weakest point in Europe, though.
No_one
12hr ago
If there's a travel ban on North Korea.. does that mean you'd be facing criminal penalties travelling?
Also, funny story when it's a little kid. Tourettes is like that but.. all the time.. There's a twitch streamer who has tourettes. If it's undiagnosed as in her case, it's pretty brutal, she got beaten unconscious in middle school. NHS only diagnosed it at like 27.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
12hr ago
Can't decide if you should be banned or AAQC'd for this.
trying to go for change in the law would work better
You mean getting a bill passed to solidify either “DMV respects common names” or “DMV entitled to do what they want”, so that either way we're not stuck squinting at a 1982 court case and trying to guess whether a lawsuit is warranted?
(But I do agree with @Rov_Scam: with the law as it stands, it seems more likely that the ACLU would address a case of actual anti-transgender discrimination by the judge by simply making the judge do the thing, rather than making the DMV do the thing, if only because it would be a more valuable ideological win.)
TheBailey
soapy mop
12hr ago
But why do we want to surrender a freedom we currently have to the government?
On a weaker but more dialed in note: if we are to get rid of that particular liberty out of arguably valid fraud and impersonation concerns, it should be done procedurally, not just by the Alabama License Director invoking the secret “Who Will Stop Me, LOL” clause of the Alabama Constitution to overturn decades of established case law.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
13hr ago
Speaking from experience, they’re the glue that holds a lot of things together.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
13hr ago
Not gonna watch videos until I’m back at home, but thanks for the links.
How are you assessing Reisner’s reliability? If he were distorting numbers—or selectively reporting, or remaining conspicuously silent—how would you know? It’s easy to spot the most shameless partisans, but that leaves out a lot. I suppose I’m assuming that anyone who spends this much time covering a subject will develop something resembling an opinion.
That twitter post mostly links to a longer article on the National Catholic Reporter.
It starts by quoting JD Vance:
Now, JD Vance is is a Catholic, and he is making a claim about a "Christian concept" which is vaguely reminiscent of Subsidiarity.
Now, I am not a fan of non-political organizations meddling in day-to-day political affairs, be it the American Mathematical Society or the RCC. But that does not mean that these organizations should keep quiet when they feel that their teachings are misrepresented. If Trump claims that 15 is a prime number, then I will not consider it undue meddling if the AMS releases a press statement which says that he is wrong. If JD Vance had called it a common-sense, Protestant, Jewish or Hindu concept, then I would consider the NCR reaction undue, like most cases of "my religion says what you do is bad". But a bishop disagreeing with a Catholic who explicitly invoked Christianity does not seem undue to me, never mind "dunking"
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