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but it never comes up again and has no impact on anything.

Isn't the whole point of the novel that God is a virus, infecting our simulation?

I'd say that's pretty plot relevant.

In fact, from a realism perspective, it is entirely believable that we might discover clear evidence that the universe is a sim, while simultaneously not being able to do anything about it. I assume the people with the capability to simulate an entire universe would have better sandboxing and intrusion hardening than AWS.

There's a reason why the blurb/introduction has the following quote:

Whenever I feel my will to read becoming too strong, I read Watts

(Great book. Up there as an all-time fave.)

how the Trump administration is increasing apprenticeships. Of course, few illegals do those high-skilled jobs,

Apprentices mostly are doing low-skill construction work that illegals also do until they’ve learnt enough to be useful helping a full tradesman. Trades jobs do require some training and when the norm is that that training is paid then they’re going to be trained by doing useful but low-skill work. Apprentice plumbers do some digging.

There are late 19th century American military studies recommending intermediate cartridges. They even plainly spell out that higher velocity 6.x mm rounds would be deadlier at all ranges than much heavier slower rounds.

And yet it took almost a century for it to be realized.

The McVeigh story as understood in the popular consciousness is incomplete at best and outright wrong at worst. I'd recommend anyone wanting to learn more to read Aberration in The Heartland of the Real.

Problem is, yes I would lose weight if you locked me in a camp and beat me with sticks. But to keep the weight off, you'd have to keep me locked up for life, or give me my own personal 'beat me with sticks and knock the food out of my hands' 24/7 person.

Changing habits is hard and willpower won't let me power my way to the new regime. I managed to willpower my way to stop biting my nails after years and years of that, but I can't willpower 'just stop fucking eating, you fat bitch'.

If the chatbot doesn't quite have your 30 years of memories, but can make an impression that would fool anyone else, what's the difference?

It's just that I feel like your arguments prove too much, as the expression goes. If there can be such a thing as "not enough data", then indeed how can you place a cutoff point? There's never all data. You of today don't have all the data on the you of yesterday.

The WSJ reports:

Preliminary findings indicate that switches controlling fuel flow to the jet’s two engines were turned off, leading to an apparent loss of thrust shortly after takeoff, the people said. Pilots use the switches to start the jet’s engines, shut them down, or reset them in certain emergencies.

The switches would normally be on during flight, and it is unclear how or why they were turned off, these people said. The people also said it was unclear whether the move was accidental or intentional, or whether there was an attempt to turn them back on.

This is preliminary and unofficial, so this isn't necessarily the real cause; no small part of the Boeing MAX scandal was because original 'leaks' heavily emphasized pilot error over the technical faults.

But if true, this is staggering. NA255 and other takeoff misconfiguration disasters have happened, and typically reflect a long series of systemic failures in addition to pilot misconduct, but each individual step is recognizable and understandable until it was too late. By contrast, the aircraft here could not have taxi'd, or run up, or gotten down the runway with fuel cut off to both engines; they're designed so that neither one could be hit accidentally. There is no failure that would cause pilots to turn them off mid-takeoff, and not even some bizarre reason to want to try.

Which... does not leave a lot of options, and they're all bad.

EDIT: official preliminary report here:

The aircraft achieved the maximum recorded airspeed of 180 Knots IAS at about 08:08:42 UTC and immediately thereafter, the Engine 1 and Engine 2 fuel cutoff switches transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position one after another with a time gap of 01 sec. The Engine N1 and N2 began to decrease from their take-off values as the fuel supply to the engines was cut off...

As per the EAFR, the Engine 1 fuel cutoff switch transitioned from CUTOFF to RUN at about 08:08:52 UTC. The APU Inlet Door began opening at about 08:08:54 UTC, consistent with the APU Auto Start logic. Thereafter at 08:08:56 UTC the Engine 2 fuel cutoff switch also transitions from CUTOFF to RUN.

I don't think there's any plausible solely-electrical or mechanical explanation that would explain these recordings.

a very young child would benefit from being around its family, versus being one of 10 or 20 kids overseen by essentially a cut-rate nurse, I’d think.

Over here, there are government regulations about staff-to-children ratios, and you would need more than one staff member to supervise 10-20 kids, depending on age (unless this was a really cut-rate, under the counter, unlicensed operation):

Sessional pre-school service A pre-school service offering a planned programme to pre-school (Montessori) children for a total of not more than 3.5 hours per session. This services category covers may include pre-schools, playgroups, crèches, Montesorri pre-schools, naíonraí or similar services which generally cater for pre-school children.

Adult to Child ratio
0-1 year 1:3
1 — 2.5 years 1:5
2.5— 6 years 1:11

Part-Time Day Care service A pre-school service offering a care service for children for a total of not more than 3.5 hours and less than 5 hours per day. This may include a sessional pre-school service for a child not attending the full day care service but instead a half day service. The service must provide the same physical environment, including rest, play and facilities, as for full day care. This service category may include pre-schools, playgroups, crèches, Montesorri pre-schools, naíonraí or similar services which cater for pre-school children.

Adult to Child ratio
0-1 year 1:3
1-2 years 1:5
2-3 years 1:6
3-6 years 1:8
(While within a sessional class - 2.5— 6 years 1:11)

Full Day Care service A pre-school service offers a structured day care service for pre-school children for more than 5 hours per day. This may include a sessional pre-school service for children as part of that day. This category includes day nurseries and crèches.

Adult to Child ratio
0-1 year 1:3
1-2 years 1:5
2-3 years 1:6
3-6 years 1:8
(While within a sessional class - 2.5— 6 years 1:11)

So why are Indian tourists, from a country where pickpockets are routinely beaten, not beating these pickpockets on the metro, where they are surrounded by other Indians, who (presumably) routinely beat pickpockets? Why is this dog not barking?

I never claimed that. I presume that they do, in fact, raise hell should they catch the culprit in the act. Unfortunately for tourists, they tend to be found in crowded places, some of which might be called tourist traps, where it's harder to notice, or figure out who the culprit was, while the latter has an easier time vanishing into the crowd.

To be clear, I'm not talking about online Indians, I'm talking about actual Indians I've met IRL, with who I've talked about life in India

Did you specifically ask them about the topic? It rarely comes up unprompted.

When Ashwin was arrested by the police in New Friends Colony, the seeds of doubt were sown in his mind.

This doesn't say anything about whether or not it was a victim who caught him, whether he was roughed up during the process, or after by the police. I've never claimed that standard means of law enforcement don't exist in India.

"mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts..."

Do you think DeRemer sees MAGA voters as a mass of white unemployed drug addicts?

You do seem to nail it on the sewing bras etc...

I had an Indian coworker once comment that shoplifters in India would be beaten. Rather unlike the American response of letting them do it.

Recently @RandomRanger accused me of strawmanning the Right:

Turok was being banned for being overtly aggressive and obnoxiously creating imaginary narratives like "The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain."

That's not what the 'woke right' thinks and he surely knows it. He need only check the MAGA rhetoric from Trump about good factory jobs, or the rhetoric from the right about the need to mechanize dull fruitpicking jobs and raise productivity. Why, they say, should millions of people be brought into the country if AI is going to destroy everyone's jobs? Or the need to have American wealth kept in America rather than sent off in remittances. Or them hating H1Bs as cost-cutting that interferes with developing talent. Or them not seeing the country as purely an economic zone but having responsibility to native citizens. It's an insanely uncharitable and aggressive butchering of other people's ideology.

Did I strawman the Right? Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:

FOX: I think American citizens are willing to do the jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to do.

LORI CHAVEZ-DeREMER: Americans are willing to do the job. What we have to give them is the opportunity to have those jobs.

DeRemer refers to "Americans," the online racialist Right is talks about whites, but in both cases the vision is the same, uplifting the ingroup means getting them the opportunity to do the jobs currently done by the guy standing in the Home Depot parking lot. Is there any wonder high-income whites are moving away from the Republican Party? Working-class whites, too, don't want their sons working casual labor, which is why in the video DeRemer goes on to talk about how Americans will be given opportunity through being "skilled, upskilled, re-skilled" and how the Trump administration is increasing apprenticeships. Of course, few illegals do those high-skilled jobs, so upskilling Americans won't replace many illegals, but it's not like the Fox News host is going to point out the apparent contradiction.

Given that I've given an example from a cabinet-level Trump administration official, (not "nutpicked" from some rando on Twitter) I expect that @RandomRanger will withdraw his claim that I "obnoxiously created imaginary narratives" in the interests of truth and courtesy.

In the wider internet, I think I'm quite unusual in being open-minded about the benefits of such extrajudicial punishment, compared to the kind of Indians you would pay attention to online.

To be clear, I'm not talking about online Indians, I'm talking about actual Indians I've met IRL, with who I've talked about life in India.

India is a poor country! Western tourists are probably not taking public transport except for the sake of it. That is not nearly as true for Indian tourists, in India.

So why are Indian tourists, from a country where pickpockets are routinely beaten, not beating these pickpockets on the metro, where they are surrounded by other Indians, who (presumably) routinely beat pickpockets? Why is this dog not barking?

Further, there's obvious selection-bias at play: Vice didn't choose to interview an ex pickpocket, did they?

They did, he's no longer a pickpocket.

So, in this sentence, what is the "problem" that is in need of a solution? Is it, like, "the problem of trying to decide what to tell people"? Or what?

You claim it is, but again, I have met many Indians and I have never heard any of them claim that thieves are guaranteed an ass-whooping on the spot.

That is not a claim I've made. I've said such an outcome was "guaranteed", merely that the risk is high enough to be a real deterrent for would-be criminals.

We don't have that many Indians on The Motte, so I don't see how it makes a difference. In the wider internet, I think I'm quite unusual in being open-minded about the benefits of such extrajudicial punishment, compared to the kind of Indians you would pay attention to online.

It's not a video, it's an article. The guy mostly picks pockets of people on public transit, which tourists are usually wealthy enough to avoid and has a critical mass of witnesses and people who would be available for administering an impromptu beating

India is a poor country! Western tourists are probably not taking public transport except for the sake of it. That is not nearly as true for Indian tourists, in India.

Further, there's obvious selection-bias at play: Vice didn't choose to interview an ex pickpocket, did they? If someone is still up to their shenanigans, then they're either skilled or lucky. An ideal pickpocket doesn't want to be caught, if they did, they'd be a bandit.

I can't even imagine what it means to be "too dumb to care" about being beaten to a pulp. It is possible that he's lying, but why would he lie about this? Why would he continue to be a pickpocket if he's getting beaten every day by mobs of Indians? More importantly, how could he continue to do anything but lie in a hospital?

Criminals aren't particularly known for their keen ability to do fine risk-benefit calculations. If they did, they'd probably be more likely to look for a job. That doesn't mean that they're immune to incentives.

As I've made clear, I never claimed that pickpocketing is guaranteed to lead to a beating. If literally every pickpocket was caught right away and beaten, then I think the number of pickpockets out there would be, if not literally zero, within spitting distance. Mostly because of kleptomaniacs I suppose.

You get families like that, and they're not confined to Russia. They're trash, dysfunctional, and the kids have little chance to grow up not to be dysfunctional trash themselves given how they're raised, unless someone intervenes at a very young age and takes them out of that environment.

They'll probably still have a ton of problems, but at least they're not being raised like feral dogs.

I know, which is why I've resisted the blandishments of doctors trying to sell this to me. I know I'd be one of the patients who didn't stick to the stringent lifestyle changes you have to make along with the surgery, and I'd be one of the ones who over-eat to the extent of bursting the sleeve.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18586571/

Those high in dietary adherence had lost 4.5% more weight at postoperative week 92 than those low in dietary adherence.

In other words, it doesn't really matter if you're a good boy/girl and listen to your doctors after you've had most of your stomach removed. Of course, bariatric surgery isn't a truly permanent solution, weight tends to come back after several years, but it was a good option before Ozempic made it somewhat obsolete.

There is a difference between "crying because hungry/wet/scared" and "crying because I started and don't know how to stop" and if you're around kids for any length of time you'll pick up on the difference. That being said, I'd hate to be a kid raised under the "at six months ignore the crying" regime because yikes. A small baby is not trying to manipulate its parents, it has few other ways to communicate except through crying.

Kids today, or at least middle class kids upwards, are a lot more isolated. "The newborn is in a crib in the nursery and we monitor via babycam"? The hell? Babies were sharing the bed or at the foot of the bed in a cradle in lower class families, so they were never far away from human contact (see The Reeve's Tale, where a plot point is the deception wrought by moving the baby's cradle from the foot of one bed to another). Now it's a lot more "put the kid in a separate room nowhere near the parents until it cries to be fed" which has got to have an affect.

My man, did you bother to do something as simple as Google the phrase thief beaten up India?

India, as you know, is a big place. I am confident that there's a thief beaten up in India every day. The question is, is pickpocketing and robbery rare, and is it rare because thieves are sure to be swiftly beaten? You claim it is, but again, I have met many Indians and I have never heard any of them claim that thieves are guaranteed an ass-whooping on the spot.

I don't have the time to watch the video right now, but my expectation is that they're preying on tourists primarily, which would be easily true in Delhi. They could also, more tentatively, simply be lying about the risks of being caught, or too dumb to care.

It's not a video, it's an article. The guy mostly picks pockets of people on public transit, which tourists are usually wealthy enough to avoid and has a critical mass of witnesses and people who would be available for administering an impromptu beating.

I can't even imagine what it means to be "too dumb to care" about being beaten to a pulp. It is possible that he's lying, but why would he lie about this? Why would he continue to be a pickpocket if he's getting beaten every day by mobs of Indians? More importantly, how could he continue to do anything but lie in a hospital?

That telling people to make lifestyle changes is highly ineffective? That implies nothing about whether or not the changes themselves don't work. I consider it clear enough, in the context of the comment. In fact, the very next sentence is:

Telling people to use their will to get over depression or diabetes doesn't, and the same is true for obesity.

The only reason we even bother trying is that telling people to do things is rather cheap and low-effort. In rare cases, they might even listen. It also makes us feel good, and ticks boxes.

are historically used to them and because fear of foreign threat is an emotionally powerful motivator.

also, because it is quite hard to find alternative solution (other than "I guess we surrender if we end in a serious war") but states with such approach tend to disappear for obvious reasons

I'm not kidding here, we genuinely are rather unsure about the mechanism of action. Most of the commonly advanced suggestions were found to be wrong or inadequate at best.

I know, which is why I've resisted the blandishments of doctors trying to sell this to me. I know I'd be one of the patients who didn't stick to the stringent lifestyle changes you have to make along with the surgery, and I'd be one of the ones who over-eat to the extent of bursting the sleeve.

Trying to fill yourself with low calorie food is an approach known as "volumetrics", and it works okay.

I don't think just drinking water would work as well, because you'd need an uncomfortable amount to fill your stomach, and the body would quickly realize that it's just water, without calories.

Oh, I've tried the fibre tablets thing - eat this tablet before a meal, drink water, it'll swell up inside your stomach and make you feel full and you'll eat less. Never worked for me because I never got the "feeling full" bit even after taking more than the recommended dose (luckily, I think/hope eating too much fibre is not a bad thing as such).

The problem with false flag theory of this size is that the ten people arrested would have to be genuine. You can't find ten people willing to do a decade in prison over a false-flag attack.

As opposed to the 10 people who demonstratable were willing to do a decade in prison over a non-false-flag attack?

Present culprits aside, you should probably update your sense of scale of people willing to accept severe consequences to act against their enemies. There were more than 1000 suicide bombings, which is to say more than 1000 suicide bombers, in Iraq alone between 2003 and 2011. Iraq during that period was about 1/10th of the population of the US, and hardly had a monopoly on whatever virtue/vice you think it takes to accept guaranteed death for a chance to kill the target of your animosity. Whatever your view of the relative hardiness of the average radicalized American versus the average radicalized Iraqi, finding 10 people to take much lower risks for much lower costs is not the bottle neck.

In fact, we can find far more than ten Americans willing to risk a decade in prison merely by going to the prisons where people are serving sentences of ten or more years. These prisoners are a group who are, by necessity, a smaller subset of the group of people who take risks that could result in a decade or more of prison, since the people who did the same but were not caught/convicted will obviously not be there. And the people who are actually did take the risk is a smaller subset of the people willing to take the risk, and so on.

If your formulation was meant to specify people intending to go to jail as part of the plan would be impossible to find, that would indeed be a lot harder... but it would also be unnecessary. Getting caught isn't required for a false flag any more than it would be for a non-false flag.

Well, they didn't seem to have practiced or thought this out. A competent cell could have modified rifles for fully automatic, controllable fire. I'm sure if you do a bit of research you can find accurate blueprints on how to modify the receiver to allow full auto..

They could, but this would be the sort of tacti-cool that serves as an even greater indicator of cell incompetence that works against a false flag from a competent group hypothesis. It's not that modifying for full auto is something a competent could do and this group failed to do it right, but rather that modifying for full auto for the purpose of this attack is something the competent would not do, and this group thought it would be good to pursue.

Part of this is because 'fully automatic, controllable fire' is more of a video game hollywoodism than a practical advantage for this sort of attack. The physics of recoil are why the sort of squad automatic rifles that use the AR-15's 5.56mm ammo, and larger caliber automatic weapons, are braced against the ground with bipods for full auto. It's also why shoulder-braced SMGs use correspondingly smaller ammo with less kickback, so the body can more easily absorb recoil. Recoil is why militaries train both in terms of small bursts rather than, well, 'full auto.' Unlike video games, where automatic rifles put out more shots on target for more damage, in reality the role of automatic fire is far more for suppressing the enemy for movement and maneuver. You don't control fully automatic fire onto a meatbag target unless that target is particularly numerous, like a WW1 wave attack, particularly close, or both.

And part of this is that this is the google maps image of Prairieland Detention Center. This sort of image is the bare minimum you should expect the weapon-modifiers to have for their planning purposes.

Note that the closest treeline is 100m away from the parking lot. Note that the other woods- the ones large enough to be where Song hid- are closer to 300m. These are not 'close' targets for automatic weapons to effectively hit the target.

And then there's combining the role of an automatic weapon, suppressing for maneuver, to the terrain and how the attack initiated.

From the initial criminal complaint describing the attack in the original Ngo post-

…around 10:59 p.m., an Alvarado Police Department ("APD") officer arrived in the parking lot at the Prairieland Detention Center in response to the 911 call by the Correctional Officers in order to assist the Correctional Officers in their official duties. Immediately after the APD officer got out of his vehicle, an assailant in the woods opened fire, shooting the APD officer in the neck area. The assailant in the green mask, standing near the woods on Sunflower Lane, then also opened fire at the unarmed DI-IS correctional officers. In total, the assailants shot approximately 20 to 30 rounds at the Correctional Officers. Police later recovered spent 5.56 caliber casings at the locations of both of the shooters.

An unmodified AR-15 in its purely semi-automatic function of a shot a squeeze could go through 30 rounds in about 30 seconds.

A M16 on full-auto, the military basis of the AR-15, would go through 30 rounds in about 3 seconds.

Even if you double or triple the shots fired if the weapons didn't jam- a jamming made more likely by the modification to fire faster- you still aren't having a maneuver element do a 100-meter flank assault in 7-to-12 seconds from the closer tree line. Even Usain Bolt took over 9 seconds for his world-record 100m dash, and he wasn't carrying a roughly 6 lb / 3 kg two-handed rifle while doing it.

Again- modifying for rate of fire here is tacti-cool, not tactical. It is anti-competence to expect or pursue, and this group's effort to do so is an indicator against the false flag hypothesis.

(Which is part of why I wish Ngo's article had mentioned it from the start. It would been a helpful balance against his weird flags. Ah well.)