domain:drrollergator.substack.com
anti_dan
23m ago
No, we should, but it shouldn't include camps for children. Places like New Orleans should have buildings, they should be basically shanty-port towns for workers. Mostly single men. And they should get risk wages like high wire guys do, and probably should have a union that negotiates life insurance.
But children certainly shouldn't be living in floodplains.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
25m ago
A flash of light and a loud bang followed by my phone announcing a thunderstorm warning happens at least several times a summer. Yeah, and no shit...
FD4280
31m ago
Finished Sharpe’s Tiger by Bernard Cornwell. I’d love to read more historical fiction of this quality, especially set in India.
gattsuru
56m ago
Louis McMaster Bujold is always a blast. Sometimes a little preachy in the later works, but great howdunnits. Miles, Mutants, and Microbes is a little weird of an anthology since "Labyrinth" touches on topic the topic but not as heavily on the plot points of the other two works, while Diplomatic Immunity is more
DI can stand alone or as a sequel to Falling Free, but it's an odd editing decision, even by Baen's standards.
You see that Vorkorsigan-like tones more often in fantasy -- Diana Wynne Jones is a little less high social drama but similar -- but it does seem pretty badly underserved in scifi. Maybe some of the Ciaphas Cain series, if you're into Warhammer?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
Style history:
- Special Forces types started wearing them during Iraq / Afghanistan. So a lot of tactical bros started that as well. You can see this all over GunTube and CopTube.
- On the other end of the culture spectrum, "chill dude" vibes since the early 2010s have been facial hair friendly. Everything from a kind of lazy, Seth Rogan three day beard, to weird retro mustaches a la Arthur Shelby from Peaky Blinders.
The underlying reason common to both; growing a beard is a pretty good solution if you have a weak jawline. Some women don't like beards, but some do. The pool is large enough you aren't giving up much if you go for the beard. Very few women will totally overlook a particularly weak jaw line.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
I have at least heard the idea from Aboriginal people directly, though the way they framed it to me was in terms of having 'weak genes'. That said, I do not rate the scientific literacy of the person who told me that at all, so I have no idea if it's actually true, or just an excuse one might tell oneself on seeing one's pale skin.
This reminds me, I'm finding Dungeon Slayer pretty bad so far. The worldbuilding makes no sense, the main character is pretty dumb, and the secondary characters' behavior is extremely unrealistic. Fights have mostly been interesting and cool though!
(Edited to spoiler on the side of caution and also to add:)
Still enjoying 12 Miles Below but it's slowed down a lot and frankly I don't care about the
Anyhow even though I'm mostly complaining I do appreciate the recs. 12 Miles Below has unquestionably been worth the read overall and will stick with me.
Oh hey I started a new series recently called Iron Tyrant by Seth Ring and it's a lot of fun. First few chapters are extremely unrepresentative of the rest of the series. Overall the author shows a lot of competence in the stuff he's writing about -- brutal military training of enslaved child soldiers, espionage, political intrigue, etc. -- and that makes it good. First book is called Chain of Feathers. Absolutely cannot wait for more of these to come out. Oh, but I'll say that the magic system is... idk, it's not the most interesting, but he does cool stuff with it and for a litrpg it's surprisingly light on stats and stuff. It's much, much more about the character, the setting, politics, and just general coolness than it is about the magic system.
@Muninn extra ping in case you missed the edit.
jkf
1hr ago
Should be possible to slaughter a calf in a rad suit -- the L*** helps those who help themselves, y'know?
miras_chinotto
certified low iq
1hr ago
Most places in the US do tightly regulate floodplain development. Most places like these summer camps, some of which are 100 years old, are grandfathered in so it's left to local government, communities, and operators to determine what they need to do to ensure adequate safety.
faceh
1hr ago
End of day you really can't account for every variable, or conditions that are far outside the 'expected' normal range.
Weather in particular is a chaotic system. Some days the conditions just happen to coincide to make things more severe than expected.
Remember just about a month ago a Swiss village got swept away by an avalanche. What are we to do about this risk? Engineer every mountain to be stable?
Or Volcanic eruptions. We don't HAVE an engineering solution to those!
The arguably better solution in many cases is to build the houses and infrastructure as cheaply as can reasonably be done so they can be more easily rebuilt, and spend the extra money on early warning and evacuation efforts.
The entire religion is predicated on the Messiah returning and the Temple being rebuilt on these grounds.
Would the Messiah not just remove the fallout? If anything, it'd be a pretty good indicator that it was time to rebuild, plus now there's no existing competition for the site.
And radiation actually maps pretty well to existing divine wrath, specifically the Ark of the Covenant curses from 1 Samuel.
But after they had brought it to Gath, the hand of the Lord was against the city, causing a very great panic; he struck the inhabitants of the city, both young and old, so that tumors broke out on them.
... For there was a deathly panic throughout the whole city. The hand of God was very heavy there; those who did not die were stricken with tumors, and the cry of the city went up to heaven.
AnonymousActuary
1hr ago
just wanted to say, extremely here for the anti-dog content. I love dogs, but like 5-10% of people max who own them should own them, and you should have to have a kid or be a single male (saying this somewhat sarcastically, but not completely).
This is one of my favorite blog articles on the subject: https://mattlakeman.org/2020/03/21/against-dog-ownership/
Why not set up a machine instance in one of the VPCs, ssh into it, run mysqldump against the source DB and pipe it to mysql connecting to the destination DB? The piping avoids storing it on a disk/bucket.
Why would the security team kill you for connecting to public IPs? Just make sure TLS is enabled and you're good to go. Also if both VPCs are in the same AZ/DC you're likely not going to go over the internet. You might not even go over the Internet between Google Cloud DCs.
Might need to ask an LLM for the right set of options to disable buffering and select the databases you want to clone.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
In this case the context is also that most senators dislike that oath and took it insincerely. If you look at the recording of Thorpe swearing the oath and making a fuss, the other senators in the room were rolling their eyes. One commented, "None of us like it", and a minister afterwards called the oath "archaic and ridiculous".
Australian parliamentarians are legally required to swear an oath to the Queen (as it was at the time; it's now the King) when they take office, but it is safe to say that very few of them actually believe the oath or take it remotely seriously. This is from 2016, but over half of them support a republic (yes, this is significantly out of step with popular opinion, politicians as a class are often unrepresentative), and I think it's fair to say that on a plain reading of the oath, bearing true allegiance to his majesty and his heirs and successors would be incompatible with wanting to abolish him.
But none of them take it seriously. We are not a nation that takes oaths seriously.
(I would not single out Australia in this respect - I think the West in general has largely given up on oaths. My favourite example of this, actually, is that becoming an American citizen requires a person to explicitly renounce any other citizenship or allegiance, and yet large numbers of people become American citizens while retaining prior citizenships. Nobody cares.)
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
1hr ago
Well I just finished The Geneva convention(s). So I started with a new book "In another world with my smartphone"
The Geneva suggestion convention is a way more interesting read when you have all the cultural context of people calling things war crimes. It's a lot of fun to read and go "wow that isn't a war crime and the amount of effort it puts into this is really fun. (admittedly I was also watching an anime with a bunch of people in /r/anime and just recording the war crimes comitted by the good/bad guys (mostly the good guys) really made it a lot more fun of a read.
JarJarJedi
1hr ago
Any task that can be described as "look up the thing which I describe, possibly in vague terms, among vast array of similar things, and bring it to me" is excellent for it. Using it as a search engine that understands natural language very frequently works. I use it multiple times a day this way and it helps a lot. Same for generating simple scripts that I know exactly what needs to be done, and maybe even have an example of doing similar thing but would have to spend 15-20 minutes tweaking it to do the other thing - it can give it to me in one minute. This is an awesome tool for such cases. But nowhere near "junior programmer" or "fresh law degree graduate" as some claim. At least if I had a junior like that on my team, I'd have a talk with the manager that hired him.
zeke5123a
1hr ago
It is evil in the same way that when you strike a bargain, you ought to uphold the bargain.
Sure bargains are revisited after some time. But most people understand that a bargain is designed to last at least for some period of time; not weeks.
Activists therefore are violating the spirit of the bargain.
I also think activists frequently have wrongheaded goals and make things worse off but that’s a separate matter (though it no doubt makes me less favorably disposed to activists in general — in truth I think an activist is a shameful “profession.”)
clo
1hr ago
It's hard for people to take the libertarian lesson from such events because lizard brain instinctively understands that the levers of power are like, right there.
If you think you've won forever and for all time, what possible reason would you have to build in checks and balances to the infinite expansion of state power? They were wrong about this, but there were a significant amount of people in America - some of them reasonably intelligent, just isolated in their own bubbles - that did in fact think they were going to win forever, for all time, and the only thing left to do was consolidate and grind down the boot.
I like libertarians. I lean libertarian. But they're losers. Their win state is to check out and to be left alone to do what they're doing. This is inherently a losing position, because those who show up to the game are those who get to play.
JarJarJedi
2hr ago
The whole concept of "getting your views" from a youtuber sounds quite bewildering to me. I mean, listening to, sure, thinking about some ideas they raise, definitely, agreeing with something, maybe, but "worldview"?
Also, I have no idea who the twitter is and who those blogger types are, but if you compare them to antifa types commonly featured in arrest reports or just plain regular report from places like Portland that gave up on arresting them, they look the normalest normal of the bunch by far. They don't even have blue hair!
JarJarJedi
2hr ago
Finished the Rhesus Chart from the Laundry Files. I am sure it were a lot funnier for me if I were a Brit, absent that it kinda feels the series are running out of steam. Started the Annihilation Score which only supports the conclusion so far. Maybe it will get better, but starting it I found it a bit hard to sympathize with Mo so far. We'll see how it goes.
clo
2hr ago
This is very weird to me because this is heavily colored by recency bias. China looks like this because this is intentional. Their realpolitik and pragmatism is born out of fire, revolution, infighting over the levers of power and millions dead.
The reasons people like to hold up for China's success - their uniparty, the absolute dominance of the governing power, their zero-tolerance model of governance, their model of state and local governments, their high-IQ population - are also reasons to doubt them.
China has unique strengths, but also unique weaknesses. The Party is bloated, corrupt, inefficient, and bloodless transitions of power are not guaranteed. Local governance lies, schmoozes, and fakes numbers to look good to state governance. Measures are targets. Their state capacity leaves other states green with envy. But for all the bemoaning that You Can Just Do Things, or that the Chinese Government Can Just Do Things, the corollary is that the Government Can Just Do Things to You.
They're facing some genuinely difficult problems now; real estate collapse, the income trap, historical weakness in domestic consumption, demographic issues with tax base + aging population. It's too early to call the Chinese century. But broad policy strokes can affect billions.
The best way to understand this is that in China, the trains will not stop for you, even if you get caught in the doors. It'll drag you for miles, uncaring of if you become a corpse or not. And you have little control over where the train is going. It may lead to a prosperous, stable future, but if it doesn't and the train is headed for a cliff, what control could you possibly have over it, short of killing your way to the front?
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
I think that generally holds true for older, more established churches, like Catholics and Anglicans. They tend to be asset-rich and cash-poor, all the more so because many of the most conspicuous assets have substantial maintenance costs. There's a reason why most cathedrals you visit have donation boxes for upkeep, because just having a cathedral is a major ongoing expense.
Younger or more 'low church' groups often don't have this issue. If your church is run out of a big concrete block, or even a warehouse or something, you can enjoy much lower operating costs. You may just rent the building and be quite mobile, or if you own it, it can much more easily be shared with others or rented out for an additional income stream. Traditional church buildings don't have that flexibility.
I note that Deverell's fourteen aspirations put a particular emphasis on property sales, which I take as reflecting the reality that the Anglicans are declining in numbers and are therefore regularly selling church buildings that are no longer used in sufficient numbers to justify their upkeep. The same is true of Uniting, though somewhat less so of Catholics (who have done better at buoying their numbers through migration). Probably there's opportunity there?
Property sales were, to my knowledge, required from the churches to fund compensation about the sexual abuse scandals - or at least, that's what the Anglicans and Uniting did. They just don't have the cash on hand.
Anyway, yes, in general the stereotype that the churches are rich is misleading. The churches often have a lot of valuable stuff, if only because they are very old and have accumulated property intergenerationally, but their actual budgets are much more shoestring than one would expect.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
I think rich countries shouldn't be building houses and infrastructure in flood plains without damming or proper measures to control the water. It's not impossible. The Netherlands has most of its economic activity below sea level, they eroded the North Sea.
There are big floods all the time in Britain and Australia that wreck people's houses. There ought to be a more aggressive stance taken towards the weather, bring it under control one way or another.
I feel like when I was a kid we got thunderstorms all the time (various locations in California) but now it's maybe once every few years. Wonder if that's pure inaccuracy on the part of my memory or what. I miss the majesty; the sheer primal power in those storms.
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