Thrashy

Thrashy, 1 month ago

I fully expect a dissenting opinion from Alito and Thomas that attempts to retcon nominative determinism (“Donald Trump can do whatever he wants, but Joe Biden is a stinky poo poo head and must go directly to jail”) into a core pillar of Constitutional originalism, but I don’t think there’s a majority on the court that would sign on to an opinion legitimizing drone strikes on the opposition party. I’m fairly certain the end result will be a significant narrowing of Trump’s criminal exposure regarding the January 6 insurrection, but the biggest impact that the court has made with this case is dragging out the process of trying it to the point that it likely will not be decided before the election. If they help Trump run out the clock and it winds him the election, then he can instruct the DoJ to kill the case, and his toadies on the court will have handed him a win while being able to maintain the thin veneer that they’re not nakedly partisan operators. If Biden wins anyways, they’re not in danger of catching flak from the MAGA crowd because they will have done their part.

Thrashy, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I mean, I’m about as pro-Taiwanese-independence as they come, but the fact of the matter is that the Kuomintang was basically government by mafia, and so corrupt that a large chunk of the Chinese populace decided “hey, let’s throw our lot in with the guy who thinks insect-eating birds are bad for crop yields, he can’t be any worse than the status quo.” That turned out poorly for them, but to a certain degree I think that if you want to recognize Taiwan’s right to self determination you also have to respect the historical decision of mainland China to go a different direction.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

Dude, even the US State Department notes that the Communists had broad popular support against the repressive Nationalist government.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

Looking at your comments in aggregate, you seem to be taking the position that the legitimacy of a government is derived from the end of a gun rather than the consent of the governed. Is that really a position you want to promote?

Thrashy, 1 month ago

Me: “The KMT was corrupt , repressive, and did not have popular support on the mainland for some time before their retreat to Formosa.”

You: “But WW2 depleted their capacity to resist the Maoists militarily, so you can’t say they lost popular support!”

Me: “I fail to see how the former fact supports your latter assertion. Popular support for the Communist side is broadly attested.”

You: block quote supporting my point "See, you’re wrong! Your own source says the KMT was made vulnerable to the communists during WW2!

Me: “It seems to me like you’re valuing the WW2 military contributions of the Nationalists over the broad domestic support for revolution against them.”

You: “That’s not what I said, you’re being ignorant”

Thrashy, 1 month ago

produces a fascist vision of society with less sophistication than a bad dystopian YA novel

Marc Andreessen: “This man is the greatest genius of our era!”

Thrashy, 1 month ago

Ah, yes, because that one ex-cultist that showed up in the background of every Trump Rally is totally the same thing as Jewish people who don’t like it when they’re told they are obligated by their genetics to support an apartheid state that thinks it’s OK to bomb 100 innocent bystanders to kill one militant.

Thrashy, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

They’ve got drawbacks, too, especially since most examples of them in residential construction are the efforts of, shall we say, enthusiastic amateurs.

1. Because soil holds moisture for an extended period of time, they tend to get saturated, and then excess moisture migrates down to the waterproofing system, which will inevitably leak over time. Most amateur-built earth sheltered homes are not using particularly sophisticated waterproofing materials, and rarely take a defense-in-depth approach to them that could mitigate a failure in one layer of the system.
2. Maintenance is expensive: once any part of the waterproofing fails you are going to have to dig it up to repair it.
3. Soil - especially wet soil - is heavy and the prescriptive structural parts of residential building code aren’t really intended to address this kind of construction. You need an engineer to ensure the house is properly structured for the loads involved, and if you’re building new that extra structure is going to cost money and limit design options.
4. Building into a slope to allow roof access for planting, mowing, etc., limits daylighting options, and particularly in the US where bedrooms are required to have an egress window it can be nearly impossible to design a floorplan with the expected gradient of public to private space.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the concept, and I’ve even drawn up plans for one I’d like to build on the lot next door to me once the nigh-derelict rental house currently occupying the space gets condemned… But this is one case where I absolutely do not want to be buying somebody else’s project. I don’t trust the other people who build them to do it right.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

The heyday of the Eve Online subreddit was great for this shit, and it was always good for a laugh when something that made complete sense in-game hit r/all and started freaking people out. Some bangers were:

• How do I sell a hanger full of corpses?
• I just killed someone for the first time! I’m so excited!
• Does anyone know if drug production is a good source of income?
• I want to kill someone, I need help.
• Did you ever regret killing someone?
• Industry Question: Drug Labs
• Assasination Request

Thrashy, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Folks, there’s a difference between a slumlord and a decent landlord. I’ve owned a house for ten years now, and in addition to the mortgage and taxes and insurance I pay every month for the privelege, I’ve had to spend tens of thousands replacing the roof and doing other regular maintenance tasks. I’m actually about to dump thirty percent of the original purchase price into more deferred repairs and maintenance to get it back to a point where all the finished space is habitable again. Owning a house is expensive in ways that I did not fully understand until I bought mine, and decent property managers are taking care of all that for you, and if that’s not a job I honestly don’t know what is.

Slumlords and corporate landlords can fuck right the hell off, though.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

You can’t win a war from the air… but it makes it a whole lot fuckin’ easier.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

The sad thing is that I spot-checked a few of the commenters and they appeared to be genuine human accounts. If I’m being honest, I would have expected more interesting replies from a GPT-style chatbot than the endless parade of regurgitated Christianese and emoji-spam that I found.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

Bees are basically an introduced domesticated animal outside of Europe. Other parts of the world have their own native pollinators that are at significantly greater risk than bees, which are heavily managed and extensively studied due to their agricultural importance. For all the popular alarm over Colony Collapse Disorder, bee colony populations have been basically stable for decades and certainly haven’t seen any measurable decline in recent years.

Thrashy, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

This used to hold broad cultural applicability, back in the Before Times when the “Hitler Did Nothing Wrong” crowd was still excluded from the political mainstream. Norms excluding out-and-proud ethnofascists from official, public participation in the English-speaking political right started to seriously slip around the time of Obama’s election and certainly ceased to exist after Trump’s win in 2016, but prior to that time “Nazi” was very much more often an ad-hominem attack than an accurate description of somebody’s politics.

Thrashy, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

The South being The South yet again. Certain folks just can’t achieve orgasm unless they first work a brown person to death and reap economic gain from it.

Thrashy, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I did a deep dive on this recently (my day job is in architecture, and in the US we infamously MAKE ALL NOTES ON DRAWINGS IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE THAT’S THE WAY WE’VE DONE IT SINCE WE HAND LETTERED IN BLOCK PRINT SO THAT DIFFERENT DRAFTERS’ SHEETS ALL LOOKED CONSISTENT) and it turns out that’s 100% just an acclimation effect – the old conventional wisdom of skilled readers recognizing lower-case word shapes doesn’t hold water. If tomorrow we deleted lower-case letters from every Latin font on earth, given time we’d be able to read all-caps text just as fast as we currently read sentence case.

Which was disappointing for me to find out, since I REALLY HATE SHOUTING AT CONTRACTORS THROUGH THE PAGE ALL THE TIME and wish I could make a convincing case for sentence case, but oh well.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

Toddler dad, mostly.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

For those of you who recognized the Transport Tycoon graphics, enjoy this magnificent recreation of the soundtrack with live instruments that the original composer put together several years ago.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

Stumbling across Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog on the Atlantic (I think the first post of his I read was about him making a character in SW:TOR, come to think of it) was my first step on the road to understanding the huge racial disparity in equity and justice in America. I even subscribed to the magazine on my Kindle for a while, but when they put up their paywall my digital subscription didn’t count, they’d shut off their comments ages ago (taking with them a lot of nasty for sure, but also squelching the communities that had sprung up around TNC and a few other writers like Alexis Madrigal), and the normal churn of writers meant that most of the folks who I like to read had moved on anyway, so I did too.

Once in a while I see an article I’d like to peruse from them, but it’s just not worth the cost of admission anymore.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

The Kievan Rus was founded by Viking settlers, therefore by the Putin’s own logic he should cede all of Russia east of the Urals to Denmark, Sweden and Norway while he’s at it.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

Studies have shown that in most cases that you’d care most about, extreme punishment does not serve as an effective deterrent to bad behavior. Creating the Torment Nexus as a way to enhance prison sentences serves only to increase the degree of cruelty involved in our already vengeance-oriented justice system.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

It’s been many years since I read them, so I don’t know them off the top of my head. That said, as I recall the explanation was that:

• most violent crimes are crimes of passion, and since they tend to occur in the heat of the moment people aren’t thinking about consequences
• a significant amount of property crimes are acts of economic desperation and/or crimes of opportunity, where the consequences of being caught are either unimportant compared to the more immediate survival needs of the perpetrator, or not fully considered when presented with a tempting opportunity for quick gain

and as such, most of what people think of when they think of criminal activity isn’t well controlled by draconian punishment, and is instead better addressed by improving the general welfare of the most at-risk populations, and focusing incarceration on rehabilitating offenders so as to be able to safely reintegrate into society.

If I recall correctly, white collar crime is one of the few exceptions, since it tends to require quite a lot of planning and forethought to carry out… and if I’m perfectly honest, I’m fine with a billionaire CEO being sentenced to one hour in the Torment Nexus for every hour of stolen wages his company profited from, but alas, that’s not the world we live in.

Thrashy, 2 months ago (edited 1 month ago)

Battletech has flamers, which are basically like if you took one of those WWII flamethrower tanks and powered it with nuclear fusion instead of napalm. The lack of a WarShip-class flamer for space combat seems like an oversight, though…

Thrashy, 2 months ago (edited 1 month ago)

Look, some of us old farts started on Linux back before nano was included by default, and your options for text editing on the command line were either:

1. vi/vim, a perfectly competent text editor with arcane and unintuitive key combos for commands
2. emacs, a ludicrously overcomplicated kitchen-sink program that had reasonable text-editing functionality wedged in between the universal woodchuck remote control and the birdcall translation system

Given those options, most of us chose to learn how to key-chord our way around vim, and old habits die hard.