SatanicNotMessianic @ SatanicNotMessianic @lemmy.ml

Posts

4

Comments

930

Joined

2 yr. ago

Well, at least their spamming this post reminded me to block their account, so there is that.

Just say no to fascists, kids.

Yup, and they successfully argued for years that their non-physical presence in a state meant they should not pay sales taxes in that state, effectively forcing states to subsidize Amazon at the expense of local businesses.

So what you seem to be arguing is that logic dictates that anyone with the economic power to ensure or prevent the passage of laws is necessarily correct, and that the only definition for a term like “theft” is the legal interpretation that you, as a non-lawyer, decide to apply. You’re saying that, despite centuries and millennia of colloquial usages of the term, both predating and concurrently used with the very restricted legal definition, any dictionary or other usage-derived definition is invalid.

That doesn’t sound like logic to me, Mr. Spork.

The basis of high crimes and misdemeanors would imply it being criminal

That’s an incorrect reading of that phrase. “High crimes and misdemeanors” is a particular term of art that means pretty much the same thing as “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” It means someone holding office who, by virtue of using the powers of that office, abused those powers in a particularly impactful way. It doesn’t necessarily mean the violation of a specific law, although it could obviously include that. There’s obviously legal precedent that provides additional context, but as formulated at the time it was written it basically means “abuse of power.”

Trump has literally argued in court that the President can do anything up to and including the assassination of a political rival with no repercussions other than impeachment. By extension, that includes the arrest and assassination of members of Congress and the courts who would oversee his impeachment and/or prosecution. They argued that this is a protected right of the office of the president in the constitution, in front of a judge.

To point out that if the same logic were to be applied by Biden to solve the Trump problem is simply showing the absurdity of the argument. You can unclutch those pearls.

“Right to work” means employees can work in a union shop and receive the benefits of such without having to join the union or pay dues. It’s a set of laws that have successfully destroyed unions.

You’re thinking of “at will” employment laws, which means an employer can fire an employee for any reason or for no reason, but not for an illegal reason (which varies depending on state but includes the right to organize and rights against discrimination and retaliation).

You do understand that 1) these ideas are floated mostly in jest and 2) they are floated because they map more or less directly to statements Trump has already made outlining his intentions, and he will not require precedent to do so.

Trump didn’t require precedent for anything he did, up to and including not conceding the election and attempting the violent overthrow of the government of the United States. I’m not sure why people say “Appointing additional justices just means the Republicans will do the same!” Of course they’d do it tomorrow if they had the 6-3 position reversed.

Precedent (even in Supreme Court cases), congressional comity, “respect the office of not the man,” and everything else has been thrown out the window in an accelerating process, but completely since 2016.

Setting a precedent means nothing anymore, unless we can expect Joe Biden to order Seal Team Six to assassinate Trump and the FBI to arrest all members of Congress and the courts who would hold him accountable for it. There, he’d have some precedent.

I absolutely loved House - to the point of distraction - because I identified so strongly with Hugh Laurie’s character. Having myself a tendency in that direction (which I’ve worked, with intermediate success, to overcome), it was very easy so see the world through his eyes.

I even really liked the repeating theme of his always being wholly confident that his initial diagnosis is 100% right, then being proven wrong and being full in on his secondary being right, and finally having his third being right is very very familiar from my own career.

Thanks!

I think I’m going to have to disagree on the basis of such usages as “women singers/songwriters.”

The differentiation is socio-linguistic, because “female” is often used in a dehumanizing context in English. Sociology-linguistically, it’s similar to referring to “blacks” as opposed to “black Americans” or “deafs” as opposed to “deaf people.” The problem is specifically substituting a noun that historically been used to dehumanize the people to which it refers, because it is exclusionary of the “default” status (male, white, hearing).

I am on the side of the linguists who take a descriptive rather than a prescriptive approach to the analysis of language, but part of being a descriptivist is recognizing the subtext potentially if subconsciously involved.

For future reference:

Male/female is chiefly used to refer to biological contexts. “Female spiders in some species tend to devour their male mates” is a perfectly acceptable description.

Men/women is chiefly used to refer to human-centric sociological contexts. “Women in technology roles face hurdles that men in similar roles do not.” is also a perfectly reasonable description.

Please sir, what episode was this?

Just a note to say that PJ Harvey can send you down a dark, dark path. I can’t listen to her unless I’m able to clock out for a couple of days to recover. She’s a really powerful singer.

Also, I want to call out both Sinead (and I’m not even going to get into the character arc she was subjected to, but highly recommend her later work as well as her early stuff) and Kate Bush, if you’re into the more experimental stuff. Going further I that direction would be of course Björk and the incomparable Diamanda Galas. On the other end of the spectrum you’ve got bands like the Cranberries, with Zombies being easily if not superior to anything done by U2 on the Troubles.

In that use case, it makes perfect sense for a binary switch to say I am (not) on the ground. It doesn’t necessarily address the situations in which flight attendants will make manual adjustments to passenger seating assignments in smaller planes while at the gate (which I assume would still involve actual numerical values to some actionable degree of accuracy), but I’ve worked with enough engineered systems to know the design limitations that went into them versus what we wish they would do. That still happens in shipping smartphones. I remember working on a study design from 10 years ago where we could tell the survey team pulled over to the shoulder of the road based on their gps signal but only because they were in the middle of nowhere with a clear line of sight to multiple satellites.

Try this:

Eivør - Trøllabundin

Also, “females” makes you sound like a Ferengi. It’s okay to say women, even when you’re using it as a sexist overgeneralization.

Elon is first and foremost a con man.

He gives them the old razzle dazzle, and even tech investors get so impressed with his confidence and his technobabble and his statements like “This is ready to ship today” that they’ve just lined up to give him money.

I think what’s happening now is that the blush is coming off the rose. Elon first got his money because he was involved as a founder in a company that he was fired from because of incompetence, but kept a large enough founder equity stake that he cashed out a billionaire. Then, because money was cheap and because you hit a tipping point where it’s easier to make money than lose money, he failed upwards.

Now reality is starting to catch up with him, and he’s in a panic. He’s psyched himself out enough that he’s turned pure Trump, doubling down and becoming more outrageous instead of taking his responsibility to his companies into account.

That makes a lot of sense. I worked with space systems for a while, and so I’m very conscious of technological conservatism and its critical role in aviation and space systems. Absolutely no pushback there.

I did not anticipate a binary/on-off system for weight detection. Even in legacy systems, that seems less than ideal, but I’ve been around enough that it shouldn’t surprise me. For that, though, I can see the need for more accurate readings and will concede that it might be cheaper to weigh every passenger than to upgrade a fleet given the certifications etc.

I do harbor a suspicion that things like wind loading, given enough readings and the additional meteorological data, could be corrected for more cheaply than deploying a passenger weighing system just based on what I know about data corrections, but I do have to admit that I was not taking that effect into account in my initial thinking. This was exactly the kind of pragmatic insight I was hoping to get, so thank you! Basically, the approach I would start with would be the same flight number/aircraft model with the airport wind speed or other weather data and see how it affects variability against a null model where you assume no effect. But when you combine that with janky or binary sensors (and I’ve only been to Finland when the weather was actually quite nice so I can’t speak to the variability in their data), and then I can see why this approach might be quite pragmatic.

Thank you! I learned something today.

I think that Toyota recently announced they sold a total of 14,000 (in the US, I’m assuming). They also announced that they were planning on continuing production on the same article, but I don’t know what this will do to their plans.

I absolutely do understand that, but thank you for the detailed explanation.

What I’m saying is this. I’m assuming (based on having flights make adjustments to seating at the gates and just thinking about how I’d design it if I were engineering an airplane) that each wheel/strut measures the weight placed on it while on the ground. This, to some level of accuracy (think back to sig figs from physics 101) gives you the average loading for a flight. You already have the loading for checked baggage (which are already weighed independently as the bags are checked), and I assume something similar is done with any additional cargo. So the total passenger weight (people plus carryons) would be total loading - checked bags - cargo. The passenger/carryon component is automatically an average over that particular flight, since it’s the total weight that you could then divide by the number of passengers. You get that metric for free, since the sensors and data collection is already in place to ensure flight safety and (I assume) required by federal regulations or something.

So you can say that Flight XY3094 that flies from Dallas to NYC at 9AM averages (I’m just making up a number here) 30k lbs of passenger weight. Because you already have the data, you can break that down to seasonal metrics (more weight in Dec and Jan, less in Jun and July eg), compare between flights on the same route but different days of the week or times of day, and so on. You can look at the variability for the data as a whole or within each collection (eg +/- 3000 lbs for winter flights). These are just the most simple examples I can come up with, but hopefully you get the idea. I could have a data scientist write this in such a way that it is constantly updating the stats daily, and be able to perform time series analysis to see whether they’re increasing as a trend over time, or whether the deviations are increasing. I could tie in the data with ad campaigns, to see if those act as a driver that give us a predictive model we could use to offset ad expenses and increased fuel costs versus ticket sales, and so on.

The only additional resolution you’d get from weighing individual passengers/carryon is per passenger variability data, which would not be useful unless they’re looking to build a model where they adjust ticket price by weight of the individual passengers. Remember, they already have the aggregate data. To get the aggregate data from the individual passenger data, they’d have to add them all together then divide by the number of passengers and so on. You could look at stats like the skew in the data (“What percentage of our passenger weight comes from really heavy passengers?”) but again, I don’t see that being useful unless they’re intending to redo their ticket pricing model.

Again, it’s not free. There are costs for collection (purchase and distribution and maintenance of equipment), personnel (“Sir, please stand on this platform. No, like this.” Etc), data collection (physical network and software to collect and transfer the data), analysis (including defining the metrics and writing the software to execute on it and make reports), and actioning the data (business types figuring out what to do with it). That’s easily several million dollars, now that I’m thinking about it step by step.

They have to have justified this - they’re expecting it to pay for itself. I just can’t think of anything unless, despite their denials, this is going to be used to create a legal argument to charge heavy passengers more money.

Yes. The basic method is listen and repeat with variations thrown in. You might be able to get the old FSI recordings for free, and I think there’s a commercial remastering or something like that available for sale. I got those out of curiosity at one point. Pimsleur is an updated version of the same approach with better structure, better voice actors, and in the most updated version available as an app/application.

I’m going off of memory here, but they’re a series of about 3-5 courses (the most popular languages go further) of 30 hour long sessions each, and I would do them while commuting. It would generally take me a few times to get through each course, but it’s really remarkable to think about how in the first course (and many after) what starts out sounding like a string of completely undifferentiated sounds turns into language. At some point some dial really starts to turn and you’ll have your first dream in Spanish or whatever. It’s pretty amazing.

Yes, it is my educated opinion that this person, for the reasons I outlined at a pretty high level, has mental illness.

No, I do not think that the other person’s statement was totally cool. I agree with you that it was insensitive and dismissive. I want to make it very clear that I’m not trying to invalidate the reaction that kind of comment inspires.

What I am saying is that we do not do the fields of medicine, mental health, or criminal justice reform any favors if we try to take the stance that mental illness has no role to play in these kinds of incidents.

Look, I’m a researcher. One of my primary areas of research is studying how susceptibility to contagious ideas like these cluster in social networks and how they’re exploited by the viral contagion between individuals as pushed by their peers and mass/social media. I can get all into sigmoid transfer functions from opinions to behavior and how they’re left-shifted by predispositions.

But my main, ethical point is that this is a medical problem, and we need to treat it like one. None of that casts aspersions or makes any assumptions whatsoever about the vast spectrum that constitutes what we broadly and often erroneously term “mental health.” It just means that people need psychological and medical interventions rather than life in prison or the electric chair.