tburkhol @ tburkhol @lemmy.world

Posts

1

Comments

613

Joined

2 yr. ago

My usual drinking vessel is a souvenir cup from the 1992 Miramar Air Show. I still use a "boom box" style radio and clock timer from 1985 as an alarm clock. The tape player on the radio is long expired, but it still plays radio.

Infrastructure for distributing the air once it gets to the settlement is one thing. At least for now, though, Earth is the only place to get oxygen in life-sustaining quantities, which is the single source they're talking about.

Maybe you can posit harvesting oxygen from mineral oxides, hydrolyzing water if you can find it, or capturing an ice asteroid. Whether you split every atom of oxygen you breathe out of rust or lift them out of earth's gravity, let alone doing both for redundancy, it's orders of magnitude more energy and complexity than growing potatoes in Antarctica.

My recollection is that Kelly had a pretty contentious relationship with his President and, even at the time, portrayed himself as 'the adult in the room' trying to restrain Trump's worst impulses. There was a whole stream of people who served with barely concealed disdain, then promptly unloaded in scandalous books and interviews upon leaving the administration.

Plenty of people did just join the grifter admin to get their grift on, but a few of them had the misguided idea that they could be the one to make Trump understand politics and professionalism.

+1 mythtv. It distributes OTA TV to kodi all over the house.

Some people will refuse to pull the lever to divert the trolley from killing 10 people, because pulling the lever kills 1.

If you make it to 62, your life expectancy is 21 more years. that mean 21*0.7 = 14.7 years worth of social security payments. Full benefit at age 67 gets you 16 years worth of payments. If they'd raise full retirement age to 70, you'd only collect 13 years of payments.

In the US, social security is a tax on poor people earning less than~$160k. That's the bottom 90% of earners.

The top 10% of earners collect about half of the country's personal income. Each of them does have to pay SS tax on the first $160k of earned income, but clearly there's a huge pool of income that doesn't pay into social security.

It's easy to forget that US political parties are not actually the government. They're just people who get together for common purpose, like a book club or a softball team. Those parties can run whomever they want in their primaries, and the states have no role until it gets to putting people on the real election ballot. At that point, if someone puts in their name and they're too young, not a citizen, not a human (looking at you Idyllwild), or otherwise ineligible, it becomes the job of the state not to put them on the ballot, regardless of whether they're sponsored by a party or not.

Back in the day, you weren't allowed to plug a private phone into AT&T's network. You had to rent phones from Ma Bell, for something like $10/month, back when $10 would fill a gas tank.

Between that and Columbia Music Club, so when Netflix was still sending DVDs in the mail, I decided I'd rather buy one movie a month than rent 4. Ripping them wasn't so easy in those days, but there was already library organizers. Now, it's like 20 years later and I've got something like 250 movies I can watch any time. Mostly good ones, now spread over four different streamers, if they're even out there. Plenty to keep me entertained.

It's a corollary of Pratchett/Vimes "boots theory." More expensive to buy stuff, and the first few years you go without a lot, but in the long run, you get enough for less.

[edited:] That's what the Trump cases in MN etc are about. The MN(?) judge punted, though, and declined to say whether he was ineligible for office, saying instead, basically, that the state didn't have any rule against insurrectionists being on primary ballots.

Parties are welcome to nominate someone who might never be allowed to take office - that's a party problem, not a state problem.

I don't think watermarking would be helpful. If you're the prosecution and you hand over watermarked evidence, but also want to leak evidence to the public, then you'd almost certainly use the version you watermarked. As we saw with the SCOTUS leaks, it's really hard to detect the source of court leaks.

It's not just secret service. There's plenty of private citizens who'd open fire, no questions asked, on someone breaking into their car.

Splitting parts of government that they consider essential from those they're willing to hold hostage. TSA and defence in one bill, medicare, FDA, and DOT in the other.

McCarthy could hope to get at least a few Dems to substitute for the right wing crazies. Johnson is a right wing crazy, and there's [ed:]no pool of super-crazy right wingers he can use to substitute for moderate GOP.

I imagine this back-room negotiation, where the moderates told the crazies they can have the Speaker in exchange for just keeping the government open, and now they're learning the lesson we've known all along: right wing crazies never negotiate in good faith.

Opinion arguments, like "gaming feels like a chore" require different support from fact arguments like, "the world is flat." You absolutely can not prove the world is flat, gravity works, or birds are real with an opinion poll, but a poll will support whether newer games are less fun or Coke is better than Pepsi.

IMO, the best argument against the video is that he's focused on old games that he still plays - he's comparing the best of old games with whatever has just come out. I'd argue that there's something special and unique about a game you can still play a decade later - it's not the story, which is definitely going to get tiring after 10-20 playthroughs; it's not the quests for the same reason. Game mechanics, decent pacing for that one-more-turn feel, and maybe just aesthetic appeal. Where would he put games like Minecraft or Valheim, both of which rely heavily on resource farming and repetitive building?

I think that many of the new, big titles have tried to capture all possible niches - part FPS, part RPG, part basebuilder - and it's hard to make all of those seem important to the game without forcing FPS players to do basebuilding and basebuilders to do RPG. That takes away from each person's enjoyment of their preferred mechanic and imposes tedium.

Judge has already ruled that fraud was done. This part of the trial is just to figure out the penalties. The more they can muddy waters as to who, exactly did the fraud, the more they can hope the judge treats them like absurdly negligent morons rather than criminal masterminds.

It's like there's this committee of Trumps, and they're going one by one, asking "who shat in the punchbowl?" None of the kids can remember doing it, and their daddy just thinks it's a travesty that we're even talking about the steaming load. The evidence is all there, everyone knows what happened, but it's hard to know how much of a team effort it was and whom to punish.

Consent can be hard to judge when you have wildly disparate financial powers.

Let's not oversell this. OH #1 only passed 55-45. 52% turnout is far better than a normal odd-year election, but 55-45 is hardly a blowout, especially because it depended on 70-30 wins in the big cities. A huge swath of Ohio's regular voters are perfectly happy to go along with abortion restrictions, and a sizeable number of staunch pro-choicers will show up to keep Roe in the dirt. Any district that doesn't include a major metro, abortion is still a convenient wedge issue.

No cameras in this courtroom. Georgia will be televised.

Political campaigns have turned into gossip wars, and I kind of want to know if this is because journalists can't be bothered to talk about issues, if their audience can't understand anything deeper than "ha ha elevator shooz", if journalists have to fill so much time that they've exhausted issues, or if their audience just doesn't care about issues. I don't think it's a particularly new phenomenon - I remember mockery of Jimmy Carter for his peanut farm - but it sure does seem a lot louder now.