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DuskStar

5,988 karma · joined July 19, 2012

Software developer, normally in Los Angeles, now in Michigan to ride out COVID with family. Not the best choice of locations in retrospect, but what's done is done.
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DuskStar··on The most radioactive spot in New York City can also fix your muffler
It's less radioactive than Denver. Like, all of Denver.
DuskStar··on The most radioactive spot in New York City can also fix your muffler
As opposed to the European solution, where you know there's explosives in that field over there but you only deal with the stuff that floats to the surface each year.
DuskStar··on The U.S. cannot afford to turn against immigration
The reverse is also plausible, and whites could begin to show in-group preference again.
DuskStar··on Twilio’s toll fraud problem
I would strongly recommend cracking the DRM on those when you have the chance.
DuskStar··on Kerbal Space Program free on Epic
As long as you pay some minimal level of attention this shouldn't be a problem. 10s delays between stages won't prevent something with a minimum TWR of 2 and 4000m/s of combined dv from reaching orbit.
DuskStar··on Japan to invest on nuclear energy in major policy shift
I think you're missing the distinction. It's not that bureaucracy caused the meltdown, it's that the bureaucratic reaction to the meltdown was the source of the damage.
DuskStar··on The cyanide tooth is a cold war fairy-tale (2018)
Carfentanil, maybe?
DuskStar··on FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried says he can’t account for billions sent to Alameda
> There's no upside to sparing him.

The upside to saying "yes I can be bought" is that people will give you boatloads of money.

DuskStar··on Backyard Ballistics
Getting the tax stamp takes several months, unfortunately.

And you need a new stamp if you want to transfer it to another person.

DuskStar··on Anti-War Speech Sent Eugene V. Debs to Prison, 1918
The regulations that allowed for private warships and artillery?

Those gun control regulations?

If there are actual gun control regulations from the post-revolutionary period, I'm sure that they'll be used to defend NY's and CA's modern regulations soon.

DuskStar··on Anti-War Speech Sent Eugene V. Debs to Prison, 1918
Don't forget "machine guns aren't weapons of war" which is also quite a bit of a head scratcher!
DuskStar··on Anti-War Speech Sent Eugene V. Debs to Prison, 1918
I'd personally put US v. Miller on the list instead of DC v. Heller.

Wickard v. Filburn deserves a mention too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Miller

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn

DuskStar··on South Africa's national electricity crisis to worsen
Have living standards (literacy, health, etc) improved for the nonwhite population in the past 28 years?
DuskStar··on $477M FTX ‘hack’ was a Bahamian government asset seizure
> dude who plays League of Legends

A dude who plays LoL badly. Embarrassingly badly for his number of games.

DuskStar··on The Ethical Principles of Public Health
There's two general reasons for a person to get a vaccine. One is that it makes them healthier, and the other is that it makes society healthier.

If the person gets to choose, then there's a natural counterbalance against things that are harmful to the person but good for society. Only an idiot would turn down a vaccine that has a 90% chance of saving their life.

If society gets to choose, then forcibly sterilizing poor single mothers/disabled people /those of poor breeding/etc might be on the table again. (It's a health intervention that is bad for the individual but also leads to a healthier next generation)

DuskStar··on Somali Law (2013)
It depends on perspective. We in the west generally have a "no innocent lives lost ever" perspective. But sometimes "minimize total societal damage" looks pretty good too.

Is it better to live in a world where 1000 murders happen a year and half the murderers escape punishment because they ran, or one with 100 murders where 10 ran and family members were killed in their place? That's a lot less deaths!

Nuclear MAD is an extreme example of this - it's very obviously immoral to kill a few million civilians in retaliation for the murder of other civilians. But that's what MAD is! And in practice, it's likely prevented millions of deaths due to war.

DuskStar··on The Basic Law: A Fifty Year Assessment (2019)
> Says who? I understand the core principles of absolute free speech. I just don't agree. This is a very absolutist (and americano-centered) view of what liberties encompass.

It should be obvious, but the people in power will not want you to say bad things about them. If given the power to prevent that, of course they will. (and they'll say that "politician X was found in bed with a dead hooker" is libel, regardless of the facts)

> Some political organizations should be prohibited.

But which ones? Just genocidal ones? Do communists count? How far do philosophies need to differ before a party is allowed again, and who (besides the individual voter) should be the one to choose?

"They're totally just lying about their beliefs" can be both true and not an acceptable reason IMO.

> prosecuted after intimidating opposition through violence.

Then BAN INTIMIDATING OPPOSITION WITH VIOLENCE. Ban ALL of it. But "these words are violence, this violence is just protest" isn't ok.

> Your voting rights cant be stripped away for small offenses.

Only being able to vote for people with governmentally approved opinions is itself a removal of voting rights. This should obviously be true for the limit case (only one candidate), but it's a spectrum.

DuskStar··on The Basic Law: A Fifty Year Assessment (2019)
Free speech must include the things people do not want you to say.

If it only includes the things people would be ok with you saying, there would be no need to protect it as a right.

DuskStar··on Should frequent flyers pay for the decarbonization of the air industry?
Burning Kerosene emits as much co2 as producing it consumes, but kerosene is massively easier to transport and store in existing infrastructure. (It's literally jet fuel)
DuskStar··on The United States’ Unamendable Constitution
> Extended the definition of "time of war" to include a war in which the state is not a participant. This was to allow the Government to exercise emergency powers during the Second World War, in which the state was neutral.

Seems like Ireland lasted 2 years before (in practice) removing all constitutional limits on government power forever. Oh sure, it's only "if so resolved by both Houses of the Oireachtas" but that's slim comfort to me.

DuskStar··on Should frequent flyers pay for the decarbonization of the air industry?
I think that the business case for hydrogen over synthetic kerosene is slim to non-existent.
DuskStar··on Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society
> Real liberals (not necessarily leftists, although perhaps so)

Leftists are 100% part of the problem here in the US, I'm not sure what you would need to be smoking to think otherwise.

DuskStar··on Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society
Define "first", "violence" and for good measure "group". Do things ever reset, for instance? Are some wrongs too far in the past?
DuskStar··on The reality of celebratory gunfire
That's only including celebratory gunfire incidents, and only in the United States.
DuskStar··on The reality of celebratory gunfire
A lot of ammo is military surplus of one form or another, and the military doesn't have quite as much use for blanks.
DuskStar··on ‘I'm Dropping My Covid Hubris,’ Vows a Top Immunologist
> Al-Aly and two other researchers looked at the health records of 250,000 veterans who had been infected once with COVID; 36,000 who had been infected twice, and 2,000 who had been infected three times.

> Using a “hazard ratio” — a measure of how often bad things happen to one group compared to another — the researchers found that the risk of heart, brain, kidney and blood complications all increased with each subsequent infection.

So does this sound like something in the same ballpark as "antibody dependent enhancement" to anyone else? And is there any reason to expect that "real" infections count but vaccine doses don't?

DuskStar··on Volvo is using Rust for its in-vehicle software
But when your smart oven and smart smoke detector conspire...
DuskStar··on ‘We don’t have to feel like prey’: the female joggers running with guns
Off the top of my head, there was a shooting in a mall food court stopped by a concealed carrier in Indiana a month or two back, and another in a Texas church maybe 2 years ago.
DuskStar··on Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers
"My family and I went to see bears at Yosemite. It was so exciting! Can you point to Yosemite on a map?"
DuskStar··on Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers
It's trivially true though? If you had a functioning justice system, the lynchers would be arrested and it wouldn't happen again.

It's also true in more significant ways, in that lynchings happened because people felt that crimes (or "crimes") were not being appropriately dealt with.

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