WaxProlix

I encountered a theory that 'planet x' might be such a PBH, explaining its ability to gravitationally impact post Neptunian bodies and its elusiveness. Would be incredibly cool to have something so exotic (or commonplace?) so close to home.

Cool idea on Tunguska - would such an explanation make predictions that we could verify? Radioactivity or changes to carbon in stones or the rings of local trees... An interesting thought.

Hey Chris, great to see you here. Still waiting for my hefty kickstart of Light Table to pay off, any updates there?

(for real though, this looks cool; what kinds of longevity should we expect from such a project - how can we be sure?)

Same

At least in the Settings pane, the slider is kinda ambiguous as to whether you're opted in or not.

https://postimg.cc/2V7mM77C vs https://postimg.cc/1nF1HGzh

Sure, and their real estate sector is shaky, their domestic investment model (and their foreign policy wrt trade and subsidy) has some real sustainability questions, it's not perfect but they're absolutely blitzing. Even if the growth plateaued now they'd eclipse the western world for the next century easily.

China poured more concrete in 2023-2025 than the US has throughout its entire history. China creates and consumes an order of magnitude more energy, and in an increasingly sustainable and cost-effective manner. China has largely moved towards internal market sufficiency, with internal demand outstripping external imports.

I'd be interested in a rebuttal piece too, because I don't necessarily want reality to be what it is. But it is, and it is.

They've been around in one form or another since the early 80s, and have been in and out of a few of the major chaebols in that time. I wouldn't call them privately owned in the western sense, necessarily. There's no institutional investment behind the chaebols themselves generally, they're 'owned' by a single family and passed down hereditarily, and are nationalistic in a certain sense; they're much more closely ingrained with both government and state identity than most western corps.

This is a good intuition. The construction is actually sometimes jokingly called the "Try And"-C, where "C" stands for Complementizer, a thing that introduces and subordinates a clause.

Iraqis didn't view Saddam as an invading force. Some even liked him!

I don't really agree - a dedicated populous with light arms in both cases was able to ward off a full victory on their home turf, and the US caved to losses and other pressures (60k dead americans in 'nam, hundreds of thousands wounded physically, notorious trauma uncounted etc).

I don't have any sort of civil war fantasy, but I think that holding out against a military deployment in-country until it became socially and politically untenable would be pretty reasonable.

Substitute Vietnam then, if the point makes you feel better.

Do you feel that way about the last time Israel broke ceasefire in operation Cast Lead, which resulted in similar civilian vs combatant deaths? Maybe no amount of punishment is enough for the evil on the other side?

It's not a helpful frame to think in tbh, because now you get to look at the considerably more evil thing done by Israel and justify - what - a chemical weapons attack or something against its citizens?

Let's just stop the killing first

That's true up to a certain threshold on 'probabilistically correct', right? At a certain number of 9s, it's fine. And increasingly I use AI to help ask me questions, refine my understanding of problem spaces, do deep research on existing patterns or trends in a space and then use the results as context to have a planning session, which provides context for architecture, etc.

So, I don't know that the tools are inherently rightward-pushing

There are other websites on the internet, and I don't want to/didn't consider toggling off ghostery, noscript, ublock origin, etc per domain that I choose to pay for.

It's funny, I had YouTube's paid offering for a few years (I used the service a lot and want to support non ad-based revenue streams). But they changed something a while back that started giving me a degraded experience, and eventually made the site unusable. Did some digging and it turns out they were detecting my adblock and intentionally making my experience bad despite being a paid customer. I submitted a ticket or whatever but of course nobody gave a shit. I ended up upgrading my adblocker to something that worked on the new YouTube but of course at that point why keep the subscription if I have to fight some ads arms race anyway?

Ads are useful and have their place in keeping the web accessible to everyone, but Google's anti user policies really stretch that relationship.

People band together for sports teams, open source software, volunteer fire brigades, drinking clubs, fantasy football leagues, cover bands, all kinds of things that require all kinds of levels of investment, toil, coordination, and subjugation to a greater cause without monetary gain.

Now, how prime real estate is doled out back in earth...

Many preppers work towards this goal so it's not unreasonable if you've already made the leap to 'something bad happened but I survived with my house/bunker/bug out bag/whatever'. I'm not really a prepper at all and even I've got a little solar capacity, batteries and such.

So they check the bill and see that you incurred a $500 fine for smoking in the room they paid for? How does this help :(

Aside from the fact that nobody is lionizing a group in Sudan (vs say Israel), and so there's no direct comparison here?

One major difference that I see - though of course I can't speak for the journalists - is that my country and tax dollars are directly involved in this conflict. Every child who burns alive, every man woman and child raped in an Israeli camp, every doctor or medic killed by targeted drone or sniper fire is in a sense in my name. I'm not saying Sudanese political instability isn't impacted by western actions, but this conflict is very real for a lot of people because of a direct, material involvement.

Journalists maybe feel this way, too?

I do also think this is a pretty straightforward distinction, and suspect your bringing up a fundamentally different conflict to say something like "well you think Israeli deaths get too much coverage in this war, why do Sudanese deaths not get very much?" is weird and borderline disingenuous.

> This presumes the journalists are somehow neutral to begin with

I don't think it presumes that, I'm just pointing out that the existence of articles reporting on Israeli war crimes doesn't preclude bias.

> How do you define what the neutral version of the headline should be?

I don't really believe that true neutrality exists, we're always exposed to biases. Which and to what degree are at question here. My hypothetical headline was specifically meant to highlight this - the same events can be reported on "accurately" in many ways, with many biases. The existence of those facts in a newspaper doesn't mean there's no bias. That's all.

1. You don't have the counterfactual here, so who's to say how the world would have turned out without exhortations from top brass.

2. Recent is the keyword. The tide of public sentiment has shifted somewhat against Israel in this conflict as the civilian casualties mount & theater of combat expands, so maybe it's easier to be a Brave Truth-Teller in the past 2 months of a conflict whose most recent flare-up dates back going on 2 years now.

3. These seem like fairly sanitized headlines considering what they're actually talking about. Consider the last one vs "Israeli Terrorist Strike Murders Dozens, Though They Claim One Murdered Individual Among the Group Not So Innocent" or something. So even though some of the facts are getting reported on, how they're reported on (arguably almost as important) could still be an editorial decision from higher echelons.

Maybe a replacement for sqlite in some contexts if it's even lighter? What does tinykv do better than the current standard for file backed lightweight DB?

True, they should set up child abuse checkpoints too - think of the children after all.

This is classic playbook for this administration. Is air force one out of date, is replacing it a boondoggle? Yes and yes! Should we take a garish bug ridden pile of expense second hand from foreign sources? No! Does America somewhat subsidize the 'free world' with its military spending and asymmetric dollar? Sure, yeah. Should we fucking tank the economy and ruin our standing with every ally to address it? Probably not!

This pattern is pretty common when you look for it.

Already in orbit around Earth, notably. Not Sedna.

Sure, but GP's point is that that level of spending likely won't continue now that the (forecasted) demand has been met.

Na, the utility payers actually pay it, though taxpayers pay for some of the infrastructure and administration, and given to some service providers in the form of tax breaks I think. The circles of that venn diagram are close to an overlap though.

That's largely true, but on the flipside at least some of the rush of batteries into Texas to do ancillary services and provide redundancy are a result of greedy capitalists seeing the profits a few hundred MWh can get you in Texas (at taxpayer expense!) and rushing in to get a piece of the pie. So, markets!

ERCOT has done a great job of setting up incentives, getting out of the way, and letting markets solve their problems. Working with CAISO and then going to set up batteries in ERCOT was such a breath of fresh air for an old team of mine.

Yeah sorry for the typo - I obviously didn't mean the dude from the 80s. I'm not a scholar but have been paying attention for at least the last few years, so mea culpa.