content_sesh

> It's almost as though there's another force at work, silently undermining reason, relentlessly overwhelming rational discourse. Like some nefarious hidden incentive structures which reward attention getting over honest discourse. But every time I've broached the topic, I get ridiculed. (One actual quote is "sweaty, paranoid kook". True story.)

The term you're looking for is "manufacturing consent". I highly recommend Herman and Chomsky's book by the same name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Every one of my ex-wives is a crazy bitch.

Every judge has it out for me.

It's not my fault my kids don't like me; their mom keeps poisoning them against me with lies and my visitation schedule makes it impossible for me to be in their lives.

No one ever believes me, they all just want to think I'm the bad guy.

You don't need to construct hypotheticals here because we're talking about a specific person. He pretty much sounded like what I just wrote. How many years can you listen to someone give the same excuses over and over - it's never their fault, it's because X, Y or Z - before you figure out that they're not the unluckiest person in the world but just an asshole?

What the hell are you talking about? It was multiple women, independently, over decades, that all gave similar allegations of abuse. At one point, one of the unpaid site administrators flew across the country so she could take one of these women to a shelter. How far would you have had the people who used his site and paid for his lifestyle go to cover their eyes and ignore his behavior?

Also buried in that massive thread is a post by one of the women he abused. An actual court of law, not just a web 1.0 forum, found him guilty of squandering marital assets and domestic abuse. By all accounts, he killed himself to avoid taking responsibility.

Lowtax's was a relentless downward story, where he squandered everything he had with no redemption arc. It's very sad, but it's not the bizarre strawman scenario you've concocted.

Inverted by whose standards? You could just as convincingly argue that capitalist enterprises are the ones with inverted incentives: to extract as much value from workers as possible while paying them as little as possible.

Depends on your definitions, right? What you describe sounds an awful lot like the Democratic party, but they're liberals, not leftists. I'd argue they're center-right.

From what I've seen at least, when more leftist parties like Green, DSA, the various communist parties, etc, talk about reducing gun violence it's in the context of eliminating poverty and other environmental contributors to the problem.

The left (both modern and not) is much less self-defense averse than you think. There's plenty of leftist gun clubs; the Socialist Rifle Association and Redneck Revolt, formerly John Brown Gun Club, come to mind immediately.

There's also the long history of unions literally going to war against capitalists, like in the Battle of Matewan.

Also worth remembering that leftist groups like the BPP encouraging its members to legally own firearms led to significant gun control expansion in California.

In 1989, those under 40 had 13.1% of total household wealth. In Q1 2021 that number was 6.0%. It seems 2009-2011 saw the lowest levels where it didn't crack 5%

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire happened on March 25, 1911. The owner kept the factory doors locked and as a result 146 people either died in the fire or jumped to their deaths. The owners were acquitted of manslaughter, but did have to pay $75 per person they killed. The owners made $60,000 profit due to the insurance payout.

Two years later in 1913, the one of the owners was arrested for locking his factory doors, again, and fined $20.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...

Haskell's Maybe type (monad?) comes to mind.

Does your hot take genocide-based solution include "tactical nuking" of Pakistan as well? Because the Afghan Taliban gets plenty of support from them as well.

Really nice explanations and visualizations. The discussion about ship stability and the moment arm between center of gravity and center of buoyancy gave me flashbacks of my undergrad aircraft stability and control classes (where the moment arms between CG and center of lift on the wings determines static stability).

The discussion about propeller design is also very similar to aircraft as well - not just aircraft propellers but also compressors in turbofan engines.

The fact that there's a ton of similarity between the disciplines isn't too surprising, but the great visuals in this blog post made that connection seem particularly satisfying.

Appendix B (pg 76) contains the extremely dystopianly named Prolific Offender Calculation, which I think is the criteria applied to the letter recipients in this article

I'd argue that by their own criteria, every member of the Pasco Sheriffs Office should be on this list, given that rates of domestic violence are 2-4x higher in police household than US households in general.

citation: https://sites.temple.edu/klugman/2020/07/20/do-40-of-police-...

edit: Someone posted an unredacted version of the 2018 version of the Pasco Sheriffs Office ILP manual in another comment. Appendix B lays out the specific criteria they use. It appears they tally up the number arrests or bookings (but "suspicions" are not counted). I'm not a criminal law expert, but it sounds like that just means the more times the cops haul you in the higher your score is, even if you're never convicted of any of it.

So my initial comment wasn't quite right. Their criteria provides even more incentive to not book fellow cops for misbehavior, as that happening too many times (even if nothing comes of it) would make them pop on this list.

You're correct, "particular" and "specific" are synonyms, and I concede that I might have been unclear. I'll try again.

What bothers me, and I imagine the original commentator, is that swatting works at all. It is deeply concerning that police in America are so reliably violent that they can be used as a fairly effective murder weapon.

Discussing the fact that communication mediums that allow arbitrary messages to be sent allows one to construct abstract scenarios in which such a transmission causes a chain of events that leads to someone's death feels like it misses that point.

GP isn't talking about any particular consequence of phone calls. It's talking about the specific consequence that, because American cops have a tendency to murder people instead of arresting them, you can use them as a hit squad with a simple phone call.

Like what happened here: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/12/kansas-man-killed-in-swa...

I've held clearances before and that was very much not the attitude of the security folks I met. But they were big fans of reminding you what happens if they catch you doing an unauthorized disclosure.

I was very low on the totem pole, so I can't know for certain what leadership actually expects. But it doesn't jibe with my experience that there would be some kind of "leak budget" similar to Google SRE "error budget".

"An occupied building partially collapsed, killing multiple residents. But on the other hand, the report about its systemic structural issues was long and kind of a boring read"

Are you for real?

I would like to know this as well.

I'm not a Civ E, but I have worked in aerospace and software and seen reports in both fields that contain warnings of potentially catastrophic problems use similar language as the report:

  The joint sealant was observed to be beyond its useful life and are in need of complete replacement. However, the waterproofing below the Pool Deck & Entrance Drive as well as all of the planter waterproofing is beyond its useful life and therefore must all be completely removed and replaced. The failed waterproofing is causing major structural damage to the concrete structural slab below these areas. Failure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially.

If I get an audit of my production system and it says on page 7 "There are no database backups. Failure to take regular database backups will lead to permanent data loss in event of hard drive failure." and then two years later, the hard drive finally fails and I lose data, that's my fuckup, not the auditor's. And as others in this thread have mentioned, I don't even need to be licensed to do my job.

It takes an astounding lack of responsibility to say "well they never said the major structural deficiencies were going to cause an imminent collapse! And why was it buried on page 7, and not in bold font?"

They call out that it is an extremely expensive systemic issue that will need to be repaired (bullet point "b" on page 7), and the first paragraph on page 1 indicates they attached an estimate of the overall costs of necessary repair (although it does not appear to be included in this copy of the document).

What omission are you talking about?

Boeing was my first job out of college (BS in Aero Eng but I was hired as a software dev). I worked there for a few years in both commercial aviation and defense projects. I've since moved out of the aerospace industry entirely in favor of tech.

Boeing is a huge company and I saw just a small slice of it at my time there. So with that caveat, in my opinion the root cause of Boeing's problems are mismanagement. Mismanagement flows down from the top of the organization and impacts everything they do.

Here's just one example, off the top of my head: There is no "psychological safety" in the workplace. I wasn't aware of this term at the time, but it's crystal-clear with the benefit of hindsight and a decade more working experience. There is no good way to fix irrational or ineffective processes; or at least, I've never seen it happen. What I did see, several times, is course changes and "new approaches" that result in whole departments (dozens of engineers) getting pink slips. So as a result there was inherent mistrust of change, because "we're going to stop doing X and start doing Y" meant "everyone currently doing X needs to scramble to find a new project before the hammer drops". It is impossible to build a culture of continuous improvement and engineering excellence in such an environment.

Again, this is just one example. There's probably hundreds, thousands, more. It's mismanagement all the way down.

What proof is there that means-testing this to weed out "unworthy" renters will save more money than it costs?

It's to throw red meat to DeSantis's base while making sure to avoid pissing off one of the state's largest employers

Today I'm proud to announce my candidacy for Dog Catcher of Sarasota, FL, and that I am suing this website for its communist deplatforming of my many troll accounts.

> The Zoom bombers’ public IP addresses matched Malachi’s — but four other students who did not appear to be Zoom bombers were also listed as having Malachi’s public IP address, an impossibility since they were not in the same house, said Scott Moulton, a Woodstock-based forensics expert hired by the attorney working on Malachi’s case.

So in other words, 5 students plus the zoom bomber had the same "public IP address" (probably due to NATing) in this list, and they picked him as the culprit. What did they do, roll a dice?

Reminds me of frequency hopping.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spect...

Interesting side-note, one of the people who re-invented this technique was actress Hedy Lamarr who was quite an accomplished inventor

Campus activism is much older than 10-20 years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Philadelphia_student_demo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_strike_of_1970

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University_protests_o...

Somewhere a Gentoo maintainer's ears are ringing, but they don't know why...

so because child porn and not-child-porn are both stored and transmitted as bytestreams from a hosting company's servers, you can't actually draw a distinction between them? is that where we're landing on this one?

"Playing opera on my stereo isn't a morality question, I'm just creating vibrations in the air, and I should not have to care what interpretations of those vibrations can exist when I play it at 4am with the dial cranked to 11"

can you see how playing semantic games to try to dodge responsibility for poor behavior can be irritating even in the best of circumstances?

whoa nelly. asking for a "rational argument" against distributing child porn before launching into one of the strangest combinations of ad hom and strawman arguments I've ever seen on this web site. here I'll break it down for you:

The grandparent post said (abbreviating):

  But hosting isn't a morality question, they are just storing a number, and hosting company should not have to care what interpretations of a number can exist.

The parent post responded, saying that this is a flawed line of reasoning, because it (imo purposefully) glosses over an important distinction between hosting child porn and hosting most numbers:

  but there is a real human cost here

hope this helps you come to a decision on whether hosting child porn is bad or not!

If this isn't some type of thought experiment to prove a point, then this is some off-the-charts chauvinism. Why do you believe they would actually want to relocate here?