function_seven

We played Golden Eye a lot before Perfect Dark came out, and it was awesome to see that the Facility... er, I mean the Felicity was kept in the game.

Never actually played the single player part of either game. It was nonstop 4-player battles. I hated it when they put prox mines near the spawn points, but that's only because I didn't get there first.

You can leave the infrared sensors in place, and use the relay to simulate a button press. It wouldn't be any more dangerous than clicking your remote when you can't see the door.

+1 for OpenSprinkler! I have their sprinkler controller. Works with Home Assistant, it's awesome.

I don't have a garage door, but if I did, I wouldn't hesitate getting this one.

The whole part about her meeting the hitman at a Waffle House, and giving him a $100 down payment seals the deal. That's not LARPing. That's an overt act.

Guess I'm backward as well.

Oh you just gave me an idea for another hypothetical. If the House was unable to elect a Speaker during the time the debt ceiling was breached, would they even be capable of bringing any action before the Court?

One stalemate averted by another!

Haha. Well obviously that what I meant by my shorthand phrasing!

But like, for other people who aren't so smart, thanks for detailing the mechanisms I would use :)

I think you could say that about our own genes as well. They don't physically pull the levers and whatnot to make their own copies. They rely on external cell machinery to pull the strands apart and start transcription and so on.

A gene "self-replicates" in an "emergent property" kind of way, in that it encodes the information necessary for its own future proliferation. A viral strand of DNA/RNA does the same thing, encoding the behaviors and structure of the virus such that it'll proliferate.

You know, like a spicy meme :)

This is a piece I was missing in my hypothesizing. It didn't even occur to me that Treasury needs the Fed in order to transact in this way.

I kept thinking about the Fed doing maneuvers as "one possible path", and the Treasury doing maneuvers as "another path", but they're kinda the same.

Thanks.

Then mint it instead?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion-dollar_coin

I think you're right. If I'm sitting on the court, I might accept whatever flimsy loophole the Executive Branch provides, and say, "Congress is free to clarify their intentions at any time to resolve this impasse".

Now the ball is in the House's court. Are they going to vote to positively default? (Rather than passively not act before some deadline, like how they do it now?) I bet not.

Yeah, I'm asking a hypothetical to see where it goes. Lots of things that would "never happen" seem to be happening, so I wouldn't be too sure of it.

So, Treasury decides to punch through the debt ceiling. What happens next?

For those more knowledgeable than me:

How would it play out if the Treasury decided to ignore the debt-ceiling outright, and continue to service the national debt? Imagine a policy that says, "In accordance with the Fourteenth Amendment, we will continue to pay bondholders their due monies" or something like that.

I don't think the 14th amendment gives the Treasury that power, but that's not what I'm asking. Imagine they decide to interpret it that way. The Supreme Court rules against them. They ignore the Court and continue to pay.

What happens then?

I guess what I'm getting at is: what is worse, a Constitutional Crisis? Or a default on our debt? To me it seems like the better outcome would be to ignore the Court altogether on this issue.

(I'm sure I'm making naive assumptions in this questions. Let me know!)

Shit. Yeah, I guess it is. Let me try again, rephrasing the grandparent comment:

> Not every picture with text is a meme. To become a meme it requires a certain level of distribution.

becomes

"Not every sequence of amino acids is a gene. To become a gene it requires a certain level of self-replication."

Okay, so that's still a bit shaky, but I what I'm trying to get at is that a "meme" is something that includes its popularity in the definition. It's impossible for me to make a meme that only I see. That's just a photo or whatever.

Jokes, music, and insults can be inside jokes, or a Wu-Tang album, or a dig I only share with one other person. A meme is any of those things that's also popular in the viral sense. It encapsulates a maybe-complexish idea in a simple image.

If I asked you for a meme that demonstrates "wanting what I don't have, even though I have more than enough" you might give me that classic ::guy-looking-over-his-shoulder-at-pretty-girl-walking-by-while-his-girlfriend-gives-him-dagger-eyes:: one.

By definition, a meme is memetic. It "self-replicates" from one person's mind to another's in an anologous way to how genes propagate.

A meme that fails to attain some sort of popularity doesn't meet the criteria. Like a gene that fails to propagate itself. An evolutionary dead-end.

Yeah. In criminal trials the jury instructions will include something to that effect. "The Defendant has chosen not to testify. This is normal, and you cannot consider that lack of testimony as evidence of guilt." We know that jurors will often still make negative inferences in their head. We can't do a thing about that. But not all of them. Jury instructions carry weight.

So the jury instructions would be pretty powerful if the judge said, "You should consider the lack of bodycam footage as beneficial to the Defendant. You may reasonably find that the accused's testimony is more credible than the officer's during those 17 minutes."

The Personal Savings Rate on this graph includes money saved via investments. It's not just a Savings Account tracker.

They take what people make, then subtract out money spent on goods, services, and taxes, and interest payments. The money left over is what is considered.

How am I supposed to interpret this? That we're currently at the same point we were just before the 2008 GFC?

Because that's how I read it, and I hope it isn't a rhyme.

Indeed, whenever I see a snappy headline here, and the domain name is "bloomberg.com", I just go to my inbox and 9 out of 10 times, it's his column sitting there waiting for me.

Thanks. I never knew about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_city#California

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-law_municipality#Calif...

I’m too dumb to know if you’re making a math joke or if this is a real 3D modeling thing.

Or both?

No disagreement here about the failings of elected judges, but if partisanship is something to be avoided, then having appointed judges can often be just as bad. The politician doing the appointments will surely pick judges that align with their party's ideals.

In the best case, when the executive and the legislature are in opposition—and appointments must clear both branches—then you have opposing forces that hopefully weed out the most partisan of judges.

My proposal is to have candidate judges throw their name on a list. Whenever a spot needs filling, then each of 3 committees makes their selections from that list. Those 3 committees would be (1) current judges, (2) prosecutors, and (3) defense attorneys.

Only if a majority of each group blesses a candidate, would that candidate be eligible for appointment by the governor.

I delivered pizzas back when Phil was on KFI. There were so many late deliveries because I just couldn’t get out of my car until a commercial break.

RC Collins, Bud from Ojai, Margaret Gray, Bobbie Dooley, etc. All hilarious.

I just priced out a base Model 3. No options whatsoever. The price—including Federal, State, and utility subsidies—is $34,185.

I included sales tax. Without that it's still $30,630, but I don't think it's fair to include government subsidies but exclude government taxes when determining the effective cost of the car.

Here's the breakdown:

    Vehicle Price       $38,990 
    Destination Fee       1,390 
    Order Fee               250 
    Sales Tax             3,555 
    Federal Tax Credit   (7,500)
    Calif Tax Credit     (2,000)
    Utility Rebate         (500)
                       —————————
                        $34,185

My 2012 Ford Escape has drums in the rear. I’m dreading that brake job.

Who does the pruning, and what is considered repressive?

For purposes of this discussion, let's talk about the origins of Covid-19 and how surgical masks had little effect on the lab-borne virus. Or we can talk about how anti-maskers' rhetoric harmed a vulnerable population, and how discussions of lab-vs-wild distracted us from what should have been our immediate concerns.

Should the government talk to Twitter about my statements to that effect?

What about forcing vaccinated pupils to share a classroom with unvaccinated peers?

Some people will share their (reasonable!) opinion that allowing unvaccinated students presents a hazard to the school population. Others will share their (also reasonable!) opinion that denying education based on vaccination status presents a hazard to the development of our kids.

These are examples! I do not want to actually debate Covid 19 shit. Instead, I'm using it as something concrete to get at the larger ideas about speech "cultivation" and "pruning", and who decides what is "repressive".

So, who's building the garden walls?

How do McWhorter, Pinker, or Haidt give free speech a bad name?

The quote is from a year ago.

Something that occurred to me the other day regarding my own "memories" of times before I was born:

From 1965–Present, the world is in color. The tone shifts a bit, but it's all in color.

1900–1964: Black and white. The world was actually black and white. Sometimes people moved around at a weird frame-rate :)

1800–1899: Color, but very much sepia toned. The whole world was slightly dirty and brownish, but the sky was still blue.

Big Bang–1799: Color, no sepia or nothing.

Of course this is all due to photography and movies. The general lack of both of those before the 20th Century (yeah, I know photography goes back further, but just barely. It wasn't widespread) means whatever images I get from that time period come from paintings and illustrations and written accounts. The sepia I perceive from the 1800s is basically thinking of them in terms of the railroads, westward expansion, etc.

So the result is that when I think about the Roman Empire—when was the last time you thought of that?—I see a richly-colored world like the one we have today. But when I think about WWII, it's all black and white. And the Civil War occurred in a vast, dusty, brownish field.

If I'm on my regular nightly haunting mission, and I decide to speak to the new owner of the house that I'm haunting, how do I convey to them that I am really, actually, truly dead? I could say, "I'm literally dead", but they would think I'm laughing at their joke they just made!

If the answer to this is to avoid the word "literally", and instead replace it with "really, actually, truly" (like I did above), then I might just decide to retire from haunting.

> irregardless is not a word.

Lots of dictionaries disagree. But not me! I'll join you on this hill, regardless of what those dumb dictionaries say.

The misuse of "literally" and the common use of "irregardless" are the red pills that have turned me into a crotchety old ... prescriptivist.