thebooktocome

The text is painfully awkward, not McCarthy at his best.

1985 isn't usually considered a locus of Victorian attitudes toward sex, at least in the United States. The Hayes code was abolished in 1968. The Miller test was established in the late seventies, reducing publisher risk for content that would have been considered pornographic a decade or two earlier.

Anxiety about sex—and particularly homosexual sex—didn't significantly rise again until the early 2000s, around the time Lawrence v. Texas was decided. The Puritans have been loudly agitating for blanket censorship ever since.

Fisher did not “produce” the UK left, he was an outspoken critic of Labor. Actual politicians these days rarely take notice of philosophers.

His main work, Capitalist Realism, was about the post-Cold war condition in which any alternative to Capitalism seems defeated before it gets off the ground—your comment is a splendid example of this phenomenon.

The Wikipedia numbers are reported by the CPD and are therefore skewed by their political objectives.

> Bond reform designed to make sure no one stays in jail while their cases are pending with no safety net to handle more criminals on the streets,

At the time you make bond, you have merely been charged with a crime—you are not a criminal. I’m sure a prosecutor does get tired of having to argue cases against defendants who were able, by virtue of habeas corpus, to prepare a defense.

> shorter parole periods, lower sentences for repeat offenders,

Things that mitigate real inequities present when the justice system interacts with poor people.

> the malicious and unnecessary prosecution of law enforcement officers,

This is a terrible thing to say in a world where police officers have no obligation to serve and extraordinary legal defenses that protect them from almost every form of wrongdoing.

> overuse of diversion programs,

The United States already incarcerates a relatively large fraction of the world’s children. He would prefer incarcerating more.

> intentionally not pursuing prosecutions for crimes lawfully on the books after being passed by our legislature and signed by a governor,

This prosecutor has had this power for twenty years, and I’m certain he’s used it freely. He’s likely used it to protect people he feels sympathy toward, and refrained from using it to protect people he feels no sympathy toward. He’s likely used it because he feels overworked or under-appreciated.

> all of these so-called reforms have had a direct negative impact, with consequences that will last for a generation.

As a prosecutor, he had wide-reaching legal power to make his community a better place. What did he do instead? To hear him tell it, he was the one in prison for twenty years.

Fannie Mae just settled a foreclosure discrimination class action in which they where failing to maintain foreclosed properties in minority neighborhoods. This caused a chain reaction where nearby homes went underwater and were subsequently foreclosed upon.

Mortgage lenders have remarkable legal resources with which to make a homeowner’s life miserable. While they usually have a financial incentive not to, that doesn’t always pan out.

More likely you have a mortgage, and now there’s all the incentive in the world for the bank backing that mortgage to have a sweetheart arrangement with the company that “sold” you that property.

I grew up in a Midwestern small town with one major employer. It’s not a sustainable way of life. When that employer inevitably pulls out, the taxpayer pays the brunt of their externalities and the people pay with their QALYs.

I see no reason to incentivize that kind of development no matter how badly some people think they want it.

What’s weird is, from my reading of the law in question, a minor using either a VPN or a stolen ID card to access PornHub is a violation. . . for PornHub.

That seems a little wonky to me.

> Just film the book.

This is an impossible request. Movies are fundamentally different from books, they have different languages and cadences, different historical developments, different audiences, different expectations and traditions and tropes.

If you want to read the book, read the book. The film adapted from that book might not be for you and that’s okay.

> You wouldn’t hack up Shakespeare. . .

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of the greatest comedies of the modern era, and it gave us The Lion King 1 1/2, one of the greatest animated films made after the Disney Renaissance.

The IRS regularly forgives large amounts of tax debt for various reasons, some of which are humanitarian.

Why bother removing it? You're not under the impression that misrepresenting your brother's anecdote matters.

I'm happy we drilled down and got to what really happened, which as far as I can tell was something along the lines of, "my professor said something about race once and it hurt my feelings." In Florida (and probably in Texas, too, or soon enough I imagine), I think that's a felony now!

The false positive rate for students reporting “my professor is teaching critical race theory!!!” is outlandishly high.

CRT is also not “political pop science propaganda” so I’m not convinced you can recognize it either. It’s a legal theory. About law.

In the real world of academia, CRT is a legal theory, not a biological one.

It’s getting pretty common in conservative states. Just this year there were (in various states) hundreds of laws passed against public expressions of LGBTQ+ identities, including some that affect public sector employees (e.g., state university professors).

I made more two years into my industry job than any of the tenured professors at my Tier 2 mathematics department (comparable to A&M).

There’s no way Texas state govt can stomach paying competitive salaries for non-tenured professors. They can’t even stomach investing in critical infrastructure.

Japan is famously mountainous. I can’t imagine they don’t road test them on “real hills”.

I think a more charitable read of OP is that you don’t need a satellite (or even GPS) to provide centimeter-accurate localization over a wide area. Spacebound systems are always going to have worse uptime and less resiliency than ground ones.

I’d agree with you but for the part where—at least in America—any substantial loss one of these landlords might take is bailed out or subsidized by some level of government, i.e., by the taxpayer.

For example, a local mall is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, but not to fear: the township is in talks to purchase it at market value so as to not create an eyesore. Utter insanity.

Plenty of usmil enlisted are anti-war. They’re the ones with skin in the game, after all.

Imperial units are unfortunately still in common use in the United States, the United Kingdom, and related colonies/ex-colonies. They are variable base number systems that people reckon with on a daily basis.

It wasn’t so long ago, historically speaking, that England used pounds, shillings, and pence! Decimal currency really was a fantastic innovation.

There’s a razor’s-edge between “why can’t we talk about [racial difference X]” and “[racial difference X] means they’re infrahuman.”

If you’re interested in the contours of this debate, I recommend Paul Gilroy’s “Postcolonial Melancholia”.

> Publishers didn’t like it CDL, but they lived with it.

Publishers spent millions of dollars developing digital lending platforms with fewer features and worse ROI than CDL, and then bullied libraries into adopting them.

This is a reasonable summary of their pre-IA activities:

https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

> There absolutely is a correlation between NEL and the lawsuit.

As many comments point out in this thread, legally the trial and the judicial decision had little to do with the NEL. Therefore, in the counterfactual where the NEL had not been part of the dispute, the publishers would have still won their case.

I read the opinion. The emergency library appears once, only insofar as CDL being found not fair use entails that emergency lending was also not fair use.

It’s an entirely severable part of the decision. The publishers legally had a case against CDL without it.

Nuclear warheads on ICBMs are wildly different from what the Allies had during WWII, and far beyond the scope of this debate. They also represent an incremental advance in the state of the art, and not the quantum leap Scott is failing to invoke here.

He's not a public intellectual and he doesn't want to be. But people treat him like one regardless, because he happened to attain a little clout as a "Rationalist".

Insofar as it is objectively true, it is irrelevant to his point; insofar as it is relevant to his point, it is historically false.

Dresden, Tokyo, Hanoi—how many more counterexamples do you need? The means to level a city with conventional bombs already existed. The nuclear bomb's innovation was as a weapon of intimidation, not raw destructive force.

Astral Codex Ten (or Slate Star Codex, or,...) would be a lot more compelling if one didn't always find some obvious historical error like this in the typical article. If only he could afford a fact-checker.

We have enough carpet-bagging venture capitalists in Ohio already, thanks.

Your patience is legendary. Thanks for taking the time to debunk this.

Nobody drinks tea anywhere near 100C; that’s absurd. Ideal tea drinking temperature is between 57 and 65C, anything higher risks throat damage [1]. All but the blackest teas will fail to brew if held at 100C for the duration of steeping.

[1] https://letsdrinktea.com/what-is-the-right-temperature-for-d...