vundercind

The history with actual cases of private arms being used to support or to resist government tyranny in the US can be generously described as "mixed".

It's also telling that so many instances like that, in the US and elsewhere, start with "... and then the good guys (or sometimes bad guys) seized a barely-guarded state armory". It's debatable how relevant private arms are to the resistance of tyranny anyway.

Foreign occupations are a whole other matter. When the call's coming from inside the house, plenty of your fellow "freedom-lovers" are helpfully using their liberty to liberate you from your liberty.

The law is arguably not what's written, but what actually happens, and analyzed that way our laws about war crime are complicated.

[EDIT] I mean, of course, 1080p's also not typically called that, yet another resolution is, but labeling 1440p 2k is especially far off.

This one covers several things but is basically motivated by spreading the bad news about the seriousness of cat bites, as made clear by the alt text.

The course after that is a few weeks of effectively rapid-onset severe dementia. Animals don't get violent and unpredictable because the virus is simply angry-making—they get that way because they stop recognizing once-familiar things and can't remember how they got where they are, and so are constantly fucking terrified, plus their throats are closing up so they can't eat or drink (assuming they could remember to, or how to) and are experiencing dehydration and starvation. That's your near future by the time there are signs of the disease. You're about to dehydrate to death over a period of low-tens of days while becoming increasingly confused and frightened by your situation and by your own loved ones.

It's absolutely horrifying.

It's a little different when we're talking about someone so rich that they could pay (to them) peanuts to have someone else take care of it for them, but I still get the impulse to just be done with it, permanently.

Maybe, but most of the time they're just a hell of a lot dumber than one might suppose. And maybe a bit mentally ill. And, even odds, have a drug problem ("Winners don't do drugs" and "cheaters never prosper"—grand lies of our childhoods, both are hilariously false)

They have to have that innate child’s sense of fairness trained out of them. The notion that “what the market will bear” is fair rather than (often) screwing people over is something that has to be taught, more often than not, from what I’ve observed.

Otherwise, yes.

I just figured realizing that (and, not unrelatedly, that at least 95% of people in prestigious and powerful positions, in society, business, or politics, are a lot less remarkably-capable than one might expect… or hope… and are surprisingly often outright idiots) was a common experience for those who’ve been “adults” for a while. The whole thing, top to bottom, is mostly large kids doing dumb shit with things they present as understanding but super don’t.

It’s a big fuckin’ game of play-pretend that actually kills people pretty often.

And, more power to them, but at that point I'm not going to willingly rely on the project for anything.

Loopin' Louie? The modern one's lighter and has a weaker motor, even if the original was never exactly greatest-games-of-all-time material, the modern one's just non-functional.

Rock 'em sock 'em robots? Weaker punches, plastic's lighter, new models are often smaller. They suck compared to vintage ones.

Hell even soda bottles are kinda like this. Those things used to be thick and you could re-use them for all kinds of stuff.

It seems like at some point around the late '90s and early '00s we got a ton better at precisely optimizing plastic use in mass manufacturing processes, and all plastic products got somewhere between a little, and a lot, worse, because manufacturers could make them just barely thick enough to not fall apart. Good for waste on the one hand, for disposable things, so that hits "reduce" at the expense of making "re-use" a lot worse. But also makes non-disposable things so shitty they become disposable (often because they suck so bad to begin with that you're gonna toss them out after one use)

If someone eventually makes a non-broken computer that's in no way cool, I'll switch to that.

[EDIT] Though nb a mostly-just-works ecosystem of devices and integrations is basically table stakes for a competitor now. Just a better computer is almost useless to me, it needs to take just a couple clicks or taps (if any at all) to have it integrated with the rest of my shit. That's where the time savings and utility comes in, and fiddling-with-electronic-crap becomes computers actually doing things useful for me in my life, making paying any money at all for the damn things worth it.

One's pure joy, the other's a damn to-do item.

Shit, I even tried not to become a programmer, but people kept offering me jobs that paid enough that it was hard to say no. At some point it's like... grad school and some career I want at poverty wages and having to work hard to find employment at all, or stare at glowing screens for the next few decades but just have high-paying jobs thrown at me based on stuff I picked up by accident?

Do you have to open Google Lens to do it? I could already do something like that, just didn't. It's totally different when it Just Works.

The other day I was reading something and was surprised that "50 years ago" was the mid '70s, not, like, the 50s. Then they hit me with Guardians of the Galaxy already being ten years old. Ouch, right in the mortality.

I think I’ve become some variety of techno-determinist pessimist. We are what technology lets us be, including when it comes to ethics and government. And major inventions aren’t guaranteed to push the space of the possible in the right direction—but neither can we avoid these changes, as effectively sounding the alarm early enough to matter, while also correctly calling which are bad and how they’re bad, is too hard to practically happen.

Freedom’s a fleeting gift of circumstance, and the world is a machine none of us control and that’s often bad and sometimes destroys important things, I guess is where I’m at now. I’d definite press a button to permanent un-invent the Internet, if someone put it in front of me.

It turned out not to be the one I was sure you meant, hahaha. "Iceman" from Generation Kill is rather a twist, but of course, as mentioned, actors are supposed to be able to act....

I've got enough past actually-greats—genre and otherwise—to catch up on, I don't need 100 "OMG it's so good!" comments from a dozen sites steering me toward a newer book that turns out to be pretty damn mediocre. That's been the outcome often enough that I just have to ignore those kinds of comments, no matter how frequently-encountered and how unanswered by credible-seeming naysayers they go—those aspects, maddeningly, don't seem to correlate with them being more likely to be good advice on what to read next.

IDK what the deal is, though I suspect it's actually multiple forms of difference in judgement of fiction and expectations for how one frames a recommendation, which have different causes but the same outcome.

Like, I basically need a top-ten in-genre books and a top-ten (dealer's choice) works outside that genre in any medium from someone recommending a book, to even begin to judge if what I'm going to find on the other side of the recommendation is probably going to at least be fairly good. A bare recommendation, no matter how glowing, carries no signal. Let me know what else you think is good, and I can start to get an idea of whether we're in alignment, because otherwise there's a decent chance we very much are not.

“You commit an incredibly boring sort of fraud.”

looks at hands

“Oh my god”

(Just purchased. Easy buy vs. wishlist decision since it's currently half-off on Steam)