zipwitch

We've gone further than that. Here in the US, our current government has sanctioned the ICC, and restricted travel for anyone affiliated with it as retaliation for the ICC investigating war crimes (by all parties) in Afghanistan.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/11/politics/icc-executive-order/...

I've had these several times myself. For me, they start as a small "blind spot" at the center of my field of view, which was really scary, particularly if I was trying to read or do screen-work at the time. After the first one, the appearance of the rainbow zig-zags was actually comforting, because that confirmed what it was. Since I was effectively incapacitated for the duration, I'd just lie down and enjoy the light show.

It's been years since I had an occurrence, but the timing was pretty reliable.

~30 minutes: slowly growing blind spot at the center of my field of vision.

~15 minutes: rainbow zig-zags in a slowly expanding circle from the blind spot until it encircled my whole field of view, after which it faded out and I could focus pretty normally again. No headache during or after.

After multiple rounds, I figured out the, or a, trigger: absinthe. Drinking absinthe reliably brought one on ~18 hours later. Only ever had one that I couldn't tie to absinthe. Stopped drinking absinthe years ago, and the scintillating scotoma stopped as well.

Using race to divide labor is a time-proven capitalist tactic. Go back to Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, where the system was made explicit after the mixed-race uprising again the oligarchs of the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_Rebellion

I can't take Taibbi and Greenwald's antagonism against "elites" seriously when they take every chance possible to defend the actions of a billionaire President and his billionaire-stuff Cabinet.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2233/

I've never had a Medium account. I had no idea an account was something you'd need, other than for posting stories. I use Pale Moon as a browser, with Noscript, uBlock Origin and Flashblock. (As a rule of thumb, if I can't read it in Pale Moon with those running, it's probably not worth reading.)

The military intervention in Libya was initially led by the United States and then handed off to NATO. The US contribution to direct attacks consisted mostly of cruise missile strikes. The British, French and Canadian air forces also played a major roles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...

This is a farce.

The United States is done fighting Great Power wars. No one talks about it publicly at all because doing so would shatter America's self-image as the Lone Superpower. The military the United States has now is quite capable of wrecking any nation that is not another Great Power. I say wrecking and not defeating, because as should be obvious from the last three decades, the United States has zero interest in winning wars. It really doesn't even bother trying - too expensive, and too hard. Instead the United States has made it very clear that if you displease it too much, and aren't another Great Power, it will trash your nation, and then either walk away or hang around stomping on you every so often.

The unspoken assumption is that there never will be a "real" war with China or Russia or any other 'near peer'. Whether that ultimately turns out to have been a foolish approach remains to be seen. But, it does leave a lot of money floating around to be siphoned off by various parts of the military-security industry, because Americans think they're paying for a Cold War military, when what they're actually getting is a military good for knocking down weaker opponents and then kicking them, but that barely even tries to pretend it can do anything else. (Except via propaganda, which is really cheap compared to manpower and materiel.)

The Whisperer in Darkness By H. P. Lovecraft

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/wid.aspx

>* the SLS is what will be used to launch the Artemis missions*

That seems overly optimistic for a system that is now a year and a half past it's original target launch date and has a current target date of late next year.

It seems appropriate to mention The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi, a whirlwind sf novel where a large part of the story involves a city where the currency literally is Time. (When a person runs out of Time, they are transformed into a Quiet, mutely doing the necessary work to keep the city running, until they have earned enough Time to be restored to themselves.)

Huh. And here I had always thought that backhoes were the internet's natural predators.

Which is fine. It's a tough problem, and I have no expectation that a random poster (myself included) is going to suddenly come up with a perfect solution. As we search for solutions, there are at least two fallacious lines of reasoning that need to be rejected:

Something must be done. This is something. This must be done!

And,

This won't work. Therefore, nothing will work. We should do nothing!

I understand and agree with those who reject the first. But turning from the first only to embrace the second is also a mistake.

The expression is derived from 'Fabian strategy'[1], but the 'strategy' part didn't seem quite appropriate, since this isn't a military campaign. I've heard it before, but a quick round of googling shows that the 'Fabian struggle' construction is considerably rarer than I expected.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_strategy

I reject the presumptions that the only possible response is a unitary authority and that we shouldn't do anything in response because any such response is automatically going to be bad. Come, on, this is Hacker News!

Why do we have to have a single central authority? We ought to at least be willing to speculate about AI-mediated Blockchains of Truth that reward factually accurate reporting. Or about ways to smoothly tell users how accurate the source they're reading has been in the past, or how to implement smart filtering of information streams to protect our own minds so that we can avoid wasting time on cognitive hazards.

The point is that we have options beyond just sitting back and giving up. The problem is real, as are the risks to responding poorly. But that doesn't justify not responding at all.

The facile answer is, "have an educated public who can make those decisions themselves". But it seems clear to me that the "educated public" approach has failed. The spread of memetic hazards has risen to the level where a significant segment of the public have been robbed of their ability to think critically, and the post-Enlightenment consensus that objective reality exists is under attack.

Beyond fighting a Fabian struggle in favor of critical thinking and quality information flows (which are lacking all across our society, even if that lack is particularly obvious with a certain political group) I'm by no means certain what a good, useful, and just response ought to be.

I am confident that the danger is real and needs to be acknowledged. We need to find paths forward if we're to have any hope of keeping our civilization. And that means talking (and doing something) about the "propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies". Sticking our heads in the sand and screaming "Free Speech!" while the tidal wave informational sewage rolls over us isn't going to be sufficient.

This comment needs more upvotes. It's endemic to the software industry and far beyond. From employees who need to meet some arbitrary (and possibly unwritten) metric, to executives who are compelled to leave their mark on anything they touch, the number of people-years we waste on unnecessary churn has got to be staggering.

Anyone who is interested in this sort of thing may wish to take a look at the seven-book Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap series by the late David Gingery. While intended as a guide for the hobbyist, the series could easily serve as a blueprint for how to go from scraps of metal, wood and earth to a fully functioning machine shop in a post-apocalyptic scenario. And if you add in Herbert and Lou Hoover's excellent translation of De Re Metallica you're well on your way to having a blueprint for rebuilding humanity's pre-WWII tech base from scratch.

I misread the title. I was really hoping this was a link to house-rules on playing the Pandemic cooperative boardgame with the COVID-19 coronavirus as the disease.

The whole article reads like a punchline for a joke involving Admiral Rickover's famous letter. (We just had a thread on it here not two weeks ago!)

"An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose (’omnibus reactor’). (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now."

Link to the thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715730

Years ago, I read decent alternate-history piece of fiction, set in a world where nuclear-powered bombers were put in service by the United States Air Force:Steambird

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/s/hilbert-schenck/steam-bir...

Sometimes it doesn't have to be "I figured it out". Just being able to say to yourself, "I feel X about Y, but maybe I don't want/need/choose/have to feel X about Y" can be very empowering. And I'm not talking abstract empowerment, I mean in a very practical "I have more control over my life, my self, and my choices" sense.

Reminds me of E.E. "Doc" Smith's diesel-powered stealth spaceship in First Lensmen (1950)

https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/smithee-firstlensman/smithee-fir...

Interesting story about Norway's oil industry: The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feab...

Only if there's a real demand for it.

>WW II was probably the last conflict where all sides basically removed the gloves and fought with everything they had where everything on both sides included some very scary options.

I think that would actually be the Iran-Iraq War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War

Tank combat, air combat involving a wide range of aircraft, bombing raids, ballistic missile strikes, naval combat, trench warfare and chemical weapon use all took place during the war from 1980 to 1988.

Playing without spoilers would be very challenging indeed. And you're right about the early game - there's a breakpoint where you've got enough food, hit points, AC, damage-dealing capability, and miscellaneous tricks (if you know how to use them) where the only think that's going to kill you is YASDing yourself. And then the game transforms into prepping (and prepping, and prepping some more) for the ascension run while staying alert enough that you don't YASD yourself because you forgot something or panicked. (You never have to panic in Nethack.)

The government picking well-connected winners for private profit is just "American capitalism".

As for socialism, I'll quote Harry Truman's 1952 speech,

   "Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.

    Socialism is what they called public power.

    Socialism is what they called social security.

    Socialism is what they called farm price supports.

    Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.

    Socialism is what they called the growth of free and 
    independent labor organizations.

    Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps 
    all the people."

Should we be calling this branch of science electrophrenology?

Your memory is likely faulty, or you may have read an abridged version.

Odysseus first has to choose between Charybdis and Scylla. He and his (surviving) crew pass Scylla and reach the isle of the sun-god. There, the crew kill and eat the cattle, angering the gods. When they depart, a storm pushes their foundering ship back to Charybdis, which only Odysseus escapes, drifting while clinging to the remains of his ship's mast.