Just a random thought on this topic: Putin originally claimed (and his Western partisans still do) that the offensive in Ukraine was about countering NATO aggression. It’s resulted in attacks on Moscow itself, occupation of Russian territory, and now, modern NATO weapons being used inside Russia. He’s still in a fairly advantageous position militarily right. He could easily, I think, ask for and win strong restraints on NATO in a peace negotiation. But it never was actually about that, now was it?

Salt is a preservative, so salted butter will last quite a lot longer when unrefrigerated.

Scenario: I want to call a friend in Bulgaria. It’s 11:23AM GMT. What’s he likely to be doing right now? With timezones, I can quickly calculate that it’s 2:23PM local time, and intuitively know. Without, I’d have to look up a timetable of daily activities in Sofia.

I guess if I called regularly, I could memorize the timetable, or maybe roughly calculate an offset in hours to add or subtract from GMT to intuitively relate his schedule to mine. For example, my dinner time is about 11PM GMT, so his dinner time is about 7AM GMT.

But, I wonder, if I went there to visit, would it be easier to memorize the local timetable, or just do the math when I check the time?

I would make the written English language 100% phonetic.

Nobody speaks written English, so how do we know it’s not already phonetic?

Hamas is Israel.

Case-sensitive is easier to implement; it’s just a string of bytes. Case-insensitive requires a lot of code to get right, since it has to interpret symbols that make sense to humans. So, something over wondered about:

That’s not hard for ASCII, but what about Unicode? Is the precomposed ç treated the same lexically and by the API as Latin capital letter c + combining cedilla? Does the OS normalize all of one form to the other? Is ß the same as SS? What about alternate glyphs, like half width or full width forms? Is it i18n-sensitive, so that, say, E and É are treated the same in French localization? Are Katakana and Hiragana characters equivalent?

I dunno, as a long-time Unix and Linux user, I haven’t tried these things, but it seems odd to me to build a set of character equivalences into the filesystem code, unless you’re going to do do all of them. (But then, they’re idiosyncratic and may conflict between languages, like how ö is its letter in the Swedish alphabet.)

One can define mass shooters as mentally ill. It’s not exactly wrong, but not useful in the slightest, since you can only make that kind of diagnosis retrospectively. So what? The victims are already dead. To the point, mental illness is useless as a prospective indicator of potential mass shooters, since the vast majority of people with mental problems do not become one.

That’s true, but our theory of physics is far more complex than those simple patterns. It actually consists of many, many interrelated theories that mutually reinforce each other. And that so many of them describe phenomena described with c as a term strongly indicates the speed of causality of pretty fundamental.

In any case, I’d be very interested to learn how it shakes out, but I probably won’t be around in 300 years to do so!

Ah, but “major technological breakthroughs” != “major technological breakthroughs concerning faster-than-light travel”. Certainly, there will be more of the former in the next 300 years, but our understanding of physics precludes the latter.

The quality of our understanding of physics is proved by the technological advances that we’ve already made with it. Yes, we’re missing some major pieces, like how to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics (how to quantize gravity), but the problem that physicists face on this front is actually how stunningly well the Standard Model holds up, and has so far resisted attempts to break it. It’s highly unlikely that we’ll discover anything which completely upends the laws of physics as we know them.

Honestly, I feel like too many people have a cognitive bias from living in a time of unparalleled technological advancement. We’ve gone from, e.g. mechanical chronometers to calculate longitude on wooden vessels propelled by the wind to GPS-guided international flights in a historical blink of an eye. The pace of technological change even in living memory has been immense.

Not knowing how any of it works, it’s easy to think of it akin to magic, and to extrapolate from “18th century humans -> 21st century humans” to “21st century humans -> alien technology”. The catch is that this technological surge has come about because we’ve figured out how the physical universe works, not in spite of missing out on big chunks of potential knowledge.

All of our technology has plumbed the depths of our physical, scientific knowledge. The same physical knowledge that allows us to do wonders also shows us the limits, and provides the definitive answers as to why there’s not “alien technology” out there that would seem like magic to us.

Put another way, it would be really bonkers if the scientific knowledge that has enabled us to do so many practical things, like create tiny devices like the one I’m using to tap out a message, was somehow totally wrong.

I’m having an “akshually” moment here. For what it’s worth, the Tragedy of the Commons refers to over-exploitation of material resources that are held in common by a community, like public grazing land in Hardin’s famous essay. That can’t happen in a libertarian system, because there wouldn’t be any commons; all of the land would be privately-owned.

The closely-related concept that plagues libertarian systems is the Free-Rider Problem, which refers to people not paying the cost of a public good, which is defined as one that is non-excludable (can’t stop people from using it), and non-rivalrous (use or benefit by one person doesn’t prevent use or benefit to anybody else). A classic example of a public good is a lighthouse. Any ship can use a lighthouse, even those that don’t help pay for its maintenance. The incentive is not to pay, so public goods are the things that every successful society has to re-invent taxes to pay for.

We focus on the bears thing because that’s the unexpected, humorous part, as humor is about subverting expectations. The rest of it—sexual predators, budget cuts/bankruptcy, antisocial behavior, declining quality of life—is exactly what most people expect from a libertarian town experiment. It’s the bears that turn a depressing shitshow into a hilarious shitshow.

As Bill Burr said about the difficulty of raising kids vs. pets, you can compare anything. I could compare frisbees to Bundt cakes. They’re both round, but one has a hole in the center. See? I compared them.

So if I compare a genocidal, xenophobic ethno-state to a genocidal, xenophobic, theocratic ethno-state, well, that doesn’t mean they’re the same thing.

Ixonia, Wisconsin solved that problem by just drawing random letters from a hat until they came up with something pronounceable: Ixonia.

But I’m always amused by the street Oxford Place near my house. It’s a street named after a university, named after a city, named after a shallow spot where cattle could cross the river.

Cairo in Illinois, pronounced KAY-row.

Have they been hunting Palestinian people across the globe? That’d make the Israeli regime worse than the Nazis, which is a bold claim. I think that, like the Nazis, they just want their targets removed from the land they claim as their own. They just happen to be fine with genocide to achieve that goal.

This is probably 10 years ago that I read it, but I don’t expect that the numbers have changed much: The median number of lifetime partners for men is 4, while the median for women is 7. The median means that half of the group had that many or more, and half had that many or fewer. If every heterosexual encounter by definition has to include a male and a female, the way that that works out is that there’s a subgroup of men who have a partner count way over four.

In short, yeah, that observation checks out in the research. Among men, there are a few Wilt Chamberlains balanced by thousands with only a partner or two. (NB: extreme example for rhetorical purposes)

If you’re asking whether the binding arbitration clause would apply to the murder case, then no. Homicide falls under criminal law, where the state is the plaintiff. The state didn’t enter an agreement under the TOS. I suppose Disney could try to argue it applies if your legal estate filed a civil suit; in the real case it argued that the arbitration clause applied because the husband (who’d agreed to it) filed a civil suit as the plaintiff.

Instead, Disney would get away with it the old-fashioned way: because it’s a rich corporation.

Shout-out to Raritan Engineering. I accidentally cracked the porcelain bowl of the head that was original equipment in my 1974 sailboat, and needed a new one. Not only is the company still in business, the parts from a model they still sell are compatible, 50 years later! Their support techs were able to tell me exactly what parts I needed to buy.

Actually, quite a few marine brands are always reliable. The harsh environment at sea tends to out cheap crap in a hurry.

I think you have some stiff competition on the shortest war from the Conch Republic. You’d have to sign the peace treaty in 59 seconds to beat the record. (Be sure that the enemy sets their killbots for a very low preset kill limit.)