JReynolds

Recent Actions

• Commented on Place your bets
  As for old films: I remember a throwaway line in a book that mentioned a character noticing a film showing Clark Gable and Cary Grant crashing through the jungle and asks what it is. The other character replies "That's The...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Doesn't all strategy treat soldiers as expendable? Whether done miserly or with great abandon, the fundamental job description of command is "spend lives to achieve objectives." Have to disagree with you on that one. Good generals are able to get...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Huh. Looks like William Shatner was born 8 years to the day after Marcel Marceau (it's WS's 92nd birthday today). Here's an attempt to show troop strengths on every front in WWI as the war unfolds. Not sure how accurate...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I heard a really good show on This American Life recently. The theme was: "When is it time to cut and run?" Opened with a guy who has been getting people out of besieged Ukrainian cities for the past year....
• Commented on Place your bets
  Oh my god. There are so many ways that inherited debt is terrible. Next step: indentured servitude for you because your parents died in debt. Because their parents died in debt. And the people who are at a disadvantage here...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Paleolithic populations hadn't domesticated any animals, though, and their population density was so low that isolated families or tribes probably wouldn't have time/contact to transmit a lethal and contagious plague to other groups before it killed them. Not quite sure...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Howard NYC @472: But it did break my mother's heart she never got to ever say, "my son the lawyer". How would she have felt to say, "my son the rabbi"? Ed Seedhouse @476: Did you perhaps miss the /s...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Republican politicians advocating "putting convicts to work" and other forced labor schemes Don't be absurd. The USA doesn't have slavery, and hasn't since 1865. /s...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Indeed one of them was the exact spit of a mate of mine. They were clearly twin brothers separated by time travel. (Maybe?)...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  I heard that about Jimmy Carter too. Probably has single-digit days left to live. Still, a long life and a productive one. Not a terribly good president, but he seemed to do well in every other job he turned his...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  bad heartburn My doctor suggested a spoonful of chia seeds for heartburn. Even if it's just placebo, it works a treat for me....
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Where I am is currently 13°C. Average high / low is -1.5°C / -9.8°C. It has been an extremely mild winter here so far. I'm waiting for July, when we might see 40°C. Which has only happened once so far...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Personally I think De Gaulle was embarrassed by having to have France liberated by the US/UK Someone once asked Churchill if he had really said: "During the war, I had many crosses to bear. And the heaviest was the Cross...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  ISTR he claimed Truman authourised the second bombing to justify the cost to the public to help Truman win the coming election. I think that Truman mentioned in his memoirs that if the public found out that he had huge,...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  I read Downfall too, albeit many years ago. I got the impression that the Japanese high command was well aware that they were screwed, but were hoping for something not unlike the Treaty of Versailles - they'd make some humiliating...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Another vote for 'yeah, nope.' Basically, everything that strategic bombing touts is mistaken. 1) It will weaken the enemy resolve to resist! It actually hardens resolve. 2) It will destroy the enemy's ability to make equipment, the very sinews of...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Do you think that the MAGAs think that the constitution is a bar to anybody? At least, anybody important?...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  It is a part of the huge funeral burial marketing money extraction business. I understand that selling plots in the cemetery goes by a similar method. Show the punters to the low-end first, get them to think "How grotty is...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  you can donate your skeleton rather than your entire cadaver Dry Bones comes to mind (Delta Rythm Boys singing "Dry Bones"). A chapter epigraph from Howard Waldrop's Them Bones also comes to mind: "them bones, them bones gone walk aroun'...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Thanks. Yes, fully boosted. Haven't bothered testing for the past couple of days - it's obvious I'm sick, so why bother? Today is the first day where my temperature isn't (very) feverish, but I'm not feeling ready to rumble yet,...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Using the 3M Half Facepiece, with the 3M Multi Gas/Vapor Cartridge/Filter. Which is a P100, rather than N100. If it turns out that this has been, in fact, useless, and I've just been cosplaying being protected, I'll feel like an...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  COVID19 ain't over and I'm not optimistic about the wisdom of hanging out in a mostly-unmasked area with lots of talkative people from all over the world. Ugh, tell me about it. I've been careful. Always worn a mask (N95...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  I've been in Charlie's presence once. Actually exchanged a couple of words with him while he was signing a copy of The Delirium Brief. Robert Prior and I both live in Ontario, so it's conceivably possible that we've both been...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Selling Louisiana to the U.S. was a Win-Win. Yep. The Louisiana Sale (from the French perspective) was one of the few times that Napoleon looked at something, realized that he couldn't win, and cut his losses. If he'd known to...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Gran Colombia was history by 1831, so events in Europe in the late 1840s would have no effect upon it. Unless someone was able to reconstitute it (unlikely, IMO, but then I know next to nothing about those countries). JohnS....
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Not Harry Turtledove, but Howard Waldrop's A Better World's in Birth! (collected in Other Worlds, Better Lives) has German unification happening in 1848. The hammer and sickle instead of the swastika behind the politician gives you an idea how the...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  ilya187 @695: Or chemical. This was the scenario I kept seeing back in early to mid 80's: Soviet tank divisions roll into West Germany through Fulda Gap, NATO forces bring them to a halt, Soviets use chemical weapons to break...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  I liked the story too. I'm sad that it didn't get turned into a novel, but Vernor Vinge seems to have stopped writing novels. Can't always get what you want, I guess....
• Commented on WTF
  A condition of wining the lottery once the amount gets to where the seller can't pay you is that they can publicize you accepting the big check. Mostly true. In a USAian context, seven states allow winners to maintain their...
• Commented on WTF
  JohnS: only $60M more and I'm gonna' buy another lottery ticket Be careful what you ask for. You might just get it. Have $10M? You have the money. Have $1B? The money has you. Granted, you could underwrite a great...