Retiring

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• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Lead story in the NYT today....
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  That seems like a simplistic assessment, but OK. I'm not familiar with the reasoning of those cretins. I'm just pointing out that what one individual wants in their government may not be what others want. (And I have to admit,...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  The majority voted? Not usually. Usually it's a plurality, with plenty of non-voters. You don't get to chose whether or not to drive without a license.... Only because the government says so. The government selected by consent of the people....
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  I want to live in a nation governed with the consent of the people, rather than by the divine right of kings. Forgive me for straying back to the original topic, instead of the discussion of cooking techniques for...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  It was a joke, of course. Though impressive that you know what the requirements are. But the larger point is that everyone has something they don't like about the government they live under, and they (we) all gripe about it....
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  The points about the cost of emigration are reasonable. Though a couple of my ancestors were dirt-poor when they fled the UK. And somehow they managed to reach Illinois. But OGH doesn't have those financial barriers to emigration. Heck, he...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  It is a tradeoff, indeed. Anyone still living in the UK must feel that the advantages outweigh the burden of monarchy, or else they'd emigrate to... where? Switzerland? Lithuania? the USA?...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  From the U. S., I always figured the royals were sort of like Fox News or the NFL: entertainers who were allowed to plunder the customers. It's not about government (or journalism, or sportsmanship), it's about distraction from the mundane....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  In other words, your bog-standard car. Formerly bog-standard. Ford has announced they are discontinuing their sedans, except for the Mustang. SUVs rule the US....
• Commented on Place your bets
  completely bounced off her Phrasing, dude, phrasing....
• Commented on Place your bets
  The film that astonished me was an Apollo launch recorded by the engine observation camera at pad level, so the engineers could get a good close up look at the big engines just as they started firing. those actually on...
• Commented on Place your bets
  The blast-off scene in the 2019 "Apollo 11" (about 20 minutes in, for those with short attention spans) is worth looking at. Apparently NASA had all these high-speed 70mm cameras spotted around Canaveral, and they used this footage for a...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Have you seen "Memento"? "Godfather I" or "II"? "Licorice Pizza"? "No Time to Die"? Any James Bond movie, really. Or, for that matter, "Heat" or "Casino" or "Goodfellas" or "Everything Everywhere All At Once"? "Casablanca" is a shining example of...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Casablanca is a great story. But if you look at it critically it looks like a bunch of scenes stitched together. Not a continuous flow. I don't understand this take at all. But my favorite movie is the 1933 "King...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Gable and Bogart, I think was the original plan. But Bogart died while Huston was filming "Moby Dick"....
• Commented on Place your bets
  We keep seeing scary articles about minerals running out, then a few years later it turns out that we have even more of them available than we did before and the promised end of supply is nowhere to be seen....
• Commented on Place your bets
  I really would like a hybrid Someone should start selling a petrol or diesel generator on a trailer you can tow behind your Tesla for long trips. Continuous top-up of the battery....
• Commented on Place your bets
  I'd imagine this supposed insight was commonplace by the 1950's. But the real drivers were probably the advent of electrification+television, and the Pill. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/05/07/family-size-among-mothers/...
• Commented on Place your bets
  You're thinking of the term "willrogersy". As in, "He was a willrogersy kind of guy."...
• Commented on Place your bets
  All the early operating systems, and their paraphernalia like command-line shells, were written by wizards for wizards. I suppose evil wizards were inevitable. In the best of them, the Lisp and SmallTalk machines, everything was open to tweaking. A key...
• Commented on Place your bets
  David, thanks for the heads-up about "college NIL" (name, image, and likeness). The change in just two years, since the Supreme Court ruling, has been immense, and I missed it, not being interested in college sports. Glad to see it's...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Where does news come from? Reporters. And they don't say it first in newspapers and/or TV. By the time it gets to legacy media, it's stale....
• Commented on Place your bets
  The "news cycle" is for legacy media operations with fixed release times. In other words, what's now entertainment and advertising. Makes sense that a sports operation, also essentially entertainment, would dominate it. Real news isn't distributed via legacy media any...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Most TV news should really be classed as entertainment, as the ongoing Fox News lawsuit is teaching us. But it's true for local TV stations as well. Most news stories have no compelling visual element, and these days there are...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Sorry, didn't mean to trigger a rant. By "in harmony with nature" (agreed an unfortunate phrase) I meant that they'd found a way to accommodate their life with their surroundings, which doesn't preclude active management of "nature", if possible. My...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Of course, a lot of people are stupid, and there's not much they can do about it. Wearing armor (and clothes) probably helps them avoid some of the unfortunate situations they might otherwise stumble into. As for natives living in...
• Commented on Place your bets
  None of them reliably do well when prompted to show people wearing goggles. No doubt because the tags and/or captions on the training images don't mention the goggles. These engines only see what they've been trained to see. True for...
• Commented on Place your bets
  How can we know what's true? In the context of "place your bets", perhaps pre-2022 non-fiction texts are the place to put your money. Or buy up used book stores. Before the flood of plausible but completely wrong books hits...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Remember that you can't actually prove scientific hypotheses, only disprove -- or really, call into question....
• Commented on Place your bets
  Beware the JBIG2 problem......