anonemouse

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• Commented on Brexit! Means! Brexit!
  Never mind not having to post guns from a Second Amendment jurisdiction to the soldiers of the Cause, it'd be interesting* to see if the revanchist ex-NORAIDers are more tightly wrapped in the Stars and Stripes or the Tricolour. *terrifying...
• Commented on Brexit! Means! Brexit!
  Charlie, is there a "disqualified for being too close to reality" category here? (Alternate reaction: Boris, please quit reproducing your columns in other peoples' comment sections.)...
• Commented on Dread of Heinleinism
  A comparison from which I draw no strong conclusions, being a scholar of neither author: John Wyndham published Trouble With Lichen three years before Heinlein published Podkayne. (And if you ever want to see how far Wyndham had to come...
• Commented on That sinking feeling
  there's a definitively non-null chance of the "case law" judicial principle not surviving an EU re-entry (it caused no end of grief in just about every working group, and also: this is the *21st century*, not A Glorious Empire...
• Commented on That sinking feeling
  Bugger. Thanks for the correction....
• Commented on That sinking feeling
  The systems in other English-speaking countries are much the same, by inheritance I suppose. *bzzzt* unthinking Anglocentrism, zero points, go to the back of the class. New Zealand has never had a non-coalition government, one of Australia's federal parties is...
• Commented on That sinking feeling
  Or: "maybe we shouldn't keep doing the same thing and hoping for different results."...
• Commented on That sinking feeling
  With respect to stockpiling food... excepting people with certain medical problems, and assuming some ability to make hot/warm water, rice and beans provide all of the proper amino acids for proteins. Augmented with vegetables or multivitamins they can keep you...
• Commented on That sinking feeling
  But if it's the UK, well, they're going to have a lot of explaining to do, to make the case that it is moral failings on the part of the UK. You don't think "They joined as the sick man...
• Commented on That sinking feeling
  A reminder that the UK got a bit bigger at the end of the 18th century - and that most of the gain was agrarian - might be in order. :-)...
• Commented on That sinking feeling
  A lot of organising work? Not really, because that can follow the initial unrest, if it is mishandled, thus adding more grievances and tangible causes to those existing. An example was in Northern Ireland. When the disorder started (1968...
• Commented on The Pivot
  A local allotment society would not change its rules on a 50% +1. All the legal precedent "citrine" etc are pretty clear that a major constitutional changes should be 2/3 or 75% The Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland's...
• Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
  So why was so much food imported, then?...
• Commented on Silence is ending (soon)
  Home Rule was coming - the shooting was more about who was going to run things afterwards Well, yes, in that the shooting was about getting a Republic instead....
• Commented on Silence is ending (soon)
  Government of Ireland Act, 1914. Easter Rising, 1916. Look up "promptly," Greg. And while you're in the P's, look up "postponed indefinitely" too....
• Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
  It doesn't involve the PHYSICAL transfer of money, but it critically relies on the EXISTENCE of money What transfer of what is money in the modern incarnation could not be replaced by transfer of goods in a Neolithic one?...
• Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
  Yeah, I wonder why England didn't have a famine in 1847. Can't possibly think of an explanation. Your smugness is disgusting....
• Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
  But it's irrelevant for the purposes I was talking about, anyway. Trading information, yes, but information is simply NOT suitable for a trading token (a.k.a. proto-money). Hawala - which appears to have been in use in the Indian Ocean trade...
• Commented on Silence is ending (soon)
  Mate, if you drongos had put aside your absurd differences, made peace with everyone, got everyone on side and then gone to the Brits and said 'we're at peace, everyone is safe, we'd like to go now', they'd have packed...
• Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
  Is the USA in that pre-revolutionary civil war period & is T Donald Rump Marius or Sulla? You're not the first to draw that analogy....
• Commented on Silence is ending (soon)
  One vote for "whatever plot you like as long as we get more Nyssian biology and DIY-scale terraforming, possibly with parrots if you want to" here. :)...
• Commented on Silence is ending (soon)
  I really want to set another story in Nysus Yes please. :)...
• Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
  And there at least two combinations among the usual culprits who probably have the skills and resources to mount such attack It's not that hard....
• Commented on Crib Notes: Empire Games
  An example: check out food imports from Ireland to Great Britain during the Industrial Revolution, then remember the cottier class who paid their rent in farm labour to raise that food subsisted entirely on potatoes and buttermilk....
• Commented on Are VR esports going to become a thing?
  Or change a drudge on a treadmill into a harrowing escape through a zombie apocalypse... *cough*Zombies, Run!*cough*...
• Commented on Are VR esports going to become a thing?
  Definitely: there's a huge market for fitness and a huge market for video games, so there must be a decent overlap Wii Fit was the sixth most popular game on the Wii, so just maybe. :-P...
• Commented on Crib Notes: Empire Games
  Immediately after the Iraq war Iranian clerics issued fatwas that Islam favoured only two children, the government offered free vasectomies and tubal ligations, and birth control class attendance was made a requirement for marriage. Not all theocracies?...
• Commented on Burn The Programmer!
  2: What counts as "tested to destruction" or even "comprehensively tested" in software? There are so many more degrees of freedom than for a bridge truss. I'm not claiming designing and building for reliability in software is hard. I'm claiming...
• Commented on Burn The Programmer!
  1: "Really hard" != "can't". 2: What counts as "tested to destruction" or even "comprehensively tested" in software? There are so many more degrees of freedom than for a bridge truss....
• Commented on Burn The Programmer!
  I'm finding the role of religion in empires fascinating -- and not just Christianity. Every major pre-industrial empire save the Mongols had a single established religion (Rome, Persia, India, China, Byzantine, Ottoman, Spanish, British, ...), and I suspect trust and...