Barry

Barry

  • Commented on Oh, 2022!
    "The most likely thing that would happen if the sitting President shot and killed an aide in front of witnesses with no provocation would be an emergency session of Congress fast tracking at what appears to be the speed of...
  • Commented on Outage report
    On blog, WordPress run you....
  • Commented on An update on the revolutionary experiment
    Picking just one......"8. Self-humiliation: enemies who are strong and weak at the same time No, I'm not seeing it. They regard the EU as a strong enemy, but not simultaneously a weak one." Well, I see it - the EU...
  • Commented on An update on the revolutionary experiment
    "I can't be having with this "Priti Patel is a fascist" business. Actually this is just a special case: in general any statement of the form "X is a fascist" had better be accompanied by arguments and evidence to support...
  • Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
    "WTF is going on in Britain? No petrol, no milk, grocery stores empty, fruit rotting in the field, and natgas prices climbing 40% in one day." Brexit, of course. Or, for Tories, the Savage Attack of the EU Dictatorship on...
  • Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
    Oh, leading back a bit: When Smith made his comment about 'info war dominance over social media', he could have been ignorantly boasting. He could also mean 'we keep the truly undesirable stuff pushed into the fringe and fail to...
  • Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
    By 'killing some people' I mean that they'd have implemented it, under the assumption that some individuals would be killed, and that they'd be happy with that. I wonder what they'd have done after several airplanes disappeared....
  • Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
    Those are very good points. The trick is that the ability to jaunt with large masses was not know. And after the nuking of Washington, DC, the Cheney government would have gone ahead, killed some people on US airliners, and...
  • Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
    "(The bit about the DHS adding the knotwork display to the in-flight video and how it would have failed very badly was a nice gotcha, too.)" Why? It would have gotten some people, which would have given DHS some information...
  • Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
    David Wallace: "What exactly is the thing early in the original MP stories that committed you to the existence of a senior US figure in league with the Clan?" Charlie: I can't remember. (You're asking me about a thought process...
  • Commented on Invisible Sun: Themes and Nightmares
    "One thing bothers me: no one has said anything about what the US did to, let's see, Gruinmarket was about 6M people, and nuclear winter took out how many more millions of serfs and peasants? None of the characters has...
  • Commented on Invisible Sun: Themes and Nightmares
    "Well, yes. Americans in general are not famous for getting out into the world, learning languages, living among and persuasively conversing with other peoples. If you're the CIA and wanting Americans who know how to do those things, the Mormon...
  • Commented on Invisible Sun: Themes and Nightmares
    "Why? (You need to explain your reasoning. Hint: it's going to take a very long time -- if it's even possible -- for any off-world colony to become capable of supporting itself in the absence of imports from Earth.)" On...
  • Commented on Invisible Sun: Themes and Nightmares
    "Nurses burn out and leave the profession, and a significant number leave to have kids then return to different jobs in the nursing sector (eg. care home work, non-ICU work) so assume a career life of 20 years rather than...
  • Commented on On inappropriate reactions to COVID19
    Charlie: "But the foolishness of this idea will become glaringly obvious in a few years when it allows a fourth SARS family pandemic to emerge." In the USA, we are clearly in wave 4 and with a new variant. We...
  • Commented on Starship bloopers
    (re: jacks) "I wish I had one just to pull things out of the ground. They were great for fence posts or small woody plants/trees." Try a swedish windlass (two crossed sticks or bars, winding the main rope around the...
  • Commented on Starship bloopers
    "Really? Why is that? The last time we had a sudden and dramatic collapse in population (the Black Death) it freed up the labour market, created upwardly mobile peasants, upwardly mobile merchants, and ultimately the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution....
  • Commented on Starship bloopers
    "Really think that folks will not want to emigrate to a newly-opened colony? No parking problems, you can live where (like Dan'l Boone) you can't see the smoke from your neighbor's chimney?" This was covered in our good host's post...
  • Commented on Starship bloopers
    "Mine out Mercury to create a Dyson swarm (a better use for Elon's Boring company instead of going to Mars)" By the time that we have that sort of large scale, high-tech and even higher-energy civilization, any problem that we...
  • Commented on Starship bloopers
    "I watched the trailer for Edge of Tomorrow, that someone posted a link to. Um, wearing little to no clothes under the metal armor? A visor that falls off when he hits the ground?" I think that the point was...
  • Commented on Starship bloopers
    "He almost certainly didn't have black neighbours or really know any African-Americans, until he joined the Navy -- and possibly not even then." Not even then. He was an officer, and blacks would have been a very, very small majority...
  • Commented on Because I am bored ...
    "But to get out of the 1929 deflation, nothing worked, even the new deal was not really enough. " Actually, the New Deal was working great, as graphs of the time will show. What blew it was that they decided...
  • Commented on A death in the Firm
    The mention of pumped power storage above reminds me yet again how well we have concealed the Future Inland Sea Empire from you thirsty unfortunates in the rest of the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant . Built in 1973. As for the US,...
  • Commented on A death in the Firm
    "You're talking "off the grid". That works, if you care to live like that... or at least until the land you're living on becomes of importance to the Powers That Be." Or to people who have themselves been pushed, or...
  • Commented on A death in the Firm
    "Instead of crossing a Berlin Wall to freedom on the other side, you simply find freedom in living an obscure, simple life off by yourself and not interacting with the powers that be." The problem is that bad societies tend...
  • Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
    " In other words, the problem isn't necessarily demand but supply (of sufficient interested candidates)." That's not an excuse....
  • Commented on Lying to the ghost in the machine
    "And about 10% of murderers contest their guilt instead of accepting it and getting out of jail." Let's see...... You were wrongfully convicted of murder. You will spend the rest of your life in prison. Unless you sign a false...
  • Commented on Lying to the ghost in the machine
    "For those applications, the thought is that there isn't a lot of data out there to train anything this complex. Perhaps transformers are revolutionizing that field as well?" For speech to text, what I have heard is that close caption...
  • Commented on Lying to the ghost in the machine
    "I suspect we're going to need a lot more (and a lot more sophisticated) use of "supervised classification". Short version: That's the term used in remote sensing to describe when humans "supervise" the classification performed by a computer algorithm to...
  • Commented on Central Banking on Mars!
    Oh, in terms of hospital system failures: When I was hired (as a statistician), we reviewed emergency procedures. Under 'blackout' I said that I'd probably just go home. My boss said that I'd more likely go to the main hospital,...
Subscribe to feed Recent Actions from Barry

Following

Not following anyone

Specials

Merchandise

About This Page

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Propaganda