Geoff Hart

Recent Actions

• Commented on Books I will not write: BIGGLES!!
  Further to my suggestion of losing the Biggles connection, I can imagine OGH using a similar framing to craft a response to Heinlein's "I Will Fear No Evil" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil) the way "Saturn's Children" responds to Heinlein's "Friday". I read a...
• Commented on Books I will not write: BIGGLES!!
  Elderly Cynic replied to my suggestion: "The trouble about the "boys' own adventure" tropes of that era is that they were almost all seriously nasty" Which is why I wrote "[but] with a modern sensibility". The "fun adventures" was what...
• Commented on Books I will not write: BIGGLES!!
  You're the author, of course, but what you've described would be a perfectly cromulent space opera if you lose the Biggles connection and simply treat it as it is, on its own merits. And I suspect it would be a...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  David L responded to my comment about checking a post driver in my carry-on luggage: "Ah, sure. 20 - 30 pounds of dead weight." You missed my point. Sure, it's 30 pounds, but try smuggling that portable howitzer past Security....
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Robert Prior wondered: "Tough question. Were the bison likely to be injured if you hadn't intervened?" Probably not. Bison leather coats are thick. Heteromeles, thanks for the secret weapon tale. I'll be sure to bring a post driver next time...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Heteromeles noted: "Well, I've stood within 30 feet of a bison (no fence) to chase it through a gate. By myself. So I guess I am that stupid (and I had a secret weapon which worked wonders)." Well, first, you...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Robert Prior reports the tale of parents putting their kid on potentially lethal ice, despite the sign. I saw the same thing back about 25 years ago at the Cliffs of Moher, in Ireland. We're talking overhanging thin shelves of...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Robert Prior noted: "You don't need to outrun the bear, just the slowest hiker ;-)" Indeed, I whispered that to my buddy during the lecture. He was really, really not amused. To support what others have said, bears are really...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Greg Tingey wondered: "Leave the Amendment, but regulate "The Militia" - if you want a gun, or to keep an existing one, fine, no problem, but you MUST join a "Regulated Militia" group ... to be defined in the legislation...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Damian noted: "The [Atari] ST series were desktop computers, not gaming consoles." Definitely. I owned a 520ST ca. 1986, and apart from disk operations, it was a lean, mean writing machine. If memory serves, STWriter (the port of the venerable...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Nojay, AlanD2: Thanks for the updates to my knowledgebase....
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Nojay opined: "As for nuclear waste, there is not really any problem with it despite the best propaganda efforts of Greenpeace and the gas industry." It's not nearly that simple, but let that lie. ("Lie" meaning "rest in peace", not...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Crap... should've been Godzillas 1 and 2, not elephants. Oops!...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Nojay noted: "It would be even cheaper to build nuclear power plants which don't need trillions of dollars worth of storage on top of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of solar panels, but Godzilla put paid to that option...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Troutwaxer noted: "Yeah. A beam of concentrated sunlight aimed at the Earth is just what we need during global warming." Note that solar power satellites are NOT just big mirrors that reflect and concentrate the sunlight. They're photovoltaic, with the...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Charlie noted: "Omicron confers limited or no immune memory after infection -- there've been cases of people being reinfected within 2 months." Current record is 3 weeks: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/21/woman-caught-covid-twice-in-20-days-marking-a-new-record.html (I saw this reported by an infectious disease specialist earlier in the...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Heteromeles (997) embarked upon a jeremaiad about GDP. Dude, you were the one who used that variable name in the post I was responding to. I just picked up where you left off. We're in complete agreement about the relative...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Heteromeles noted: "We do have to change the game, and IPCC modeling for how to deal with climate change pretty much requires shrinking GDP." Not necessarily. There's also a-growth (freezing things at the status quo) while aggressively removing carbon from...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  For those who are interested in home economics (ca. 1800), I can recommend "Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvmd861g). Primarily about the poor options available to 2nd and subsequent sons, but much interesting detail along the way about family finances and...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Moz noted: "There's been a lot of work done on reinforced concrete structure design to come up with things that work until they don't but fail by turning into bags of gravel rather than fragments (the "bag" being the reinforcing...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Heteromeles noted about GPS: "I like them. And I've had problems with them. I've had much bigger problems with those who can't read maps well enough to know when they're being misled by the sat-nav, who insist on blindly following...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Charlie noted (521) "That's why they added satnav to the driving test: you're supposed to know when to ignore the bloody thing." Those of us of a certain age have worked long enough with computers (more than 40 years in...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Nick Barnes wondered: "I don't follow. What's wrong with "left bank" and "right bank"? It relies on the assumption of shared context that isn't necessarily shared. If I'm facing upstream and you're facing downstream, the meanings we infer from left...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  CharlesW noted: "Musk asked how they would use $6billion to help solve world hunger. The answer he got was to give $6billion worth of food and vouchers to people. My take was that Musk was looking for how they would...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Speaking of Keynes and Hayek, an upcoming story: Hart, G. 2022. Barbarians at the Gates: a Parable of Dueling Philosophies. Sci Phi Journal (date TBD). Without questioning Charlie's original proposition, a counterpoint to "even trillionnaires" have limited power: https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/18/tech/elon-musk-world-hunger-wfp-donation/index.html TL;DR:...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  whitroth noted: "Corps not doing jail time - what I want is if a company is found guilty of crime that is not civil (such as the gas explosion in India, years back), all the chief execs go to jail,...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  gasdive noted a problem in my suggestion: "Makes it tough to build anything or trade anything." My bad for not being specific. I wrote "income tax" by which I meant "personal (human) income tax". I don't consider corporations to be...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  The asterisks used as footnotes seem to have been swallowed. The first footnote, which became a bullet, should be tied to the 10% tax rate; the second should be tied to "most aren't"....
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Charlie noted (about flat tax rates): "Wrong, that's a regressive tax. Ideally you want income tax to be progressive, banded so that above a certain threshold you pay a greater percentage of your income in tax." It doesn't have to...
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  Heteromeles noted: "Anyway, we've got a deity who made humans twice. The first time (Gen 1:27 "male and female he made them"), They told humans to be fruitful and multiply and establish dominion over the entire Earth. Ethics not required....