Graydon

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• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  Nothing material is easy. The ur-grift is the idea that somehow, that can be changed. Before there is anything like language, there's expensive signals; if it costs to send it, it's a credible statement. What we're seeing is a bunch...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Warrant Cards. These work on the entire Civil Service (at least); it's sort of implied that the Warrant Card mechanism and the Auditor mechanism are at least related. His Nibbs isn't going to leave the alternative source of authority ("we...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  The Grants were invited to see that play with the Lincolns, but US Grant was able to deal with his paperwork and head north that day. If I ever went mad and tried to write the alternate history, that's the...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  One of the standard tropes of SF is "science is easy"; individuals can make epochal discoveries, initial discovery to mass production is a matter of months, full comprehension of the consequences arrives with the discovery, all of the heady mix...
• Commented on Summer webcomics
  How to be a werewolf What is says on the tin. The running conflicts are flavours of how much of a problem people cause by substituting personal power for collective conflict resolution. Sleepless Domain Using magical girl tropes to write...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  Pumped hydro is almost impossible to build. You need an existing change in elevation with lakes on the high and low sides. To a first approximation, there are no usable sites. There are certainly not enough sites for it to...
• Commented on I can't even
  Methane becomes methanol and methanol-air fuel cells seems to be where the existing shipping industry is going. Trains or tractors, I don't know, but you can just buy a methanol-air fuel cell APU for your cargo vessel today. There are...
• Commented on I can't even
  I know it's a completely different virus, but I wonder if looking back to the recovery of POLIO survivors could provide any useful information? I really hope not; some equivalent of post-polio syndrome when the statistical-first-approximation entire population has...
• Commented on I can't even
  Canada reports deaths, and thus excess deaths, slowly compared to other G-7 countries. With COVID, some provinces have effectively stopped reporting deaths since early this year. Some (Quebec) are managing to report as quickly as usual; some (Manitoba) are clearly...
• Commented on I can't even
  Something that's not made up; Canada's median age has decreased. Just a tick, in a year with high immigration. And we don't know what the life expectancy numbers are due to really delayed death reporting. In the US, it's dropping....
• Commented on I can't even
  Income and asset caps so there aren't any rich people. If money creates security you get a feedback where the only way to be safe is to have all the money. Almost everyone's lives are worse than they needed to...
• Commented on I can't even
  As a bonus the Tory party faces annihilation. I commend to your attention the Canadian example; after the Mulroney government was voted out of office, there were two (2) sitting conservative MPs. It didn't matter. Funding pressure moved around...
• Commented on I can't even
  If the next UK PM tries -- and maybe succeeds -- in having Charles executed for Crimes Against Diana as a distraction it wouldn't surprise me at this point, and it really should. Eventually, "military coup" is going to start...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  Mourning generally happens when something is over. (A demand that something be over because that allows emotional processing has happened with COVID; it was not a net win for anybody.) Creating that state of being done is a political force...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  Any actual fix takes a post-imperial ethnogenesis that allows a re-introduction of empiricism into public life. That's difficult in general and more difficult because movement conservatives are against empiricism. (It causes taxes.) Combine that with a protracted forcible decarbonization event...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  unless it's foggy The US military has a lot of experience with laser designation; since the 1960s. I'm pretty sure they know about fog. The defensive installations are putting out a lot of power, and as I understand it,...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  The Lesson of the Great War is that anything seen can be destroyed by artillery. (With caveats about how fast the guns can point and what you can see.) That gives you the continuous front; mechanisation gives you a continuous...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  Don't get too focused on tanks. Tanks happened because of a need to advance into machine gun fire. If you can make tanks ineffective, you can make land vehicles ineffective, which implies you're going to lose your tube artillery because...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  It's a revanchist war to support the status quo, but it's not just the Russian status quo. It's the carbon-extractive status quo. War runs on oil; this is true for everyone's military. That embeds the carbon extraction status quo. Real...
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  My "who ordered that?" Covid prediction is that the ten year mortality rate is 100%. (No, probably not, we'd expect to see signs of that already, but the ability to get good stats on Long Covid is pretty clearly actively...
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  The US military is deploying single-digit-kilowatt lasers as weapon systems. I don't think it's obviously crazy from an engineering perspective to imagine someone leveraging that to get power to the ground. The weapons and the power delivery have the same...
• Commented on On inappropriate reactions to COVID19
  https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/moderna-may-be-superior-pfizer-against-delta-breakthrough-odds-rise-with-time-2021-08-09/ This is a summary article by a news organization. It reports findings by the Mayo Clinic that vaccine effectiveness in the US is down in July (= vs Delta); to 76% for Moderna and 42% for Pfizer vaccines. It...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  I think the right-wing vulture capitalists will dismember Scotland first, as easy pickings .... Good reason to write anti-capitalist laws. Which Scotland can't have in the UK, but can if independent. Good reason to be in the EU, too....
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Finally, the old Common Law system was mostly written out of the code between the 1980s and early 2000s (in England and Wales... My understanding is that while this is true of the law, it is not true of the...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  It turns out to matter if the government are mammonite death-cultists. The current Canadian federal government are truly terrible; they're approving pipelines and neonictinoid pesticides (both in my view crimes-against-humanity level stuff; there's an established legal view that the ongoing...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  I'd have said that there's no need to install a new figurehead by changing the sock-puppet dynasty at the top: to do so would make you a visible target. If you're trying to install MyCronies3.0 over the existing stuff that...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Graydon @24: You can carry that on to ->offspring->Edward (now DofE IIRC)->offspring->Anne. If they started skipping steps Anne would have a lot of support, and if the rules change had been retroactive she'd now be ahead of Andrew. Anne ought...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Farage isn't part of the Ruling Party, he's an insurgent outsider I hypothesize that so are the New Masters, the money and planning behind Brexit. (The New Masters being the mix of expat how-dare-tax?! billionaires, Russian money, Saudi money, we-don't-know-where-that-comes-from...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Can we have the Republic of Canada when his widow dies1? 1 Almost certainly not. Thanks to Canada's Constitution, that kind of major change is basically impossible. I don't give it more than six months -- and so long only...
• Commented on What happens now?
  And how do you justify blaming schools for any mid-September or later surge, when there are other potential causes - including cooler weather, the starting up of indoor hockey, etc. Where am I blaming schools, rather than blaming the decision...