Pixodaros

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• Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
  I wish I had the right education to talk about that, because on one hand there is a tradition of "freedom means my freedom to do violence to my neighbours" which goes back to Classical Greece, on the other hand...
• Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
  I think there are some questions in life with no good answers, like "who will best represent the interests of a child: the child's parents or public servants?" Any answer you choose will go horribly wrong some of the time,...
• Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
  Writers like Harry Harrison and Fred Pohl were reinforced in their pacifist and anti-authoritarian tendencies by being conscripted as enlisted men for WW II (Jerry Pournelle had a brief army career during the Korean War, so that was not a...
• Commented on Summer webcomics
  If we are covering naughty comics how about the Tales of Gnosis College (a chronically depressed gentleman with a mad science fetish starts writing comics about a little Midwestern college in the days of the Universal Vaccine, negotiable research ethics,...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Yes, I think one fair criticism of inflation statistics is that a homeowner may not see an increase in housing costs but a renter (or someone who needs their home repaired) may see a shocking increase. Someone with a kitchen...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  i think one of Umair Haque's better prophecies was "everything the far right touches dies" https://eand.co/the-lesson-of-elon-musks-twitter-everything-the-far-right-touches-dies-5d7d4ddb980e But he mixes that in with the arithmetically illiterate whine about inflation which sounds like a pundit in the 20th century with 12 years...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  I can't read those essays without logging in, but recently Umair Haque wrote that "When you have to pay 10% more for food, and then another 10% more for shelter, you’re not averaging. Those costs are additive. You are 20%...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Generals on the eastern and western fronts in 1915-1917 sometimes told themselves that they were going to break through, but what a successful offensive actually achieved was doing more damage to the enemy than it suffered. An accessible example is...
• Commented on I can't even
  My understanding is that if you take a bike ride along the Rhine, every so often you see a pair of bridge pillars and a new railway bridge side by side. Those are bridges which the Germans blew in 1945...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Perhaps I should have spelled out "traditional solution (for peoples with iron)." The rest of your post is not things I disagree with (the best way to avoid troubles with bears is to avoid bear habitat and especially not get...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  People have been living on Turtle Island for tens of thousands of years, but they only had smokeless powder for about a hundred. For the few people in areas with bears, a spear and a big knife are the traditional...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  A very queer writer who wrote a life of Putin was once invited to his office. She accepted and discovered that he wanted her to return to a magazine she had formerly written for but been fired from for refusing...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  I think that K. Kazani would say that the reason the UK changed its attitude was the War of 1812 (and the fact that the USA was over the sea, so the British didn't have to notice how the United...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  The cover and the author (David Richter) look right! Because there was so much money to be made by seizing and privatizing Indian land, it was very tempting for settlers to invent theories why that was right and good. Canada...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  "Ultimately all U.S. racism stems from slavery; from classifying people as property based on the color of their skin. How did that come about here in the colonies? We imported it from England." First Nations and Asian-Americans might disagree. It...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  Heinlein's public statements that he was just an entertainer competing with breweries for people's fun money were another of those half-truths which he threw out to distract people, like the carefully censored autobiographies in the backs or the true but...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  Those are two separate issue (an unreliable narrator does not describe the plot and setting accurately, a character who is not a mouthpiece has opinions which the author does not share) and the more of Heinlein's letters are published, and...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  Heinlein wrote "Job: A Comedy of Justice" and what he thought were witty digs at those durned philosophers. And he often explores contradictory ideas in different books, which is why he can speak to so many different kinds of people....
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  Its commonly believed that the US military over-recruits poor and racialized people, but that was not really true circa the 1990s (and one reason many blacks ended up in the military was that they perceived it as a less racist...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  IIRC, the US Marine Corps has accepted conscripts at various times in its history, but the marine corps of the Banana Wars and gunboats in China in the 1920s and 1930s was volunteer. My point is that governments have avoided...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  For some reason Americans of a certain age idolize conscription. Lets look what US conscript armies since 1890 have actually done. There is the army that Woodrow Wilson rounded up to fight on the Western Front. There is the army...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  I am an Anglo, not a US person, and under 45 and I am a fan of Heinlein's fiction up to the 1950s / thinner than my thumb. He saved my father growing up in a series of small towns...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  I notice in passing that he says slavery in British North America began in 1619! But he is aware that he does not know many black people. I think it is to Heinlein's credit that people with such different philosophical...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  On Heinlein's ideas on race circa 1960, this unsent letter to Francis Marion "F.M." Busby might be helpful https://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/04/weekend-reading-robert-a-heinlein-letter-for-fm-busby-on-freedom-and-race-relations.html It was published in one of the Virginia Editions....
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  I agree that groups often cluster around neurotypes like they cluster around age, class, occupation, sex, gender, religion, nationality, etc. And that making a group more 'mainstream' often destroys what made it wonderful for the odd people who created it....
• Commented on Lying to the ghost in the machine
  Not just Asimov, they are in Beam Piper's "The Return" and Pournelle's "King David's Spaceship." In the early Cold War, they seemed like a plausible way of preserving large amounts of information after a disaster. Then the problems with illegible...
• Commented on Lying to the ghost in the machine
  That makes some big assumptions about the resources which will be available for anything but managing climate change over the next 2 to 3 generations. A lot of current digital technologies are very energy-inefficient and creating digital storage media with...
• Commented on A Quick Infomercial
  scratches head Until the 16th century most European swords had left-right symmetrical hilts (more or less: Roland Warzecha has showed that Viking Age sword hilts often have subtle asymmetries which make sense if you assume 90% of them were hilted...