Tom M

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• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  I strongly suspect but don't know that the movie name change stemmed from the source of funding. The candy is branded "Wonka" and since the candy company was stumping up the cash they probably made sure they got that name...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  The funny thing is that before printing and standardized spelling, literacy was relatively easy in languages with phonetic alphabets. Knowing one's ABCs was all it took to transcribe a spoken message, though it might be incomprehensible to someone from two...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  Weirdly, the US presidential (and in some states gubernatorial) pardon power doesn't have any explicit limits. Parsing the constitutional text, courts have only found a few major caveats-presidents can't pardon future crimes, only federal crimes are fair game, and accepting...
• Commented on WTF
  If you can get your hands on an overhead projector there's a fresnel lens under the glass where you put the transparency. Having salvaged a few after going through the school library storage, I can say that they're not any...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  US Western Interconnect, Colorado, a small power authority) where pumped hydro is readily available if desired The idea of pumped hydro storage in Colorado runs hard into the problem of having the water. Building new reservoirs has been a decades-long...
• Commented on Necroqueen!
  Maybe a great man theory kind of thing, all the big name innovators of the industrial period had Saxon derived names... if you discount Bruenel, who, with his kid, was kind of a dick...
• Commented on Necroqueen!
  'Scotland will not be admitted, because one particular nation will automatically veto such an application - Spain.' I strongly suspect the mechanism from the EU side won't be to admit Scotland as a new member, but rather some legal shenanigans...
• Commented on The ends of education
  It's still a complex play since the judiciary has no enforcement power. It takes an executive who is willing to enforce judicial orders and a legislature who won't immediately pass laws to negate those decisions. It's still likely that the...
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  The big problem is that a lot of US short range commuters live in apartments or other shared domicile situations that don't have accommodation for charging a car. Convincing those in the outer suburbs or further out that they can...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  Bare minimum requirements to add a state is a majority vote of both houses of Congress. Constitutionally, we don't actually even need the permission of the people living there. It's not unheard of for the US to think 'Golly, we...
• Commented on Books I Will Not Write #8: The Year of the Conspiracy
  There are still a limited number of options if the votes aren't counted by the date the electoral college meets: The courts impose a result (unlikely to fly a second time after Bush v Gore, but possible) Whatever bodies certify...
• Commented on Books I Will Not Write #8: The Year of the Conspiracy
  The issue with declaring martial law, contesting results, etc is that nobody particularly likes Trump enough to stage a full on coup to keep him in office. At best, he'll manage to contest individual state results in the courts, but...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas" (Part 2)
  The SCOTUS electors decision may have made the most sense, avoiding potential chaos around the presidential election. It's also directly contradictory to the intention behind creating the whole clunky elector system in the first place. Originally, electors were supposed to...
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  Elections are regulated by the states, but administered by county - ie state law and a secretary of state sets the rules around elections but individual counties handle the voting process and the counting. Mail ballots come in several flavors....
• Commented on The sudden eruption of news
  Moreover, the actual running of the elections happens at the county level. In most states, a local official certifies the vote counts and forwards just the totals to the state. The opportunities for hanky panky abound, especially since it's common...
• Commented on The End of the British nuclear deterrent?
  Hiding some things isn't particularly extraordinary. Planning it might be - overt attempts to shut people up or hide an installation creates a backlash. Unless there's something really obviously weird, most people will pass off things. New office park? Know...
• Commented on The End of the British nuclear deterrent?
  One thing about county sheriffs is that they're usually elected officials. Even in large cities where the city and county is coterminus and the city police chief exercises law enforcement jurisdiction, there tends to still be at least a figurehead...
• Commented on Placeholder? Placeholder!
  I've not traveled much by air since that change, and I probably couldn't distinguish one machine from the other anyway. Is there any assurance that the changeover is complete? Knowing the nature of these bureaucracies, I would suspect that there...
• Commented on Eleven Tweets
  The Never Ending Quest for Eyeballs may not even entirely be about ad revenue. Crackpots, cranks, and propagandists are entirely ok with pursuing venues that don't generate CPM cash. Unfortunately, reputable writers and producers also use non-monetized channels to build...
• Commented on Duelling - Essentially a Bloody Stupid Idea
  I'm reminded that in Colorado's state law, criminal libel was explicitly the replacement for dueling. The law outlawing dueling is immediately followed by the criminal libel statute, which made it a felony to comment on the natural defects of the...
• Commented on Just plain icky
  A parasite colonizing nerve tissue, optimizing for all sorts of actions that result in sentience as an emergent property... sounds a bit like a soul. Mind/body dualism as an actual biological reality would be an interesting story hook....
• Commented on Ever Young?
  'Also, the idiots who look at how you dress might be the ones paying your salary, so sometimes it pays to dress how they want.' In those cases, I'm disturbed by management that favors coworkers who dress beyond their means....
• Commented on Suspense is the key
  This is almost journalistic in form - a modification of the inverted pyramid. Put the meat of the story up front with a hook. Follow up with the context. Finish with a kicker that brings the story back to the...
• Commented on The iron law of development
  Call the support number? I recently worked in a library that served as the venue for high school students taking online courses. Oddly, questions about the material rarely came up. These kids were mostly repeating courses that they'd previously failed....
• Commented on A plaintive request
  The question is if the system would be set up with protections or recourse for those that have been wronged. In the US it's common for senior living facilities to set their rates to match or just barely exceed the...
• Commented on A game of consequences
  That only works if the distribution of ideas and action works primarily from the bottom up - if the top level of the hierarchy is empowered to impose on the lower levels rather than act on the directives that bubble...
• Commented on Updating a classic
  One simple hack that's eminently plausible is to disseminate to HR a policy on time off requests designating employees as 'mission critical' based on salary - obviously, higher paid staff MUST be that much more important to the business or...
• Commented on Updating a classic
  1) to avoid unnecessary production delays, and achieve competitive pricing we shall source all large quantity purchases from two or more vendors Surely you mean solicit quotes from multiple vendors and award the contract to the best proposal? No I...
• Commented on Rise Of The Trollbot
  Once it becomes obvious that troll bots are running loose in a forum, the sport is to identify the conditions they're programmed to respond to and goad them into outing themselves. Ideally, when there are multiple bots in thread the...
• Commented on 5 Magical Beasts And How To Replace Them With A Shell Script
  There certainly is a device that will report if you've been in a car accident - OnStar and similar services have been doing that for years. Some Texas schools have been sued because of the tracking devices they require children...