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• Commented on The Biggest Little SF Publisher you never heard of pulls on the jackboots
  SJW is about as neutral as you can get. It's an argument about what the term means, more than what term to use, and SJW is vague enough that any definition can apply....
• Commented on The Biggest Little SF Publisher you never heard of pulls on the jackboots
  Finland - probably chosen for symbolic reasons if you're wondering (WWII - Winter War and all that; last bastion of Aryans fighting against Communist threat and winning). That's make sense if VD was a neonazi, but having permanently stained my...
• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  It's an extreme leap to say the War on Drugs would obviously fail because prohibition did. The scale and scope of alchohol prohibition was completely different. You had to deal with things like other countries flagrant refusal to provide any...
• Commented on Over-Extended Metaphor for the day
  It'd probably work better to compare it to really early Christianity. Microsoft is the Roman state religion, the UNIXes are the infighting branches of christianity. My early Christianities history just isn't good enough to overextend it, but it probably works....
• Commented on PSA: Why there won't be a third book in the Halting State trilogy
  "Because that's the direction the trilogy provisionally titled "Merchant Princes: The Next Generation" is going in." I don't know if this is old news and I should have checked in more often, but HOLY SHIT YES....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Saturn's Children
  Damage to existing memory won't have happened to most people at initial diagnosis. Usually its motor skills or impaired formation of new memories that prompts the complaints to the doctor....
• Commented on A Bad Dream
  I suspect it's an inevitability of voting systems. The only way to increase voting share for the majority parties is to move toward the center outside a few hot button issues, and there's no possibility of popular outsiders filling the...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  On asteroids: Given that it'd take us at least a couple years to put a delivery system together, being two years out from making a bomb doesn't hurt....
• Commented on The Curious Experience of Middle Age
  Interestingly, I pulled up some DK Simmons papers to skim through them, and in one of them he goes over typical creativity curves by profession. The late bloomer/retains creativity post peak is something that's supposedly typical among writers (among other...
• Commented on The permanent revolution
  The difference in heating and cooling tech compared to when it was done by having ice hauled in to cool your food (something still within living memory) qualifies as a pretty radical change in household tech. There are a lot...
• Commented on How I feel this morning
  I have had a failure of sorts on Kickstarter, but a mitigated one. The short film in question is done, but it will be a great deal of time (at least a couple more months, it was promised in October)...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  I have no idea about the UK, but in the US what that really means is they want the government to train their employees for them....
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  @Greg Tinley, consider the lingua franca shift to be a hypothetical, I have no idea if it will happen, of if it would even be Chinese....
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  I see an advantage to the AESU, which is that as the world starts shifting away from English and toward Chinese (assuming that happens), English speaking countries (I think India will be an exception, while English is one of the...
• Commented on Me, talking
  (Its worth noting that you do not burn hydrogen in a fuel cell, normal hydrogen burning inefficiency does not apply)....
• Commented on Me, talking
  You already lose over 75% from a gasoline engine, so I fail to see why losing 70% is a bad thing. That said, real world fuel cell efficiency is usually over 45% for vehicles. This isn't all that great when...
• Commented on Dragged kicking and screaming into the 19th century
  The claims of the age of the RCC are no less inflated by myth and propaganda. While the religion is a old as claimed (let us not delve into conspiracy here), the Roman Catholic Church itself was an arm of...
• Commented on Political failure modes and the beige dictatorship
  That's really got nothing to do with the random method, unless you somehow randomly pick hundreds (or even thousands, if you want to mix this in with getting the numbers high enough that reps are accessible) narcissists. Though, there's a...
• Commented on This explains everything
  My favourite is that Alex Jones is a government agent whose job is to spread distorted conspiratainment versions of the truth, thus discrediting people who come close to his deranged crack-pottery and distracting those on the left inclined to mistrust...
• Commented on Unbreakable (part2)
  On Lance: There's something else people miss about the whole Lance Armstrong thing, and that's the obsession with performance enhancing drugs. And this is a relatively recent thing, at least in force. A lot of PEDs have been illegal for...
• Commented on It's a Wonderful Life
  So in the first paragraph we have "managers and senior managers only make up 3.6 per cent", and then in the second paragraph we have "managers and administrators ... make up 11.7 per cent". "Staff" and "workforce" are technical terms,...
• Commented on The Algebraic Properties of Equality in SF
  "Most women in boot camp at the time were failing their grenade qualifications. Many of them just didn't have the necessary upper body strength." This stands out to me as not training for women properly. Unless your hips are for...
• Commented on THE END.
  What's the motivation with putting 'The End' at the end of the manuscript? Tradition, personal satisfaction, or is there some publiching reason like making sure the editor (or whoever else) knows they have a complete copy?...
• Commented on In case you were wondering ...
  Can't do much else besides puke and sleep on opiates either. Dic's great for normal life, except the whole risk of internal bleeding thing....
• Commented on In case you were wondering ...
  Damn, having been on that stuff I can only express my sympathies for whatever forced you onto it for good....
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  I wouldn't be taking it for at least a decade, but that's a matter of my own youth, and not needing to waste money on something I already have, once I'm older I'd jump at it. As for my plans......
• Commented on Sitrep
  I want to hear about your broken cenral heating! I suspect I'd have to ask the engineer to know what's wrong though. Which is its own oddity, is that term more lax in the UK, or did you hire a...
• Commented on National Talk About Something Else Day
  I'm listening to political podcasts from a different part of the year while I avoid the [redacted for off topic] on TV. I may have a problem....
• Commented on Context is everything
  It doesn't happen as behavior, but there is such a thing as food based fertility adjustment, where as food becomes scarcer fertility drops....