Aardvark Cheeselog

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• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  I've been waiting for this one....
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  ITT: Various familiar nonsense from highly opinionated people whose first real thinking about military affairs started after Russia continued its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Emptying the inventories of the NATO powers to equip the Ukrainians would not have enabled...
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  Russia could get away with this shit when they invaded Ukraine because Russia kept national service, so the call-up mostly got adults who had been through the (highly abusive) draft some time in the preceding years Um no. One...
• Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
  The most alarming thing isn't that Bad lies, it's that Bard initially offers up plausible truths, then gradually increases the distortion level as it continues. There's no clear-cut delineation between truth and lies; rather, there's a sliding scale of bullshit....
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  drinking with your buddies was better than drinking alone; and without radio or teevee, drinking alone was better than sitting alone without distraction; I like this reasoning, and it provides something to stack up against the almost overwhelmingly negative social...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  With respect to banning cigarettes, I have always thought that to be a recipe for drug education aimed at people who will never get the message. To the extent that such a policy were successful, it would lead to gangs...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  With respect to dinosaur high-tech civilization, I say that the existence of the Great Lakes banded iron formations disproves it. That those were still around to be mined out by us is strong evidence that we're the first to have...
• Commented on Minor updates
  Thanks, I hate it....
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  I thought about writing a lengthy comment on the topic of the history of man's inhumanity toward man, and how only very recently in the longer scheme of things has any (food-producing) human society had more classes than owners (a...
• Commented on New guest blogger: qntm
  we now share a literary agent, so hopefully you'll be reading more of his books soon. This is excellent news....
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  One thing that confuses Americans is that there seems to have been no movement away from neoliberalism by Labor. In the US the D Party is hobbled by too many D officials who are still stuck in the 1990s, but...
• Commented on Crimes against Transhumanity
  What LAvery said....
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  For reasons along the lines of what's discussed here I have long been in favor of confiscatory taxes on income over a certain amount. The number I picked for Americans would be income in the neighborhood of $30M/yr: once you're...
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  The foundational privacy rights case is Griswold and the smart money expects it to wind up on the docket soon. It's worth noting WRT Roe that the smart money did not expect an opinion like the one leaked: the Supremes...
• Commented on Yokai Land Q&A
  Final note: it's been nearly 20 years since I worked in anything remotely connected to IT. I can't keep up any more with the tech side of the Laundry. I have been in the programming end of the business since...
• Commented on Yokai Land Q&A
  ... to doing something so unspeakable that the Invisible College installed the Eater of Souls on him as an alternative to the tender mercies of the Home Office hangman. I missed this part of the backstory somehow... is it in...
• Commented on Yokai Land Q&A
  Is "Princess Kitty" a real Sanrio thing or is that a thinly-disguised reference to Hello Kitty? Or does Hello Kitty have a special Princess manifestation? I guess this is really a Sanrio question and not a Yokai Land question. Please...
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  It's interesting that almost every politically conscious person (and you strike me as such) predict, for the future, the victory of the other side and an oppressive nondemocratic nightmarish regime. I think that you will find it amusing speaking with...
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  The goofy posts are coming up early this time. I didn't bother looking at the youtube link for a fuel additive consisting of sodium and NaOH. Because It doesn't pass the laugh test. Metallic sodium? As a fuel additive? For...
• Commented on Outage report
  And I think you overstate it about his “obvious” the risks were. Risks, yes. “Obvious” - no. Not at the time. People in finance were almost all very surprised and shocked by the 2008 crisis. ... Why did people...
• Commented on Outage report
  I had my own problems with the thing at the link, but seriously, "Subprime mortgages were an example of people choosing to use a short-history data set, and extrapolate from it." Seriously? Subprime mortgages were a scheme for getting lots...
• Commented on Outage report
  Ideally I'd just be setting up a Xenix box with dial-up terminals and a restricted shell, for modem dialup users to use a choice of a gopher client or trn to read a local NNTP spool. (Shakes walking frame...
• Commented on Outage report
  20 years ago I worked on a project for getting H.323 through a firewall and came to the conclusion that CCITT standards exist for the purpose of allowing vendors to check off a "standards-interoperable" box without doing any interoperability engineering,...
• Commented on An update on the revolutionary experiment
  With respect to the institutional history of Police Scotland, I'm trying to picture a comparison with US police forces. Which originate in union-busting hired muscle organizations in the industrial North, and slave-catcher/anti-insurrection patrols in the South. The police in the...
• Commented on An update on the revolutionary experiment
  At which point the optics include Police Scotland (who are armed -- in some parts, notably the Highlands, the cops all drive around with guns because the nearest armed response unit is half an hour away by helicopter) in shoot-outs...
• Commented on An update on the revolutionary experiment
  If the Beige Dictatorship is the failure mode of Democracy, the failure mode of the Beige Dictatorship is when the party of the opimates gets taken over taken over by pure factionalists who will do or say anything to "win,"...
• Commented on An update on the revolutionary experiment
  Sorry, I have to stop reading early to respond right away to ... traitors or insufficiently-enthusiastic wreckers must be at fault. (See also Bolshevism in the Lenin/early Stalin period.) That there is High Stalinism you're talking about, if you're talking...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  That is to say, Heinlein differs from Tolkien in that Tolkien's magnum opus was made into a film by someone who had some reverence for the story the writer was trying to tell, while SST was "made into a movie"...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  The Bushies were told in 2002 that the Iraqi oilfields were already trashed by 10 years of sanctions and that no way would the production goals be realized. The response was to shoot the messengers. The "high on their own...
• Commented on Starship bloopers
  @JBS #169: But they did believe they were going to create a democratic Iraq - for values of "democratic" out of some NeoCon Libertarian Free-Market smoke & mirrors pipe dream. High on their own supply & suckered by their own...