You know I really should have just tried praying to Isis first. Transition was expensive and such a pain in the ass. Though, being an ancient God, I imagine if you pray to Isis requesting a gender transition, she’ll probably demand an offering or make you perform a feat so great in exchange that the savings and effort over regular transition just cancel out. Or she’ll change your sex, but also turn you into a cow or bull for some reason, just to be dick.

Iran is a modern version, sort of a fun house mirror of LGBT acceptance. They’ll accept you if you’re trans, but YOU DAMN WELL BETTER BE STRAIGHT!

Not if they’re incendiary drones meant merely to land on a roof and set a building on fire.

You underestimate the destructive potential of even small drones. Quantity has a quality all its own. Imagine a swarm of thousands of drones, all cheaply built 3D printed things, made by a single individual or small group. They have one task. They fly to a fixed set of GPS coordinates and land. No targeting needed. No AI facial recognition to target some specific politician. No auto-gun mounted beneath a large drone. Just a dirt simple task. They just fly up, over, and down. Once landed, they send a small electrical signal to a small incendiary device, perhaps a thermite charge, installed at the base of the drone. Such drones could be made quite cheaply if made on a large scale.

Imagine fires being started atop the roofs of every building in a city. Oh, and the attack starts with each fire station being attacked by a dozen such drones. Imagine every building in a city being lit on fire simultaneously. Soon a firestorm develops, and the fire starts feeding itself.

Let’s say you needed 10,000 such drones. Maybe you make them for $50 each. That’s $500k to burn down a city. For the cost of a single building you can burn down every other building in a modest sized city.

We are approaching a point where a single determined individual, using the scale of resources regularly available to a single individual, could recreate the firebombing of Dresden.

Unfortunately now Google is ChatGPT. It provides its own shitty AI answers, and its search results have been corrupted by an ocean of slop.

I see it like this. Books are the work of a single individual. That one person will have broad authority to write their story however they please. So range of book quality is very large. There are great books and there are truly awful books. And in fact, the vast majority of books are total rubbish. But the dregs get forgotten and the good stuff rises to the top.

Movies are made by committee. This reduces the spread of quality. Many hands tends to move things towards the average. So you have a much lower portion of total crap, but you also don’t have as many true masterpieces. The quality of most movies tends to be pretty mid.

But because books don’t go through as much of an averaging out of quality through being created by many hands, when they go well. They go WELL. Sometimes a master author will sit down, truly be in their element, and create their greatest work. And their vision will carry through and arrive to the reader undiluted. But movies? You can be the greatest director or screen writer on the planet; you’re still not going to be able to make a movie without the help of hundreds of other people. You could write the world’s greatest movie, but your vision will inevitably be worn down quite a bit before it reaches the audiences in theaters.

Or, expressed graphically:

Oh, your hard drive has the whole movie series on it? Well I got the whole series right here!

TIL trans men and trans masc top surgery were a thing in the ancient Roman empire.

The beauty of this is approach is that even the American Service Member’s Protection Act is irrelevant here. The process I outlined would occur at the direction of a future administration. That law you cited only gives the president the option of interfering with the ICC. The president is still perfectly capable of allowing prosecutions at the ICC. It’s purely voluntary.

Skyscrapers and large office spaces are on paper horrible investments and have an awful time filling enough vacancies to offset their upkeep. The only thing that makes them a “safe” investment is that every company uses them as a way to bank equity. If those same companies pulled the rug from under themselves they would all lose that safe equity piggy bank.

This is just the sunk cost fallacy though. You can inflate the paper value of assets by playing games like this, but the bill always comes due in the end. Yes, companies that do this can juice their books a bit in the short term, but they’re harming themselves in the long term. They retain a bit higher book value for their real estate, but they make whatever goods or services they provide noncompetitive in the marketplace. They have competitors who aren’t bogged down by past bad real estate decisions. Those competitors can outcompete them on price and can attract better talent. Meanwhile, they’re stuck in their ways, fruitlessly trying to inflate their real estate holdings, all while their revenue is plummeting because they can’t attract good people and have to charge higher for their services than their competitors.

It’s just the sunk cost fallacy. You could inflate the book value of real estate by doing all sorts of foolish things. You could create a subsidiary and have that company rent out some of your floor space for absurdly high rates. But you’re ultimately just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Those commercial real estate properties have already lost their value. The value was lost the minute it was proven that work from home was a superior work model.

These companies are going to go bankrupt at a mass scale when the next recession rolls around.

Fuck, these companies might actually be violating the law. Deliberately choosing unproductive business practices just to cook your real estate books is something Enron would do.

Not my version of gay marriage. If they’re going to take away gay marriage, I propose we institute mandatory gay marriage. Anyone registered as a Republican will be eligible for mandatory forced gay marriage. If a gay person wants to marry you, you’re getting married! Also, that will have interesting interactions if the Republicans ever try to repeal the spousal rape laws…

On our forever home, I want to install solar panels and a redundant AC system, or maybe just a backup AC system in a single room. We’re in the US PNW. Here, heat waves are becoming more and more a threat to human life. Where we’re at, we can get rare heat waves that go up to 112F, and that’s in an area where historically AC wasn’t common. It’s only in the last decade or two that it’s started to be viewed as a necessity. But thankfully when we get more of a dry heat, and the highest temp days are win the Sun is shining brightly. So I would like to have a setup where our home was essentially equipped as a lethal heat wave survival shelter, where we would be fine even if the grid fails. And part of that would likely just be keeping a duplicate AC, maybe just for a single room to shelter in, in the event of a lethal heatwave.

I’ve read that this phenomena - near zero energy at times of peak production, is producing some interesting effects on some areas of energy use.

For example, one potential use of this excess energy is hydrogen electrolysis. Traditionally, industrial electrolyzers have been built to maximize energy efficiency. They’ll use expensive platinum anodes to get the absolute most out of every watt of power.

However, in this application - taking advantage of dirt cheap intermittent electricity - we might not actually want to optimize for efficiency. These machines are expensive. And if you’re only running them for a few hours a day, making the machines cheaper to build may trump making them maximally efficient. You need a machine cheap enough to run for just a few hour a day and let sit idle the rest of the time. So some companies are developing electrolyzers that are designed to use the cheapest materials possible, even if they’re less efficient than those made with platinum anodes. Dirt cheap electrolyzers might have 20-30% less efficiency than the expensive ones, but if they cost a small fraction to build, it can be worth it. That extra energy was just going to go to waste anyway.

When energy is essentially free but highly intermittent, it starts changing the whole calculus for how you build industrial machinery. You start optimizing more for lower CAPEX and less for efficiency.

I don’t believe you. You’re clearly lying.

Think you want to be bred now? Wait until you have SRS, if that’s your cup of tea. T_T

Oh, the CEO should also be caned…rectally.

When this is over, we will need to find ways to hold admin officials and ICE agents accountable. Trump will issue a blanket pardon at the end of his term, and SCOTUS is no longer a legitimate institution. So we need to look for other routes to bring these criminals to justice.

I’m sorry, but if you’re working at a concentration camp, you are committing crimes against humanity. So, who assuming the US justice system can’t hold them to account, who can? Well this is where ICE agents are boned. Operating these concentration camps, they’re going to be responsible for the deaths of scores of citizens from dozens of foreign countries. And those countries don’t give a shit about US pardons. We need to ship ICE agents off to Venezuela and other countries whose citizens they have killed. Rendition them there, and they can put them on trial for the deaths of their citizens. ICE loves shipping people off to random countries. Let’s ship ICE agents off to countries where they can be held accountable for their crimes.

I like the idea of the transition happening slowly over several decades. Basically you found a company, and you’ll be able to maintain majority control over it until you reach your retirement. You can have a vision and carry it through. You just can’t create a multi generational empire that makes your children and grandchildren into newly minted aristocrats.

Anything related to food it is!

The next version of Firefox should be shipped exclusively in a large collection of several dozen 3.5" floppy disks.