There are sophisticated and nuanced critiques to be made of Western power projection, soft and hard. “Nuanced” and “sophisticated” are not words appropriate to the average hexbear or lemmygrad denizen’s take on geopolitics, and for those of us who live in the real world rather than living to argue over how many Maos can dance on the tip of the icepick that killed Trotsky, the loud and unrelenting naysaying of anything less extreme than “armed proletarian revolution now!” got to be incredibly tiresome, not to mention the constant cheerleading of brutally-repressive regimes that don’t have any values in common with actual socialists or communists just because they oppose the US and its allies.

Look, some of us old farts started on Linux back before nano was included by default, and your options for text editing on the command line were either:

1. vi/vim, a perfectly competent text editor with arcane and unintuitive key combos for commands
2. emacs, a ludicrously overcomplicated kitchen-sink program that had reasonable text-editing functionality wedged in between the universal woodchuck remote control and the birdcall translation system

Given those options, most of us chose to learn how to key-chord our way around vim, and old habits die hard.

But it did give us a damn fine concert movie from Muse, and that’s indisputable.

One of the more unnerving “benign” interactions I’ve had with a cop was when the officer standing guard duty at the DMV subjected my wife and I to ten minutes of exposition about his various weapons and the effects they had on people while we waited for the line to move us out of conversation range. It’s never been more clear to me that somebody desperately wants an excuse to do violence, to anybody he might be allowed to.

Hard to say. Real estate has been weird in China for years since it’s one of the few investment vehicles available to the masses. A collapse domestically could even push those with the ability to do so to move more of their money into overseas real estate, which could have the opposite effect. Regardless, it’s a bad sign for the Chinese economy generally, especially given that Evergrande is only the first of what’s likely to be a wave of real estate industry bankruptcies.

What’s got me is, why bother with the legal system? Just call up the Texas National Guard into federal service and order them to enforce the law as regards Border Patrol’s access to the border. If they refuse, court martial ‘em. Either way, Border Patrol gets access to the border to cut down Texas’ illegal barriers, and Abbott gets an unsubtle reminder about how the states are subordinate to the federal government. Win-win scenario.

Even if their military is a cesspool of corruption and incompetence that lacks the real-world capacity to invade a wet paper sack (something that I wouldn’t take for granted even if the rumors and reports about it are true, given the sheer volume of men and materiel China has to throw at an enemy nation regardless of quality), China at war with Taiwan would create a global economic crisis, between shipping disruptions in the Pacific and the knock-on effects of isolating China economically in retaliation.

Really, the best thing for everyone would be for Xi exit stage left somehow and be replaced by someone with less imperialistic ambition, but for the moment he seems fairly secure in power, which is why we’ve seen Western nations making efforts to decouple their economies from China, and more overtly signal their support for Taiwanese independence.

Older variants of the 737 are some of the most ubiquitous aircraft in the world, with very solid safety records. The 737 MAX, however, is the product of a Boeing much diminished in terms of engineering mindset, and it shows badly.

Difference between an industry used to being regulated like planes dropping out of the sky onto people’s houses might be a Bad Thing, versus one that is used to regulatory capture and a low public profile.

As the old saw goes, never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel. Guy’s about to have every piece of dirty laundry he’s ever forgotten about aired in public.

Of course he’ll just go home and cry about it into his swimming pool full of cash, but I’ll take billionaire tears over no billionaire tears any day.

He’s suddenly full of righteous indignation now that he’s had a taste of his own medicine. Hypocritical fucknugget.

For a second, I thought maybe he was engaging in the popular tax avoidance strategy where you keep your investments in stocks, and then rather than sell them for liquid cash and pay capital gains tax, you take out low rate, interest-only loans using the value of the stock as collateral. It’s the sort of bullshit loophole available to the billionaire class to avoid paying their share of tax…

…but no, guy’s just leveraged up to his eyeballs in real estate and gold-buggery, and has the audacity to claim to be a finance guru.

As an architectural professional, I kinda want to skim over Russian building codes on the off-chance that they just have really shitty practice around fall protection at windows, and all of our jokes about it misunderstand the situtation after all.

But that’s kinda the problem, right? Piketty’s central thesis is that above a certain amount of critical mass capital has a sort of gravity that almost inevitably attracts more wealth to itself at an exponential rate, and only truly cataclysmic events (either on a personal or societal level) can disrupt that accrual. People like Elon, Trump, and all the other failsons and nepo babies populating the millionaire and billionaire class are walking proof of the theory – even if he wasn’t keeping pace with the larger market, Trump still managed to make Daddy’s money last until now, and he’s self-evidently less intelligent than most small rodents. That wasn’t any special talent on his part growing the family fortune – it’s just (effectively) ambient cash getting caught in the gravity well of his inheritance and falling past the event horizon, in spite of his dumbassery.

What in the generative AI nonsense is that header image? A mysterious man is lasering the moon, while his crotch ray attacks a low-flying jet and another beam shoots from his briefcase towards parts unknown, and a confusing late-night aerobatic demonstration takes place in the background?

I’ve caught a few slips of the tongue and minor errors when Robert touches on things I have particular knowledge of, but not any gross misrepresentations. The warning was more along the lines of “I haven’t gone to primary sources on this” rather than casting aspersions on the podcast.

My understanding (entirely mediated by the Behind the Bastards episodes about him, so take it with a grain of salt) is that he never posted directly to YT; everything of his up there was and continues to be reuploads from his followers. So, regrettably, even though Romania has thrown him into a hole in the earth, Tate-stans will continue to spread the bad word.

Several years ago in my city a guy got punched once outside of a bar, fell backwards, and broke his neck on the street curb. “Just one punch” can do a hell of a lot of damage, if you get hit in the wrong spot or fall the wrong way.

Well, if another curbstomping by Britain is what it takes to run this addle-brained right wing moron out of office in short order, then perhaps that’s a silver lining.

Scott Manley suggested the hot-stage combined with the fast flip maneuver may have caused fuel to slosh away from the intakes in the tank, leading to ingestion of gas bubbles in the fuel lines. Those would have damaged or destroyed engines as they worked their way into the turbo pumps, leading to the progressive engine-outs seen on the stream before the eventual catastrophic failure of the booster.