This is how Wisconsin’s law is so fucked up: The three men he shot were not working together, were not coordinated, did not know each other. So, on the one hand, Rittenhouse may have subjectively felt under coordinated attack, he was not, but the subjective feeling is what matters for the law.

From Huber:s POV, he was trying to disarm a murderer. Maybe he felt threatened, too? But the law is so fucked, his POV doesn’t matter because he’s dead. In Grosskreutz’s POV, he was approaching an active shooter who’d just killed two men and trying to defuse the situation. When Rittenhouse pointed his gun, Grosskreutz would have been justified under the same law in blowing him away.

In short, the law incentivizes shooting first.

Okay, but I’m not on board yet. We start with the biggest crooks of all, the wage thieves, right?

Proposed reform measure: Just like teachers have to buy classroom supplies out-of-pocket, have police officers buy their own ammo.

Yes, that’s what I see, that’s clearly what he’s doing. The difference is that in 2016, he was able to retain in long-term memory what didn’t work, and had the mental flexibility to try out new bits to find things that did. Now, he keeps going back to the same dry well over and over again, in every speech, which is evidence that he’s losing it. (As further evidence, I’d point out that this is consistent with the amount of time it took him to grasp that he wasn’t running against Biden anymore.)

Reminds me of an old Yakov Smirnoff routine. Espresso powder makes espresso, and milk powder makes milk. So what does baby powder make?

Case-sensitive is easier to implement; it’s just a string of bytes. Case-insensitive requires a lot of code to get right, since it has to interpret symbols that make sense to humans. So, something over wondered about:

That’s not hard for ASCII, but what about Unicode? Is the precomposed ç treated the same lexically and by the API as Latin capital letter c + combining cedilla? Does the OS normalize all of one form to the other? Is ß the same as SS? What about alternate glyphs, like half width or full width forms? Is it i18n-sensitive, so that, say, E and É are treated the same in French localization? Are Katakana and Hiragana characters equivalent?

I dunno, as a long-time Unix and Linux user, I haven’t tried these things, but it seems odd to me to build a set of character equivalences into the filesystem code, unless you’re going to do do all of them. (But then, they’re idiosyncratic and may conflict between languages, like how ö is its letter in the Swedish alphabet.)

Indeed. Notice, too, that the concerns about Biden’s cognitive abilities have instantly stopped? He’s still the President, and still in charge of the nukes. But no more news stories.

Meanwhile, the other guy has recently developed a habit of swearing at rallies, and there are a few articles about his wife asking him to knock it off, but nothing pointing out that a sudden increase in swearing is a symptom of dementia. At a town hall in La Crosse, WI the other day, he didn’t know why he was there at first. Still radio silence from the news media.

Funny, isn’t it?

Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.

I know. At least in the US. It sounds wonky, but think it through: Cars and zoning law. Between the two of those things, there are fewer and fewer third places. There’s nowhere to go to just be around other people. First (home) and second (edit: work) are incredibly isolated, too. You get in the car and pull out of the garage, and interact with nobody until you pull in to the lot at work. At best, you interact briefly with fast food workers for a few seconds at the drive-thru window. There’s no “local,” no stores, no restaurants, no cafés in the neighborhood; you drive to those. They draw from a large area, so you never see the same people twice there.

Proximity has always been the best builder of community in human history, and we’ve done away with it.

Perhaps the 3-day-no-poop challenge guy was one of these cave explorers?

It’s mostly the velocity. Orbiting a planet just means having enough kinetic energy to fall toward a planet, but continually overshoot and miss. They need some way to slow down dramatically, which is usually accomplished with rocket thrusters. If they just strapped on parachutes and jumped out, they’d orbit the Earth alongside the ISS.

It’s gratifying to see President Biden quoted in an interview saying that he doesn’t think that The Biggest Loser will concede peacefully. It may be his job to order a former President detained for national security reasons, probably at Guantanamo Bay, so he’s inaccessible to the insurgent mob trying to free him.

He wanted a photo op of himself looking impotent and awkward? Maybe he’s as weird as they say.

How about a government-sponsored, non-profit authentication service? That is, it should be impossible to get a loan, open a line of credit, or anything else in somebody’s name, without the lending institution verifying that it’s actually on behalf of the named individual. Eliminate the security-through-obscurity technique of using bits of easily-leaked personal information as a poor substitute for actual authentication.

I mean, (as a comparative example) I have to go through an OAuth2 consent dialog to connect a third-party app to my email account, yet somebody can saddle me with huge debts based on knowing a 9-digit number that just about everybody knows? It’s the system that’s broken, tightening up the laws on PII is just a band-aid.

Deep state fake news!

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, either, but my preferred suspicion is that it’s aliens. They’ve tried a number of techniques, from implanting mind-control devices (Mitch McConnell and the way his face carries a look of horrified disgust at the things they make him do) to direct infiltration by putting one of their agents in an ill-fitting human suit (Ted Cruz). Ultimately, they seem to have given up the finesse approach, and settled on lobotomizing humans with existing personality disorders to create a RAID (redundant array of inexpensive dipshits) to simply overwhelm our system of government.

It’s the only explanation that really makes sense to me.

I just checked, the MBFC web site explains that it has an American perspective on left vs. right. The Overton Window in United States politics stretches from far-right (Republicans) to right-center (Democrats). From a lot of Americans’ perspectives, the BBC is a bunch of counterculture hippies.

Paved roads don’t just naturally occur, though. That lifestyle is already an insane prospect, unsustainabke but for the large tax subsidy required to enable it.

I live in the U.S. That comment is 100% true, no matter where one lives.

Ha, I thought that the blatant contradiction about having too much space and therefore not enough space would make the joke obvious, but I guess not.

Also, a Canyonero isn’t a real vehicle. It was a joke from The Simpsons.

Yes, that’s what Europeans don’t understand about America. When we go to, say, Wal Mart, there’s only one. We have to go to Bentonville, AR. Not so bad for us here in the Midwest, but the residents of Alaska have it particularly tough. And since you go to Wal Mart to pick up milk, we can’t go by public transport. It has to be by car, or better yet, drive the Canyonero. (No train schedule can predict when the milk runs out!)

The country is so big, and we have so much empty land, there’s just simply no room to build more stores near where people live. What kind of madness would that be?!