my gunner

You know they were on Hoth because Luke was being stone cold there. You think Wedge didn’t know who Dak was and which speeder he was in? Speak his name, motherfucker.

Usenet but via AOL. I was a few months after Eternal September began. I believe “100% certified non-cringe” user MODESTGOD has a post or two that made their way into searchable archives.

You may be right.

I would gently counter that while many of them can be fixed in software, the list is mostly hardware issues or real driving risks. It’s a shoddy vehicle that was also poorly coded.

Even completely beyond Elon’s personal fuckheadery, which really shouldn’t be dismissed, it was still a bad product:

• poor fit and finish
• frequent recalls
• poor durability, including cheaping out on the stainless alloy for one that’s barely worthy of the name
• poor truck functionality for the few who would want to use it that way
• pricier than expected
• took a concept design we might generously call polarizing and pooped the production version out the anus of their design process looking less like a Martian armored personnel carrier and more like an unpainted Pontiac Aztek.

I hope that this means thoughtful conversations about how much AI compute infrastructure is actually useful given realistic demand curves, where it should be located, what resources will it require, and, importantly, how the companies that benefit from it will directly share those benefits, as compared to hazy gestures towards “economic development”.

I fear that this is just the industry telling us they’re about to start lying even more than they have.

Woostercheshterworstershire…

Garum.

On a related note, as a parent I think school perfect attendance awards are perverse. Congratulations, we’re rewarding a kid for being a disease vector and being sent to school miserable and snotty, or at best making other kids feel less-than because they received proper treatment and isolation. I would guess that the average perfect attendance kids costs the rest of the school at least half a dozen absences per year.

I’ll try to say something a little more precise, I hope. I have limited sympthy for the individual fate of somebody who does some of the things that can get a person executed, but the death penalty itself is not a good thing.

I just don’t see the value in revenge, and as much as we all feel for victims, the reason you have society make these decisions is because you know victims and their families can’t be objective. Maybe some of them will even really feel better, but the rest of us won’t. The death penalty can only go wrong, either by being inequitably applied or literally dooming the wrong person to die with no way to salvage what’s left of their lives if you learn of the mistake later. Or hell, with recent attempts, it can just literally go wrong and torture someone, maybe even without even killing them.

Permanent removal from free society is more than sufficient for public safety and deterrence. More blood doesn’t bring anyone’s loved ones back; it just makes a community that much more grim for indulging its worst instincts.

FWIW, they haven’t actually executed anyone there in twenty years, and Newsom issued a moratorium when he took office in 2019. In typical Newsom fashion, he’s playing it for maximal media attention, but this is not some huge change for California.

As for the rest of the US, feel free to pile it on. Capital punishment erodes the soul of a nation, and the more you use it, the worse the corrosion.

Idiots who don’t understand that, to evolution, your baby is a fuckin’ rounding error, and they also don’t understand why it is that infant/childhood mortality is now so low. I think these motherfuckers think that ER is the end-all be-all of medical science, rather than a side show, when compared to decades of development in preventative medicine and public health policy.

You must not have been getting the ads. No atheists here. We’re all Sharia Muslims now, but also post-op trans, a group famously embraced by fundamentalist Islam.

I think there’s also a bit of “new kid at school” energy, plus part of me even now doubts that we’re more than a purple state.

::reads thread::

::awards OP the “most accurate shitpost” award::

Do we get the mandatory pediatric bottom surgeries at the Sharia mosque, or just file the paperwork there?

Yes. Even gerrymandered as they are, Texas is probably sending one more Democrat to the House of Representatives than in 2024. That it wasn’t worse for them is probably the closest thing to a silver lining the Republicans have in Texas this year.

The one thing that Democrats need to understand is that this is now a purple state, not a red one. in 2028 we’ll likely see Republicans who aren’t “frothing at the mouth” racist, and while the statewide officeholders will have more time to show results, there’s no guarantee that the state votes blue in the next presidential election.

All that said, between Musk and a pair of Christofascist oil billionaires, we in Texas were up against it, and I’m extremely happy there’s some sanity and some proof that money has diminishing returns.

You’re right, but god what I wouldn’t give for a good-faith constitutional convention. Trump has proved that you can’t do this bizarre dance we do in America where the constitution is vague and rickety and relies on jurisprudence, legislation, and unwritten norms, but simultaneously treats the governing documents as holy writ.

And it’s Fetterman-proof in the Senate. What a weird and great night.

I’ll concede it’s increasingly rare as a reason, but if you have a plastic part in an otherwise well-made device, it can be a good thing. If that’s a common point of failure, having it fail gracefully 5 years in with a cheap replacement is better than having it fail in 10 years at 8 times the price, or potentially blow apart in a housing of some sort and take other parts with it.

Some people would disagree it’s a “well-made device” but when I let a piece of wood jam the jointer attachment on my old Shopsmith woodworking machine, I was extremely happy that the power coupler was not sturdy metal.

I’ll disagree with other folks here and say I don’t think it’s nukes. The one thing Trump seems to have digested from growing up in Cold War America is that “Nuclear War is bad.” It’s been how he overcame his own cognitive dissonance about being dragged into Netanyahu’s War in the first place, and I think it’s part, though by no means all, of why he kisses Putin’s and Kim’s asses so repeatedly.

It’s literally the last thread that seems to tether him to a human version of foreign policy. Of course, he’s done huge damage in the world that has made nuclear proliferation more likely, particularly among rich nations who avoided making them on the theory that the US had them covered, but I don’t think he wants to be the one to use nuclear weapons.

He is also, however, stupid and cruel, so I think what he has in mind is more of what he was always blustering about before TACO’ing. Massive conventional campaign, but now including civilian infrastructure with a huge tolerance for direct collateral damage and knock-on human suffering. I could even see targeting cultural heritage, because he’s that big a bastard and boor and he’s talked about wiping the civilization off the map (admittedly this is also why I can’t fault someone if they take him at his word and assume nukes). If there’s a nuclear element, it might involve leaving the power plant in Bushehr on their targets list. Fallout is not a mushroom cloud.

There’s also apparently a Marine Expeditionary force involved, which on the one hand is partly just a smaller aircraft carrier for more bombs, but may could also mean enough troops to storm some of the Islands in the Strait itself or even Kharg. You know Hegseth is desperate to get boots on the ground somewhere so it isn’t all the “pussies” in Naval Aviation and the Chair Force who get tot have all the “fun.”

In short, think Dresden or Tokyo, not Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Yay.