It's not actually that expensive to network two computers with 10GbE:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07VC9T3WQ
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09M8C4R1D
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BGMZPL4Z

Used these to connect my PC to a custom 10GbE NAS running TrueNAS. (Finding OCuLink cables for the NAS drives, though, that was a trick).

Two men walk into a bar

The third man ducks

PC-98 is still unmatched. Nobody ever needed more than 16 colors.

Show

Can someone explain to me why the hell he’s ever needed a monte-carlo analysis? The margin of error is gaussian, and it’s not like it’s running up against zero bounds when it’s 50/50, so why isn’t it just a linear equation?

It’s just a linear equation, right? He does a monte-carlo so he can brag about running 80,000 simulations, not for any good reason, right?

What do you mean by the word in this context? [ur-liberalism]

Liberalism is “the ideology of capitalism,” of course, but also all the stated beliefs about individual freedom, one man one vote, self-determinism, everything that makes westerners feel warm and squishy. I believe all of this is ultimately based in idealism; in a fundamental belief that society progresses through the competition of ideas, and that the best ideas win out when they are explained to the masses. The search for the best voting system seems like the search for the final proof that society really can be improved one good idea at a time.

Rather than, you know, reckoning that the history of politics is the history of class struggle.

Hospital example

So starting with the assumption that people who want to build a hospital negotiated for the resources to be diverted to build exactly one hospital (in today’s world: they got a grant from the feds):

Voting obviously isn’t where we start; if each individual has a different idea of where to build the hospital there’s nothing to vote on.

Influential individuals might put forth ideas or arguments as to where to put the hospital, and they might collect others around them and organize for their preferred location. Maybe opinion coalesces around two locations, A and B. We now have two affinity groups, who have decided they have a collective interest in each of those locations, with people making any number of individual negotiations to land themselves in those groups.

The politics happened when people organized themselves into groups and decided on their interests. Ideally, the final decision would involve a negotiation between these groups (hospital goes to A, but with a tram line to the largest neighborhood near B, or whatever).

This isn’t really very different than how it works now, except now the groups wouldn’t usually have any public involvement since most people intuitively understand that they have no political relevance. Some capitalist who wants A will direct their lobby group to ask that of officeholders, maybe capitalist B also exists, maybe others if they don’t get scared off by the competition. The officeholders don’t generally have any personal interest in the outcome—they aren’t members of either group in our example—but they have interests in keeping various lobby groups happy and might negotiate with them on those terms. The point is that the political negotiations always happen.

The final voting on A or B, if it happens, is just a formality. Even if we had direct democracy the process to get to those two was much more impactful, and only the really interested would come out to vote anyway, making it again mostly a formality. If you could force every person to have an informed opinion on A or B, and then force them all to vote, then certainly the result would be meaningful… but this comes back to exactly my point about idealism.

Ultimately my point here is that matters of public political opinion only exist in the kind of mathematical models used to evaluate different voting systems. All real politics is negotiation, and finding the best voting system is irrelevant.

The fundamental problem I have with all of this kind of analysis is that it treats democracy as a tool for finding the median set of ideas amongst a population of people with ideas, and that the “most democratic” system would enact the idea of each idea set that is most tolerable to the most number of people. This is the ur-liberalism.

Politics is the process by which society’s scarce resources (commodities, nature, leisure, whatever) are allocated between people with competing interests. A just outcome would require negotiation between representatives of affinity groups, however composed and however determined, weighted somehow by the size of each group and the impact upon them. Matters of popular opinion just fundamentally are not the problem of politics, and the Condorcet criterion is only good for finding the least unpopular opinion.

I honestly think there’s just no way to make a single-seat election just or democratic in any meaningful way. Multi-member districts are better, since at least you might elect representatives from multiple affinity groups.

In Michigan someone (probably the Democrats) is actually sending canvassers door-to-door to do polling.

No, they have it right. Add-on software means “added to this node/machine”, as in not part of the system image used to configure multiple machines. It’s all very archaic.

The weight classes used to be round numbers, but they changed them all up or down a couple kilo in 1992 after a doping scandal in order to reset all the records.

And then they did the same thing in 1997, for the same reason.

And then they did the same thing in 2018, for the same reason.

It's very silly, but I guess it means we get more world record attempts?

Depending on atmospheric conditions bullet contrails can be very visible. Looks real to me.

To be fair, the criteria are very precise, they’re just only vaguely related to reality.

My favorite is the double-barreled 1911 pistol. It has two triggers, because if it only had one trigger it would be a machine gun (it would fire multiple bullets with one pull of the trigger). But physically it would never work if it didn’t always fire both barrels at exactly the same time, so it only has one slide and both hammers are connected to each other. But because you have to drop two sears with two triggers before it will fire apparently it’s totally legal.

Caught NPR this morning as they brought someone on to tell us:

• Raisi was the hardest of hard liners
• He hated America
• He even opposed the assassination of Suleimani, in an example of how hard-line he was
• He was actually just a puppet of the supreme leader
• And everyone in Iran hated him anyway

So I guess it was an assassination then?

It's actually a film from 2020, about film during the cultural revolution.

The magnet links should work without signing up, so in decreasing order of quality:

https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6288206

https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6071969

https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6072852

Three working torrents at rutracker.org (search "one second 2020").

I found a few Chinese torrents on BT4G searching "一秒钟", but I don't have a way to connect to Chinese peers.

Iskandr and Kinzhal don’t follow that ballistic missile trajectory, though. Neither does ATACMS. These are all semi-ballistic missiles that follow something closer to the "hypersonic glide vehicle" trajectory in your drawing (without the little skim maneuver, though, probably).

The real difference here is range. Things called "hypersonic glide vehicles" are intercontinental. Iskandr is "just" a missile that flys a low trajectory really fast.

Worked for Fidel, though?

Loved these, and played 999 side by side in English and Japanese. Have to say it’s much better in Japanese, though, and

is permanently seared into my brain.

Where I am in the US I have to go to an asian grocery store and buy a 20 lb bag if I want white rice that isn’t pre-washed and fortified, and even then half the stock is labelled 無洗米.

I don’t understand this dunk at all.

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