I was involved in discussions 20-some years ago when we were first exploring the idea of autonomous and semiautonomous weapons systems. The question that really brought it home to me was “When an autonomous weapon targets a school and kills 50 kids, who gets charged with the war crime? The soldier who sent the weapon in, the commander who was responsible for the op, the company who wrote the software, or the programmer who actually coded it up?” That really felt like a grounding question.

As we now know, the actual answer is “Nobody.”

Smalltalk would probably make more sense than C++.

No.

GOTO Hell is BASIC.

I haven’t been able to find a good answer to that either.

One of the speculations that I’ve heard kicked around is that they were trying to do something that would light a fuse, but there was no follow up. Hamas isn’t a bunch of student rebels out of Les Miserables, throwing caution to the wind but not having done the actual groundwork. It was a small attack that happened to have what I suspect was a far larger impact than they imagined. They obviously were doing prep work for the attack itself, if the stories we’re reading are to be believed, but it was a modest-sized incursion without coordination with either the West Bank or Lebanon assets. I think it was a terrorist attack - and I am not someone who throws that word around lightly - but I don’t think that they thought it was going to be this big of a hit.

I think it’s analogous to 9/11 where OBL wasn’t expecting the whole towers falling thing, and while trying to provoke a response, the US over-response exceeded his expectations. I don’t know if Hamas will survive this as an organization, but it’s really affected the global perception of Israel.

One. Ping. Only.

Arizona iced tea in a state without sales tax?

This is what externalizing costs looks like. Neither the industries driving climate change nor the economies benefitting from those industries are forced to bear the costs of their decisions. Exxon profits are driven by their not having to account for the harms they cause.

Yet we’re still driving headlines about the “surge” in shoplifting.

I’m responding as a hiring manager for a big tech company.

I am not allowed, by law as well as very strict company policy, to ask any questions relating to the candidate’s health. I can’t know whether they’ve had four heart attacks, plan to get pregnant in the next six months, had a history of psychological issues, or anything like that. I think that most people would generally agree that’s a very good thing.

There are certainly roles where physical performance is key to the job, and so they’re able to take that kind of thing into account.

I guess what I’m saying is that, while your concern is of course valid, it feels different because we tend to see the president as someone with more of a job than, say, a senior software engineer. Okay, that’s fair in a very real sense. But I think that it’s different between the president and a prime minister, and that’s where it gets interesting. I think there’s an idealization of the role of president. And, bizarrely, that’s one reason Trump was so wrong but so beloved by so many.

This is a subject I know a bit about.

It is commonly felt that menthol makes cigarettes more comfortable to smoke. This was particularly important for cigarettes that used cheaper (and harsher) tobacco. However, it also allowed menthol cigarettes to be sold for less money. This lead to a popularity of menthol cigarettes in the black communities in the US in the 40s and 50s, when extreme racism drove much of US politics and economics, and thus a perpetually underemployed and underpaid underclass.

So then the civil rights war was started, and saw the emergence of a self-concept in some of the black communities of being an accepted part of American middle class culture. You remember the Jefferson’s theme song Movin’ On Up? That was the sentiment and the phrase used at the time. Kool cigarettes came out with ads in the black communities with phrases like “Move up to the cool taste of Kool” and crap like that. One company actually tried to launch a menthol brand called Uptown. Menthols are (or were) also popular in low income white communities, but there they had to compete with brands like Marlboro and Camel, and could carry a trashy image, as it were.

Anyway, it’s the tobacco companies making the argument about infantilizing the community. Black social and political leaders stand pretty uniformly behind the legislation, because of the toll the industry takes on the black communities.

And in any case, it’s legally no different than the government banning candy flavored cigarettes (which it can do). Menthol just had a carve out for a bit.

Fun fact - talking about overthrowing the government is legal

However, if you actually try to do it - like calling out people to do so - then that talking retroactively becomes a crime of conspiracy to commit (eg treason). That was a Supreme Court decision from early in US history.

Well, minimum age requirements are constitutional because they’re literally in the constitution. I’m about as far from a constitutional literalist as you can possibly get (I think it’s a deeply flawed and outdated document), but at least as of right now it’s literally the foundation of the US legal system.

There are a number of reasons to be concerned about adding additional requirements on top of the current set of requirements. The whole Trump thing highlighted the degree to which the entire system is built around an assumption of good faith, and I’m more concerned about that than the fact that DiFi has no business being in the senate at her age. The problem, as I see it, isn’t all of the old people. It’s systemic issues that go to the heart of this particular form of government. I mean, Reagan didn’t know where he was for most of his second term, but the real damage he did to the country has nothing to do with his cognitive decline.

You don’t have to be faster than the bullet, you just have to be faster than your friends.

So don’t hang out with the track team. Hang out with the AV Club.

I completely agree with you on term limits.

But if you’re the kind of person who argues against term limits by asking the person you’re talking to to visualize lobbyists’ influence as a three dimensional metric space, you’re also the kind of person who knows that age based term limits are absolutely a violation of human rights and an example of ageism.

So even if we set aside the fact that it would take a constitutional amendment to do just because the constitution is what legally defines the roles and requirements of federal office, it’d have to be a constitutional amendment because agism violates the 14th.

I’m not against the idea in principle, of course. Democracy itself often feels like one of those late night “There’s gotta be a better way“ commercials. The problem is that their central assumption derived from the enlightenment that man was a rational actor who could both be trusted to work in his own interest and (at least amongst the noble and wealthy) self-sacrifice for the good of all.

Absolutely amazing! You have given me a playlist for this Christmas that’s going to blow everyone away.

I absolutely agree, and thank you for explaining it better than I did.

There’s several factors involved. One is weather. Another is population density. Others, of course include vaccination rates and efficacy, public use of PPE, and how contagious the particular viral strains circulating in that area at that time actually are.

Basically, every viral transmission is a function of physics and biology. If you take the covid virus, for example, you have a dose dependent relationship. I like to think of it as the 3 D’s: Dosage = Droplets + Duration. We’d say that the probability that a given person would get infected on the basis of a given interaction with an infected person would be a function of virus containing droplet density (ie how many tiny, virus containing spit particles are floating around you, which would decrease as a cubic function of (another D) Distance from that person. Any given virus like that would have a dosage threshold - a number of viruses necessary to cause an infection), which will itself depend on the individual strain and the target’s immunity level vs that variant. The duration part is just to make sure we write it as a function of time - so the cumulative number of viruses you inhale, for instance.

So conditions that tend to increase duration and decrease distance would tend to push infection rates up, but that’s in turn going to be bounded by things like PPE, which work by reducing droplets. And the number of droplets necessary to cause an infection will increase based on the target’s immunity profile.

All of which is to say it’s going to shift around, and the areas with higher (recent) vaccination rates and higher PPE usage will have lower values than they otherwise would have, but because things like population density vary so much between states, it’s going to throw off your analysis if you don’t account for that.

Yes and no. Both DARPA and IARPA fund research with significant academic applications, even if their ultimate goal is national security. I stopped working for those funding sources because I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the potential applications of the work, but my work itself didn’t significantly change when NIH and FDA started funding it. They’ve funded a significant amount of work in chaos and complexity theory, for example, as well as linguistics, and obviously medicine and psychology. A lot of the work they fund is applied sciences, it’s true, but a surprising amount is theoretical. I can’t remember all of the resources off the top of my head at the moment, but if you look at the requests for proposals for DARPA and IARPA, as well as from the DoD, DoE, and service branches, you can get a feel for what they’re prioritizing over the next couple of decades.

That hadn’t occurred to me, although both the military and intelligence communities are HUGE sponsors of academic research.

I get that and I agree. I’m just differentiating between shows that were transformative for their viewers and ones that were “just” popular shows. Sometimes you get a crossover, like MASH, which was a very strong voice for post-Vietnam era America in which the idea of war and military service had begun to transform. We’ve lost ground on that one, of course, post-Reagan and especially after 9/11.

Like I said in another response, I see Schitt’s Creek as transformative in how it portrays LGBT persons and relationships by deliberately crafting a world in which prejudices (like racism and homophobia) do not exist. There are a number of shows that have over time led to the greater acceptance and normalization of the LGBT community, such as Queer Eye, but even a lot of those play to high camp tropes, and shows like Drag Race target the queer-and-ally communities more than being just a straight forward (sorry, couldn’t resist) sitcom.

In just my lifetime, we went from a world where Rock Hudson was closeted, Elton John and Boy George were flamboyant but not officially out, and where Nathan Lane worried that his epic role in The Birdcage would make people realize that he’s gay. There’s a great story behind that one. Before that you had the gay-coded villains like Vincent Price and comedians like Rip Taylor. Taylor never came out. Neither did Liberace.

I cite the Jeffersons similarly because the show came out as black Americans were moving from a civil rights struggle to a feeling of acceptance for and from the white American communities. The theme song Moving On Up embodied that social dynamic, while All in the Family lampooned the alternative vision of the white blue collar racist whose excuse was that he was just an “ordinary guy.”

I’d feel differently if Fraiser were to take a similar approach to mental health issues - normalizing and humanizing them, instead of playing them for gags. In my opinion, it was mostly about class dynamics with most of the humor involving the disconnect between the egotistical educated elite versus the real world. Contrast Fraiser’s relationship with his patients with that of the psychologist Sidney Friedman on MASH. By our standards today we could look at MASH and see homophobia and rampant sexism, but for its time it was humanizing, and Arbus’ character played into that narrative in most of his appearances.

Awards are awards, and at the end of the day they represent the opinions of the industry. I’m absolutely not saying they don’t matter. But people who watch a show like The Good Place (which explores absolutely fundamental issues of ethics and philosophy while still being a brilliant sitcom) have the power to change the way people think.

If I’m remembering correctly, “unaffiliated” is either among the fastest or the fastest growing denomination. The phenomenon has been called things like “the rise of the nones.”

The strong politicalization of US Christianity is usually pointed to as one of the drivers. Since the 1970s, when the federal government wanted Christian universities to accept black students or risk losing their funding, American Christians have steadily increased both their political affiliation with the anti-integration Republican Party (Reagan played a big role there). Prior to that, even groups like the Southern Baptist Convention came out with a statement in support of Roe because it expanded women’s rights. The Catholics were always anti-abortion (but also more likely to be pro-social justice and immigrant friendly), but it was the pivot by the evangelical industry leaders who ran those universities that made it into what it is today.

Since the majority of Americans disagree with the radical right stance on social issues, there’s naturally going to be an exit as Christianity becomes more and more associated with far right politics. There’s also a positive feedback loop in which the far right politicians seek to curry favor with evangelicals (without whom they cannot win) by moving ever further to the right, and there’s a far right in the Catholic Church as well (although they were better aligned with JP2 and Ratzinger).

I view the near constant string of losses post-Roe that the gop has been dealing with as a positive development, and that goes along with things like falling church attendance. However, the moves to ignore or overthrow democracy because they can’t win the votes is what’s ultimately going to determine where we go as a country.