Sternhammer

Every single thing Trump does is about the grift.

I don’t think there’s any coherent end game for global oligarchs, just the habit of acquisition and growth without limit. It’s a kind of mental illness, in my opinion. As they say, the world has enough for everyone but not enough for the rich.

In terms of population and the ruling class it’s interesting to consider feudal Europe. Lords had complete control over those who worked their land. Serfs even needed permission from their lord to leave their village for any reason, they had no freedom to look for a better life elsewhere. (Incidentally this is why there are so many accents in the places like the UK—isolation lead to language differentiation.)

The Black Death destroyed the feudal system due to population collapse (on a scale that’s difficult to comprehend) and the nobility suddenly had to compete for workers, offering better pay and conditions to lure them to work their land. This lead to increased social mobility and the rise of the middle class.

We may be heading towards a new feudalism but it’s difficult to predict what it might be like, especially if there’s a population crash. Capitalism needs consumers no matter how much automation is employed to produce goods.

To each his own, of course, but coy swearing is still swearing.

Actually I do sympathise. I swear too much (but not more than the average Aussie) and wish I could train myself to use some other intensifiers in my language but most of them lack intensity. By Jove! My word! Sweet zombie Jesus! Drokk!

I think it’s pretty good for what it’s trying to do, which is relay scientific data to non-technical readers.

Judging by their ships, they have gravity generators which are small enough and have a small enough ratio of energy consumption to energy generation to be used in something like the Millenium Falcon.

Indeed and it’s quite clear that the Falcon has two gravity planes perpendicular to each other: 1. the plane that supports everyone on the main deck (cockpit, crew lounge, etc.) and 2. the gun battery gravity plane at 90 degrees. This is easiest to see in A New Hope during the TIE Fighter battle in the escape from the Death Star. Han and Luke are sitting back-to-back, separated by a short corridor that sits perpendicular to the main deck. I don’t think most people notice this because it’s not obvious.

This is an insightful observation.
I was raised Catholic as well, stopped going to Mass when I left home in my early 20s, and just never missed it. As a child I think I believed but as an adult religious belief seems completely unnecessary.
My son, who was raised an atheist, is now deeply religious—he’s a Benedictine monk (no, we didn’t see that coming!)—but even when visiting him religion seems like a lot of nonsense to me. (He’s happy and we accept his choice despite not sharing his beliefs.)

Some Australian cockroaches definitely fly but don’t seem to do it very often. They’re quite noisy when they fly—kind of like the propeller sound you make if you trill your tongue—and there’s nothing worse than hearing that sound suddenly stop very close to you. ‘Oh fuck! Have I got a cockroach on me?’ I hate them.

Still, the world’s most successful African American. /s

Indeed. Apple always gets criticised for the 30% ‘Apple Tax’ but the console manufacturers get a free pass for the same thing. Bizarre.

Yes, additive colour theory is based on red, green and blue (RGB). These are the colours you see if you look at your TV screen very closely.

Subtractive colour theory uses cyan, magenta and yellow. In printing black, abbreviated ‘K’, is added for contrast—CMYK. These are the inks used to print the dots you see if you look closely at a magazine photo.

I think people are confused by this because they’re taught a bastardised version of subtractive colour theory, using red, blue and yellow, at a very early age.

I think the Easter Billy thing may have been a fund raiser for the Save the Bilby Fund, though I’m not sure. Did some work with them in Charleville some time back, as part of a student field trip looking at design concepts for what eventually became the Bilby Experience. Great people.

From what I can remember they’ve had good success in rebuilding the bilby population.

It wanted to end its suffering. Blue jaunt.

Tower Bridge has its own website which has a little information about what’s inside (though it’s mostly trying to get you to do a tour).

Re: dickie for car boot (what Americans would call the ‘trunk’); some old two-seater cars had a third seat in the boot, known as a ‘dickie-seat’, at least in the UK, so perhaps it’s an old term that still survives in Indian English.

I wonder if doing the Moon Walk would get you burnt at the stake for witchcraft a few hundred years ago.

I’m not a coffee drinker but my partner is. She says she had two decent cups of coffee in Italy (two weeks in Rome, Bolzano, and Venice) but every day in Australia she has better. Australians are complete coffee snobs.

Nah, your just use your increased intellect to get other people to push the button for themselves, increasing the pool of intelligent potential friends available to you.

Actually this reminds me of a story I read last year where two people are in a race to massively increase their intelligence. Neither can tolerate the potential threat the existence of another hyper-intelligent person holds so it’s a struggle to the death. If I remember correctly they gain there ability to effectively read people’s minds by reading body language, micro expressions, etc., develop new systems of logic and hyper-efficient language to think in and have an entirely mental showdown at the end.

Unfortunately I’m too stupid to remember the title.

Well said.

I’d also point out that dehumanising a subgroup is a powerful technique used to manipulate people. Tell people who to hate and you can get them to go along with anything while they’re focused on the scapegoats. Popular scapegoats include:

• immigrants (taking our jobs while, paradoxically, being a welfare burden)
• religious groups (Jews, Muslims, etc.)
• welfare recipients (dole bludgers, a burden on society)
• criminals (war on drugs, tough on crime)

Any time someone is demonising a group theres a good chance they’re just trying to manipulate you.

I think players are desensitised to unnatural dialogue. For example, to my Western ear lots of Asian games seem to have weird dialogue, no doubt due to poor translation. (Kojima is known to insist his dialogue be translated strictly and literally from the Japanese which explains, partially, why his games feel pretty strange. Plus Kojima is bonkers.)

I hope this isn’t Microsoft becoming more Apple-like. That said, if this leads to a restriction on the use of cheat-capable controller accessories such as the Chronos Zen then it could be a significant positive for FPS console gamers.

It reminds me of Apple locking faster charging and data transfer on USB-C to their own proprietary USB cables.

Are you sure of that? It was certainly rumoured before the release of the iPhone 15 Pro that Apple would require MFi cables for high speed data transfer but I don’t think that turned out to be true. As far as I can tell any high speed USB-C cable will allow full speed transfer from an IPhone 15 Pro. It might need to be a Thunderbolt 3 cable, especially for recording to external SSD, not sure, I’m no expert, but I don’t think it needs to be an MFi cable.