Emergency response and recovery has always been a problem of the commonwealth, not of individuals. Private insurance is and has always been a scam.
The cost of lives lost became conspicuous during the prison boom of the 1980s in which the Reagan—George H. W. Bush tough on crime policies literally more than decimated neighborhood populations. When police busted someone for possession, or loitering or contempt of cop (or was gunned down in spite) it wasn’t just an alleged thug removed from society, but also typically an employee, a parent, a renter, a consumer who bought food and paid bills. (The You’re Wrong About pod, amusingly on Dan Quayle vs. Murphy Brown gets into the 80s era conservative policies of broken window policing and harsh sentences for nonviolent petty crime)
So whenever someone’s life is demolished by a natural disaster, an untreated health problem, a vehicle collision, a rampage killing, police on a bender, whatever, it hits like a bomb in the community. Almost everyone has others who depend on them, as family, as a friend, as a customer or laborer. And when something makes them disappear, collateral crises manifest like shrapnel.
I’d assume we’d have to get into the nitty of how things work.
If it’s a field that bends light around a perimeter then the light from the torch would respond much like light reflected off shiny armor, and get displaced. That said, if light isn’t absorbed by the inside but reflected back onto whatever’s inside it, it’ll get toasty with normal body heat, let alone a burning fire. An invisibility cloak might double as a thermal cloak. Space blankets (that is, aluminized plastic) work based on this principle.
So a cloak such as Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak might not just be configured to bend light but also regulate the environment under the cloak, discretely venting heat / collecting heat as necessary to keep the wearer comfortable. Otherwise it might be like the option considered in Sneakers (1992 film staring Robert Redford) when the sneak team was confronted with the challenge of getting past high-end motion detectors / heat cameras:
We can wrap you in a full body suit of neoprene, heat-resistant rubber… …or raise the temperature in Cosmo’s office to 98.6 degrees… …which is probably what we’ll do. The neoprene would suffocate you…
Then there’s mental invisibility, which convinces the observer that I’m not here! e.g. an SEP field or Jedi mind trick. This would block the beholder that the light source doesn’t exist but would still allow them to see by it, which can create cognitive dissonance that would eventually alert the observer that something is amiss. Depending on the details (and whether it’s relevant to the story) the beholder might be able to realize what is going on, even as their brain is blocked from comprehending it fully.
I’m reminded of a play-through of mine in The Sims in which I was managing the house of a lesbian couple. One of them wanted kids, and as an experiment I had her woohoo (cheat, have sex) with a man and get pregnant to see if her partner would notice something was a bit off. She never suspected a thing.
There’s an example similar to this in Wild Cards: Joker’s Wild (1987 gritty super-hero genre, edited by George R. R. Martin) in which the Astronomer whammies Fortunato so he can’t perceive the Astronomer in any way. In a late chapter, it starts driving Fortunato crazy since the Astronomer is among the service team at the restaurant Aces High, and he notices people near him are being served when all the visible servers are busy with other tasks.
Easy listening in my experience is production music for lobbies and non-spaces (places we go through but don’t exist in, like luggage claim areas). It’s part of the social science of keeping people calm when they have the stressor of not being where they want to be or are supposed to be.
LoFi in more recent experiences are similar – music you can study to, or research to, or otherwise focus on other tasks – but are usually qualified by being also part of another genre (say metal, or classical or blues or retrocore or cyberpunk).
The folks at social security I’ve talked with seem to be super concerned about getting our checks to us on time. To be fair, angry vets go to the DVA and start waving a handgun around all the time, like once or twice a week. (No, security doesn’t jail them because the military turned them into that in the first place) I don’t know if that sort of thing happens very often at SocSec.
Both sides were sure they wanted the bridge destroyed rather than see it fall to the enemy. We were on the wrong side of the Sûre. Between the Frenchies and our platoon we had forty, fifty men, which wouldn’t be enough to stop the armored Gerries only minutes away. But we were determined to leave not one of us behind. It just so happened that two years prior I collaborated with a harlequin from Moulin Rouge who was in a secret order descended directly from Chicot the Jester. They were dire times, and against his oath, he taught me secret clown techniques lest such lore, forbidden to non-clowns, would serve the resistance. That day at the bridge, I used clown car packing technique. We were able to fit all the men into a single utility Jeep and race across the bridge moments before it was destroyed in front of the armored offensive.
— The time I made the same joke. ( Source )
Yes. The United States of America is, itself a federated state that also represents the fifty states. It’s why we have a state department and a Secretary of State in the White House.
That would involve building a factory in space. If we’re capable of doing that, creating a kinetic OWP with which to bombard the earth would be small ambition.
I’m assuming USKS is willful absurdity. It would be the United Kingdom state, or state of the UK (not to be confused with a UK state of the union speech).
I remember that this was one of the factors that weirded up the whole cold war. ICBMs are hard to aim, though in the US we were able to find a workable solution. (A Polaris could drop a retarded-descent pizza into my driveway and then conveniently dispose of itself in the nearby unused lot.)
Soviet missiles were not so accurate, so they just build bunches of them hoping to hit their targets through sheer redundancy. (This became dinner talk at Cal-Tech in the eighties since SDI was expected to be able to intercept the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal, including bunches of decoys) So their redundancy was used by General Electric to promote the missile gap, as justification why we needed to buy more GE nukes to close the difference.
This is why, I’m pretty sure, we don’t really need to be too afraid of DPRK going madman with their handful of nukes. So far we’ve seen the Kims lob ICBMs into the pacific, but they haven’t shown they could hit a given continent, let alone someplace important, and the US knows from its own experience that ICBM math is hard.
It’s well within the character of the US federal government and the armed forces to go forward with an OWP platform program right now, even despite the risks and ethics concerns, sadly.
I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,… If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you. — Lyndon Baines Johnson (Attributed to LBJ by staffer Bill Moyers.)
The point is there’s a whole lot of water. Saying the ocean is full of critter piss is like saying space is full of debris.
Oh incidentally, space is really big, which is why we don’t have to worry much about rogue planets or rogue black holes.
ETA Oh, and yes, continuing my nerd-out here, rogue black holes can be a threat if one gets near the solar system it can throw the planets into eccentric orbits, which could get really bad for life on earth. But again, the solar system is tiny and the black hole would have to aim like a marksman (or get super lucky) to hit us.
A rogue star (of similar mass) would be an even greater threat, but stars are nicely bright and telegraph their bearing and heading, and none that we’ve detected are coming our way in the foreseeable future. Black holes are stealthy.
In my two years experience on Reddit, the subs had lots of hidden rules usually based on the biases of the moderators. Still not sure why I got kicked off r/selfawarewolves and r/aboringdystopia.
And r/communisim booted mr for Atlanteanism which I got for understanding and explaining a NATO policy (I think).
The Jewish funeral [I attended] was more about coming from dust, returning to dust and didn’t have any talk of afterlife.
Some Buddhist traditions borrow from provincial reincarnation traditions, which fuels apathy towards the poor and suffering in some countries (e.g. if you weren’t such a dick in a previous life you wouldn’t be suffering in this one. )
But Pope Francis says only God knows what it is and how it works, and who gets the backstage pass.
Assuming Memento Mori compassion and kindness is the order of the day, otherwise life’s a bitch and then you die. All we can do is help to make our moment with each other a little bit better. Remember everyone else os having a fucked up time of it too.
I did have the nickname Dax by partners during the height of DS9. In retrospect I wasn’t wiser than my years, just smart.
I also was a blood doll…for the Blood Centers of the Pacific, who really liked my AB‐ plasma. Vampy / gothy / witchy partners capitalized on the emotional side of the affair.
So once again I’m tempted to hue and cry about Behind The Bastard’s two parter on how capitalism totally ate Christianity. (On YouTube: Part One, Part Two, note that these are ad-free if you’ve successfully ad-blocked YouTube)
During the great depression (1920s-1930s) preachers were as left-wing as Marx and were totally into feeding the hungry and clothing the poor and stuff, but that all was about to change.
Hoover was great for the industrialists, who were making serious bank, and even buying banks. They actually liked that the population was living in cardboard boxes and dining on shoe leather and flour paste (and dying of malnutrition). It built character! But the people were getting lean and hungry and despite missteps by the Leninists over in the Soviet Union, whatever they were doing had to be better than this. So much of the US was thinking of Octobering some Revolution themselves.
The industrialists, in the meantime liked the other guy and were thinking of taking some NatSoc tips and Putting on the Reich over here in the States.
FDR instigated the New Deal to slow down discontent from burning down the US federal government. Which mostly pissed off the industrialists.
James W. Fifield Jr. enters the chat. He’s in super debt for erecting a huge chapel in Los Angeles, the very first megachurch. He finds that he can make bank by telling rich people they don’t have to follow all that feed the poor nonsense based on his interpretation of the bible. This, they realize, is a fabulous idea, and this heralds the beginnings of a massive PragerU style propaganda campaign (targeting children, and later, religious ministers) to convince people that unregulated capitalism is actually good, and communism is a clear and present danger to the spirit of America.
At first it’s pretty bad, but in time it convinces more people, at least people who want to believe they too will be on the gravy train and one of the elites. It all eventually leads us here, where we’re polluting the species to death and the MAGAs are on the warpath, but this was intended by Ford, Disney, Westinghouse, Koch and all those crew.
So originally I was sceptical about the TERF claims on rowling (because I didn’t want them to be true), I’d assumed terminally online people had decided something silly (as has happened before), but the more I looked at it and thought about it, the more I thought, “Ok, I don’t really have proof here, but the odds are...
If someone tried to ram someone else with their truck because of a disagreement on policy in Israel, that counts as doing a terrorism. It may also count as doing a hate crime.
alt textremember when there used to be all these articles about how people in europe live longer than americans because they drink red wine and eat more olive oil or bullshit like that? turns out it was universal healthcare the whole time
The industrialists were happy during the Great Depression and resented the New Deal. The US was always about preserving polarized power structures, just with extra obfuscating steps.
Spoiler: The same is true in Europe, but they have been smarter, possibly from centuries more experience they know the peons will only take so much bullshit.
US history as it is taught in US schools is rather hagiographic, suggesting at most we borrowed a few ideas (e.g. the two-house congress), but otherwise were dismissing all that was feudalism. Even our elected officials dressed as officials and not as aristocracy.
So yeah, we also discarded a notion from classic peonage that serfs belonged to the land. Rather we had slaves and waged workers (not that we treated them particularly well.) The American Dream before the California gold rush was an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay and we were crap at that even then.
A screenshot of a tweet from @zumo_zd, which reads “I like it when this happens”. The attached image is a drawn mock-up of an IMDb-style page of “Popular Voice Actor Man, known for Lord Darkness Edgeman from Blood Dying and Screaming”. On his list of roles, this casting is listed, but he is also listed as voicing...
alt textYou’re allowed to believe in a god. You’re allowed to believe unicorns live in your shoes for all I care. But the day you start telling me how to wear my shoes so I don’t upset the unicorns, I have a problem with you. The day you start involving the unicorns in making decisions for this country, I have a BIG...
The problem is they reinvented gods in order to justify the world they want.
It doesn’t matter if we believe in Jesus, Poseidon, shoe unicorns, or celestial teapots. There’s an established conspiracy to change the culture through propaganda and reeducation. This week’s Behind the Bastards on How Christanity Got Eaten By Capitalism notes James W. Fifield Jr. as a keystone figure in the late 1930s.
So if we had an established religion of shoe unicorns they would be about property rights and freedom to be exploited by capitalists in the 21st century, even if they were pacifistic communist unicorns in the 19th century.
A lot of money was spent by industrialists in order to turn the US into a theocratic oligarchy. Jesus is just the mascot.
According to Marx, the capitalist will always dismiss all other concerns than their own gain, and will lie and murder for their ill-gotten gains.
The 21st century teems of examples
This week’s Behind the Bastards (about the capture of Christianity by capitalism) tells about the _exact same thing in the 1930s and 1940s (parallel with the rise of fascism). The same give us all the money push was happening tgen as now, only now the campaign is bigger.
Fuck these guys. They’re no better than nineteenth century railroad tycoons
Local student is being denied the role for not be assigned male at birth. Now they’ve decided that Oklahoma is too controversial of a play and includes graphic scenes not fit for minors so they’re pulling the whole show. Bunch of asshats at Sherman, TX ISD....
Mostly mountain lions keep to themselves but they have been known to attack and kill joggers. Checking wikipedia there were two fatalities in 2018 and the next previous one is in 2008.
So vending machines kill more people.
When hiking in North America, you’re much more likely to get killed by snake bite. And the elements (thirst, hypothermia, etc.) provide an even greater risk.
Meanwhile on the savannas of Africa Cheetahs are notorously easy to domesticate. A saucer of milk is kitty crack and will reduce a cheetah into Your Furry Forever Friend. It’s a problem because the wild cheetah population is vulnerable.
In the United States, the police are really bad right now. But much of the American public has been taught they have certain civil protections which have been getting stripped away since the PATRIOT act in 2001, so they might be of the belief they still have rights and protections that no longer exist.
So if I’m interacting with law enforcement but in an industrialized nation that is not the US, I’m likely better off by far
The contrast came up in one of Beau of the Fifth Column’s videos ( Here on YouTube ) about black American tourists in Denmark that were arguing (in need of insulin that didn’t get packed on their trip), and when the officer came to help, the man dropped into total submission-and-compliance mode, fearing for his very life (which was embarrassing to the poor officer).
I certainly would rather be arrested in Denmark even not knowing the law or my rights, than arrested here in the States knowing the degree to which our rights have been gutted. The crime for which I am accused (or whether I am guilty) doesn’t affect that equation.
In 2015 officer involved homicide averaged four a day, a factor that has only increased in the following years during the rise of Trump-led hate rhetoric. (also not including those covered up by precinct coroners, which was discovered in studies to be routine)
50% of the victims were neither armed nor resisting.
If you are lucky, they’ll allow younto make a phone call to either family or legal council.
In the US, the best option is to be wealthy enough to have a family lawyer, or otherwise a friend who knows what to do in case of detention by law enforcement.
If you have a family member who can adult, they can comb through the many non-profit legal services and see for which ones your incarceration qualifies.
That said, copyright infringement is not a felony in the US and you’ll piss off the lawyers of the MPA and RIAA if they can narrow it down to you, but you’re in danger of non-legal retribution like your ISP throttling your service.
Kim Dotcom got his house raided by ICE (in New Zealand!) on alleged piracy grounds (by way of the MEGAupload service) but that case is way more complicated and has to do with a new (legal) music distro service he was rolling out that competed with the record labels. I digress.
But the police are less interested in stopping crime as much as pinning crime on someone easy (preferably marginalized or counter-culture) So you’re in danger just from pure luck.
Also thanks to the CFAA the average American commits three felonies a day, mostly social media TOS violations. No one enforces these unless youre already regarded as a person of interest. Then these can be used to add years to a sentence. Judges are getting less interested in enforcing petty CFAA violations until your infecting hospitals with ransomware.
The reality in the US is the legal system is very arbitrary and routinely jails people (or kills them) for no good reason just to channel warm bodies into the prison industrial complex. The US has more inmates, total or per capita, than any other nation. Many in gulag conditions or worse.
The US Supreme Court has ruled that passwords are protected by the fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination.
Biometrics are not.
Law enforcement hacking into your device is acceptable. Evidence on your device remains admissable with probable cause, a warrant or a judge who likes the police / dislikes you.
Some judges will hold you in contempt for failing unlock your own device. (fourteen years is the record on contempt jail terms). So YMMV once youre facing charges.
Theres also a forgone conclusion rule. If the prosecutors can show sufficient evidence to a crime exists on your device, you can be compelled to open it. I do not know how this proof happens.
Also some judges (including SCOTUS by a ruling) just dont care if the evidence of a crime was legally obtained, they let it be admissible because locking you away is more important than state actors following protocols that preserve civil rights. Id est, the whole of the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States are as slippery as Schrödinger’s cat.
At the point that a law enforcement officer is ready to kill, they’re not going to get much intelligible out of me at all, since I would panic myself right into a face full of lead, and joining the disproportionately high statistic of people with mental illness massacred by law enforcement for no good reason.
Asserting my rights would be at the point I find myself detained and they’re asking me questions, at which point, I’d hope guns might no longer be involved. But I expect a dark room, hours or even days of detention without food or water might be involved. Black sites and enhanced interrogation might be as well, since it’s not easy to extract a confession from an innocent man, but the Reid technique insists they try.
That is much more likely than it sounds. Law enforcement in the United States are fond of a $2 drug test that reacts with practically anything. Allegely, it waa supposed to serve as a field test (with follow-up tests at a lab) but these days is used as probable cause in a baggie.
This test has been known to land gazed donut enjoyers in jail as well as someone transporting the cremated remains of a recently deceased loved one. It would not surprise me if a (willfully) ignorant police officer eager to ruin someone’s day woud use such a test on produce mushrooms to assert cause to arrest.
While I cannot say that is what happened here, I can say it’s not merely plausible in the States, but expected, especially if someone shows signs they don’t have a family lawyer.
You seem eager to give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt, which I assure you in the US, at from the precinct level though municipal department, county sheriff, state department and federal level they do not deserve.
This implies our fine efforts to keep getting ad-free content keeps some YouTube techs employed.
I’m reminded of the egregious copyright defending efforts of Sony, Universal, etc. is not because they’re afraid of dancing babies, but because they outsourced IP policing and their subcontracting firms couldn’t care less about tact or discretion.
In contrast it is totally on brand for Disney and Nintendo to go after day-care murals.
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Parents Of Baby In Carjacked Vehicle Are Suing VW For Refusing To Assist Police (jalopnik.com)
Volkswagen representatives demanded a $150 fee before using GPS to locate the vehicle and child....
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A while ago, my D&D group had a lengthy debate about what would happen if you cast invisibility on someone holding a torch...
Music Genres Over Time [Rule] (i.imgflip.com)
For those unfamiliar with the genre “easy listening” here’s a link to a Wikipedia article about it
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Rowing is a terf, how do I prove it?
So originally I was sceptical about the TERF claims on rowling (because I didn’t want them to be true), I’d assumed terminally online people had decided something silly (as has happened before), but the more I looked at it and thought about it, the more I thought, “Ok, I don’t really have proof here, but the odds are...
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Dear consumer: do not operate this motor vehicle while experiencing emotion...
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alt textremember when there used to be all these articles about how people in europe live longer than americans because they drink red wine and eat more olive oil or bullshit like that? turns out it was universal healthcare the whole time
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A screenshot of a tweet from @zumo_zd, which reads “I like it when this happens”. The attached image is a drawn mock-up of an IMDb-style page of “Popular Voice Actor Man, known for Lord Darkness Edgeman from Blood Dying and Screaming”. On his list of roles, this casting is listed, but he is also listed as voicing...
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But deep down isn’t human flesh something we all want?
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alt textYou’re allowed to believe in a god. You’re allowed to believe unicorns live in your shoes for all I care. But the day you start telling me how to wear my shoes so I don’t upset the unicorns, I have a problem with you. The day you start involving the unicorns in making decisions for this country, I have a BIG...
Internet providers say the FCC should not investigate broadband prices (arstechnica.com)
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Local student is being denied the role for not be assigned male at birth. Now they’ve decided that Oklahoma is too controversial of a play and includes graphic scenes not fit for minors so they’re pulling the whole show. Bunch of asshats at Sherman, TX ISD....
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Okay, fine. Here and here.