It’s because our whole society is built around having a car. There is no real alternative. Taking away a license inflicts a major burden on them. The idea that “driving is a privilege, not a right” is a cruel joke.

I had a friend who’s mom had a seizure while driving. Her foot jammed the accelerator to the floor while going downhill. She didn’t hit anyone, and survived the inevitable crash, but there wasn’t much left of the car. It was likely going to happen again, and yet the state did not take away her license. Now, the family was responsible and made sure she didn’t have to drive anymore, but not everyone has a responsible and proactive family like that. There are almost certainly people with similar medical issues driving around right now, and it keeps me awake at night. Not even an uncontrollable medical issue that makes you a rolling time bomb is enough.

You MAD lad.

Mostly, yes.

I’d like to find a better way to phrase "why aren’t you . . . " questions. It carries an accusatory tone in text, even if you don’t intend that. The answer is almost invariably going to be either “I didn’t know it existed” or “because reason X”. Neither case justifies the accusatory tone. Maybe if the “I didn’t know it existed” answer was something so basic that they really should have known it existed, but probably not even then.

FWIW, you’re not totally off. There’s a direct link between JWs and Adventists, though JWs don’t like to admit it.

Niven actually wrote them in himself, but the animated series has a loose connection to the rest of canon. There were rumors that Enterprise was going to introduce them properly before it got canceled.

I can accept that the US is doing bad things. Can you accept that China is doing bad things?

Continuing to build coal plants in 2024 isn’t just “pretending you’re better”.

The two are interrelated. Charles Taze Russel (founder of what is now called the Jehovah’s Witnesses) was associated with the Millerites. Lots of their doctrine was copied from the 7th Day Adventists, including the numerology of the timeline that gets them to 1914 as “the” year. That one was supposed to be just a step along the way, but after WWI happened, it was a lot of pointing and saying “see, we predicted something big would happen”.

They’re also building 95% of the world’s new coal plants: https://www.carbonbrief.org/china-responsible-for-95-of-new-coal-power-construction-in-2023-report-says/

New coal construction has basically stopped everywhere else, including the US.

“Per capita” is also doing some heavy lifting. Nature doesn’t care about per capita. It cares about overall output, and China’s is enormous. They’d need to produce over four times less co2 on a per capita basis to be equivalent to US output. They’re closer to two times.

7/10. Too many multisyllabic words to be a Trump post.

I have a bit of schadenfreude around this. For years, people said Europe was fine, and didn’t need to invest more in their military. “No, you silly American, we are just fine with the military we have because we don’t go invading other countries.”

Now here we are. Thing is, I wasn’t even talking from the perspective of Europe becoming warmongers like us. I wanted Europe to be armed well enough to handle what the US has been doing, and the US can draw down its military. Then we could put that money into healthcare and schools and shit, but Europe would have to pick up the slack (and also Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan, and Australia). This is still a good idea.

Almost like they’re looking for an excuse to hang NATO out to dry.

That’s always fun. Some people will swear it can’t possibly work like that, but they have plenty of experience riding bikes. You wouldn’t be able to turn properly at speed unless you’re counter-steering, so they clearly have done this. The idea seems to be so incredibly intuitive that people don’t even realize they’re doing it, which is very interesting.

The idea behind clips is that you can pull up on the rising pedal instead of just following momentum from the other foot pushing down. It does work, but isn’t really necessary for commuter biking.

I got a used bike that had a hybrid pedal with a clip on one side and flats on the other. While the clip (heavy) side usually landed down, it didn’t always and it was weird to pedal with it. I just ride around on my bike, so I replaced them with cheap flat pedals and it’s fine. I also converted it to an e-bike, and I don’t need the extra pedal power.

It’s pretty common to bring up gyroscopes for this when people know a little bit about physics. It’s all over motorcycle forums, for instance.

As you say, it doesn’t work. Experiments have been done where they attach a counter rotating wheel to cancel out the gyroscopic effect, and while it’s a little wonky to ride, it works fine.

IIRC, we’re not 100% sure how bikes work just yet. Every time somebody comes up with a model that seems to be good, someone finds a counterexample that throws it in the bin. Even your explanation of bike trail isn’t all the way there; Razer-type scooters still work without trail on the front wheel.

It works on its own. If you push your bike along with a good run and then let go, it’ll stay upright until it slows down too much.

Learning to ride a bike is mostly about being confident enough to let the bike work itself out. It gets more stable as it goes faster, but it’s natural to be afraid to go faster when it already feels unstable at low speed. Then there’s a little bit to learn about countersteering, but most people figure that out without being told it’s even a thing.

I have seen SQL written by professional Oracle DBAs. What I learned is that I do not want to look at SQL written by professional Oracle DBAs.

One of the things they already did is build a database of people who can be stuck into appointed roles as sycophants. The people behind Project 2025 have said that database is useful regardless of Trump winning or not.

Gopher itself is spec’d out in RFC-1436. It’s not a particularly difficult protocol to implement. It’s easier than HTTP/1.1 (though not necessarily pre-1.0 versions; those are basic in an under-designed way, and I’d say the same about Gopher). I don’t know if that licensing fee claim holds up. People may have been worried about it at the time, but UMN never had a patent on it or anything, and RFC’s are public. If there were fees charged, it’d be the creators themselves charging them.

Truth, even though it still doesn’t make sense.

A while back, another team asked us to clean up some noisy logs, because it cost us $3k a year with our new logging provider. As we discussed it on a call, my boss pointed out that with the people we had on, that meeting cost more than $3k.