PrinceWith999Enemies

No wonder they think we’re all commies. They can’t read a map.

The font and kerning is so bad it makes me want to send whoever designed this to a North Korean re-education camp, but for graphic design.

Seventeen is also easier to fit into lyrics. Dancing Queen by ABBA. Sexy + 17 by the Stray Cats (although the song was about ditching high school classes). At Seventeen by Janis Ian (who was singing about herself at 17). Paradise by the Dashboard Light by Meatloaf (again about both being high schoolers, but he’s a bit of a creep anyway).

I might be giving my age away here.

I thought it was Spicer in the bush.

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.”

In the books, Isildur turned invisible by putting on the ring, and dove into a river to escape a band of orcs. The ring, under its own will, slipped from his finger and he was spotted by orcish archers, who killed him.

I’ve always thought that the “invisibility” aspect of the ring was that it shifted the wearer into the shadow realm. The Nine were invisible without their cloaks, but were visible when the ring was worn. It also made the wearer more visible to Sauron, iirc.

If that’s the case, then the power granted by the ring might mean that magic users (such as Gandalf or Galadriel) would more easily draw on power from the other realm into this one.

Here's the thing. You said a "jackdaw is a crow." Is it in the same family? Yes. No one's arguing that. As someone who is a scientist who studies crows, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls jackdaws crows. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing. If you're saying "crow family" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of Corvidae, which includes things from nutcrackers to blue jays to ravens. So your reasoning for calling a jackdaw a crow is because random people "call the black ones crows?" Let's get grackles and blackbirds in there, then, too. Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It's not one or the other, that's not how taxonomy works. They're both. A jackdaw is a jackdaw and a member of the crow family. But that's not what you said. You said a jackdaw is a crow, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the crow family crows, which means you'd call blue jays, ravens, and other birds crows, too. Which you said you don't. It's okay to just admit you're wrong, you know?

Yes. These should be made illegal, or restricted from on-road use. As trucks increase in size and height, there are studies that they become more and more dangerous. They should be banned for safety reasons.

I know that technology continues to improve, especially in driver assist modes. However, previous iterations also tried to make it easier by doing things like have traditional steering at one speed and four wheel steering at a much lower speed. None of those experiments were successful as commercial products.

I do agree that the more the car is using it for you, the more realistic it is. It’s just that my car can already park itself with two wheel steering, and as much as I like automated everything and am cost-neutral on most things, I don’t see the four wheel steering bringing enough to the table to be worth the additional manufacturing and maintenance complexity.

I’m more than happy to be proven wrong, and maybe they did it right this time. But at this point I can really only see it in specialized applications - forklifts, aircraft maintenance vehicles, that kinds of thing.

I think related technologies have been introduced a few times over the years. I remember seeing a similar system on an American pickup truck at least a decade ago, and I think Cadillac or someone tried it as well.

As I recall, they’ve always tended to fail because drivers don’t know how to use them. They require learning a new skill and a new way of thinking. An actual self driving vehicle might be able to make more use of the added maneuverability, but people who have been driving for decades (who are the primary market for cars in the price range these run in) have developed a muscle memory such that driving is automatic. Learning to use four wheel steering isn’t just picking up a new skill - it’s actively having to unlearn a fairly complex process that is literally hardwired into your brain at that point.

People who parallel park already know how to do so, and higher end cars can park themselves. Roads are designed for traditionally steered cars (eg for things like the turning radius) so I’m not seeing a benefit there either.

I could see this being useful in something like a forklift, where you do have to be concerned about limited spaces, but there it would be explicitly taught as a new skill which your brain could separate from car driving because it’s a different vehicle with a different application and environment. You wouldn’t have to unlearn anything.

I respect Daryl Davis enormously and I think in many ways he shows us the best of who we can be.

At the same time, the criticism I heard from (I believe) the person who was an NAACP executive was that Mr. Davis works against racism in retail mode, while organizations like the NAACP work in wholesale mode. It’s good to reach out a hand and change a mind, but these movements - the racists, misogynists, and LGBT-phobic - are recruiting thousands and tens of thousands. They can and should be humanized, but the real battles are being fought in the courts, the halls of government, and the media. I admire him and think he deserves to be elevated and we’d all be the better for it, but there’s a very real fight to be had in addition to reaching out a hand and doing a one at a time conversion.

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.