snakeyjake

I do not understand Akkadian so I must defer to the work of Adolf Leo Oppenheim, the editor of The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago for over 20 years and the translator of that tablet.

He asserts multiple times the existence of banks, money lenders, and multiple written records of persons demanding payment of money in his book Letters from Mesopotamia, Official, Business, and Private Letters on Clay Tablets from Two Millennia: https://isac.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/shared...

Do you have an alternate translation?

In the United States the average commute time is under 30 minutes.

The vast majority of Americans live in suburbs and the door-to-door from their suburban rancher to the office by car is 15-20 minutes.

If, in the United States, your commute is over one hour you are an extreme outlier in the "wtf are you thinking?" direction.

> Bronze age civilizations didn't know money.

There is ample written evidence that Bronze Age civilizations had money and here's just one example.

Ea-nāṣir!!!!!

https://www.archaeform.de/wordpress/blog/2016/03/30/worlds-o...

That was only common for a blip in time where NOTHING was normal because it was all being figured out and cost constraint, not personal or ergonomic preference, drove computing capabilities.

> Even GUI wise, Amiga used a dark-blue background as the default Workbench

That's because of cost. It was expected that many people would be viewing Amiga video output on a television via composite output and white-on-blue is something that TVs are good at displaying. The 1080 was like 1/3rd the cost of the A1000 and I'm willing to bet that many, MANY A500s were hooked up to TVs for at least a while after being opened on Christmas.

I used practically every word processor ever made for Amiga. Except for WordPerfect they were all black text-on-white, and WordPerfect you could change that they just kept the default blue and white to match DOS.

>don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires

Fireproof concrete bunkers would be worse for insurance because when the firestorm blows through and shatters the 7-centimeter windows slits your fireproof design calls for and ignites the interior you have to demolish steel reinforced concrete with machinery instead of knocking down wood with a sledgehammer and muscles.

A Caterpillar D9 is more expensive per day than a migrant laborer.

There are so many images of concrete buildings being burned out that if I search "california fires" the 9th image is of a steel-reinforced concrete building has ~10 meter fire jets blowing out one of its windows.

>Every Saturn 5 was successful

>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure

Subassemblies that made up Saturn V went through several hundred (inflation adjusted) billion dollars' worth of iterative failure before the Apollo program was announced.

The only reason it WAS announced was all of the iterative failure that had been paying off.

The day JFK uttered "shall go to the moon in this deck-aid", the F-1 engine had already been exploding and failing for three years.

My memory is hazy, from a brown bag I went to at work 15 years ago, but they blew up around 50 F-1s before one worked right.

And while the Saturn isn't an upgraded Jupiter it is EXTREMELY closely related to Jupiter and Jupiter had a shit-ton of failures before they got it right, turned around, and used all of that knowledge to build Saturn.

>The article also throws shade at him as a “eugenicist.” I looked it up, and again, the truth is more complex.

You didn't look it up very well.

>In 1911, Fisher became founding Chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society, whose other founding members included John Maynard Keynes, R. C. Punnett, and Horace Darwin. After members of the Cambridge Society – including Fisher – stewarded the First International Eugenics Congress in London in summer 1912, a link was forged with the Eugenics Society (UK).[122] He saw eugenics as addressing pressing social and scientific issues that encompassed and drove his interest in both genetics and statistics. During World War I Fisher started writing book reviews for The Eugenics Review and volunteered to undertake all such reviews for the journal, being hired for a part-time position.

I think that if you:

1. are the founding chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society,

2. stewarded the First International Eugenics Congress in London in summer 1912,

3. saw eugenics as addressing pressing social and scientific issues, and

4. started writing book reviews for The Eugenics Review and volunteered to undertake all such reviews for the journal

..you are a eugenicist.

My research consisted of clicking on, and reading, the link you yourself posted.

I know this isn't the time or place, but international law doesn't exist.

Well, it does but only by the consent of the participant and participants can withdraw their consent at any time, arbitrarily.

It's like how international treaties become worthless the second one party decides they don't want to abide by them anymore.

So, any time someone mentions "international law" I kinda just smirk a little bit and make the "jerking off and then ejaculating" motion with my hand.

The actual smallest country on earth, Tuvalu, can tell the UN to eat a bag of dicks and ignore every single plea to obey "international law" and the only remedy is embargo, begging, or the cruise missile.

>you try to roll a million fair dice and get them to all come up six.

That is not a low probability event; that is an impossibility.

I think the problem here is that you think I am a digital electronic computer. I am not.

I am a human being.

I do not now, have never, and will never care about the technically possible I only care about the actually possible.

As a human, I know that six to the power of one million is impossible. Not to mention that rolling one million dice is absurd.

But as a human I also know that the chemical reaction needed to spark life isn't a six to the power of one million proposition.

I don't know what it is but it ain't that because it's been done, at least once.

edit: It's not absurd, rolling one million dice.

The heaviest verifiable weight ever lifted by a human being is 2422.18kg.

A 4mm die is 0.4g. Conceivably a contraption could be built by which a human could "roll" several million dice using the strength of their entire body.

Now I kinda want that to happen.

>This is exactly the same argument that Russia has been using to annex territories such as Crimea;

How many times have Ukranian terrorists murdered a bunch of Russian athletes at the Olympics? Or hijacked a 3rd nation plane carrying Russian tourists and then murdered them? How many bombings have Ukranian extremists carried out in Europe, targeting Russian tourists?

They are not the same arguments.

At all.

Low probabilities become certainties with billions of tests per year over hundreds of millions of years.

>Everything nowadays comes packaged with excessive emote track.

You may have never done anything that warrants an emotional response.

Some of us have.

We enjoy seeing others express the joy we ourselves have felt at the end of a long, winding, process.

My US state, one of the ones NOT living in the past, does almost everything online.

The only times you have to come in are:

1. for your first license, either as a newly-licensed driver or an out-of-state driver who recently moved

2. if you were bad and broke the law or otherwise had your license cancelled/revoked/suspended

Even those people have to call or go online to make an appointment.

All other tasks from getting/returning plates to requesting a duplicate title can be done online, though drop boxes, or by mail.

I have been to the DMV three times since 1995: once to turn my out-of-state license into an in-state one, once to turn that drivers license into a realID-compliant one, and once to have my fingerprints taken for a concealed carry permit.

Men, of all kinds, are.

Cowards posture.

It's like when someone threatens to sue: they're posturing from a position of weakness and fear and almost certainly will not.

Powerful, secure, people just do.

That's what makes all of the podcasting machomen so pathetic. Men just are. Insecure cowards ramble on about it.

edit: this is applicable to many things

The person who constantly talks about sex is almost certainly not having any or is insecure about how bad they are at it.

An "entrepreneur" on linkedin constantly posting grindset memes is almost certainly about to have his leased 3-series repossessed because he hasn't done anything except register an LLC.

A morality policeman or woman is with so few exceptions as to be irrelevant covering/masking/deflecting from their own immoral behavior out of guilt or malice.

And men who talk about how manly they are or how manly they want things to be are almost certainly insecure, cowardly, losers.

All macho posturing comes from a position of insecurity and cowardice.

>"Any attempt by law enforcement to carry out civil asset forfeiture in any way is a felony."

Civil asset forfeiture means a lot more than what you think it does.

Do you remember a story a couple of years ago about a couple who foreclosed on a local Bank of America branch after Bank of America wrongfully started foreclosure proceedings on their home? That's civil asset forfeiture.

The sheriff's deputies who went with them to enforce the foreclosure are not criminals.

If you are a freelancer and your client doesn't pay you and you get a court order to collect what you are owed: civil asset forfeiture.

A clerk filing the paperwork to get you your money is not a criminal.

Even the ACLU is fighting civil asset forfeiture ABUSE because as actual lawyers they understand what it means.

https://www.aclu.org/news/by-issue/asset-forfeiture-abuse

>And even if Russia is not capable of MAD, what does that change?

They should be thought of and treated like North Korea with oil, not the Soviet Union 2.0.

> Mutually Assured Destruction is still a thing.

My assessment is that it isn't.

The only MAD-able nation states in the 1980s were the United States and the Soviet Union.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian successor state has been unable to adequately maintain its military.

I have seen ample evidence that the entire Russian military apparatus is a fraud and no evidence that it is not. The examples are too many to list in total so here are some highlights:

1. A string of ballistic missile test failures.

2. Photographic evidence of the poor conditions of their ballistic missile submarine bases and the submarines themselves including submarines that are considered "active" but haven't left port in many years.

3. The halving in the last 30 years of the number of Rocket Armies and the reduction of Rocket Divisions within the Rocket Armies.

4. The reassignment of Rocket Army personnel, supposedly the highest-priority and most stringently-selected personnel in the Russian Armed Forces, for duty in Ukraine where they have very quickly been killed.

5. Obsolete equipment rendering their strategic bombing forces ineffective in the face of Ukrainian air defense systems to the point that no strategic bombers enter Ukrainian airspace, instead lobbing cruise missiles into Ukraine from outside the air defense envelope due to numerous airframes being lost to, quite frankly, an inadequate and patchwork Ukrainian air defense network.

I find any military that claims to have thousands of nuclear warheads ready to launch but cannot feed or clothe its infantryman to be, as the kids put it, "sus".

Finally, they seem to have shifted their rhetoric to absurd doomsday weapons because they know we know that their nukes are shit so they have to come up with "nuclear tsunami torpedoes" and "nuclear doomsday cruise missiles" which are, I'm telling you as an engineer not a poly-sci major who grew up on Cold War fetishism and is now an "analyst", impossible fantasies.

So you have the nuclear triad: submarines, bombers, and land-based ballistic missiles.

Their subs are rusting hulks that rarely leave port, and those that do are at Kursk/Moskva levels of readiness.

Their bombers can't even operate over Ukraine, a nation subsisting on single-digit percentages of obsolete NATO equipment.

Their land-based ballistic missiles keep blowing up on the ground. Even their saber-rattling launch before Biden's trip to Ukraine, something that they would want to get right, exploded on the launchpad.

Let's be very clear: they still have nuclear weapons.

But MAD is MAD. Annihilation. Extinction. Not "fuck this is bad", but "fuck we're all doomed, permanently, forever".

MAD doesn't mean NYC gets nuked, MAD means all human life on earth ends for all practical purposes with only scattered bands of irradiated survivors in the southern latitudes.

Russia is almost certainly incapable of MAD.

I don't really mind agricultural consumption because there has never not been enough water for human consumption.

And agricultural water consumption produces food.

You can't eat a lawn, or a swimming pool, or a long shower.

Well, I suppose you can try to eat anything once but the point stands.

There are very few places as ideally suited to agriculture as California so the water distribution priorities should be:

1. Humans: drinking and cooking

2. Farms

3. Humans: personal hygiene

4. Nothing this far down really matters so I don't care if they get a single drop. yes that includes data centers ps: kill your lawn

Also, I don't care if #2 gets 99.999999999% of the water and the agribusinesses make a quadrillion dollars so long as #1's (and #3's) needs are met.

I find the act of banning someone from tiktok being equated with "de-personing" them extremely interesting.

I think we have very different perspectives on what it means to be human, how much all of this (waves around hand in the general direction of social media) is worth, and what is important.

I value tiktok, and all other social media platforms, at nothing. $0.00, maximum. If you built your business on them, you fucked up. If you use them for news, you fucked up. And if you feel that they are needed or important, you DEFINITELY fucked up.

Dang. I wanted to see what "the youths" were watching so I scrubbed through a couple of those videos.

The people in them make me feel like the world's most accomplished actor.

The machines and processes needed to package the individual integrated circuits are fantastically expensive but the margins are so low in that step that it's only profitable at massive scales.

So you put the fantastically expensive machines near where most of the customers are and most of the customers are in Asia.

Works the same way with fiber optic cables. Making the long skinny bits is hard and high-margin. Actually turning them into cables is easy and low-margin.

So Corning makes huge spools of fiber optic cable in Arizona, North Carolina, and New York (I think) and ships it off to Taiwan and China where it is made into the cables that you plug into stuff.

Like many things with California, sensible policies that are very effective and will eventually be standard in other states are presented incorrectly for many different (usually financial) reasons in order to turn public opinion against them to delay their spread.

Commercial/industrial properties are not permitted to water grass lawns with drinkable water.

Commercial/industrial properties are not permitted to use drinkable water to water lawns within 48 hours of 1/4" of rainfall.

Commercial/industrial properties are not permitted to use drinkable water to water lawns with so much water that it runs off the lawn into streets or storm drains.

https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/conservation/regs/docs/2023/F...

Landscaping businesses and landscaping supply retailers launched a campaign several years ago framing the above as "watering lawns and plants is going to be banned in much California".

It appears that campaign was partially successful.

Commercial/industrial properties can install water recycling systems and use all of the greywater they can get to water their lawns.

There are additional local restrictions that depend on the severity of the water supply situation but those are too numerous to list, but at worst none of them prevent weekly watering of plants and lawns adjacent to dwellings.

An E5530 with an i5-3210m, 16GB of RAM, and HD4000 graphics cannot play 1080p YouTube videos without dropping frames.

I tried.

My current garage computer, a i7-8700 with 64GB and UHD-630 graphics cannot play a YouTube video without dropping frames if the "Ambient Mode" (which adds a glowing drop shadow behind the video playback rectangle) YouTube option is turned on.

A Raspberry Pi can.

Smooth 1080p video playback using contemporary video codecs is a mandatory task for the average person with average needs.

I like old computers. My home's NTP server is a Digital AlphaStation 200 4/233 from 1995 running Digital UNIX 4.

I have so many old machines people think I am a little off, which I am. One of my coffee tables is a Sun Ultra 450.

You will hear no arguments from me about keeping a system running as long as is practical.

As is practical.

A user with only $100 to spend is better served by a Raspberry Pi.

Anyone who needs the computer to improve their education, further their life, or earn money, needs something that gives them the least amount of friction they can afford.

And a Latitude E5530 is nothing but friction. From poor battery life to abysmal screen to slow performance to OS workarounds: friction.

> Just do it directly

It is impossible to do it more directly than at the point of sale.

Literally every other method is less direct.

A tax is ten thousand times less direct.

Did you read what you wrote or was it a stream-of-consciousness thing?

Because you wrote:

> This will increase costs for ISPs and likely increase prices for others.

It will not increase costs.

Which is what I wrote.

This does not increase the cost to ISPs.

It does marginally decrease their profits.

A profit is not a cost, and despite what finance bros think lower profits are also not a cost.

It is perfectly possible to supply 1000Mbps symmetrical fiber service to end users for $20/mo because numerous self-sufficient non-profit municipal broadband organizations in the United States are doing just that.

This is 2.5% the capacity for 75% the money. If ISPs can't figure out how to do that profitably, they deserve to fail.

After several decades of taking public money to build out their networks, ISPs can give back a little by very slightly lowering their margins when serving low income residents.

>making broad generalizations not supported by the data.

There are psychologists who do not do this.

There are not very many psychologists who do not do this.

>I do worry what we are going to do with all the failed gearboxes and blades

There are three companies I'm aware of in the United States who have commercialized, and are, today, right now, recycling turbine blades.

Additionally, there are multiple startups in both the US and Europe who have developed more easily recyclable blades and those are starting to be deployed.

Blade lifecycle is a solvable problem.

The steel in the gearboxes is a problem that solves itself.

I use Excel to run my life. I have PTO calculators, workout and nutrition spreadsheets, and tons of financial spreadsheets with predictions, records, what-ifs, etc. How much did I spend on prescription eyewear in 2007? I can tell you. I've been using Excel since either the late 80s or very very early 90s so it is very familiar to me.

I use Word to draft and submit board reports for two non-profit boards I am on. One, has followed the same format, except for typeface updates, since 1951. You can take the very first vice president's report from 70+ years ago, set mine next to it, and they look practically identical (except for the typeface). Using the Word template someone made 20-ish years ago is very handy. I assume that is when they eliminated the secretary's position whose job it was to type up the reports for all of the old men, which I am one of now. I fill it out, hit save, email a copy to the rest of the board, show up with two printed copies, and put one in the binder that has every monthly VP's report since July 1951 and use the second as a reference for when I give my verbal report. Easy peasy no cloud bullshit.

I am a volunteer watershed steward, a fire prevention educator, and a member of an amateur radio and an astrophotography club. I give presentations 1-4 times per year for all of those and all of them are done in powerpoint. Again, no cloud bullshit. My presentations are on my laptops and don't rely on hopping on someone's wifi or tethering to my phone in a cinderblock building with no service anyways.

Even onenote is fantastic but I think that's free. I'm using it right now to plan a trip with 8 other people. When in-country with no, or poor, cell service the local notebook will be synced and ready for reference. No cloud bullshit.