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Comment Bull fucking shit (Score 1) 41

Even the crown thought he was pushing things. But fuck that product that is time shit. Human beings didn't develop empathy in the last 200 years we've had it for at least 20,000. People knew what he was doing was wrong but they did it anyway. And I don't give a shit about the times. Bad people or bad people regardless of the times.

If we use the times as an excuse we can always kill people horrifically any time we want and just say well, I was having a bad day. That's only a mild exaggeration. Your argument means that I can build death camps if the economy goes south. Which is exactly what America is doing

Comment You Don't have to doubt Christopher Columbus (Score 1) 41

You can literally just look up the history of the horrific things he did which were documented by himself and his people because they didn't think there was anything wrong with it. You will not find a single historian denying any of that because Columbus himself didn't think he was doing anything wrong so he documented his own shit which was horrible.

Don't know where you get this single source nonsense but that's just not true. Like the Nazis he documented what he did because he thought it was fine. To be honest even the crown thought what he was doing was a bit much though.

Christ we're at the point where we have Christopher Columbus apologists.... There really isn't a lot of Hope left for this country

Comment I'm surprised you're still believing (Score 1) 41

That 12-year-old bullshit.

Let me explain it in terms you can understand. Think of government as a box of loaded rifles sitting into town square.

You've got two options. You can pick up a rifle and defend yourself or you can do what anyone who picks up the rifles says you're going to do.

You cannot have small government. If you try to have small government large corporations will just build power structures identical to large government and make you say. And then you are nothing more than a slave to Kings that used the word CEO instead.

You are going to have to form a large centralized government to protect your rights. And it has to be a large centralized government because small decentralized government is prone to being taken over by those large corporations. They even have a phrase for it, small enough to drown in the bathtub.

You also need a large centralized government to protect minorities. And at some point in time everyone ends up being some kind of minority. We can all be broken down into an out group that the in-group can be turned against.

With a large centralized government it's difficult to create little fiefdoms where the minorities get oppressed because the minorities can form voting blocks that become relevant in a national centralized government. That's how we got the civil rights movement and how black people got rights.

You fundamentally do not understand the world as it actually exists. You have a vision of the world that you want to be that isn't real and never can be because that's just not how human beings work and how we organize societies. You're either going to get over it or you're going to die in a fascist hellscape. With your property taken by trillionaires.

Honestly I think it's going to be the latter. I don't think there's any hope left for this world or let alone this country. I would love to be proven wrong but we're a nation of 12-year-olds.

Or house cats. The old saying is true for sure, libertarians are like house cats, convinced of their fierce Independence while utterly dependent on a system they neither understand nor appreciate. Chesterton's fence.

Comment Re:effective? (Score 5, Insightful) 75

It's worse than that. People should have learned from the pandemic. When we collectively get together to push development of these things forward, the results are hugely beneficial. Governments acting on our behalf to get mRNA vaccines funded and released in record time is going to have long term positive effects for all sorts of conditions.

The same thing happened during WW2. Massive advances in technology. In the UK after the war, the new socialist government ran on a platform of continuing those big national collaborative projects, and the benefits were huge. Lots of infrastructure, affordable housing, socialized healthcare, a state pension... The US did some similar things with the GI Act, and also back in the 1930s with the New Deal, and again with Apollo.

What makes it worse than just rejection of science is rejection of the kind of collaboration and national projects that reap huge rewards.

Comment Re:Trump has expanded the high skill work visas (Score 2) 153

More than that, people are actually leaving.

It takes a lot to make people leave. Usually it's an idle threat to avoid being taxed, but once you start really messing with people - taking away their healthcare, deporting members of their families, destroying their research, that sort of thing - you start to see people with the skills and the motivation actually doing it.

Comment Re:If drones are doing all the work (Score 2) 190

The US tried that in Afghanistan. They had drone pilots in nice air conditioned offices in the US, flying over Afghanistan. Some of them got PTSD, made worse because when a soldier is on the battlefield they at least feel like killing is justified to ensure their own survival, or as revenge for what the enemy did to them and their comrades. Sat in an office thousands of kilometres away though, it's harder to rationalize.

The Afghans started to put big pictures of children on the ground near civilian targets to discourage the drone operators from firing on them too. A lot of civilians were killed, either accidentally as of "collateral damage".

Comment Re:if u want 2 kill dolphins (Score 1) 71

There is some truth in it. Fossil fuel interests support nuclear because every time a new plant is announced it means 25+ years more gas or coal while waiting for it to become available. It means the grid won't be transitioned away from big central generation for another few decades.

And then there are the ones who are just bizarrely obsessed with nuclear power, like MacMann. I don't know what's up with them.

Comment Re:Oh wait, you're serious? Let me laugh harder (Score 1) 10

As it mentions in the summary, it's not full self driving, it's just driver aids that are common in cars now. Cruise control that automatically maintains the distance to the car in front. Automatic emergency braking. Self parking and summon. The only bit specific to scooters is the self balancing. It seems like it only works at low speed and uses the steering system to do it, not a gyro or something like that.

Comment Re:interesting re-framing of their failures as "su (Score 1) 116

None of the bad DC movies were bad because they were "woke". They were just badly written on a technical level, and the stories were not that interesting. There was clearly a requirement from on high to make them into franchise set-up vehicles. The early Marvel stuff that was actually good worked because they were good movies by themselves, and most of the new stuff is bad in no small part because it's just there to set up the next thing.

The Snider ones had their own issues of course.

Gunn seems to have the formula. Movies that are good as stand alone stories, and he leans into the silliness of the comics. Peacemaker is a great example - low level criminal who for some reason that is never explained has access to sci-fi level weaponry from the pocket dimension accessible from his old white supremacist dad's house.

And ironically that show was actually kinda woke, at least as far as it mocked both white supremacists and gullible believe-everything-they-read-on-Facebook types. It's not the wokeness that is the issue, it's just plain old bad writing.

Comment Re:if u want 2 kill dolphins (Score 1) 71

I'm not familiar with that particular case, but they might just be NIMBYs. For example the panned Severn Barrier, which would use tidal energy to produce electricity and combine it with a barrier that can hold water back and thus shift availability to match demand, has been objected to on all sorts of grounds. Actual environmentalists Friends of the Earth supported it. While there would be some disruption to wildlife, it would also create new habitats, and most importantly it would displace a lot of other sources of electricity that are far worse.

Generally speaking the UK is crap at infrastructure. It takes forever, it almost always goes over budget, and it almost always gets botched. It's a political problem and it's unfixable without radical changes to the UK political landscape.

Comment Re:Tides change but are predictable (Score 1) 71

Tides are at different times in different parts of the UK, let alone in wider Europe. They can always be used with tidal barriers to shift supply, as is being planned in the UK for the Severn. The fact that it is completely predictable and not subject to any weather also means that shifting demand to meet availability is as simple as setting a timer.

It's an excellent solution.

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