We will never truly know how many dimensions the Chess game has.

Say it with me, now. As we all know, the infamous saying goes:

A COMPUTER
CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER
MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION

It's really incredible how marketing departments can radiate amnesia like this with such proficiency.

Remington settled. They didn't admit liability.

The Cypress Street Viaduct (the major double-decker that collapsed in the Loma Prieta quake) was built in 1957 by US contractors. Embarcadero was similarly built by US contractors in the 1960s. Russians had nothing to do with it. The only thing Russian about any of it is Embarcadero running near Russian Hill, which was named for a Russian cemetery near its peak.

Most of the deaths are explainable.

• Amy Catherine Eskridge died by suicide in 2022. The cause of death was a single gunshot to the head. Her activities leading up to her death are suggestive of mental health struggles, though they're used by some people as evidence of a conspiracy leading to her death.
• Michael David Hicks died in June 2023, age 59. He worked at JPL on comet and asteroid missions. No cause of death was released.
• Frank Maiwald died in July 2024, age 61. He worked at JPL on planetary missions. No cause of death was released.
• Anthony Chavez has been missing since May 2025. He was 78 when he disappeared. He left his wallet, keys, and cigarettes on a table at home, a common action right before a suicide.
• Melissa Casias has been missing since June 2025. She was an administrative worker at Los Alamos and held no security clearance. She was last seen walking down a street. She had left her keys, wallet, purse, and both work and personal phones at home after telling colleagues that she was going to work from home. Shoes similar to those she was wearing were recently found in a nearby forest. This also lines up with a possible suicide.
• Monica Reza has been missing since June 2025. She worked at JPL in California, and went missing during a hiking trip. Her hiking companion said she was there one minute and gone the next. A fall is a much more likely event than an abduction.
• Steven Garcia has been missing since August 2025. He worked at the Kansas City National Security Campus in Albuquerque. He was last seen walking away from his phone carrying a gun and had left behind his wallet, phone, and keys. As with others above, this is a common behavior of suicidal people.
• Nuno Lureiro was killed on his doorstep by the Brown University shooter in December 2025. Motive hasn't been established, but the shooter left a recording that he had planned both shootings for years.
• Jason Thomas went missing in December 2025 for three months before his body was found in March 2026. He was last seen walking along railroad tracks, another frequent precursor for suicides. A cause of death doesn't seem to have been released so far, but law enforcement said that they don't suspect foul play.
• Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Neil McCasland has been missing since February 2026. He was last seen on a neighborhood surveillance camera with hiking boots and a .38 revolver. He had left behind his wallet, phone, and wearable devices. Many suicides start the same way.
• Carl Johann Grillmair was killed at his home in February 2026. He was a prominent astronomer and astrophysicist. A suspect has been arrested and has been charged in his murder, which may have happened after an argument.

One suicide (Eskridge), one likely suicide (McCasland), four possible suicides (Chavez, Casias, Garcia, and Thomas), two murders (Lureiro and Grillmair), two other deaths (Hicks and Maiwald), and one missing (Reza). Neither of the murders are linked. Reza may have simply fallen while hiking and been severely injured or killed. The two other deaths were both in the age range where sudden deaths start to become unfortunately common.

Stage 3 smog alerts were year-round when I was a kid in the 1980s. They were more common in the summer, but they could happen any time the temperatures rose, and they were a fact of life at school in the spring and fall. I spent a lot of recess and PE time indoors for Stage 2 and 3 alerts. This page shows the number of days at different air qualities for Los Angeles going back to 1980. The highest number of good air quality days was 11 in 1983. For all but two of the remaining years, it was in single digits. The combined number of unhealthy, very unhealthy, and dangerous days usually covered a cumulative six months or so out of the year.

You can see the numbers shifting to the left starting in 1989. Both Republicans and Democrats in the state government (which was run by Republicans at the time) had authorized various government agencies to make changes that would affect smog levels. Since 2002, the number of moderate or good air days has covered at least half of the year, a huge reversal from the 1980s. The number of very unhealthy or dangerous air days has been in the single digits every year (bar one) since 2007, even reaching zero in 2010 and 2013 and only one in six of the other years.

Well, what are you waiting for? Step on it!

(The idiots may also have been algorithms.)

Thank you for taking the time to read all that! You are right, of course. It is something of an unsolved problem with the design. The question of "exactly what work are these draftees contributing?" is something I'm still working on; it may not literally be core parenting or teaching work, but actually more like e.g. hanging out with your cool uncle on the weekend who helps you learn life lessons. Maybe said uncle isn't exactly teaching or parenting material, but he still has something to contribute to building a child's character, and is assisting the parents just by being around to lighten the load. The Big Brothers Big Sisters charity seems to indicate that this is a sound principle with incredible ROI.

There would also be mandatory training to teach people the skills needed to do this work (critical to figure out what goes in there.) Also I'd like to hope that the system would "even out" over a few generations; if we assume the root cause of dangerous personalities like BPD or NPD is being trapped (or in an echo chamber) with a toxic parent figure, the practice of this "socialized parenting" is essentially guaranteeing kids have alternative support networks that can soak some of those traumas. Efficiency would never reach 100%, of course (does it ever?) and there would always be some difficult people for whom alternative credit would need to be devised, but in any substantial system there's always other work to do—maybe a truly broken person contributes by grading homework or something.

You can just say openly that you're an edgy, racist teenager. It's fine; the first step to self-improvement is admitting that you need help.

It seems the pressing the key actually generates Win+Shift+F23... and also function as a Right Ctrl modifier at the same time? It may or may not function normally if you're outside of Windows.

I can't comment on your masculinity. I don't know you. But it seems like you're wounded, so let's cauterize it.

In a very strange sense, it is true that males are disposable, but this fact is built into sexual reproduction by evolution itself. In virtually all species, if one parent is responsible for carrying offspring and the other isn't, then by definition the former parent is anchored longer in the reproductive act, and is thus in need of protection during that period.

Mammals in particular have an "experimental male, stable female" genetic strategy where more pronounced variation in traits (height, academic performance, et cetera) is presented in males. With each generation these traits then get folded back into the matrilineal trunk, which is less affected by them. This specifically happens with traits on the X chromosome via Barr body inactivation.

So there's one answer that you can settle on, if you want to feel really shitty. You are disposable. Society isn't responsible for this, though. The game was rigged tens of millions of years ago when some fucking fish somewhere evolved live birth. Unless you're a salmon, you've drawn the short straw.

But there are a couple of other angles worth considering.

First of all—who is doing the disposal of all these men? Women aren't the ones declaring wars, or cheaping out on safety equipment, or blocking legislation that reduces gun violence. We didn't invent conscription and we didn't bomb the World Trade Center. I mean, fuck, Pete Hegseth is systematically firing female generals and wants to stop women from volunteering to serve in the military, even if they meet all the physical requirements for service. These bloodthirsty assholes are the ones actually killing you, and they should be your #1 enemy. All of these problems are reduced by a factor of ten just by moving to Canada, where the reproductive laws are basically the same as any blue state.

Now, as for reproductive politics... I used to be a fairly left-libertarian person on this issue and felt that the real problem was that people are immature assholes to each other. It seemed to me that custody and child disputes only happen at all because the people involved had shitty parents, and that the only solution was to get rid of societal expectations; live and let live, make it easier for single moms to get good jobs so they don't need alimony in the first place. (Another "-mony" word, but this time from -monia, "condition," + alo, "nourishment.") But these days it's pretty damn clear to just about everyone that the last thing civilization needs is yet more isolation and atomisation.

I think the actual solution is to turn parenting into a social obligation. It's a little different from how things are now, but I think the benefits would be worth it.

Consider the consequences of what would happen if made the following into a moral principle: your parents' generation raised you, so you have a duty to raise the next generation. In this system, every adult is expected to have and raise 2 kids, or contribute the equivalent amount of work to paideia by helping to raise the kids of strangers, teaching, tutoring, babysitting, et cetera. This would have the additional benefits of making childcare cheaper, reducing the work parents actually have to do alone, and reducing the power and scope of serial child abusers (can't hurt a lot of kids if positions of power over them aren't a viable career.) Experts would still exist for key jobs like high school teachers.

Parents still get to choose who they hire to help raise their kids, so you don't have to worry about some weirdo brainwashing them. Since virtually every adult is going through the labor pool, there's a ton of choice. Both parents and helpers would be anonymized during this selection process to reduce biases around gender, appearance, etc.

The enforcement is as follows: anyone refusing to do this work would be slapped with heavy taxes and might even have trouble getting good jobs later on in life, the same way having no high school diploma, or bad credit, or a criminal record can haunt you currently. (There would be waivers and exemptions, deferrals if you can show you're making progress, etc.)

For parents going through divorce proceedings, most of the gendered BS goes away. In situations of joint custody, there's less concern about which parent gets priority because it isn't just 2 people raising the kids. If a parent doesn't want custody during a divorce at all, then they're basically downgrading to the "default" option of paying their debt to society, and there's no real shame in it. The one who gets full custody won't have as much of a burden than a single parent would today because the broader safety net of socially subsidized childcare exists.

The proximate reason is that there are no editors on Slashdot.

The broader reason is that the fortunes of tech companies are often caught up in financial headlines, so publications that cover economics are invariably syndicated here. The intended audience of these publications—the capitalist class—is deeply anxious about any changes in their host organism that may result in the contraction of their debt-based casino, so they eat up stories with pearl-clutching themes. Naturally, slave shortages are a major concern.

Patrimony is a word already. It refers to a son inheriting possessions from his father. The -monium suffix is productive in Latin and means "obligation:" testimony is the obligation to testify; patrimony is the obligation to act as a father; matrimony is the obligation to act as a mother, i.e., fulfil "womanly duties."

Whoever sold you this bullshit was lying to you, and not even doing a particularly good job.

You are being scammed.

Ads: The homescreen has a couple of small store links at the bottom that are relatively unobtrusive. There are no recommendations forced on you unless you go to the store. There is a store button at the bottom of the homescreen, which I imagine is pretty handy if you actually want to get your eBooks from them.

Organization: You have to set up book categories after putting files on the device (like how the Kindle 3 was back in the day) but there are no forced labels or anything. There are at least 2 homebrew launchers that replace the homescreen, one of which lets you use a directory structure for files.

There is no screensaver advertising at all, unlike the Kindle—you can set it to display the cover of the last book you read, a generic "sleeping" message, or upload your own pictures for random display. I was really surprised by this; it's like they asked Kindle modders what they wanted and just made it the default.

There is a trick for skipping user registration during the onboarding experience by plugging the device into a PC and editing a YAML file, allowing you to use the device without giving them any info at all—unthinkable on Kindle!

Rakuten is a small Canadian company, so their niche is being less shitty than Amazon. If they ever stopped doing that they wouldn't have any customers.

Ironically this war has worked out well for Russia—it draws media attention away from Ukraine while simultaneously expending supplies of Patriot missiles and other munitions, and the spike in oil prices has basically wiped out the benefits of crushing them with sanctions for the past four years.

These are just some of the 'miracles' you can accomplish when you let Bibi Netanyahu start another war so he can keep postponing the conclusion of his corruption trial...