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admiralteal

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admiralteal ,

People really seem to forget that prior to October 7th, Bibi was facing regular mass protests. Accusations of full authoritarianism. He was being condemned for the fact that he was building the most ultra-conservative government Israel had ever seen. Facing multiple political corruption and bribery accusations and MAYBE even looking at future jail time, at least if he didn't maintain the PM seat and the relative immunity it offers.

The Bibi administration NEEDS Hamas. Without them, they're just screwed. Only the threat of violent attack from across the border is able to maintain his power. And indeed, he'd even been facing accusations that he was directly sending support to Hamas.

Really, nothing good will happen on the region until the Israeli people follow through on their political duty and vote all these fuckers out, then immediately become partners with Gaza and the West Bank to build Palestine into a functional, modern democracy where its citizens have a chance to thrive. THAT is their recipe for long-term peace and stability. No amount of smart bombs, iron domes, blockades, and border walls will get them there, at least shy of completing the genocide so many in the Bibi administration have said publicly they want.

I sure hope you are right, that this is finally the tide turning... but I've seen that tide fail to turn before.

admiralteal ,

Huh?

admiralteal , (edited )

Considered too cruel to be used by vets because of the clear signs of distress shown in animals to which it was administered. But this guy says it's good enough for humans!

It's important that a prisoner not just be killed, but can feel themselves dying, apparently.

I understand why you would think this seems peaceful. But we have no idea whether it is, anyone claiming otherwise is bullshitting or lying, and the entire idea of "humane" execution is an oxymoron to begin with.

admiralteal ,

And for anyone who doesn't put the dots together: a doctor cannot intentionally kill someone. It is the most profound ethics violation everywhere I am aware.

Even in places where there is medical euthanasia, the person must do it to themselves by e.g., pushing a button and someone who is incompetent to do so is ineligible for that euthanasia.

I'm sure there are shady places where this isn't the rule. But those same places, I suspect, are a lot more practical about execution than all this pseudo-humane "medical execution" crapola.

admiralteal ,

And how do you know that is the experience, here? When most medical experts say clearly they have no idea whether this is peaceful or torture, how are you so confident it is the former?

admiralteal ,

Good thing executing prisoners never gets the wrong people and always makes the victims whole.

admiralteal ,

It would be a bit less terrible a method if it actually worked that way. Still depraved, but slightly less.

But it doesn't. Took 30 minutes for the guy to die, supposedly.

Vets swore off using this technique a while ago because of how clearly-distressed animals were when it was performed on them.

There's a big difference between the kind of freak industrial accident you're describing and intentional administration via a mask. And either way, we literally do not know if it is peace or torture.

admiralteal ,

I mean, the citation is, to start with, not a medical organization. They're reporting on workplace incidents, essentially, and making big assumptions. Also no mentioned of the violent seizures.

Also, not to be captain obvious, but reports of the experience, definitionally, come from people who survived, which is another layer of it being a vastly different experience than dying that may not even be terribly analogous. Surviving it might mean a biologically different process happened to you than not surviving it.

There's a huge difference between an industrial accident and an execution. One of them is being done on purpose. An industrial accident may be someone running into a room flooded by the N2 fire suppression system, expecting nothing was wrong, taking a few deep breaths, and suddenly blacking out. Sudden, unexpected, unprepared, confused. The prisoner knows its coming, it's being administered on a schedule, and might not be too keen on the whole thing. The guy in this case, for example, was strapped down to a gurney and had the mask tied to his head, allegedly. Not being surprised means it is a lot less likely to work in that sudden, shocking way even all-else being equal, which it isn't.

Again, the medical experts I've seen interviewed all shrug at the question. They do not know. And even if knowing its coming isn't an issue, the best evidence of using it for deliberate execution we have was the great distress it apparently caused animals.

admiralteal ,

Oh the bar is quite high. No problem then, it will only be a small number of definitely innocent people we murder.

How about we can execute people, but if they're later exonerated every single person involved in the execution themselves gets executed automatically. I think that may enforce a high enough standard for me.

admiralteal ,

You have missed my point. If the penalty for an error were death, with no wiggle room whatsoever, there would be no more errors because no one would be willing to risk it. It would end the death penalty.

And even then I'm not sure "I would literally stake my life on it" is a high enough burden. But it is absolutely insane and unacceptable that anyone is willing to stake someone else's life on it and not their own.

admiralteal ,

That's horrifying. Holding your breath until you think holding it any longer will kill you because not doing so definitely will. At least with the injection there was absolutely nothing you could do to delay or stop the process once it started.

admiralteal ,

Oh, you've done it? Tell me about your specific medical expertise that is greater than... basically every medical organization that has spoken on the subject. Is your expertise also that you read a wikipedia page?

Pretty much everything real on the subject is about industrial accidents, which are not really analagous, or from the few examples of euthanasia with nitrogen pods -- and the information provided by Dr. Philip Nitschke who researched the actual N2 aspyxiation euthanasia devices and who publicly said the Alabama method was not like that at all and was likely to cause significant pain and distress.

~22 minutes is now being reported, with the guy struggling, gasping, resisting, fighting, trying not to die. Fighting for his life on the gurney. This method provides no guarantees, no timelines, and DEFINITELY is not the nonsense people are describing about "gentle sleep" or whatever the fuck.

I suspect you and the people in this thread have exactly the same level of expertise as the Al lawmakers and agencies that allowed this to happen: bullshit none.

admiralteal ,

The fucking US Veterinary Association published that it is only approved for pigs and even then recommends sedating the animal first because of observations of extreme distress. This is widely published -- find it if you want, I don't care at this point. Wikipedia is not going to undermine the countless medical organizations who all objected or condemned this shit. So sick of the wikipedia PhDs in this thread claiming to know what none of the doctors or medical researchers do.

admiralteal ,

Love that you had the time to get your degree from wikipedia but couldn't plug "veterinary association nitrogen asphyxiation" into a search engine and click the first, second, or third result.

For me, the first are a couple of UN articles about the subject that contain all of this information. But you couldn't be bothered to look this up because you can only do wikipedia "research" that confirms your priors, not that might contradict them.

admiralteal ,

Blocking bad faith actors is my pastime.

admiralteal ,

But that IS the point. We don't know. It isn't studied -- cannot be studied ethically.

It is presumed to be painless based on unrelated case studies. And so people are proudly and confidently stepping forward to say "ignore the situations where it causes apparent pain and distress (animal examples), we'll just use very different industrial accidents where we THINK it maybe was painless but have no way to know and will use that to declare it is painless."

Meanwhile this guy struggled to live for over 20 minutes tied to a gurney.

You have a belief without evidence. You have to prove it. And we both know it is not going to happen because the research doesn't exist and would be unethical.

admiralteal ,

Strongly recommend not using this argument, or any of the ones showing up in this sub-thread. No one is going to be convinced on any of this. The people trying to ban abortion will never, ever be convinced by arguments about when life begins -- and will likely just become more certain that the pro choice crowd are full of callous monsters that don't grant dignity to life.

Read A Defense of Abortion, Judith Jarvis. It is the argument.

In a nutshell: it doesn't matter if the fetus is alive/a human/has a soul/whatever. You can grant that it is a full human being with rights from the beginning, even. Our ethical rules place autonomy of your own body hierarchically higher than preserving the life of someone else. That must be true or else it would be perfectly reasonable to harvest extra organs from people without their consent, take any or all property from citizens without cause to give to the needy, or draft individuals into whatever charitable work you wanted with no due process. There are very strict limits on how much charity a person can be mandated to participate in, and that limit is usually down to transient circumstances and taxes. It certainly does not dive into your flesh.

The state has no business enforcing control over decisions an individual makes about the contents of their own uterus, even if those decisions may lead to a death.

Whether or not it is RIGHT or GOOD to get an abortion doesn't even matter and, frankly, isn't worth debating. That is a subjective question. All that matters is whether the state is allowed to step in and prevent it from happening -- and they aren't.

The only thing marking a clear difference between a fetus and any other person is the fetus's need of the womb to live. And unfortunately for the fetus, one person's need of some service to live is not sufficient to enslave another.

admiralteal ,

Oh, alright then. The guy didn't spend 20+ minutes gasping for air and struggling on a gurney, then, because industrial accidents are the exact same as what happened here. And the euthanasia researchers that have actually researched N2 asphyxiation and said the Al process would likely be torture are all just... less knowledgeable than you.

admiralteal ,

I don't think any undecided audience will be convinced by this "mass of cells"-style argument either. But to someone who DOES worry that it is a 'person' being aborted, hearing someone else dismiss that life makes it seem like the pro-choice people are callous and uncaring.

If you're arguing for an audience, all the more reason to be explicit and clear about the underlying ethical conviction rather than just a subjective opinion about what is and isn't life. How this is about a person's right to make the right choice for themselves, privately.

Either that or talk about the pain and hardship brought on by pregnancy, especially pregnancy caused by violence, and the benefit the abortion can provide. That can also be pretty compelling.

admiralteal ,

God, that has to be depressing for him. He did so much to set that show up for success, but he's now coming back in to put out fires and try to get it working again.

He thought he was retiring and moving to doing good work. AppleTV fucked him on editorial control and his baby TDS couldn't hold itself up on its own.

Meanwhile his protegee is winning Emmy after Emmy with one of the best programs out there.

And worse, coming back in for the 2024 election. The joke people were telling when he left is that leaving right as Trump was coming into power was 'such a waste' of comedy potential. And his response was, pretty frankly, that it was an awful thing he didn't want to see. Now he's coming right back into it.

I really hope he's able to come back, get it back in shape, and then find a strong successor and go back to doing the projects he really wants to be doing. If anyone can, it's Stewart, I suppose. I'll give it a watch with him back in the helm, which is more than I can say of most of the rest of it since he left.

admiralteal ,

I hear you, and maybe I am too critical. It never had the love for me post Stewart though, and I watched it pretty much every day for many years. Including the entire Oliver stretch. I dropped it pretty early during Noah because it just didn't catch me at all, and in spite of several tries I never was into it again. Even Al Fraken's stint didn't capture me. Bee was great though.

I think this may speak more to the state of talk series than anything else -- most of them are just so bad these days. ...how on god's green earth is Bill Maher still consistently one of the top-streamed shows on HBO I will never understand.

admiralteal ,

My memory idles on around 3341MiB with a browser and just a few basic daemons like Syncthing used in mint cinnamaon. 4GB is pretty tight unless you are willing to make some behavioural changes or use a less friendly distro. But 8GB is more than enough.

Different story trying to run VMs on my server, though.

admiralteal ,

We shouldn't even need to "remove" qualified immunity. We do, but you we shouldn't. Qualified immunity already excludes violations of statutory/constitutional rights. It already shouldn't be protecting pretty much any incompetent cops. Showing it was a violation of training -- that is, that the officer was incompetent -- should be enough to re move the protection.

The original standard as applied to police required they be able to show they were acting in good faith in a situation where the law is not clear. For Christ's sake it was established by an Earl Warren decision -- from probably the ONLY time in US history the SCOTUS has mostly been a force that strengthened civil rights instead of deleting them -- and it somehow has become this bulwark of the police state over time.

Even now it is supposed to be a 2 part test: first, can the official show they believed in good faith they were behaving lawfully and second was the conduct objectively reasonable. Most police abuse shouldn't pass either pillar of that test.

It isn't even originally statutory. It came from the SCOTUS legislating from the bench.

The idea that qualified immunity should protect police is utterly absurd to begin with. Qualified immunity is what stops a bureaucrat for being sued for stamping approval on a zoning change according to the policies of his job. It's just a category mistake to apply it to 95% of police activities.

The insurance solution sounds good until you remember it's the taxpayer that foots the bill and a private industry that reaps the profit. The cost is basically external to the department so it is unlikely to seriously change their behaviors absent a separate and more complete cultural shift to one where the police are viewed as public servants instead of... well, police.

admiralteal ,

The greatest enemy of good driving conditions is and always will be other drivers. The people who really care about being able to drive should be enthusiastically supporting getting others off the roads because congestion is inevitable.

Especially since it costs less total taxpayer money that way (the classic is Houston vs NYC vs Amsterdam, which spend something like 20%, 10%, and 4% of their municipal budgets on transportation respectively). You're less likely to have congestion AND potholes in a city with trams and bike routes.

admiralteal ,

I found out one of my 22-y-o coworkers, with no accident history or the like, pays as much quarterly as I do annually for car insurance.

It's just nuts. Used vehicle prices are through the roof in no small part because new vehicles are now ABSURDLY big and expensive.

AAA is now rating the cost of a new car to be something like $0.50-$1 per mile to operate. Or an average of $12k per year. When you carefully do the math, a lot of people are finding that the rideshares aren't much more expensive -- plus now they don't need to deal with the non-monetary costs of car ownership (maintenance, parking, fear of accident/theft, etc). And you can get blackout drunk to try and tune out the chaos of a dying planet and still be able to get home.

Not to mention car accidents are still, last I checked, the main killer of young people.

admiralteal ,

Yep, and the technology to operate that fleet is only 5 years away. Just like it has been for the last 15.

Anything to make communities think it is safe to refuse to invest in any other transportation mode.

admiralteal , (edited )

Trains are not the solution to every problem.

Light rail intercity transportation is a good option, but it only makes sense on well-traveled routes. And while it is true that the trains induce significant demand -- that is, the route they are on will BECOME well-traveled because the train access is so valuable that people want to be near it -- this is only solving a few very narrow commute problems.

Trains ARE the solution to major commuter congestion, though, and for many well-developed metros are probably the only path to reducing congestion since you cannot just continue to add more roads.

Your autonomous shuttle idea might make sense for less-traveled routes, but pavement is incredibly expensive to maintain compared to rail and vehicles that have to carry around their power source around are seriously inefficient compared to a pantograph, not to even get in to rolling resistance. Busses are useful as a start, but in response to growth they should continue evolving sensibly -- car to bus to trolly bus to tram to fully-separated light rail is a logical progression as a city grows, but a city that knows it is growing fast is often wise to skip steps to save longterm cost.

The actual full solution to the issue of cars is the same one it has been for all 10,000 years of the human urban experiment (less the last 60ish) -- build towns that are primarily navigable on your own power. Don't create robust social policies that cut off infill and multifamily residence. Don't push all business and work sites to some far-flung corner compared to where people life. Don't subsidize a fake-rural lifestyle in islands that cannot sustain themselves at the expense of the poor people living in old-development neighborhoods. Don't build more roads that you can afford to maintain and don't permit road geometries you know are going to kill people -- zero routine deaths is the only acceptable number.

A city you can get around under your own power is less expensive to maintain and more pleasant to live in for most people.

Not to even get into the relative safety (or lack thereof for cars & roads).

admiralteal ,

Also saw significant increases in road fatalities.

Because it turns out the main thing keeping many of our roads safe was... congestion. When operated at true designed speeds, the roads kill people.

admiralteal ,

Nah, we know this isn't the reason because in other countries that have better road design that actually takes psychology into mind for design speeds, they did not see the same uptick. Also, other countries are seeing gradual decreases in road deaths while the US continues to see increases.

You can also look at e.g., the dangerous by design reports and see very clearly WHERE the road fatalities are happening. During covid it was all over the map. Post covid, it is clearly skewing away from the blue cities.

It's a very clear natural experiment with an obvious conclusion: the US has fundamentally unsafe road engineering. We focus on speed over safety in our designs, which in low congestion works perfectly (i.e., makes roads fast and unsafe) and in nominal conditions achieves neither.

Load up all of AASHTO into rockets and shoot them into the sun.

admiralteal ,

It IS a cultural thing, but you're placing blame on bad actors when it's a systemic problem -- a systemic problem with the culture of US road engineering. That is, US road engineers do not have a robust culture of safety. The priority is and always has been speed and "level of service" (aka throughput) in the designs over safety or cost effectiveness or even pleasantness of the urban landscapes.

I'll never buy the idea that a wide set of diverse people across an entire continent are all just worse than the rest of people around the world. The fact that the problem is widespread is proof the issue is not bad actors.

The US does have more people who shouldn't be driving driving though, I'll agree with that much. But it isn't because they're reckless lunatics that don't care about other road users, and I'll never buy the covid arguments that people all went NUTS during covid and started mowing down pedestrians -- because no way that would've happened in JUST the US and nowhere else. It is, again, a systemic issue. The same one. Since driving is essential for most people to live their lives in the US, people who had no business driving are driving. Because of our INCREDIBLY terrible philosophy towards urban design and road constructions, we have pigeonholed ourselves into an expensive, unsafe urban landscape.

A lot of mass transit got downsized during covid, for example. That could've put more bad drivers on the roads -- but it isn't because they're monsters, it's because they have no choice.

Overdraft fees could drop to as low as $3 under new Biden proposal (apnews.com)

The cost to overdraw a bank account could drop to as little as $3 under a proposal announced by the White House, the latest effort by the Biden administration to combat fees it says pose an unnecessary burden on American consumers, particularly those living paycheck to paycheck....

admiralteal ,

The IRA is a big structural change that puts us on a path where we might actually escape global armageddon. It doesn't get us there, but it puts us on the path and buys us just a little bit of time. And its entire philosophical approach builds constituencies massively, which means the longer it exists, the more it will go into a virtuous cycle. So long as Trump doesn't get in next cycle and dismantle it from within, it will be incredibly sticky.

It's almost certainly the most important bill passed in any of our lifetimes. Not just climate-wise, but legislation-wise. It's very technical and kind of boring, which makes it not as exciting, but it's still absolutely huge.

I don't give a fuck if people hate Biden for whatever reasons they have. But at least this one piece of major progress, somehow passed through an uncontrolled congress, must not be denied. If we deny it, that's probably it for our civilization. If we let the achievement be ignored, climate policy will probably be over and the ecosystem will be allowed to die. Any other issue is petty next to total collapse of the global climate and if passing this bill was ALL he could achieve -- even ignoring some of the other stuff like filling departments with the most diverse crowd ever in American history -- it would still have been a good term for a president. Better-liked presidents have achieved less.

admiralteal ,

I hear this all time to time and I just don't understand it.

My 9-year-old Windows laptop does literally everything I need a mobile notebook to do (which unfortunately includes a bunch of software like AutoCAD which just gives a double middle finger to Linux). It's reliable, boots quickly, doesn't frequently bug out, has more than enough battery to never make me stressed and scrambling for outlets, and all these things. It's windows 10 and not signed into an MS account. It can run powershell, python scripts, all those little sugar things that make computers less horrible to use. I'm not forced into any weird proprietary rabbit holes by the OS and have all MS telemetry shut down on it.

If not for bad actors like AASHTO or AutoDesk, I'm quite confident the notebook would be working just as well with something like Mint Linux on it.

What the hell is it that Macbooks are doing that my notebook can't? I just don't get it.

admiralteal ,

Well, I certainly don't get 10 hours, more like 5-6, but have also never in my life and hopefully never will need to sit in the same public place for 10 continuous hours using my notebook. God help me, my life is so off the rails if that ever happens that I don't even want to consider it.

The rest of those things my budget notebook does just fine. Maybe if I used these touchpad shortcuts that the Mac offers it would change my life, but I've always massively preferred navigating the OS with the keyboard and have always found the way Mac application windows and taskbars work totally unitiutive and fighty.

On the whole though, even if I accept everything you said at face value, it's still just... not an argument for "there is no alternative". Seems to me my ancient ASUS is a perfectly reasonable alternative, especially considering it was a less than a third the price of the Macbook even when it was new. Plus it's repairable. I can open it up and change out components myself, with just a screwdriver.

admiralteal ,

It is, but not on its own. Only when compared to the larger canon of conservative thought in which these principles are only applied to things they have preference against.

If a conservative doesn't like it and the federal government is protecting it it's a states rights issue. If a conservative does like it and the federal government isn't protecting it it's a constitutional issue.

There is no well reasoned principal backing these beliefs. It's merely a facade of justification put on top of preferences.

admiralteal ,

For someone who ostensibly believes in small government, a marriage should be seen as a contract between consenting adults. There is absolutely no reason ANY greater organization, whether the government, the community, the church, or whatever it is, should be making decisions about who can and cannot qualify for engaging in that contract.

This guy's entire comment is a smokescreen hiding his actual opinion. He invokes the courts jamming it down our throats... that is their job: to limit the activities of government when government overreaches. Bans or restrictions on gay marriage ARE an overreach. A "true" advocate for small government should be happy the courts are telling the government no when it overreaches -- but he isn't happy about it. Because he's, like most conservatives, full of shit.

The entire thing betrays that he doesn't actually give a shit about small government. He wants government right up in peoples' business. He wants you to share your bedsheets with government. He's an insane, evil fuck because anyone who thinks the government should be involved in restricting marriage at ANY level is an insane, evil fuck.

admiralteal , (edited )

I mean, operated as an investment property they have near certainty you will have a stable income source (the tenant) so it makes sense that the loan value is higher. You're guaranteed to have the income of the rent checks and just as likely all your other potential income on top of that. You actually can afford higher mortgage payments in that situation -- and substantially so.

Which is a strong, strong, strong argument why all cities which have housing shortages (basically all cities) should be exercising policies that discourage non-owner-occupied properties.

admiralteal ,

How long until the inevitable posts of "Oh I respect WHAT they're protesting but I hate the WAY they're protesting" shows up on this like it does for all the other anti-fossil political activism?

Oh wait, it won't, because this kind of protest has minimal impact and is easily ignored by the average person.

And those same people will act like these directs protest were never even considered. "Why don't they just take it to the oil companies", they'll say, ignoring that it is entirely ineffective to do so.

I'm thinking the disobedience around fossil fuel protests is still quite a bit too civil.

Prince William County admits election tally in 2020 shorted Joe Biden (www.nbcwashington.com)

A Northern Virginia county acknowledged it underreported President Joe Biden’s margin of victory over Donald Trump there in the 2020 presidential election by about 4,000 votes, the first detailed accounting of errors that came to light in 2022 as part of a criminal case....

admiralteal ,

Read the article.

admiralteal ,

Hanlon's razor.

Is it really so hard to believe a few poll workers (who are, in my experience, mostly seniors) read the report from their local count machines (which are not internet connected) and copied those numbers into the wrong fields on the higher-level election website?

Is it really easier to believe there is a grand shadowy conspiracy publicly revealing itself with "penetrations" into the system?

Seems to me you're mere moments from coiffing an election denial hat, if you feel this way, when we still have no evidence of fraud (including in this story), I see little point in engaging with you.

admiralteal ,

Then that would've been revealed in both of the TWO recounts.

admiralteal ,

Dead Internet Theory

admiralteal ,

This is a big part of why I dislike consolidating downloading and viewing.

I've been using PerfectViewer on a tablet for viewing for ages. I'm sure there's a better one and would be game for recommendations, but I am very used to this app and its quirks.

There exist any number of ways to download and sync the chapters to my device. I currently mostly use the mangadex-dl script and a syncthings folder and it's no trouble. And all my read chapters I can just move into an archive drive where I'll have them if anything ever happens.

This is standard practice with media. You use something like MPV for viewing and the downloading is handled elsewhere.

admiralteal ,

In all 50 states, firing someone with cause without cause to avoid paying them benefits is illegal.

admiralteal ,

"ISIS could come in and want to display one, the IRA…basically anybody. You’d have to be content neutral and let everybody." He then went off-topic to accuse schools of trying to indoctrinate students with 'transgender ideology.'

Yep, that sounds like a typical conservative. Mind is just a jumble of terrified nightmare-fantasies about the big bad de jour that wanders off into total nonsense without any notice.

admiralteal ,

The word for people who care about individual liberties is "liberal".

The right tells us they are not liberal. Believe them.

admiralteal ,

Not to mention that Harvard will likely settle just to avoid going through discovery simply because they know there is an entire political movement looking for ANY excuse to go for blood with them.

admiralteal ,

And it doesn't help that, as of late, the term "antisemite" is aggressively being expanded to include those who show any criticism whatsoever of the current Bibi administration.

It's crazy to me. On October 6th, 2023, the Bibi administration was largely viewed as a far right, antidemocratic, religiously extreme collection of intensely corrupt lunatics. On October 7th, so many otherwise totally-reasonable people just forgot how they felt the day before.

admiralteal ,

Saudi Arabia should not be allowed to exist as a Muslim ethnostate, though. Their human rights abuses against those that aren't part of their specific ethnicity and religious sect are pure evil.

"They get to do evil, so I should too" is a very bad argument that is not made by people who aren't evil.

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