It would be interesting to learn what fraction of SWAT (and SWAT-like) responses are to legitimate emergencies where their presence is both warranted and helpful.

Tucker Carlson is deeply disingenuous and it’s probably a mistake to listen to anything he has to say, ever.

What’s up with the strange “RJ II” scrawl on the source painting?

Maybe I’m taking things way too seriously for c/memes, but this painting is so, uh … racy? It got me curious. It’s called “The Reading,” by an Italian painter named Vittorio Reggianini, who was far more modern than I had expected (1858-1939). Those clothing styles are (I think) from before his own time; he was painting the flirtations of rich youngsters from a century before his day. Historical fiction, really.

paradigm, noun 1. A pattern, a way of doing something; especially a pattern of thought, a system of beliefs, a conceptual framework.

The “paradigm shift” in personal computing was the way computers changed from jealously guarded, centrally controlled, elite resources, to uncontrolled, delegate-able appliances that showed up at the outer edges of networks and organizations, where they could be applied to tasks that hadn’t been computerized before. Computers had been a part of systems of control, but they looked like they were becoming agents of chaos, for a while.

The change in cost was the mechanism, the driver of the change, but it wasn’t the paradigm shift itself.

The post-COVID work-from-home boom is a paradigm shift. Gig-economy work is a paradigm shift, but you could argue it’s not a positive one. Vaccination was a paradigm shift. Small-scale solar power can be a paradigm shift.

We might argue that it’s precisely the “briefly” part that separates the true boats from the not-boats-after-all

This font is begging for some long s love

for (conſt item of imagetagſ)

Why exactly would anyone want to draw this line? “Erotic” and “vulgar” are both bad looks at a funeral, you know?

In the future you will downvote nothing and b̵̰͇̹͔̩̹̲͉͉̟̜͂̓̊͝ȩ̸̛̹̠͈͍͓̬̥̱̰̯͎̖̤̫̏̐̍̏̐̀̍̓͜͜ ̴̢̧̰͉̗̠̼̹̙̩̱̫͖̫̂̇̃̅̎͆̕͜ͅh̴̙͓͎͉̩͙͎̪̥̺̔̈a̷̡̰̗͚̪͈̩͆̋͘p̵̢̨̙̪͚̞͇͎̱̰͕̈́̃̂̽̋̒̚͠p̶̛̛͕̓̌̒̒̅̿̃̃̿̌͠͝y̶̢̛͍̟̥̲͇̠̗̼͍͓͐̒̋̿̽̄̓̋͐͊̎͘

I showed this to my wife and now she’s leaving me for Taika Waititi.

I go back and look at my old code and find it clear and beautiful, easy to understand, a pleasure to read. “Ah yes,” I’ll say to myself, “that approach was clever and elegant. Gosh, past me was pretty smart!”

I like to appreciate it in this manner. Because that way, for a moment at least, I can forget about how it doesn’t actually work.

I tried putting some figures ($85K Ram 3500, diesel, financed) into truecosttodrive.com and got a cost/mile of $0.95.

Point being: Cutting the price of fuel by a third (getting back to where it had been in 2025, say) isn’t going to turn that into an economy ride. Even at $6 / gallon, most of the cost is depreciation, insurance, and maintenance. Driving is absurdly expensive and I believe we only put up with it because so much of the cost is hidden or easy to overlook.

I wasn’t trying to say “Therefore it’s all OK,” so much as “none of this makes any sense, none of this has ever been fair.”

Even non-drivers wind up paying taxes for roads.

Roughly half of the money that gets spent on US roads comes from sales taxes, property taxes, income taxes, etc., and none of that bears any relation to how much driving you (we) do.

It feels so out of the blue, so unnecessary. Like the writer had been bored. It’s difficult to imagine that this didn’t jolt readers out of the story, even at the time.

Even in the glorious AI powered future no one wants to work on docs

I read A City On Mars and came away convinced that questions like this one are pretty silly.

Show us a Las Vegas that thrives on its recycled water alone. Show us an airtight building, made of materials that can be recycled into new building parts. Show us a self-contained arcology in Antarctica that’s so appealing, ordinary families dream of moving there to raise their kids.

Then we can talk about Mars.

You know, it’s interesting, I’ve been now around long – you know, I think of myself as a young guy, but I’m not so young anymore. And I’ve been around for a long time. And it just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans … We’ve had some pretty bad disasters under the Republicans. – DJT 21 March 2004

My understanding is that US municipalities do red light cameras like this:

1. The city hires a contractor, a for-profit service, to install and operate the cameras. That’s appealing for the city because the contractor deals with the up-front costs. The service gets paid some fraction of each ticket it issues.
2. Part of the contract gives the contractor control over the lights themselves.
3. The contractor shortens the yellow lights (and may manipulate other timings besides) to ensure more tickets.

People will tell you that red light cameras make roads less safe because they make drivers panicky. I think most drivers have no idea the cameras are there, I think the situation is simpler: Shorter yellows are dangerous. This is literally “Profit > Your Life.”

Traffic cameras should be a good idea. But if they’re operated as a profit center, they probably won’t be.

There’s an open-source successor to TrueCrypt called VeraCrypt. For that matter, as far as I know, one can still download the last version of TrueCrypt. It hasn’t been disappeared.

It’s true that the TrueCrypt developers retired and said that commercial packages like BitLocker were finally good enough and available enough that they didn’t feel compelled to maintain TrueCrypt. I remember that. I think it’s plausible that Microsoft has (or has provided to someone) back-door access to BitLocker, but I don’t remember any hint that the TrueCrypt developers had been coerced; have you got something you can link to?

“Off road” pretty much always means “on crude roads,” and this bothers me more than it should