The object of a system of authority is order, not justice. Justice matters only after injustice sufficiently compromises order.

  • 6 Posts
  • 83 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • My ideological opponents are already silencing speech.

    Uh huh. I can fire up Social Media and find endless content openly discussing the entire spectrum of Political,Cultural, and Economic beliefs. Nearly all of that is openly discussed on Mainstream Media as well. You aren’t being silenced.

    As long as fascists exist they must be silenced.

    Define “fascist”.

    When they seize power, they will not do you the courtesy of allowing you to speak…

    Which is precisely what you yourself are proposing. Congratulations, you are rubbing elbows with the very people you claim to despise.

    If you do not tolerate dissent then you are ethically and morally inferior.


  • Censorship of speech is a powerful tool. Why, if you have the true conviction of your beliefs, would you fight with one hand behind your back?

    Yes, but have you considered the outcome of everyone doing this?

    Moreover, I’ve seen no evidence in my lifetime that letting my ideological opponents speak leads to positive results.

    Mmmmm, yes. All ideological opponents should be silenced. This is clearly the way.

    Seriously, if this is what you believe then you are clearly stating that you have no interest in a Free Society. You are literally placing yourself in the same group with every other Tyrant, Authoritarian, and Fascists who needs to be resisted.

    Free Societies must tolerate dissent, it is a foundational requirement.



  • It is fun, but it’s much smaller than I imagined.

    It’s a product of its time. Oblivion’s game size was right at the 4.7G limit of what would fit on single layer DVD-5.

    Oblivion Gates

    Ugh, arguably the most boring and repetitive part of the game. Such a wasted opportunity too as they could have made each Oblivion gate be a hellscape mirror of the area that it spawned in (including towns). That would have been a fairly small amount of additional data for a huge gain in game play.

    They suck, don’t do any more of them then you have too.




  • Tesla employee or not they’re almost certainly correct, the barriers to entry in the automobile market are very high. Tesla made it, barely, through leveraging enormous amounts of Venture Capital. BYD made it by using even more enormous amounts of Government Funding plus Venture Capital and those were both done in areas that already had stupendously high levels of ICE auto manufacturing.

    Mexico has none of that and they’re competing with all of the established players. I wish them success but it’s extremely unlikely that they will succeed.




  • I have Z-Wave switches but being able to make a voice command like “Nabu, setup to watch TV in the living room.” is faster and easier than pulling out my phone, unlocking it, opening the HA app, and then triggering the “Watch TV in the Living Room” automation and that’s assuming my phone is actually with me. I often roam the house without my phone, relying on my Smart Watch to alert me to text messages and phone calls.

    Here’s another one. I’m taking laundry downstairs but the stairs lights are off and so are the basement lights. My hands are full carrying a basket of laundry so flipping the switches or using my phone to do it means that I have to set the basket down. Instead I say “Nabu, turn on the stairs and basement lights.” and the lights turn on for me. When I’m done and back upstairs I can either wait for the motion timer to turn them off or simply say “Nabu, turn off of the stairs and basement lights.” EZ-PZ and so convenient.

    Different strokes for different folks and all that, I’m not judging how other people live, but I really don’t understand why people choose to do without voice control when they have an HA setup and the ability to run it all local.


  • That’s the answer commonly given but I don’t understand how automation can handle the ad hoc nature of life. Here’s some examples, maybe you could explain how this works for you?

    • Watching TV and I’d like the lights dimmed or turned off.
    • Finished putting laundry away and laid down to go to bed.
    • Someone left the kitchen and the light is still on. I want it turned off without having to get up from the couch and I don’t want to wait for the motion timer to expire.
    • Someone is coming over, say Pizza delivery, and I want the exterior lights to go back to full bright before they arrive.


  • Meh, this is how Tech has always worked. The list of companies that foresaw endless growth due to a temporary market advantage is long. As an example ask Intel how their DRAM production is looking these days. They were dominating the market with it in early 70s but by the early 80s they’d been entirely supplanted. Anybody still buying new ZIP drives? How much market relevance does MySpace or Napster have these days?

    This particular stock “crash” is really just an investor driven blip that Nvidia will quickly put in its rearview mirror but its a signal flare that the AI Market in general and the GPU market in particular is ripe and waiting for disruption. That disruption is coming and it will arrive quicker than most realize.


  • Could be that they are taking a loss on the initial units in order to get going. Once the campaign backers are taken care the product is commercialized and then the price goes up. I’ve seen more than one Kickstart campaign used to launch a company in just this way. (Tempest PWS is another example).

    Anyway they aren’t vaporware. I backed the campaign and received my units today.