nickhammes

Would it have actually worked though? The access Hollywood tapes came out during that election, Trump's behavior of entering the dressing rooms of Miss Teen USA were well reported on, and neither really hurt him. Maybe there's a chance it would've changed the outcome, but it's hard to imagine that chance is large.

I would not automatically jump to the worst case conclusion that he's definitely exhibiting serial killer traits. Like, if he views them as pest animals, that's not exactly normal and healthy, but it isn't clear evidence of something much worse either.

Ideally, he should probably talk to a professional to help him deal with it in a healthy way, if he isn't already. Telling your friend and/or their parents that you're worried about him, and quoting specific things he's said, is probably a good place to start.

The thing is business is more booming than it's ever been, but making the line go up forever is a fool's errand, at some point you'll hit a peak. Hitting that peak is immensely punished in our economic system.

If you make a hammer that'll last 100 years, you'll sell as many as you can reach customers who need one, before hammer sales plummet. Instead of being rewarded for making a great product, you'll be punished when sales fall because you've solved a problem for most people.

Advertising is kind of neutral in abstract in my head. Make a great product for a fair price, and let people know about it, and that's actually probably a benefit to both parties. Make a terrible product, and tell a bunch of people it's great, and you've spent resources doing them a disservice. But if you can convince them it's good enough to spend money on it, and keep your revenue per customer above the cost to acquire them, it's profitable. And that's all they care about. It's basically the same pattern as a scam, but profit is the only thing they're told they're allowed to care about.

Did they do their darnedest to pick only people who are true believers? No doubt. Is that a property that's perfectly ascertainable and immutable? Absolutely not.

The number of people increases the difficulty of hiding a conspiracy, but so does the time scale. I suspect we'll know a lot more than we do now in 20 years about this, for whatever that's worth.

Conservatives have been fighting to push the Overton window to the right for a long time.

The terrifying thing about this kind of problem is that they do have morals, but they've been warped. They're surrounded by systems that tell them that what they do is good, necessary, or at least morally justified. That warp their judgement and morals, protecting and encouraging their part in heinous acts. All the while their moral judgements see themselves as the good guys, and that's the worst part.

If somebody sees a conflict between their personal morals, and the actions of themselves the system around them, good on them for refusing to participate anymore.

Suddenly cutting off a lot of trade suddenly is a stupid and reckless move that would hurt people in their countries as much as it would hurt the US. It's basically the same behavior as Trump with his absurd tariffs, banning trade with a country, and taxing people obscenely to buy things from that country mostly work out to the same effects in practice.

Incentivizing other trade partners, and maybe slowly disincentivizing the US makes a lot of sense though. Maybe it made more sense years ago, but as they say, if the best time was yesterday, the next-best time is today.

I'm legitimately surprised a journalist didn't use virtual credit cards. Knowing full well you're giving credit card info to the world's most famous grifter? I'd take every security measure available

What are the cool and interesting tools in stone masonry?

I know a reasonable amount about metal and wood working tools, so I imagine CNC cutting and engraving have added some interesting new options, but I really have no other guesses

In the 90s, a lot of programmers spent a lot of time carefully optimizing everything, on the theory that every CPU cycle counted. And in the decades since, it's gotten easier than ever to write software, but the craft of writing great software has stalled compared to the ease of writing mediocre software. "Why shouldn't we block on a call to a remote service? Computers are so fast these days"

There are like 3 different routes that make sense for me to get home from work, depending on where there's traffic

Some games also use the rarity system to funnel mechanically simpler cards into more common rarities, which works well in a draft environment, since those are often the cards you want to have come up more. Which is really the point of the system, ideally it would be a system to support draft environments that work well, without artificial scarcity that hurts constructed players.

But you can also make a constructed format that only allows "simpler" cards that have been printed at common, which is neat. Or one that only allows higher rarities.