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Joined
3 yr. ago

Laboratory planner by day, toddler parent by night, enthusiastic everything-hobbyist in the thirty minutes a day I get to myself.

  • In AEC work we’ve moved almost exclusively to a competing PDF tool called Blubeam, which is proprietary but very worth the price, with tools for scaling, dimensioning, and producing material takeoffs from PDF drawings. Much of what you’d use Acrobat for in a more typical office environment are absent or limited, though.

  • Got a reference? Pro-UBI and anti-billionaire as I am, I’ve done the math and I don’t think that checks out. Meaningful UBI has an annual price tag in the trillions, and even if you assume 90%+ top bracket tax rates there aren’t enough billionaires in the US to foot that bill. Other programs would have be discontinued and/or rolled in, and tax rates increased across the board.

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  • If the parties involved wanted a clear moral solution there's a very clear precedent in the form of South Africa's truth and reconciliation process. For that to happen, though, Israelis would have to be willing to acknowledge Palestinians' fundamental right to exist, and as I noted above they're currently opposed to that by a 2:1 ratio, and Palestinians do not have the power or tools to force the issue. The international community would have to drag Israel to the negotiation table kicking and screaming, and as long as they've got the US on their side that's not going to happen. Realistic political solutions seem remote right now, sure -- but if you're just talking about a moral one, it's shockingly simple.

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  • If I could pick a nit or two, Jewish people internationally are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government. Israeli citizens might be -- and while Netanyahu and Likud are extremely controversial in Israel, they do represent a significant and very vocal portion of the Israeli voting public. Worse, general Israeli sentiment towards Palestine and Palestinians is not good -- 60% of Israelis still support the war after 18 months of wholesale civilian slaughter in Gaza. 70% support the ongoing settlement and annexation of the West Bank. The positions of the major Israeli parties on Palestinian lives and rights differ from Netanyahu's "kill 'em all" approach mostly in degree rather than in kind.

    To put the rotten cherry on the shit cake, Israel has one of the highest rates of dual citizenship in the world, with ~10% of Israelis holding two passports. Unlike the other countries you named, a significant fraction of Israelis could just leave if they no longer wanted to co-sign their government's genocide in Gaza. I am perfectly willing to hold the Israeli people responsible for the actions of their government, moreso than I am for the other countries you mentioned. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine was not forced on them against the popular will. They chose this, and continue to choose this, by a large majority.

  • Microscopes, too!

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  • All the people mentioned in the article are alt-right lunatics and/or Trumpworld grifters. The only other place they might conceivably take their schtick is Truth Social -- this is really only interesting as confirmation that the thin-skinned and insecure FrEe SpEeCh AbSoLuTiSt running that shithole is absolutely willing to silence anybody who annoys him, over the pettiest of disputes, regardless of political affiliation.

  • Frustratingly, these are required now because a significant number of American high school grads didn't actually absorb any of that information in high school. College professors have long bemoaned the declining educational attainment of incoming students (not surprisingly, starting around when W signed NCLB into law) and these remedial introductory classes are an attempt to bridge the gap between what freshmen are actually bringing in to college and where they need to be to actually grasp more advanced concepts.

  • As ever, working to build the post-apocalyptic wasteland that would finally justify their insistence that they need 500 guns and a fleet of milsurp Humvees to traverse the miles of crumbled roadways between their compounds and the last operating Fortress Hospital in the Dakotan Oil Wastes.

  • And of course this would be a massive harm to their own voters, because Medicaid expansion has been the only thing keeping most rural community hospitals afloat for a long time. If they cut it, then it's likely that many small towns are going to lose their only medical providers within a hour's drive or more.

  • Twins are safer in theory but with caveats, mostly to do with pilots putting too much trust in that sense of security. A twin with one engine out has serious differential thrust that needs to be managed, and significantly reduced climb rate that can easily catch the pilot off guard. Pilots can get into an unrecoverable situation thinking that they're still airworthy, whereas in a single when the engine starts sputtering you immediately are looking for a place to put the plane down.

  • Can't wait for the inevitable companion pieces: one from Conor Friedersdorf entitled Actually You Are Wrong And I Am Very Smart and the other from Jeffery Goldberg, with the headline This Will Be Catastrophic For Israel's Capacity To Bomb Palestinians.

  • We already can't economically build ships for the navy because we've so dramatically hollowed out our steel refining and commercial ship-building industries. We're looking at a future where the US military is primarily a client of the international arms industry for everything but guns.

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  • Says the 'man' who just tried to buy an election in Wisconsin.

  • That's far too realistic a lab for stock photos. Stock photo labs have clean benches save for a handful of test tubes and Erlenmeyer flasks. Real labs have equipment on every flat surface and boxes of shit stacked up to the ceiling on the shelves.

    Weirdly enough, I recognized a publicity shot of a lab I'd designed being used as a stock photo recently... in an article about how scientists are trying to flee the country. ...Hooray?

  • Eugh, daylight.

  • When the base is mad enough to throw them out if they don't. The Florida special elections didn't flip any seats, but they showed a 15-point swing away from the GOP in deep red parts of the state. That's gonna make them sweat. Unless they can sufficiently rig the midterms or sway Trump off his current "crash the economy for lulz" trajectory, it may well be a bloodbath, and that's the sort of math that starts peeling sycophants away from Trump.

  • Back in my day us hermit types just did our grocery shopping after 9PM, this is a whole other level.

  • It took several violent landgrabs and wars of aggression before Russian oligarch money wasn't welcome around the world, and those guys were all but openly affiliated with the Russian mafia from the days of the fall of the Soviet Union. I fully expect American oligarchs' money to be happily accepted just about everywhere for at least as long as it takes Trump to get around to trying to take Greenland by force.

  • The Zionist factions that were foundational to the establishment of the Israeli state saw the Holocaust as proof of two things: first, that the Jewish people would never truly be safe in the world without a country of their own, and second, that the horrors visited on Jews by the Nazis, and European antisemites before them, and the Cossacks before them, demonstrated that no extreme was unjustified in the establishment and protection of that state. Those attitudes have been at the bedrock of modern day Israel from its founding. To those who adhere to them, "Never again" is short for "Never again to us," and damn anybody who doesn't fit their narrow (conservative, religiously observant, largely white Ashkenazi) vision of Jewishness.

    To these folks, ethnic cleansing of Palestine was always the goal, and they've been waiting decades for an international order that would look the other way while they purged, displaced, and slaughtered their way to complete Israeli control of the land they saw as theirs to take. Now they've got it, and they're not wasting any time.