I love the way you weave in the cultural context, including the culture war parts of modern political and policy debates, the business/corporate trends in entertainment, in your telling of this history. It’s clear you know your stuff, and you’ve helped me understand something new (the influences these slasher films drew from, from Agatha Christie), grounded in stuff I might have already known (the actual movies themselves and the cultural context they were released into, including how people looked at boobs before the internet).

So thank you. This comment is awesome, and you make this place better.

This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.

Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.

Alaska’s top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.

Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.

But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.

Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.

TL;DR: I’ll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.

$83 billion per month is almost $1 trillion per year. That sounds about right.

The inspector general of the postal service actually compared this next generation vehicle project with what foreign post offices do, in this report.

One of the big differences is that the US Postal Service wants to keep the vehicles in service for 18-20 years (while purchasing them over 12 years), instead of replacing them every 3-9 years as the European counterparts do. They think that the cost of ownership will be lower with custom vehicles on a maintenance plan and parts supply chain specific to them, rather than relying on commercial manufacturers regularly turning over their assembly lines. And maybe the volume (160,000 vehicle fleet) is sufficient to actually pull that off, economically.

No, no, the bigots hate people who speak French too

Yeah, I don’t see it.

As a matter of electoral politics, oil production is still popular in swing states like Pennsylvania, and having a noncommittal stance towards domestic oil companies might cause a few oil billionaires not to back Trump (whose own policies are a little bit too erratic and chaotic to allow the business world in general to count on profit/prosperity under a Trump term).

As a matter of policy, domestic oil production is an important tool in countering Russian and Saudi interests. Strong domestic oil production gives the United States more incentive to tighten restrictions on Russian sanctions (without hurting domestic economic interests), and in weakening Saudi price-setting power through OPEC.

Fracking is terrible for the environment. But there are reasons why energy policy looks to more than just environmental issues.

especially the historical ones

Tycho and Kepler always cracks me up.

I didn’t know I was learning a life skill at the time.

The House of the Dead 2 was a really popular arcade game at the time, so adapting the preexisting game into an at-home typing trainer was actually genius innovation.

There was. If you map that onto the growth in population you’ll see that tickets per person has been dropping since about 2000.

Typing of the dead

Still my favorite example of gamification: take a useful task and make it so fun that people will gladly devote hours and hours of their time to it.

who do not understand that driving a car with AC to a home with AC is making matters worse.

For what it’s worth, globally, heating buildings accounts for more than 4 times as much CO2 emissions as cooling buildings. Yes, this ratio might shift as the world warms, but the lower hanging fruit for climate change is to make heating more efficient and less impactful, not necessarily to focus those efforts on how we cool our homes.

if it’s immediately rewarding

Hell of a caveat there.

If you you blow the guts out and faces off Russian soldiers by more traditional means they are just as dead

I (and all the people and organizations that have worked throughout the last century to get incendiary weapons banned as anti-personnel weapons) generally feel that the method of killing matters, and that some methods are excessively cruel or represent excessive risk of long term suffering.

The existing protocol on incendiary weapons recognizes the difference, by requiring signatory nations to go out of their way to avoid using incendiary weapons in places where civilian harm might occur. Even in contexts where a barrage of artillery near civilians might not violate the law, airborne flame throwers are forbidden. Because incendiary weapons are different, and a line is drawn there, knowing that there actually is a difference between negligently killing civilians with shrapnel versus negligently killing civilians with burning.

There are degrees of morality and ethics, even in war, and incendiary weapons intentionally targeting personnel crosses a line that I would draw.

The moral high ground is absolutely critical in war. War is politics by other means, and being able to build consensus, marshal resources, recruit personnel, persuade allies to help, persuade adversaries to surrender or lay down their arms, persuade the allies of your adversaries not to get involved, and keep the peace after a war is over, all depend on one’s public image. There are ways to wage war without it, but most militaries that blatantly disregard morals find it difficult to actually win.

In this case? The entire military strategy of Ukraine in this war is highly dependent on preserving the moral high ground.

The United States and the UK successfully blocked attempts to outlaw all use of incendiary weapons, and all use of incendiary weapons against personnel, and all use of incendiary weapons against forests and plant cover.

This is an area where it’s perfectly reasonable to disagree with how the US watered down this convention, to push for stricter rules on this, and to condemn the use of thermite as an anti-personnel weapon and the use of incendiary weapons on plants that are being used for cover and concealment of military objectives.

So pointing out that this might technically be legal isn’t enough for me to personally be OK with this. I think it’s morally reprehensible, and I’d prefer for Ukraine to keep the moral high ground in this war.

Wait is there a way to invent awful things and then patent troll so that nobody can actually bring them to market?

The escalation of Starlink not complying comes from that, not the other way around.

I’ve looked closer (at other articles, too). You’re right - the freezing of the SpaceX accounts came from the same order that ordered that Twitter be blocked, and before SpaceX announced it would refuse to comply.

The proper thing to do is to recognize the legally distinct personhood of SpaceX, which isn’t part of Twitter, even if Twitter/X itself is wrong on the law.

Twitter has accounts that Brazil says violates Brazilian law.

Brazil took steps to shut down those accounts in Brazil.

Twitter refused to cooperate, going as far as to fire all of its Brazilian staff, so that it can’t be reached by the Brazilian courts.

The Brazilian courts ordered all of Twitter be blocked until they comply with local law that they designate a corporate representative who can be served by court processes.

Brazilian ISPs complied with the court order to block Twitter.

Starlink did not comply, and Brazilian courts froze SpaceX’s Brazilian assets, including bank accounts, and started making moves towards de-licensing Starlink, including its 23 ground stations located in Brazil.

The issue escalated to the full Brazilian Supreme Court, who ruled that the assets should remain frozen until Starlink starts complying with court orders.

Now Starlink says it will comply with the court order.

The order to block Twitter went to all Brazilian ISPs, and Starlink is the only one that didn’t comply on Saturday. So the escalation stems from the disregard of an order that everyone was required to obey, but the intertwined nature of both companies being controlled by Musk is both part of the reason why SpaceX would even consider not complying with local law in a country it operates in, and why the Brazilian courts seem to be willing to aggressively enforce their own orders.

Edit: I’m convinced. This comment as originally written presented the facts out of order.

There’s a paper from 1984 that worked out the math for a two-sail system that could get a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, and slow down and end up in that gravity well, with a 41-year mission time. It would do so by discarding a reflector that points backward at the actual payload with its own sail. The paper also proposes a mechanism for a round trip mission, too, using 3 sails.