I’ve looked into it, but in the sense of “tiny island in the middle of a freshwater lake where I can become the local cryptid living in a spooky shack.” Does that still count?

I’ve found myself taking a paradoxically accelerationist stance about it, for this exact reason. At the moment, those on the right agitating for violence are a minority, and those that are actually prepared to act consist primarily of a few thousand militia LARPers and an even smaller number of actually-capable fighters. These groups are gradually accruing malcontents while the right wing’s filter bubble casts their ideas as acceptable, but the sooner those chuds decide to go loud, the more lopsided and emphatic the beatdown will be – provided that the armed forces are under the command of non-authoritarian President. Afterwards the public condemnation of insurrectionists will effectively choke off recruiting. Conflict feels almost inevitable at this point and giving the violent authoritarian fringe more time to plan and recruit only makes that conflict deadlier.

Rather, I’d say there are many immigrant groups with culturally conservative values (think Hispanic Catholics, BJP-aligned Indian immigrants, conservative Muslims, etc.) as well as certain more religious and patriarchal Black communities, that have a lot in common with the Republicans on social issues, and might be willing to overlook their racism if they find the Democrats’ stance on those issues unacceptable. Think also of expat communities that came to America on the heels of Communist revolutions in their home countries and have a reflexive hatred of even vaguely left-ish politics.

In a sick way, we’re lucky that the GOP’s embrace of racial hatred pushes as many people away as it does, because if they’d let that go they’d have a much broader base amongst minorities.

Alas, I was so looking forward to hearing them parrot the talking points of acclaimed Leninist… (checks notes) … JD Vance.

Conservatism is about preserving a historical social order, rather than existing conditions generally. Acknowledging an environmental change and altering the structure of the economy to prevent it threatens the social order that allows oil companies, chemical companies, and auto manufacturers to be some of the wealthiest and politically powerful entities in the world.

Further, in the short term, ignoring climate change preserves the status quo for the wealthy and powerful. In the long term, though, it only really becomes an existential threat to those who are not positioned to profit from it – look at Nestle attempting to take control of water supplies for an early example of what this might look like. Cataclysm is a life-and-death issue for the masses. For the powerful, it’s an opportunity.

Semi-credibly, I’m watching to see if the offensive pivots east to cut off attackers north of Kharkiv, but it seems like they went over the border along ways away from that area if that was their goal.

New Ukrainian strat just dropped: attack everything with a vague phonetic similarity to Will Griggs:

• Kerch Bridge
• Kursk (is)
• (Saint Peters)Burg (is)
• Il’pryskoye? Sure, why not open a front in Kamchatka

The problem is that the private sector faces the same pressures about the appearance of failure. Imagine if Boeing adopted the SpaceX approach now and started blowing up Starliner prototypes on a monthly basis to see what they could learn. How badly would that play in the press? How quickly would their stock price tank? How long would the people responsible for that direction be able to hold on to their jobs before the board forced them out in favor of somebody who’d take them back to the conservative approach?

Heck, even SpaceX got suddenly cagey about their first stage return attempts failing the moment they started offering stakes to outside investors, whereas previously they’d celebrated those attempts that didn’t quite work. Look as well at how the press has reacted to Starship’s failures, even though the program has been making progress from launch to launch at a much greater pace than Falcon did initially. The fact of the matter is that SpaceX’s initial success-though-informative-failure approach only worked because it was bankrolled entirely by one weird dude with cubic dollars to burn and a personal willingness to accept those failures. That’s not the case for many others.

NASA in-house projects were historically expensive because they took the approach that they were building single-digit numbers of everything – very nearly every vehicle was bespoke, essentially – and because failure was a death sentence politically, they couldn’t blow things up and iterate quickly. Everything had to be studied and reviewed and re-reviewed and then non-destructively tested and retested and integration tested and dry rehearsed and wet rehearsed and debriefed and revised and retested and etc. ad infinitum. That’s arguably what you want in something like a billion dollar space telescope that you only need one of and has to work right the first time, but the lesson of SpaceX is that as long as you aren’t afraid of failure you can start cheap and cheerful, make mistakes, and learn more from those mistakes than you would from packing a dozen layers of bureaucracy into a QC program and have them all spitball hypothetical failure modes for months.

Boeing, ULA and the rest of the old space crew are so used to doing things the old way that they struggle culturally to make the adaptations needed to compete with SpaceX on price, and then in Boeing’s case the MBAs also decided that if they stopped doing all that pesky engineering analysis and QA/QC work they could spend all that labor cost on stock buybacks instead.

Another perovskite hype piece. You’ll know that they’ve got something that’s commercially viable once they’re making these sorts of efficiency claims and not omitting information about cell degradation.

Consider that many of the same people think of Arch as a viable daily driver distro for the everyman. Some folks are more accepting of jank than others.

Israel has been on dubious moral ground from the beginning. There is, perhaps, a future in which Israel either accepts existence as a pluralistic, multiethnic state, or forces Jewish settlers back into its internationally-recognized borders in order to facilitate the existence of an independent Palestinian state, but those futures seem remote and unlikely – and unless one or the other of them becomes reality, Israel will continue as it began: a settler-colonial state enforcing a regime of apartheid on the native people they have intentionally displaced, disenfranchised, and dispossessed.

Much as I’d like to buy into the idea that Trump suffers from advanced cognitive decline, I think the balance of evidence points towards his odd posture specifically being the result of wearing shoes with lifts and/or heels on them to enhance is height, and possibly also shapewear that disguises his paunch but also constricts his range of motion.

That said, the “Man woman person camera TV” episode is strong independent evidence of either dementia or general intelligence on the level of a nematode – but the way he carries himself appears (ironically) to be a result of his vanity rather than his spongy brain.

Given that the first perovskites studied had lifespans that could be measured in minutes, this is great progress, but the fundamental problem is that as a class of materials they just don’t want to exist outside of an inert atmosphere. Without significant progress in stability and encapsulation materials, they’re more of a research curiosity than a viable real-world PV tech.

Commentators in the industry have been prognosticating about a subprime auto loan bubble burst for years and it keeps not happening, for whatever reason. Frankly I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t happened yet, but without some sort of engineered soft landing it feels like it has to be coming eventually. Car prices keep going up, loan terms keep getting longer, and the cost of borrowing is punishing right now. Negative equity in new loans keeps rising too. It’s only going to take a small systemic blip in people’s ability to pay to create a sudden spike in repossessions.

It’s worth pointing out that there’s a marked division within the genre between Black gospel music (which is the tradition rock-‘n’-roll has its roots in) and “Southern” or “Christian” gospel which is tightly interrelated with southern evangelical fundamentalism, and is (not surprisingly) both overwhelmingly white and extremely conservative musically.

With regard to this specific issue, you don’t even have to go looking for cases of young women being discouraged from reporting rape and sexual assault allegations against promising young athletes, because “think how you could hurt his future prospects” – examples are so plentiful that you can’t help but find them if you spend any time reviewing sports news. It’s really only been in the last decade or so that anybody has seriously pushed back against the idea that Johnny Sportsball’s ability to score points for the local team is more important than the safety and bodily autonomy of women.

I’ve not rewatched Voyager since its original airing, but my recollection is that they had been playing up a Seven/Doctor pairing for a while and then Chakotay just swept in out of the blue as the Designated Guy in the final episodes. I always wondered if there was pressure against pairing off the two most “synthetic” members of the crew as being too much like having them “keep to their kind?”

So this is something that I already have to deal with at the state and local level, in the form of building and fire codes. Most such codes are developed by standards organizations. Is it a little bullshit that these organizations are able to maintain copyright control over parts of the law? Yes, but also organizations like the International Code Council and the National Fire Protection Association generally do a very good job developing these documents, and the current state of affairs is such that these organizations and other like ANSI and ISO are de-facto part of the fabric of law in the specialized areas they write standards and tests for. Requiring their publications to be freely and publicly available will actually be an improvement on the current state of affairs, where much of their work is locked behind paywalls.

After leaving the church, I’ve always found Saul/Paul’s conversion story a bit suspect. So you mean to tell me that you’re just out on the road one day, going from town to town persecuting Jesus-cultists, and a beam of light from heaven strikes you and tell you that what you actually need to do is join the Jesus-cultists, but spend the rest of your life assiduously walking back every radical thing they believe? Suuuure. I think maybe ol’ Saul just saw a movement with a power vacuum at the top and thought he should be one to fill it.