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@MorlockP
Prometheus award-winning SF author https://t.co/X1XAm8tVlh Learn how to homestead https://t.co/tsoohJ5emD Legislator @travis4nh
10 subscribers
Feb 9 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
1/
There is huge amounts of waste in DoD contracting.
Absolutely.
But it's not "...and then someone walked away with a suitcase full of cash".
It's: 2/
- the DoD says "we want 3 more bushings."
- the contractor says "if you really really really want to buy them from us, we will have to spin up the factory again, which is mothballed. There's a $2M fee for that. After that, each bushing is $1. How many do you want?"
Feb 8 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
I'm on team @kitten_beloved here, and against friends @shlevy and @tracewoodgrains , because you have to WIN a war before you can rehabilitate and work with former enemies.

We gave West Germany some degree of autonomy in 1949, not in 1943. @kitten_beloved @shlevy @tracewoodgrains 2/

I'd suggest that we don't have a boolean here, but a floating point.

The question is not "should we contemplate acting as brothers with our brothers?". Of course we should.
Jan 28 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
1/
I used to be taken in by this.

...then I realized that the same argument generalizes to "if our Ricardian comparative advantage is making gravel, then we should stop making our own jet fighters and missiles and nuclear warheads and just let China be our sole supplier..." 2/
The argument assumes a lot of things:
(a) steady state / no chance of sudden policy changes
(b) good will from trading partners
(c) the value of optionality from having CAPABILITIES is zero
etc
Jan 20 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
1/
> if your hobby is woodworking, you're deciding *not* to do something technologically important.

My hobbies are woodworking and improving my land, and, yeah, I agree w this.

OTOH, I think that there's a lot to be said for investing in / revitalizing / passing down >>> 2/
modes of human existence that are not optimized for max e/acc long-shot possibility.

I invested lots of hours per week on tech stuff in my 20s through 40s (regrettably none of it super-future-relevant, bc that was an era of building out web infrastructure etc), and now >>>
Jan 12 • 54 tweets • 12 min read
100% agreed about Sarris. One of the worst, most superficial, catty accounts. 2/
he's a self-elevated authority ("legend in his own mind")

Dec 29, 2024 • 20 tweets • 5 min read
This is actually super relevant to me as right now I'm working on the conlang created by two young dogs, one of whom is safely home in the Blue Phyle asteroid base, while the other one is forced by circumstances to move to the Orange Phyle, where he doesn't fit in and is bullied, until he's taken under the wing of a male dog schoolteacher who teaches him to fight the bullies. [ Ari 3 + 4 ] 2/
Sadly writing goes slowly, bc before I can write the next chapter I have to develop the conlang and before I do that I have to develop the morphemes and before I do that I have figure out the Great Consonant Shift, and before I do that I have to understand the IPA >>>
Dec 26, 2024 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
"We will REPLACE" ?!?

What the actual $%^& ?

I just totally and immediately flipped the bit on Razib ...and am pretty close to doing the same on all of his coethnics.

Why exactly should we let "we will replace" people into our country, society, or companies? 2/
I just did, Razib.

Nov 28, 2024 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
1/
There is one thing that offends my autism beyond all other insults:

when there are two concepts, A and B, and two words for those, A' and B', and someone says A', and I say "no, that's not actually the case", and they respond 2/
"oh, I'm using the term rhetorically / poetically to indicate both A and B"

and

youtube.com/embed/xDwPwvTp…
Nov 22, 2024 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
1/
Almost none of this is true.

2/
> On earth, the oldest rocks are deep down, but on the moon, the rocks and soil on the surface are older than what's deep down...

We have never drilled on the moon, so we have no data to suggest the above is true.
Jun 19, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
1/
In isolation, yes. But it's a very modern thing, outside of its historical origin, and it's part of the "1619 project" which seeks to alter all of American history, and it's tied up in toppling monuments, etc.

In that context >>> 2/
It becomes much more ominous. It came out of nowhere, was made a federal holiday, is being incorrectly called "national independence day" (overwriting the actual independence day).
Jun 8, 2024 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
1/
Here's how I bought a new truck for the lowest price in 2000 and again in 2023: 2/
Find every dealer in ~50 miles.
May 26, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
one thing I note often is that knowledge is fractal

you can spend part of your life knowing "chainsaws exist" without much detail

then you get into it and there are different brands, bar lengths, swappable power heads

you go further down the rabbit hole and you learn that 2/
chain oil comes in summer and winter weights, chains have various pitch / gauge / cutter types / grind styles

...and pretty soon you know about rivet spinning and bulk chain purchases ...
May 15, 2024 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
garbage tats, too many rings, BPD eyes ... this is the 'elite' that rules over us
Image 2/
You actively should judge books by their covers.

Publishers pay a lot of attention to what covers look like, and use them to convey important marketing information to prospective purchasers.

Apr 24, 2024 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
the last few years where midwits have been taking to social media to explain geopolitics in terms of Star Wars and Harry Potter analogies has been hugely enlightening

no one can deal with any complexity or ambiguity at all. "It was historically Russian territory, and a majority of people who live there are Russian speakers, and the Ukrainian regime is deeply corrupt and has paid off the family of the US president *** BUT *** the attack was unprovoked, and tons of civilians were killed for no reason, and the Russian president jails his political enemies in a manner even worse than the US president does, and it's pragmatic to show that the US will defend the existing world order, *** BUT *** ..."

No one's got time for that.

Everyone wants to LARP Les Miserables or the French Resistance or Valley Forge or some such crap (all of which is ALSO, in the popular imagination, a one sided simplified LARP with one heroic side and one villainous side and no gray at all).

It's all so fake and ghey and I'm dispirited by how willfully stupid people are and how they yearn to throw themselves (or, actually, others) into literal battles that will leave them dead, mutilated, burned over 50% of their bodies, with traumatic brain injuries, missing limbs, or worse because evolution has designed us to be enthusiastic murder monkeys who love joining coalitions. 2/
Everything I've read says that Crimeans thought of themselves as much more Russian aligned than Ukranian aligned.



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_…

Image
Apr 10, 2024 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
1/
A list of things where I can be slightly mistaken for a lefty:

(a) if you can't get sufficient workers, that's because you're not paying them enough 2/
(b) law enforcement is terrible and they disproportionately victimize the poor and the incompetent. Like PETA throwing red paint on women in furs, not bikers in leather, LEOs go after people too poor to fight back.
Mar 26, 2024 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
this is an extremely leftist/wordcel/normie question

the normal state of cargo ships is sinking/no electrical power/no rudder control

only constant maintenance, discipline, and executive function keeps cargo ships out of that ground state and in a more energetic state 2/
The power in your house does not "want" to be on.

The clean water does not "want" to flow.

The supermarket does not "want" to be stocked.

Entropy is always and everywhere trying to destroy, corrode, sink, and endarken.
Mar 26, 2024 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
1/
I had a [ slightly left of center ] teacher in HS who said that the distinction between right and left dictatorships is that in a right dictatorship you could keep your mouth shut, go along to get along, and all would be fine 2/
...but in a left dictatorship, you had to actively parrot the party line, and the regime would switch up the party line all the time to trip people up. The constant greengrocerism and whiplash was PART OF THE PROCESS.
Mar 3, 2024 • 25 tweets • 6 min read
a new 747 costs $450 million, and one single trusted individual can destroy one in 5 seconds if he chooses to

the modern consumer-facing world trains people to think that everything has, metaphorically speaking, seat belts and airbags, but it's not true 2/
Feb 25, 2024 • 38 tweets • 10 min read
1/
Krugman, like most other midwits, uses data to persuade, not to understand.

He sees a graph that proves that "food at home spending" is up 1.2x not 2x, and immediately uses it to demonstrated that "food prices are not up 2x".

Let's dig in. 2/
The graph he is using comes from here



Scroll to the bottom and find

> Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Release: Consumer Price Indexfred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR000…
Feb 10, 2024 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
sure, he violated the law

and, sure, the law specifies that there are no exceptions, and the law must be followed

...but we don't want to

...so we won't.

Rule of man, not rule of law.

justice.gov/storage/report…
Image 2/
"he DID share classified information"

and yet "... evidence falls short of supporting criminal charges"

ok, so there's rock solid evidence that he shared classified info he knew was classified...but...something something

is there some other branch of the law not fulfilled?
Image
Image
Feb 5, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
1/
Megan is getting at what @slatestarcodex calls "the non central fallacy".

My rebuttal is that being here illegally is a form of election fraud, often a form of benefits fraud (taking advantage of our roads, schools, and other things with real maintenance costs), and ... 2/
while I detest the scare mongering of " MiLiTaRy aGeD mEn !!111", is it true that illegal immigration, en masse, and without assimilation, fundamentally changes the character of a nation, and often - contra @AlexNowrasteh - for the worse.