Or the get a giant mess of unstructured data that they cannot derive any useable anything from. But in obtaining the data they broke numerous laws. And so they all go to jail. The end.
I don't know Big Data enough to say with any authority, but I'm skeptical they can get AI to process the data any more efficiently than a traditional police state could. Any lists of targets created would be full of errors; going after those lists would still work to achieve terror, in the same way random selection would, I suppose.
If some Stasi-style future agency gets personnel sufficiently numerous to actually comb through all this data for anyone who draws their attention in whatever way - yeah, scary.
I remember a short story by, or possibly just promoted by, C Doctorow back in the day when Google ads were new, a metadata based police state where someone's private emails were still protected but they were harassed based on Google having scanned them & displayed ads for explosives.
The direct to consumer market due for explosives remains small.
Palantir to build the database too. This is the kind of thing that used to have conservatives* frothing at the mouth.
*remember them?
In Russia, small explosive consume you.
I always park my strategic bombers inside.
Israel used a system like this to decide which Palestinians to bomb in the early days of the current iteration of the war. Turns out its a great way to generate lists of targets while offloading accountability to a machine.
Aren't they just shooting at children now?
They're not disturbing in a "someone's life is getting materially wrecked in the next year" kind of way, though.
I don't understand why not, these are small-minded vindictive people. I could easily imagine them digging into that data for dirt on anyone that pisses them off.
If you have AI why would you need data? You can just ask AI to make it up for you.
11: good point! I hadn't considered revenge.
We can rest easy then, if there's one thing Trump and his minions have no interest in it's revenge
There's a field called "entity resolution" that is directly concerned with taking massive unstructured data-sets and deciding which are about which persons, finding connections between persons, etc. It's a very well-developed field, and there are a number of companies selling product, e.g. Palantir. I worked for a pioneer in the field for a while, and the stuff actually works; this guy's group had a wall of plaques from three-letter agencies that used the stuff -at scale- to find terrorists and such.
Also, this sort of data-mining is how RU finds the Ukrainians they need to focus on for filtration camps and such: it's been widely-reported that when they take over an area, they scoop up all the computers and drives, dump all that data into their data-mining systems, and crunch it to find individuals of interest.
I think we should -assume- that that is what they're doing with all this data: it ain't as innocuous as "DOGE lets AI train on it"; it's "DOGE lets Palantir build detailed profiles of every American and their social (human-space) networks".
I can believe Russia is using it in this way. And I guess mapping the networks is more likely to result in something useful to an authoritarian regime than feeding it all to Grok & expecting something coherent to emerge.
That said, if Russia's methods were all garbage, how would we know?
They would be unable to stop Ukraine from driving up to an airbase and burning th strategic bombers with drones.
Minivet: I don't know whether Russia's methods are garbage, but the reports I've read say that they work.
But my own time working with these folks who did this ER stuff, convinced me pretty quickly that they knew what
they were doing, and that the stuff works, -at scale-. They have clients in law enforcement, credit card agencies, etc.
A tiny example: this guy was funded by In-Q-Tel (CIA's in-house VC), and some of his first clients were the casinos in
Vegas. They use his software to map out the social networks among their customers, and to find the rings that that
try to count cards, etc.
And the thing that makes these things work, is the -scale- of the data. The bigger the better.
Or hitting the Kerch bridge for the umpteenth time today
ETA: This is why I think that Americans' phobia about a national identity card is misplaced. Such a "card" already exists,
virtually, by way of this ER stuff. We should be pushing our government to provide us such identity cards, and to make
it an -affirmative duty- of government officials to ensure that all Americans have such cards. With penalties -- personal
penalties -- for officials who deprive (by action or inaction) Americans of their identity card.
B/c otherwise, what we'll get us what we have today: government ID used as a -cudgel- to beat on poor people and
minorities.
I actually picked up my passport card at the embassy last week because I wanted a handy way to prove I'm a US citizen when I go back home on leave this Friday. Not that it will matter because the Feds will just think it's fake like that guy with the Real ID.
Barry: yeap, I got mine too back in March 2024 when I renewed my passport. And like you, I have my doubts that it'd work, but better safe than sorry, and I don't want to carry my passport around everywhere like I used to when I lived/worked in France. It was sometime in March 2025 that my (middle-aged, white, Pennsylvanian-born, Irish-American) friend E. exhorted me in no uncertain terms to start carrying the damn thing in my wallet, explaining that back during Trump I, ICE was stopping people on the streets of NYC and arresting those who "fit the description" and couldn't present their papers. He carries his passport card at all times.
I'm still using a driver's license that isn't Real ID and a note from my mom.
22 I stupidly did not apply for one when I renewed my passport last year because I thought why would I need one? Things have really changed.
(May marked ten years I've been overseas in Arrakis)
I'm not freaked out by the vacuuming up of the Federal data, but for the depressing reason that I think it's uninteresting compared to the commercial data about most of us that is already out there being bought and sold.
Back in 2013 Kieran Healy (of Crooked Timber) showed how network analysis of 1770s data would have found Paul Revere. No doubt that techniques and machinery have improved in the last 12 years, in the ways that Chetan describes.
https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/
It seems pretty bad to me! It makes certain kinds of abuses a lot easier. Locally we now have a requirement that every syllabus for any required course must be uploaded to a searchable database. Most of us would freely give out our syllabi anyway, and many of us post them online. Yet! Putting them into a keyword-searchable database definitely means we'll be in for '354 syllabi at the LIBERAL U used the word 'bias' and 'inclusive' makes harassment of a certain inevitable kind much more likely. Being mandated to
(I'm trying to talk some engineering colleagues into seeding their syllabi with forbidden words just for the lulz. Gotta watch out for those Fourier trans.)
My dad worked as an international banking regulatory lawyer and he thinks where it's going is large scale civil forfeiture for enemies of the state. Right now if you drive through Bumblefuck OK with $1000 in cash the cops will legally rob you. Now give that power to the federal government if they can find any tenuous connection to a suspect financial entity and they'll be free to electronically ruin your life by freezing your accounts, at any scale they want. Oh you're one of 150000 people who went to Harvard? We know they support terrorism, too bad you and all your co-conspirators won't be able to pay your mortgages this month.
SP @ 28: i'm certainly not going to say that father is wrong, i've mused about this very thing. This is Nazi level expropriation, and besides causing the collapse of the US' International reputation, Would almost certainly resultIn violent Revolution. As things stand unless you're literally wealthy it is difficult to establish investment accounts in other countries because of FATCA. But this is the sort of shit that would cause anybody with half a brain to move all their Investments out of the country.
Again, I'm not saying that your father is wrong. I've worried about this very question myself.
That would definitely be a big jump up from where they are now - regime consolidation, "Kash Patel has called Justice Barrett and directly threatened her family" territory. Not to say it's impossible.
All this said, I thought it would be a really easy step for the first Trump administration to start getting back to deniably political CSA enforcement. Raid the legal dispensaries in blue states, get their customer lists, a good chunk of dissidents are probably on there and can be raised in turn whenever desired. Never happened. Generally, they seem bad at crafty plots - most of their evil has a first and final step, then they do something else.
I would be more worried about this.
The Financial Research Fund referenced in Section 50005 finances both the operations of the Financial Stability Oversight Council -- an overarching body that includes all the main US financial regulators and is chaired by the US Treasury Secretary -- and the OFR that supports it. The FRF gets its money from a small annual levy on big US banks.Also, the Genius act would effectively give crypto companies banking licenses without any banking regulation.
The bill seems to place a cap on these charges, equal to the average annual budget of the "Council", which presumably means FSOC in this context. But FSOC's budget is tiny compared to the OFR, which consumes the lion's share of the money raised by the Financial Research Fund's bank charges.
By seemingly restricting those charges to a maximum of only FSOC's average annual budget, the budget bill would de facto kill the OFR by defunding it, without the hassle of having to actually pass any legislation to do so formally (a favourite playbook of the Trump administration)
[...]
The whole point of the original 2010 Dodd-Frank Act was to bring together America's stupidly complex patchwork of regulators and prevent the kind of cataclysmic failures that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. But to do so it needed data, research and analysis, which was why the OFR was set up inside the US Treasury.
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More charming behavior from EAC members.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250524-sexually-assaulted-and-smeared-in-excrement-uganda-activist-details-torture-in-tanzania
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Ooh - Milder versions of what SP is describing do sound plausible.
I'm not clever enough to figure out exactly what they would do, but I'm nervous about Kennedy's plan to build an autism registry. I mean, your local health system has a diabetes, hypertension and depression registry. There are always errors, but they are built off of billing codes, so it might not be super hard.
And in theory, in a place like Denmark, that could be a good thing for tracking outcomes. Kennedy has made so many disparaging comments about people with disabilities, describing people with autism as being completely incapacitated and useless, that I find this terrifying. Autism is such a broad category anyway. It describes something pretty "mild" in the sense that you need help but can lead a basically normal life to people who need a lot of support to manage basic activities of daily living. This WH's pattern of going after individuals with disabilities in the Federal workforce and taking away accommodations leaves me disinclined to think their goals are gathering evidence to improve care.
There are a lot of people on the internet who will say that anyone not wearing an N95 24/7 is a Eugene cost, and I think those people are a little bit histrionic, but there is a eugenecist flavor to Trump. It goes hand in hand with the anti-intellectualism and efforts to destroy the universities.
The Genius Act sucks. Cory Booker's promise to do better (which I never took all that seriously) was reneged on within months.
Cf. https://issafrica.org/iss-today/samia-suluhu-hassan-drops-the-pretence-of-reform
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Faine Greenwood is a genuine expert on drones and makes some very good points about Ukraine's Operation Spider's Web here:
https://little-flying-robots.ghost.io/ukraines-audacious-drone-attack-some-thoughts/
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/navy-new-name-usns-harvey-milk-ships-named-for-civil-rights-leaders/
"Among them are the USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, USNS Harriet Tubman, USNS Dolores Huerta, USNS Lucy Stone, USNS Cesar Chavez and USNS Medgar Evers."
37 is really interesting, in particular this bit:
"I'll put it this way: it's really interesting that we still haven't seen a major terrorist attack using small drones outside of the context of hot wars or serious civil conflict. I'm not totally sure why this is the case, and I'd certainly never claim that it'll never happen. I assume it will eventually. We should be working hard to anticipate that it will, and technologically hardening ourselves against such an attack. But the fact that we're in the middle of 2025, almost 15 years into the modern consumer drone technological revolution, and we still haven't seen anyone successfully execute a major terrorist attack using small drones?"
I think she's slightly off here, for a couple of reasons.
First, we actually have: someone tried to kill Maduro with a couple of drones at a parade in 2018. (That's still only one, though, I suppose.)
Second, yes, we haven't seen a major terrorist attack using small drones outside of the context of hot wars or serious civil conflict. But how many major terrorist attacks outside of the context of hot wars or serious civil conflict have we seen, full stop? Here's the list. They're rare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_terrorist_incidents
Most of those are in the context of serious civil conflict, or they're Islamic militants for whom the suicide nature of the suicide attack is part of the point.
Another point: drones are precise. Not only because they can be, but because they have to be - because, as she mentions, they've got limited payload. But if you're ISIS or HAMAS or someone like that, you want to kill a lot of people indiscriminately. That's your whole thing. Hence, you know, bombs, and unguided rockets, and just rounding up and panga-ing everyone in the village.
ObChesterton: "The revolutionary is unhappy because the bomb failed to kill the tyrant. The anarchist is happy because the bomb has killed somebody."
38 is outrageous. They really are a bunch of misogynists and segregationists.
39 And you don't even really need any explosives for a mass casualty event, a large SUV or pickup truck rammed into a crowd will do the trick, and in the US at least guns are readily available.
(I know you have no way of knowing this but Faine is they/them)
Really, the thing to grasp here is that there is no such thing as data, in the super-general sense people love to use it in. Data is only ever interesting, important, or useful in the specific and the more specific the better. The generic sense is only interesting if you are thinking about how much disk space you need to keep it in. I have seen far far too many stupid projects and business ideas thinly justified by "uhhh....data", there are basically two (2) that actually work. It is true that one is Google AdSense and the other is Facebook's ad program but even so that's two and you bet they go to extreme lengths to prepare, curate, filter, validate, etc the data involved.
Even - especially! - if you are trying to train an AI model, there is no such thing as just generic data. Improving your training data set is the equivalent of improving the antenna for radio systems; it will always improve the whole thing and usually by more than any other change. Stable Diffusion worked and will run on a phone because they made an enormous heroic effort to curate the LAION data set.
(This pisses me off mightily because it is so common and so bullshitty and also because my name is on a white paper from about 2008 saying data was an asset class; I didn't believe it then and added all kinds of caveats that my then boss mostly cut out of the final text.)
So the answer to the OP question is "what specific data do you mean and to what end?"
42: good point - drones are basically very cheap, very small precision-guided munitions, and many terrorists aren't really interested in that sort of thing. Can you imagine HAMAS going "ah yes, drones! Finally an answer to the question of how we blow up military targets without risking the lives of innocent Israeli bystanders".
Improving your training data set is the equivalent of improving the antenna for radio systems; it will always improve the whole thing and usually by more than any other change.
This is, regrettably, true. Regrettably because, unlike everything else that you can change about your radio system, all of which you can change by pressing buttons and twiddling knobs while staying inside in the warm, improving your antenna tends to involve you (or rather me) going out into a blizzard in the middle of the night and climbing fifteen feet up a tree, and then climbing back down again and saying "how about now? Did that do any good?" using the tone of voice which is the direct English equivalent of num, the Latin particle which "expects the answer No".
9: people were extremely excited about this but a) the Israelis had a specifically curated database of suspects they built for the purpose not, idk, partial lists of small grant program applicants, and b) it turned out to be heartily irrelevant to the utter orgy of violence they were about to unleash, which was either completely indiscriminate or deliberately targeted on things like hospitals.
Improving a training data set also tends to involve an enormous amount of thankless scutwork, funnily enough.
9, 46 972 Magazine has done some really good reporting on this https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
I think 48 is unreliable, or at least out of date. IDF attacks now are completely indiscriminate and genocidal, or deliberately aimed at protected civilian targets with no possible military justification, like the Gaza European Hospital. The idea that they have some special software looking for HAMAS members and are following its guidance is ludicrous - they're just trying to kill everyone.
50 I believe it is reliable and was picked up elsewhere (though 972 broke it) but you are correct that is very much out of date.
51 again me (the hazards of commenting incognito mode on my work computer)
Incidentally I just finished this harrowing piece in NYRB by 2 Israeli doctors and one Israeli professor of international and humanitarian law about the complicity of Israel's medical establishment in a slew of horrific human rights abuses https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/05/31/the-shame-of-israeli-medicine/
More than 400 soldiers have reportedly been killed by insurgents since the start of May in bases and towns in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, an unstable region prone to coups. Sunday's attack in central Mali hit a military base in Boulkessi, near the border with Burkina Faso. The Malian army said in a statement it had been forced to pull back after dogged defence, but gave no casualty numbers.
meanwhile our Chinese competitors have their priorities right, they've finetuned YOLOX to identify whether chefs in an open kitchen environment are wearing their standard chef hats.
This is ByteDance Volcano Engine, the cloud services side of the TikTok company, so you better believe they know whether you're wearing a chef hat in your sexy clips.
Root access to systems across government means they have the on/off switch for the coup.
OT, but I'm sitting quietly listening to a large and disorderly meeting, and wondering what people think about this question:
Which of these would you perceive as ruder?
B in this scenario: A is talking and B interrupts mid-sentence
Or B in this scenario: B is talking, A interrupts when they're mid-sentence, and B keeps talking over A
In the moment I think I would perceive scenario 2 as ruder but thinking about it rationally scenario 1 is ruder.
Ultimately, of course, it really depends on the gender of A and B.
59: I think it might be a gender issue because I am noticing, unscientifically, that it's generally women doing the first one and it's generally men doing the second. (I'm not any of the As or Bs in this scenario. I'm just sitting quietly at the back.)
The other gender split is on Teams meetings, interestingly - women are much more likely to indicate they want to speak by clicking the wee raise-hand button. Men tend to treat Teams meetings like in-person meetings and just say things. I'm talking about fairly small meetings here, like ten people or less. In huge meetings it tends to be much more rigorously chaired and no one speaks without clicking the raise-hand button first.
In general, I'd say 1 is ruder.
I think the reverse could be true, depending on the track records of A and B. Is A wasting time? How likely is it that B will say anything worth hearing? How likely is it that A will gracefully yield the floor after speaking over B?
More important, did B make polite efforts (raised hand, helmet on table, whatever) to be heard before interrupting?
58: They both seem fine.
58: It's interesting that there's even a debate about this. Surely (all things being equal) the first scenario is generally rude and the second is generally not.
But of course it depends on the reason for the interruption. And being rude isn't necessarily a worse crime than being off-topic or disorganized.
Kinda depends on how long B has been talking. If you like to monologue then you have to accept interruptions.
58 is interesting. It feels like 1 should be ruder than 2, but my clear gut reaction is to go with 2. Like everyone else says, you need a lot more context and genders to know how this specific situation is playing out.
What it's drawing my attention to is that the quality of the interruption in 1 matters. Not all interruptions are equally rude. (Maybe I'm drawn to this because I'm terrible about interrupting people and try to work on it.) There's interrupting to build on what the other person is saying and almost champion their point, and then there's interrupting to stomp on what the other person is saying and diminish their point.
If the interrupter is doing the champion model, then they also have an obligation to wrap it up quick and let the originator resume their point, but they're not being that rude, and talking over them would be worse.
If the interrupter is doing the stomp-and-diminish model, then they're capitalizing on etiquette norms to control the other person, and the other person is escalating the situation by talking louder over the interrupter. But in this case, escalating isn't necessarily the ruder option. It's just fighting back.
There's also a middle ground - interrupting because the speaker is boring and you just want to change topics. That kinda depends on reading the group - is everyone bored and annoyed with the speaker? Or is the interrupter wrecking the point of someone who is holding everyone's attention? Definitely context-specific.
I think there's a sort of body-language dance that happens on these occasions in person, which I think is the missing component. Like, sometimes I will interrupt someone by mistake, because I think they've reached the end of what they're saying and are inviting replies, when in fact they're just pausing. Normally what happens is I think (I'm not sure because this is largely instinctive and unconscious) that we both stop talking and they make a sort of "I'm not finished here" face and I then stop talking and make a sort of apologetic noise and allow them to carry on.
But this is all happening at an almost reflex level. So it's weird (and rude, I think) if A interrupts B and B makes the "i'm still talking" face and A ignores it and just steams on, and it's equally weird if A interrupts B and B just carries on talking and ignores A.
I agree with 68.
One of the Geeblets in particular is deadly for having extremely long monologues and getting furious if anyone tries to contribute.
58: I can't answer the question, because if there's a Teams meeting, I'm almost certainly taking a nap.
You could use that time productively by reading Wikipedia articles on Allied logistics in World War 2.
Today I learned that Moby is living in the bookshelf behind my desk.
71, 72: Ok, which of you sent me down the rabbithole that included both the A-10 and whatever type of Studebaker truck it was that the Soviets loved in WWII? I learned that most of them came up through Iran rather than across northern seas, which makes sense.
I also learned that the Great Toyota War was a real thing. It was a longish meeting.
It might not make as much sense as it appears when you think about transit times.
Let's say it's late 1942, you're building that Studebaker truck in Detroit and you want to get it to the Red Army in, for the sake of argument, Moscow. You put it on a Liberty ship in Detroit, and off it goes.
Detroit - Bandar Shahpur: 48 days (via the Cape of Good Hope of course - sailing convoys through the Med is a no-no at this point).
Then you put it on a train and it goes off to Teheran and Bandar Shah on the Caspian (say two days?), then by ship to Baku and up the Volga (another ten days at least).
Total, sixty days. And you've tied up your Liberty ship for 100 days making that delivery - 48 days each way plus loading and unloading at each end.
Or, you send the Liberty ship to Liverpool instead (11 days) and it gets crossdecked into another Liberty ship (2 days) and sails to Archangel (8 days) and then train to Moscow (2 days). 23 days total. And you've tied up your ships for just 40 days.
You've only got a finite number of Liberty ships and that means that each year you only have a finite number of ship-days to use (and there are a colossal number of things that need moving from place to place all competing for those ship-days) so you really want to spend them as wisely as you can. The Persian corridor is expensive in ship-days per truck delivered.
And, yes, the Arctic convoy route is a lot more dangerous than going round the Cape and up to the Persian Gulf, but you're getting a much bigger payoff. And most of the ships you send will probably make it OK. 94% chance.
ajay @ 58: Deborah Tannen wrote a book about this (that I read in the late 80s). In that book she described research that had been done on this very subject (interruptions and how they played out -- whether speakers continued, stopped, and whether, if they stopped, they resumed later, or were handed back the mic by others), and found that -systematically-
(a) men interrupt more
(b) when men interrupt women, the women more often stop, than when women interrupt men
(b) when someone is interrupted, women are more apt to hand back the mic to that person later to resume
I remember reading that some researchers had done follow-on work when all-female schools like Vassar started admitting male students, and found that, yeah, even a small percentage of males in the classroom -completely- changed the dynamics in the ways Tannen had described.
75. She has also written specifically about an NYC style of speaking, where frequent interruption is expected and accepted as asign of enthusiasm.
Agreed that identity of the speakers (basically information density of their speech-- interrupting someone interesting and informative for anything other than clarification or confirmation is bad, interrupting a windbag or a management shill is fine). Also of course size of group and expected formality level-- shouting from the audience is bad.
Here's the New York style essay, with 1981 New Yorker ads for legniappe: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5523ffe4e4b012b2c4ebd8fc/t/56c4e00cf8baf3808c58f077/1455742988945/Talking+New+York.pdf
74: So why'd they do it then? The Allies weren't perfect, but it doesn't seem like they were systematically stupid. My first guess would be other bottlenecks between Archangelsk and the front.
Wiki says that it was the only all-weather route and adds that from 1943 the Mediterranean was passable by Allied shipping again. Although the chart accompanying the Lend-Lease article shows that less than 1m tons went via the Med. Same chart shows 8.2m tons crossing the Pacific, 4.1m around Africa and up through Persia, 3.9m across the North Atlantic. So maybe the issue was Soviet capacity somewhere?
Or lack of capacity? Trucks might be able propel themselves across gaps in the rail network, or on and off barges without cranes.
Or lack of capacity? Trucks might be able propel themselves across gaps in the rail network, or on and off barges without cranes.
That's what's great about blogs. I am constantly interrupting all of you, halfway through reading your comment, and it appears polite.
More threat to the ports around the Black Sea / less capacity at the safe ports, maybe?
By 1943 only one berth of all [Novorossiysk Sea Port] facilities remained intact. The State Defense Committee ordered the reconstruction to begin, as soon as 1 October 1944, NSP was officially reopened.
Maybe they figures that spreading out the shipments forced the U-boats to spread out more and that the Archangelsk route would have lost more ships if the U-boats were all that way? Or maybe most of the trains from Archangelsk ran through Leningrad?
Which is covered in 78, but I'm just guessing on the why.
Maybe the ships to Persia were bringing back something needed. Pistachios? Oil? I don't know anything else that comes from there.
Telegram bandwidth being constrained in wartume.
Oil moved by tanker, and ME oil went to Britain.
A finite, but constantly changing, number of ships.
Maybe just the vagaries of the submarine war: that the Azores route happened to be in favor when more trucks were being shipped.
Or trucks preferentially being carried as deck cargo, and more seawater splashing on thenorthern route.
Have you ever had really good pistachios?
When pistachios were these red nuts you got from gas station vending machines, my uncle was sending bags of beautiful undyed pistachios from Iran. Until he had to leave very quickly.
Lots of reasons, I suspect. Limited capacity in the ports on the Atlantic/Arctic route - don't forget that route has to supply Britain and North Africa as well, and later on Italy. Limited capacity within the US - if you're building something in California it might be harder to get it across the country to an Atlantic port, while Long Beach is right there. And Limited capacity in the USSR.
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Relevant for heebie's college list blog
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/06/06/metro/clark-university-enrollment-layoffs-worcester/
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Maryland people talk at a regular speed but some people are too slow to pick it up.
89 not during the war, if I remember my Edgerton - the UK switched almost entirely to Caribbean oil.
40: Odd to see an apologist for Israel's bombardment of Gaza with between 70,000 and 100,000 tons of explosives criticizing other people's bombing methodologies. Post-1945, has anyone who could vaguely be described as an "anarchist" exploded even 1 ton of explosives? Even if you're including the RAF and similar left-communist groupings, anarchist bombs have amounted to little more than minor fireworks displays for the better part of a century. Meanwhile, of course, "democracies" have bombed millions of civilians right out of existence, from Palestine to Vietnam to Philadelphia.
50 to 102 (it did not go unnoticed).
Also, you should really sign your comments.
102 I don't think GK Chesteron can hear you, son.
Also, is there maybe another political tendency which one could also defend by saying "they haven't really hurt anyone much since 1945"?
Prussian militarism has entered the chat?
I'll say this for Pol Pot and Chairman Mao, at least they didn't use bombs!
I'm having vague memories of Bush I making a speech implying Saddam was worse than Hitler because Hitler at least respected the sovereignty of embassies.
There's a guy at the gym on the pull-up bar with a thirty pound dumbbell held between his legs as he hangs. There's got to be a better way.
Sixty pounds, held the same way. But he's pushing up with his arms. Not sure what you call that.
112: a dip? on a U-shaped horizontal bar?
114: Yes, with handles. He did not drop the weights in at least two sets.
Tell him I said he must be very strong.
I'm long gone from the weight room.
Is it a crossfit thing? Because I've noticed a lot of things that look like they are designed to create injuries are crossfit things.
105: Are you saying you're pro-Ustaše now too?
On the interruption thing -- I'm an interrupty New Yorker. I interrupt, or at least start talking when my interlocutor has not clearly finished, all the time and do not perceive myself as being rude. While it's not super conscious, I believe I'm waiting for body-language/tone signals that an interruption is okay, because there are definitely people who never send those signals and then I wait and get frustrated. So situation A usually doesn't seem rude to me, either when I'm interrupting or getting interrupted. What feels a little rude to me is taking an overly long conversational turn without allowing interruption.
OTOH, I'm a litigator and I'm in conflictual conversation fairly frequently, and that's the only time situation B ever comes up for me -- if someone interrupts me inappropriately (in my opinion) and I keep talking. And that feels wildly hostile when I'm doing it: I don't know if rude is exactly right, I wouldn't do it if I didn't think I was justified. But it's about as hostile as saying "C'mon, fight me" and making a little beckoning gesture.
I don't think I've ever been in a B situation from the other end -- continuing to interrupt despite the fact that the initial speaker wasn't allowing it -- and I think it's because that is so rude that I am not capable of doing it. Most interruptions are (grudgingly or not) consented to by the initial speaker, who stops talking. If the initial speaker doesn't stop talking, and the interrupter keeps going, the interrupter is being very rude by not giving up the interruption-attempt, and the interruptee is going nuclear in response.
All of this is very sensitive to the specifics of how long the conversational event takes.
To put it another way, I think it's easier to identify when something very rude is happening than to be sure which person is out of line.
122 does sound quite pro-Ustase, I must admit. (Because of the international Zionist conspiracy, I can't work out how to do the little thingy over the s.)
My health insurance company wants me to do PT, but with AI instead of a physical therapist. I think I'm going to start seeing a physical therapist in person because my joints do hurt, but fuck AI.
I went to an orthopedist for my self-diagnosed cubital tunnel syndrome in my elbow, and he thinks it's actually coming from my neck, and now I'm all freaked out.
Your elbow is coming out of your neck? That should have been noticed earlier.
re: 125
I had the same thing (NHS doctor/physio). The diagnosis was that there was some kind of nerve entrapment in the neck/should area, and I was prescribed Alexander Technique style exercises with a physio (actually with the Dr but a Dr with physio training). I don't know if it really cured me, but it helped a bit. The exercises were all about alignment of the spine and head, and nerve gliding type things.
I've got a pinched nerve in my neck that causes trouble in my shoulder. In our modern age, the doctor was able to show me on a screen the specific nerve that ran from my neck to the spot on my shoulder. He couldn't dumb it down enough to explain why the shoulder should hurt and not the neck or anywhere else along that nerve.
PT has done me a world of good in several situations, and AI PT seems ... kinda plausible, actually.
I'm trying to start a Butlerian Jihad.
He's trying to block regulations on AI.
https://politicalwire.com/2025/06/09/doge-transmitted-reams-of-white-house-data/
Sinners was terrific!
And also, after seeing it in a theater I got to my train station well after midnight and as I started walking home I noticed the nearly full moon low in the sky and it was blood red.
My health insurance company wants me to do PT, but with AI instead of a physical therapist.
Kind of curious what they mean by "AI." I've seen some things where it's more like "AI-infused". Somewhere in the supply chain or the production chain or maybe just the marketing department is a product that claims to involve "AI" but the thing you get as a customer is as intelligent as a phone tree or a series of menus.
My health provider had an "intelligent" "agent" call me to remind me to watch a video before an appointment and it insisted on modeling a conversation when it could have just said "watch the video." Instead it was a series of questions. Do you know you have an appointment? Did you get the link to the video? Are you going to watch the video? I assume if there was any AI in there, it was speech recognition instead of "press 1 for yes, 2 for no."
127: that makes me feel a little better. I keep thinking that if this happened in my 40s, it's a grim prognosis for the next few decades.
Do you know if it was a sleeping thing, or a posture thing, or an injury, or what?
139: Sorry for observing. Next time I'll check the velocity and the color will remain unknowable.
140: It's looking more like a Wii Fit Yoga, but without the hot animated lady praising you after each exercise. I should probably look into it. I am in pain very often.
My ankle that doesn't hurt very often has the pointy bit on the inside tray sticks out more every year older I get. The ankle that usually hurts has a heel that's easily 150% larger than the other one.
Rent-free in my head since yesterday.
147 reminds me of this old joke:
f you tell the Army "Secure that building!" They will surround it with armor and heavy infantry and not let anyone out of it until told to
If you tell the Marines "Secure that building!" They will storm the building, eliminate any resistance, and allow no one to enter it until told to.
If you tell the Navy "Secure that building!" They will turn out the lights, close and lock all doors and windows and post a fire watch
If you tell the Air Force "Secure that building!" They will take out a 30 year lease with an option to buy.
I knew the version where the navy ties the building down securely so it can't wash overboard.
147 is one reason why we don't say vague things like "cover me". If you mean "watch that building and shoot at anyone who pops up with a weapon" it's "watch and shoot". If you mean "curtain of fire to keep heads down" it's "covering fire", and you'd ideally make it part of a fire control order unless you'd already identified the target to everyone - naming the people you want to fire, identifying the target, and specifying a type of fire (for Doctor Who fans this is "Jenkins, chap with wings there, five rounds rapid".)
Because of course, as everyone should know, suppressive fire isn't, unless it is landing one round every five seconds within one metre of the enemy being suppressed. If he's on the top floor right, you can pour as many rounds as you like into the second floor left, and it won't bother him at all.
The US Marines are, god knows, a little more joyous and carefree in their attitude to fire and movement (some of their tactical decisions on joint exercises have caused me to become very quiet and thoughtful) but if they just heard "cover me" and went full-on Lebanese unload with live rounds in peacetime on a building in downtown LA then I hope the NCO in charge got a very firm talking to at least.
Wiki, incidentally, agrees that this incident actually happened - I would otherwise have been doubtful for the very reason that it sounds rather like a joke or an urban legend, especially since the skeet is basically "this dude I know assures me it happened" rather than "I have heard this from a named eyewitness" - but cites a paywalled source that I can't read (HKS case study "The Flawed Emergency Response to the 1992 Los Angeles Riots") so I don't know how reliable it is. For all I know HKS just has a citation reading "This Dude I Know, pers. comm., 1993").
This article says it happened but cites a self-published book that isn't by an eyewitness either. https://www.mca-marines.org/wp-content/uploads/1992-Riots-in-Los-Angeles.pdf
Also says that CJ Chivers, now a reasonably competent journalist working for the NY Times, was a Marine officer who was deployed in Los Angeles - interesting.
In the UK there would have been a public inquiry into the 1992 riots and one would be able to check the inquiry report and recommendations - don't know what the US equivalent would be?
There was a commission appointed by the then-mayor of Los Angeles. It was headed by future Secretary of State Warren Christopher, so I strongly suspect that there were also consultations with the Clinton White House about it form, remit, and personnel. The Wikipedia article links to the commission's report.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Commission
Cursory research shows that there was a separate commission that looked into the conduct of the LA Sherriff's office. I don't know if there was a Congressional inquiry as well, or how broad the mandates of the commissions were.
The Christopher Commission seems to have been looking at the LAPD and its many failings, not the riots and the response to them.
Cursory research is all I'm gonna do. Anyway, the answer to what the US equivalent would be is that a Congressional inquiry would be the most direct (banned?) analogue, but that in practice an inquiry could be done from the local, state or federal level.
I was older than I probably should have been before I worked out that cursory research did not mean "research done hastily and reluctantly, while muttering rude words".
154.2 I tried to obtain a free copy but I needed to create an account for educator access (which I have just done) only it takes about two days to process.
"Early humans were cursorial hunters" - picturing Stone Age man loping across the Kenyan savannah muttering "bloody antelopes, off they go again, I have had it up to here with those bastards, I just wanted to have some roots and berries but we've got her bloody mother coming for dinner again and of course she's got to have antelope..."