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Dan Quayle lost a serious bid because he couldn't spell potato.

Now look at where we're at. It really is wild. Right, wrong, or indifferent. How far we've shifted is absolutely wild.


Dan Quayle also had the charisma of a potato. Let's not overfit this curve.

Morels are find as long as you cook them and don't eat look-alikes. The look alikes that I'm aware of (false morels and mule tails) don't really even look like morels.

They're 100% worth the very negligible risk.


My father was a mechanic and crew chief working on F-14's during his time in the air force. His two takeaways from his service were: 1. No one should ever join the military for any reason ever forever, and 2. Somebody needs to color code literally anything.

He talked about how the wiring schematics were a maze, made worse by using only non-labeled gray and black wires with connections and mounts that were the same color made of the same material.

The exterior being gray makes sense - harder to see with human eyes. But internals? They should be massively contrasting colors for every single series of pieces to be removed so you can just follow along by color.


Tangentially, this reminds me of stories from my dad who got some kind of special award for having made their ship radar the best in the fleet.

Sometime before that, he got a lot of flak for having neglected one of the standing rules, to label everything as you take it apart and put it back "the way you found it". He decided to break it down and put it back the way the technical documentation said it should actually go. This seems to be part of the reason his radar performed better than the others after teardown maintenance.


I worked on military avionics in a previous life and all of the planes I worked on had miles of white wires. The reasons given to us were:

1. Cost savings when buying.

2. There are hundreds to thousands of wires in an aircraft, but there are NOT hundreds to thousands of different colors of wires (even if we allow for stripes, etc) that are readily distinguishable to an overworked airman hunched over in a dim, cramped avionics bay trying to fix a plane that needs to take off for a mission in an hour.

If you are lucky, the wires are numbered. But even if they are, you typically identify a wire by its connector pin and PRAY that the fault isn't a break somewhere back in the wiring harness.


I'd also mention that black lasermarked white wire has marvelous contrast, even in the dim, covered in dust. Black lasermarked (or god help you, heatstamped) wire on damn near any other colour, like one finds in automotive, is distinctly worse.

Yellow would be manageable, but the wrong shade of red, purple, green, or blue (wihch, when seperating systems by colour, would inevitably get used) would be shitty to work on


Cheaper to buy huge spools of gray clad wiring than a lot of different color coded wires? Also you don't have to stock a lot of different colors for repairs.

Unfortunately when you get enough conductors you start running out of insulator colors and start running into the problems copper telephone lines had - using pairs of colors (base with stripe) and tracing get pretty hard at that point.

Surely you mean F-15 right? (F-14 was exclusive to the Navy + Iran exports)

Womp womp. Yes. F15. Somewhere my father is screaming.

We just bought a vizio to replace one that broke. Once you skip the setup process, all you need to do is remove the solder from the 'home' button on the remote or whatever it is and you'll never see their pop up crap again.

I get why people like this, though. It takes all of your accounts and puts them in one place. Honestly, if I could run Plex and my own media through it, it would be tempting to just block it from dialing out and get rid of my Nvidia shield.


I have a chromecast with google tv plugged into mine. Not sure what it's called these days. Chromecast Home?

It comes with a super minimalist remote that does volume and a d-pad and on/off and a remappable netflix button. My tv's original remote is... Somewhere. It's been more than a year since I've needed it.

Both the chromecast and my xbox uses hdmi-cec to instruct the tv to "switch your input to me". The chromecast remote controls the tv volume directly.

I have an Emby media server on the network, and I use the emby app on the chromecast to play content. I'm also a sellout so we have the standard streaming apps on there as well.

It's a truly god-tier setup and it works so well.


Yeah, the current Chromecast on an HDMI port is far superior than anything the TV vendors offer. I think you pretty much get access to every service you might want except Apple TV (no surprise, Apple gonna Apple).

Apple tv is available on my chromecast?

Yeah there's an appletv android app.

That's my main setup too. Sometimes still need to main TV remote but not often.

I tried to describe to my kid the sound of a 5.25" floppy disc the other day. MMWA MWA mmmmmm MWAMWA mmmmmmm.

He has seen 3.5" discs, but never the large floppies. His mind almost exploded when I talked about games needing 7 or 8 discs and hitting certain points where the game would pause while you put a new disc in.


According to the Google search I just did, an average American hypersonic missile costs between 13 and 41 million dollars.

So that is between 131 and 410 of these. At that rate, and with enough disdain for my enemy and apathy for their people, I can just launch a shit load of them in the right direction and cross my fingers.


the concept of 'The average hypersonic..' makes me laugh.

in actuality the concept of equating real life dollars to defense budgets makes me laugh, too. It's not really a money thing, it's a production thing; and even if it were to be considered as a money thing the values involved in no way reflect a real life value.

It's like the NASA hammer story/packard commission. They're not going to say no to a 435 dollar hammer versus a zillion dollar project, but it's not actually a 435 dollar hammer.. .

Similarly a 41 million dollar weapon only costs that much until a wartime powers clause forfeits your factory to state production..


> Similarly a 41 million dollar weapon only costs that much until a wartime powers clause forfeits your factory to state production.

I seriously doubt such clauses still exist today. The entrenchment of the MIC in the US political structure is so deep and stretches for so long, that they have probably managed to avoid having such clauses by now. After all, that's their obligation to their shareholders.

Also, the more high-tech the weapon, the more complex and fragile are its supply chain logistcs. So, scaling up the production of high-tech weapons is much harder, especially in wartime.


No till requires access to first world country technology to make work. No till in the United States and similar countries is very very very established practice. It's not less work by any means, it's just a different kind of work with different machinery.

Source: was full time farmer until Grandpa died.

I'm guessing less developed countries still till the soil? I have no idea.


I don't think politicians across the board are corrupt. I think they're just surrounded by syncophants and special interest. Also the old absolute power corrupts, absolutely sort of thing.

I can't be convinced people go into politics twiddling their mustaches like a cartoon villain. I think that they go into it either to genuinely help, or because they like the attention. Then the system surrounds then with people who either take small bites of their ethics, or agree with anything for the chance to be powerful as well.

Is there a solution? I'm not sure there is.


The difference is the physical aspect of the trades. The design for wiring can be (and already has been) automated, but you physically need an electrician on site to pull the wires. So I can see a hollowing out of the engineers, but not the actual electricians.

That being said, the absolute focus on trades from the fed right now just reeks of the wild pendulum swing. It used to be 'go to college to get a good job' then we had too many college grads. In ten years we'll have a glut of people trained in the trades with no prospects.

It just keeps swinging back and forth and somehow Joe Regularworker keeps losing.


Indeed. If you squint a little, it kind of looks like the machines are trying to shift to a world where we are just meat puppets to do the tricky stuff there aren't robotics for (yet). :(

Cory Doctorow's "The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI" [1] agrees with you:

"<...> a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine."

[1] https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-12-05...


Or humans are just the "sex organs" that work to bring about the artificial life-forms that come next.

Have you seen what Unitree G1 can already do? I see the writing on the walls for going onsite and pulling wires.

Yeah, things change. What do you propose to do about that? The only people who lose are the ones who can't accept that they may need to change careers to make more money.

Cheating in Warhammer is both the bravest and dumbest thing to try. The people that play that are usually SUPER into the game and absolutely will call you out if there are any tells at all.

Only MtG has a more rabid fan base, I think.


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