I’ve always liked this portrait of Bach, because it looks like he stopped reading because you just said something shockingly stupid. pic.twitter.com/q2MpwOYakL
— Jean-Michel Connard 🎃 (@torriangray) July 29, 2023
Something like this, perhaps?
that's nice. he's not going to though https://t.co/QYc8zjJ7tr
— flglmn (@flglmn) July 28, 2023
that's true but on the other hand it is a lot easier to put six dead people at the bottom of the ocean than 1,000 dead people on venus
— flglmn (@flglmn) July 28, 2023
Crucially he said nothing about wanting to bring them back
— Alex Peterson (@AxonsReplete) July 28, 2023
Because we’re gonna need some kind of guillotine-energy entertainment, watching the EELEET suffer their own consequences, and of course Elmo has already wimped out on his ‘challenge’…
no shit.
good thing "tech journalists" wrote 75,000 articles about ithttps://t.co/5BD9yyv23a
— Karl Bode (@KarlBode) July 28, 2023
spotted in downtown Las Vegas pic.twitter.com/DYmfHxdQ4n
— kristen desilva (@kristendesilva) July 29, 2023
Okay, maybe the Apartheid Princeling’s not the worst Worst Person, but surely he’s qualified for the Worst-Person Olympics?
it’s not that i think elon musk is the worst person alive so much as i think his wealth, power, stupidity and arrogance create big opportunities for the actual worst people alive to thrive
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) July 27, 2023
At least take advantage of other peoples’ ideas (the actual EM skillset), and do something fun with your money, dammit!
i am dying at this context note pic.twitter.com/TcTnUHM0Pt
— David Mack (@davidmackau) July 29, 2023
dmsilev
Anybody who goes to Venus deserves, well, to go to Venus. It’s pretty much the closest realization of Hell that our Solar System has to offer.
Kristine
Some people just have too much damn money.
Yarrow
Can all the billionaires please go to Venus.
Westyny
I didn’t CM Kornbluth was working for OceanGate.
Another Scott
@dmsilev: +1
Its day being longer than its year is yet another clue that it’s not for humans.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
The co-founder of the exploding mini sub business seems like he enjoys killing people by talking them into taking extreme risks for a lot of actual money. He seems to think big, I know this will sound weird but I wonder if he thinks in the metric system and thinks that 8mm is a big _ _ _ _? Or is his name _ _ _ _ or does he think that his brain is in his _ _ _ _? Because his _ _ _ _ is involved in at least on of these scenarios.
sdhays
I don’t care about the cage match, I just want those fuckers put in a cage where they can no longer do any harm.
Alison Rose
Zuck’s got bigger boobs than I do. What would make the gender essentialists more frothy — Zuck’s rack or my near lack of one?
sdhays
And it’s impressive how quickly that Oceans Gate founder has moved on from killing his cofounder, some other rich people, and an unfortunate 19 year old pressured to join a doomed trip with his asshole father.
NotMax
Did someone say Venus?
:)
anitamargarita
Is that a Border Collie? Looks like regular collie to me, or a fat little Shellie
sheltie, argh
Chetan Murthy
@anitamargarita: now that you mentioned it, yes that ain’t no border collie. That’s Lassie’s chubby brother.
dmsilev
This is amazing: Trump PAC has spent more than $40 million on legal costs this year for himself, others
$40 million in half a year. And his legal troubles are only accelerating. And yet, his donors will continue to donate. That’s the amazing part.
Another Scott
@anitamargarita: +1
Cheers,
Scott.
Ken
@dmsilev: Offhand the only post-1960s* SF I recall where people lived on the surface of Venus was Varley’s “In the Bowl”, which used an indistinguishable-from-magic forcefield technology.
A few writers have had balloon cities floating in the high atmosphere, where the temperature and pressure are almost survivable and all you have to worry about is the sulfuric acid clouds and the lack of oxygen.
* Before the Mariner and Venera probes spoiled everything. Earlier SF often had tropical jungles and dinosaurs on Venus.
dmsilev
Sounds legit…
From a blog post on his website,
Yeah, somehow the whole “clouds made of sulfuric acid” thing would seem to be a bit of a turnoff for most people.
Keith P.
@dmsilev: I dunno…if it could be seeded with enough thermophiles, maybe in 10-20k years it could be terraformed into a lush world.
But like Mars, if we’re sending people out there in bulk, it’s as a prison world.
dmsilev
@Keith P.:
“Venus is a Harsh Mistress”
Chetan Murthy
@dmsilev: Seems to require enough off-planet industry for metals and other inputs, that you might as well set up your colony where all that industrial action is happening. I mean, you can’t do any mining on the *surface*.
Brachiator
Is this serious? Guy must be doing some serious designer drugs.
Has anyone done a good SF novel about a floating city on Venus? Sounds like an interesting idea for a fantasy novel.
West of the Rockies
@dmsilev:
Fine. Let the stupids waste their money.
Ohio Mom
@Kristine: Yes. This.
Anne Laurie
It would not be possible to fit a normal-sized human male into a Border Collie body, even at an increased scale. ‘Standard’ Collies come from Border-Collie roots, and the heavy fur coat disguises the human-shape torso much more discretely.
The suit-wearer could’ve gone with black-and-white instead of sable-and-white, but there *are* sable (well, red merle — AKC color names vary across breeds) Border Collies, so the combination is not impossible.
(Of course, it’s also possible the suit-maker simply misunderstood the assignment, but for $20K, surely there must’ve been work-in-progress sketches?)
Although my own suspicion is that the NYPost headline writer just misunderstood what he was told…
Ken
@Brachiator: Wikipedia has pages for both fiction and fact. I don’t see anything on the fiction page specifically about floating cities.
They (briefly) appear in Charles Stross’s Saturn’s Children, though the inhabitants had the advantage of not being human — though even they wouldn’t survive the surface.
Chetan Murthy
@Ken: fact? where?
Ken
@Chetan Murthy: I meant “fact” in the sense of the science and the very few (and very unlikely) possibilities that it allows. Though maybe we need to reassess the likelihood, given that one guy thinks it should be no problem to pull off in 25 years. After all, he’s rich…
Anoniminous
Not only is there no point to establishing colonies on Mars, Venus, or the moon given what we know about the long term biological effects of zero and low g environments outside the Van Allen belt the colonists would arrive at the planet with new and interesting cancers from radiation and brains of snot.
(also)
anitamargarita
@Anne Laurie: ok , so given all that , what kind of border collies do they have in these off earth worlds? Short-legged rough collies or Sheltie pancakes? Inquiring minds…can we get a congressional hearing?
Anoniminous
Just living in an enclosed environment with limited social interaction is damaging to the brain.
Brain Changes in Response to Long Antarctic Expeditions
“Studies in animals have shown that exposure to environmental monotony and social isolation have deleterious effects on the brain, particularly in reducing the generation of new neurons in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus. Whether stressors associated with prolonged isolation lead to similar impairments in brain plasticity in humans is not known. To evaluate the effects of physical and social deprivation on the hippocampus, we conducted a study involving persons who had participated in polar expeditions, which are characterized by environmental monotony and prolonged physical and social isolation.”
The number of people in the Antarctic vary from ~4,000 to ~1,000, approximating the projected population on that stupid floating whatever.
eversor
@Chetan Murthy:
IIRC all of these crackpot plans seem to involve AI drones doing all sorts of mining of asteroids for materials (which drone mining of asteroids is not a completely batshit idea) and have space station type structures for manufacturing things and growing food or producing water (also not completely crazy). This, in and of itself, while a long way off, is stuff non insane people are talking about and looking into.
This is all way out though and is largely talked about in the context of building stuff around the earth or doing stuff on the moon. You know, the boring infrastructure, staging, research, and figuring out what you are doing phase of things. There’s no dick waving or bragging in that, like there is in Venus or Mars. So our rich overlords are trying to rush past that and go for the big win.
Exploration is awesome. But tons of people get killed in horrible ways in the process. It’s quaint to point out that “we” found the New World and look how great that went. Even if you leave out all the horrors inflicted on the native populations who got here first, shit loads of people died in horrible fucking ways. Many just in the journey.
The cynic and dark side of me thinks they are going to institute some sort of “how we settled Australia” system. Where we just ship convicts, debtors, and the desperate there and leave them on their own in what turns out to be a place where everything is trying to kill you all the damn time.
Before you get “we came, we saw, we conquered” you always get “we tried, we died, a lot”.
ColoradoGuy
The Border Collie fur suit would be even more impressive if the owner could take a whiz on a fire hydrant.
mrmoshpotato
Will he include himself in the 1000 rich shits he kills by 2050?
NobodySpecial
To be fair, it’s not like these guys know a lot about heavy lifting. They probably just handwave it like magic. I admit I’d love to see a satellite orbiting Venus’s upper atmosphere just to map the weather, since Venus is marginally more habitable than Mars.
mrmoshpotato
@Kristine:
Ain’t that the truth!
Mel
@Chetan Murthy: Absolutely! Rough Collie, not Border Collie.
Lassie’s lesser known brother Assie, perhaps?
Sister Golden Bear
@Anoniminous: I’ve seen various videos on YouTube by people who were posted at the base at the South Pole. It’s notable that that a good amount of space in the building is devoted to physical and mental stimulation — gym, basketball (and volleyball?) court, library, gaming room, movie rooms, etc.
mrmoshpotato
@dmsilev: Hot damn there are a lot of racist, misogynistic dumbasses in this country that will fork over money to a known conman.
rikyrah
@dmsilev:
One born every minute😒
Danielx
@dmsilev:
He has no other discernible talents, but he knows how to separate marks from their cash.
eversor
@NobodySpecial:
True enough. The thing that catches my interest are the moons around Saturn. We know Titan and Encladus have water.
I get the feeling a lot of the fascination with Mars, and I guess now Venus as well, is that they are relatively easy targets to reach. I also think their prominence in science fiction of all types is the exact sort of thing that attracts the sort of billionaire nutters like Elon.
eversor
@dmsilev:
No, it’s really not. You know why he won the primaries? He got the Christian vote. Know who his biggest supporters are? Christians. Know who turned down all the vaxcines, created the rally before Jan 6 to hype it up, most likely to believe the big lie, who dominated Jan 6 with their crosses/flags/prayers? Christians.
The same group of people who dutifully contribute to the collection plate, follow Orban/Putin (and dragged the GOP to that, it came from the churches not the top), and contribute to anything that says it’s going to help them take back the culture/nation.
Trump didn’t create this, he just realized there was a giant group of suckers and they all have the same symbol and read the same book. He even expressed shock at how quick they came around when he started talking about abortion and othere culture issues.
Trumps just doing what the Church has done for ages now. Shit he’d have better luck making himself some sort of Pope or mega church preacher than hes had at any of his business ventures. Also, it would be tax free!
NobodySpecial
@eversor: Yep, especially the kind of 50s and 60s fash curious scifi they seem to pattern themselves after.
Amir Khalid
@Ken:
Oh, it’ll take a lot more than 25 years to put a human colony anywhere on Venus. Even if you could get Weylan-Yutani Corp involved. I’m thinking it will be a 75-year, multi-quadrillion dollar project at the very least.
Steeplejack
Power still out (since 5:00 p.m.) here at Sighthound Hall and environs. Not clear how widespread. But 81,000 Dominion customers are out in this area.
I went to my apartment a while ago to get USB lamp, flashlight and ice chest. So Chip and I are huddling by lamplight, thankful for Kindle and charged devices.
I left one light switched to the “on” position to alert me if the power comes back on.
Chetan Murthy
@Amir Khalid: Charlie Stross once estimated the # of people it would take to put a self-sustaining colony on Mars at the level of tech required to build the iPhone. Why self-sustaining? B/c you can’t supply it from Earth — it’s too damn expensive to do so. The number of people was 100m. Yes: a hundred million people. It makes complete sense, when you remember that you have to regenerate all the infrastructure for everything required to build the phone, and the infra to build that infra, etc. All the machines, all the machines to make machines, all the mining, smelting, fabrication, and all the people who know how to do all that, repair all that, teachers to teach them, etc.
Now do that for Venus. Without being able to touch the ground and do any mining. You’d have to put that 100m person colony in space, someplace where there are minerals (the asteroid belt). And once you have it there, why on *Venus* would you put a colony on Venus? What could you get there, that would justify the cost, that you couldn’t get from asteroids?
It’s nonsensical. People dreaming of a colony on Venus when there’s nothing there for us. And if there were, robotic probes could just dip into the atomsphere, harvest it, and bring it back out. No need for humans there.
I mean, I don’t even believe that we’ll colonize the asteroids. But hell, at least that would make *sense*. A human-unfriendly *planet* though? Why? And how? Climb down into a gravity well, and then climb back out again? Over-and-over-and-over? It all assumes infinite quantities of energy, both in space, and down in the gravity well.
Just madness.
sab
@Mel: What are those collies called that look like
tinysmallish English sheepdogs? Bearded collies?sab
@dmsilev: Extremely hot and toxic atmosphere. What’s not to like?
Chetan Murthy
@dmsilev: in the science fiction stories they always have to stipulate some sort of unobtainium that they can’t get anywhere else in the solar system.
prostratedragon
Chetan Murthy@45: The nightmare version of this: “Young at Heart,” Jimmy Durante.
Steeplejack
@Anoniminous:
Whoa, sounds too much like me during the pandemic!
eversor
@Steeplejack:
Also in VA we lost at 5 as well didn’t come back till midnight. We got hit with 80mph winds where I am and the rain was going in a cyclone motion. Massive trees torn up from the ground roots and all. Others fallen on buildings. Shit everywhere. Street signs bent to the ground. Lawn chairs and trash cans hurled all over the place.
We toughed it out as I have UPS (for non computer people these are a combination surge protector and massive battery commonly used to keep a server or desktop class workstation going for anywhere from save your work and safe shutdown, to running for a bit) for each critical item so… meh. We still had stuff going for a bit. Also have some of the laptop class portable batteries (the heavy ones, not those crap ones for phones or thin and light laptops) which get you multiple charges from phones or tablets.
I’d advise all of these devices.
Gary K
Seems this guy is jealous of all the attention that Musk Melon has been garnering.
sab
@eversor: My experience with Christians are that we are a mixed lot. Across the board politically. Quite diverse doctrinally. Also on enforcement and behavior.
My mainstream Protestant church tolerates a lot of doctrinal differences ( what we say we believe) but is pretty rigid about misbehaviors with the youth or women laity.
My husband’s Catholic Church is pretty rigid about doctrine, but quite tolerant about misbehaviors with children.
Evangelicals seem to be all over but often weird but also often not.
All Christians. Hard to lump us all into one category. But I agree treat us with wariness.
Steeplejack
Yee-haw! Power just came back on. Alerted by my light and the AC firing up.
. . . And it just went off again while I was writing this. 😾
Redshift
@dmsilev:
Hey, all of that isn’t going to Republicans who will do something useful with it. Not that all of his donors would necessarily donate to other Republicans, but some of them surely would. Seems like a net plus.
Steeplejack
@eversor:
I have UPS and various charger gizmos at home, but I’m “camping out” here.
sab
@Steeplejack: We in NE Ohio had power out for 3 hours. My house has a generator so that was okay, but wifi and cable stayed out. Also too cats don’t like the loudness of the generator.
Our grid is breaking down ( phuck infrastructure maintenance) and everyone acts like this is normal.
I have relatives who do post storm line repairs. They have to carry guns when they go into the boondocks.
eversor
@sab:
The catch is I can say the same thing about Conservatives and Republicans. But if we can blanket criticize those than Christianity is fair game as well. There are good people in each, but on the whole all of that is so toxic it’s a massive problem for the nation.
Hell I could point to good billionaires as well. Doesn’t mean billionaires aren’t bad as a whole and even having them around isn’t dragging us down.
Christianity is more than fair play.
Chetan Murthy
@sab: [I don’t dispute anything you’re saying, but …] All of this is too mortifying:
What’s this country coming to? I have an elderly (no longer driving) relative in TX, and keep explaining to them that they really ought to calculate the months this year when they couldn’t leave the house b/c of the heat, add a healthy margin, and plan to spend that time next year in CA with us, b/c FFS, if the grid goes down, they’re dead and there’ll be nothing we can do about it.
It’s all madness.
sab
@eversor: I was reading something Catholic today, probably extends to broader Christianity, where they said God made us in his image. I have heard that my whole life and I suddenly realized that I have never believed in God as that limited. He looks like my husband or my Dad? No way.
Steeplejack
@sab:
The design for my “if I win the lotto” dream house includes a generator. One of the Sighthound Hall neighbors apparently has one. I’m surprised that more McMansions don’t have them.
BeautifulPlumage
I had a conversation with one of our local linemen this week and he said workers have had guns drawn on them in the more rural areas of our county (King Co where Seattle is located).
eversor
@Steeplejack:
My bad!
I had people camp out at my place! I had wifi (till my ISP also cut out for a bit)! Working fans! Charge your laptops and phone And I’ve been through this enough to know and I need them for work. I already had ice to drag out of the freezer and a cooler (from when I go camping) to chill ermm… “liquids” in ;)
Plus being someone that plays games having two Switches (normal and OLED) along with a Steam Deck helped calm some people down. Apartment complex so it was impossible to hide that I still had power. Figured might as well share the wealth with all the people who don’t work in IT and did not know to have all this stuff. Though they don’t need to have it either.
Then again, given how VA power is I’m sure some of them are going to go out and get it.
sab
@Chetan Murthy: We had a close friend, since died, who had a battery operated heart. Couldn’t recharge his heart battery he would die.
Power outages used to be extremely rare. Now they are routine. He told us about his
batterygenerator so we bought one. Expensive but it has paid for itself in saved fridge food.I am so old that I remember going to elementary school in Florida with no air conditioning. Hot and sticky but we survived.
Chetan Murthy
@sab: And again, I completely believe you, and yet ….. madness. It’s madness. I have never known a person who had a house generator, and I grew up in burbs and a small town, went to college in a small town. So much has changed in our country.
sab
@Chetan Murthy: Ulysses S Grant and his generation believed in government because they were building things out of the wilderness. We think infrastructure just happened when God created the world. Arghh. My cats are more sophisticated.
Yutsano
@sab: Shetland sheep dogs also known affectionately as Shelties.
eversor
@sab:
Years ago when I was in the military and still under massive pressure to go to prayer I got into it with a chaplain over “heaven” and why it all sort of seemed stupid to me.
It’s all just people so what about those who love animals, they aren’t covered in this idiotic situation. What about those of us who have the most fun hanging out with non believers or those who believe in other things? If there is no sickness, no illness, and we are all just perfect where’s the fun in that? It sounds like straight up eugenics. The entire concept is the precurser to the idiotic libertarian utopias we keep hearing about. “Imagine no disabled people!” ok, yeah sure I know where that one goes.
Even if you handwave away and pretend the cruelty, barbarbarism, and hiearchial issues (in the Old/New Testaments and from Jesus himself) do not exist or are all made up, the entire thing is still all nasty.
I get that ideologies are what you take from them. At the end of the day most people are “Cafeteria Catholics” about any ideology. But certain ideologies keep producing bad results that override any good they may. In the US Christianity, Conservatism, Republicanism, and Libertarianism are the four big bads. And advocating getting rid some of them, and not all of them, is the same as keeping all of them. I know good people that adhear to any number of those, some all of them, but none of that changes that those ideologies as a whole are so beyond toxic that they are beyond the pale. It’s like hydra, you can’t cut off just one head you have to cut them all off. If you aren’t willing to, the fight is already lost and you should just go home.
columbusqueen
@Chetan Murthy: Good buddy, if AEP was your electrical utility, you’d own a generator too. They are incompetent bastards.
sab
@BeautifulPlumage: My nephew lineman says that. He and his crew arrive with expensive tools, cash and credit cards.
He and his wife ( stupidly) use the same luggage. She arrived at an airport (unbeknownst) armed to the hilt with his guns and ammo. She is now on the Do Not Fly list.
BeautifulPlumage
@sab: oh no, that must have been awful when that happened! So none of her actual luggage was with her?
sab
@Yutsano: Bearded collies are bigger and more English sheepdog looking. Same job. Different appearance.
ETA Very amazing how many very different sheepdogs there are in the world.
eversor
@Chetan Murthy:
Here in VA those are rare. But for those rich enough to afford a home (and we are in a land of condos that cost several home in other places) what’s in is Tesla batteries to charge your electric car in your garage.
Musk isn’t just selling cars. If you own a home, he’s selling charging stations for your home, and also batteries in case of a power outage. Also his charging stations are better. Tesla sells an eco system.
BeautifulPlumage
@sab: how long that day before they let her go? Did he get his gear back?
sab
@BeautifulPlumage: They let her go promptly. Getting off the Do Not Fly list is sort of not doable.
GW Bush wasn’t a process sort of guy. He was more a PR guy. Opposite of Biden.
I have a nephew now in his late twenties who has been on since he was a toddler because he has the same name as some IRA guy.
He wants to be an airline pilot.
sab
@columbusqueen: AEP. Also First Energy.
BeautifulPlumage
@sab: I get the idea of the “do not fly” list, but not creating a way to release someone from it when a mistake/mis-ID is made is not right. I had forgotten about that list & it’s problems. My sympathies to both!
Betsy
But that’s just a regular collie.
sab
@BeautifulPlumage: It has been a problem for a decade and yet nobody cares.
sab
@Yutsano: Shelties, like many herding dogs, are kind of too yappy for a normal household. Lovely, loyal, kind, but cannot stop barking if they see an issue.
Same problem with my pitbull. I want to strangle her three times a day. ” Please stop yapping!”
sab
@BeautifulPlumage: It is a problem. Do not shrug in sympathy. Call your congressperson. If you don’t call then you are complicit. Saw it and said nothing.
mrmoshpotato
@sab:
Oops!
sab
@mrmoshpotato: So you are okay next time power goes out because workers don’t like your area?
kalakal
@Ken: Fred Pohl had one in The Merchant’s War. So long since I’ve read it I can’t remember the details except it was set in a Venus colony.
Steeplejack
Power back on for a solid 25 minutes after a couple of false starts a while ago. Think I’m going to take the W and hit the sack.
Ugh. My phone won’t connect to house wi-fi. So I assume some reset might need to be done. I’ll deal with it tomorrow, or hope that it heals itself in the night.
kalakal
@Steeplejack: Generators are pretty common in Florida because of hurricanes. The sound of dozens of them drive you crazy. Not necessarily full house generators ( that’s rarer) but you can at least run some cooling, lighting, fridge etc.
kalakal
@eversor:
And that’s before you get to the arguments over naming
Mitchell & Webb – Discoverer
mrmoshpotato
@sab: You took the wrong thing away from my comment.
BeautifulPlumage
@sab: yes, senators & rep & white house & maybe even a few govenors. Do they even update if a person on the list dies (which I doubt & rhetorical question).
Joe Falco
Elon is always a strong contender for the Upper Class Twit of the Year award: https://youtu.be/kdFnfcxhNnA
Ruckus
@Anoniminous:
Just typed my USN rant but it’s 50 yrs old and I’ve written it here before, so I’ll refrain other than to say I agree with you – from experience.
Ruckus
@Steeplejack:
It may have lost your phone’s access pass with the power loss. Just a possibility.
Mel
@sab: The littler guys are indeed Bearded Collies. They weigh about 50-60 pounds, versus the English Sheepdog at 80 pounds or so. Bearded Collies are so smart, and so lovely!
I truly love the Collie breeds in general, but I’ve got a particular soft spot for Rough Collies, since I’ve had several rescue Roughs throughout my life. They are such smart, funny, kind dogs. My last Roughie had been abused and then dumped on a busy city street before being rescued. He turned out to be the finest good boy and best buddy that I have ever known. He did therapy dog work with my students and at medical facilities, and after the awful and frightening start in life that he had been dealt before he was rescued by the SPCA, watching him give such instant and unconditional love to people who so needed it was utterly humbling.
satby
@Steeplejack: I keep looking at the solar generators on Amazon. There’s smaller ones, but I would want to be able to keep the refrigerator and coffee pot going. Priorities!
Mel
@satby: I hear that! Fridge, coffee, and the heating pad for my old arthritic knees and wrists!
lowtechcyclist
We’ve lived in our current house in northern Calvert County, MD since 1998. Before Hurricane Isabel (2003), thunderstorms would frequently knock out the power for several hours; the candles and the battery-powered lights got a good workout.
Whatever BGE did to fix things up after Isabel (which knocked our power out for 4 days) seems to have worked, there’s only been a couple of times in the two decades since that our power has been out for more than a minute or two, and one was when a truck crashed into a nearby transformer pole.
Not too long after Isabel, before I had reason to believe that we wouldn’t have more outages, I bought a gasoline-powered generator. It’s still in its original box in the shed. And at this point it’s probably useless to us, even if it still would work, because I switched to an electric mower last year, so I no longer have reason to keep a can of gasoline handy. And in event of a major outage, the gas stations would be without power, so where would I get the gas to run the generator?
Maybe it’s time to get solar panels installed on the roof.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@dmsilev:
Maybe burnspesq can correct me if I’m wrong, but it occurs to me that every dime he diverts from his PAC to his lawyers on his indictments should count as personal income and is reportable as such.
Chris T.
@Chetan Murthy: We (Spousal Unit and I) live about 10 miles from town, which puts us a bit in the boonies. It’s a large development with power lines underground—most of it was built within the last 40 years and with “try not to mess too much with the existing trees and stuff” in mind, so there are no phone poles in the immediate area—and yet the power feed to these 3000 or so customers goes down regularly when trees fall over in the early fall when the heavier rains come back to western Washington.
Some of the neighbors here have generators, but so far we have gotten by with batteries for our CPAP units and a battery backup for the gas fireplace (the main house heating and, now, cooling, is forced-air, it was a traditional gas furnace and is now a heat pump).
It’s true that infrastructure is a problem, and it’s worse than one might think. Utilities—especially electric ones—once were good in the US, but in the 1980s, the Harvard Business School types struck, and now, well…
Another Scott
@eversor:
Eos.org:
Messing with stuff can have unforeseen consequences.
Cheers,
Scott.
Barry
@BeautifulPlumage: “I had a conversation with one of our local linemen this week and he said workers have had guns drawn on them in the more rural areas of our county (King Co where Seattle is located).”
The locals heard about ‘alternating’ current, if you know what I mean.
bjacques
@eversor: mostly dead thread, but here goes:
I really like your posts and find them almost always thoughtful, but when religion comes up you just seem to go off the rails.
People are gonna be saints, devils, or somewhere in between, whatever their belief system. They’ll find inspiration or license anywhere, which suggests at least that moral codes not backed by an invisible sky god wielding a club perform as well as those that are.
When it comes to body counts, in the 20th and 21st centuries, non-religious ideologies are topping the league tables. The Holocaust was mostly about “race”, not religion, which also doesn’t figure into the Armenian genocide, the Congo under Leopold II, the Holodomor, China’s Great Leap Forward, Indonesia in 1965, Cambodia’s Year Zero, and others I could mention.
In the 21st century you can add Daddy issues, vulture capitalism, and the general scramble for control over mineral and energy resources, over Burna massacring the Rohynge for being Muslim.
If, by some miracle, you could eliminate religion, you’d just create a vacuum humans would fill with something else. Meanwhile, religion fuels state-sponsored bigotry in Texas and Florida, but it also drives Black church ladies doing most of the work to hold this country together.
So is the reflexive religion bashing really necessary or useful?
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Ken: I loved Leigh Brackett in particular and was very sad that she decided the science wouldn’t let her keep writing Eric John Stark novels.
Ken
Most of the outer-planet moons have water, but it’s frozen rock-hard and is what passes for the ground there. That Charles Stross novel I mentioned above briefly touched on the difficulties of colonies in places where your buildings melt the ground underneath them.
You may mean subsurface oceans, but they’re usually hundreds of kilometers beneath the ice. And, as XKCD reminds us, they’re also everywhere.
lowtechcyclist
As a Christian, I obviously disagree with eversor’s take on Christianity, but I totally understand where he’s coming from.
I mean, look around. If you get your impression of Christianity from the news and social media, you’d be tempted to throw the baby out with the bath water, because it looks like it’s mostly raw sewage instead of bath water, and you’d be hard pressed to find a baby amidst all the sewage.
Part of it is that the Falwells and Robertsons and Dobsons and all the rest of those professional assholes did a good job of being the ‘Christians’ in the news, and after nearly half a century of their ilk being the main types telling the story of what Christianity supposedly is about in our national dialogue, they’ve essentially won: the media turns to those types when they want the ‘Christian’ take on something in the news.
Also, it seems their followers are the most loud and proud about their faith on social media, and of course their faith is pretty toxic.
And the media is too busy interviewing white men in Ohio diners to interview Black women in Atlanta churches or beauty parlors. So whatever the reality is of Christianity in this country, people mostly see the toxic Christians. If I weren’t having this ongoing and rather mindboggling religious experience, I’d probably feel not that different from eversor.
Ken
Not exactly. “God created them in God’s image; male and female God created them.” So God’s non-binary, or hermaphroditic.
Some interpretations avoid that by saying this does not refer to the physical form, but to the mind and its creative powers.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Nominated.
marklar
@eversor: “You know why he won the primaries? He got the Christian vote. Know who his biggest supporters are? Christians. ”
Probably a dead thread by now, but what the heck…
Care to take a guess which religion was most represented by Biden voters?
Dorothy A. Winsor
While I have no sympathy for Trump’s legal expenses, I do wonder about people who don’t have his money and face the legal system. I see why his co-defendants cling to his covering their expenses.
Geminid
@Chris T.: From what I’ve read, home battery systems will get better and cheaper. Calcium-ion batteries are now acheive results comparable to that of lithium-ion batteries a decade ago., and there is room for improvement. The calcium-ion batteries are heavier, so they are more suited to stationary applications like home battery backup.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Venus is actually less of a death trap than Mars. Of course it requires the whole floating city thing which is unproven technology.
brantl
@eversor: Shhhhhhh, we don’t want him to start THAT.
pluky
@sab: add Portuguese Water Dogs to the list. The fishermen who bred them would leave the dogs in the yard with the boats and gear. Any intruder would cue a choral performance by design.
Miss Bianca
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: A quick scan of your message without really focusing led me to reading “Venice is less of a death trap than Mars”, which scanned with the “floating city” reference as well; and first I thought “duh”, and then I thought about “Death in Venice” and “Don’t Look Now” and then I saw that you had actually written “Venus” not “Venice” and my conclusion was that I needed more coffee.
Hob
@kalakal: The Merchants’s War is a good choice in this context because it proposes that a Venus colony is a terrible idea. It’s a sequel to The Space Merchants, a classic of satirical SF whose title refers to advertising agencies who are trying to sell the idea of emigrating to Venus to a public that doesn’t understand how hellish the place is. The much less good sequel takes place several generations later when a small Venus colony has managed to scrape by, but it’s a thankless existence and they’re treated like shit by Earth. Neither book is very interested in scientific details, they’re more about corporate shenanigans on Earth, but they do make it clear that trying to live on Venus makes no sense.
Frank Wilhoit
Bach was notoriously irascible. He got fired, from one of the many jobs he got fired from, for fighting with one of his orchestra players, a bassoonist whom he had told that he sounded like a goat. By some accounts, knives were pulled.