Do not obey in advance.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not at first have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another. After the German elections of 1932, which brought Nazis into government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed.

https://timothysnyder.org/on-tyranny

This would be better on lined paper with cursive writing.

Even if efficiency per passenger is better with larger ships, they should definitely still ban the largest ships. The largest ships simply shouldn’t exist.

Banning big ships shouldn’t be the only thing Nice does, but it’s a very good step 1. Step 2 should be limiting the total number of ships and/or passengers that can visit the city.

I hate these. You don’t need to program for very long before you see one of these. And, you get used to the idea that when it says there’s an error on a blank line, that it means something isn’t properly terminated on one of the previous lines. But, man, I hate these.

At the very least, you’d hope that by now compilers/interpreters would be able to say “error somewhere between line 260 and 265”. Or, more usefully “Expected a closing ‘)’ before line 265, opening ‘(’ was on line 260”.

Error on <blank line> just pisses me off because the compiler / interpreter should know that that isn’t true. Whoever wrote the compiler is a seasoned developer who has been hit by this kind of error message countless times. They must know how annoying it is, and yet…

Which is also awful, but you don’t notice at first because of the glaringly ugly throat tattoo.

Well, English is always silly with the various silent letters. The worst are the silent letters that nonetheless change the pronunciation of the non-silent letters nearby.

Like, I saw a place today named “something-valu”, with no “e” on the end. With no “e” it should really be pronounced “valoo”. Adding the “e” somehow changes it to “valyoo”. Rather than changing the vowel sound, it adds a consonant-like /j/ sound (IPA) to the start of that syllable.

To some extent. There are different winds at different altitudes, but it’s the kind of navigation that lets you fly over a city once. It’s not the kind that lets you linger over a certain building, or go back if you missed something.

Needs more hand shoes.

I’m confused. The modern word in french is “reçu”, which is pronounced something like “ruhsue”. The English word is “receipt” but pronounced something like “ruhseet”. There’s no “ooh” sound in the original Latin, so it’s not just a matter of adding extra or silent letters in there, it’s a complete change to the vowel sounds, plus the re-addition of a ‘t’ sound.

At the beginning, yes. But, once you reach the mid-game your dupes’ needs are basically managed. The end-game is all about crazy engineering.

basically everything was plot, which made the emotional parts feel unearned.

Unearned, and also shoehorned in. They were in the middle of a series of crises, and instead of just putting the personal stuff to the side until the crisis/crises were over they had to deal with personal soap-opera stuff in the middle of that. And, that meant that you couldn’t have personal character development that was low-stakes. For it to interrupt the crisis it had to be high stakes. That just heightened the soap-operaness because every emotional moment was high stakes.

Discovery lacks that kind of deferring to better expertise, and often comes across as Burnham does everything.

That’s basically what I mean about the incompetence. She had to do everything herself rather than consult with the rest of the crew, often breaking the rules because she didn’t have time to follow them because everything was so urgent. On every other Star Trek, the chief engineer would be consulted when it came to engineering things, the science officer when it came to science things, and so-on. But, because Burnham didn’t consult her experts, it makes it seem like they’re not competent enough to keep up with her.

So, these other crew members are involved when there’s a high-stakes soap opera scene where they bare their souls. But, they’re bypassed when Burnham has to take quick actions or the whole multiverse dies. Which makes it seem like this isn’t a crew of a captain, a science officer and a chief engineer working together to solve things. It’s a soap opera involving Tilly, Stamets, and Jett while Burnham saves the multiverse.

A hilarious part of this thread was that they convinced themselves that X couldn’t possibly be that unpopular and it had to be a bunch of bots posting and upvoting these threads to ban X.

In support of this they said “This post about banning X is the [n]th most popular post ever on /r/LiverpoolFC, even higher than when they won the champions league! It can’t be real”. They didn’t even consider that the post about banning X made it to the top of /r/all where a lot of people who couldn’t care less about football/futbol/soccer upvoted it. They couldn’t care less about that team, but they also supported banning X, so they upvoted.

and read their newspaper.

Even at the height of yellow journalism, the results were better than what we have now. Newspapers have to write for a mass audience. That’s much less effective than the algorithm-driven micro-targeting we have now.

Definitely not.

Er, yeah, that.

Or drop the 800 kg of ice while going up the colony’s main ladder just because their shift ended, or dig a block out and decide rather than just stepping down to the floor, that they’ll now jump up onto a ledge on the wall and get stuck until they start to piss themselves and/or suffocate?

But really, that throat tattoo is awful.

Removed by mod

As someone who worked in mapping, many people don’t realize how much this kind of BS actually comes up.

The map you see in Google / Apple maps isn’t the map the whole world sees. What you see is what’s culturally / legally appropriate for viewers in your region.

For example, in parts of India it’s legally required that Jammu and Kashmir be displayed as being part of India on their maps. On Pakistan’s maps it’s legally required to be weirdly ambiguous, with a strange open border that doesn’t properly close. The rest of the world gets dotted lines indicating it’s complicated.

For most of the world the body of water between Korea, Japan and Vladivostok is labeled as “The Sea of Japan”, but users in Korea will see “The East Sea”. Is the body of water around Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, etc. the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf? Depends on where you are when you ask that question.

This even has a strange effect when all the countries involved agree that a certain geographic feature is the border, but that geographic feature is a river. Some rivers, especially ones like the Amazon river keep shifting. Sediment piles up, erosion happens, and the river shifts. The river is still the border, but now someone has to go in and adjust the political border to match the river’s new position.

So, if Trump does do something official to rename the Gulf of Mexico, the online mapping companies (and any offline ones that are left) will probably follow the rule and rename it… for their American users. The rest of the world will still see it as the Gulf of Mexico. It will just be yet another one of those funny exceptions the companies have to keep track of while displaying maps for a certain subset of users.

I thought these guys were all about reducing regulations

Did you really? Be honest.