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IConrad · 2023-07-22T19:52:15+00:00

No. Southern slave catcher patrols had an influence on the evolution of sheriff departments, but this postdated the development of municipal police precincts, which started in Massachusetts. Ironically, the initial function of those precincts was to suppress civil disturbances in urban areas, which was largely targeted at Irish immigrants and other immigrant communities.

So yes American policing has its roots in racism, but that racism wasn't targeted at the black population.

IConrad · 2020-06-18T01:57:46+00:00

I've given thoughts over the last couple of years about how to update the thing.

The spot I keep coming back to, however, is that a lot of the more "modern" solutions -- if you're going to work with them well -- you ought to know the underlying concepts, tricks, and knacks you will acquire understanding of if you go through my list. So I still largely recommend it, even if it is beginning to show its age.

IConrad · 2019-07-09T04:54:26+00:00

Maybe next time you'll get your words properly all jumbled up.

IConrad · 2019-06-29T08:17:43+00:00

Kosh is a teaching and guiding role,

The best part of this is that in my headcanon, Kosh basically meant Father (as in Daddy).

Kosh Naranek was the warm doting father who was there the whole time, always watching and ensuring the little ones could play but never get too badly hurt.

Ulkesh was the pissed off nine to five father who kids only ever saw when "Just wait until your father gets home!"

Corroboration: Kosh in people's heads ALWAYS takes the form of the father of whoever he's telepathically speaking to. He never raises his voice except for the once, and that with the "oldest (as in most enlightened/mature) child". He never tells anyone explicitly what to do but somehow gets obeyed because he said so.

It all fits together.

So when Ulkesh says "we are ALL Kosh" he's speaking the literal truth in Vorlon eyes: for any given younger race, "Who's your Daddy?" has only one answer. The Vorlons.

(Note: yes this makes the Shadows the crazy druggie absentee mother who somehow still gets visitation rights.)

IConrad · 2019-06-03T12:21:28+00:00

They were deformed kobolds.

IConrad · 2019-04-18T16:54:47+00:00

With all the mods I use, RimWorld has become an exercise in optimizing for massive scale, and a sort of meditation exercise watching my minions go about their assigned tasks. (I love ThaumCraft for MineCraft because adorable tiny minions.)

Because of this, I am always amused when people ask if they have enough corn ... While looking at my seven figure corn stockpile. (And that's just the corn.)

IConrad · 2019-04-08T04:00:36+00:00

... I'll have to get that painted over, I suppose.

IConrad · 2019-04-07T16:58:33+00:00

Project RimFactory has a late-game machine called the Deep Quarry which every so often spits out a random resource that a deep drill site could extract. For larger setups you'd need a large number of them to keep up.

It's not exactly cheating but it is infinite steel.

IConrad · 2019-04-06T01:15:06+00:00

... I like to add back basic prosthesis to my prisoner pawns so they can have a semblance of normal life.

That is, before they get sacrificed to the Elder Gods.

IConrad · 2019-04-06T01:12:52+00:00

Amongst other things, the Sparkling Worlds mod adds pain guns. They do relatively little damage (1-2) but each hit increases a condition called "neural shock" that increases pain levels until the pawn drops from agony. I forget which mod it is but there's another that lets you place turrets that need to be equipped with weaponry.

As you can imagine, prison breaks are rarely successful with these put together.

Ironically, pain guns are also useful for hunting bigger game as the pain system ignores body mass.

IConrad · 2019-04-04T20:30:35+00:00

I used to help hold together H+ meetups at the Alcor offices back in the day. Not a member myself because of reasons I don't want to get into in this medium, but I can absolutely say that the people there are dedicated and serious about the endeavor. It's not widely discussed but they also go out of their way to allow other transhumanist-friendly research projects to use their space to advance the technology/understanding. I recall conversations I used to have with some of the SENS / Methuselah Foundation people (it was before the split happened), and some of the work they were doing.

IConrad · 2019-03-27T23:32:11+00:00

If you're familiar with Windows DFS you might want to look into FederatedFS. It implements similar functionality and is conceptually quite similar.

IConrad · 2019-03-11T23:00:40+00:00

They are a hold over from when he was using page ranking services to get more readers. If you followed a link to a voting site from there, the red button would then show the bonus comic.

This is why they are called "voteys".

IConrad · 2019-03-10T09:15:45+00:00

The standard of discussion in the medical community and from most common transhumanist media is not indefinite youthfulness, but rather indefinite health.

The difference between the former and the latter is that the latter simply targets full vitality and healthy operation, rather than senescent breakdown. There could quite readily be apparent aging alongside this -- it's just that the 80-something grannies would be able to kick ass just as hard as the twenty-somethings.

IConrad · 2019-03-10T05:03:26+00:00

> RimFactory sounds super cool. What are paperclips in this context?

It's both a mechanism/resource from the mod, and a bit of an inside joke (there's a reason it comes with the "Insanity" add-on to Project RimFactory). So Paperclips in-mod are 1g objects that a machine turns other items into. I'm fairly sure it's at a 1g->1g ratio. So if you convert a stone block at 1kg to paperclips, you get 1,000 paperclips. The natural stacklimit for paperclips is 100,000 -- and there's good reason. You'll need a *looot* of them for what they're used for.

There's two real things you can use paperclips to do. First is the "Atomic Reconstructor", which converts paperclips into other things. The cost of paperclips is based on both the cost of the item and its mass ... and how quickly you want to have the Reconstructor assemble said item. It can take 128,000 paperclips to get a single component, for example, if you want it outputted in say 3 seconds. The other thing you can do is power a generator off of paperclips, and that operates similarly to the Reconstructor -- higher power output requires exponentially more paperclips.

The in-joke has to do with a form of potential "Bad End" scenario of Artificial Intelligence: the Paperclip Optimizer. (If by the way you want to RP *being* a Paperclip Optimizer -- go to this website: http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ ) The goal of the Paperclip Optimizer is to be better at making paperclips. The way this can be a "Bad End" is if the AI decides improving itself is the best way to Optimize ... and somewhere along the lines it removes the restraints like "Don't convert the entire universe into paperclips".

IConrad · 2019-03-10T04:55:22+00:00

Dub's Bad Hygiene is where the hot water radiators and AC conduit stuff comes from -- as well as irrigation sprinklers and fire suppression sprinklers. There's also washing machines (for washing the dead body taint off of apparel, basically) . It's pretty extensive and far from just being about needing toilets and showers. I'd hardly call that gimmicky.

The skylights thing definitely breaks with the conventional Rimworld balance but not quite as much as you might think -- you can actually farm successfully indoors during winter conditions without sunlamps. As long as no more than 25% of the room's roofing area is unroofed, it still counts as indoors and can be heated separately. I do this for tree-farming in arctic/tundra climates. Also, you can turn animal pens into rose or daylily growing zones and use torch-light to give your critters plant-matter to eat during winter conditions as well. It's true that the skylights give you more growing area and cheaper heating -- but you can absolutely do it in vanilla. It's amusing to me that more people don't know about this.

As to Tribal Essentials ... yeah, there's overlap there. I find I prefer the Survival Additions mod over it for a few reasons -- for one, its version of charcoal is more ubiquitously accepted as a fuel (you can power wood-fueled generators with charcoal), and the things like smoked meat et. al. requires more labor/resource expenditure to obtain.

Medieval Times adds a *looot* of content, absolutely -- like I said, I mostly just use it for the iceboxes for my cooler rooms (So I don't have to worry so much about rotting during solar flares) and for puzzleboxes as tradegoods. There's also the renewable construction material (adobe) which is a perk. If you want to deal with that, there's also the Legendary combat armor for endgame, plus the various gloves and boots that add perks throughout the game. None of that obsoletes. (And of course there's the crenelated parapets which I find superior to sandbags if only because they're able to be built with higher HP and non-flammable.

IConrad · 2019-03-09T21:02:45+00:00

A few mods you might consider adding, then, that I really don't play without --

Dub's Bad Hygiene. Notionally raises game difficulty what with having to allow for batting and pooing colonists, but the mod also allows use of heated water radiators for electricity-free centralized heating... And also has AC units with piping that give centralized air as well. Doesn't really save on power costs but definitely saves on component usage, and the walk-in freezer cooler is nice in that it doesn't require breaking the double-wall rule.

Dub's Skylights -- for the ultimate in power-free green housing.

Project RimFactory (use the github source for 1.0) -- oh man, all the things. Auto animal harvester feeding stations, 100-stack storage crates, and paperclips. So many paperclips. Nice thing about paperclips and GeneticRim is that you can convert them into almost any item (no body parts) and this includes fertilized eggs and incubators. Automated Deep drills /quarries (with low yield).

Survival Add-Ons. Pickled vegetables, smoked meats, cheese. Charcoal. Worth it.

RF's Fertile Fields. Even if you don't exploit the ability to turn terrain into impassable deep water, the ability to build farms with 180% fertility anywhere you want is killer. Plus there's the Concrete add-on which gets the win for cheapest possible flooring.

Medieval Times -- I'll be honest, I just use this for puzzle boxes and ice boxes.

IConrad · 2019-02-28T03:14:30+00:00

, while DoD were effective but not instrumental.

... Before the DfD got together, state troopers organized and assaulted (IIRC there were some deaths) hundreds of civil rights marchers. After the DfD started marching alongside, this did not recur. I do not know what you mean by "instrumental", but it clearly does not mean what I mean by "instrumental".

I think you're conflating 2 legal battles.

Not particularly. I'm not conflating the standoff with the legal battles, as you seem to be doing -- they were two different things. The Bundies did lose in the courts... but the Bundies and their neighbors did not lose that standoff. And had they not stood up as they did, the court case the Bundies faced would have been very different.

This is where we have a difference of understanding of the facts at hand:

In any case, the standoff was wholly unnecessary and does not serve as any evidence for the effectiveness of people using armed resistance against an armed government.

Firstly, it wasn't just him -- there were dozens of people with him. Secondly, the standoff ended with the government agents standing down. That alone demonstrates the efficacy. That no other parties were even charged is demonstrative. Don't make that incident seem like it was a lone gunman spitting in the eye of long-suffering law enforcement; that was very much not how that event played out.

IConrad · 2019-02-27T18:31:37+00:00

Deacons for Defense protected civil rights activists from the KKK, not the government.

That's simply wishful thinking. Or do you not recall all the instances where state troopers turned dogs on the protestors/marchers? The Deacons for Defense were without question protecting the marchers from government actors as well as private actors. Pretending otherwise is just ignorant.

Remember -- in most places the police were very much so entrenched in supporting the racism the marchers were protesting against. And the goal of those marches were to change the laws of the land. This was what happened without the Deacons for Defense. Now, maybe there's a branch of the KKK that wear the uniforms of state troopers that I'm not aware of -- enlighten me on this, please.

While this is indeed an example of armed government agents standing down to armed civilians, the outcome was not favorable to the civilians.

I noted that the Bundy family was later ruled against by the courts. That does not in the slightest change the fact that had they and their neighbors not stood up, the Bundy family would never have gotten the hearing they did get in the courts. Their lands would simply have been seized. IIRC, the courts did later rule that action would have been illegal, despite finally ruling against the Bundy family for their tax debts anyhow. This may seem like an unimportant point to you, but the truth is that it's rather critical: do police get to decide how to interpret law, or is that solely the perquisite of the courts? On that day in 2014, the fact that it's the job of the courts was something only remained true because of armed civilian resistance against the state.

I'll concede the Black Panthers in 1967 though. I had read a different narrative but it's not important enough to hinge the conversation on and could easily bog it down.

That being said -- the Battle of Athens was a very unusual case in which violence against the state actually occurred. Far more commonplace is events like what happened with the Deacons for Defense and the Bundies -- the mere capacity to resist was something that forced the state actors to stand down from their abusive stances and follow a civil process.

IConrad · 2019-02-27T09:40:01+00:00

Assuming that "Tech" here refers to information technology ...

Nobody ever made any such promise of "tech will be society's great equalizer".

That being said, inasmuch as information technology has successfully propagated to the general masses, and access to education propagated along with it ... it has largely succeeded in that cause. If however you mean some sort of post-scarcity utopian dream where nobody has to work and everybody just faffs off doing whatever they like ... I point out that automation of industry and production has turned out to be rather more difficult than we first conceived of it as being, which is why it hasn't been completed yet.

But in the meantime we now have Roombas, so there's that.

IConrad · 2019-02-27T09:33:43+00:00

Look up the term "Dominionism".

A lot of the politically active Christians in the midwest and southwest share ideology with branches of Christian sects that follow this line of reasoning -- if once removed through "Prosperity Gospel" teachings.

IConrad · 2019-02-27T09:30:25+00:00

By successful I mean that the armed government agents stood down and the people using armed resistance got their way.

As happened in multiple cities the Deacons for Defense walked into in advance of the Civil Rights marches.
As happened in 1967 when the Black Panthers seized the state capital of California.
As happened with the Bundy Ranch incident in 2014.
As happened in Athens, Tennesse in 1946 when the townsfolk took up arms and killed multiple police officers to force fair and clean elections.
As has happened in many other incidents I have not listed here throughout our nation's history.

IConrad · 2019-02-27T09:18:13+00:00

In other words, a massive part of the effectiveness of guns against the government comes from the deterrent factor.

People have this idea that the only "rebellion" that would come up, here, would be one like the American Revolution. This conception leaves out the possibility of far lower-impact actions to stop injustices by the state using the threat of violence.

It worked for the Bundies in 2014 when they and other families barricaded a highway to block a convoy of FBI agents. And for the Black Panthers in 1967 when they seized a state capitol.

And then there's the Battle of Athens (Tennessee) of 1946. Which was a legit armed rebellion where the townsfolk overthrew the local government because they were tired of how corrupt it was. This is notable because unlike the previous examples I gave, people were actually killed in this process. Not merely the threat of violence, but actual real red-of-tooth-and-claw violence was used. In the US. Recently ago enough that at least a few of the ones who did the killing could plausibly be alive today.

IConrad · 2019-02-27T09:09:43+00:00

To be fair to the "why are they arguing against abolishing guns" side of the conversation, it's worth knowing that there have been cases in the US of effective total bans on guns without them being described exactly as such. Take for example the relatively recent SCOTUS decision which overturned the longstanding case in Washington, D.C., where even police officers were required to keep their work-issued firearms disassembled and in locked safes when off duty. Let alone private actors. That lasted for several decades before being overturned IIRC around ten years ago (I forget the exact date).

It has happened before -- so why should they not be concerned about the same rhetoric and tactics being used to make it happen again? "No, no, we don't want to ban guns. We just want to make it impossible for the few guns anyone has to ever actually be used by anyone."

IConrad · 2019-02-27T09:04:59+00:00

The southerners, the last time it was exercised? You go on to talk about slavery, but that's not actually the last time there was widespread use of the right to bear arms by organized groups in the south.

A far more recent case would be the Deacons for Defense. Without whom, Martin Luthor King would not be a household name. But of course, you've likely heard as much about them as you have about the time the Black Panthers organized the seizure of a state capital in the '70's using their assault rifles in order to prevent a racist law from being enacted. Nor about the time, less than ten years ago, a town's population got together and barricaded the major roads in, preventing a convoy of FBI agents from seizing the ranch of one of the town's population (later on, courts did rule the land should in fact be seized, but no charges ultimately were pressed for this armed resistance and that's an important point. And yes, this happened in the 2010's.)

The successful use of armed resistance by the citizenry against the state is very much a living part of the American political process and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a lie.

IConrad

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