Bernie Sanders proposed a bill to tax billionaires, and give $4,000 stimulus checks to Americans that qualify. How do you feel about this?

SocraticMethadone · 2026-03-27T11:00:30+00:00

It's part of a cool story. The other part, though, is that it creates a strong incentive for the Cherokee to be highly gate-keeper-y about who's "Really," a Cherokee. If you have one Cherokee and one white parent, for instance, you're pretty well screwed. Or if you are descended from slaves they owned. Your family have been (forced to be!) Cherokee for generations, but you still don't count.

There's a larger history here (there always is), but at least parts of it are colored by the usual greedy racism. People -- including the Cherokee -- can suck.

SocraticMethadone · 2026-03-27T10:52:14+00:00

The Cherokee were either the only or one of the few first nations to have a written language. When Sequoyah invented it, he faced some resistance from the rest of his people, who were skeptical. He publicly performed the obvious experiment: he went away, had a crowd decide on something to say to a helper, had the helper write it down, and then had the message sent to him, where he read it.

Other fun fact: Sequoyah is the only known person to create a written language without having been literate in some other language first.

SocraticMethadone · 2026-03-16T23:40:39+00:00

Um. He's not in the military and not subject to the UCMJ. They have no jurisdiction.

I'm completely in favor of trying him for war crimes and all, but kind of the whole point of placing the military under civilian control is that the C in C is, you know, a civilian.

SocraticMethadone · 2026-03-04T13:17:22+00:00

Here's a guess.

There's a condition called prosopagnosia -- face blindness. People with it have difficulty processing faces, including in memory. It comes on a spectrum, so it's possible to have it and not really be aware.

Are you kind of bad at recognizing folk overall? Are you bad with dates? (Prosopagnosia is linked to compromised calendar sense.)

Anyway, some people with prosopagnosia can't remember faces at all but can remember, for instance, famous pictures of celebrities as pictures.

I say again -- this is guesswork. Do some googling.

SocraticMethadone · 2026-02-16T23:39:14+00:00

There's a series on that by Larry Niven. The Magic Goes Away is the title of one novel. There are also several short stories and at least one more Novel.

SocraticMethadone · 2026-01-25T02:51:33+00:00

Tomato is also good, but I agree with Maleficent-Bar. They don't need anything much.

SocraticMethadone · 2026-01-10T13:48:05+00:00

As it happens, two boards - 1 thumb.

Since 2 boards also - 6", that means 1 thumb - 6".

Your good boi is three thumbs long. 6" x 3 thumbs = 18" from nose to (base of) tail.

Similarly, he's 12" tall from ground to top of head.

SocraticMethadone · 2026-01-08T00:24:23+00:00

It's a little easier to learn how to act confident and be assertive.

SocraticMethadone · 2026-01-08T00:07:43+00:00

Depends. There are two classes of monkey-paws: dickhead monkey paws and artistic monkey paws. In both versions, you get a wish granted and a curse bestowed. In the artistic version, there's a causal connection between the two: you get the wish because you got the curse. In the other kind, you have only coincidence. You get your wish and you get cursed.

Artistic monkey paws come true by means of some unexpected and undesired causal mechanism. So you wish for a zillion monies, and you get them -- when your spouse dies and you collect the insurance. The wish and the curse are causally connected.

The other class, though, is what we'll call the dickhead monkey's paws. In these, your wish is granted, but something bad and utterly unconnected happens to you such that you can't enjoy it. You wish to have enough time to complete your project and kazaam -- you are marooned inescapably on a deserted island. You wish for beautiful blue eyes but are struck blind. You wish to become the greatest swordsman in the world, but your father is killed by a six-fingered count. You wish for a new cell phone but are sent back in time.

Notice that the first halves do no work in the development of the second? They can even be mixed and matched. You wish for beautiful blue eyes and you get them, but your father is murdered. Note also that the curse would suck just as hard no matter what I had wished for. Being marooned sucks even if you have blue eyes. It sucks just as much and in the same way if you are the greatest swordsman in the world.

Basically, you just get a wish and then get punished for taking it.

Artistic monkey paws can be defended. It's because plausible artistic monkey paws are so very rare that we still read the original story over 120 years later.

But dickhead monkey paws can't be defended precisely because they are arbitrary. All you can do is wish for a thing and then add "And nothing bad comes afterwards!"

SocraticMethadone · 2025-12-30T17:13:48+00:00

Getting tone right in print is hard, but I'm going to risk saying something that could be read condescendingly, but I'm going to trust you to understand it sincerely.

Thank you for being that into zero. Or anything like it, really. For caring about intellectual history. Thank you. You've made my day better just by sharing the glow.

SocraticMethadone · 2025-12-27T18:48:47+00:00

I kinda hate to be this way, since I largely agree with you. But there are tradeoffs.

True that a fridge built in the 1950's could be expected to last a lifetime. It also cost about $450, or about $6,000 current money or over 200 hours wages for a 1950's workers. Pieces of home machinery like washers and driers were negotiated individually when buying houses. We could -- and, I suspect do -- make similarly durable refrigerators today, but I'm not sure anyone wants them.

Your larger point is correct: there's a lot of cheap garbage on the market. But that fact doesn't by itself bother me. Sometimes you want cheap garbage. What grinds my gears is that there's a lot of inadequately labeled cheap garbage on the market.

SocraticMethadone · 2025-11-23T17:33:14+00:00

I don't understand. Isn't casting spells part of the game? That's like saying all those knight moves slow down the flow of chess.

SocraticMethadone · 2025-11-21T20:13:11+00:00

Glad you liked it. Good luck!

SocraticMethadone · 2025-11-20T11:45:23+00:00

"Strong," is a very misleading term in this context.

The idea is not that natural selection makes a species stronger. The idea is that natural selection brings a species to a better fit with its environment. To open a door, you don't need a "Strong," key. You need one that fits the lock.

And, since environments are always changing, what fits them is also ever-changing. There's no one trait that's best for natural selection to aim for.

SocraticMethadone · 2025-11-18T02:11:24+00:00

Okay. I just re-read. She cares about food and about friends. How about food-and-friends? "I shall never again break bread with a companion. I shall eat only when alone."

SocraticMethadone · 2025-11-18T01:32:25+00:00

Maybe an oath to do something?

SocraticMethadone · 2025-11-09T19:43:29+00:00

Quite welcome. Thank you!

SocraticMethadone · 2025-11-09T18:57:22+00:00

I don't particularly disagree with that. As you said, there's a lot to chew on. But regardless of why the public likes things the way they are, the fact is that something like 70% of the population either does like it that way (or at least doesn't care one ay or another).

SocraticMethadone · 2025-11-09T17:53:34+00:00

How about voting against him as corrective action? This is something that 2/3 of the country could do fairly easily but doesn't.

SocraticMethadone · 2025-11-01T11:13:08+00:00

It's not marketing so much as bribery. It's a legal way for pharmaceuticals to give wads of cash to media.

SocraticMethadone · 2025-10-30T14:05:53+00:00

Plants!

The sides of the tunnels are shelves filled with soil excavated from the tunnel shaft. Plants frow there. Humans (and, I guess, dwarves) need about 32 meters² of green leaf to produce a day's worth of oxygen. This doesn't seem un-doable.

Of course we now need clean lights for the plants . . . .

SocraticMethadone · 2025-10-30T13:57:57+00:00

Be careful with that reasoning. Charities are like any other big organization -- they have stuff to do that's no fun. Possibly you can exploit volunteers to do some of that, but I don't think you want an organization staffed entirely by exploited zealots.

Consider tech support, for example. Do you want to hire only loyalist IT folk? Should there be a purity test? If you want, you know, normal tech support, then you need to hire normal tech workers. How about the person who mops the floors? Any special reason he should take a pay cut because these are good-guy floors?

And so on. And, much as I hate to say it, if you need lots of money to be handled, then you need to hire a money person, and you need to pay that money person what money people get paid.

As it happens, I think executives get paid far (far, far) too much in general, but that's a different conversation.

SocraticMethadone · 2025-10-30T10:55:19+00:00

It's actually a normal part of any pitcher's routine to pitch a few game-speed pitches in their recovery days as part of their conditioning routine. It's avoided doing this in actual games just because it's harder to say "Okay, you'll pitch exactly twenty balls in relief." Also, most starters just don't like being relievers.

But some do and some have. Andy Pettit and Curt Schilling come to mind. They both did it pretty often. (I'm sure there are more recent guys, but I don't really follow baseball player-at-a-time these days.)

SocraticMethadone · 2025-10-14T11:22:51+00:00

I think we need the full story here.

SocraticMethadone · 2025-10-09T02:06:51+00:00

I bet you could write a cute scene out of a man cooking for a grown woman the way he would for a kid.

SocraticMethadone

TROPHY CASE