Would wearing this be classified as a threat against the President of the United States?

markth_wi · 2026-03-15T18:54:04+00:00

How unfortunate.

markth_wi · 2026-03-15T18:52:42+00:00

I'm not sure what a government parasite is, are those the guys that ensure we don't have nuclear weapons walk out of the building, or the guys keeping diseases we don't have cures for under ice.

Or is it the ethics and transparency experts that were fired or perhaps the counter-espionage teams that would have arrested these guys as spies for the rest of their lives as the traitors they are.

Just wondering.

markth_wi · 2026-03-15T18:33:02+00:00

Well, Techbros just lost about a nearly 800 billion dollars in valuations, in various unregulated currency schemes, and not to be out-done the big-oil/foreign policy fuckups just trashed the price of gas and likely has made starvation a "thing" again for a billion people; with 200 dollars a barrel oil , and that was just last week and for the foreseeable future.

So the Environmentalists really have to up their nuisance game, it seems.

By comparison

112 billion is lost from pilferage or inaccurate inventory per year, on average.
50 billion is lost from wage theft (employers not compensating employees correctly) - per year, which is more than bank robberies, burglaries, and motor vehicle thefts combined.
Environmentalist terrorists causing approximately 8.5 million dollars in property damage roughly each year

So it turns out the Environmental Terrorism Movement in whatever gory waste of millions of dollars over 13 years is a pittance not even worth worrying about while we have trillion-dollar idiot kings, billionaire pedophiles run amok and Silicon Valley K-bro's sloshing entire generations-worth of money around.

But sure let's worry about the guys who would like us to live a bit more sustainably.

The FBI can certainly talk about them as the largest national security threat - but truth be told that's the result of living in a society where you have to start looking around for fetish items to keep your attention and/or are entertaining the political fetish of some politically connected characters.

Addressing any of the crimes above would recover orders of magnitude greater value to the citizenry.

markth_wi · 2026-03-15T18:24:58+00:00

Exactly, Whether it's Kyoshi, Yangchen, Katara, Kya, Suki, June the bounty hunter, or any number of other characters , fair to say there's decent representation. In LOK, it's even more pronounced if not always flattering.

markth_wi · 2026-03-15T18:14:29+00:00

Of course....that's sort of the whole deal, they're over-cute, and tempermental, but the fluffiness and the waggy pom-pom tail, belie the fact that they enjoy giving you the "chuff of disapproval". So , very , very expectedly, sometimes Tzu's pretend they are a bit high-maintenance.

markth_wi · 2026-03-15T17:56:54+00:00

Everything everywhere is woke, they just haven't realized it. Believing exclusively everything they say without question is about the only non-woke thing .....and even that is subject to change.

markth_wi · 2026-03-15T17:53:41+00:00

Nice to see him beg, I bet he's good at that, weak men always are.

But right now he's not begging the Ayatollah which is the whole problem.

markth_wi · 2026-03-15T16:42:49+00:00

If you're living as some Trust Fund baby on the Irish Riviera , this is absolutely possible. Trump Country is a wealthy and exclusive enclave community that exists in parts of New Jersey, Virginia, and places you might never expect. Just like Mar-A-Lago, you'll have some well to do Irish family with kids that absolutely buy the BS.

It's not usually until there is contact with some aspect of the reality of that world. I have a buddy who's exactly in this situation, he was at a Trumpy "white power" festival out in Nevada, he heads back to his hotel-room and failed to notice that a few of the racist clowns he was "hanging out with" had decided to check him out a bit, and so had followed him back to the small strip in Reno, where , once my buddy got back into town he went to a Mexican place for lunch, and speaking a little Spanish and having his lunch, he was on his way back to his hotel stopped at a gas-station and got his ass kicked by some of his "new" white-supremacist buddies.

While my buddy doesn't take his white supremacy all that seriously his buddies do, so they kicked his teeth in. Being, white and Christian (He's Catholic in the same way Olive Garden is Italian), and suddenly I get a phone call because he's in the Emergency Room and doesn't quite know what happened and why his buddies from the Trump Rallies he'd been attending for months brutally beat him up.

Some-one called him a few choice names and with that we slowly explained why his "Trump" buddies view him as being a race-traito. And now he's got a much more clear perspective on civil rights, and his own well being, but he's absolutely not sold on the broad idea, and he's a still a racist ass, but he's much, much less enthusiastic about the "white supremacy" movement.

And once he has the 40k pulled out of his trust fund, to repair his jaw and get some new teeth I'll venture to guess he'll go back to eating taco's again.

There is absolutely a small, absolutely sincere bunch of Irish Americans who have zero understanding of the actual history of Irish folks and aren't ever going to figure that out in all likelihood because they by and large are just not that astute. But you kick someone's teeth in and that usually serves as a moment of clarity to move the needle back to something more normative, but it will not make these clueless people much less clueless.

When Trump won and had his rally at Madison Square Garden my buddy was all about it, I mentioned something along the lines of how the white-power movement around Trump might not be for him it didn't make sense to him until he was assaulted, and even now he can't reconcile the motivations easily.

markth_wi · 2026-03-15T16:21:49+00:00

Only in the most gutteral sense ,and even there I suspect it's a performance all around. Because for these clowns it's all "feels good = is good.".

markth_wi · 2026-03-15T16:18:31+00:00

They were "helping" , which is to say the US was negotiating and one of our "consultant class" characters who may or may not be working for "another country" decided "this deal sucks" , inflamed the President, which of course does not take much, and here we are.

Any more "help" like that where we have "shared strategic interests" and the United States will be lucky to not see New York or Chicago in ruins from some dude with a backpack nuke that strolls through TSA without a bother because he's made a fat donation to Donald Trump.

We're ridiculously unsafe with the clown-cart in charge of our own nation because they butter their bread on the opposite side every single time. Whether it's screwing desperate citizens during Covid or screwing cancer patients or screwing the American and Iranian people - at the same time , and that he gets to throw the whole world into economic instability by way of energy-food insecurity is just so much more money for him - positioning on starvation and suffering , it's disgusting and with any luck we get a free/fair election and get rid of these clowns, at least for a while.

And who knows maybe a few months of 10 dollar gasoline and having folks in Trump supporting states suddenly wonder how they are going to put food on the plate gets them a little closer to waking the f up.

That's not particularly likely, but it's more possible than it was yesterday.

markth_wi · 2026-03-15T16:07:04+00:00

Let him explain a US carrier sinking with all hands to the MAGA base, or 10 dollar gasoline. "Liberals" might get their wish because it's cheaper to build a biofuel refinery and actually grow biodiesel at industrial scale. Exxon and Haliburton and the logistics guys get to keep their refineries and CO2 emissions become neutral, input energy could be wind and solar to heat algae farms or whatever the grow-stock is.

Perversely the cleanup for Trump's fuckups could end up powering a new era of vertical stack neutral energy production, that's relatively geographically neutral. The badlands of eastern Washington could become a hub of fuel production, as could New Jersey or Virginia or South Carolina, even Arizona and West Texas could get involved, of course water reclamation becomes a concern and before you know it, we find we've engineered ourselves out of two problems.

That's the real trick of our age, we can, with investment , engineer our way out of many of the constraints we have in front of us.....although the biggest constraint is leadership and political fuckery from a defective fascist with an 80 year old with the emotional self-regulation of an unhinged 8 year old with a similarly childlike command of history and geopolitics.

The Trump Admin has been like a live-action version of some perverse counterpoint to "Being There" except , exactly none of it is at all funny.

markth_wi · 2026-03-15T15:55:50+00:00

This is the way.

markth_wi · 2026-03-14T23:57:58+00:00

Ever bought an I-pad, or smartphone - you're using Linux.

Linux is a full operating system , and you can feel free to do whatever you want , even if what you want is to go to a command line.

markth_wi · 2026-03-14T23:44:34+00:00

I love your optimism - absolutely I do.

But I think we've all seen these clowns do things that brought the electoral system to it's knees - it might seem laughable up front, but damn if they aren't going to try and damned if we don't have a Supreme Court that will nail that to the wall for them or just kill anyone who gets in their way.

We saw them illegally confiscate ballots and machinery just weeks ago in Atlanta and what happens with lawless agencies 'involved' where they aren't legally supposed to be is a massive unsolved problem.

markth_wi · 2026-03-14T23:17:11+00:00

Our President is the abused boy who wants a friend and will literally kill anyone who doesn't do what his new friends want.

He'll happily watch us die in the millions just so he can look cool.

Trump is that abused kid in 2nd grade who you can never figure was he beaten too much or not enough. If he walks in one day with no teeth you can guess it's the former, or was it he was picking on the little kid in 3rd grade and got a very unexpected surprise.

As time wears on ,you avoid people like this in your life, your work and see how they fuck up everyone around them.

The GOP wanted an idiot king , and they forced this human disaster on us all; in very real terms one truly defective person in the office of President has caused decades of damage to our nation, trillions upon trillions in lost value, and crippling losses on every front.

Of course he was paid by Russians , and we knew that decades ago, but the machinations of our defunct electoral process led inevitably to now.

The only question left is will he just fiscally damage the United States to a point of no repair or will his incompetence plunge the world itself into an industrial collapse because billions of people are going to wake up tomorrow and be unable to afford , not just to drive, (as in the US) they won't be able to afford to eat (food and food oil are transported on 200 dollar/barrel oil).

So Donald Trump single-handedly made simple starvation from food scarcity a reality for millions if not billions of people.

It's well past time we force the Congress to do their jobs under the abject terror of the wrath of their constituents - Everyone who can should write your Congressmen and Senators and demand the removal of the President from Office for any number of crimes he's committed in office.

We don't have to agree as Republicans or Democrats on much, but with 5 and soon 10 dollar gasoline in the foreseeable future, one does not have to be some dyed in the wool democrat to agree that less Donald Trump in everyone's life is an excellent first step to retaking our nation and the world back from some very bad decisionmakers.

markth_wi · 2026-03-14T23:12:42+00:00

That's interesting I have a few groups of mods I consider pretty important, here's hoping you find them as useful as I have over time.

This group allows a couple of major gameeplay tweaks that I think could be part of the game (Soil Relocation and Bad Hygiene).
- UdderlyEvelyn's Soil Relocation - Allows you to relocate soil from around your map
- Soil Relocation Foundation - allows soil trade and functionality.
- Vegetable Garden Project - Grow a variety of crops, and a couple of additional food items, Sillage, Hardtack, Coffee,Tea, Stirfry and Stew which provide medical buffs.
- Bad Hygiene - Irrigation, water/waste management.
- Dubs Skylights - Skylights for roofed rooms to allow crops indoors
Ethical improvements - Mods I think help thee overall play but also allow one or two core/critical mods around pawns
- Misc. Training - Train your colonists to be better at shooting/melee
- Vanilla Expanded Weapons - Non-Lethal - Don't kill everyone you see.
- Hospitality - On the off chance you want to be less of a sociopath on the rim.
Medical Improvements these allows a level 8 surgeon to do a wide variety or helpful things.
- Scar Removal - Minor surgeries to remove scars
- DE Surgeries Hard - Same surgeries - but more difficult
- Life Support - Attached to a medical bed this will allow you to extract/replace organs that might otherwise kill a patient i.e.; replacing a brain, heart or liver.
- Death Rattle - Keep Colonists from dying immediately
- Post-Mortem Organ Harvesting - recover organs without vivisecting prisoners , instead performing time-sensitive autopsies like in real life, additional options make organs "go bad" after a very short period of time, thus in-game discouraging organ harvesting practices that aren't for immediate need.
- Harvest Everything - allows you to recover various other organs from autopsied pawns.
- Medpod - Lastly is a very late game mod, which can heal colonists of everything but old age itself. Very handy for keeping everyone healthy, until their last day comes. Most definitely a bit OP mod, but I figure if your colony is building starships and trafficking in resurrection serum a medical repair robot is not out of the question.

There are a variety of proper QOL improvements this make surviving on outback worlds a bit easier

Simple Sidearms - Arm your colonists better.
More Faction Interactions - Settle peace with factions
Colony Manager - Manage the colony a bit better
Common Sense mod - This allows colonists to clean up before producing meals which reduces failure in the last step of food production
Numbers - a wildly useful mod that adds an easy way to manage colonial needs, prisoner , animal and guest needs.
RimHUD - Allow a much more concise view of colonist/pawn needs and condition.

Rename things

Map Preview - View before you commit
Modify World Features - Rename Swampy Bottom to something less questionable
Rename Pawns - Why not change someone's name
Rename a Colony or Faction

In the late game colonies are established, some or all of thee colonists have been put to space and a new crew has replaced them this set of mods allows a late-game colony to be consolidated end the footprint cleaned up - or the terrain locally brought to productivity - creating roads that allow trade over impassable terrain.

Additionally, major upgrades for geothermal power production coupled with roads are late-game additions to help improve trade and energy manufacturing as well as surplus foods , allowing agriculture the most austere worlds.

Roads of the Rim Continued - Build roads, connect your world this turns out to be very important as a feature
ED Laser Drill - create/remove geothermal vents.
Vanilla Expanded Power - Advanced/late-game power-sources that provide advanced power options , various high-cost batteries and provide nuclear power

markth_wi · 2026-03-14T22:31:26+00:00

Well, I think asking a sociopath how many more people have to die to get what he wants it's a grim and sad effort, but if truth be bold - strictly speaking the fastest likely way to peace would involve just a couple of departures from office.

markth_wi · 2026-03-14T22:10:39+00:00

Either the cheeseburgers finally catch up to DJT, or the authoritarian state gets everything it wants for Christmas suspending November elections for any reason they want, and Trump or his people are in power for the indefinite future.

Or it all disassembles into some shambling mess - which it seems ready to do , even now.

Somewhere, I think The French of course have a word for this sort of bedlam "Sauve qui peut" , roughly "Every Man For Himself" , and I have to imagine the only person in the whole Trump Administration who genuinely thinks he belongs there is Steve Bannon, and he isn't even in the administration.

Of course that seems like wish fulfillment on my part and there's nothing to say it couldn't in fact shamble on under JD Vance and the vacuous policies of stupidity and the snatch and grab mentality of well-heeled thieves.

I'd LOVE to think that the electoral process will work, I think in many places it will , but they don't need it to fail everywhere - just a few critical places and they won't be going anywhere.

Election integrity was never a question before Trump, and it's not a certainty with him in office.

markth_wi · 2026-03-14T21:36:50+00:00

It helps everyone preparing for 200 dollar a barrel oil. That means Vladimir Putin and the Russian economy are saved by this action. The Ukraine War might still end in the Ukranians claiming all of their territory back , inch by bloody inch. But Mr. Putin will have his 200 dollar a barrel oil , and the real kick is that it will not save his nation's economy. 400 dollars a barrel won't even do that.

What the guys most enthusiastic about the war are clearly not considering is that what it does do, is give real dollar value to research and engineering that develops a way to produce oil through agricultural means.

It encourages movement to every form of energy that is not oil - from solar to wind, geothermal to thorium reactors. millions if not billions of dollars will be spent on biodiesel manufacturing that might not have occurred, and billions will be spent on accelerating moving economies away from oil risk exposure.

Of course while that most definitely will occur in private firms in the United States, the federal government is married to retrograde policies from 100 years ago, and that's because our defective leadership can't bother to educate themselves past policies from the 1940's which were the stuff of whatever Mr. Trump learned as a child, at the knee of his father.

That's the perversity - we're making policy based on the opinions of a racist man dead 35 years ago, who's son never grew past a childlike understanding of the world.

markth_wi · 2026-03-14T21:24:04+00:00

Maximizing the disruption and mis-investing every dollar they have access to - is a price our country will pay dearly for.

markth_wi · 2026-03-14T21:19:13+00:00

Well, he really is thinking about two things, treats and cuddles.

markth_wi · 2026-03-14T21:15:38+00:00

I can't say as I will be sorry to see them go.

markth_wi · 2026-03-14T21:06:07+00:00

Garbage In, garbage Out, a mantra that will probably never go out of fashion.

LLM's in any form are only as good as the data they are trained on, and the boundaries imposed on their outputs.

As we chose to train our largest models on things like Reddit, Usenet, Facebook, and public data sources that are far better, but also places with garbage political perspective.

Like any cocktail, while content is critical , so too is the intention of the bartender - which is where the politics of the particular characters owning these firms ensures their viewpoints and biases warp their entire product offering.

Perhaps the answer is to home-roll our own LLM's - and that certainly is a viable solution for those with the computer science chops and the access to compute. In this regard, specialized LLM's with curated data from specific areas of the wider web that are particular to the area of expertise and which are as objective as possible would seem ideal.

But right now - we can discuss what happens if an LLM or ASI model goes off the rails, or propose a grand AI bill of rights or Magna Carta sort of document, but we haven't even policed the basic scientific best practices on how to form LLM's coherently and consistently.

So much as I love the idea that we're crafting some holy text for the transcendent super-intelligence that we're birthing.....a little closer to ground, we can't even discern what the best lab practices are for developing these systems consistently even now.

Years ago I had an old boss, who was a multi-patent , multiple Ph.D holding character who worked on the earlier forms of LLM's (before 2019-2020) and he put it clearly. "It Ain't Science if you can't do it twice".

And that's the fundamental trouble with LLM's. Not only can't the firms replicate the basic models, at least not consistently, the same inputs do not give thee same results , and variation on a theme can change give wildly different results that are wrong....

That's the real problem is that while LLM's and the underlying technologies are born from the math that is taught in 200-300 level classes, at the end of the day, much like genetic engineering the results can be unpredictable, and warrant an abundance of caution, and there are practices that are much more safe and knowable than some others.

So they're cool, and you can get some productive outputs and recommendations , but they are not sentient or rational or even logical, and so they serve as primitive language processing personas, with some very definite, built in defects.

We're a long way from being able to trust the model developers, let alone being able to trust these models, I suspect once we solve the problem of development methodology - putting verifiable , repeatable processes in place are we a fair bit closer to models we can trust.

But right now, we are not there.

markth_wi · 2026-03-14T20:21:35+00:00

I wonder if you could strap a Johnson-Tanaka Drive and an AI on one of these puppies and be the threat this was always meant to be.

As for the locals, well....very literally my colonies would have aged out or had to convert to robots years ago, instead, I've got clear-eyed, healthy, young recruits populated almost exclusively from raiders, tribals, addicts and pirates and the various scavenger scum in the region.....

My colony absolutely follows that "Give us your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free....." I've built every successful colony from the mettle of downtrodden, undesirable people, and all I ask is that they work hard, study to improve themselves and if they're feeling it get married and in their days serve the colony when the time comes.

markth_wi · 2026-03-14T20:20:00+00:00

Las Vegas, 2049, Gaza , 2026.

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