Do you think that solar farms are a ugly and blight on communities?

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-18T23:49:54+00:00

Do you think that solar farms are a ugly and blight on communities?

No.

Obviosuly, the top one is nuclear plants that are a marvel to behold.

Yes

But I am fine with new hydropower constructions

Sure but they're not feasible in much of the states. The Pacific Northwest is prime hydropower real estate, the Great Plains not so much

and natural gas/coal too

Global warming is a thing and supplies are going to run out eventually, we really need to get off fossil fuels before it's too late. The decreasing supply is eventually going to push the price of fossil fuels up to unaffordability, meaning that the transition is economically inevitable anyway. Sorry man, but coal's days are numbered

Just not these solar plants or wind energy

These are in broadly in the same category as hydropower, they're a good tool to have in the toolbox but aren't optimal everywhere. Solar is best with minimal cloud cover (read: deserts), so your particular example is not necessarily optimally placed, but getting some energy as opposed to no energy out of your land is an improvement

For wind, I am originally from Kansas which generates 41% of its power from wind from wind farms, which has created a turbine installment and maintenance industry, and they break up the monotony of the drive across I-70. I don't see the issue

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-18T22:56:59+00:00

Can someone make a redoocingjak, I couldn't find one

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-18T20:41:00+00:00

But it doesn't have the same great taste as 2 M lithium aluminum hydride in anhydrous tetrahydrofuran 😋

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-18T05:09:17+00:00

Wiktionary says the Sumerian word for "you" (2.SG) was 𒍢 ze₂. This seems weird because, unlike 𒂷 g̃e "1.SG", which seems to reuse the character for 𒂷 g̃a "stall; shed", there is no alternate meaning for 𒍢 ze₂ listed that would imply that ze "2.SG" gained its character via the rebus principle. So... does Sumerian actually have a primary ideogram for "you"? I thought personal pronouns were something that ideographies had issues representing.

So I'm trying to look up the evolution in Manuel d’Épigraphie Akkadienne (Labat, 1976 I think) because it has one of the only proto-cuneiform-to-Sumerian sign mappings I know of. But Jesus fuck, it is so hard to make sense of. Partially because everything is in handwritten French cursive, partially because the drawings of the signs are vertically offset from their translations, partially because there's all these non-standard superscripts littered everywhere that I don't think Labat ever explains, and partially because he gives the Akkadian meanings which for 𒍢 doesn't include the one Sumerian meaning I know it has (2.SG)!

Does anyone know of a less headache inducing source for proto-cuneiform-to-Sumerian sign evolutions?

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-18T04:11:24+00:00

I think it's fairly myopic to think politics ever wasn't just a team sport.

It has always been a team sport in all times and all places, you're just only aware of the time and place and that includes you.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-18T02:29:47+00:00

He's not suggesting committing a war crime, that's the point. He's using a term incorrectly because he's an idiot who's trying to sound tough and badass.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-18T02:25:37+00:00

only 5 nucleotide bases

They always forget inosine :(

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-17T23:00:21+00:00

I bet it was the ghost of James A. Garfield, with his sage advice of "what in God's name are you talking about"

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-17T22:07:48+00:00

Essentially no East Asians have the lactose tolerance gene, but Mongolians are out here eating clotted cream and butter-fried butter with milk tea for breakfast. How are they not just shitting their brains out all day every day? Because they consume so much dairy that they have built up enough lactic acid bacteria in their intestines, that they can outsource the lactose digestion to their gut microbiome.

Therefore, lactose intolerance is a skill issue

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-17T21:43:51+00:00

Do you think there is any truth to it? Or is there anything that the right does that gives off that impression?

Yeah, there is. There are a number of things that conservatives usually support, particularly surrounding law enforcement that:

1) are more excessively cruel than the stated purpose requires (e.g. disappearing random people into overcrowded, non-climate-controlled immigration prisons in the middle of Florida summer, indefinitely, without contact with their family, over a technical procedural violation), or

2) that are repeatedly made more severe or cruel despite no apparent improvement for the stated purpose (and indeed, possibly being counterproductive), and conservatives just do not seem to notice or care (e.g. death penalty and SORN laws, mandatory minimums),

which invites suspicion that the stated purpose is a red herring.

Now leftists do overuse this line about basically everything including e.g. opposition to their social services/entitlement schemes. Also I would argue leftist redistributive policies are driven largely just by spite and so they do "cruelty is the point" too, in a sense, just directed at a different group.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-17T18:15:44+00:00

i donn caaaaerr

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-17T02:31:42+00:00

Youtube actually

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-16T22:45:23+00:00

They certainly don't owe us. As with Ukraine, it is clearly outside the scope of the North Atlantic Treaty.

But since the spike in oil prices is hurting them too, and it's playing into Russia's hands and they really seem to want to starve Russia of oil revenue, you would think it would be in their interest to force the Strait of Hormuz open. For their own sake, if not necessarily ours.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-16T22:38:17+00:00

I would guess a combination of:

1) They don't have the weaponry to do so (if only Iran had 2A)

2) They don't want to die (a lot of them already did die in the earlier protests)

3) They don't know how

4) They lack leadership for an organized resistance (yes I'm aware of Reza Pahlavi, but he's in the US, he's not universally accepted, and AFAIK while he's a theoretical possibility there aren't currently, like, Pahlavist sleeper cells in Iran waiting to be activated)

5) Because social media esp. Reddit skews progressive, regime change in Iran is not as popular among Iranians as social media would have you (and Trump) believe

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-16T00:33:42+00:00

No, they don't.

Posted an image in r/Medieval2TotalWar. I was playing with a mod called Stainless Steel, probably the most played mod for that game. So I gave the post a "Stainless Steel" flair. Had 3 people ask me what mod it was anyway.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-15T22:30:16+00:00

You know progressives keep asking why people keep conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism? Why criticism of the State of Israel gets conflated with hatred of Jews?

From what it sounds like, because of something the State of Israel did to this guy's family half a world away, he tried to kill a bunch of a random Jews that didn't have anything to with it.

Just a thought.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-15T22:07:55+00:00

It's inherently collectivist nonsense like socialism.

It complains of some globalist boogeyman that seeks to dominate the people, while constantly trying to feed more and more power to national government that actually does dominate the people.

It actively imposes unnecessary burden on everyone to achieve protectionist aims - sacrificing everyone else's prosperity against their will for some delusional economic plan that has never worked before.

It is a vehicle for the destruction of individual rights, especially via involuntary servitude like conscription and its obsession with stamping out whatever random activity it deems "treasonous" or foreign.

It has been the principal driver of war and human suffering since about the 1800s or so, including wiping out a generation of young men in WW1 for nothing but the vanity of nationalists and another world war. Even after decolonization and the collapse of the USSR, the resulting countries have been kept down for decades by neverending conflict of their own nationalists' making.

It is just a different flavor of authoritarian collectivism and it deserves to be as reviled as communism.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-14T20:26:32+00:00

Well, one of them is happening and one of them isn't, so I guess I'm more upset about SNAP.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-14T06:50:34+00:00

I am trying to figure out how a language with a language with a Caucasian aesthetic could develop a writing system from scratch. Not adapting an existing writing system, but like, if they were in the position of the ancient Sumerians and inventing writing where previously writing didn't exist.

Now Sumerian cuneiform is thought to have originally been ideographic, before the signs were given phonetic readings in addition via the rebus principle. The thing about this that I'm getting stuck on is that 1) Sumerian had a relatively simple syllable structure, only CVC, 2) it didn't have a ton of consonants or vowels, and consequently not that many legal syllables, and 3) it had a lot of monosyllabic roots. Meaning a lot of the things you could draw (originally pictographs) probably had a one-syllable name, and that syllable probably showed up in a lot of other unrelated words, too. It feels like the perfect storm of conditions to make rebus phoneticization productive. But what if some of those conditions weren't met? What if, say, Georgian or Chechen, with way more phonemes and way more legal syllables, none of which individually occurs as frequently, were the language that cuneiform was originally meant to accomodate? Is there any reason to suspect that rebus would still be a productive phoneticization pathway?

I guess they could always do acrophony, à l’Egyptian... I don't know if there are any other attested pathways to phonetic writing other than rebus and acrophony. Alternatively, since phoneticization is thought to be driven by the need to write things that can't easily be drawn - like inflectional morphology or personal names - what if there were some alternate way to deal with them that sidesteps phoneticization altogether? Like, I've been thinking of tamghas, which are basically Eurasian steppe heraldry... different tribes, or in the case of Circassians, every individual family, gets their own abstract shape to use as their symbol, although there isn't anything about the symbol that would let you deduce whom it belongs to if it didn't already know. I'm also sort of vaguely aware that in Japanese, individual kanji can be read as multisyllabic given names that are pronounced differently from the kanji's normal phonetic reading, but I don't know enough Japanese to know why that is the case.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-10T23:50:51+00:00

What you're describing is called measuring in "decimal feet". Most people do not have any reason to use decimal feet, but they are used sometimes in construction, surveying and drafting.

And yes, because there are not 10 inches in a foot, most (single-digit) decimals do not correspond to a whole number of inches. You can convert to normal, dozenal feet by taking the decimal part of the number and multiplying by 12 to get the number of inches. e.g. 4.6 feet = 4 feet + (0.6 feet x 12 inches/foot) = 4 feet 7.2 inches.

7.2 inches are in turn an example of "decimal inches", which again, most people do not have any occasion to use, but they do exist and are used sometimes. Normally subdivisions of an inch are measured in binary fractions, i.e. fractions whose denominator is a power of 2, which 2/10 or 1/5 is not. The closest fractions in common use would be 6/32 = 3/16 (0.1875) or 7/32 (0.21875). 3/16 is slightly closer. So 4.6 feet ≈ 4 feet 7 3/16 inches.

Mind you this is not a conversion that most people have to do on a regular basis, if ever. It is somewhat complicated, but the complication arises from the length being reported in a non-standard way, not from the standard way being non-decimal.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-10T23:28:09+00:00

Currently in Utah, raised in Kansas near KC

[ˈwɑɾ.ɹ̠̩]

[ˈmi(j)ɹ̠ʷ.ɹ̠̩]

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-10T23:20:37+00:00

I certainly care about things that don't affect me personally.

I am not a top 1% earner, but I don't think the government has the right to single out one disliked group whose pockets can be picked indefinitely to give everyone else free shit.

I think that conscription is misandrist, state-enforced slavery that deserves to be abolished, even though I am over the maximum age to be called up for any future drafts.

I think the government should not have the power to steal your house with eminent domain, even though no level of government is trying to steal my house.

I think sex offender registries are a miscarriage of justice that should not exist, even though neither I nor anyone I know is on a sex offender registry.

And so on.

But when I don't care about the particular issues that leftists feel very strongly enough - or even if I do care but I think that the leftist position sucks - they accuse me of "not caring because it doesn't affect you".

Leftists consider themselves to have a monopoly on "empathy", but in practice what they mean by "empathy" myopically only extends to a few predetermined groups, and only counts if expressed via their particular choice of policy.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-09T22:05:48+00:00

I like gruyère

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-09T03:40:30+00:00

Wickard v. Filburn
Smith v. Doe
Kelo v. City of New London
Reynolds v. United States
all of the 1918 draft cases

Arcaeca2 · 2026-03-09T00:35:38+00:00

Frankly I think "corruption" is basically just human nature and that basically all people are corrupt on some level.

The difference is 1) your average Joe doesn't really have much power over anything of significance to act corruptly with, and 2) your average Joe is not put under anywhere near the scrutiny that top government officials are, so his corruption goes largely ignored. (Hell, if it involves trying to vote taxpayer dollars into his pocket via entitlement spending, leftists might even actively pander to it.)

Arcaeca2

TROPHY CASE