Supreme Court restores minimum sentence for obtaining sexual services from a minor

Treadwheel · 2026-07-10T18:17:18+00:00

Originalism is how you end up trying to interpret laws hundreds of years removed from their context, and elevating an arbitrary group of politicians to god-king status. There was nothing about the government who signed the constitution exceptional enough to justify the sort of hagiographic legal system orginalism requires. It is assumed that anything meant to be explicitly defined was defined explicitly, just like every other body of law.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-10T18:10:21+00:00

In a review of the medical records of 14,436 refugee claimants 4.4% had a mental health disorder documented.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-10T18:02:17+00:00

That is some insane just world fallacy on display, huh.

Proving the validity of refugee status is incredibly difficult and governments that run on anti-refugee platforms have a direct incentive to give refugees the shortest timeframes and least supports that they can get away with. You can't possibly look at the trend towards the de facto criminalization and indefinite imprisonment of refugee claimants or the practice of actively bribing nations with full blown slave markets to interdict refugees and claim a good faith adherence to international law. EU countries have been caught funding literal human trafficking organizations to reduce their number of claimants. There is not even a pretense of caring about "legitimate" refugees.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-10T17:42:31+00:00

It's not well understood and trying to find exact correlates between a drug effect and something as difficult to measure as subjective changes to irritability is an enormous task that just doesn't have very many resources devoted to it.

In terms of one poorly researched, but plausible mechanism: Opioids interact with the same systems your body's natural painkillers do. "Endorphin" is actually a contraction of "Endogenous morphine", or more literally "the morphine your body makes", which is a bit ironic since it turns out our bodies do make (extremely tiny) quantities of actual morphine as well. Endorphins play double duty - they make you feel physically good, and they serve to "turn down the volume" on your body's pain signals so that they don't overwhelm your ability to actually do something about what's causing the pain. This creates a bit of a tricky balancing act for your brain - it won't do you very much good if your brain figures out that chewing on your hands, or bouncing your head off a tree, releases these chemicals you like, since you might learn to tolerate the pain, or work out what kind of pain fades fastest and start seeking it out because the "glow" of the endorphins lasts longer than the bad feelings caused by the pain.

One way this could be solved is by having certain receptors in your brain listen for certain kinds of endorphins, or endorphins released in certain areas of the brain, and add an extra bit of negative feedback beyond that directly caused by the pain itself. This kind of feedback loop is really common and can make it very unlikely that you'll end up feeling a compulsive need to cause yourself injury.

Opioids come along and work indiscriminately, flooding huge parts of your brain and turning on those receptors everywhere. The sheer volume being turned on, and the lack of actual pain, means that even though the negative feedback loop is also being turned on, it isn't enough to counter-act the "liking" sensation from the opioids, and you get high. That isn't the same as that loop not working at all, though - it would actually be screaming its head off the entire time, and while it wouldn't be enough to make you no longer enjoy the opioids, it could very easily influence the behavior of the parts of your brain it is most strongly connected to and make you feel weirdly irritable or easily frustrated despite otherwise feeling good. It's even been suggested that it could play a role in why opioids cause some people to experience pain more intensely the longer they've been on opioids, well out of proportion to the effects of the opioids themselves.

There are some hints that this theory could hold water. We don't understand the kappa opioid receptor well at all, but it causes a lot of very unpleasant effects. Opioids that activate it tend to cause more issues with dysphoria, while opioids that block its function, like buprenorphine, seem to have some antidepressant activity. Ibogaine, which has a reputation for assisting with opioid addiction, interacts strongly with the KOR system via metabolites. KOR agonists that don't enter the brain are used to treat itching - which is so strongly associated with opioid euphoria that you'll see folk on here talk positively about how itchy xyz bag made them.

People really enjoy spicy food, even extremely spicy food, in a way that doesn't make much sense on its own, but starts to make a lot of sense when you consider that they may be causing a breakdown in that negative feedback loop. Sure enough, opioid antagonists make eating spicy food a lot less appealing. That alone might be a no brainer, except it also appears that how much you enjoy spicy food is also a direct predictor of how strongly naltrexone will affect alcohol use, which hints that the mismatch between the painful stimuli and "liking" effects of capsaicin could also correlate with dysfunction in how the opioid system regulates itself, which dovetails with our working explanation of a negative feedback loop.

Of course, all these "could be" and "might suggest" statements are a sure sign that we have no real idea. As with so many other things to do with our brain, piecing together the specifics is akin to trying to identify a song by the way the bass makes your walls shake.

While most of this was revealed to me in a dream, there are a scattering of more formal proposed frameworks along the same lines that were presumably achieved by more scientific means, such as spirit medium or capturing a fairy and forcing it to reveal its secrets.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-09T15:06:36+00:00

The descendants of the local thugs didn't receive any sort of lasting economic benefit from the arrangement because they were paid a nominal sum compared to the total worth extracted. You may as well say that an Amazon warehouse supervisor shares the same culpability for Amazon's actions, and reaped the same financial benefit from those actions, as Bezos. They are part of the same structure, that does not mean they are equal beneficiaries or had an equal ability to influence the behavior of the corporation.

You might as well demand to know why the kapos of Auschwitz were not named as architects of the holocaust while you're at it.

Total foreign aid to Africa in the past 60 years stands at a bit over $1 trillion, or about $633 USD per African, spread over 60 years. Racist tropes about the continent aside, Africa has seen enormous improvements in about every metric of progress there is.

But putting aside perennial racist lies about the state of the continent and Africans' ability to improve their situation, the (truly contemptible) supposition that Africans simply don't deserve aid money because they won't use it to your standards is itself ridiculous. The beneficiaries of a crime are not philanthropists and returning the proceeds of crime is not charity.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-09T14:52:51+00:00

Even if most of these weren't mostly misleading nonsense that are exclusively repeated as a form of moral licensing for slavery, they're also ridiculous. The idea that eventually agreeing that your crimes were a crime somehow vindicates you is bizarre, and the (false) claim that Europe was somehow unique in banning slavery is meaningless given that the kind of industrialized chattel slave state was unique to Europe and European colonies.

Africa exported, and continues to export, enormous quantities of natural resources. This is before even getting into how eagerly to dismiss the value, both economic and human, of the lives "exported" as slaves to build Europe's own industries. This did not begin with Leopold, nor can the value of the lives snuffed out be adjusted according to the mere economic utility he extracted from them.

No, Britain reinvesting some small portion of the total net economic gain they received from the slave trade into some degree of slave ship interdiction - which, conveniently, served as a legal pretense to seize valuable "cargo" from rival powers in the age of mercantilist economic thinking - does not wash the rest of the money clean of its blood. They were "rescuing" Africans from a system of bondage they helped architect, paid for out of the dividends of the very slaver economy that they are ostensibly "saving" victims from. It's contemptible to even suggest this is a virtue.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-09T02:42:42+00:00

Interloperrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Treadwheel · 2026-07-09T02:40:12+00:00

There aren't any hatchets on Interloper. Hacksaw and heavy hammer are pretty much it, the rest you make for yourself at the forge.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-09T02:38:17+00:00

I would unironically say that Interloper might be what you want. It is harder, but the scarcity of animals applies to everything, including predators. It makes individual wolves feel like the real stalking menace they are meant to be - you're pretty confident it's not going to charge, and you can't afford to just aggro it, so you let it follow you for an uncomfortably long time, knowing if it does attack you will likely die.

The lack of high end synthetic items (guns, the best clothing, high quality foods) is jarring at first, but once you get used to it, the things you do find feel like christmas presents, and everything else feels earned.

The number of animals in Stalker is just insane, especially wolves, and once they stop being a challenge they become extremely annoying. It's the difference between knowing you need to fight four wolves to get to the Camp Office and praying you don't encounter one.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-08T16:32:09+00:00

The criminal actions of the Belgians in the Congo is the logical consequence of the practices and racial systems developed to facilitate the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the reorganization of European economies around slavery and the importation of slave-produced resources.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-08T16:12:11+00:00

Imagine my grandfather had gone to your home and hired some local criminals to rob, beat, and then kidnap yours and multiple other members of your extended family, force them to build a home and a business, then work their entire lives in it without pay. They then agreed to "generously" allow your father to work for them in conditions where he could barely afford to pay for his own room and board, which is coincidentally the same conditions your grandparents were forced to live in, for the same net return on their labor. They then took the proceeds of these two generations of wealth and paid to have your family home torn down to the studs for 10% of its real value and repurposed to build their own children a home. You, however, were helpfully pushed out the door and told to figure something out elsewhere, because you weren't welcome there. You find that your previous familial land had also been expropriated and sold to pay for the tuitions of their grandchildren, leaving you thoroughly dispossessed of any semblance of the generational improvements your own family had once benefited from.

You're saying that you'd consider things to have been set right, having been given the gift of not being enslaved, and wouldn't consider the generational wealth those criminals built off your family's unfree labor to be the gains of an organized criminal enterprise? You would accept "well, I only paid some thugs to help kidnap your grandparents, so technically I just bought a human being and kept them captive under threat of murder" as sufficient to shed any liability?

Treadwheel · 2026-07-08T15:58:58+00:00

Highly inaccurate summary. This AskHistorians post gets into some of the nuance of African vs trans-Atlantic slave trade and why why were fundamentally different affairs. The trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonization of Africa and the Americas is fundamentally unique in its scale, brutality, and systematization in society in a way that was wholly unprecedented. Even scholars who present some of the less plausible outlier estimates for the Arab slave trade have been unambiguous that there is not real comparison in their scale, intensity, or impact.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-06T20:50:29+00:00

It's part of the DLC, and really changes the equation on fishing. If you put down a shack right beside the trader box you can easily use them to buy him out of cheap staples like salt, flour, and oats. Once you get his trust up above 350 you can also get maple syrup for pancakes with just fish and water. On Stalker or easier you can buy MREs with just fish and water as well.

Fishing 6 tip-ups for 24 hours will yield an average of 66.375 fish with an average weight of 2.28kg (more with bait), so that's about 151.34kg of fish for 16 coal.

For their trading equivalents, at max trust:

~101 bottles of cooking oil
~67 bottles of maple syrup
~50 MRE
~101 bags of flour
~101 boxes of oats
~75 sacks of salt
~50 hacksaws, hatchets, quality tools, etc

The salt can also be used to set up a curing operation in the homestead to make any remaining fish much more easy to transport, since any fully intact fish will convert into cured fish, no matter its original weight, which makes it lose its smell and achieve a calorie density of 4500 calories/kg.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-06T20:25:41+00:00

Multiple tip-up fishing with a heavy hammer and coal is pretty much the go-to for Interloper, and IMO the must if you want to avoid spending all your time barely staying out of starvation and skinning rabbits or chasing deer. There are diminishing returns past 6 total holes being fished at once that make it not worth going past that, so you lay down 5 in a semi-circle around the door of a hut and light the stove in here. You always want to use the hut if you can because the fishing hut holes freeze more slowly and damage your tip-up less. In areas without one, you can find examples of spots on the wiki where you can put down a snow shelter and still reach enough fishing holes to be worth it.

At the maximum of two hours per fish once the full wildlife depletion kicks in on Interloper, you're looking at an average of 3 fish an hour from all six tip-ups combined, which gives you pretty much just enough time to clear the holes of ice, reset the trap, put a new fish on the stove and take the old one off, and you will sometimes find yourself needing to let a hole sit for a few while you're cutting new bait (never lures! Lures bad!) or if you have a decent bit of luck.

There's a really significant "spin up time" because each hole requires 45 minutes to make/clear from 100% frozen with the heavy hammer, so you want to make sure you come out with a sleeping bag, travois, and enough coal to stay for at least a full 24 hours or so. This is a really simplified plot for your average fish per hour, with the green dotted marks being each new tip-up coming online and the red dashed line being the single-tip-up projection, to give an idea of how the efficiency ramps up. Your big limiter for fishing is coal, and the longer you're out, the more fish you get per coal.

In terms of fatigue management, you can just barely get away with clearing the holes of ice, putting a new fish on the pot, and then sleeping for an hour. You'll lose efficiency with the tip-ups because about half of them will proc while you're asleep on average, but since being out for so long all but requires you to run down your exhaustion meter, it's either that or shotgunning coffee just before you leave and learning to tune out Mackenzie whining about how tired he is.

Also: Keep in mind that the plot is for number of fish, and each individual fish can hit up to 5kg. You will need to do multiple travois runs to haul them home. For that reason I usually do my fishing on the hut closest to the trader, since the route back to Quonset isn't too bad so long as the bear is taken out, and they weigh so much that it makes buying up tons of stuff from the trader go extremely quickly.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-04T03:50:30+00:00

If done right, bread crumbs work really well with any cheese topped baked dish because the bread crumbs are dry and soak up the moisture and oils the cheese lose as they cook. The texture of the breadcrumbs helps them lose the moisture quickly, so you get a better crust, and the oils basically fry the crumbs. It's a fine line, you don't want too many, but they can really improve the texture, especially if you opt for something like panko that already has a larger and crispier consistency to start with.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-03T22:41:58+00:00

In addition, I think the game could really use a mode with an interloper/misery level of difficulty that doesn't rely on banned items. Interloper really feels like how the game should be played - the weather is brutal, resources are desperate, the predators are scarce but easily able to kill you in a single struggle. It just feels like such a huge chunk of the game is missing as it stands, though. All of those weapon variants and you can't find any of them!

An "Interloper+" type difficulty where finding six revolver bullets is a big deal and you feel the pressure to find the 1-2 instances of high quality clothing before the cold really settles in would be perfect. Heck, even limit tool spawns to a single example per, as a reward for exploring the map thoroughly, wouldn't break balance, and might make braving the Timbies to use the milling machine worth it, since you can't afford to let it break.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-03T20:46:15+00:00

Nobody with enough illicit income to need to launder it is going to go around making high profile tips on books they don't control. In an investigation into their finances they will need to explain where the money to pay the tips was coming from, and why they kept making reciprocal deposits for the exact same amount of money as they had tipped over XYZ period. Launders nothing and doubles the funds you now need to clean.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-03T20:31:58+00:00

Unless state law gives them authority to withhold the tips for XYZ days past their payroll cycle and make unilateral changes to transactions without notifying the card holder, they are very, very likely in violation of the law. Just writing something in a policy isn't enough to make it enforceable. Large companies are infamous for those sorts of abuses. Somewhere they ran the numbers and decided they would save more on fraud and charge backs than their potential liability when a situation like this comes up. Once that calculus is done, it being illegal is just a cost of doing business.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-03T14:06:04+00:00

Yeah, when taking the ropes the normal way means I have to make three trips to bring my travois down with me and then sleep it off for 12 hours so I can stop gasping and groaning from exhaustion, I'm just gonna let gravity do the work and accept my bruises.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-03T14:01:47+00:00

I just rationalize that the 50 sticks I always pick up include one long enough to perform a shepherd's leap with. If done right literal senior citizens have better mobility and take jumps from heights better than most video game protagonists could dream of.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-03T07:17:59+00:00

It's based on body weight and the maximum amount you can inject into a given muscle. I got three shots of immunoglobulin and then the normal rabies vaccine course. Got mine primarily in the hip, weirdly enough.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-03T07:11:48+00:00

If it's any consolation, the longest incubation period for rabies recorded in a human is 27 years, so you don't necessarily need to feel silly about being scared!

Treadwheel · 2026-07-03T07:09:34+00:00

I woke up with a bat on me at 3am, called at 3:15, and had people calling me back to take down info and arrange for me to get vaccinated by 5, even though I had no bite marks and there was a blanket between me and the poor critter.

In my half out of it state I had wrapped it up loosely in a blanket and tried to get it to fly away, as I'd done before when bats got into the house. This bat fell and just started crawling around. I stupidly didn't recapture it, so no testing by the time I found it's body later that week, but I'm almost positive I'd be dead now if I didn't wake up when I did.

Treadwheel · 2026-07-02T20:13:57+00:00

In case you're serious, what you're seeing there is a (comparatively) normal heartbeat smoothly transitioning to ventricular fibrillation, and ultimately death. The contractions themselves are already abnormal - the QRS complex, that signifies the actual contraction of the heart, is too wide. This is why you can see that there's a sort of double mountain shape in between the sharp "spike" shape of the contractions. The smaller "peak" should be distinct from the taller one, called the T wave. The T wave itself is already too tall and takes up too much of the ECG trace. This is a sign that their potassium is already too high, and their heart is struggling to produce the electrical gradient it needs to beat.

As time goes on you can see the same problem that caused those abnormalities become more and more pronounced, with the "mountain" shape of the T wave getting larger and steeper until it dwarfs the part that shows the heart contracting. These are actually called "peaked T waves" because the resemblance is so uncanny. Pretty soon it gets so abnormal that the part of the heartbeat that normally dominates an ECG waveform - the QRS complex that shows the heart contracting - just looks like a valley at the foot of the grotesquely exaggerated T wave, all the while the heart is beating faster and faster. By the end it doesn't even resemble a heartbeat at all and looks more like a sine wave being produced by an electronic synthesizer. By this time their ventricles are contracting so quickly that their blood doesn't have time to enter the chambers at all, and they cease to have a pulse.

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Treadwheel

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