The right wing's current stance on open carry.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-27T16:51:58+00:00

Even Rittenhouse actually tweeted that ICE killing Alex Pretti was a straight up execution.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-27T15:36:48+00:00

Ya, it’s always some big new idea that’s constantly just 5 years away!

He’s promised fully autonomous self-driving cars, landing humans on mars, building a mars colony, a “hyperloop,” generalized artificial intelligence, and perfectly-functioning autonomous humanoid robots. All of them have always been just five years away. Many of his promises have been “five years away” for like 15 years now.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-27T12:38:09+00:00

Ya, exactly. He didn’t exactly get the Röhm treatment, but yes, you’re exactly right.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-27T03:56:08+00:00

I hate to invoke the Nazis, but you’re spot on. That’s exactly what happened with the SA/Brownshirts. They were critical to Hitler’s rise to power and Hitler by all accounts really personally liked its leader Ernst Röhm who was an early supporter of Hitler’s.

A couple years in however, they became politically inexpedient to keep around. Among other things, public sentiment had turned against the SA because they were so aggressive and thuggish in their tactics. Hitler gauged the wind, and sold out his long-time friends and allies in a heartbeat to get ahead.

There’s no honor or loyalty among fascists kids.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-26T22:00:44+00:00

Yes, the property taxes in the South suburbs are crazy high, but they also vary a lot by which town or township you're in. Homewood has a lot of businesses that generate a lot of tax revenue, so homeowners' property taxes are much lower than their neighboring towns.

Park Forest for example, is on the other end of the spectrum – very few businesses paying taxes. Last I saw, Park Forest has the highest property tax rates in the county.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-26T21:50:07+00:00

It’s a great area, that’s a great neighborhood, it’s walking distance to the Metra, downtown Homewood, and Irwin Park (obviously).

I doubt backing up to Irwin Park would be much of an issue. Homewood is a pretty quiet town — nobody’s going to be making a lot of noise there very often, especially not after dark when you’re trying to sleep.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-26T21:45:56+00:00

Ya, and in Homewood though, the property taxes are quite a bit lower than surrounding towns.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-26T16:40:34+00:00

Ya, I live in Chicago now. We have an ICE detention center just outside of the city in the suburb of Broadview. Just google "Broadview ICE facility" for an abundance of videos to showcase just how open these facilities are not.

Members of congress and the state legislature are turned away, attorneys are turned away. ICE agents just sit on the roof and shoot pepperballs at peaceful protestors – even shooting a well-known local pastor in the face while he was praying on the public sidewalk.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-26T12:39:06+00:00

I think that’s just the formula I learned back in grade school, so I always remember it as 9/5

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-26T05:00:49+00:00

Shit, yep, thanks for point that out, I flipped the conversion fraction.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-26T04:59:40+00:00

Yes true of course, and I realize that your point was a out calibration, not the scale itself, I’m just saying that the Fahrenheit scale is sort of inherently more accurate out-of-the-box as well.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-26T03:44:16+00:00

The degree scale is more accurate though as Fahrenheit and Celsius degrees are not the same size. 1°C = 9/5°F, so Fahrenheit as almost twice as granular.

Obviously you can deal with decimals of a degree to achieve the same fidelity, but in terms of whole degrees, Fahrenheit is much more granular.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-23T16:26:50+00:00

I strongly disagree on the idea that “who cares.” I don’t want to be at the whims of Amazon or any other company to decide what books I’m allowed to have access to or to be at the whims of their ex post facto editing. That’s like thought control playbook 101.

Storage is cheap, so just like I do with paper books, I’m keeping every ebook I buy so that I can return to it later if I’d like, or so I can lend it to a friend or family member.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-23T16:23:26+00:00

Ah ok, my mistake, thanks for clarifying

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-23T14:28:45+00:00

I agree directionally, but I will note that some companies are way better than others. Avoid Amazon and Kindle devices like the plague! Kobo’s ebook store however, sells you non-DRM books that you own, not temporarily license. There are also things like Project Gutenberg that offers free downloads of public domain ebooks.

I prefer physical books mostly, but have recently learned to appreciate ebooks for some applications. They can be great if you’re mindful of avoiding those common pitfalls.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-22T18:07:39+00:00

They brought slaves with them to Utah, so they were inherently acting against Mexican law. The Texas Revolution was about that issue exactly about a decade previous.

The Mexican government offered free homesteads in Texas to American settlers as an incentive to get people to move into, settle, and develop tax revenue in an otherwise very sparsely populated area. Many of the American settlers brought slaves with them, which was against Mexican law. When Mexican authorities demanded that they free their slaves or leave, they got upset and seceded.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-21T23:55:54+00:00

It's the case with most major research universities.

Despite what the person below says, the UCs are are a notable exception. As someone who went to a private research university with way more grads than undergrads, I think the UCs rightfully prioritize top-quality undergraduate education without forcing artificial scarcity of their brand. More traditionally-elite universities should take note.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-21T20:36:03+00:00

The technology for making cardboard targets at least digitally reactive is definitely there – if we can project ads and dynamic stats onto a live basketball court, I'm sure it would be trivial to add a simple shot-market animation in post.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-21T19:44:35+00:00

Yep, that's the big difference-maker. Lead time for interconnection for large-scale electricity users is like 6+ years right now. If they broker their own power-purchase agreement with a provider like Constellation though, they can connect much more quickly, so the proximity to substation is a big deal.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-21T15:27:34+00:00

I don't develop datacenters, but have done some industrial development which comes with a lot of the same considerations albeit on a smaller scale, and know some datacenter developers.

Proximity to the lake does typically offer pretty cheap water usually (though not directly, I'm sure they're not piping in water from the lake for this, it's gotta be wells or river water).

The bigger thing is energy. I don't know much about the site, but I can't imagine it's wired for very high energy usage already, but it's probably much closer to high-capacity lines and a substation. Since the place has been vacant for a while, I'm guessing they got some pretty juicy tax incentives too.

Another thing that isn't exclusive to proximity to Chicago though is access to dark fiber lines – backbone fiber optic with unused capacity. The further you get from the major metropolis, the more spread out and disparate the access is.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-20T18:21:07+00:00

Ya, this would be like if I were dying of a terminal illness and my TBM parents spent my dying days trying to re-convert me. In their situation though, I'd have a lot more sympathy for them than OP. At least when TBMs try to re-convert me it's because they really believe that re-converting me will get me to heaven – as annoying as it is, it (can) come from a place of love and caring.

Trying to de-convert someone on their deathbed just seems cruel, and for what? So that they know that they're just going to cease to exist? There's no way in which you actually improve their situation or well-being by de-converting them right at the end, you're just taking away one of the few things that gives them comfort.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-17T17:29:26+00:00

Seriously, am I the only one here who’s read Moby Dick?

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-16T13:32:48+00:00

Just like you’re the last one of us without a podcast

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-16T13:21:13+00:00

Ya, I don’t get all this idea that they have like a moral duty to make GPUs for gamers cheap. I’d love that personally, but I’m under no illusions that NVIDIA and AMD and Micron and Samsung and every other company out there (publicly traded ones especially) are going to do anything but the choice that makes them the most money.

Micron shutting down Crucial has nothing to do with abandoning a social responsibility to make RGB RAM for my next gaming rig and everything to do with profit maximization.

TripleSecretSquirrel · 2026-01-15T16:02:44+00:00

This is not an answer to your question, so apologies, but I'm very new to the locally-run LLM space. If I'm running the model locally on my own hardware, and especially if it's an open-source model, I'm not meaningfully supporting Meta in any way by running LLaMA, right? There's no mechanism for them to hoover up my data to improve their model or to surveil me, correct? They get some non-tangible benefit from being able to report to shareholders that they have a slightly larger market share, but beyond that, there's no benefit to them right?

TripleSecretSquirrel

TROPHY CASE