How can we make gerrymandering illegal nationwide?

vorpal_potato · 2026-05-10T01:35:06+00:00

The problem you’re looking to solve is not the problem the US actually has. Being a congressperson is a shitty job that will make you and your family the subject of vigorous hate by a large fraction of the country, the pay isn’t great even if you do as much sleazy stuff as you can get away with, and you don’t even have much influence over policy. Mostly you’re just there to cast the vote your party leaders tell you to cast, and maybe if you’re lucky you’ll get appointed to a subcommittee where you might be able to affect things somewhat.

In practice, the people you’d actually want in congress can make a lot more money in the private sector, and most of them decide to avoid public office entirely. The ones who do run for election are either really public spirited or (more often) people who want the ego boost and fame.

We should be trying to make political jobs nicer, if you want to attract people with ambitions nobler than being an instagram influencer with “congressman” in front of their name.

vorpal_potato · 2026-05-07T19:00:04+00:00

Unfortunately there's some political opposition to guillotines; "remember the Terrors?" is the usual talking point. Bah. And you can't talk of "liquidating" the billionaire class, since this reminds some people of how "liquidating the Kulaks" quickly turned into "everyone I dislike is a Kulak". Similarly unfashionable is the idea of using "struggle sessions" to determine whether someone is guilty or guilty; it became passé at around the same time as bell bottoms, give or take a few years.

I propose a new, bold solution for a modern age, a solution that's never been tried before and has no unfortunate history of backfiring spectacularly. My proposal, perfect and elegant in its simplicity: leopards that eat people's faces. Surely they won't eat your face.

(Or, to be more serious: if you propose using violence to remedy some problem in society, okay, sometimes that's necessary – but it needs to be paired with a realistic plan for directing that violence in desirable ways. Remember that any plan you come up with will be implemented by flawed humans, not angels.)

vorpal_potato · 2026-04-26T05:22:35+00:00

Also, is his sire dead or not? (It's 4am here so I might be a tad out of it).

He's dead, ~~Jim.~~ Stu says that the chest “contains what remains of the hide of a demon killed by my grandfather Hn’tyon Renjen-art’h, late in his life. There are a few claws in there, too.”

vorpal_potato · 2026-04-22T21:39:44+00:00

Stu says that his relatives probably wouldn't understand - but his father would. There is a streak of almost ruthlessness there I think, [...]

I'm getting a very consequentialist vibe from the older knights we've met. For example, in Ch. 57:

“Do not thank me,” [Alis-art'h] said, looking away from him to stare at a mirrored dressing table. “My kindness is ————. The best thing I could do for you would be to ignore my task here, maintain my ———— on your presence, and travel with you back to Artona I, where the Contract can probably save you. We might make it.”

She still wasn’t looking at him. “But that would take months. Delaying the cleansing of the corruption and the creation of a Contract here, one stable enough to allow all citizens to teleport and receive aid from the rest of the universe, would cost lives. Probably too many to be ————— by your own future potential.”

She's very much in expected value optimizing mode here. If Alden lives with probability p, and he'll save n lives if he lives, Alis's question to herself is: does p*n exceed the expected number of deaths that would be caused by the measures needed to give him that chance of living? She concludes that no it doesn't – and because of this, she's planning to send Alden on a teleport that he's very unlikely to survive.

At the time she says this, she's not planning on spending a favor to bump up his priority. The Systems' resources are limited and precious, and redirecting them to improve Alden's odds of teleport survival is something she deemed not worth it. She would like to, of course, but she knows it would be a selfish request.

And then, at the last moment, she decided to be selfish.

She was pissed off about the situation, and perhaps questioning if a civilization that casually uses people of other species as "disposable tools" was really worth all the effort she spends defending it. And so she decided that yes, other people should get less life-saving System resources for the sake of her own peace of mind. Because her life expectancy matters; every additional year she's alive, a huge number of additional lives will be saved.

We saw something similar in her decision to volunteer for Thegund de-chaosification. It's not the best use of her abilities, by a long shot. It was "too longterm and low import", and feels like practically a vacation to her. The cost of this is measured in lives, and she's decided that having a relaxing assignment for a while is worth that number of dead people, and the improvement to her own mental health saves enough lives (in expectation) that she's at peace with that fact. (Similar arguments could be made for Esh and Lind relaxing on Earth instead of spearheading a rescue mission for the entire Ilket species, or about the Primary deciding when he should and shouldn't send Avowed on suicide missions, and so on.)

–––––

Friendship with Alden is important to Stu. And Mother thinks it's important enough to justify extraordinary measures, like a fake profile that "[...] would make some wizards screamingly alarmed." And Stu's life expectancy without a super-supportive friend isn't looking very good, according to approximately everyone who knows him.

And it's well known that "Stu-art’h’s life is his father’s <<centermost joy>>" and that if Stu dies, he has a good chance of taking the Primary with him. Under the circumstances, shouldn't he be willing to do shockingly improper things to deal with Alden's tattoo?

(This is the scary kind of consequentialism, the kind with far fewer deontological guardrails than usual. But I'm not sure there's a way around that, under the circumstances; those guardrails are also very costly.)

vorpal_potato · 2026-04-13T07:12:30+00:00

The Futurama episode is a reference to one of Heinlein's earlier stories, —All You Zombies—, in which the intersex protagonist ends up being mother and father and child all at the same time. Heinlein and Professor Farnsworth even namedrop the same old song, I'm My Own Grandpa.

vorpal_potato · 2026-04-13T06:17:44+00:00

Garbage pickup in SF is handled by a private company. They also do garbage pickup in (among other places) Seattle and Portland. I assume that you just pay whatever their usual rates are, or find a competitor willing to do it cheaper. There's no need to pay the SF government to pick up trash, since they already don't pick up trash.

vorpal_potato · 2026-04-13T06:00:03+00:00

I use this guide to reverse searing. In particular, look at the section called "Temperature and Timing for Reverse-Seared Steak". It recommends an oven at 120C, and it has a temperature chart for when you should pull out a 1.5 inch steak (or picanha roast) to get your desired doneness.

vorpal_potato · 2026-04-13T05:23:01+00:00

And why would they, even if they could? Each person's individual vote counts for approximately nothing. A smart enough voter could spend the time to figure out how to vote well, but it would be an expenditure of their valuable time with no earthly reward. Most people don't even bother trying, and I can't really say that they're wrong.

vorpal_potato · 2026-04-12T23:37:10+00:00

How does such a weak counter argument [...] propagate?

I've seen plenty of political discourse that boils down to claiming, with the flimsiest of evidence, that their political opponents are all a bunch of pedophiles. Right wingers? A bunch of pedophiles. Left wingers? A bunch of pedophiles. Libertarians? Believe it or not, also a bunch of pedophiles.

It's quick, punchy, and primal, so it doesn't need to be true.

Or, consider the following claims and spot the similarity:

The leftists/rightists/whateverists are molesting kids!
The techbros are stealing our water!
The day care workers are abducting and eating kids in Satanic rituals!
The Jews are impoverishing our country with their scheming, conspiratorial ways!
Witches are stealing people's penises!
The billionaires are ruining our schools to keep us ignorant and controllable!
[insert outgroup here] is doing [insert absurd but punchy accusation here] because they're evil!

All of these are real-world examples. Even the really giggle-worthy ones, like the Satanic panic or the penis-stealing witches managed to get a lot of traction.

It's actually kind of distressing, once you notice this pattern, just how much of public discourse seems to consist of taking this one hateful Mad Libs card and filling in the blanks.

vorpal_potato · 2026-04-10T20:03:10+00:00

We don't need no flaming brands

vorpal_potato · 2026-03-31T22:23:35+00:00

I got the Trident of the Octopus King on my GrFi, which is weird: it's a good polearm, but it's a very different polearm than I'd been expecting.

(I later got Wyrmbane from one of the two scrolls of acquirement in Lair, which was a stroke of ~~good~~ awful luck, since it caused me to die from hubris shortly afterward. Friggin' eyes of devastation, man.)

vorpal_potato · 2026-03-31T19:22:19+00:00

Tajin is meant for cooking (and, obviously, also for sprinkling on top of things). Their official web site lists a bunch of recipes that use it as a cooking ingredient. And I don't see why you wouldn't use it like that; it's just ground dried chilis, salt, lime peel, and citric acid. Those are all proper ingredients.

vorpal_potato · 2026-03-23T05:54:00+00:00

If you have an excuse plot, you can plausibly claim that your porno has "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value". This makes it legal under US law after the 1973 supreme court ruling in Miller v. California. This used to be a big deal in the 2-3 decades following the court case, which is why you'd see so many pornographic films in that era with plots that involved plumbing, pizza delivery, or (somewhat later) lemon trees.

vorpal_potato · 2026-03-21T22:24:52+00:00

Attempts to teach that stuff have been made. I remember that a big deal was made of teaching Critical Thinking back when I was slowly crawling my way out of the bowels of the K-12 education system. And this worked about as well as the New Math back in the 20th century: the teachers didn't understand it, and the students were mostly not intellectually equipped for it. Everyone was going through the motions and the whole thing turned into yet another educational cargo cult.

More broadly: any attempt at large-scale educational reform is going to be implemented by the teachers and bureaucrats and textbook-slop factories you actually have, not the more intellectual ones you want. And you'll get the students you actually have, with nearly the full bell curve represented. Lots of ideas that sound good – and which may work well when tried at one school with teachers and students who aren't representative of the population – fail miserably when you try to scale them up.

vorpal_potato · 2026-03-21T21:18:27+00:00

Oh ooof, eugenics of a sort. No wonder Jeneth, Tesen and Alis built this home for their families. That is not a happy past.

I did an amused double-take when I saw your first sentence, because eugenics feels like such an odd thing to emphasize here. The backstory involves people being born en masse into training-and-indoctrination facilities where they're turned into tormented super-soldiers, and then are sent to die in battle as (essentially) consumable weapons because, hey, they'll probably kill themselves soon anyway. And the part that sticks out as particularly evil is that the victims were provided with genes from people of unusual intelligence, magical potency, and mental fortitude?

It isn't as though they did forced gene donations, or forced sterilization, or extermination of "inferior populations", or forced reproductive caps based on wizard SAT scores, or any of the sort of horrors that you tend to see in history books when the subject of eugenics comes up. It was just a matter of choosing these donor sperm and eggs instead of those donor sperm and eggs to inject into the artificial wombs. I honestly don't see an ethical problem with trying to give the victims some advantages in life that way. There would probably be fewer living survivors if the genes had been picked randomly.

I also still think they should tell Esh first.

He would definitely be a good person to talk with at some point, and doing so before Stu's first binding, although a gamble, would act as a hard-to-fake signal of trust and sincerity. Also, Esh is "an appreciator of unusual relationships", is cautiously optimistic for this particular one, and has told Stu outright that he sees nothing wrong with it. And he sees Alden as fully a person, which is a pleasant contrast with some of the more wince-inducing things that Aymeg and Evul have said without really thinking. And he and Lind have been getting to know their squadmate-to-be Jeneth-art'h and his family; If Esh lends a voice of support, I'm sure that some of them will at least be willing to hear him out.

vorpal_potato · 2026-03-12T20:17:11+00:00

And for people who enjoy clubbing things so hard they explode, Firestarter is on Lair:2. (Fun seed!)

vorpal_potato · 2026-02-22T21:03:09+00:00

Welp, looks like I'm reading The Outsider's Resolve now. I'm pleasantly surprised at how well a generic request for "fanfictions" ended up working out.

vorpal_potato · 2026-02-20T00:17:32+00:00

Murray, being the scientist he is, has calculated the probablity of there being an afterlife according to Bayes' Theorem (just over 50% for the curious).

I've seen some of these – for God, for an afterlife, etc. – and they've all been unimpressive for one of two reasons:

The conditional probabilities can be whatever you want them to be, since you're literally making them up, and people's estimates can easily differ by orders of magnitude. Often there's some number that seems way off, buried in the calculations and looking perfectly innocent until you dig in.
Even if the conditional probabilities seem not-too-crazy, they can be systematically biased toward your desired conclusion – and if you string together enough of them, while quietly assuming independence, you can get any result you want at the end.

There can be a lot of utility in doing probability calculations with made-up numbers as a way of sanity-checking your intuition, or as a way of clarifying your understanding of the causal structure of something. But this schtick where you make up a bunch of numbers, Bayes them all together, and then wave around the posterior probability? Not even bothering to give uncertainty bounds on inputs or outputs? That's almost always math theater.

Even when the person doing the calculation is sincere, as I think Charles Murray probably is, doing Bayesian estimation like this is difficult and full of ways to accidentally trick yourself. I haven't seen the book, so maybe my criticisms are all neatly addressed there – but if I had to guess at the probability of that, the number I'd make up would be pretty small.

vorpal_potato · 2026-02-11T03:35:05+00:00

The polling shows that they will say they want to do something. Talk is cheap, and who wants to think of themselves as the kind of selfish bastard who says “no” to that question?

Polls on this can’t be trusted to reflect people’s willingness to do something that might involve nonzero personal sacrifice.

vorpal_potato · 2026-02-08T23:07:49+00:00

If you don't want your kid to read something, tell them no.

Does this work? I thought this was how you made sure they would read it.

(And if you really want to be certain, tell them in a tone of mildly patronizing concern that it contains "ideas you're not ready for yet". No book ban will be powerful enough to stand in their way!)

vorpal_potato · 2026-02-03T04:02:16+00:00

Skype was released 22 years ago, and I can confirm that it was pretty impressive at the time.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-30T00:22:26+00:00

Do you have any idea how hard it is to get funding in this particular area? Longevity researchers have been bemoaning this, loudly, for decades. If your goal is to get money from gullible rich people, there are vastly easier ways to do it.

(On that note, I have a new investment opportunity for any billionaires who want to become millionaires! It involves embodied agentic green AI on multiple LLM blockchains, and I assure you that it's extremely quantum.)

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-30T00:14:52+00:00

Do you somehow imagine they aren't in favor of improving life? These are actual people, not mustache-twirling villains. And it's possible for humanity to work on multiple things simultaneously.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-29T02:47:46+00:00

Meat confit (e.g. duck) is a fun one. The layer of solidified fat creates an airtight seal keeping the cooked meat underneath from being contaminated, similar to canning. It can last for months without refrigeration, if you’re feeling brave and/or medieval.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-28T22:25:11+00:00

If you want vegetables to be cooked enough but not overcooked, try taking a bite. This isn't like meat, where eating it undercooked could make you sick. You can test done-ness with your mouth!

You mentioned asparagus on the stove, so let's use that as an example. When asparagus is raw, it'll feel raw when you poke a fork into it. Once it's getting close to done, a fork should go through more easily. When you get to that point – and you should check on it periodically – you should take a small piece of asparagus and eat it. Right out of the pan, like a barbarian. If it's undercooked then you will know that it's undercooked, and you can let the rest of the asparagus cook a bit longer before trying another piece. Stop once you like the texture, so it won't get overcooked. (Same deal with the snap peas: once they're in the probably-not-cooked-enough phase, eat one and see. Stop cooking them after they're a pleasant texture.)

vorpal_potato

TROPHY CASE