clavicat

Would it be possible to construct a building that has four sides of apartments surrounding a central spiraling stairwell, but the stairwell is also adjacent to a conventional emergency stairwell that can be entered from every floor of the central stairwell? You would have to shrink all the apartments on one side of a building to make room for it, but I can see the layout in my head. Furthermore, you could connect another tower of apartments to the same emergency stairwell.

This just reads like a bipolar person recounting their various episodes, presenting themselves as the victim when others get tired of them being obnoxiously confrontational and blaming everyone but themselves despite all the drama they somehow attract, as if by magnetism.

I just assumed it does. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t.

I think jurisdiction and the choice of prosecutor and judge do more to explain the incredible discrepancies we see in the mess that is the American justice system. You have to be very careful when contrasting different cases in different areas—there are so many cases and so many outcomes that it's very easy to cherrypick any two to make any point you want. Two examples:

The son of multimillionaire entrepreneur James Khuri killed a woman while speedracing his Lamborghini through Los Angeles. He was sentenced to serve a pathetic seven to nine months not in prison but in a youth camp and home detention.

On the other hand, Cameron Herrin killed a mother and her baby while speedracing his Mustang through the streets of Tampa—he was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison.

They're the same age. They're both rich. They're both white boys. They were both speedracing. And yet their sentences could not be more different. Frankly, it sounds like California is just soft-on-crime when it comes to vehicular offenses.

In the case of the Cuban truck driver, he was railroaded by local sentencing laws that forced the judge to sentence him to consecutive terms for each individual victim. Even the prosecutor in that case is now filing motions to get his sentence reduced.

Intel joined other prominent U.S. companies Monday pledging to do more to address systemic racism in the wake of the killing of an African-American man, George Floyd, by a police officer in Minneapolis.

“Black lives matter. Period,” CEO Bob Swan wrote in a memo to employees Monday, embracing the rallying cry of contemporary civil rights activists. “While racism can look very different around the world, one thing that does not look different is that racism of any kind will not be tolerated here at Intel or in our communities.”

lmfao

The history of twentieth century tells us that Germans have questionable judgement and bad opinions.

"People who are good at math will be good at this math test."

I do feel like we're reliving the seventies in more than one—among them, crime, inflation, the end of an unpopular war, the rise of social and racial movements, and the Nixonian backlash against them. Biden makes for a very credible Carter, and who is Trump if not Nixon? But while the seventies saw a backlash against the sixties, it was not a defeat for the forces of the new social movements. They regrouped and consolidated their victories in many other ways. They organized minorities and fought for their rights through the courts, they graduated and became the educators of future generations, they staffed the philanthropic foundations, and they entered the culture industry. They accomplished all this despite how much the majorities that gave Nixon and Reagan their overwhelming victories never wanted any of it.

We may have seen the end of the most noisy and obnoxious phase of wokeness, but its aims may very well survive in a more mature and effective form.

So, are societies allowed to maintain any standards at all if it can be argued that the maintenance of standards has disparate impacts on racialized bodies?

How much more frequent do these outages need to become before it starts triggering SLA limits?

It's affecting Substack.

Microsoft watched Silicon Valley and thought, wow, Hooli Chat looks like a great idea!

Sucking a dolphin’s dick for science.

Some have wrongly accused progressive prosecutors like me of not pursuing accountability despite my office’s high prosecution rates on these kinds of crimes and our transparency on filing rates.

Buddy, if you’re so transparent, why are you [refusing to disclose](https://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/opinion-why-wont-chesa-bo...) the outcomes of your prosecutions?

Annie Gaus, of the San Francisco Standard, asked for the disposition memos that reveal the final outcomes of criminal cases. Chesa Boudin’s office denied the request, saying there were no relevant public records to her query — and if any did exist, those documents were “privileged.”

“I can’t emphasize enough what a load of horsesh-t this response is,” Gaus said on a Twitter thread that posted the letter she received from the district attorney’s office. “At a certain point, you gotta wonder why they’re so adamant about keeping this info from the public.”

Report it for child porn, hate speech, etc.

Whatever they’re doing is clearly working in comparison to whatever it is the entire west coast of North America is doing. Are you saying that they could be doing even better if they just emulated San Francisco?

a living hell for all of us

Put all these grievances to paper, have every worker sign it, and submit it to every member of the board of directors.

FSD = Filming Sudden Death

The spaceship in WALL-E but with Metaverse VR pr0n.

Exciting. Chips made in Japan often come in weird flavors.

Do you really think “economic austerity” is an accurate description of the financial response to the pandemic?

I would like to see the stats with people who are in prison for low level drug offenses taken out.

Lucky for you, criminologists have crunched the numbers over and over again. Only 20% of prisoners are incarcerated for drug offenses—not just “low-level” ones. Furthermore, many of them are violent offenders who pleaded down to lesser offenses as part of a plea bargain.

In other words, the United States could release every single drug offender from prison and still have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Mass incarceration is overwhelmingly driven by violent offenders. America is simply a much more violent country than any European one.

Funny, that’s how I felt last year when every respectable media outlet and seemingly every Fortune 500 company unanimously pivoted to amplifying BLM and promoting street demonstrations after they had just been telling everyone to stay home because of the pandemic. If anything, Americans are just now sobering up and surveying the damage after last summer’s wild drunken party.

It’s a bloodbath out there. Is this the dot-com burst all over again?

I like the idea, but now, in the midst of labor shortage?

Hopefully, realizing how unnecessarily shitty and bloated nearly all existing software is and rediscovering an appreciation for simplicity, reliability, and performance. There’s so much low-hanging fruit to be picked yet we let it rot on the vine.

Projects like Zig I think are the first signs that we are getting fed up with what we have.

The most important application to consider when developing the next generation of wireless communications technology is to ensure that 6G will have the robustness and reliability needed to deliver on the promise of doubling Zuckerberg’s net worth by making his portable VR pr0n world into a reality. Users should be able to strap on a VR helmet anytime, anywhere and partake in Metaverse activities that far exceed the imagination of even the most crazed Roman emperors.

It’s undeniable that racial egalitarianism is part and parcel of the ideological complex of the postwar world and its attendant ethical commitments also shape our scientific discourse. It might be correct in its claims, but anti-racism can absolutely form the basis for an ideology just like its opposite can.

The New Yorker published [a decent article](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressiv...) recently about a geneticist—not a “race scientist”—who has to contend with hysterical, hyperbolic backlash from progressive scholars for simply exploring the genetic components of human behavior. The fear is that her work will somehow rationalize racial and sexual inequalities, so it must be suppressed.

“There will be no reason to pursue these types of research programs at all, and they can be rendered to the same location as Holocaust denial research.” By the time he wrote again, several hours later, one of Harden’s few supporters among the fellows had changed the thread’s subject line from “new genetics paper” to “Seriously? Holocaust deniers?” Darity responded, “I feel just as strongly that we should not keep the notions that the world is 6000 years old or that climate change is a fabrication under consideration.”

What is that if not pure ideology?

There is no logical contradiction at all in simultaneously opposing abortion while supporting capital punishment or vice versa. A right-winger believes that the state should serve to enforce the social contract and punish violators—they believe that a fetus is entitled to protection because it has done nothing to violate the social contract whereas a serial killer is clearly a menace to the interests of society. Right-wingers don’t object to state power over the individual in the abstract—they object to it situationally because they think state power is largely controlled by people who are hostile to their preferences and interests.

When your values lead you to [almost castrate yourself](https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2119) and then publicly flagellate yourself further when your supposed political allies dogpile you, maybe you should rethink them.