jackfoxy

cosmic context is NOT astrology mumbo-jumbo, but the actual orientation of the earth and moon in the solar system (coarsely grained)

I watched the entire series, The Americans. It's thrilling and well-crafted television, but totally bogus as a representation of how illegals worked in the USA.

Illegals were/are special assets that would never be concurrently running so many different operations and engaging in risky wet (i.e. assassination) operations right and left. More likely they would spend many boring years cultivating their positions in society and a select few important contacts. That doesn't make for good television.

That which you incentivize you get more of. That which you tax you get less of.

Or, as Charlie Munger famously remarked, Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

The real Master and Commander story, https://www.amazon.com/Journal-Cruise-CLASSICS-NAVAL-LITERAT..., is from the American perspective and is way better than the fictional one. To do it justice it would have to be done as a mini-series because it would be too long for a movie.

Drachinifel is pretty darned knowledgeable. I imagine its not that easy to get enough footage of some American WWII destroyer that is NOT a Fletcher class, (as a made up example), to fill out an entire 45 minute narration. And there's a shit ton of work that goes into a video that long for a solo creator.

Now, the abysmal nature of name brand corporate history videos is another matter.

This is more and more a problem, not just with images. Even most of the higher quality (better researched) Youtube channels are fast and loose about using irrelevant stock footage to go along with their narration. Of course the channels with AI voice-over are universally terrible at this. I know a lot of this is content creators have limited access to good visual content. A naval historiographer I follow will show, for instance, ship photos or archival video that is not exactly the ship or event he is describing. He's probably a solo creator and I'm sure constrained by archival access, and frankly time.

One notable exception I have found is this channel https://www.youtube.com/@wildwestfaces The narration is often of first person memoirs of historic events and the images are relevant and sync well with the narration.

They had not kidnapped Patty at that point. The only thing the SLA was taking credit for at that time was the Marcus Foster murder. They probably thought they had a safe house in east Oakland, which is why all the hippies (as described by the bystander) went there for the meeting.

No. There was no reason for this ex-cop to tell me the story 5 years ago about something that happened 45 years earlier. And he didn't make a career as a cop, so he wasn't protecting anyone.

A former Oakland PD officer shared with me insight into how police intelligence worked back in the day. And I'm sure this still goes on.

It was back in the time of the SLA terrorism and Patty Hearst kidnapping. One of the brothers in East Oakland casually mentioned to a cop "What are all these hippies doing in our neighborhood?" (It turns out they were having a strategy meeting.) This got reported up the chain of command and OPD intelligence set up traffic stops all around the neighborhood perimeter. That was it. They just asked for ID of everyone leaving the neighborhood and recorded them, with special interest in anyone White.

When the sh!t hit the fan and the FBI got involved (soon thereafter) the OPD chief told the FBI they knew exactly who was involved. The FBI was dismissive and wasted valuable time. When the FBI hit a blank wall in regards to identifying SLA members they finally swallowed their pride and asked the OPD for the list. That's how the SLA membership was identified.

Nor should it be in our republic. There is no national security override to our rights in the Constitution.

It may not make any significant change in the numbers applying for k-12 positions, but do people really need to go through the torture, indoctrination, and expense of graduate school to teach k-12? Won't a handful of undergrad courses, seminars, and internships suffice in addition to whatever other degree is pursued? As it is now wannabe teachers already have too much time, the most precious of all commodities, invested in ramping up to teaching.

Spy craft goes way back. You can read about it in Herodotus and the Old Testament.

George Washington was a spy master and much of what we think we know about his operations is dot connecting. This is true of most historical accounts of spying.

A good fictional account of true to life spy craft in the 19th century is Rudyard Kipling's Kim. Some of the characters are based on historical persons in the business.

The OG does well to point out the misconception this is somehow a modern invention. It's interesting to read well-researched accounts of spy craft in different historical eras. Its secrecy at the time makes it hard to find source material. They knew how to keep secrets in olden days and there were not many whistle blowers. A lot of what you come across is just speculation. From the article it appears there is quite a lot of source material for Venice.

To be clear. Geothermal is great in some places and circumstances. It will never be a big enough world-wide market in the foreseeable future to move the needle much in proportion of total energy produced.

Damn long-form journalism takes forever to get to the point, so my skimming sometimes misses something crucial.

With that disclaimer out of the way, (I think) it is distressing and damaging for young people to be doing this job. (And maybe the rest of the article goes on to say something like that.)

Still in today's world it is a job that has to be done. If it is to be done it should be by older more mature people with more life experience under their belts. And it should be revealed up front what the job is and how damaging it can be. I think you would have to be very spiritually grounded and take many breaks to refresh your spirit (mental health) to do this.

The way to determine who sold them the data is a service and agent I've envisioned for a long time, but never had the wherewithal to produce. (I won't go into all the hurdles.)

Everyone should have their own email domain, and an agent that also serves as your email client will generate a proper looking (for some definition of that) email address within your domain for every new correspondent.

Now, whenever you see your identity (email address) associated with anything at all you can determine the original source.

What? No. It's how much fluid (not how much heat) and the oil cut of the fluid you are pumping up the borehole in the O&G industry. This has no bearing on whether the hole is fracked. It's a matter of the decline curve of the well. Not every well in amenable to fracking, and there are techniques other that fracking that will lift the decline curve, but then it starts declining again.

But this is neither here nor there. The energy you extract from a geothermal well is heat, which then needs to be converted to electricity. The BTUs in a good oil or gas well exceed those of a geothermal well. You have the same issues of the well becoming less productive. The remediation strategies for this are similar, i.e. pumping fluid back into the ground.

It comes from having researched the GeoThermal market to determine whether the last software company I worked for should enter that market. The answer was a resounding NO.

I've left the Microsoft world. That said the dotnet environment is pretty frickin' cool. Not least of all for the mostly excellent documentation across a lot of libraries. And MS keeps throwing money at development. It's just not better enough to attract Linux devs brought up entirely in the Linux world. And I suspect most dotnet devs who jump entirely into Linux abandon dotnet because their new shop doesn't use it.

It's not a tunnel, it's a borehole; and therein lies the problem with geothermal power. The usable energy is proportional to the cross-section of the borehole. That's just the beginning of the issues, e.g. the magma chamber recedes or it blows out your facility. There are good reasons geothermal only accounts for a small fraction of worldwide energy sources.

What bothers me about canola oil is it is actually rape seed oil. Rape seed is/was originally toxic. I have heard two different stories on how this was overcome. 1) The toxicity was bred out by Canadians. 2) The toxicity is removed in a process invented in Canada. In either case Canadians are responsible and came up with the more marketable name. Imagine trying to sell rape oil.

I worked on a farm growing rape seed in Germany and once slept on the side of a rape seed field outside Malmo, Sweden on summer solstice night, a very short night.

I've also noticed a movement renaming to canola seed. Yeah, some people need a new name for everything.

What is the take on peanut oil from the seed oil bad crowd? IIRC it is usually missing from both the good oil and the bad oil columns.

The second paragraph of the article starts out

Most on-line sources claim the phrase originated in 1104 in a small town in Essex, England.

In the third paragraph the author states he prefers the boxer story.

Personally, I think the usage of that idiom is older than 117 years.

I would also say good old small.. but the rest of the adjectives flow as I would expect to hear and say.

Worked my way through college on semester breaks on farms in Oregon and Germany. I can totally relate. The camaraderie of showing up at the shop with the other hands on a frigid morning, working until sunset, sometimes longer. Watching crops grow. Harvesting. It also helps that I grew up in the last great generation of feral children. We were outdoors all the time. Rain or shine. I get depressed if I'm not outdoors enough to this day. Outdoor living (as well as hard work) seems lost on so many people today.

I'm only about half-way through, but if you skip to 30:50 he makes a big point. And frankly the lead up to that point was necessary, which necessity is also part of the message he is delivering.

I'm with ya. I still use F# for scripting in Linux. I've been out of enterprise computing for over 2 years.

One of the first comments on the site points out this lacuna. Leave it to the F# community to be vocal about this.

I was in Prof. Marvin Mudrick's Troilus and Criseyde course at UCSB in the '70s. Things I learned: it is high literature (whereas one could argue the Cantebury Tales are in a more popular genre), and it is long. I'm sure I never finished it.

A good portion of the class time was spent listening to Mudrick's phenomenal reading of the text. I knew at the time he should have been recorded for posterity and I'm sure today no such recordings exist and he liked it that way. There are plenty of audio recordings of Mudrick from his writing seminars.

The really big thing Mudrick maintained about this work is it contains a chapter that is the single greatest description of love-making in all of world literature. (And Mudrick should know, he was a great scholar.) Every other work attempting this reduces to mere pornography in comparison. (My words, not his, so you know I agree.)

https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/mr-mudrick-is-100/

The insider class gets its lifestyle boosted to aristocracy tax free because it is all for business, or rather operating expenses.

Think of nonprofit not as another term for benevolent or charitable organization (which is what people instinctively think), but as an alternative tax accounting scheme. Excess revenue gets funneled to the insiders at the top so that at tax year end there is no profit. Presumably these insiders are paying income tax.

I once knew a guy who worked in the field of providing services to non-profits, and he described to me the lavish retreats provided to people in the industry, the first-class air travel and five-star hotels provided for travel. He called it the charitable industrial complex.

Take a hard look at the tooth to tail ratio of the organization the next time you make a charitable contribution.