Toxic dust clouds if the lakebed were to dry out and blow away.

Enwokenment, surely

"there has been constant gene flow between populations for essentially the entire history of the human race, we passed through a genetic bottleneck only a few thousand couples wide, intelligence is our key adaptive trait, and the most genetically diverse population of humans on earth is all dumb."

Technically though money for the army was appropriated in the most recent defense authorization act, which has not yet lapsed. It’s rather that the government has run out of money with which to pay its appropriations.

As far as loopholes go, it’s probably not as bad as the one where the army just keeps existing without pay on the promise of future pay when funding lapses.

The constitution prohibits the army from being funded for more than 2 years at a time.

Academics’ and planners’ single-minded focus on making *brand new* homes affordable to the poorest people has been a disaster for poor people’s’ ability to afford housing.

Acting like you can’t win a political argument with Ultima Ratio Regum. Such disrespect for Clausewitz.

Under the right conditions and for certain definitions of “better outcomes” democracy can outperform some other governments (though “wise philosopher king” is hard to beat), but the only thing it really guarantees is that a majority can nonviolently depose the government.

They might be addressed better or worse, but at least now you can depose a poor government without violence. And you are right if you assume that ability to get elected and ability to solve the problems that got you elected are related, but that is not always true.

It’s hard to draw a clear distinction between grievance over policy and grievance over lacking a nonviolent mechanism to change policy.

The colonies of the American revolution arguably are 13 examples. What started as concrete grievances evolved into violence over having their concerns ignored.

These sound different but are kinda the same thing. Rulers not being accountable means you lack a conflict resolution mechanism other than violence. You remove a despot with violence over policy grievances and replace them with a democracy so you don’t ever have to do it again.

you have the brain of an eleventh century peasant, and not the kind who revolts

If Congress must do something then Congress cannot through its own actions render it impossible. That’s the same as deliberately not doing it, which isn’t within Congress’s power.

This also relates to a weird hypothetical about whether the house can move to expel multiple members in a single vote, since if they can then a 2/3 majority could carry out a single vote to expel the entire body, with the same effect as everyone resigning.

To the extent that a house rule would make it impossible to achieve a quorum, presumably the rule is just void, since the house doesn’t have the power to put itself into that state.

Under A1.S4.C2 it’s impossible for a house of congress to end up in a situation where it can’t meet for a year or more, which presumably requires quorum, which presumably requires members. So it must be otherwise.

I suppose the workaround is that as long as there are >0 members of the house they have a quorum to do business and can be the judge of membership.

This has the squirrely implication that if the entire house resigned en masse the elections to fill the vacancies would have no effect. This can’t be the case because congress must assemble at least once each year, so dissolution of the chamber for the (1 yr+) rest of a term must be impossible.

Can you even sue the speaker in their official capacity for a writ of mandamus? The constitution provides only that the office exists. All the responsibilities are house rules, which are an internal organization detail of the chamber. I would think you need to sue the house itself.

I think because their argument is that he doesn’t. If the speaker administering the oath of office is purely a convention with no legal significance, there should be no need to sue the speaker in his official capacity.

The diagram doesn’t even show any circularity for AMD. Doesn’t seem like it ought to be included.

Two thousand pounds of education

"OK I'm going insane."

The first encounter of the characters Knight and Hornet from the game Hollow Knight

Couples costume Knight and Hornet

They need to orbit into position first

this is like shaking a bag of watch parts and dumping out a fully assembled watch. many people say that this is impossible.

the people who say that result from an even more disorganized bag shaken by an even stupider process.

Variation on xkcd comic. A: Group theory is second nature to us cryptographers that we forget the average person is only familiar with one or two examples of groups, such as permutation groups or the the group of invertible matrices. B: And Z_N(+) of course. A: Of Course. Bottom text: "Even when they're trying to comensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person's familiarity with their field."

im immune to LLMs because the Internet has already driven me insane in every possible way

It's kinda strange that there isn't more Aztec-themed vampire fiction.