Nato Powell

It’s very much intended to be a basic missile that does its job as long as it’s not intercepted rather than a fancy super stealth missile with all the countermeasures that Lockheed or whomever can pack in. It’s a stunningly cost effective weapon for saturation or just slipping through cracks in IADS

A funny thing I just learned when I looked up etymology of “choate” to confirm it’s a back-formation from inchoate: the first attestation we have is from no less than Oliver Wendell Holmes talking about having encountered a human having hallucinated “choate” into legal writing.

Sure, but I only know about it from women, some of them young. And you, I suppose.

But it’s not clear in which direction they’re wrong. Hopefully we’re the first, or almost the first, and that’s why we don’t see anybody else. But if we’re not, that implies most people who get to our level encounter something that makes them disappear. Maybe we are rapidly approaching that thing.

So if there have been, say, 50 other civilizations in the galaxy (the other 50 expected to arise in the future), with the earliest arising as long as a billion years ago, we would expect them to have spread throughout the galaxy by now, unless something stopped them. My calculations are surely wrong

But what happens next matters a lot. If we stayed at a level of technology a little higher than where we’re are today, with reasonably efficient sublight drives sufficient to very slowly colonize the galaxy, we’d spread through a lot of the galaxy in a short timescale relative to the galaxy.

1 in 10 of those eventually give rise to intelligent life.
1 in 10 of those make it to at least our tech level without civilization-ending catastrophe of one sort or another
This implies 1 in a billion stars will develop roughly comparable technologic civilizations at some point, ~100 in Milky Way

The resulting frequencies. So:
1 in a 1000 stars have at least one planet in a habitable condition long enough to form the most basic life
1 in a 100 of those sustain that life long enough for it to get firmly established.
1 in 100 of those develop rich multicellular life (plants, animals, etc.)

@drbecky.bsky.social has a short out talking about life elsewhere where she gives a pretty conservative estimate of how many instances of intelligent life there are out there and it’s made me want to make my own order-of-magnitude type guesses about the various filtering requirements and thus

Paris is never going to work. No one’s going to want to live there or visit without more parking, and they should open that park to cars five days a week. As a compromise.

What kind of domestic terrorist suggests that e pluribus unum?

I want to say that the salesmen who worked at the same company I did as a teenager were like this. Not with me as I was just a kid to them, but it was the sort of thing I overheard. But that was a somewhat retrograde industry decades ago. It sounds Paleolithic today.

For some people transit activism is about better transit systems, and for some people transit activism is a plot point in a post-capitalist revolutionary fanfic or something.

Maggie Koerth is a well respected journalist so you can feel confident that you’re really helping.

🤞

The complication is that most reasonable observers did not doubt the top line numbers; the dispute was over the counts of non-combatants (women, children, etc). Biden doubted the casualty breakdown but I don’t think he said anything about the topline numbers; the IDF disputed those until now.

I guess it would be too one-sided to report that 2+2=4 and anyone advocating 5 is not telling the truth, so you just have to report that a battle over math erupted and stay neutral about what whether it’s 4 or 5.

Have any of these guys ever been actual centrists vs putting a little “I’m a centrist but…” hat on all their right wing opinions?

How do we know this?

Do Sunday papers go to press so early? Or is this really tomorrow’s paper? (Thanks for explaining!)

I’m not really disagreeing but it seems to me (very much not an expert!) that they’re giving an awful lot of prominence to the DHS accounts without noting that they are contradicted by video evidence. Maybe just a timing thing I’m not understanding?

Using even nonlethal chemical agents in a war setting is strictly prohibited to prevent misunderstandings but also there’s like 5000 other huge differences.

I don’t know how to say this, but there’s really no respectful way to discuss the realities of the executive branch of the US government right now.

Basically, if the US court system allows the tariffs to go into effect and remain in effect for a significant amount of time, that’s a sign that Trump might be able to get at least some military units to take hostile action in Greenland before courts and Congress stop him.

It’s less a test of Europe than it is a test of the US legal system. Both the tariffs and any military action against Greenland would be facially unconstitutional because both tariffs and acts of war are Congressional prerogatives and there’s no plausible national security crisis around Greenland.

Maybe no one is that good at citing correctly/they mostly cared that it was a recognizable attempt?

This would have made me sweat; so many times I wasn’t sure if I was citing correctly. Though I suppose it would probably be fine because if anyone asked I’d be able to show them by references, however dubiously cited they were. And honestly profs rarely called me on my citations anyway.

He does strike me as the highest placed and most thoroughgoing fascist in the Trump Administration.

It is indescribably mortifying that my fellow Americans voted to hand our legacy and aid for our brave friends around the world over to a cowardly braggart with no principles nor understanding of what the United States is even about. Thank goodness places like Ukraine are building a new legacy.