proofofburden

[proofofburden]

Another formulation I've used to describe my feelings here are, "You dismantle rainbow capitalism last". I've got to live here in the meantime and I'm not clawing back progress for queer people for your utopia, sorry

PRIDE marketing is better than the alternative

Like, it's marketing and it deserves some cynicism, I'm not naïve over here. Chase bank putting a rainbow in its logo is not, like, queer liberation or anything radical. But being a sexual deviant used to hurt your credit score, so, like, this is a W and it goes in the W column and if you want to put it in the L column I will fight you

[proofofburden]

The answer to these is always they are badly typeset

There is a correct way to interpret it, and the answer is 16, but it doesn't scan well. If I were going to use the division symbol I would render this (8÷2)(2+2), but in the computer age there are free LaTeX sites that will give you a great image:

so you can avoid having to ever plumb the finer points of PEMDAS. Just like natural language, if it's hard to read, it doesn't matter if the grammar is impeccable, it's still bad communication!

[proofofburden]

My main objection to banning heterosexuality is that the bisexuals have been through enough already

[proofofburden]

PRIDE marketing is better than the alternative

Like, it's marketing and it deserves some cynicism, I'm not naïve over here. Chase bank putting a rainbow in its logo is not, like, queer liberation or anything radical. But being a sexual deviant used to hurt your credit score, so, like, this is a W and it goes in the W column and if you want to put it in the L column I will fight you

[proofofburden]

What, no, heliocentricity's not anymore obvious at the pole than the equator

This argument is really bad. Just, stunningly out of touch with the intellectual problems the actual cosmological debate raises, and a bit confused about the difference between a day and year

If you watch the video, you can see a time lapse of a single day where the sun rotates around the Earth. There's no evidence in the video that the Earth is moving, and your normal experience should be that the things around you are fixed. If you're on a merry-go-round you have to hold on, or you're at risk of getting flung off. The obvious inference from this is that the thing you see moving is moving and the thing you see holding still is holding still---geocentricism is the obvious conclusion here. The solution to this turns out to be inertial frames. If you get a merry-go-round up to speed and keep it there you don't have to hold on anymore because you're turning at the same speed as the merry-go-round. Before it was easy to construct objects and get them up to a constant speed like this, this was not an obvious thing, and the experience with moving "vehicles" came from horses, which are famously hard to stay on. You could argue this in an ancient society, it's just going to be even more counterintuitive than in a world where you can walk around planes.

There's still a problem with that, though! Coriolis argued that this was nonsense because if you fired a cannonball north, it should get deflected East as it fell closer to the Earth's axis and the earth moved slower closer to the axis. You've probably never observed this firsthand, though if you've ever tracked a hurricane on satellite or radar---something you couldn't do in the 1600s---you have seen it happen. It turns out on the Earth the size of the effect is most noticeable at continental scales, but precision artillery strikes over many miles have to account for it. It is downright hilarious, by the way, the that effect is named for a guy who thought it was nonsense. At any rate, you can't see that at the poles any better than in Italy.

And then, to cap it off, the diagram he puts up for heliocentrism is about the revolution of the Earth around the sun, which is a different problem of watching the sun apparently orbit the Earth in a day. The ancients knew the stars orbited once a day and that the sun mostly moved with the stars, but moved in a circle against the stars over the course of a year, and that the planets wandered even more. (There are two slightly different definitions of a day whether you wait for the stars to come back to the same spot in the sky or the sun to come back---astronomy will give you a nosebleed with this stuff.) The ancient Greeks would have eviscerated this guy with rhetoric if he showed up mixing up a day and a year like this!

As another aside, one of Galileo's' arguments for Heliocentrism was it explained the tides because that was an example of something getting thrown around merry-go-round style. It turns out, that's not the cause of the tides and people at the time gave correct refutations of the idea. The fact that there are two tidal effects, one generally tied to the day and one tied to the month, was a major problem for the idea of sloshing, but in Galileo's defense, the tides are extremely finicky and don't follow any simple rules so the idea wasn't completely bonkers. But the Heliocentrists were often putting forward wrong arguments, which sapped credibility from what was already a counter-intuitive hypothesis. Science requires not the right answer, but a good argument for that answer!

Your ancestors weren't dumb and had good, rational reasons for thinking the Earth was stationary---and your day-to-day experience should be that's the obvious observation. Finding a place where they could watch the sun's whole rotation with the stellar sphere would be seen as proof for a spherical, geocentric Earth!

[proofofburden]

Wow! The woman who was visibly working as an agent of the Russian government turns out to have been an agent of the Russian government the whole time!

[proofofburden]

One of the more striking things about the local no homework debate is...

the gated community is very vocal about wanting to abolish homework for "equity" reasons. The parents there are tripping over themselves to say its for the poor kids, you see. Poor kids just can't compete since their parents won't help them with homework! Now, forgive me, but I've lived in this area for a long time, and those families would use a kid on free or reduced lunch as a step ladder to reach a few quarters and act offended you said that was exploitative. The sudden concern for those kids rings extremely hollow to me.

This doesn't settle the merits of the question, of course. I may doubt the sincerity of the argument, but that doesn't prove it wrong, and I've gone back and forth on it myself; I'm sympathetic to the idea that as a rule parents of less means tend to be less able to support their children's academics for a myriad of reasons. But even aside from local class dynamics, it does not escape my attention that parents from the gated community are some of the worst offenders of calling the manager to insist that their kid shouldn't have to do schoolwork and the rules don't apply. That suddenly it is fashionable to be class traitors on this one thing to argue that their child shouldn't do schoolwork at home certainly does not ring with authenticity, you know?

Anyway, homework philosophy remains a thorny issue and I'm not staking out a position on the actual question here. I'm just side-eying a local dynamic in the debate

[proofofburden]

The Freedom Caucus could derail the debt vote if they wanted to, and only the Democrats can stop them

The motion to vacate the chair---that is, to hold a vote on keeping McCarthy as Speaker or not---is privileged. That means if someone raises it, it has to be dealt with before main motions, like the debt deal. It's also not subject to committee shenanigans like a main motion. This would put Democrats in the awkward position of having to vote to save McCarthy's speakership to preserve his deal. Were McCarthy to be ousted, the House would become unable to pass legislation until a new Speaker were elected, effectively freezing the deal

Democrats would probably save his Speakership on the understanding their support only lasted through the debt vote. But I would not want to be Hakeem Jeffries calling up moderate Dems to ask them to save Kevin McCarthy on camera, you know? Like, they are the party of grownups, someone will take that bullet, but yikes

That the Freedom caucus isn't doing this tells me they aren't willing to try "everything" here

[proofofburden]

It's Been a Long Year, I'm Starting PRIDE Month Early

It's been a banner year for misbehaving straight people and I am exhausted. I've been listening to gay playlists and reconnecting with queer friends. PRIDE month will run for as many hundreds of days as it takes for you people to stop this year. I will ban heterosexuality given the chance. Thank you for your cooperation

[proofofburden]

I do think there's an honest argument to say they should have gambled in court, and I'll hear it. But if you go down that road, you have to admit it's a difference in tactics, not a fundamental disagreement of policy preferences. And you have to admit that tactic could make borrowers just as bad off for no upside, and that's a legitimately hard choice!

The GOP-Leftist Podcast Industrial Complex is going to have a field day with the student loan payments resuming, but it looks like Biden was playing his hand very well:

To be sure, I think this is bad policy, and also won't be entertaining an argument about it. But if the Administration thinks they can't hold the policy, they might as well trade it for something rather than let it fail. Anyone suggesting Biden is the one driving this bus this is a GOP ratfucker, not a leftist

[proofofburden]

The GOP-Leftist Podcast Industrial Complex is going to have a field day with the student loan payments resuming, but it looks like Biden was playing his hand very well:

To be sure, I think this is bad policy, and also won't be entertaining an argument about it. But if the Administration thinks they can't hold the policy, they might as well trade it for something rather than let it fail. Anyone suggesting Biden is the one driving this bus this is a GOP ratfucker, not a leftist

[proofofburden]

Good news! On the off chance you're important enough to be cased this carefully, your security consultant already told you to take these stickers off

[proofofburden]

If you want to convince someone, you should insist on your jargon and do proof by semantics rather than address their underlying point

To that point, I *agree* with what the meme means to say on its own terms. But it's worth pointing out that even in a formal, academic setting canvassing tertiary sources with a lens (yes, even a garbage lens) meets the definition of research, so this isn't even pedantically correct. And even it were, saying that research is something that only cloistered insiders can do firsthand is CONFIRMING THE CONSPIRACY MINDSET YOU ABSOLUTE RUBES. Finally, "research" colloquially definitely means looking up tertiary sources haphazardly, and if you really, honestly don't know that, touch grass

[proofofburden]

Are you a jazzy sad song gay or a horny pop song gay?

[proofofburden]

The East Coast underperforms on passenger rail against Europe, but I think people wildly overestimate how fair a comparison that comparison is when factoring in population density

Also, the West Coast underperforms hard, but it's even worse off than the East Coast in the comparison

[proofofburden]

The Chinese project was such an expensive, corrupt, and underused boondoggle they literally shot the people who approved it. Say what you will about US rail---there's plenty of room for improvement---China has serious buyer's regret on this. (But hey, at least there are stops near the empty housing projects that are deadweight on their economy!)

Passenger trains in US vs Europe (image is making the rounds among U.S. transit advocates today)