Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s a comedy movie parodying the stylistic exaggeration that is part of the Bond movies.

    It’s going to be a hard math problem to get this bomb to go off near molten lava but not in it. The bomb will probably not be able to generate its full destructive potential if it melts first. Also, there is more atmospheric pressure down there and we didn’t build bombs for that. But even if you accounted for all that, worldwide eruptions sound like a stretch. The shock wave in air of a 50 kiloton explosion would probably be in the 10 mile range. That’s going to be lower in a thick liquid medium and a not insignificant part of that energy would also want to travel back up the drilled shaft. So this will probably affect an area of the world but far from all of it. And there is no guarantee it would work or be instantaneous. Pressure buildups that lead to eruptions can take ages. It’s a bad plan.


  • Sole custody? Not a big chance unless the other parent becomes criminal, sick to the point where they can no longer take care of the child, or worse.

    Japan is embarking on a journey of allowing split custody. That concept is new though because we love a law with tradition that goes back to the Heian era. My layman guess would be they will somehow exclude foreign passport holders without PR, just on principle.

    Forgive me for being this blunt: your friend is effed. They didn’t get their kid a passport. They are at the mercy of the Japanese courts. And even if they had the passport and could ‘go on vacation’ to the US, there is a very good chance the US courts would eventually send the kid back. There is international law at play to prevent child abductions, chief among it the Hague convention, to which the US and finally also Japan are signatories. Your friend’s best chance is a stable life in Japan, a good lawyer, and hopefully no marks on the record that diminishes their chances. Naiveté isn’t a defense. If the friend didn’t know that if the marriage went south this could be the outcome that’s regrettable but also the toughest of luck.

    Also, we only get half the story on hearsay. The other parent’s story might paint a very different picture.





  • They probably looked at who users burner phones and quickly realized it’s mostly people cheating on their spouses or people of the criminal variety. None of these groups are going to start a political movement. And cheaters gonna cheat and one more obstacle for the criminal folks isn’t a bad thing. Tourists are a rounding error.

    Sure, in the past we had phone booths and boxes. The majority of landlines were registered to a name, a business, or an institution. There isn’t really a long established right to have a burner number. People used to voluntarily list their names and numbers in a book. And no cheating farmer Bob had a secret line put in the barn so he could talk to his side piece.

    I’m going to guess the Aussie rules apply to most of the countries we group under the label western. And there is a danger that they harvest your data but it is more likely a government requirement to register ID. Like with private car ownership in the US as well if I’m not mistaken. It’s not wildly outlandish as a concept.

    Don’t look into what they make you do if you want to own a firearm.



  • The further into the future you are trying to predict the weather, the more the reliability drops. The last time I heard a meteorologist talk about it, it was 5 days into the future for a specific location. Anything more than that was as reliable as reading tea leaves. You can say it’ll rain in Asia 10 days from now but you cannot say with any certainty it’ll rain in this village.

    The climate which we ruined will provide us with punishment. Warmer oceans will give us stronger tropical storms. But they’ve gotten pretty good at detecting and outlining their likely paths. That sort of predicting is likely to improve with more storms and more data. Another suitable punishment is torrential train causing flash flooding. In the places with good satellite cover, they can see that and warn people with an hour’s lead time or thereabouts. The time span is short but the prediction accuracy is good.

    We as consumers are not good judges of the weatherpeople. We look at our phones and form an opinion. But we don’t investigate where the data came from, which LLM may have added its hallucinations, and what other corners may have been cut to get us this information, which we don’t pay for. So we see it’s pissing down outside, the forecast was for blue skies, ergo the weatherpeople are getting worse at their job. When it is more likely the quality of the free data declined or somebody asked ChatGPT and Claude.





  • There are few feces filled salvoes flung at Melon Usk that I would object to. This is not one of them. The question I have though is this: do we need a new Twitter? It had its time in the sun but most people look back at it through rose tinted glasses. Before the takeover by the son of South African emerald mine owners, Twitter was in deep trouble. It had cultural relevance but was a financial flop. It benefited from being the first service of its kind with sufficient reach. I don’t think Twitter would have survived without the Nazi saluting shithead either. Its decline would have been more graceful by comparison. It would have done it without the bullshit tsunami emanating from the top, it wouldn’t have had the money to digitally undress people or other adventures in so-called AI, but I believe it would have faded anyway. People have split up from the one consensus platform to many different ones and making people switch is hard. So coming back now with a new Twitter is like announcing we will electrocute another Topsy next week. That turned heads more than a century ago but we have moved on.