Musk needs to get lucky and avoid it every time; The public only needs to get lucky once.

Here’s a reminder that the Allied forces had multiple opportunities to assassinate Hitler, but chose not to do so… Because he was a laughably bad military tactician, who was surrounded by yes-men. He would repeatedly make bad military decisions, and everyone around him was too afraid to tell him it was a bad idea. The Allies were worried that if they assassinated Hitler, a competent military leader would take his place.

Sun Tsu’s Art of War has a line that goes something like “Never interrupt the enemy when they’re making a mistake” and it feels germane. I wouldn’t be surprised if historians are writing about how Europe had several opportunities to assassinate Musk/Trump but chose not to because they didn’t want anyone competent in charge.

I would rather not do it and hope nobody else does it.

While this is certainly something to dream about, I live in the Bible Belt. If I hadn’t taken it, there would have been a hundred others lining up to do it.

“Oh, if I don’t use my electrical engineering skills to bomb children for a MIC company then someone else will do it, nah bitch I’ll work in a different field”

It’s a bit of a stretch to equate it with making bombs. And if you have the flexibility to work in a different field, then you’re already speaking from a position of privilege. Not everyone has that luxury. Some people have niche skills or have small tight-knit job fields, where burning a bridge with one company could cascade to other companies as word spreads.

Edit: although I do have to say you have to consider all aspects. If you’re only making content that changes gender to sex and you gotta feed yourself, then it’s a big jump from killing people for a war company for fun.

There are absolutely arguments for why we should require engineers to take engineering ethics classes. Hell, even city zoning departments can be abused by racists. But it all eventually boils down to a cost/benefit analysis for the person considering the job; Ethics studies may cause an engineer to weigh the moral “cost” more heavily on certain topics. But it’s still essentially just a mental calculation when deciding whether or not to take the job.

At what point do the benefits of the job begin to outweigh the moral costs? When you’re going to go hungry if you turned down the work and burned bridges? When your family is going to go hungry? Sure, the high horse may be attractive when it’s just you… But nobody wants to see their child go hungry because they refused work. Eventually, people will compromise on their morals in order to put food on the table. And effecting change is a lot easier to do when you have a good job and can afford to donate (either your time or money) to causes you believe in. Homeless people aren’t exactly known for their political weight.

So I used to do a lot of freelance, and encountered similar situations a few times.

The most blatant example that comes to mind was a charity run. I had the client reach out for AV gear and crew for a charity run. They needed some projectors and a small stage (and all of the AV gear+crew to go with the stage) for a charity event; They were going to be at a college campus, with joggers making laps on a 1/2 mile loop. For every lap, sponsors would donate to charity.

The projectors and stage were to give the MC a place to be, and to keep the audience entertained while the joggers ran. They’d have a band playing, and cap the event off with a movie screening. Sounds fun. I quoted the job like any other gig. The perceptive reader may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned what kind of charity they were raising funds for. That’s because I didn’t think to ask ahead of time. I got there, and discovered it was a pro-life fundraiser. Fucking yikes.

But I still did the job. I needed the money, and didn’t want to burn future bridges with other companies that were involved. I simply made a mental note to ask more questions the next time a charity event came across my desk. But the big takeaway is that even if I didn’t do it, someone else inevitably would have. The event still would have happened, and the charity money still would have been raised. At least with me doing it, I was able to avoid adding another enthusiastic voice (whoever would have taken my spot) to the echo chamber. Even if I had climbed up on stage to interrupt the event, it wouldn’t have changed any minds. Afterwards, I donated what I could afford to Planned Parenthood and moved on.

For the confused: The SCOTUS ruled that Jackson wasn’t allowed to force the native Americans off of their lands and onto reservations. Jackson responded with something along the lines of “they’ve made their decision, now let’s see them enforce it.” He pushed ahead with the reservations anyways, which led to the Trail of Tears.

Until fairly recently, it has been the most direct “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” between a president and the SCOTUS. It led to Jackson’s opponents sarcastically dubbing him “King Andrew”.

Yeah, that was the first thing I noticed too. 30% of voters actually want a god-king.

It’s in French, but here’s a link:
https://www.watson.ch/fr/!884988581

Basically, Yen did an interview for Watson (a magazine) where he talked about the swedish government encroaching on encryption. He got political when he started talking about how all of the Swedish government officials were useless bureaucrats, and praised the US government’s methods instead.

And the CEO just did it again, because apparently it wasn’t enough backlash the first time.

The issue with baby formula is that it’s pretty strictly regulated by the FDA, and getting approval is a lengthy (and extremely expensive) process. So there are only a few companies that hold a functional near-monopoly on the production, because they’re the only ones who had the resources to go through the process.

And to be clear, I’m not advocating for looser regulation on formula. Safety regulations are writ in blood. But local formula production would essentially require massive subsidies and fast-tracking to offset the costs and testing associated with starting production.

Was gonna say… First it starts with stealing treats, and next thing you know they’re gonna be returning stolen artwork to the louvre.

The Gatcha system is why I never finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The first game was phenomenal… But the second game required a gatcha system to unlock new party members. There were even quests that were locked behind certain ultra-rare party members. It’s an entirely single player game.

Does that really count? As far as I know, the golden keys mechanic was just a way to get some good gear. It wasn’t exclusive gear, and you could get it just by playing the game.

Yeah, my 1200 dose was after a month of tolerance break, so it definitely hit me. Still had a great time though.

After a certain point, I’d imagine that there are diminishing effects. The difference between 100ug and 200ug is huge, but the difference between 1100ug and 1200ug isn’t anywhere near as big. After a certain point, it all just becomes a trip. But the size of the trip is entirely up to your mindset and individual brain chemistry; I know people who have found or lost religion on 300ug, and others who said 1500 was just a nice smooth trip.

To be clear, it would be a mind-bogglingly large trip. But I doubt it would have any more of an effect than a much smaller (but still very large) dose.

Most I’ve done was 1200 and I had a wonderful time. When I was doing it every weekend, 200 was my “chill out and play a video game” dose, and 500 was my “I’m too fucked to focus on a game because the edges of the screen are wobbling. I’ll just zone out to some anime instead” dose. The tricky part about acid is that it’s entirely subjective.

“No mom I’m not taking hormones! It’s the 5G towers immense amounts of pussy that I’m drowning in, I swear!”

it’s hard to really prove he’s a fraud at spacex and tesla and pretending to be some super genius

I mean, even this isn’t very hard. My relative used to work at SpaceX, and it’s an open secret that the company has a team of people dedicated to keeping Elon away from the engineers. Like as soon as he steps out of his office, there are multiple people whose sole job is to push paperwork and “problems” (read: “literally just basic decisions that anyone in middle management could make”) in front of him to keep him completely distracted with inane and inconsequential things, while also making him feel like a big important decision maker.

All so he doesn’t have time to wander down towards the engineers. Because if he does get to the engineers, he’ll inevitably try to one-up them with some “why are we doing it this way that I’m too dumb to understand? I don’t like that I can’t understand it. We should do it this dumb way instead” decree. And now the entire company is going to grind to a halt until the engineers can redesign the entire system to fit his new dumb design.

Like he desperately wants to fit in with the engineers, but the only way he knows how is to try and flex his (nonexistent) technical expertise. So the company has hired people specifically to prevent that scenario from ever happening.

Yeah, you’re paying for consistency, not quantity. The standard reference material will contain exactly what it says on the label. No more, no less. It’s meant to be a reliable and dependable product, with absolutely zero variation between batches. And that consistency costs a lot of extra time and testing to guarantee.

I mean, this seems like a reasonable restriction. Being able to freely create realistic images of real people is a dangerous thing if used maliciously.

I mean, Japan depends on the US for defense too. Their constitution only allows them to maintain a small “Self Defense Force” and everything else is run by the US. It was one of the largest and most impactful changes to Japan’s constitution in the wake of World War 2. Basically, the Allies went “you fucked around in Korea and China so hard that we need to prevent you from ever building an invasion force again in the future.”

That’s why Trump threatening to pull the military out of Japan was a monumentally stupid move. The US military is already wildly unpopular in Japan; The average Japanese person’s experience with them is “US military dudebro gets drunk off base, sexually harasses a Japanese girl on the street, drives drunk, causes damage/injury in a crash, and flees back to the base to avoid punishment.” Even if the solider is penalized by the military for it, Japanese people still see it as avoiding punishment… Because Japanese punishments tend to be much much harsher than US punishments. So since he’s not being punished by Japanese authorities, he’s getting off too easy.

Trump made the threat at a time when conservative (bordering on jingoistic) rhetoric is at an all time high in Japan. Japan has always been an extremely conservative country, but there has been a new wave of nationalism and xenophobia recently. So when Trump made the threat, there was a non-zero chance that the average Japanese person would go “fucking good, we deserve to have our own military again anyways.”

It’s also why people were talking about China, Korea, and Japan banding together to oppose the tariffs was such a big deal. The three countries hate each other due to blood grudges that go back centuries… And yet Trump was able to get them to agree on something.