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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Angry humans can take several 9mm rounds to the abdomen and continue to advance.

    Bullets also aren’t magical death pellets. A bear has about 20 inches of hair, skin, fat, and muscle to get through before organ damage, assuming you miss a bone.

    A bear that hasn’t committed to an attack is entirely likely to decide “fight” isn’t worth it after the equivalent of getting stabbed in the shoulder by a screwdriver.
    If it’s already decided that violence is the right way to handle the “you” threat it may continue to attack until it cannot. Then it becomes relevant that many guns don’t have the power to disable a beat before it gets to you and does serious damage. The bear dying in 30 seconds doesn’t help you if it’s last act is to break your arm, and put a two inch deep slash in the side of your neck. The goal isn’t to kill the bear, the goal is to keep it from attacking you. That requires a lot more gun, since the near can move and attack very fast.

    This is also deep in the realm of “what if”. Most bear encounters involving a firearm resolve successfully without even shooting the bear. They don’t like loud noises and will run from basically anything. The most encountered bears will usually run from shouting and waving your arms.
    But if you’re looking to get a gun for bear defense, you need to consider that they’re extremely durable critters, and to cover what can happen probably requires more than most handguns can deliver.

    Avoidance is a better first defense, followed by pepper spray.


  • Like, it is the parents responsibility. It’s something that must happen and it’s their job.

    If they’re not fulfilling their responsibilities you don’t just let it not happen though, that’s not how a functional society works. You make sure what needs to get done gets done, and then you act like a member of a society and figure out why they’re having trouble and what you can do to help.

    You might, if you’re feeling extra civic minded, offer food to any kid who wants it and leave the concern and extra assistance to people having trouble with home nutrition.


  • I had no idea that “galaxy” ultimately derived from the Greek word for milk!

    Not following on the planet one though. Almost every word for the planet we’re on in as many languages as I can think of has the name for Earth being roughly synonymous with the substance upon which we walk.
    Doing some digging I found some references to it being like the word for “under the stars”, “the place where humans are”, “everything surrounded by water”, “where you can hear the thunder”, “deep”, “round”, “life” and my favorite: “turtle”.



  • It entirely depends on the bear species, but in general guns are a last resort defense against bears.

    Primary defense is avoidance and making it so they can avoid you. A bear will eat you, but is unlikely to hunt you. For most bears we’re an unknown quantity so they’ll avoid us, since other food is reasonably available with less risk.

    A bear has heavy fur, thick skin for storing winter fat deposits, and dense bones. While bullets will injure the bear and perhaps even kill it, it won’t be enough to save you.
    Much like how hitting someone on the head with a glass bottle will hurt them, almost certainly injure them, and potentially kill them, the type of injury is likely to be a fractured skull or brain bleed. Extremely serious and deadly, but they have minutes of functionality and hours of bewildered stumbling before they black out.

    So it’ll likely die… Later. For now you have a scared, confused and pissed off bear.

    I believe hollow points have less penetration power, so it might not even get through the hide. Other bullets will get through fine, but are unlikely to stop the bear dead.



  • Only one of those is actually something that would cost money. The rest either don’t cost money (how does ending birthright citizenship require revenue increases?), or they’re plans to reduce revenue.
    One doesn’t typically count a plan for reducing revenue as the reason for increasing revenue.

    Again, the government doesn’t need to match spending with revenue. When you control the money supply you can just spend what you need. There’s an impact to doing so to much, but that probably won’t come to a head for a few years.

    It’s not a grand scheme. It’s surface level opportunism.


  • The beef issue is actually older and a bit more complicated than the hormone question. When the hormone ban went into effect, the only product banned that wasn’t before was edible organ meats.

    North America is an agricultural powerhouse and the US in particular. A lot of countries have deep and legitimate concerns about US agricultural exports purely based on the low cost and high volumes, which can threaten domestic food production: An unacceptable condition based purely on national security concerns. It’s part of why the US exacerbates the situation by subsidizing agriculture. We may produce a stupid quantity of food, but it must always be, on the whole, economically viable to produce food domestically.
    While the concerns of the EU citizens are real, the readiness with which they were acted upon is in part due to the convenience of protecting the agricultural sector of more powerful European countries.
    While correcting artificially low prices is actually a valid use of tariffs, using them for protectionist purposes like offsetting actual competitive advantages creates a lot of trade agreement drama.
    Can’t retaliate against food safety restrictions. Hence the wto court cases that have been flying around for decades.

    The reason there would be a demand for US beef is the same reason as Japan has such a high demand for US beef: it’s cheap and available. Even the high quality import is often price competitive with average or low quality domestic.

    Also, there’s already a fair number of US producers of beef that didn’t get hormone treatment. Nothing mandates they get it, and we even already have inspection programs to facilitate it: https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/imports-exports/nhtc

    If course, that’s all the center of the current wave of wto disputes, since the EU restricts beef imports to a quota, and no one can agree on certification requirements.


  • I honestly can’t think of promises that would require more money.
    And the simplest way to do it is to just spend the money. The government isn’t required to have money in order to spend it.

    The richest make more money when they sell more and the stock market does better. The tariffs hurt them more than a tax increase would because they can’t dodge revenue loss and market devaluation.

    He’s not running a grand plan. He’s not a mastermind. He’s doing exactly what he said he would. He had to get back into power to avoid consequences. He did so by putting all the awful people with irrational agendas into positions of power so they would support him. He doesn’t give a shit about the 1% unless they’re helping him, and he doesn’t give a shit about the 99% unless they’re voting for people who can help him.
    All the “distractions” are him letting the people who got him into power do what they want, because it doesn’t hurt him and he doesn’t care.
    The deportations aren’t a distraction, they’re the point for the racists who directly helped him.

    It’s not about who in society it helps, rich or not. It’s about who in his cabinet it helps. Everyone else can go fuck themselves.


  • among newborns (0–2 months), RSV hospitalizations fell 52 percent

    there was a 71 percent decline in hospitalizations in NVSN

    0 to 7 months old—RSV-NET showed a 43 percent drop in hospitalizations

    NVSN data, there was a 56 percent drop.

    Shit like that is fucking huge, and makes me get some happy misty eyes thinking of the people whose lives have just been made better because of this.
    30 to 40 thousand kids kept out of the hospital. Some heart wrenching portion of that as lives saved.
    Every year. And that’s in the US alone!

    I hope the researchers who worked on this feel appropriately proud.


  • Suggest she talk to her OB sooner rather than later. The window for the maternal vaccination is reasonably narrow, and some places where you might routinely get a vaccine aren’t accustomed to it yet and might take longer than expected to work through it. (If they give the vaccine too early the antibodies don’t transfer as helpfully, and too late and they don’t have enough time to develop and transfer)

    My wife had a hell of a time getting it from the usual place we get flu and COVID shots because it was a more nuanced criteria and they, reasonably, didn’t want to give a treatment outside of approved guidelines. Eventually the OB said the back and forth was silly and had someone go get a dose from the hospital pharmacy and just gave it during the office visit.

    It’s literally a lifesaver. We had twins that were born premature, which is a major risk factor. At six months we all got it, and one was miserable but fine, and the other required a relatively non-invasive hospital stay for extra monitoring for a few days.
    Given the giant risk factors we had, without the vaccines it would have been a much more scary time, and it was already basically textbook Not-a-great-time.


  • I feel like I could be persuaded either way, but I lean towards allowing them during sentencing.
    I don’t think “it’s an appeal to emotion” is a compelling argument in that context because it’s no longer about establishing truth like the trial is, but about determining punishment and restitution.

    Justice isn’t just about the offender or society, it’s also indelibly tied to the victim. Giving them a voice for how they, as the wronged party, would see justice served seems important for it’s role in providing justice, not just the rote application of law.

    Obviously you can’t just have the victim decide, but the judges entire job is to ensure fairness, often in the face of strong feelings and contentious circumstances.

    Legitimately interested to hear why your opinion is what it is in more detail.


  • Hearsay is allowed in sentencing statements, and Arizona allows those statements to be in a format of their choice.

    It’s the phase of the process where the judge hears opinions on what he should sentence the culprit to, so none of it is evidence or treated as anything other than an emotive statement.

    In this case, the sister made two statements: one in the form of a letter where she asked for the maximum sentence, and another in the form of this animation of her brother where she said that he wouldn’t want that and would ask for leniency.

    It’s gross, but it’s not the miscarriage of justice that it seems like from first glance. It was accepted in the same way a poem titled “what my brother would say to you” would be.


  • Reading a bit more, during the sentencing phase in that state people making victim impact statements can choose their format for expression, and it’s entirely allowed to make statements about what other people would say. So the judge didn’t actually have grounds to deny it.
    No jury during that phase, so it’s just the judge listening to free form requests in both directions.

    It’s gross, but the rules very much allow the sister to make a statement about what she believes her brother would have wanted to say, in whatever format she wanted.


  • Jessica Gattuso, the victim’s right attorney that worked with Pelkey’s family, told 404 Media that Arizona’s laws made the AI testimony possible. “We have a victim’s bill of rights,” she said. “[Victims] have the discretion to pick what format they’d like to give the statement. So I didn’t see any issues with the AI and there was no objection. I don’t believe anyone thought there was an issue with it.”

    Gattuso said she understood the concerns, but felt that Pelkey’s AI avatar was handled deftly. “Stacey was up front and the video itself…said it was AI generated. We were very careful to make sure it was clear that these were the words that the family believed Christopher would have to say,” she said. “At no point did anyone try to pass it off as Chris’ own words.”

    The prosecution against Horcasitas was only seeking nine years for the killing. The maximum was 10 and a half years. Stacey had asked the judge for the full sentence during her own impact statement. The judge granted her request, something Stacey credits—in part—to the AI video.

    From a different article quoting a former judge in the court:

    “There are going to be critics, but they picked the right forum to do it. In a trial with a jury you couldn’t do it, but with sentencing, everything is open, hearsay is admissible, both sides can get up and express what they want to do,” McDonald said.

    “The power of it was that the judge had to see the gentleness, the kindness, the feeling of sincerity and having his sister say, ‘Well we don’t agree with it, this is what he would’ve wanted the court to know’,” he said.

    I don’t like it, and it feels dirty to me, but since the law allows them to express basically whatever they want in whatever format they want during this phase, it doesn’t seem harmful in this case, just gross.

    I actually think it’s a little more gross that the family was able to be that forthright and say that the victim would not want what they were asking for, and still ask for it.


  • It says in the article that the judge gave the maximum sentence.

    The sister who created the video gave a statement as herself asking for something different from what she believed her brother would have wanted, which she chose to express in this fashion.

    I don’t think it was a good thing to do, but it’s worth noting that the judges statement is basically “that was a beautiful statement, and he seemed like a good man”, not an application of leniency.



  • Chromes decision actually makes a lot of sense, from a security perspective. When we model how people read URLs, they tend to be “lazy” and accept two URLs as equal if they’re similar enough. Removing or taking focus away from less critical parts makes users focus more on the part that matters and helps reduce phishing. It’s easier to miss problems with https://www.bankotamerica.com/login_new/existing/login_portal.asp?etc=etc&etc=etc than it is with bankotamerica, with the com in a subdued grey and the path and subdomain hidden until you click in the address bar.
    It’s the same reason why they ended up moving away from the lock icon. Certs are easy to get now, and every piece that matches makes it more likely for a user to skip a warning sign.