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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Im making this reply to help you better respond to people, not to start a fight:

    Hey, just a heads up, your cfr link directly cites Adrian zenz, the person many people don’t trust to make even handed statements about China, directly twice.

    The vox link sources statements from him several times. I tried to just quickly parse what was what but I came up with seven different statements.

    The bbc article seems to reference zenz in six different claims.

    I wasn’t able to give these articles a deep read, or check if the other sources also pull from that particular controversial figure or his organizations.








  • That’s not illegal.

    The crime is not reporting it.

    It’s reported on a filing. Sometimes electronic but paperwork in spirit.

    If the “problem” in your words is the crime, then the problem is paperwork.

    The crimes are falsifying business records, not paying hush money.

    The hush money was paid by trumps attorney who was then reimbursed with campaign funds. The crime is not paying hush money, the crime is covering it up.

    As I said before, I don’t think it’s a very good idea to try to beat trump over the head with the convictions. At best you appeal to reactionary voters who have regressive ideas about crime and justice and at worst you have to reply to questions like “it’s legal to pay hush money out of campaign funds?”



  • I honestly think it’s more likely that like almost every business, nonprofit and other organization I’ve had any experience with, trump doesn’t have a “proactive” filing regimen.

    An old ass accountant I used to work with explained why it’s like this: why give them something to beat you over the head with? Just know the requirements, know the punishment and give the least amount of information you possibly can until compelled.

    Of course, larger, richer groups are more able to take that strategy, but that’s a systemic problem.

    But it doesn’t matter for the purposes of the crimes in question if it was an “innocent” mistake or purposeful omission.

    I think it’s pretty disingenuous for the democrat message to be an attack on trump for simply having been convicted because democrats are at the same time trying to catch lefty and otherwise third party voters who see that criminal justice system as having serious fundamental flaws.

    I think getting bogged down in the details of trumps convictions isn’t helpful to the democrats either because explaining them to people makes trump relatable. Nothing he actually did with money was a crime. It was not filing paperwork that was the crime.

    The whole thing becomes more akin to having to pay a ticket for a taillight you got fixed because you didn’t bring the receipts to court.

    “Your honor, the taillight in question is new, intact and installed on my car”

    “Your car isn’t in my courtroom”

    “It’s in the parking lot 80 feet to the west of your courtroom. I have a picture of it right here.”

    “I will only admit a receipt”

    Tbh the conviction rhetoric only appeals to reactionary right wing voters who want to punish people with records or makes him incredibly relatable to normal people.

    If anything it seems like a hedge to move towards the right.


  • It’s really funny seeing ppl make the surprised pikachu face about fetterman.

    I don’t agree with his reasoning, but I do agree with his assessment that it’s a mistake to push the felon message so hard with trump.

    If simply being convicted of a crime makes you a person not worthy of serious consideration in the political sphere, is that implicit endorsement of the legal system? Seems pretty conservative if you ask me.

    Even if a person was to believe that our legal system is infallible and that there’s nothing wrong with weaponizing its decisions against one’s enemies, doesn’t bringing up the felony convictions beg the question of what they’re for? That hasn’t been a powerful message for democrats.

    I have no love for trump, democrats seem to be messing up here though.


  • you really might not.

    before there were mobile phones there was analog dtmf wired telephones. they replaced pulse dialing and allowed for all kinds of additional signalling and triggering. ring a bell, operate a relay, kick people off so you could call the president, entire automated analog switching centers, you name it.

    when mobile networks came on the scene there were all sorts of additional triggers but because the (second gen? the ones that could do sms) signals were actually digital, there was a much wider array of possibilities. dtmf had a handful of frequencies it supported and if you wanted to do something more you had to basically make sure the entire network you were using could send, transport and receive those frequencies.

    now imagine instead of sixteen combinations of frequencies played at the same time you have access to thousands of possible triggers. once you have simple stuff like the basic receiving of text and lighting a led or playing one of several legally distinct jingles covered, you could do do much more. and people did. there were all kinds of things pagers could do through combinations of local interface and digital communication with a cell tower, all mediated through a handful of baseband chips on the pager pcb that could have the pins for stuff they wouldn’t be used for disconnected.

    but how would you make a pager set off an explosive?

    well, the same way you use a casio f91w wristwatch to. you use its built in functionality (the speaker when the alarm goes off) to trigger a battery that can deliver enough electricity into a resistor to heat it up enough to make your (primary) explosive detonate.

    in the case of a pager, those baseband chips have all kinds of on and off switching built in. it’s not hard to imagine that basic, out of the box functionality would include pulling a pin high when it gets “*97” or some such. now tie that pin to the base of a transistor across the positive and negative terminals of the battery and sitting against a little petn and you got yourself a remotely triggered explosive.

    you wouldn’t even need a pcb.

    there’s probably a lot of stuff thats incorrect in this reply. it’s late and this is off the dome.



  • How much (metal, refined, produced on earth) wire would you say is required to produce an air (actually vacuum, but we know air core really well so there’s math for them) core electromagnet which can generate a field capable of deflecting solar wind over the area of its pv array? In order to maintain that field strength, how much current is required? Can it be supplied by a pv array equal in area to the effective field area? How many of those are needed to cover the area of mars?

    That’s-a lotta metal!

    Also speaking as a person who deals with e-waste daily, it’s both by volume and mass composed of petroleum products. Fiberglass is reenforced plastic. Ics are 90% plastic by volume. Discrete components are made of petroleum distillates in a lot of cases and encased in them in even more cases!

    Even if you only considered the boards as the e-waste and not the plastic cases and bodies themselves, those dont exist in a vacuum like our hypothetical electromagnets, a reduction in printer boards means fewer printers which are almost completely just plastic.


  • The scale of what you just described is really goofy.

    It’s also a very delicate shield against a very serious problem.

    I don’t think it’s feasible to protect a mars-diameter disc of massive magnets from damage by either normal objects traveling through the area or from some human engineered attack.

    If you’re imagining the capacity to create such an emplacement, don’t you imagine that such phenomenal effort and wealth of resources would be better spent solving some terrestrial problem?

    There’s a real difference between e-waste, which is mostly byproducts of the petroleum refining process with electronic components smeared liberally on, many of which rely on petroleum byproducts themselves and electromagnets, which are, at the scale you’re discussing, massive chunks of metals refined, shaped and organized into configurations that will create magnetic fields when dc is present.

    I have a hard time imagining a level of focus required to bridge that gap.