Somehow This Is Racism And Sexism

I'm a proponent of equal rights.

I have discovered that this makes me either racist, sexist, or both, depending on whom I'm talking to.

Why?

Because I'm talking about actually equal footing.

Not leveraging gender or race to get an advantage.

Not reversing the sexism and racism of the past.

Want the better job?  Get the education and training to land it.

Want that promotion?  Work hard, work well.

There's lots of specific examples that end up hurting women and minorities in the work place.

Things that make hiring them a negative for a place hoping to make a profit.

Remember, a job exists as a side effect of a successful business.  The benefit of the employee is a secondary reason the job exists.

Employees who disappear for months at a time and cannot be replaced are a detriment.

Unqualified employees a drain on the qualified ones at best. 

The soft bigotry of low expectations is rampant because we're not treating people as equals. 

I Have Not Betrayed His Teachings

David Freiburger has a saying, "Don't get it right, just get it running."

The idea is that a running car is one you will drive and if you're driving it, you will be motivated to work on it until it is right.

The AC fix is a running example of "getting it right."

I hope he forgives me doing so on my mobility blob®.

A 2012 Caprice PPV is too new for his tastes... 

Update:

I just realized that I kept it running for a year and a half without fixing the AC and, thus, followed his philosophy.  A running car with a problem gets you motivated to fix on it.

I remember The Biscayne SS being relegated to it's spot and decaying away because I didn't feel like working on it when I had The Precious to drive.

Putting My Finger On My Irritation

The main issue of how too many modern cars are put together in terms of working on them is this removal of several assemblies to access the broken part means that you're taking the chance of breaking them on the way in and the way out.

Some parts rarely break and you can nest them deeply.

But when it's a component that MUST be replaced every time a seal is broken, you don't make that part hard to get to if you're an engineer worth their salt.

Case in point is having to get the condenser out to replace the desiccant pack.

You have to break three seals to remove it and this introduces the risk of these seals leaking after reassembly.  Now you have three places to look for the leak instead of one.

Then there's the massive proliferation of single use fasteners.

What a racket.

Make it so you have to remove, at least, two unrelated assemblies to access pieces that you KNOW are going to wear out then require the customer to purchase all new fasteners.

Never mind that a lot of those "single use" fasteners were specifically designed to be reused.

Prevailing torque nuts were designed to address two issues of the old Nyloc nuts.  First was nylon melting in high temperatures.  Second was a used Nyloc is no better than a normal nut for locking once it's been removed.

Prevailing torque was designed to be reused.

As the male fastener reaches the deformed section it stretches the threads of the nut elastically back into a circle. This action increases the friction between the nut and the fastener greatly and creates the locking action. Due to the elastic nature of the deformation the nuts can be reused indefinitely.

But GM says to toss them every time.

Almost as if they developed a procedure for lock nuts based on the Nyloc and never amended it for prevailing torque...

In one aspect, it makes some sense, the mechanic doesn't know how many times the nut has been removed, so it's safest to replace it.

But if you're going to treat every locking nut as if it were a Nyloc...  Why not just use Nyloc?

Which brings me around to an elephant in the room.

The engineers the automakers are hiring.

A lot of modern cars are packaged more and more in an aviation style, with an aviation attitude towards fasteners.

Aviation is the coolest kind of engineering, after all. 

Aviation style decisions made by the least experienced engineers without moderation from more experienced engineers.

Where did the experienced engineers go?

Well, they keep getting fired laid-off when the assembly line apes threaten to strike and the automaker has to cut payroll to accommodate the union's plan.

I sometimes wonder how many of those senior automotive engineers went into robotics just to strike a blow at the UAW. 

Two Things I Know Happened

There's two things that people (kooks, really) claim never happened that I am assured did happen by a simple test.

The Soviet Union agreed that they happened.

Those two things are the Moon landings and The Holocaust.

Why is the USSR agreeing they happened such a good barometer?

Because it was in their interest to show that they didn't happen.

I noticed, recently, that we're losing the significance of this as the memory of the Cold War is increasingly in us aging Gen-X minds. 

Well Said

In response to the clip going around with the African lady saying 'WHAT WHITE CULTURE!?!'

Because I can explain it in more detail than anyone else... here are the main things that create western civilisation.

The principle, the law of nature that is an adaptation to and what…

— The McMullan (@TheMcMullan) September 15, 2026

 Read the whole thing.

We Can Argue About Anything

There's a thread on arfcom that's, no shit, debating which flip-up back-up-iron-sight is best.

Optics have gotten to the point that back-up irons are nugatory.

And I say that as a GM who really WANTS to fuck over a player counting on that optic!

We're to the point where the best BUIS is the one that weighs the least and takes up the least space.

All the rear sights put the same little hole in the same place it would be if the AR had a carry handle.

The front sights literally use an M16A2 front sight post and put it where it'd be if there was a normal front sight base.

Nugatory!

A case can be made for skipping them altogether.

I can't, quite, bring myself to skip having irons on a "fighting" rifle. 

To Be Fair

If we're going to count all the variations of the M1816 musket as a single service weapon, then we really should count all the variations of the AR-15 as a single weapon.

The M16 series (including the M4 series) is the king of service life, 1966 to 2022 or 56 years.

56 and counting since the M7 roll-out has not been smooth by any measure and many units, INFANTRY battalions, not support units, are still rocking the M4A1.

If we count each variation as its own weapon the M1865 is still the shortest in service, but the average number of years we stick to a specific design drops precipitously.

Even within some very short lived designs, like the Krag, there's several sub-versions.

Sometimes it's hard to tell how long a weapon was the primary infantry arm because they didn't replace the old ones, just stopped issuing them in favor of the new one.

This is true of the M1816 series and the Krag.  Units might have all the same gun, they might have a few of each.

Virtue

The best way to be virtuous is to simply be so.

Live it.

If someone notices, great!

If someone praises you for it, fine.

The problem with virtue signalling is the act of seeking praise by announcing you're doing virtuous things is, well, the opposite of virtue.

Steve Jackson Games added a full page of explanation about how they changed Eskimo to Yupik and that "slavery is bad, m'kay."

They could have just made those changes without mentioning why and I doubt that anyone would have started a thread demanding that the kidnappers of the rightful king of Fnordia be named, as they were in past editions.

Eskimo isn't even as controversial as they seem to think it is, but I think that change has a lot more to do with David Pulver and Sean Punch being Canadian than a general recognition that Eskimo is a slur.  Especially since it's not even certain where the word originated from!

Aside: Am I the only American who is dead sick and tired of Canadians telling us we're doing our culture wrong and demanding we change how we do things? 

They still use "slave" or "enslavement" 25 times in 4eR; down from 52 times in 4e.  12 of the reductions comes from replacing "slave mentality" with "heteronomy."

Many of the deletions are changing to a term like "subject" and the deletion makes me think they've done more to sanitize it than condemn.

The eliminated mentioning that slaves were low status under the rules for status.  How did that mention glorify slaving?  They left in that being a serf is a low status job.  Being a slave is worse than being a serf, how does mentioning that keep us from figuring out that slavery is wrong?

They had to spend extra time explaining slavery in historical context because of this. 

Taking it out of the minion enhancement for familiars didn't hurt or help.

Still, these changes could have been made silently to the same effect, they just wanted to make sure they got credit from... Whomever keeps score on this.

I do know that page of virtue signalling has cost them more than one sale.  That should matter to them more than it does. 

PS: They even mention cleaning up use of the word "Black" and capitalizing it when referring to a Black person, and the word was never used that way in the original 4e... 

I'll Give The Clumsy Answer

A Better Way 2A asks, "If gun rights are for everyone, why do you get upset when everyone shows up?"

They go on to explain what closed minded, anti-LGBT fools conservative gun owners are.

I think that might just be the reason...  You're being rude and you're displaying prejudice.

Maybe stop?

You're not Antifa or Socialists, but you're standing with members of Antifa, the John Brown Gun Club and the Socialist Rifle Association.

Smiling.

Yeah.

There's your reason they get upset when "everyone" shows up.

Remember

 

Just because things are going well now, it doesn't mean you're not fucked in the end.

Stupid Attitude

 

I would say that I don't care how much enjoyment the thief gets from my stolen property, but that's not true.

I do care.

I want them to be utterly miserable from their theft.

Far more unhappy than I am about the loss.

I want them to contract a slow moving, incurable, untreatable, painful disease that also, perversely, prolongs their life.

I want them to experience this in a poorly run prison, where their cellmate considers their affliction a kink.

For Fuck's Sake!

Where does the idea that someone who steals from you being happy about stealing being a good thing come from?

Perhaps the idiots who think this way should be treated more harshly than thieves.

The thief's depredations are far more limited in scope than the idiot depicted in the comic.  That idiot will go out to vote, get laws changed and make it impossible to punish thieves.

Shitheads like this think, "property can be replaced, so it's wrong to kill thieves," and, "your property isn't worth more than their life!"

I shouldn't be surprised to find that's a close quote to something Che Gueverra said, "The life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on Earth."

That's wrong-think.

The proper attitude is, "nothing here is worth getting killed over."

It's not me deciding that my property is worth more than their life, it's them deciding that their life is worth less than my property.

It's illegal for me to act morally on this. 

Why It Wasn't A Problem

In 1868 granting birthright citizenship to anyone born on our side of the line wasn't an issue because all you got was citizenship.

If you didn't get to work, like everyone else, you'd starve.

If you worked it was, relatively, simple to become a productive member of society rather than a burden. 

It's an issue now because of the lavish, and unending, handouts and, as was pointed out in the comments, the penumbral right to bring everyone with even 1% consanguinity with you here to live.

The issue compounds.

Personally, I'm in favor of killing the handouts.  We really can't afford them.

Ideally we only let the citizen stay and send their parents packing.  I'm not sentimental about breaking up a family whose only goal is to punch out an anchor baby and start hanging from the welfare teat.

Especially now that we've seen how much fraud came with it. 

Cross Purpose Compromise

The answer is always, "More Dakka."

But how much?

Infantry rifle selection is a compromise.

On one hand you want the round it fires to go out as far as possible and hit hard when it gets there.

On the other, you want to carry a lot of rounds.

On the gripping hand, almost every round you fire isn't hitting the enemy.

You can see these three hands going on with the M7 selection and the decision to use an electronic wonder optic:  "What if almost every round DID hit?  Then the reduction in rounds carried doesn't matter so much!"

The digital optic is supposed to make every round be the round with someone's name on it. 

Except, suppressive fire is sending rounds downrange with all the rounds labeled, "to whom it may concern."

If you can get the enemy to keep their head down while you're carefully aiming, it's a lot easier to carefully aim.

None of that is new.

But if you're going to take away 1/3 of the ammo, you have to teach the troops different suppression schedules.  They're not gonna learn that without doing some shooting in training...

Which brings us to something that a lot of shooters already know viscerally.

That bigger round is more expensive.

So getting training where rounds are expended will be more expensive.

Units in the Reagan Largesse were deferring live fire for budgetary reasons when 7.62 was a dime a shot, not a buck.  6.8x51mm is a LOT more than a dollar a round for the, lower powered, training ammo; and budgets are tighter.

So we've adopted a more expensive, and heavier, "rifle"; that uses very expensive, and heavier, ammunition; that's dependent on a very expensive, and cantankerous, optic; and all that requires more live fire training to learn how to use it because it's so very different from the weapon it replaces.

Americans, traditionally, are good at learning WARRE on the fly.

Yaay? 

By the way, there's nothing about that whiz-bang computerized optic that couldn't be applied to 5.56.

The entire justification for the 6.8x51mm round is to be able to punch our own body armor and we appear to be the only nation issuing such armor at scale.  What makes the 6.8x51mm round so damned expensive is using a 13" barrel because we're insisting on every infantryman carrying a suppressed rifle and trying to keep the overall length manageable.

It's 3" longer than the M4, and 3" shorter than the M16A2.  Winning?

I can't help but think that if we're going to insist on .270 Winchester performance, it'd have been simpler to just skip the suppressor and hang a 20" barrel out front and have $1.28 a round ammo instead of $2.60 a shot; because that bullet can be loaded into a conventional brass case at normal chamber pressures too.

That $2.60 a shot is 3,200 fps from a 16" barrel, not sure if that's the same cartridge that does 3,000 fps from a 13" barrel. 

Rephrasing The Problem Sometimes Helps

Wind and solar are what you put up with for energy production when you don't have gas, oil and nuclear power.

It's not an alternative until it's a replacement, and it will never be able to replace them. 

It Must Be Seasonal

Sarah Hoyt is talking about libertarianism too.

More To Say Than A Comment Will Bear

Joe Huffman posted.

At issue is:

Once you hit about a 20-point IQ gap, communication starts to completely break down.

It’s not that the lower IQ person is “stupid” (although that can often be the case) or the higher one is arrogant, it’s that you’re literally operating on different systems.

A 20 point difference (roughly 1.3 standard deviations) means:

Vocabulary and abstraction levels diverge sharply. What feels like crystal clear logic to one side sounds like vague, pretentious word salad to the other. Jokes land flat. Metaphors get taken literally. Complex cause and effect chains get simplified into “this good, that bad.”

Different time horizons and pattern recognition. One person thinks in months or years and sees systems, the other is locked into days or immediate rewards. Trying to explain second order effects feels like speaking another language.

Also, processing speed and working memory gaps. The higher IQ person is already three steps ahead, getting impatient. The lower IQ person feels talked down to or overwhelmed.

Both walk away frustrated.

Both have wasted each others time.

Jøhnathan @Heavenly_Race_
Posted on X May 25, 2026

I have frequently been the person who's 20 to 30 points behind the person I've been talking to.  Marv's 152, for example.  The physics students who played in my Traveller campaign definitely had higher IQ's.  I dunno what FuzzyGeff or Technomad score, but I know it's higher than me.

I routinely tested around IQ 139, despite that being below the threshold for Mensa, I still passed their silly test.  I declined the membership because...  Have you been to a meeting?  It'd be faster to tattoo your score on your forehead so everyone can segregate properly and look down their noses appropriately.

I have noticed that I'm making connections that others do not see when figuring out something abstract and complex.

Because a draftsman is a translator between engineers and tradesmen, I learned to speak both languages.

And it's more of a dialect problem than a language problem.  Terminology not words.

But being smart doesn't give one the magic ability to suppress instant gratification.

Most of the smart people I know have poor savings skills.  But the ones who do have good skills in this regard have exceptionally good skills.

Many of us have extremely awkward social skills that have hampered conventional success.

Vocabulary is more a function of education than ability!  Those tradesmen include some VERY intelligent people who don't speak with a college vocabulary, but can understand and visualize what they're about to build and what they need to build it faster than I can.

Too Simple

There's a couple data points for libertardians that need to be pointed out repeatedly.

First, and largest, libertarian is too simple to have never been tried even before someone coined the term.

Where is this vast, successful, society living in accordance with the non-aggression principle?  Did you realize that a feudal system can be created within the libertarian framework?

The next largest problem is actually the same problem that socialism has; it doesn't scale.

At the monkey level both socialism and libertarianism work.  Once you don't know everyone personally, they fall apart.

I mean, if it's so obviously easy and simple, why isn't the Free State Project a shining beacon of freedom and liberty?

I, too, want to live in utopia.  Sadly, it doesn't exist and cannot be created.

The best we can hope for is maximizing liberty and pushing for the ideal can get us more of it; but way too many libertardians are absolutists.

When you go "all-or-nothing" you get nothing.  Every.  Single.  Time.

PS: For the Rands:  You really want me to respect you?  Stop running as Republicans. 

Fine By Me

If you want to make cultural appropriation illegal, then you are going to have to stop appropriating MY culture, Ms Osei-Tutu.

I see you're in Miami.  You will have to give up air conditioning.  Your use of it is appropriating the works of European-American culture.

Best get used to walking too.  Cars, trains, buses, trucks and planes are all Western Civilization inventions.

Don't use the sidewalks or streets.  Concrete and asphalt are European and American, respectively.

The University you teach at is a product of Western Civilization and allowing you to have a prominent place in such an institution is also a Western Civ idea.

How about voting?  You're not only a woman, but a minority.  Where else, but by appropriating American culture could you have done that?

How about being a person instead of property?

But, let's not even go there.

Cultures in contact adopt what they like from each other.

Always have, and they always will.

Things get changed and relabeled constantly.

It's not a sign of disrespect.  It's not bigoted.

It just is.

It's stupid to try and stop it, and fruitless. 

Progressive

The road from high-trust to low-trust societies follows a predictable path.

One of the first steps is the entities that have been entrusted with keeping order, refusing to do so or being selective about what order they keep.

Anarchotyranny is the result.

The classic example is a homeowner who has suffered through repeated thefts and burglaries and receiving no justice who decides enough is enough and administers some on their own.

The people who are supposed to be investigating the crimes that led to this, enforcing the law and meting out punishment...  Come down hard on the homeowner.

The homeowner did, assuredly, break the law; but the motives matter.

What was the government doing to keep them from losing their property?

Had they arrested anyone?

Had they secured a conviction?

Did they even bother to actually investigate past taking a vague description or logging the video of the crime?

The government and police have failed in their duties and since they are given powers delegated from The People, it is the right of The People to reclaim those powers from the government and police.

But there's a simple solution:  Just make it legal to shoot burglars and thieves in the act of stealing AND/OR running from the scene of the crime.

Fuck 'em.

Because if the cops don't start arresting people and the district attorney doesn't start getting convictions:  People are going to start killing criminals on their own and will shortly thereafter start shooting the police who try to stop them.

It's a place we, as a society, do not want to be; but the first step back from the brink is the hardest and it's on Leviathan to make it. 

Perfection

There is no perfect hot-rod.

This is because what makes such a thing is entirely subjective.

Marv and I have been comparing our "what if we won the lottery" builds and we don't agree on very much at all.

He's thinking first generation Firebird.

I'm thinking early to mid 1960's full size.

We tend to agree about LS engines and 6+ gear slush boxes.

But I wanna car that cruises all day and am willing to accept some performance sacrifices to be comfortable for 12 hours on the road.

Marv wants exceptional skid-pad performance and an impressive 1/4 mile time.

We both want modern climate control and electronic fuel injection.

We're both aiming at something where the body control module doesn't get a veto.

But neither of us is screaming the other is wrong!

His vision is awesome.  I hope he wins the lottery and makes his dream Firebird.

It's a really cool car!

A car that I think we'd both be miserable in if we tried to take it on the Hot Rod Power Tour.

Contrariwise,  my vision is awesome at things like the Power Tour and will not carve the corners or win any drive and drag events.

We both want something that's reliable, though.  Being miserable or losing an event doesn't mean we wanna be on the side of the road fixing it.

Hot Rodding is best when you can not agree about what to build, but be totally excited about someone realizing a vision you don't share.