When I was a kid, Dave Berry had a column where he made fun of the US Strategic Helium Reserve. This taught me an important lesson: when people make fun of what seems like government waste, 75% of the time it turns out to be really important. Not always, but you should look into it more.

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Next, you’ll be telling me synthetic motor oil isn’t synthetic.

What if it’s very hard light?

It’s generally for clearing dead people off the list so that someone else can’t pretend to be them.

Unfortunately, he is very consequential. If you went to an NRA self-defense shooting instructor in 2019 and laid out everything Rittenhouse did, and then asked if that was valid self defense, the answer would be unequivocally no. What Rittenhouse found was an argument for shooting protestors and getting away with it.

That’s scary, because if you spend much time around gun shows and gun clubs, you’ll meet plenty of people who are clearly looking for an excuse to shoot somebody with a legal loophole.

Which sometimes comes down to nothing more than paperwork. FISA wire tapping warrents became a rubber stamping operation under Clinton. Bush then couldn’t be bothered to do that much.

They can take out an ICBM. It can’t take out all the ICBMs.

I actually love rules lawyering, but it has to be done away from the table, and done with a certain amount of good faith. And don’t get mad when others rules lawyer you back.

In 7th Ed 40k, I found a way to make the Tau Stormsurge to be even more ridiculous than it already was. It clearly conflicted with RAI. I had to talk it out with another Tau player, who was a real lawyer, to find a way to invalidate it. He had to pull out actual lawyer tricks of carefully reading the rule to disentangle it, and he agreed it wasn’t at all obvious.

But I never played with that interpretation, and never intended to. Tau players already have a reputation for playing like dicks.

You are 100% free to live out your pile of dust fantasy. I let you be a pile of dust. Isn’t that what you wanted?

If a guy is doing what you’re doing in this thread at the table, then yeah, I’d support them in leaving you there.

That’s probably the path I’d take as a DM if I had a player insisting on rules lawyering like OP. OK, you get to “play” as a pile of dust. Have fun sitting there until random wind currents blow you around.

Careless logging is the one.

At the time Facebook was invented, plaintext passwords had been a joke for years.

Miller replied, “Well, he’s made it very clear that he’s not gonna go and weigh in and try to push various states in how they want to go and set up their particular rules and restrictions. That’s gonna be up to the states.”

Just in case it wasn’t clear, they belive that any level of tyranny is fine as long as it’s state government doing it, not the federal government.

Lol

They want AGI, which would match or exceed human intelligence. Current methods seem to be hitting a wall. It takes exponentially more inputs and more power to see the same level of improvement seen in past years. They’ve already eaten all the content they can, and they’re starting to talk about using entire nuclear reactors just to power it all. Even the more modest promises, like pictures of people with the correct number of fingers, seem out of reach.

Investors are starting to notice that these promises aren’t going to happen. Nvidia’s stock price is probably going to be the bellwether.

To them, I’d point out the NIST warehouse of standardized materials:

https://shop.nist.gov/

$1,143 for 510 grams of Peanut Butter. $734 for 25 grams of Portland Cement. $1,107 for 100 grams of “Infant/Adult Nutritional Formula I (milk-based)”.

Is the US government ripping people off? No. It’s because when you get one, it is guaranteed to be the standard for whatever it says on the package, and it’s been made that way to exacting levels of detail. Unless you’re a laboratory using these materials, you don’t need to bother NIST with your grocery list.

Personally, I love this shit. It takes a whole lot of effort to make something to such standards. Doubly so when it’s not just one thing, but a combination of many smaller things that each has to be individually verified to work as part of a whole.

Make an instant fortune by shorting the market, and get free but mid quality root beer.

Yeah, it’s weird. Like yes, all these people put in a lot of effort to make sure that when people could die from equipment failure, we make sure that equipment is very, very good. Adding zeros to the price is the cost of that.