Alex Brown

So, the DoD just released their second tract of Chinese companies that are considered to be directly/indirectly controlled by the PLA, a government effort called Military-Civil Fusion. I decided to do a quick delve into these companies, and try to explain how they affect US. 1/13

@Orthon_Spaceman @aelfred_D It's his own fault, really. If Odysseus would've just paid for an E-Z Pass, he could have been home in 3 hours.

In the deepest archives beneath the Salt Lake temple, Mormons keep the original Odyssey, inscribed on golden plates in reformed mycenean, telling the true story of Odysseus' journey over the Atlantic to his home in Ithaca, NY.

@moorehn Right, but Golisano doesn't just have a billion dollars in the bank, it's equity in Paychex (& his other companies). To get that money, you'd have to dissolve the company and liquidate its assets. At which point, you're putting 4,500 employees on the street for a one-time payment

@AlexDRBrown The same way the IRS seizes assets. It goes back to taxpayers. Any money that is ill-gotten gains goes into the national coffers. At the rate of lawbreaking by our billionaires, we'll be able to fund universal healthcare for 100 years :)

personally, I think we can resolve these things using a similar mechanism to the one that pauses wire transfers over $10,000 for investigation to check if they are related to money laundering. We should allow people to make over $1 billion, but once they hit the $1 billion threshold, they have to be subjected to a complete audit of all of their businesses and investigations of their working practices for meeting standards of business ethics and labor laws. If somehow miraculously they come through that cleanly, they can keep their $1 billion. (but none of them will come through that cleanly)

@RazorwireRPG The Legion makes sense in a grim wasteland-a charismatic warlord taking power with old world knowledge & sacrificing freedom for security. With no NCR, choosing them over House/BOS/Raiders would make a compelling story. But that's a far darker story then the developers could sell

Of the many things people get wrong about the Legion, it's the reason why people like them so much that most misunderstand. The Legion doesn't rock because they're Roman larpers in mini skirts, they rock because they have the most fascinating characters. Severus. Lucius. Vulpes. Lanius. Ulysses. Joshua Graham. Edward Sallow. Graham and Sallow are what make the Legion so interesting, as their origin story is so incredibly compelling. Outside of the obvious Romulus and Remus theme, the story of a devout Mormon missionary and a resentful booksmart tactician building a Slave Nation with Total War and cunning - just fucking rocks. Two men have a horrific vision for an America united under one blood-soaked flag. Their guile, viciousness and sheer willpower nearly bring the entire Southwestern United States to it's knees. Art by @_deimos_art

@xwanyex 'How could (company) close their downtown store? I live downtown! I'm going to make them keep it open!' And when the company ignores them, that turns into 'The state has an obligation to meet my needs. Thus, the state must make them keep the store open b/c they won't listen to me

@xwanyex The idea is a cross between 'All companys should follow state input' & 'All companys should be required to respond to any public opinion'. That a company can just ignore their complaints & the state can't force them to listen is so outside their worldview that it seems malicious.

I’ve never worked out exactly how to say this in a way that perfectly maps on to the sense I have of it, but it’s something in the left wing brain that sees institutions as more like powerful natural phenomena, instead of as collections of individual human beings with individual desires and motivations. The local school, their Landlord, the comedy cellar, IBM — the way they think of it is that there are regular people like you and me and then there are these enormous constructs that have just kind of always existed and in some sense always will exist, as though they were imbued with power by our creator at the beginning of the universe. I think it’s a sign of a certain kind of stunted development. They see these institutions sort of in the same way that an eight year-old views their parents, not really as fully formed human beings with their own incentives, but rather as all powerful overseers from whom infinite resources can be extracted, because they’ve always been there and always will be there. Similarly, to an eight-year-old, their classroom at school needs no explanation or justification; it has always existed, always will exist. How did the chairs get there? How are teachers hired? What do we want to teach? These are questions that have to be answered by actual, living, breathing individuals who respond to incentives. But the eight-year-old doesn’t think about any of that. The classroom is just *there*. How could it be otherwise? The world has always just simply contained classrooms. This is how the progressive sees the world around them — as an eight-year-old sees their parents or their teachers or the chairs and desks in their classroom. This is how you get these situations where progressives are mad that the last remaining grocery store in the ghetto doesn’t have fresh enough produce and so they make the store stock fresh produce and then when this pushes so hard on the margins that the store is no longer profitable and closes, the progressive demands that the store remain open to serve the failing neighborhood. It’s as if the store is eternal. You have to be unable to imagine a time before or after the store. You have to see the world as an eight year-old sees the world. The neighborhood grocery store merely exists. It has always existed. It must always exist. The work of the entrepreneur is invisible. The incentives that keep the store open are not legible. Neighborhoods just simply have grocery stores. This is the store in my neighborhood. If you just kind of squint at communism, what it looks like to me like is an attempt to make this relationship to reality concrete. They think they can make this understanding of the world reality. They want to make it so that all of these hidden, invisible incentives and constraints are officially irrelevant. They’ve never understood what they were for, anyway. They usually don’t even notice them. It only frustrates them to hear them pointed out. The neighborhood grocery store should simply just exist, as it has always existed.

@nolan_2010 @xwanyex Ironically enough, the 1 car under 3k was an 08 Impreza. Though, in fairness, it had a lot more than a touch of rust. Salt is likely as responsible as cash for clunkers was for eliminating the used car market in the north.

@AlexDRBrown @xwanyex I watched this happen in real time. My first car was an 04 impreza wagon 5mt 200km touch of rust $1700 cad. Those just don’t exist anymore. I’m currently hoarding all the 2000-2015ish vehicles I can find for my kids who aren’t born yet.

I will in this post judge every aspect of this individually ✅ Encouraging the kid to start some kind of side hustle. (This actually is just straightforwardly good.) 💩Loaning him the money at a high-interest rate to “teach him about the real world.” (“The world” I live in also includes the concept of dads helping their sons get started in life on favorable terms.) ⚠️ Middlemanning returned rugs. (This isn’t as stupid as some people think. Finding a market for returned goods is a perfectly reasonable endeavor, but it’s also probably a shitty business. If anything, this will teach the kid how hard it is to make money with these kinds of schemes.) 💩 Letting your kid drive around in an unsafe/unreliable car.

@shagbark_hick OTOH, Spanish frontier development was directed by the viceroyaltys, who plotted exactly where encomiendas would be built, shipped in local slaves to build them, & then moved government-vetted Spanish citizens as needed. A Spanish farmer couldn't just up and head to the frontier.

@shagbark_hick That's b/c large (peacetime) economic migration is uniquely American. It only came about due to a combination of British common law, their use of the colonies as a relief valve for dissidents & criminals, & pre-Civil War federalism mandating local control of frontier development.

One thing that really seems to have gone out of style is kissing momma goodbye and moving overseas, never to return again. These days, even the poorest third-world refugees seem to eventually go back home, see the family, they're Skyping each other, etc. This is a major change in the history of human migration. Makes the stakes seem lower. Wasn't so long ago that the idea of "going home for Christmas" was basically unthinkable for the overseas emigre.

@lynnhowlett Perinton swung left b/c: 1: The Kodak generation is passing away/moved south 2: Avg. home prices went from 256k in 20 to 335k in 25, pricing their children out 3: NYC Dems bought up the homes during COVID Even Cheryl Dinolfo only won Perinton by 51% of votes in '19 vs 58% in '15

Fairport, NY goes full steam ahead pushing Muslim into mainstream. WHO counted THESE ballots in 2024? No one wants to talk about the Monroe County Board of Elections. How in God's name do most eastern suburbs flip to progressive in so short a timespan? Pat Reilly? Peter Elder?

@esrtweet Personally, I would end it with the zealots winning, and putting a crusade together to end the 'demons' threat, only to arrive and find, b/c of the vast time difference, the humans have already gone extinct. The slowlife's conflict, all their death, was ultimately meaningless.

@esrtweet The cycle is broken. They start dying in a certain area, and don't understand why. Some say it's a punishment, others just a natural part of the cycle. A few brave souls investigate, and find humans at different technological levels each time. The divide sparks a civil war.

I have a terrific premise for a science fiction story that I haven't figured out what to do with because I don't know how to make a plot or drama around it. I thought this one up when I was reminded that the diffuse Oort cloud of our solar system is so large that it probably overlaps with the Oort cloud of Alpha Centauri. Premise: there is life in Oort clouds. Cryogenic life, adapted to temperatures not much above 3° Kelvin. To that life, the galaxy looks not so much like vacuum but like a continuous field of overlapping cold Oort shells. Hell is downwards, in the direction of the nearest star. The common galactic ecology avoids it. There are sophont species of Oort life. But here's the twist; because the available energy gradients are so weak, the metabolic rate of Oort life, and the computation rate of Oort brains, is incredibly slow by our standards. Slowlife, experiencing the universe in accelerated time. Humans encountering slowlife might take some time to realize what they're seeing. Complex, organized patterns of matter and energy that appear static because they change so slowly. We might mistake a plant or animal for a weird work of art created by beings more like us. We'd wonder why rocks were moving around on ion jets. Furthermore, we'd be incredibly dangerous to slowlife. The waste heat from our bodies and machines would be as though a knotted piece of the Sun had landed on Earth and burned everything around it to ash. Not lost on me that we could be slowlife compared to beings that live in the photospheres of stars. Incredible sense of wonder is possible here; almost Stapledonian scope. I have fragments of stories in my head of humans reacting to these discoveries. But what's the plot driver here? Where's the tension when time scales are so different? How would we even communicate meaningfully with slowlife? Not seeing a way to make story out of this.

@QuetzalPhoenix @ShitpostRock Broke: Stardew Valley is liberal Woke: Stardew Valley is conservative Bespoke: Stardew Valley is a true Jeffersonian Democracy

@ShitpostRock Stardew Valley is Conservative: The best society is a traditional, close-knit, homogenous community maintained by local businesses? No Taxes? Minimal Government? 95% White population? No limits on Alcohol or Explosives manufacturing? More like HORSESHOE valley, amirite?

@UrbanCourtyard rather hostile regulatory environment in most states regarding food handling and storage put a lot of pressure in individual stores to close or sell out to the chains that specialize in rural grocery stores.

@UrbanCourtyard We used to, and in some places still do. But they phased out in urban areas with the rise of supermarkets, who have optimized supply chains and a larger loss margin to handle shrinkage. Rural stores are more likely to have this style, but razor-thin margins, staffing issues and a

Someone was explaining to me that we can’t have small-scale, distributed grocery store because that would raise food prices. But food prices in countries with higher grocery stores per capita see to have faaaar lower prices than we do in the US, even after adjusting for all the things

@braxton_mccoy Premiering this fall on CBS... NCIS: TDY "The Last Thing You'll Never Sea"

Are they all doing this because some officer did a risk assessment and came to the conclusion slide bite was likely to cost the Navy money and these people will never use those pistols anyway? Trying to come up with a reason the most well-funded military on the planet is like this rn.

@PhilSustainable Ok, this is hilarious b/c these are old images, and the third and fourth photos do have new construction on the lots he's complaining about. The first is the lot for the Public Safety Building (never for sale) and the second is dual-use Kodak parking they rent out to the stadium

It’s crazy seeing parking lots in Downtown Rochester, NY. The city should be as rich as Brooklyn today, but chose pavement instead

@GenZMultifamily Also, you should have 20% saved as a down payment so you don't have to pay mortgage insurance, which is also extremely expensive. For a 400,000 dollar home, that's 80,000 you have to have on hand to buy that home.

@GenZMultifamily Well, the median income for Davidson county is 80,000, which means that 70-80% of owners cannot afford that home. The rule of thumb is not to buy a home double your yearly income, so the limit would be 160,000. There are 26 homes under that price for a county of 715,000 people.

To all of the people who complain they cant afford a house and spend their whole lives yelling we need affordable housing... What is stopping you from packing your bags, moving 7 miles outside of Nashville, and buying this 3 Bed 2 bath house for $400,000? Great neighborhood, .33 acres, safe area. You can afford a house, you just cant afford your dream house.