It was a wonderful collection of rage inducing weapons: pipe bombs, laser trip mines, shrink ray (then step on them for the kill), freeze gun (any hit shatters for the kill), and the BFG.
We had LAN parties and would play for hours on end with custom maps we had built or downloaded.
Same! We used to host "Jetpack Freeze Ray" duels which ended when somebody was frozen causing them to plummet out of the sky and shatter when they hit the ground~~
It certainly wouldn't be equivalence, but it would be another 4 years of expanding presidential powers only for a republican to come to power after that, or after 8 years. It really doesn't matter. The system keeps changing to put us more a risk of a bad president being effectively bad.
Two of the most authoritarian decisions by the supreme court have been progressive in nature: Kelo v. City of New London - where the government can redistribute wealth if it benefits the government, and the whole fiasco around the ACA, which defaults every American to being a criminal until they bought health insurance, using the commerce act as justification for the power grab.
About the ACA, whether I agree with national healthcare is irrelevant, this was not the way to do it -- by expanding the government's reach. There has to be consideration for what the administration does.
You essentially seem to be making an argument for the status quo because you're terrified that anyone who promises to improve things will become authoritarian.
No, it's not. When people try to "drain the swamp", several things push them to become authoritarians, even if they weren't before.
1. The definition of "the swamp" drifts from "open, blatant corruption" towards "everyone who opposes me". That's a much larger set, so you need bigger guns.
2. Some people agree that "the swamp needs drained", but disagree on what "the swamp" is, and/or disagree on how to drain it.
3. People don't agree with everything you're doing. (Maybe this is the same as #1 and/or #2.) Some people oppose you because they're corrupt, some people oppose you because they dislike change, and some people oppose you because they dislike your methods. The more force you use, the more people oppose your methods. But as opposition grows, you need more force to get anywhere.
The result is that anybody who sets out to do something like "drain the swamp", if they stick with it as an objective, gets pushed toward more and more authoritarianism to try to make it happen.
Look, Bernie isn't Trump. He's been consistently pushing in the same direction for decades. He actually cares about his issues; he's not just using them as a cover for seeking power. But I think that, if he got actual power (president, not just senator), the dynamics of the situation would also push him to become more and more authoritarian.
(Would he become equivalent to Trump? Hopefully not.)
> Look, Bernie isn't Trump. He's been consistently pushing in the same direction for decades. He actually cares about his issues; he's not just using them as a cover for seeking power.
Exactly.
> But I think that, if he got actual power (president, not just senator), the dynamics of the situation would also push him to become more and more authoritarian.
This is just sheer unsupported speculation. It's silly.
Seems massively unconstitutional to retroactively impose penalties, especially if the previous behavior didn't violate any laws. Not to mention the reputational risk on the trustworthiness of US as a place to do business and the risk of abuse from future administrations. You might cheer that universities are getting their just desserts for scamming students, but your political adversaries might use it to claw back funding from universities for being too "woke" or whatever.
> Seems massively unconstitutional to retroactively impose penalties
For existing agreements, of course.
Going forward, for those who are the real beneficiaries of the loans, they should have a skin in the game.
Why aren't universities standing behind their product and offering financing without the unusual non-dischargeable nature of the loans? Do they not stand behind their products?
> His books are filled with exhortations to trust the workers. This is what American managers could never bring themselves to do.
This is one of the big differences in the military, with far more trust given to the "workers" in the US and generally western countries compared to others.
In case anyone is interested, I enjoyed the book "Turn the Ship Around!" by L. David Marquet, about management lessons applied by the author who was a US Navy submarine captain. It does very much emphasize giving trust, responsibility and accountability to workers (or enlisted personnel, in this case).
One of my favourite techniques from that book is to remove the centralised backlog. People's ideas for improvement shouldn't be everyone's administrative burden. There are too many ideas for that.
Instead, keep a central record of the things that need to be done right now, and if something is important to do later, then someone will probably keep track of it personally and bring it up later when it is more relevant.
Pray we never need statistical process controls for the mass manufacturing of military objectives.
Deming's exhortations exist because they are aspirational, essentially propaganda for his vision of organizational cybernetics. "Deming was part of the Teleological Society with Wiener, Turning, von Neumann, and others during and after the Second World War — one of the groups that was the precursor to the Macy Conferences and worldwide cybernetics movement that also led to the development of the Cybernetics Society." [0]
"[Deming's] view of cooperation stood in stark contrast to business as usual, which emphasized competition, even within one’s own company. Throughout his life, he demonstrated how even competitors working together benefited their respective companies and, more importantly, their customers." [1]
1. Willis, John. Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge: How Deming Helped Win a War, Altered the Face of Industry, and Holds the Key to Our Future (p. 164). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Which is also a relatively recent thing, all things considered. If I remember correctly it was primarily WWII Germany that pioneered this approach, which was then quickly adopted by everyone else
I've heard this dichotomy in terms of military command presented in many different ages and different ways. It is primarily the difference between communicating the goals of an operation versus communicating how to achieve those goals. Most recently I've listened to accounts that it explains Russia operational failures in the invasion of Ukraine. I've also read analysis suggesting that it was a relevant difference in the battle of waterloo.
It was practiced by the Prussians during the Franco Prussian war. In WWI, it led to the small team grenade tactics, the Germans deployed to try to overcome trench warfare. It culminated with the blitzkrieg tactics of WWII.
There are a lot of confounding variables. Chief among them is someone at the top just wanting to get on with their life, start a family for instance, or basically anything other than study 12 hours a day.
It's hard to say it's cognitive decline for most of the people who just aren't working as hard at 40 as they were at 25.
If Chess960 or some other variant that doesn't involve as much rote work becomes sufficiently popular for long enough perhaps it will yield some valuable data about mental function versus age. At least a more holistic view than the studies we currently have.
If you shut it down for too long and there is a lapse in reopening it, planes are grounded for an extra bit of time.
If you shut it down for too short and there is a lapse in extending the grounding, planes are getting shot out of the sky (or whatever threat it was).
edit: I would add that maybe there are forms for shutting down airspace of various specific time lengths and a convenient time for something of unknown duration would be 10 days. 10 days might also be enough time to be sure whatever resources need to be brought to bear on this are available where an hour or day might not be. Shut it down basically indefinitely, or at least long enough that the crew who handles this extraordinary situation will be on hand to turn it off.
I'm thinking of remote buttons to make his favorite things appear on tv. This is going to be awesome.
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