Toxn

On this note, I was once told something which really struck me as true, and has sort of stayed with me ever since: modern schools are the factory production line reworked to churn out citizens as product. Before, the function of schools was two-fold: to train peasants the bare minimum needed to sing mass and count sheep (ie: school as rural handcraft), or to train the children of aristocrats for rule (ie: school as bespoke luxury good). Come the industrial revolution there was a need for the masses to have more education, but the old upper-tier system couldn't handle the numbers. So the proles got a mass-market version of what the aristocrats received. This can be seen both in the way things are traditionally taught at school (large batch sizes, simplified instruction, quantitative quality control, standardised inputs) and the way the schools themselves are run (sorting into homogenous groups, uniforms, regulated hours and activities). Basically the whole story of education in the last 50 years is a realisation that the product which the modern school produced (mass-educated factory workers) was/is becoming increasingly obsolete, coupled with increasingly frantic attempts to modify the system without changing its fundamental nature. These increasing gyrations of curricula, educational philosophies, increased tertiary education and so on are simply the ongoing crises of a system which is trying to produce a new product without changing the tooling. Indeed, even the new product itself is in doubt.

So, another thought: One of the things we can all agree upon about how capitalism* works is that it includes a strong positive feedback component. My wealth allows me access to more opportunities, training and resources; so I will tend to accumulate even more. Add in the component of inheritance, and you end up with a system which very quickly produces a few winners and a lot of losers (read: my kids get a massive advantage because daddy left money in trust and sent them to the best schools). Where people disagree is how much of this process is dependent upon ability vs. luck, and how stable the system is once the winners and losers have been picked. If there is a strong tendency for people with talent to make it to the top, then capitalism can very convincingly be argued to be a good thing for society regardless of the inequality it causes. Equally; if it is relatively easy for someone at the bottom to make their way to the top, then capitalism can very convincingly be argued not to have an inequality problem at all. Finally; if you believe that the talent which allows people to make it to the top is in some way innate, then you can readily reconcile yourself with the idea of people at the top handing their descendants an advantage as they go. This is pretty basic, foundational stuff. But it should be borne in mind whenever you see people discussing if capitalism 'works'. * Note that many other systems have this dynamic too. We're just discussing capitalism for now.

T__A fighting valiantly against a myth, born as a reaction to a myth, which turns out to in no way be a myth. This performance art shit is off the hook.

The joke, you ruined it.

More tanker's chocolate would fix that mess right up.

Blood sacrifice is never okay.

True, but again it doesn't do much for the root causes of a lot of this mess. We don't even need fundamental changes to rights or whatever, just some serious changes to the laws governing how businesses may be run and how they may be structured. I'm thinking specifically about the shareholder value maximisation paradigm, executive compensation linked to share price, offshore finance and sale of companies to their offshore subsidiaries, separation of banking and investment, changes to the type of financial instruments which can be created and limitations on certain share-pumping strategies. An actual economist could probably come up with a dozen more minor tweaks which would have the cumulative effect of making it less attractive to park your money in bubble-inducing financial instruments, and less easy for fund managers to collude and bilk investors using the same.

Good point, but then it's pretty obvious that rich people aren't spending the majority of their money on investments into new businesses either. Rather, they're spending a small fraction on high-risk stuff (while doing their best to mitigate said risk) and the vast majority on low-risk stuff as described above. Nearly all of the investment I've seen going to new businesses are from government programs, with other businesses and investors jumping in only once they are convinced it's a sure thing. So I see no issue with taxing a lot off the rich (although as I mentioned I think its not the biggest issue) and ploughing the money received into startup programs.

Darwinian developments: One of the interesting things about human societies that they exhibit something akin to biological evolution. Older forms give birth to newer forms, the most successful of which grow and propagate themselves under the pressures of internal and external factors. Here it should be noted that, as in evolution itself, newer doesn't imply anything like better. In fact one of the running themes of African history is the replacement of more egalitarian forms of social organisation with more rigid, hierarchical forms. Three examples are illustrative here. The first, and most directly connected to my own history, is the Bantu migration. Here, the fascinating aspect is in how this massive movement of peoples (analogous to the late-Roman or dark age migrations, but larger and much longer lasting) was influenced by a number of factors and, in turn, how it ended up influencing events up and down the continent. The Bantu migration is a bit of dependent thing, and has been argued as 'starting' in either 1000BC or the 13th century depending on definitions. In any case, Bantu-speaking people were in modern-day Angola and using iron tools by around 400BC, and moved from here in a slow Southward progression pretty much until 500AD (by which time they had hit the Northern Transvaal). The progression was slow because ecologies change as you go North-South (as any Jared Diamond fan will go on at length about) and so you need to change farming practices and so on as you go. East-West is significantly easier, so the migration moved in reasonably solid blocks down the Western half of the continent. The pattern of migration was something like this: pioneers move down the drag looking for greener pastures, fights with or absorbs the natives they find and sets up villages. In time the villages grow into cities and then kingdoms, and a new bunch of pioneers push off (or get shoved out) to start the process all over again. As they go, a sort of social winnowing takes place by which the more calcified and useless aspects of the old homeland get weeded out and more rugged structures stay. The result is a sort of core package of Bantu cultural and social structures which got successfully transposed all over the lower half of the continent. This package included things like ancestor worship, the manufacture and use of iron tools, cattle rearing, agricultural practices and varieties, lobolo, kraal village structures, common mythology and folk stories, divine rulership of kings, age-rank groupings, inyangas/sangomas, witchcraft and curses, certain forms of pottery and weaving, communal rights and obligations, and a property system based on communal ownership of property vested in a male head of a number of households. This core package would go on to form the foundation of a number of quite different societies, but the societies in turn invariably reflect adaptions of the core package rather than outright imports or inventions. Which isn't to say that no adoption or invention occurred. Rather, new material was fitted into the old core as necessity and changing circumstances dictated. A good example of an external change was the introduction of new crops from the transatlantic exchange, via the more settled societies in the Northwest. Of these maize would become especially important as it can be grown over a wide swath of the subcontinent. Indeed, the only place in Southern Africa where maize didn't grow (the Cape) would become the last relatively unpopulated area that the Dutch colonists stumbled upon. This quirk of geography and biology would have profound implications for South African history. Another good example was the tendency for existing structures of hierarchy (especially the head-of-households) and society (especially age-ranks) to be strengthened and co-opted to support the bourgeoning political centralisation of kingdom and empire. My Zulu countrymen, whose history is well known enough so that I don't have to repeat it here, are a quintessential example of a single ruler using existing structures to form the socio-political basis of an empire. The Zulu innovations were then copied by the people they fought against or assimilated, and in that way flowed back up the continent*. This flow, in turn, fed back into the ongoing process of by ensuring that the surviving polities would tend to be of the armed and aggressive kind; led by a central guiding authority. The pimptacular king Moshoeshoe I; who managed to unite his people into a nation which still endures to this day and did so while successfully fighting off the Zulus, Boers and British. Dude is a legend and deserves an infinite amount more love than he gets. As usual, the options for pictures in this section were crap. *The Mfecane is a bit controversial now, as it long formed a sort of cover for claiming that black savagery both opened up South Africa to settlement and legitimised white South African rule. The new explanation was that the insistent pressure of Dutch colonialism and Portuguese rapacity were the prime factors behind the events of 19th century Southern Africa. My rather unstudied opinion is that trying to reframe things in this way falls into a new version of the same trap; where African peoples are only allowed to react to events rather than shaping them. In any case, the story itself is epic in scope and very interesting in terms of how the societies which popped out of the crushing were formed and welded together.

I was just extrapolating straight from this sort of graph: Per light gas guns, I actually had a go at designing a self-contained cartridge for one years back (for a dumb idea about a hypervelocity small arm). It was enormous - 30cm+ case length (including charge, plastic piston, gas chamber and burst disc) to launch a fiddly little flechette. But man that thing would have moved. For ETCs you do indeed have the same issues with energy density as rail guns - although a bit less severe as the electrical component is merely functioning as a booster for the main charge. Interestingly; I remember reading some research that seemed to show that the best approach was to use one chemical charge (presumably something like a shaped charge) to produce a plasma ignition jet, which would then go on to ignite and boost the main charge. I don't know whether this was ever implemented seriously. Travelling charge sounds interesting, but obviously you'd have to control the geometry of your blob thingy very well. Do we have any people here who can do some preliminary research? Like; they have the wherewithal to load their own cartridges and measure bullet speeds, and have a gun they are okay with blowing up in the name of science?

Trickle down always seemed like a bad idea to me because it is based on the assumption that spending patterns don't change as you go further up the ladder. In reality, the rich aren't spending more money on mass-produced goods (you can only eat so much bread, after all). Instead, they're ploughing the extra money they get into financial investments, parking it in tax havens and spending the leftovers on luxury goods. None of which involves any real sort of 'trickle down' into the broader economy. Where progressive taxation falls flat, however, is in thinking that rich individuals are the great drivers of inequality (they're a symptom, not a cause). Rather, we should be looking at how corporations themselves function to pull money out of the real economy and fix that. But reforming corporate governance and oversight law is boring and doesn't make for good slogans, so we're stuck with half-measures.

Toyota: because light cavalry is back I know the last one is a Landcruiser, but fuck it. The image was too good to waste.

Parasitic inception is a weirdly recurring theme in nature.

Large spark gap plus relatively insensitive primer will help. Test it using some poor fool, a dry shag rug and a door handle.

I'll post pictures of all the main characters (including in swimsuits) if you support my patreon

Idea for high-pressure primers: internal primer + electrical ignition through a lead going through the base centre. Case itself is used as the other electrode.

The gun felt surprisingly warm in my grasp. Testing the balance (although obviously I couldn’t shoulder it) it seemed remarkably light and centred. Everything lined up. Then, touching what I should call the grip, I noticed a faint tremor. The gun literally shivered in anticipation. “Do you like it?” Robert was looking at me now. “I actually didn’t put that in on purpose, but it’s a neat feature nonetheless. Definitely nice to have something which enjoys its job” I looked back at the gun and gave it an experimental pat. It wriggled (although the word gets a bit stretched when applied to something so rigidly constructed) and its eyes half-closed with pleasure. I kept patting it and turned back to Robert. “Bob,’ I said, ‘what on earth gave you the idea to make this thing?” “Well’, he replied, ‘it’s simple. I got to thinking, you know how I do, about gun control and all. And now I think I’ve solved it!” “That’s great, Bob, but -” “Now, I know what you’re thinking! This is kid’s stuff, these guns. A fellow could make them with... well, with anything! But that’s not the point. The point is that now they can make themselves. These things, if you feed them and care for them right, they’re essentially infinite. No way could the government ban the stuff you need to make a new one.” I had to admit that he had a point there. Looking at Robert’s creation and contemplating the info-dump he had just sent my way, his gun was pretty much impossible to restrict by anything so old-fashioned as banning tools or materials. This gun - if fed a diet of ordinary carbohydrates, proteins, fats and iron-bearing minerals - could replicate itself indefinitely. “Look at the plumbing, for instance,’ Robert continued as he directed my gaze towards the under-slung mouth beneath the muzzle. ‘The teeth are made of the same stuff the bullets: dentine and enamel with significant magnetite inclusions. It can chew rocks if it needs to. And the cloaca,’ I moved an arm carefully away from the spot he was pointing to, ‘is on the left or right depending on gender. Means both lefties and righties can shoot without touching the pellets, and that mating is done side-on. As for the eggs, they-” “You mentioned bullets,’ I interrupted. “but wouldn’t it be easier to make the ammunition separately?” Robert gazed at me levelly for a moment as the gun made squeaky noises, no doubt puzzled as to why the slow kid was being allowed to ask the questions today. “Not at all’, he continued at last. ‘Why, ammunition is the core of the gun. If it can’t make its own, then some government prod-nose could just ban that instead.” “And the mechanism? How does it fire?” “That’s simply down to the biology I used. There is a firing chamber feeding in from the dentate gyrus and the binary explosive glands. Actuation is all manual, meaning in this case that the gun uses its internal musculature to load and lock. Firing is involuntary, and is actuated by the trigger-spur on the ventral surface.” “And how many times can it do this?” “It depends. The internal bullet reserve varies, but is something in the order of one hundred mature bullets in the crop. You can also top it up with spare bullets from this operculum here’, pointing to a flap on the dorsal side of the gun, ’or explosive precursor here. The gun will also spit out excess bullets and explosive precursor if toggled by a specific movement along the caudal line.” I lined up the gun as well as I could, and sighted along the top of the muzzle. The sight picture actually wasn’t too bad, with the optical tunnel at the back of the cephalothorax providing a reasonably high-contrast view of the target and a phosphorescent dot in the centre of the view. “So, uh, how do I aim this thing?” “You simply place the dot on target, hold the grip and pull the trigger spur when the dot colour changes. The gun will use its eyes – binocular vision and all – to adjust the range and then shift the barrel to the correct position. The whiskers and skin patches measure wind and the like.” Not wanting to accidentally set the gun off (Robert would probably not approve of a test firing right now), I placed the gun down on its rather insectile forelegs. It seemed immensely pleased with itself, and capered around my feet in a sort of gormless way. I found myself strangely happy to be around it, as it gave me the unshakable impression that I was its’ favourite thing in the world. Needless to say, I am not used to this sort of reaction. “Bob,’ I said, ‘I think you really have done it. There are just two more questions I want to ask before I leave to write this all up.” “Shoot.” “One, why gun control? I mean, guns are old history. Heck, anyone who wants a real one can buy it at a curio shop or print it out at home. You don’t even need a licence. Guns are about as controlled now as spears. And about as dangerous to the likes of you and I.” The cold cameras of the bio-fabrication-complex-come-AI known (for reasons only it could begin to articulate) simply as Robert gazed at me levelly again. Despite my large, multi-legged and armour-plated exterior, I felt distinctly small and sheepish. “And the second question?” I trained a camera or two down at the gun, still happily skittering and yammering to itself around my many feet. “Can I keep it?”

So, speed of sound in a gas increases in an approximately linear fashion based on temperature. Further, the speed of sound is different for different gases (hydrogen >>> methane >> nitrogen > oxygen > carbon dioxide). Given the above, the best you could do would be to select a propellant which runs at the hottest possible temperature and dope it with something that breaks down into lots of hydrogen and methane. This would obviously make life hell on barrels, which leads to the thought that part of the barrel should be in the form of an easily-removed liner. Edit: finally, a good approach might be to try and go for an ECT - pumping in heat via a big electrode or whatever would allow you to explore faster propellant combinations than are presently available.

And the worse the quality of ingredients, the worse the fouling. Some of the muskets and I made had to be pretty much cleaned out between each shot due to the rapid build-up of blobs of black tar-stuff. Which would then invariably harden into solid chunks wherever it landed.

Eh, I just like it for being a muzzle-loader what is easier to load. Freaking ramrods, man.

This looks interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_guMksYm3TY

Pinketty is back in the news in South Africa, so I figure this is a good idea to chat about his big idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKsHhXwqDqM So what do people think? Are we headed (again) to a world where the middle class is this thin sliver between the idle rich and the restless poor? Or are we already there?

Kyuss fan spotted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mji5G1NI1bk&index=12&list=PLUM0famJkcwO62dVtn2EVSCLp0r1vNqWA

Looks like Laudo Liebenberg discovered M83 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clqL7B1txYc

Sorted.