anindefinitearticle

joined 1 year ago
[–] anindefinitearticle 34 points 4 months ago (7 children)

Dems actually executed a plan shockingly well. Get the Republican anti-Biden propaganda machine to load up on specific issues, then swap Biden with someone that doesn’t have those issues. Now that the populace has been agitated on those issues, point out that Trump is the candidate who is old and fucks with Palestine. Classic bait and switch. Trump fell for the trap.

Kamala isn’t perfect, but she seems to be running on prosecuting and cleaning up the Trump crime spree. I can get behind that. A relief to see the dems pull something like this off. Acting like they were completely blowing it was just so believable. Biden’s debate performance really sold it.

[–] anindefinitearticle 6 points 4 months ago

How has he destroyed his reputation? Just curious.

[–] anindefinitearticle 10 points 4 months ago

It’s not just that, it’s a chance at a fresh start to excite people about a new direction for this country.

[–] anindefinitearticle 9 points 4 months ago

syzygy

Bonus points for no aeiou.

[–] anindefinitearticle 6 points 4 months ago

Teamsters were part of the AFL as a “skilled labor union” pre-great-depression. What’s a “skilled laborer”? You can usually tell by their gender and skin color. Teamsters were also anti-communist and had several leaders who were anti-strikes. The Teamsters were a milquetoast union option that the bosses preferred to a real union as a compromise with organizing workers. They grew quickly.

Merging with the CIO cleaned a lot of this up. The symbol of the AFL-CIO is that of a white hand labeled “AFL” shaking hands with a black hand labeled “CIO”.

Teamsters historically have been an imperfect “foot-in-the-door” union. Something to begin the process of organizing and collective bargaining and giving workers a voice, while being willing to compromise to keep power and stay alive. Don’t look to the teamsters if you want radical change. Look to them to expand the reach of labor unions to white, blue-collar workers that are skeptical of more radical/socialist unions.

[–] anindefinitearticle 24 points 4 months ago

For best flavor, gently tenderize your long pork against a table to get the juices flowing before cutting off another ham steak.

[–] anindefinitearticle 5 points 4 months ago

Reader-mode works too!

[–] anindefinitearticle 15 points 4 months ago

Not only that, but having the entire executive branch come down to a single elected ticket is a clumsy and low-resolution choice for voters. Especially when you consider that there are only two tickets (blue and red) to vote for.

The position of the president is superfluous and should be eliminated. A president hires people to run the executive branch. That’s how senile Biden can be so effective. He hires well. The American people should be hiring (directly electing) the cabinet, the judicial branch, the top generals, the top ambassadors, etc. Those people could vote to approve/veto bills, or do other jobs currently reserved for the president. This would mean that our whole executive branch isn’t getting replaced every 4-8 years. I bet that if people were voting for each cabinet position independently, we would see a lot more specialized candidates running, and room for third-party break-ins to smaller positions. Each cabinet position is focused on specific issues that relate to that position. This gives voters more granular control over the executive branch. Have each position up for election on a staggered timeline so not everyone is up for election at once. Force the races to be focused on specific issues by making the election be about a specific department. Maybe AOC could win Labor Secretary, but that race shouldn’t have a foreign policy discussion. Maybe Bernie could run for Secretary of State as a referendum on pulling out of the Middle East. If we are electing people to specific jobs, we can focus on those jobs instead of all the other bullshit that the election cycle focuses on. Replace the presidency with a document/constitution that outlines the checks and balances, roles and responsibilities of each of these positions.

[–] anindefinitearticle 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I did this in another thread. Using the values for the speed of a bullet from an AR-style rifle quoted from the NYT, and the shutter speed that the NYT photographer claimed, the streak is about 3x too long for the streak to only be the bullet.

In that comment I said that I was skeptical of what we were looking at. Now I wonder if part of the streak is also a refraction effect from the air displaced by the bullet, allowing the streak to be longer than the velocity*exposuretime calculation predicts? I’m not sure!

[–] anindefinitearticle 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Right, all more reasons the streak in the image is too fast to be an AR bullet.

[–] anindefinitearticle 8 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Thanks! With the information in the article you just linked, I am now very suspicious that this is a picture of the bullet, where I previously thought it was plausible from my low-precision estimate. From the article:

“If the gunman was firing an AR-15-style rifle, the .223-caliber or 5.56-millimeter bullets they use travel at roughly 3,200 feet per second when they leave the weapon’s muzzle,’’ Mr. Harrigan said. “And with a 1/8,000th of a second shutter speed, this would allow the bullet to travel approximately four-tenths of a foot while the shutter is open.”

Same procedure, but an AR-15 shoots a bullet faster than the speed for a generic bullet that I used, and the shutter speed was faster because it was a fancy NYT camera. 3200ft/s is almost exactly 1000m/s. The 1/8000s shutter speed is the fact that seems the most reliable, assuming that the photographer knew what setting their camera was on.

What I disagree with is that that streak is only 0.4 feet long. The average size of a human male head (brow to back of head) is about 20cm, or 8in per this image from Wikipedia. The streak from the bullet in the image is about twice the size of Trump’s head, or 40cm/16in. Due to projection effects, this is a lower bound on the path of the bullet during the 1/8000s exposure. This puts a lower bound on the speed of 3200m/s. This is over three times the velocity of an AR-15, at minimum. Either this was some super-high-powered rifle to fire the bullet that fast, the shutter speed is misquoted (or a misleading representation of the exposure time), or this isn’t picture of the bullet.

Thanks for providing the data to make me suspicious that this is an image of the bullet.

[–] anindefinitearticle 12 points 4 months ago (7 children)

That isolated tweet with the pic doesn’t claim to be from NYT or a NYT photographer. I’ve never heard of this “spectator index”. Here is the AP collection of photos from the event.

If I do assume that’s a bullet, let’s test if the size of the streak makes sense. A bullet travels at about 750m/s. That streak (using Trump’s head for scale) is about 50cm long, or 1/2 meter. A 750 m/s bullet travels 1/2 meter in 1/1500 seconds. When you consider projection effects (we might not be looking with a line-of-sight perpendicular to the bullet’s trajectory), we expect the length and time used in my above calculations to be lower bounds, with the true answer probably being within about a factor of 3 of that bound. This means that this image only makes sense as a bullet if the shutter speed is between 1/1500 and 1/500 seconds. That lines up with this website’s recommendation of 1/1000 second exposure time for bright outdoor shots.

Either a very good fake that considered the kinematics, or this is a real image of the bullet.

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