If it’s just a single shot, then preventing the Brooks Brothers Riot would be the best use of your time.

All it would take is an industrial sized can of pepper spray. Just like the kind police regularly use on leftwing protesters.

I think that was part of Gamer Gate. The toxic rightwing backlash to women existing on the internet, and not in porn. It was the exact same time period.

Could have been. Reddit never actually told us anything. One of the other mods got a private message on another channel (discord maybe?) from the missing mod about it. But details were light, and the missing mod never even tried to return to Reddit. Said the ban was good for his mental health.

Then there was some Subreddit specific drama, and Reddit admins actually did the good thing. Then the API change, the blackout, and a couple other things that specifically fucked over mods. So I too, mostly left.

I do indeed. I didn’t actually have an account back then, because I was mostly browsing from work… I also mostly frequented Digg until the 4.0 fiasco.

Oddly, that was Spez, and when he went away for a bit, Reddit got really good. And then he came back and it went to shit.

Are you me? Because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I set my default browse experience to Top 6 hour and then scroll All.

I do miss the community aspect of Reddit. There were other users who I ran into regularly in the comments. And usually not in a hostile way.

Hell, there was one sub where I was invited to the mod team because of those interactions. I did that for a couple years and continued to be active in the sub until Reddit start pissing off mods. That and my main “friend” on the mod team had his account nuked by Reddit after he fell for a troll.

Reddit removed every comment he had ever made, including wonderful and well cited rebuttals of the right-wing bigotry of the day.

So yeah, I logged out of that reddit account and have never logged back in, instead I use a burner account and try not comment on anything.

It was a machine, it was not an engine. At no scale could it be used to power anything. And it would actually be dangerous to scale things too much. We know because people tried.

The aeolipile was a toy. And yes, toys can showcase interesting physics. I owned several of them as a child, and own a few today as, arguably, an adult.

Still, the thing about invention is that it isn’t a flash of inspiration and a new thing appears, it’s more of a slog of learning new things and applying old things in new ways.

Most often in history the most striking inventions were new ways of getting the raw resources, or improving the quality of those resources.

You can’t have a steam engine without a way to consistently produce steel.

The aeolipile wasn’t really a stream engine. I’ve played with modern versions, and you can stop the spin with your hand. Not a bare hand mind, because it’s rather hot. But a cloth or a glove is fine.

These toys have zero power to do any useful work.

This is why an actual steam engine uses a reciprocating piston. Because doing it that way builds pressure and thus power.

The point is that design patents are fucking stupid and should not exist in the first place.

Apple has sued other phone manufacturers over them making a rectangle with rounded corners.

And it’s fucked.

If he was a coward he would never have hired Joel Kaplan.

Joel Kaplan was a Bush toady who participated in the Brooks Brothers riot.

Martin has already stated the he is not a fan of Sanderson’s style, specifically in regards to being a potential contingency author.

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Yes, progressive states like Russia and North Korea.

You are stanning for a military dictatorship that’s been disappearing protesters and journalists.

They were kicked out of the African Union for being a repressive military dictatorship.

Say that in a year when it’s revealed that the Junta is using slave labor in the mine that they seized.

Military dictatorships are never good for the people. Full stop. We have thousands of years of examples of militaristic rulers, from warlords to kings. Every single time someone seizes power in a coup, the people suffer for it.

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No, it’s a fucked up thing to do.

I understand why he wanted to. Fighting off the unprovoked invasion from Russia does tend to sap a country’s attention. But even so, it’s the duty of democracies to fight against dictatorships. Or at least it should be… I can’t say that many live up to even that low bar… But I’d still take even a broken democracy over any form of dictatorship.

They literally suffered from a military coup two years ago.

Gen Tiani rules the country with an increasingly iron fist. He has promised a return to civilian rule, but those promises keep slipping. First it was three years, now two years later, it’s another five years.

The money is being concentrated in Gen Tiani’s hands, and nowhere else.

He’s abandoned much of the country to Jihadists, while only securing the capital…

Although that’s technically not true, he’s brought in mercenary units from other countries, including the Wagner Group, (the Russian neo-Nazi brigade that tried to coup Putin)

Tiani has given the mercenaries free rein in the countryside, as long as they help protect his capital.

And like any other dictatorship, the war against the media has been intense, with even random bloggers being disappeared off the street.

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I can’t find any actual evidence that the Military Junta is in any way popular…

They seem to have crashed the economy, then implemented a law that lets the military rob from the rest of the government in order to enrich themselves.

They partnered with various mercenary groups, including the Wagner group, to put down juhadists and dissidents as if those were the same thing…

Pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a military dictatorship.