Oil burning was common in some regions. The Southern Pacific had a lot of oil-fired engines. Their famous “cab-forward” steam engines could only make sense as oil burners without fundamental redesign.

Part of it might be that the last holdouts for steam, who made the most technically advanced engines, were predominantly coal-carriers. They didn’t have the oil infrastructure, and didn’t want to burn relations eith their customers.

We’ve seen decentralized education and it tends to have problems with resourcing and economies of scale, and content policies get easily hijacked by loud people with personal vendettas.

That’s what baffles me with the DOGE fracas. How long will solidarity hold when there are some very clear winners and losers within their own class?

There are a lot of billionaires who have fat revenue streams coming out of the federal budget, and I don’t think they’re all eager to trigger some sort of Mad Max/Medieval social collapse just so they can be the Archduke of San Jose after America implodes. I doubt they all bought the Network State story.

A fair number of them, expecting to live for more than 10 years and wanting to remain rich, probably invested aggressively into “skate where the puck is going” businesses that are now being slaughtered in the name of doubling down on fossil fuels and uncompetitive domestic manufacturers. Will Elon eat their losses? Of course, he’s committing financial seppuku too.

Our new defacto president is the avatar of bubble economics.

Even the other oligarchs, thry made something at dramatic scale to justify their wealth. Microsoft did sell a lot of software. Facebook got 176 billion people on board to blast adverts at. They’re trillion dollar firms that do correspondingly large run rates.

Tesla is still a minor player in its space, and SpaceX is inherently a narrow business. Even PayPal, where the horrors all came from, isn’t a major value add, it’s a thin mask atop the clunkiness of American payment rails that should have been replaced by something like FedNow by 2003.

But he’s taken these tiny fundamentals and convinced Wall Street to puff more air into them than a fresh bag of Lay’s.

ATSC 3.0 is usable. I have a HDHomerun sitting on my LAN with a couple 3.0 tuners.

The big problem is:

• the 3.0 broadcasts are still mostly tests, so you get mostly a respin of a 1.0 channel

• the audio is AC-4 and a lot of software doesn’t support it. There was stuff for Windows but when I looked, the usual suspects (VLC, mpv) on Linux didn’t support it

Why not an aerial for Jeopardy? It’s usually on local broadcast, so you could plumb together a DVR setup if you want it within a unified experience.

I’ve been working on “retrofication” of a “somewhat” modern case and have some notes for that process more than a specific recomendation:

• If you want a 3.5" floppy that works, you can either get a little USB adapter board, or a LS-120 on a PATA-SATA adapter. A Caleb UHD-144 might work, but many BIOSes and Windows still special-case LS-120s as “it can be drive A.” The USB adapters sort of suck, because the USB floppy spec sucks. 5.25, the best you can really do would be to rig up a Greaseweazle (specialised USB controller) which won’t really work like a regular floppy drive

• Instead of a MHz display, you can get a small programmable OLED. Digole offers some that can be hooked to a $1 USB-UART adapter and programmed very easily-- I’ve got some crude code hacked up (C++ for Linux) on my Gitlab (https://gitlab.com/hakfoo1/graphic-oled-control-for-linux) that gives you MHz and a bunch of other stats, but you could probably also rig up something on Windows

• Rustoleum Heirloom White is a very good “panel beige” for the metal side panels. You might also look at their “Satin Ivory” which gives a slightly yellowed tint good for the front panel.

• Intentional colour mismatches can work very well, like if you use an optical drive, paint it a different beige than the rest of the case, to indicate either being different plastic than the main case, or an aftermarket add-on. Tell a story.

• Some features feel like they “post-date” a case. Top-mounted ports seem pretty uncommon on vintage cases the first one I can recall having was well into the Windows Vista era)

• Get a momentary paddle switch, preferrably red, and mount that and it buys you a mountain of street cred.

• Grilles can be cut away and replaced with 3-D printed alternatives.

It’s San Marino. The entire country is mounted on a flip-top like a bathroom trash-can lid, covering an enormous number of missile silos. Why do you think they’ve been left alone for a thousand years.

The goal should be no hyperpowers at all. There’s probably a place for at least four superpowers: the US, an EU with more coherent military integration, Russia, and China. If there was more unification in Africa or South America then there might also be the formation of suitable powers there.

It’s a strength through diversity thing-- we want multiple different styles of government and economy to survive so each one can steal from the others’ playbook. We can’t guarantee that liberal democracy and free markets are the best solution for our next global crisis.

But which one will be a more effective fundraiser as a pinup calendar?

Yeah, he was one of a long string of lunatic leaders, which evidently “democracy” has done little to temper. The thing I recall about him was a bit in a reference book to coins and currency: at one point in the 1950s, the central bank issued a 500-hwan note that had a large central portrait of him (the overall design looked like a cheap riff on US currency of the time), and rapidly replaced it because he concluded people folding it in half across his face (as people do with banknotes) was some symbol of defiance to him personally.

They don’t teach that style of crazy in dictator school.

As for the “Korea is a puppet and exists only as long as the US props it up”, duh, but I figure there’s perhaps some chance to exploit some “we’ve been under the yoke so long we no longer notice it” and “we’re a big strong country that thinks it can actually engage internationally” mentalities to loosen the fixation with copyright and chasing those imagined license revenues that will never materialize.

You’d think there’s a whole soft-power paradigm being missed here.

The value of export content well exceeds the license fees you negotiate with the English repackagers. Think of how entire generations view Japan favourably after a steady diet of anime, samurai/ninja stereotypes, and kaiju movies.

Flood the market. Free international rights for all. Sponsor your own damned fansubs if you have to. Use it to soft sell your culture, history, and branding. We need 24 episodes of an isekai animation featuring a bishounen Syngman Rhee stat.

CDE supports it.

Do they formally need the territory? If they form a strong enough dependency, you’ve got the stability and sweetheart trade deals without the cost of actually governing it.

The US could probably ask for Wales or a French department or two in exchange for what they sunk into NATO, but they hardly need to raise the flag to symbolize the vassal relationship.

Is vampirism or zombification an option?

GE no longer makes appliances. It’s a licensed out name now.

I figure their star finally fell when they stopped making locomotives. What kind of giant industrial conglomerate does that?! EveN Hitachi, a brand mostly known for marital aids, makes locomotives!

Trident TGUI9440 on a VL-bus card. Surprisingly peppy on a 486/66 overclocked to 80.

I was always disappointed that celebrity and character voice packs weren’t a thing for the voice-assistant platforms. I’d pay literal ones of dollars for a voice assistant with a Sebastian Michaelis intonation and theming.

Cortana for Windows Phone came closest, I think they did use the same voice actress as the game character.

I figured systemd is a 90s-JRPG boss with multiple phases taking over more and more of the screen.

You hold up a Slackware CD like some sort of vampires-and-faith-objects bit.

That does seem like something that would violate some rules-of-war convention.

Booby-trapping something that might be mistaken by civilians as a legitimate humanitarian aid drop risks non-combatant casualties and makes it harder for actual aid operations to operate.