Viewing profile — dctoedt

> Having done both [software and law], lots of lawyers are also nerds who just like to tinker with the law and words Having also done both: In legal drafting work, there's less sys…

> The complete transformation and legitimization of betting culture in the United States has been surreal to watch. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress implicitly predicted thi…

FTA: "AI may be lowering the cost of operating outside a traditional firm by allowing one worker to perform tasks that once required a team, support staff, or firm-based infrastruc…

> Al Gore is definitely one of them! Absolutely correct — and that's not sarcasm or irony. (Gore never claimed to have "invented the Internet"; that was a calumny spread by Republi…

Point taken about the French thirst for revanche ; I stand corrected. Again: Catastropic naïveté.

I have to differ. I don’t think anyone on either side even imagined, let alone intended, that the Western Front would get bogged down in four years of trench warfare or (on the All…

> Countries and people WANTED the war, war was still thought about as a general benefit to the country That was true among some of the players in various governments — Kaiser Wilhe…

So you agree with me — stupid decisions, catastrophic fuckups.

> I think sooner or later, Iran will succeed in sinking a big US ship Sinking or even just seriously damaging a U.S. aircraft carrier — approx. 5K people in crew + airwing, billion…

If you were born in 1900 you probably are at the tail end of the Lost Generation — the Greatest Generation is considered to be those born between 1901 and 1927. https://en.wikipedi…

Please reread my comment — yours has two possible meanings.

> I can be absolutely certain of my perception and recollection of what my consciousness is experiencing and has experienced. There's abundant evidence to the contrary — at least a…

> If there's anything worth defending, people will volunteer to defend it. That's a pretty binary view of the situation. It's not enough for something to be worth defending: People…

Yes, that's an edge case — my comment to which you responded was not meant as a complete statement of Reality.

> It is called forced labour or slavery. In war, people who tolerate military conscription and discipline will conquer those who're slaves to pigheaded "you're not the boss of ME!"…

[dead]

Neither of the jury verdicts altered the reality of whether Simpson did or didn’t kill the two victims. (In Simpson’s second trial, the jury found him liable , not “guilty.” Guilt …

> "Innocent until proven guilty" concerns whether someone did a crime See my upthread comment: "Innocent until proven guilty" is catchy but false.

> innocent until proven guilty Pithy but untrue. The verbose-but-correct statement is about procedural prerequisites: Government officials are forbidden to imprison or fine you unt…

And Brian Reid's Scribe formatter [0] — so much nicer than roff, troff, etc. (descendants of Runoff). In 1981-82 I wrote a user manual and taught my fellow law-review editors — non…

More information about the origins of the collection and the photographer (a U.S. Army officer, assistant military attaché): https://manhoffarchive.org/narratives/intro

> a fairly narrow class of credentialed bureaucrats, entry into which is gatekept by elite universities and professional organizations. Now take the next step: Explicitly state, an…

> accepting that Congress is free to set things up as it sees fit within the Constitutional constraints. The unitary-executive crowd worships a golden calf, namely the first three …

An emacs routine to convert a region of org-mode formatting to Markdown formatting and put into the clipboard: ;; Written by Claude 2026-06-06 (defun my/org-to-markdown-clipboard (…