World War Two
Published 27 Jun 2023After years of undermining the Nazi regime and aiding the resistance, Abwehr Chief Wilhelm Canaris finally loses his battle with Heinrich Himmler and the SS. The Abwehr Trojan Horse is no more, and German intelligence is at death’s door at the most crucial moment.
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June 29, 2023
The End of Nazi Intelligence in 1944 – WW2 Documentary Special
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When “flashy” became “constantly flashing”, the user experience got significantly worse
Scott Alexander on the irritating advance of meaningless flashing elements on so many web pages where they serve no real purpose, but successfully generate anger in their users:
Everyone hates flashing banner ads, but maybe they’re a necessary evil. Creators want money, advertisers demand a certain level of visibility for their ad buys, maybe sites are willing to eat the cost in user goodwill. Fine. But what’s everyone else’s excuse?
A few days ago I needed to look up an obscure point of Jewish law, as you do, and found this Jewish law website:
The background toggles every few seconds between a picture of a rabbi and a picture of … a different rabbi? There’s no conceivable benefit to this and it makes it almost impossible to concentrate on the text.
I used to think I must be the only person who worried about this; maybe it was a weird OCD thing. But I asked about it on the ACX survey …
… and 88% of people find them at least a little annoying! 16% of people go all the way, and say they wouldn’t use a website that has them!
Yet websites have been adding them to more and more parts of the user experience. Most aren’t as blatant as the Jewish law site, but they’re still there.
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Miller’s Musket Conversion: The Trapdoor We Have At Home
Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 Mar 2023In 1865, brothers William and George Miller of Meriden CT patented a system to convert percussion muskets to use the new rimfire ammunition that was becoming available. Between 1865 and 1867, the local Meridan Manufacturing Company converted 2,000 surplus US Model 1861 muskets (mostly made by Parker & Snow) to the Miller system, using .58 rimfire ammunition. The US military tested one of these conversions in 1867, and found it to suffer from some gas leakage and about a 3% misfire rate. There was no further Army interest, although the New York and Maryland state militias did both purchase small numbers of the guns.
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QotD: The costs of taxation
What now seems like a lifetime ago, back in the early 1970s, I asked a colleague (who knew about such things) a somewhat complicated question.
Assuming that:
- the average individual (in those days) is forced to give a third of what he earns to government (which will do nothing productive with it, but turn it straight into trash of one kind or another), and that
- whenever three such individuals are taxed at that rate, in effect, one whole human being — including all his or her potential accomplishments, his creations, his ability to raise the standard of living for himself, for his family and friends, for everyone around him, and for society in general — has been economically obliterated, then
- how many human lives in total have been obliterated in that way since the Constitution, with its taxing powers, was ratified in 1789?
It turns out to be a very difficult question to answer. Tax rates have varied over the years, and so has the number of Americans subject to taxation. In the end, my colleage estimated that it had consumed the productive capacity of some fifty million (50,000,000) innocent human lives. That’s roughly four times the number of victims claimed by Adolf Hitler. It almost equals the number of individuals killed in all of the Second World War. It fits in somewhere between the number of Russians slaughtered by Josef Stalin and Chinese killed by Mao Zedong.
And according to political scientist R.J. Rummel, it’s properly called “democide”, since, for this purpose, everybody gets to be the Jews.
So now you finally know where your flying car went, and why there’s no cure yet for cancer. You know why there’s no luxury hotel aboard a Big Wheel space station, no vacation resort on the Moon, and no scientific base on Mars or Titan. All of those things, and many more that we expected to have (or still haven’t imagined) by now, were devoured, sometimes quite literally, by grants to investigate the territoriality of tree frogs, programs to feed individuals who can’t — or won’t — work (which is properly the job of churches), programs to keep people from smoking the wrong vegetable or (to quote the late Saint George Carlin) shooting, snorting, or rubbing it into their bellies), not to mention enforcing laws against licking the wrong toad.
Not the ones squatting in the White House.
L. Neil Smith, “Economic Genocide”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2014-06-29.
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