Tootfinder

As Trump's tariffs cut off the US from imports and as he deports the core of the US labor force, I think about the fact that tariffs and other import taxes were a major part of the lead up to the Revolutionary War. It's no coincidence that a bunch of the Founding Fathers were smugglers.
The logistics of the resistance and the logistics of the population were intertwined, meaning that it was not always possible to attack resistance logistics without alienating the population.
All this is worth keeping in mind right now.
#USPol

"The Daily Beast’s newsletter The Swamp revealed Monday how Cruz was caught touring the Parthenon in Athens, Greece, 24 hours after the Guadalupe River burst its banks, sweeping away dozens of lives in an unspeakable horror whose full effects are still unfolding."
Ted Cruz’s Claim He Returned to Texas as ‘Fast as Humanly Possible’ Crumbles
https://www.thedailybeast.com/vacationing-ted-cruzs-as-fast-as-humanly-possible-return-claim-crumbles/

Related to understanding firearms, "rifles" and hand guns tend to be rifled. Rifling is grooving that runs in a helical pattern down the barrel. When purchasing a firearm, it's important to check the rifling.
First check that the firearm is unloaded. Empty or remove the magazine, cycle the weapon. Next, check again that it's unloaded by looking both down the barrel and into the magazine. Now, shine a light down the barrel and look down it. In the absence of a light, you may be able to reflect light off your thumbnail.
Rifling should look as though it's drawn on with a sharp pencil, and the barrel should look otherwise completely smooth and clean. If the rifling looks like bumpy mountains, then the owner probably used corrosive ammo and didn't clean it enough. It will probably still shoot, but not at all accurately.
Both the rifling and the pin can be used in forensic analysis to match a bullet to a gun. I don't honestly know how accurate this is because a lot of forensic "science" is just made up stuff that relies on the CSI effect and doesn't actually work as advertised.
However, not all firearms are not all rifled. Shotguns are "smoothbore" firearms, meaning they lack rifling. It is not possible to perform forensic analysis of a smoothbore firearm. It *is* possible to check for powder on the hands of someone who has used a firearm within the last few days, but it's not possible to distinguish between firing inside and outside a range.
I've been gathering all kinds of tidbits like this, partially just out of curiosity and partially because I've been wanting to write a story about a revolutionary group fighting a modern authoritarian society. I'm always happy to learn other bits, if anyone has anything else I could throw in my narrative (whenever I finally get back to writing it).

“I fall in the baffled camp that thinks better designs are possible.” … “I don’t expect my calls to be heard. Selling sci-fi is way too effective. And as long as the AI is perceived as the engine of a new industrial revolution, decision-makers will imagine it can do so, and task people to make it so.”
https://ferd.ca/the-gap-through-which-we-praise-the-machine.html
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Human cost of working on the railways revealed in database https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/news/human-cost-of-working-on-the-railways-revealed-in-database/

Human cost of working on the railways revealed in database - The National Archives
A new public database listing records about railway accidents is being launched at The National Archives on Thursday 5 June to coincide with Volunteers Week. The Railway Work, Life & Death project makes accessible information about 4,500 railway staff killed or injured at work between 1911-1923. It has been made possible because volunteers at The […]

Pulsar escape: the recipe for LHAASO sources ?
Pierrick Martin, In\`es Mertz, Jean Kempf, Ruo-Yu Liu, Alexandre Marcowith, Marianne Lemoine-Goumard
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06627

Pulsar+escape: the recipe for LHAASO sources ?
Observations of our Galaxy at very-high and ultra-high photon energies have revealed a rich population of sources, many of which have significant angular extension and/or are positionally coincident with energetic pulsars. We assessed whether the properties of these gamma-ray emitters are consistent with the predictions of a model for the non-thermal leptonic emission of a pulsar wind nebula expanding within a supernova remnant, including the possibility of particle escape across the different …

"That is the real reason why Starship was doomed to fail from the beginning. It’s not trying to revolutionise the space industry; if it were, its concept, design, and testing plan would be totally different. Instead, the entire project is optimised to fleece as much money from the US taxpayer as possible, and as such, that is all it will ever do."
Wow, this is an interesting piece..
https://www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/starship-was-doomed-from-the-beginning

Very good points, a reply to a CEO who wondered why his engineers were resistant to using LLMs for coding:

Today I've been fighting again with this absolutely stupid :nixos: #NixOS bug that dates back nearly 20 years now, which prevents you from naming an executable 'log'. Yes, it is NOT possible on NixOS. 🤦 🤦 🤦 And working around it is beyond frustrating. Fixing it requires a mass rebuild, so it's not that simple. 😩 😂 It's so terrible but also hilarious...
Issue:

Can't call a program `log` · Issue #354057 · NixOS/nixpkgs
Describe the bug An executable called log will not be made available in /run/current-system/sw/bin when put into environment.systemPackages. Steps To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior: Crea...