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Dave Wallace

@dewtell.bsky.social
227 followers 424 following 384 posts

I started going to Worldcons for the Business Meeting

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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Sure, but there's an important difference between knowing something is likely, and having someone who actually knows willing to talk about it. The latter counts as evidence for court and Congressional investigations.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
So basically VIP is the experience you could have if you waited for the movie to come out on streaming, but with the addition of pissing other people off?
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
It's from the final judgement of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Quoted in the Wikipedia article on "War of aggression", which was the top Google hit when I searched the first phrase of the quote. Confirmed my initial hunch that it was from the main Nuremberg trial.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I'd say the 1933 German election that gave Hitler a plurality and the chancellorship still has it beat, at least for now. Not sure how it will stack up after a full four years of this, though.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Also in support of the times having an outsized influence is that both Cervantes' Don Quixote and the King James Version of the bible were also hitting it big around the same time and remain somewhat popular and well known to the present day. It's a combination of the person and the times.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
@eruditorumpress.com : great table talk at worldcon this year!
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Problem is, it's not clear the latest generation of AI chips would be all that useful for consumer graphics. Having to run liquid cooling into your laptop to keep it from melting down poses some interesting logistical challenges.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Ah. I didn't see the earlier context, and took "smoking gun" to imply evidence of nefarious or conspiratorial intent (e.g. the Watergate tape proving Nixon's involvement). As a simple explanation of "why are there so many trans people on BlueSky?," the juxtaposition is fine.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
That the timing is a "smoking gun" rather than a mildly interesting coincidence. Bluesky would have needed significant lead time to plan the rollout of invite codes. No reason to think it was in response to a Twitter policy change that they probably didn't know in advance.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Seems far-fetched to me. Bluesky had plenty of reasons to limit the size of its initial betas independent of anything Twitter was doing at the time, and the invite codes were a reasonable way to do that in a way that offered a marketing advantage. No reason to think X trans policy affected that.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Trump has been trying to conflate the two to get support for roundups. The strongest resistance has come when ICE is obviously violent against noncriminal people trying to live their lives. See also the administration trying to smear opponents as criminals, which quickly falls apart.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Obama? Or Biden? Are you referring to stuff that happened under GWB or Trump 1?
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
I blame the 43 Republican Senators who voted to acquit at the 2nd impeachment. Unlike the voters, they had first hand knowledge of who and what Trump was, and had a perfect opportunity to make a clean break with him and bar him from ever again holding federal office. 10 more would have done it.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
Today, the Worldcon Business Meeting voted an extra year of Hugo eligibility to Henry Bean's "The Event", due to very limited distribution within the Worldcon community last year. So it will be eligible for next year's Hugos. It's a remarkable story: jewishcurrents.org/the-event
jewishcurrents.org
The Event
“Something has taken place that we cannot speak of or know or even fully perceive, yet the fact of which sits before us.”
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
I missed that. And the two could arrange to each flip their own coin simultaneously, and bet on whether the total number of heads will be odd or even. That allows either player to force a fair result by making sure their own coin is fair, no matter what the other player does.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
With a difference of $3M at stake, I don't trust the other guy to not try and rig the coin flip, which would make hash of the EV calculation, assets aside. At least under option 1, I don't end up with an ear full of cider (Guys & Dolls reference).
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
I felt a great disturbance in the electrical force, as if a million AI generators cried out together and were silenced.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
More precisely, when there are distinct subgroups of voters, it is (very approximately) trying to give each subgroup a number of slots that is roughly proportional to the size of their support. So VD got a slight boost over PNH, whose supporters had also nominated other surviving finalists.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
I believe Patrick Nielsen Hayden also missed out as a Best Editor finalist that year (2017), and Vox Day was named instead. These are both examples of EPH performing as designed, where it gives a small implicit boost to nominees whose supporters don't overlap much with the rest of the voters.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
Sounds broadly similar to the analysis in Bret Deveraux's "This. Isn't. Sparta.", though Cole isn't holding back nearly as much on his chapter titles. acoup.blog/category/col...
acoup.blog
This. Isn’t. Sparta. – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
Posts about This. Isn’t. Sparta. written by Bret Devereaux
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
I expect that Fox legal has had a bunch of private training with the on air hosts about what they can and can't say in response to Trump, and what they shouldn't put in writing to anyone. The text or email you never write can't get subpoenaed in discovery. 2/n
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Maybe. But the big payoff, and maybe that there was any payoff, wasn't because they aired administration lies. It was that Fox News hosts repeated those lies on air, while making it clear in private emails and texts that they knew it was BS. That proved actual malice. 1/n
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Maybe he was told the chips used lots of tiny "trans sisters"? ... I'll show myself out now.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
In the specific case of a Senator, you will keep most of your sibling's staff, who have been doing most of the work. That's part of the point of appointing a close relative as a placeholder while the actual politicians sort stuff out. And if you are just a placeholder, campaigning won't matter.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
It might depend on how far you wanted to go in getting rid of the filibuster. There might have been a few more Senators opposing complete repeal, but only Manchin and Sinema among Dems officially opposed the carveout for voting rights to try and pass Manchin's compromise voting rights bill.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
Absolutely. Having even one more Dem in the Senate in 2021 would have allowed Biden to play Manchin off against Sinema, instead of needing both. Would have increased what he could fund with the BBB, where Manchin wanted to limit the deficit and Sinema to kill the billionaire's tax.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
The article isn't saying Millenials are well-off now, it's saying they may be well-off in their 50s and 60s when they inherit, thamks to people living longer. And it's talking about the kids of the best-off Boomers who live the longest, so not typical of the whole generation.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Yeah, I love Magic for Liars, and my elevator pitch for it is "Hogwarts as seen from Aunt Petunia's POV, if Petunia was a noir detective." Ivy's whole thing is about her relationship with her estranged magical sister, and how the plot gives her a chance to dream about what if she had been the one.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
"But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States." - 12th Amendment, US Constiution
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
Your original post suggested that you might not have thought through all the details of how to get to removal. If you have done that, then I would expect you to either explain a realistic plan for how to overcome the obstacles, or explain how Dems will benefit even if the obstacles defeat removal.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
Sure, just as it influenced Boromir to try to seize the ring from Frodo. How he responded was up to him, though. Boromir immediately repented; Smeagol never seems to have either tried to resist or regretted it after.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Gollum is a victim of the ring, sure, but he also made a deliberate choice to murder Deagol for it years ago, depicted in one scene in the films, which was the start of his corruption. Both things can be true at the same time.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
In the Dominion voting case, Dominion was able to produce emails from Fox news hosts where they showed they knew they were lying, and could show massive damages based on the business they lost. Probably harder here, unless Navarro ran his mouth in private. 2/n
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Fauci is a public figure, so he would need to show actual malice on Navarro's part to collect. Not just that what Navarro is saying is a false statement of fact, but that he knew it was false, or looked away from evidence it was false when he said it. Then he would have to show damages. 1/n
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Sure, but it's a big reach to get to 67, even over 2 elections. Dems have a shot at getting to 51 this year, if lots of things go right, but then you have to nearly run the table in '28, when only 19 GOP seats are up, to get another 16. Lots of GOP incumbents in deep red states there.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Do you have a plan to persuade a bunch of GOP Senators to support removal? Because without that, it doesn't happen. There's a very remote possibility you might get some GOP Senators to remove Bove if you can massively prove "ordered DOJ lawyers to defy court orders," but O'Connor is much harder.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
These guys should really read Bret Deveraux's series on what peasant life was really like in ancient and medieval times, as best we can model it. acoup.blog/2025/07/11/c...
acoup.blog
Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part I: Households
This is the first post in a series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peas…
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
Excited. In general, the team with the better offense will have both higher LOB and higher runs, as all these things are positively correlated. So having a bunch of LOB early on is encouraging for being able to score runs later, even though each LOB also represents a potential run not scored.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
Specifically, you need a bunch of Republican senators willing to remove him. At the 2nd impeachment, 17 of the 50 Republican senators could have convicted him and barred him from ever again holding federal office. There were 7. Never forget the other 43 cowards. They are to blame for all this.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
Tacitus imagining what Calgacus might have said to fire up his troops before the battle, more like. And I take the tone as bitter irony and criticism, not triumphal. Perhaps attributing to the enemy leader sentiments that might have been unsafe for Tacitus to express directly.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Is it any smarter to have a single party primary where enough candidates split the vote that the winner can advance with a 22% vote share? Because that's what we had before. In both cases, it's up to the candidates and the voters to sort things out intelligently so the bad case doesn't happen.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
Cute joke, but there can be power in honest vulnerability. Back when I was having trouble, I thought of placing a personal ad for women who could give me honest feedback on how I came across in dating, quoting Robert Burns: "O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!"
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
That's why we're using the local drop box. My wife deposited hers yesterday, got the electronic confirmation her ballot had been received and counted today. With the PO no longer guaranteeing postmark on day of receipt, I no longer trust the mail if the time is close.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
There's a process for handling the ballots the reader rejects: they get manually copied to replacement ballots and certified by the election workers at the precinct who compare to the original. Both ballots are kept for recounts, suitably marked. The copying takes days to finish. 2/n.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
Yeah. Just finished my mail-in, will drop it in the drop box tomorrow. Mail-ins are the big reason for the delay for 2 reasons: you can't do a final count until the last day for mail-in posted by election day to arrive, and a bunch of the mail-ins can't be read automatically (coffee stains, etc.)
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
No ranked choice voting here. Some jurisdictions in CA have ranked choice for their municipal elections (such as SF), but that doesn't apply to state or federal offices. By CA law, this is a top 2 primary for candidates of all parties, where the top 2 finalists go ahead to the general in Nov.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
And a solid understanding of arithmetic operations comes in handy when learning similar operations in algebra. Having done a bunch of long division problems comes in handy when trying to understand polynomial division, and it would be really hard to do long division without multiplication tables.
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
Yes. During my PhD research, I had boxes of photocopies of every single paper I considered during my initial literature review, and I reread the ones I planned to use when I wrote my lit review chapter at the end. It saved me from a really embarrassing error in the actual dissertation. 1/n
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
Nor could I diagnose a case of pellegra if I saw it. So I think I'd make a pretty piss-poor King's wizard on these diseases, which just goes to confirm the story's point. 6/n
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Dave Wallace @dewtell.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
Needless to say, I don't think I'll be able to find guinea pigs (from Central America, IIRC) in 1066 Europe. And my off the top knowledge of pellegra is even worse. I think it's caused by a deficiency of one of the B vitamins, but I can't tell you which one, or what foods have it. 5/n
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