Corvos
25d ago
And also to minimise the scale of the breach, right? It's bad if an employee tells me that BigCorp and BiggerCorp are expected to finalise their merger by May, but it's worse if they give me 2000 pages of detail on the subject including all the due diligence on both parties.
Corvos
25d ago
Yeah, I have a friend who works in a very sensitive area of banking and it’s a nightmare:
- Four layers of security before he can get to his desk
- Everything on the computer is absolutely locked down and the software is rubbish as is the authentication system
- Constant surveillance from cameras absolutely everywhere
I think other stuff too but I forget the details.
Corvos
25d ago
That's my understanding. Probably the Americans have 10 or so super-cameras hidden up there but moving the orbits of a geo-stationary satellite regularly to focus on different targets would require unsustainable amounts of propellant - I doubt they monitor anything except the highest value targets.
I imagine the hardest bit with all the low-orbit satellites is collating the data between them properly and adjusting for the differences in perspective or whatever. Night-time imagery isn't a problem I think - you can use black-body (thermal) radiation plus reflected light from human sources plus whatever weird spectra you can find floating around. But yeah, I think you'd be getting every few hours or something.
Corvos
25d ago
This might be confounded by presence of firearms. Getting close enough to someone for GBH is more dangerous if they might have a gun; conversely people might beat their opponent down harder to reduce the risk they draw a firearm when you look away.
Corvos
25d ago
I see. My assumption would be that criminals are much less capable of getting guns in Scotland than in an American state (even one with restrictive laws) and therefore that this points to Scotland's murder rate being abnormally high. A comparison to Scot-descendant groups in Canada would be nice.
Corvos
25d ago
Do people image from geostationary orbit? It's MUCH further away than other orbits: https://satellitetracker3d.com/track?norad-id=60179
I assumed that most imagery was doing using low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites that watch from 500km - 700km up, like the SENTINEL satellites, and these only have recurring orbits on a period of days, although some of these programs have several satellites following the same orbit.
Whereas geostationary satellites are 35,000km away and mostly located in the equatorial plane. I would have thought they struggle to get good images.
Am I mistaken about how imaging works? I'm not an expert.
Corvos
25d ago
modern-day Scotland's murder rate is comparable to that of Massachusetts
Are guns banned in Massachusetts?
Corvos
26d ago
Corvos
26d ago
Right. Being able to post on here during COVID was more freeing that having no outlet, but it would still have felt much better to be able to speak publicly.
Corvos
26d ago
Yeah, I know. But I didn't feel like events had been treated with enough gravity, either. What just happened was really, really grim and I feel like the narrative needed to slow down and find some way to acknowledge that. As it was, I got the same sense I tend to get from Neal Stephenson: that the author is observing human emotion from the outside as a sort of interesting plot mechanism, and my desire to read further just evaporated.
I gave up on it after Light forced a woman to kill herself in such a way that nobody will ever know what happened to her.
Literally ‘for the next two hours you will think of nothing except how to kill yourself in such a way that the body will never be found, and then do so’.
He sets a time delay so that he has just enough time to gloat in front of her before it takes effect... and then we watch the light leave her eyes as she stumbles off into the rain looking for a place to destroy herself.
And all of this is presented as, essentially, a clever ploy. Death Note makes bile well up in the back of my throat. I know Light isn’t presented as a hero but I feel like it’s way too casual and pleased with itself about the concept of playing chess with human lives.
Corvos
27d ago
My understanding (perhaps wrong) is that there was no actual pedophilia on Epstein’s island of the form that give people nightmares.
Forgive me for being lurid but I would have thought that if Epstein were deliberately luring in pedos there would be more 13-year-olds and 8-year-olds and fewer ‘haha she’s 17 years and 11 months old, pay up or I tell the police’ girls.
I can absolutely believe that Epstein found such entrapment to be a useful extra string in his bow but I doubt he was specifically advertising it as pedo paradise.
No, I mean I used to have a duty-based mindset and I pulled myself partially out of it by noticing that people who are very interested in my duties towards them (personally or in a wider sphere) are often uninterested in any duties they might have to me, or regard their traditional duties as historical oppression now thankfully abandoned.
One must have both. Otherwise it’s just playing cooperate with defect-bot.
Don’t get me wrong, I know what you’re getting at. I’m just saying that, long-term, people have to feel that their duties broadly even out. It doesn’t have to be literal ‘I will give you X if you perform Y duty’ but ultimately you have to persuade people, generation by generation anew, that your conception of duty and virtue is a valid one they should follow.
I would say that a big part of the decline in duty you mention is both sexes observing, in different times and at different ways, that they seemed to be being taken advantage of. You can’t sustain such systems long term.
Corvos
28d ago
It’s also the case that once the just cause has triumphed for a couple of generations it will look a lot less just.
After a while, the people in charge aren’t just any more, they’re incurious conformists upholding a system whose virtues they no longer understand. Social parasites get in at the cracks. The various downstream issues the just cause creates at scale are papered over to prevent exposure.
Corvos
28d ago
The thing is, you have to offer the rights/privileges if you’re going to ask for the duty. Duty without reciprocation is just exploitation.
What I’ve found is that due to inertia a lot of people expect traditional duties from men: chivalry, serving women first at meals, paying for and organising dates, being the breadwinner when necessary, child support, a certain level of strength and stoicism and respect.
But they aren’t willing to put up the traditional privileges: obedience and respect from the wife and the children.
For marriage, I don’t everyone understands and agrees on what they’re supposed to get out of it. People are constantly negotiating their wants and expectations and they don’t feel comfortable with the idea of just doing their duty because they aren’t sure what they’re going to get back from it all.
If you want something Americans would actually agree on, it would be the proposition: “Should everyone, except for children, the elderly, and the seriously infirm, work?” The answer there would be an overwhelming yes; those who disagree are a lunatic fringe.
‘Work’ means very different things to different people. Ranging from ‘contribute to society in some way with the degree and method to be chosen by the worker’ to ‘do whatever it takes to provide for your family’ to ‘idle hands are the devil’s implements’.
Corvos
28d ago
Illegal immigrant jobs have high turnover, I think, not withstanding the seasonality of the work. Someone doesn’t usually work in an Amazon warehouse for more than 2/3 months and I’ve talked to logistics companies who said that it’s difficult to get drivers to stick around (immigration status unknown).
Corvos
28d ago
You’re correct of course, but surely there is a difference between fantasising about something and getting dangerously close to the reality?
Mind you, I’ve heard of some guys who find the extreme jealousy of some RL Japanese girls hot in a ‘look how much she cares about me’ way so maybe not.
One day some dudes with erlenmeyer tubes showed up, and they saved half the children. They saved half the children.
I’m not sure what precisely this is referring to (global reduction in mortality rate?), but I think if we can take anything away from the last 100 years it’s that progress in the physical sciences doesn’t necessarily (or at all) translate to progress in the social sciences.
I agree that women’s intuition is perhaps not everything it’s ginned up to be, but I would want something pretty good before I discount that intuition to nothing. Especially for the most visceral stuff like ‘do I need to hug the crying baby?’ Which is pretty much directly the result of millions of years of evolution optimising for healthy children and functional families.
More complex stuff may be downstream of bad socialisation and I would put less weight on it.
Corvos
29d ago
I think it’s fair to say that nobody proposes that Americans are jumping at the chance to do the worst possible jobs.
You have people who accept that jobs like fruit-picking and taking care of incontinent elderly people need to be automated or done by sufficiently-incentivised Americans because the alternative is endless mass-immigration as each new set of second-generation immigrants refuses to do the scut work their parents came to do.
You also have people who believe that some of the jobs being done by immigrants are perfectly decent, okay-paying jobs that Americans are being priced out of or excluded from. Semi-skilled factory labour. Coding.
I appreciate your going and looking for an actual quote but DeRemer’s phrasing is very vague. I suspect she’s talking about the latter category, and your analysis of the rest of the interview seems to confirm that. I certainly think that
sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain
is not upheld by the quote, though she may think it in private. Regardless, who do you think is actually going to do these jobs? Do you think that America can continue to rely on illegal labour to do these jobs for the next 50 years without serious consequences? 100?
I think there is an underappreciated gap between the 'artisan' worldview and the 'executive' worldview. In the former, skills are things you acquire through great effort and are the main achievements of a well-lived life. In the latter, skills are things you buy; your merit comes from the things you have access to and the use to which you put them.
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