JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
10hr ago
I agree that trusting one's doctor, by default, makes a lot of sense, at least where data and empirical knowledge is concerned. However, there is one more methodological problem that is often missed - the unknown unknowns. Let's consider the following scenario - and I am making it completely ridiculous on purpose, to emphasize the point and not get bogged in the details. Let's assume we have a miracle drug that reduces your cholesterol with no noticeable side effects. Except in 10 years after you start taking it, your dick falls off. Obviously, no reasonable test can detect it - who runs 10 years of tests before putting the drug on the market? There's no way to know it, until people start noticing a suspicious increase in dicks falling off, try to make various statistical correlations and hopefully after several years of vigorous bickering zero in on the miracle drug and remove it from the market. In the meantime, people who took it in those 10+X years are preparing lawsuits and regretting their choices.
There's no reasonable way to prevent it - nobody can run enough tests to predict every effect and every drug+patient+environment combination. And nobody tries to, because trying to do it would paralyze any innovation way beyond the best efforts of FDA to do it. No doctor, no matter how diligent and educated, can know everything and predict everything. So there's always a risk. Often it's worth it, and I am not arguing against any intervention. I am just arguing for remembering there's always this unquantifiable risk component lurking in the background, and one has to remember it too.
If the doctor says "you have to do it, or you're going to be in serious trouble, the pills are the only way" - fine, do it. But if they say "you may try to change your lifestyle, or if it sounds too hard there are pills, your choice" I'd personally choose to try the non-pills way first.
JarJarJedi
16hr ago
I know a few people in tech - what you describe as "FAANG engineer" but vast majority of them never worked for FAANG specifically (though a small minority did). I would say I would be very surprised if less than 90% of them are Democrat voters. I of course can't know for sure, and I avoid talking politics at work or with work colleagues or potential colleagues, but you can see it, with some people right out of the door, with others eventually. Mostly because that's what nice, educated, open-minded, well-adjusted people in their circle do. Most of them are very smart people, IQ-wise. A lot of them are stunningly ignorant on actual policies they are voting for, and the consequences of those policies - and as far as I can see, most of them consider any negative consequences a minor bug which can be easily solved by proper regulatory policy tweaks, just as they'd fix a bug in the code. And I don't think anything short of at least full local society collapse would cause them to consider changing their vote. It's just not something that is done. I mean, they surely might vote for different Democrat candidates in Democrat primaries to select different Democrat policies, but that's as far as it'd ever go.
There's also a subgroup which calls themselves "libertarians". Some are actually libertarians and vote for LP (which is of course completely useless, politically, but points for consistency) but I'd give more than even chance that the majority still votes Democrat anyway.
Out of all tech people I know, I could name maybe a couple who I am pretty sure are pro-Trump, but most I'd say are very "orange man bad". Observing discussions in places like HN supports my assumption that it's not just my personal bubble, but it could be a wider bubble of course.
JarJarJedi
18hr ago
I quickly looked up statin side effects, and I know they tend to exaggerate in a lawsuit-happy society, but liver damage, muscle damage and type 2 diabetes do not sound like nothing. Most of currently available medicine are kind of blunt tools, which mess with many extremely complex chemical processes in the body, some of which may be beneficial for us, but other may be not. So I think being careful about messing with one's body chemistry is a prudent approach. Sometimes you don't have a choice - if somebody has cancer, mediterranean diet and exercise is not going to save them, but modern drugs might. But there are costs to that. I think we should not be dismissing those costs lightly.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
As everything with taxes, it's complicated (not a lawyer or CPA, just random guy on internet who files his own taxes). Generally, if it's a payout for a specific loss, it's not taxable. If it's something like disability insurance or more complex insurance not tied to a specific loss event - it may be taxable. Something like car insurance probably not taxable. I classify it as "other income" in my budgeting app but I do not report it to the IRS as income.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
would be committing war crimes
I think the first thing here is to define what we mean by "war crimes". Are those crimes by US law? By Iranian law? By the opinion of some pompous gasbags in UN that have zero legal authority but a lot of ego? By some bilateral or multilateral treaty that US signed and have not currently denounced? Do we mean it in any legal sense or in the sense of "there should be a law against it, dammit!"? I think without finding a mutually agreeable set of definitions the argument has no sense. Of course Iranians think it's a great crime bombing their stuff, who wouldn't? I am sure US military thinks its well within their authority to bomb shit in Iran, especially given Iran is a country which is actively hostile to the US and the US command chain authorized them to bomb the shit out of them. If you want to prefer one of those positions over the other, you need to establish the grounds why.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
There was a brief period in my life when I gave up buccaneering entirely because there was enough proper content on streaming platform to fill my schedule. That period ended quickly - the ecosystem fragmented explosively (and no, I am not going to buy 15 different streaming service subscriptions, thank you very much), most of individual platforms became 95% garbage, with distribution of worthy content in the remaining 5% being arbitrary and shifting all the time, and on top of that every streaming platform has its own app and most of them are crappy in their own unique ways. And of course it's all chock full of ads unless you pay and pay and pay and pay on top of that (and you'll probably still get ads because why not). It is completely intolerable to live like this - especially given the alternative is within the hand's reach, for those who knows how to reach it.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
YouGov says (link above) Americans think 30% of US people are Jewish. In reality, about 10% of New Yorkers and about 2% of Americans are Jewish (which would make it about 20% of whites in NY, though there are non-white Jews, but not too many of them in New York I presume). And this likely including people who have any Jewish genes, about half of them probably do not have any connection to Jewish culture or religion - though in New York due to large Orthodox population likely the distribution is a bit different.
That said, for comedians specifically I'd say 1/8 is probably low, could be as high as 20% if you count successful professional comedians, though I haven't seen any exact or well-supported figures anywhere.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
How many professional, actively managed funds beat their benchmark index over the course of 15-20 years?
My first estimate would be close to none. 20 years is a really long time, especially for an actively managed fund. And the risk is asymmetric - if you get lucky and win, the investors will take the extra money out and spent it on cocaine and hookers charitable projects, and if you get unlucky once and lose, the fund goes bust and is no more. Well, maybe by pure luck there are some funds that survive that long and show positive returns above market, but I'd say excluding Madoff scenario, quite a small number.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
That's a very common thing - people routinely vastly overestimate minorities and underestimate majorities: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/41556-americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population
Though a billion Jews is obviously weird - like ok, there are a billion Jews - where do they actually live? There are only two billion-sized countries, and neither of them has any noticeable number of Jews.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
I agree, that wasn't a fair one.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
I got 290 which is about as I expected, there are a few of rare English words that I must have missed, and I also am pretty low on pop-culture knowledge.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
Putting together a slide deck is second nature for many younger millennials and older Gen Zers
omg wtf
Emily Churchill, head of marketing
ok now I get it.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
Installments, for sure. If it was good enough for Dickens and Dumas, it is not such a terrible idea :)
JarJarJedi
9d ago
If Iranian authorities want to kill someone, they do not need to fabricate evidence
Yet the experience with most totalitarian regimes suggests they do. Stalin could execute anyone anytime, from a lowly peasant to a decorated general, and yet he bothered to make show trials with elaborate fictitious stories of espionage and sabotage. A lot of effort has been spent on making people admit all kinds of crazy shit and invent more crazy shit to accuse others of. Evidently, this is how totalitarian society works - you need to have something, even if nobody really believes in it, but you can't simply walk into Mordor murder people, you need to have a story behind it, even if a completely ridiculous one. So yes, actually they need to fabricate the evidence, if they are like every other totalitarian authorities that ever existed on this planet. This is how it always worked.
If Saleh Mohammadi is really heroic freedom fighter who sacrificed his life for democracy,
I don't think he "sacrificed" anything. I think he was a dude who wanted to be free, just as I do. And for that, he was murdered. Under which circumstances - it's hard for me to know, but surely I am not going to believe ayatollahs' word on it. Maybe indeed he went to far. Maybe he didn't and they are lying. I don't really know. But one thing I know is that Iranian police is not a reliable source on these matters.
are you sure you want to insult him by calling him innocent victim who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time?
Are you trolling right now or do you genuinely unable to see the difference between "he did not murder policemen" and "he had nothing to do with the anti-government protests and just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time"?
JarJarJedi
9d ago
If we did it for no reason, then it would be disproportionate.
What does it have to do with "proportion"? Hitting a public school with no military purpose behind it is wrong. This is because of how our society and our morals work, not because Iranians didn't hit exactly the same school before. Even if they did, it still would be wrong. If Iranians killed 100 random US civilians, would "proportionate" answer be killing random 100 Iranians civilians? I don't think a lot of people in the US would endorse such notion of "proportionality", neither should they.
If you're saying we should not inflict unnecessary civilian casualties, and if there is a collateral damage, there must be a very good justification of why that was unavoidable - I totally agree. But "proportionate" doesn't sound like a very good term to use in such case.
As for hitting power facilities, that depends on the goals of the campaign. If the goal is to degrade Iran's capacity of making trouble, then destroying its energy system is a reasonable step towards this goal. It's hard to manufacture advanced weaponry - or in fact any weaponry beyond light arms - without a functioning power grid. If, however, the goal is to cause the regime change, then it may be less effective, since people would be disorganized and depressed by the lack of basic necessities, and may not be able to resist the regime troops who probably have generators and other provisions to survive independently. Maybe also specific power plants are important for specific weapons factories or communication facilities and knocking them out will disable some important pieces. That's a tactical question.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
Given how densely populated the area is, and the inherent imprecision, I think it would be significantly harder to exclude Al-Aqsa than to include it. In other words, even if Israel wanted for Iran to hit Al-Aqsa, allowing it to do it without risking the lives of a lot of civilians would be impossible. And a fragment after interception could still hit it, but it's not predictable or controllable.
Look for example at this picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Aqsa_Mosque#/media/File:Jerusalem-2013(2)-Aerial-Temple_Mount-(south_exposure).jpg (the actual mosque, btw, is not the golden dome, it's the square structure with the smaller dome lower in the picture) - there are a lot of buildings close to it, most of which likely don't have protected spaces that can withstand a rocket strike. So while I know of no official policy about it, I am pretty sure the answer is "yes".
JarJarJedi
9d ago
What legal technicalities are we talking about? If we talking about war with other nation, I am not sure "legal" has any meaning here. We have a legal system in the US. You know, Congress, laws, courts, lawyers, police, 9th Circus, SCOTUS, all that beautiful arrangement. But none of it - beyond trivial cases of military cook stealing supplies and selling them on the side - has any bearing on military actions against a foreign country.
Are you referring to a fictitious notion often called "international law"? If so, I think naming it "law" is one of the biggest swindles ever perpetrated on humanity - it's just a network of voluntary vows taken by various sovereigns, each of them could be at any moment revoked or ignored by any of them. It has very little in common with that we call legal system within the US, and probably as much with any legal system in any existing country. So I don't see any problem in the military not being super-concerned with those. It doesn't mean military should not have any rules or limits - the military is ruled by the civilian leadership, and the civilian leadership can impose on it limitations stemming from our culture and sensitivities. Like, trying to minimize collateral damage, not harming noncombatants if possible, not using munitions that cause excessive harm to noncombatants, not acting in a way that may be repugnant to our culture, etc. But I don't think those can be properly called "legal technicalities", and I think it's not the military's position to define those - it's the outside constraints placed on the military (necessarily and justly), but within these constraints, they should do their thing.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
I admit I don't really understand what their strategy of "make everybody hate you" aims to achieve, but I think there's clearly a strategy. Maybe a crazy one, but there's a method in this craziness.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
Working through Christopher Ruocchio's Sun Eater saga. Not bad at all, though I find comparisons with Tolkien, Herbert and other giants unwarranted so far. I mean, it's not bad - it's pretty good, actually - and probably would make an excellent TV series if anybody (outside woke Hollywood) would take it, but it's not Tolkien. Still, it's a good read - even if excessively long-winded at times - so I plan to spend some time on it.
As a side note, he is one of the good examples how one can handle "progressive" settings without falling into annoying wokeness. In his world, Christian sexual limitations do not exist. There are gay people, hermaphrodites, sexless creatures, and all other combinations you can imagine - and it's not treated as some kind of huge deal. It is described very early that the protagonist's own mother is a lesbian, and there are several gay characters along the story, and other "deviant" characters too, and it's not like everybody is woke there - there's prejudice, hate, bigotry, various phobias, all the normal stuff - but it's handled in-world, as stuff that normal humans do, good or bad or neither, and none of it is used to badger the reader into something contemporary political. That's how fiction used to be, but a lot of it isn't anymore. Good to see people still know how to do things properly.
Also started Lying for Money - extremely interesting and fascinating so far.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
How could they aid to Iran? There's not much material they can send them, and given complete US/Israel air superiority, any shipment beyond a pack of mules could be easily destroyed before it reaches its target. Also, Russia has its own war to fight, so they are not exactly bursting with extra resources to begin with. They could share some knowledge maybe - like technology, etc. - but short-term, nothing would really make much difference, as if Russia had some technology that Iran didn't, it'd be an advanced technology taking years to adopt and scale. Of course, Russia knows how to make all kinds of nukes, but Iran probably by now does too, at least in theory. It's the practice that US/Israel intend to make difficult for them, and Russia is not going to send them their nukes. Maybe Russians have some intelligence info, but given how deeply Mossad seems to be inside Iran's everything, it'd be stupid for Russia to share anything really useful, as it would only reveal Russian cards to Israel and thus to the US. So what aid could they really provide?
Oh yes, they could just let Khamenei live somewhere in Rostov, but I don't think ruling a country of the size of Iran from Rostov is a sustainable action, so if he leaves, he's probably done with being Iran's leader.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
It's true that Iran can't target very well over long distance, but accidentally hitting Azerbaijan is probably too far fetched. Like, when they want to hit "something" in Israel and end up hitting Arab village, that's likely random. But if they hit Azerbaijan or Cyprus, that's likely on purpose, whatever that purpose might be.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
Strategic reserve is being refilled, after being raided by Biden, who dropped it to levels not seen since early 1980s. It's just going slowly, because buying so much at once would spike the prices, which aren't exactly low (even before the war) and defeat the purpose of the exercise. Oh yes, before that, Trump tried to fill it up at $24 per barrel, and had been blocked by Dems in Congress because it was clearly just "a bailout for big oil".
We could have waited for Venezuelan oil production to ramp up
That could take a while, and in the meanwhile Iran would build more missiles and recover his nuclear program. I don't have enough information to say March 2026 is the best moment and why, but saying "let's just wait and see maybe it gets better" doesn't seem to me like an obvious winner either.
We could have brought-in Ukrainian experts to teach our forces about drone warfare
There's not too much in "Ukrainian experts" that is not known in the US and that goes beyond PR. US military (and Israeli military) knows how to shut down Iranian drones. The problem is it's not 100% effective (no defense is) and it needs to be done cheaply, on existing US capacities, because wasting a million dollar interceptor on a 50k drone is unsustainable. There are solutions for that, but most of them are not scaled and deployed yet at the necessary scale, AFAIK. You can have perfect defense system, in a single prototype somewhere in Arizona - it's not going to do you much in Iran right now. Ukrainians won't help much there - they can't magic in a wide deployment of newly designed drone system (not in Middle East, and not in Ukraine). They have some useful battlefield empiric knowledge, and this knowledge is being studied (though sometimes slower than optimal, NIH syndrome is real) but they have no magic bullets. People talk like they have some magic spells that if only we could ask them we could make all Shaheds drop out of the skies - there's nothing like that. "Tons of cheap shitty drones" is a new problem, and deploying new solutions takes time, especially in a system as large and complex as US military. And again, waiting for several more years until US military fully scales to this new thing has the same problem I described above. Plus, of course, dealing with 10x more drones then.
And, of course, none of that would prevent Iran in any way from closing Hormuz. And, of course, Iran would not sit and wait until we make their strategic threat irrelevant - they could sabotage the pipelines built to bypass their zone of control, they could develop new drones that are not effectively dealt with by existing systems, they could cooperate with Russians to integrate whatever recipes Russians found to break whatever defenses Ukrainians figured out - just waiting for more time and assuming everything would be better is not really founded on anything. And there's a time boundary - as soon as Iran has enough uranium to make several nukes and does their first nuclear test, the whole construct goes out of the window and we have another Russia - except managed not by a kleptocrat with a fixation on going back to 18th century, but by an apocalyptic cult with a fixation on going back to the 7th century.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
Chuck Norris once told a woman to calm down, and she did.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
It was not unforseeable that Iran would close the strait.
It was. So what? There's no "plan" in existence that may preclude this possibility - of course, except ignoring the treat from Iran until they make nukes, and then face the consequences. Calling it "bad plan" is assuming there's some "good plan" that somehow magically makes it impossible for Iran to close the Hormuz. What would be that "good plan"? I submit it does not exist and can not exist.
That is provided Chinese already decided to take Taiwan by force as soon as possible, and are only waiting for the right moment. However, if they did not decide that, and are considering what would it cost them and whether it's worth it, then showing US Army is no longer Milley's army - which had more concerned with looking pleasant towards China than with being lethal - may very well tilt their decisions towards "maybe not right now". I mean, nobody really wants a hot war with China. That'd be a complete disaster - not for US military as such, but for the world economy. Maybe convincing China they'd lose more than they'd gain is a good alternative? Unlike Iranians - whose ideology is pretty much a religious death cult - China can be very pragmatic.
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