JulianRota
10mo ago
I don't see a strong culture war aspect to this one actually. As far as I can tell, pretty much everyone thinks that thing was obviously a death-trap and the CEO was an idiot. There's only a little variance on how hard to sneer at the passengers for being foolish rich people and whether to trash the CEO for claiming he "didn't want to hire 50 year old white guys". Okay, they're foolish, but they've suffered pretty severe consequences for it. And the CEO sounds kinda racist with that statement, but I think he actually cares more about not bringing in anyone who would question the bad design and lax safety practices than their skin color - the staff pics I've seen look pretty lily-white.
A few other notes that I picked up in my reading about this:
The hatch is only rated to a third of the depth they were diving to, and the pressure vessel was never actually proofed to any depth at all. It's made of carbon fiber mostly, which tends to shatter instead of deform when over-stressed.
The life-support limit is a bullet point on a document, and a suspiciously round number. Nobody knows how they actually came up with this number or whether their life support systems were ever actually tested with 5 people for 96 hours. It's not clear how it works either or what its failure modes are. It's possible it could lead to an abnormally high oxygen level, which makes the environment highly flammable, and doesn't appear to have any firefighting capabilities or smoke mitigation systems.
The hatch is installed in the center of the endcap of the cylindrical vessel. It's pretty clearly designed to only be opened on the submersible sled thing it gets launched with. It seems likely to me that if the sub was floating on the surface and the hatch was opened, it would rapidly flood and sink. Maybe slow enough for people inside to get out, maybe not. I guess (if it made it to the surface) being able to maybe get out and float around on the surface in the middle of the Atlantic is better than definitely suffocating, but not a lot. I guess life vests, survival suits, and life rafts would be too much to expect here.
An aspect of this whole thing I haven't seen touched on yet is that TK mostly did his thing in the pre-internet age. It seems that he started his bombing campaign before he actually wrote his manifesto, but he did indicate that he was willing to stop it entirely if a sufficiently "respectable" publication was to publish it. So I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that he basically carried out a mail bombing campaign to get his manifesto published.
Doesn't it seem at least a little bit crazy that in the modern but pre-internet age, if you have a viewpoint that's severely heterodox but not inherently dangerous, you basically have to carry out a terrorist bombing campaign to actually get it distributed. (Or at least a pretty smart guy could come to think that this was the only practical thing to do.) Yet nowadays, you can post every conceivable variety of batshit insane stuff on the internet for the whole world to see, basically for free. We get some pretty damn heterodox stuff posted on this very forum every day. I can go pull up his manifesto right now, for free, and it doesn't actually matter whether it was published on the Washington Post's website or some random free blog somewhere.
On the other hand, maybe it was fame and readership he was really after, which still doesn't come for free. Sure you can post anything you want on a random blog somewhere, but you won't necessarily get any more readership or engagement than you would if you made a few hundred photocopies and started handing them out at public events in the 80s. I guess if you were doing it now, you could post a URL in your bombs and presumably you'd get a lot more readers, along with an aggressive FBI investigation of where you posted it and who had been posting things there etc.
Anyways, there's gotta be something to the fact that anyone can post anything for the whole world to see now, whether it's strictly conventional, heterodox but reasonable, or completely bonkers.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I broadly agree with Kulak's take here. Putin isn't great yeah, but the leadership of Ukraine isn't exactly Jeffersonian classical liberals either. It's a standard regional power struggle that America has no real interests in.
If the Ukrainian people desire independence enough to really fight for it, they're welcome to it. If not, whatever, not my problem. I'm fine with selling them a bunch of weapons, but giving them huge amounts of money or direct intervention ought to be off the table IMO.
JulianRota
4mo ago
I've found the "official" conspiracy to be rather unlikely. I don't discount the possibility that they might be trafficking kidnapped children out of hand, but I don't see any rational way for any of this stuff to be involved in such an operation.
Presuming some operation along those lines is actually taking place, what's the point of posting an ad for such a thing, however disguised, on any public site? Surely you wouldn't dare make a delivery of such a thing, however that actually works, to just any random internet buyer. Buyers would have to be highly vetted and trusted. And any such buyers would probably want a lot more information about what they're buying and who they're buying it from than just a name that may or may not match up with a particular reported kidnapping victim and a semi-anonymous eBay or Etsy seller.
So there would have to be some other "real" marketplace where highly vetted buyers and sellers meet, with some way of inspecting the goods, reputations, etc and some way to arrange for deliveries. But if you have such a marketplace in place, what's the point of setting up these weird Wayfair, eBay, Etsy, etc items? Especially in public where any random yahoo can discover them and wonder what the heck is going on. Which gets us back to the old and strange point of it seeming far too much like a conspiracy to actually be one because any real conspiracy wouldn't be that obvious.
Possibly money laundering is the idea, possibly for such a scheme, but if you can manage to kidnap children in bulk, transport them around, and sell them to a market of buyers as an ongoing business without getting busted, surely you can figure out better ways to launder your money. If they have some kind of special juice with the Feds to get away with such a thing, why such a mickey-mouse level money laundering scheme?
JulianRota
5mo ago
Started reading Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock. It's considered the Global Warming/Climate Change themed one. I'm about 20% of the way through so far.
I generally enjoy his books and writing style, though this one feels a bit more, I guess, vague and hand-wavey than most so far. It has a few interesting concepts so far that I haven't heard of anywhere else, like the idea of "earthsuits" to allow marginal people to survive easily in extra-hot conditions. It has a some vague shadows of being woke-adjacent, though not in a preachy sense - a character is gay, but it's treated in a pretty matter of fact way and not really mentioned any more than any other characters' sexuality, rather than with paens to how awesome and brave they are.
So far, I'm enjoying it reasonably well, maybe like 6 out of 10, though I could see that swinging either way as I get further into the book.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Like what? That article actually makes me more convinced of my position:
A key witness for the prosecution — a notorious troll with the screen name “Microchip” — was allowed to testify anonymously. ... Microchip, who testified he began working for the FBI in 2018, pleaded guilty to conspiracy against rights last year. As part of his plea deal, he agreed to testify against Mackey and help the FBI in several other cases.
So they jacked up some other internet troll with the same type of bullshit charges who probably couldn't afford good Federal Defense attorneys to protect himself and forced him to testify against others or face prison time, and conveniently gave him anonymity, which sounds like a Sixth Amendment violation to me.
“If a single voter was tricked, the government would have called that person as their first witness,” he [the defense lawyer] said.
Sounds like a good argument to me!
Prosecutors presented a string of witnesses, including a Clinton staffer and the owner of a text message marketing company.
It doesn't say exactly what kind of testimony any of these "witnesses" offered, but I can't conceive of how it would be relevant to the case. What do Clinton staffers and text message marketers know about this person's motivation or the results of his campaign?
The only thing that could possibly be vaguely relevant to the case is:
They showed pages of group chat logs where pro-Trump trolls discussed how to make the text-by-vote images look convincing. The trolls also tested out ideas like photoshopping MAGA hats on celebrities like Ariana Grande, and posting fake Clinton ads with the logo “Draft our Daughters” to trick people into believing that Clinton wanted to send young women to war.
Exactly what did they do to "make them look convincing"? The rest sounds like normal political activism that both sides routinely practice to me. I'd have a pretty high bar against finding anything like this prosecution legitimate, and I have yet to see anything that comes anywhere near that.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Many people have compared this to the Winter War. Soviet performance was similarly inept there, but they did basically win in the end, getting relatively modest territorial concessions though rather than total control of Finland. Maybe that's the best thing to expect here too.
JulianRota
8mo ago
Two problems:
Pedophiles are out there, one of their common hobbies is collecting huge amounts of kiddie porn. We think this is bad, so we spend effort investigating it and jailing people we find processing it or producing it. When we find collectors, we lock them in jail for a while and probably mark them on a sex offender registry.
Moderating big social media sites is a headache. People post huge amounts of kiddie porn and gore and other such things, and they all employ moderators to review reported content. Many of those moderators end up mentally disturbed due to viewing huge amounts of this stuff in the course of their job. Many complain about needing therapy, never being the same again, etc.
Obvious and possibly stupid solution:
When we find people collecting kiddie porn, we make them be social media moderators (of that particular type). They shouldn't mind seeing the kiddie porn since they like it. We let them keep anything they find in their private collection as long as they never share it, in return they work at checking whether reported social media posts really are or aren't kiddie porn.
What could possibly go wrong?
JulianRota
7mo ago
I want to double-down / confirm the comment about working conditions and the ability to do things. I've worked at some Large Bureaucratic Organizations. I've seen too many times as an Individual Contributor where I or a colleague of mine comes up with a nice idea to make something work better or be cheaper or something, tried to get it done, and it gets stonewalled at the management level because the real decisions are made 5 layers up from you and there's no way to get any idea up to them through all the layers of middle management in a way they'll actually care about.
Instead, most of the project proposals that come down from on high are for stuff that people at the ground level can see is clearly unworkable, but it gets pushed anyways. When it proceeds to go nowhere, as predicted, whoever pushed it can dummy up a powerpoint that makes it look like it went great, which never actually gets checked, so they get bonuses and promotions anyways.
After a while working in a place like that, it can feel like a huge deal where a good idea at your level gets a quick "Okay, do it, here's the money", and the really dumb ideas get ruthlessly shut down. You might put up with and excuse a lot to be allowed to work at your full potential on something that's actually awesome instead of being a bureaucratic drone putting forth 10% on something completely pointless.
JulianRota
10mo ago
Everyone on Reddit. Reddit is not the world. Reddit is completely owned by Blue team, 100% top to bottom. Therefore, from a strict culture war perspective from a Red teamer, anything bad that happens to Reddit is good. Doesn't matter if it's mildly annoying a small percent of users or burning the whole company to the ground, it's still good.
I don't know why people pretend that Reddit has any pretense to neutrality when our whole forum left Reddit specifically because of their hostile rules and censorship regime.
JulianRota
1yr ago
One of the things that repeatedly bothers me along these lines is, what the heck is actually going to happen with Global Warming?
It's become a Blue Tribe value to declare that it's definitely happening, is entirely our fault, will be catastrophically bad, and the only way to fix it is things Blue Tribe likes (solar and wind power) which (IMO) probably won't work.
Meanwhile, the Red Tribe value becomes the opposite - it's definitely not happening and/or not our fault, if anything happens we can fix it with more tech, there's nothing to worry about, Blue Team just wants to crush and take over the economy for their own reasons.
If there actually is a problem, it's become basically impossible to solve due to the mentioned politicization of science and every possible solution falling along tribal lines. So I hope it's not really a big deal, because we're probably screwed if it is.
JulianRota
5mo ago
Haven't read Anathem, but I did really like Reamde, Seveneves, and Cryptonomicon.
JulianRota
7mo ago
I'd say that ToaKraka's post is a good example of actual high-quality journalism. All of the relevant facts presented clearly and concisely with minimal spin and links to relevant sources. It's more of a wonder that some person on the internet does it for free far better than the entire legacy media with their salaries, experience, and degrees.
JulianRota
7mo ago
There's a rule here for Make your point reasonably clear and plain. It's not clear to me what your point is, so why don't you just say it, whatever it is? Why are you making it all about me and my experiences? Exactly what is the "lie" that you are referring to at the end?
JulianRota
7mo ago
If Jews don't farm, why do they have a major holiday for harvest season? Farming may not be the most popular career for Jews, but it appears there's still plenty of Jewish farmers, even before the Kibbutz movement.
I am also highly skeptical of people pulling quotes from the Talmud to try and make a point about the Jews. The Talmud is a large volume containing many contradictory opinions about many subjects from many historical scholars. It's meant to be studied and debated, not read as a literal book of laws. Can you cite the exact passage that you believe condemns agricultural work and why you believe the intent of that section is to order Jews not to perform it?
I have no idea what the relationship of Eastern European Jewish communities was to farming. Certainly they were strongly discriminated against and banned from it in many places. If they refused to try or ask, perhaps they knew they wouldn't get it, or were concerned that they wouldn't be allowed to keep them for long enough for a planting and harvest cycle, or wouldn't be allowed to learn how to do it well. Or maybe it's not very well documented exactly what they did or didn't try to do over the years.
In looking around the net about the subject, I did find this interesting and pretty neutral article about the subject making the case that the root cause of Jews tending away from farming in the pre-historical era was not hostile discrimination or refusal to do farm labor, but instead the religious requirement to be literate (in order to read the Torah) in an era when that was extremely difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. It seems likely that many people thought, if you've got to acquire a relatively rare and difficult skill, better to make some use of it rather than continue to farm.
JulianRota
8mo ago
What are your goals from it, who do you want privacy from?
I'm pretty skeptical on the usefulness of VPNs. Nothing is going to be faster than your bare connection of course. If you want privacy from your parents, local ISP, employer, etc, then any of them will do. If you want privacy from your government, then use Tor from a freshly imaged disposable laptop, and then pray to God because even that probably isn't good enough.
JulianRota
9mo ago
I've wanted to remark for a while on the "tan suit" thing. I've been a pretty conventional conservative all through the Obama era. I'm not exactly glued to the media or anything, but I think I was following right wing media and forums around then pretty regularly. I still have no recollection of ever hearing about this tan suit thing from any conservative source at the time. I couldn't for the life of me name the year in which it happened.
I'm pretty sure I've only heard of it after the Obama era from Liberals trying to dunk on how lame criticism of Obama was. I tend to think they thought it sounded bad to claim Obama had no scandals, so they cherry picked the most ridiculous thing he was ever criticized on to make red team look bad, even though it was so tiny and insignificant in that world that nobody remembers it. Pretty good rhetorical tactic, I'll give them that.
JulianRota
11mo ago
What I wonder - have we done this sort of check for any years well into the past? Yes, Star Wars was a classic, but what other movies were released that year, and how many were original? I recall hearing about music, many say older music is better because they only remember the smash hits from some particular year 3 or 5 decades ago, but that was one hit, when there were maybe 500 released that year, and 90% of the rest were relatively mediocre pop. Is the same true for movies?
JulianRota
1yr ago
The "political activism" part was referring specifically to:
The trolls also tested out ideas like photoshopping MAGA hats on celebrities like Ariana Grande, and posting fake Clinton ads with the logo “Draft our Daughters” to trick people into believing that Clinton wanted to send young women to war.
Which apparently, according to the article, went to prove that they "weren't really joking".
Yes, this was a conspiracy charge. IMO, the large distance between what was actually done and any vaguely plausible claim of actually influencing an election makes this a blatantly partisan hit job. And IMO, the fact that they must have known it would look like this and made no attempt to make themselves and their campaign look more neutral says that they did it on purpose, that the goal was a chilling effect on Conservative activism.
If I start a chat with my 3 best friends where we talk about how funny it would be to trick Democrats into voting wrong, but never actually do anything, is that a crime in your opinion? What if we were all Democrats and we thought it would be funny to trick Republicans into voting wrong?
What happens when the next Republican President is as enthusiastic and skilled at lawfare as the Biden administration seems to be and start making these kinds of charges against Democrats?
JulianRota
2mo ago
Eh maybe. But then still, why an opioid epidemic now? Opium and derivatives have also been around for a very long time. Is it just that much more appealing in pill form and prescribed by your doctor than in smokeable or snortable form?
JulianRota
3mo ago
I don't suppose anyone noticed that we got our first link from the orange site?
JulianRota
4mo ago
Interesting post! I have several of those on my shelves and in my Kindle already. I actually just finished reading Turner Diaries - quick summary, it's fun as an action-adventure story, but the politics are pretty unsophisticated and not discussed in much detail. I've been trying to find more books on Irish Loyalism as well, maybe I'll try and find a copy of Paisley's book next (though I have read from some Loyalist militiamen post-Troubles that they were rather annoyed at his tendency to swoop in to a volatile situation, stir everyone up with a firebrand speech, then be whisked away before any actual violence happens).
The meta questions are what this really gets into though. All regimes in history have banned books that they considered threatening to the Powers That Be. What's curious is how the current regime is obsessed with promoting the reading of "banned" books while simultaneously actually banning other books. It seems critical to the identify of the current power structure that they were formerly out of power and had their core ideologies banned, so it's both a dunk on the former Powers That Be which they overcame and a sop to the idea of Free Speech to promote them, but they're at least as totalitarian as those former powers, so of course they continue to ban things that threaten their new ideology, while of course paying no attention to the contradiction.
It's also interesting how we all seem to seek the authenticity of these types of books. Whatever they think, at least they actually meant it! Even the wildest-eyed radicals tend to become dull if they ever do manage to become the Powers That Be, only sometimes returning to authenticity once they're out of power but still alive and not in some terrible prison, and inclined to write more about what they really did and why.
JulianRota
4mo ago
I'm thinking the IRS probably operates more like a business than most parts of the Federal Government. For any possible enforcement action, they're going to be looking at how much money they put into it versus how much they'd recover, and they'll stick with the things that bring in the most money for the least effort.
Are they going to send a SWAT team to raid your house and drag you off to jail for 20 years? Probably not. All of that is super expensive (dozens of agents tied up all day, plus vehicles and gear etc) and not likely to lead to recovering much money.
If you're living a normal upper-middle-class lifestyle, they're going to write a letter to your payroll processor telling them to fix your withholding and garnish your wages, and they will. Then they'll write a letter to your bank telling them to hand over $x from your account, and they will. That takes 10 minutes of work for one guy at a desk and will probably recover whatever they want. If you think they took too much, well sucks to be you, you can spend your own $$$ and hire a lawyer to sue them, and good luck winning anything back. Maybe they'd let it slide for a few years until the amount owed goes over $100k, but no reason to think they'd forget about it entirely when they can still collect easily.
If you're a weird hippie who went to the trouble to have hard to track income and savings, maybe they'll just ignore it because it's too much work to track down and probably not all that much money anyways. Why bother, when writing letters to compliant corporations regarding normal upper-middle-class people is much faster and easier and yields much more money.
For a Donald Trump level figure (let's say pre-Presidency, so kind of a stand-in for any super-rich cantankerous person with weird complex finances), they can assume it'll take tons of their resources to really audit what's going on with him, and he's going to throw a dozen of his own high-priced lawyers and accountants at you, so maybe they'll just leave it alone unless they think they have a rock-solid case that you owe big bucks that they can actually collect.
I actually read some of the "War Tax Resistance" people's website. They don't seem to have much better advice for avoiding enforcement action. Basically, don't work for people who will report to the IRS and obey their garnishment letters, and don't hold money in banks they can track easily.
JulianRota
8mo ago
I wanted to write a bit about the ongoing adventures in Israel with Judicial Reform. I'm not a huge expert in the country or region myself, but I've got a few friends who lived there and keep pretty close track of things. They/I might be effectively biased as a result, but here's a decent summary of it from what I have read.
As background, the Israeli Supreme Court appears at a glance to be similar to the American one, but there are a number of critical differences. Notably, there is no Constitution there that the Courts are on paper obligated to make decisions about whether laws are compatible with. In addition, the nomination process for new Justices includes the current Justices having veto power over any new selections. And, beginning around the timeframe of the 90s, the court increasingly granted itself the power to override arbitrary government and military policies and decisions at will based on rather arbitrary criteria including “reasonableness,” “worthiness,” and the “principle of equality.”
And so, in the last few months, Netanyahu and his government have been attempting to pass a series of reforms the limit the power of the Judiciary. This has been met with remarkably fierce protests, seemingly from all levels of society. Many of the most highly respected institutions have (or at least seem to have) joined in, including tech workers, entrepreneurs, Air Force pilots, academics, labor unions, doctors, etc. The fundamental issue appears to be more whether you are for the current right-ist governments policies or for the ability of the courts to be essentially an arbitrary check on them. The usual canard of "danger to Democracy" seems to get thrown around a lot by the anti-reformists, but I'm not seeing it - how is it "Democracy" for unelected and unaccountable justices to arbitrarily override the policies of an elected government on their own whims?
In any case, the first phase of the reform appears to have gone through, with others in the works. It appears to be unclear whether the courts will attempt to strike down new laws limiting their own power, or exactly what would happen next if they did so.
The WSJ has a decent overall summary of the situation with some more details. This fellow is rather less neutral and more critical of the anti-reform movement. This op-ed has more details about specific actions the court has taken that many think are inappropriate.
While I lean towards defending the car culture side in the overall debate, I think I'd soften that a bit. See how much the car drivers moan when they have to wade into an environment that actually does favor pedestrians and transit at a large scale, like Manhattan. Are the car drivers special snowflakes who hate to drive unless they have massive free parking lots everywhere, lots of wide-open 45mph multilane roads, and very few pesky pedestrians who have a tendency to go every which way on a whim?
I'd say more neutrally that the desires of drivers and pedestrians are fundamentally at odds with each other. A large-scale environment that's great for walking, like good enough that Sam the Stockbroker in Manhattan, who makes enough to keep a BMW in a private garage, chooses to walk and take the train to his job anyways because it's easier and better, will inevitably be bad for cars, due to expensive and scarce parking, slow and narrow streets, and pedestrians going every which way. Meanwhile, if it's great for driving, it will suck for walking, because of the huge parking lots, huge distances between things, and narrow and poorly maintained sidewalks with intimidating high-speed car traffic only a few feet away. My overall point is more that any environment that favors one or the other cannot be changed to be the other way without basically demolishing the entire city and rebuilding everything differently.
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