JulianRota
1yr ago
Better to provide light, and real information, than to throw shade. Could you tell us more about things like, what do these 10%ish parties actually believe and want? What's the range of opinion on them in other segments of Israeli society? To what extent is it, I really hate those guys, they're just making everything harder, versus, well I don't agree with them, but I don't mind using them - tell the Palestinians that we'll rein them in if they play nicer, or turn them loose if they don't. Or something else maybe.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I'd lean against.
A serious move against Taiwan is likely to trigger a longer-term economic realignment away from Chinese manufacturing and towards all of their regional competitors. I'm doubtful that the Chinese economy is strong enough to weather such a thing. Main wildcard is to what extent Chinese leadership either doesn't believe it will happen, or doesn't care.
The PLAN and PLAAF don't have much recent experience AFAIK fighting blue-water naval battles, amphibious invasions, air battles against air forces that aren't total clusterfucks, etc. Trying for something like Indirect Control is taking a big risk that their bluff will be called. Their leadership will look pretty bad if they try it and it ends up being a flop. Even worse, a flop of the army and navy trying to assert control over Taiwan is much less likely to generate a strong Chinese domestic backlash against whoever did it, presuming they don't do something boneheaded like major attacks against mainland Chinese civilians.
If China wanted to be taken more seriously as a threat to Taiwan, I'd think they ought to get some practice in somewhere. They've been dealing with Africa for a while, why not pick whichever African country is being particularly annoying to them and go over and smash them? If they can't, or aren't willing, to pull that off, it makes it seem like they aren't really much of a threat to Taiwan.
JulianRota
1yr ago
That seems very plausible to me. Do you know of anywhere I could read more about that? In addition to the sibling's mention of West Virginia.
JulianRota
1yr ago
This seems like as good a place as any to write about something I'd been thinking about for a while, especially since it's at least kind of against your point.
Saying the Civil War was caused by Slavery never seemed satisfying to me. It's not exactly wrong per se, but it doesn't feel like it really captures the spirit of what happened and why. I think a better thesis is that Slavery was the lynchpin of the war, the thing that caused the pre-existing cultural split to become an economic split and a more specific political split, that gave rise to there being specific territories motivated to rebel.
I think the true cause is the cultural split that goes back to the founding of the nation. Albion’s Seed stuff. Borderers and Cavaliers vs Puritans and Quakers. (I've only actually read Scott's review of it, I probably should read the actual book sometime). In this view, it was the Cavaliers who really loved themselves some slavery. For reasons I haven't entirely fleshed out, the Borderers and Cavaliers came to be allied and to mostly occupy the same territory. I guess they could tolerate each other at least. Meanwhile, the Puritans and Quakers similarly allied with each other, and each side had at least a vague feeling that they didn't really like the other side and they were the Other, the Outgroup. They managed to ally with each other long enough to fight and win the American Revolution, but they never did really get along that well, not well enough to be comfortable building a more centralized state for them all to live under.
At the time of the founding of the nation, the plantation farming with slavery that the Cavaliers loved so dearly was in fact the most economically productive thing going on in the nation. This gave the slaveholder class tremendous political power, far too much to take any action against slavery. The cultures that made up what would become the North never really liked slavery. It became a rallying point for both sides - the whole proto-South became more and more into how awesome Slavery was, even the ones who would never be able to afford a single slave, and meanwhile, the proto-North became more and more into how shitty it was and how it had to go. And so both sides went on, constantly provoking each other about it. But it's just an excuse, the real cause was always the cultural split.
In the background to all this is the gigantic freight train of Industrialization. Slow moving but massive and inexorable. The proto-North and the cultures that made it up really loved them some Industrialization. They went all-in on that, in opposition to plantation slavery. It wasn't that great at the time of the founding of the nation, but it kept slowly advancing and gaining more power. That economic domination slowly but surely started slipping away from the slavers who, due to their own culture, were unable to see it coming and shift away from slavery and towards industry. But a slow shift of economic trends is tough to fight a war over. The election of Lincoln, though, that did it. A bright neon sign saying that the slaveholder class could no longer rely on their economic clout to dominate national politics.
And so, to war! A war actually motivated by that tribal hatred, but which the slavery issue had provided plenty of more rational-seeming Casus Belli.
Industrialization was still very new, and nobody really understood how it would affect war. In the old way of war, winning the day was much more dependent on individual courage, daring, and clever maneuvering of units. The South was actually pretty well-equipped to fight this sort of war against the North. Hence why they did better than expected at first. The North was slow to understand the advantages that Industrialization gave them and how to use those advantages to maximum extent. But they did eventually. In the new way of war, non-industrialized opponents would be crushed under a mountain of manufactured goods. Individual courage and clever maneuvers mean little when your opponent out-produces you 10 to 1 or more. Parts of the Southern regime probably saw this eventually, but there wasn't much they could do about it.
Near as I can tell, the cultural effect of the war was to decisively crush the Cavalier culture for good - I don't see any sign of them being still around now. The Borderers are still around, and don't seem to have been that affected. I understand that many of them checked out of the Civil War when it really started going south for the South. Perhaps they said to themselves something to the effect of, hold on, why am I charging superior Union firepower to preserve the right of these other rich guys to own slaves? And the war and reconstruction era didn't shut down anything central to their culture. So I guess they survived.
I think this is all very relevant to today's situation. We've still got the same cultural split, and the temperature is getting pretty high, only now, there isn't a firm lynchpin to actually fight over. Nothing to define specific territory as being on one side or the other, nothing to motivate the less-cultural to join the fight and tolerate the sacrifices warfare requires. And so, it's not really clear what actually happens.
JulianRota
1yr ago
This largely tracks with my understanding of the history of the region (plus a few new details), except:
Israel surprisingly wins the war and takes lands beyond even the 1947 proposed borders, many Arabs are expelled at this point and this is what is referred to as the Nakba.
My understanding was that the Arabs largely left voluntarily upon request by the surrounding Arab nations, who expected to wreak total destruction on those pesky so-called Israelis (in their opinion), and didn't want them to be in the crossfire. Possibly there was some small-scale local hostility and encouragement, but not anything that could be called a proper expulsion.
JulianRota
1yr ago
For 1, I'm skeptical about that. I think it's very common in the US at least due to the scientific and social influence of the I think 70s-era belief in the "food pyramid", that lots of carbs and some meat were the height of healthiness and all fats were bad. The perception and trend wears on even as we've discovered that that isn't really true and nutrition is far more complex. I think any feeling of fulfillment is more due to some combination of it being what people are used to and perception of social approval.
For 2, I think it's about the overall state of society, which means that perceptions of what is attractive are more malleable than most people think. If getting any food at all is expensive and hard work, then being fat signals that you are a high-status person who has access to plenty of food, therefore you are attractive, for both men and women. In our current society where food is incredibly plentiful and much of it is not great for your health, being fat is nothing special as far as status in society, and instead being thin is a better signal that you have plenty of resources and status, in the form of time and energy to find and purchase higher-quality food and eat it in measured quantities. It also tends to signal that you have the free time and energy to exercise for fun.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Parallel to the sibling, do talk to your manager about how you're doing. What you should do depends on how they react.
If they recognize that you're getting burned out and cut you some slack, then great, you're at a good place to work and stay there a while.
If they say something to the effect of, suck it up kid, here's another assignment, then it's probably time to start looking for a new job. Put together a resume, talk to some recruiters, reach out to any friends or former co-workers. You might well be surprised how much more money and lighter workload you can get at a new job.
Either way, burnout is very real, don't ignore it. Take action now, before it gets too unbearably bad.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Probably a troll, but why not discuss seriously anyways?
If we wanted to investigate this theory, soccer doesn't seem like a good place to start. If women really do have social skills and body language and facial expression reading ability so much better than men that it might grant them practical skills, let's pick a game where that's the most important thing and physical ability is meaningless. Poker sounds good to me.
I have no clue offhand how high-end competitive poker works. A few quick searches show World Series of Poker seems to have separate men's and women's leagues. Somebody out there must be running high-end mixed-gender poker games though. If women really are that much better at those things, they ought to be cleaning up at mixed-gender poker tables.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I don't recall anyone actually being against body cams, aside from some griping about the cost. IME most cops want to wear them because they're great at rebutting false accusations of misconduct and brutality.
I haven't noticed the sibling's comment that BLM is actually against them now, though maybe I haven't been paying enough attention. I suppose it wouldn't surprise me all that much though. I still recall the case where the cops shot a black teenage girl who was actively in the process of stabbing another girl, it was caught on bodycam quite clearly, and BLM still threw a fit, though a bit more muted.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think it's pretty well-accepted that an Iranian nuclear capability would likely result in a number of regional counter-moves, such as:
The regional Sunni Arab states may then perceive a much more serious threat from Iran. They would likely seek to either build their own nuclear weapons or come explicitly under the protection of one of the existing nuclear powers. We're talking Saudi Arabia, Emirates, Oman, Quatar, Yemen, Egypt, and Jordan. Iraq and Syria aren't usually seen as Sunni-aligned, but they may not necessarily take such a thing lying down either.
Israel has long maintained a policy of "nuclear ambiguity", refusing to explicitly confirm that they do have a nuclear arsenal. If Iran does openly have a nuclear arsenal, I would think Israel would change this policy.
It's also the status quo of nuclear geopolitics that nuclear powers are not allowed to attack or threaten non-nuclear powers with nuclear weapons. You can attack, invade, and conquer with conventional weapons, but nothing nuclear. Once you have your own nuclear weapons though, you're now fair game for other nuclear powers to more directly threaten.
So, maybe Israel and Iran openly pointing nuclear ballistic missiles at each other? Not sure if that's a good thing. At least they might both cool their jets a little with the constant proxy wars.
Maybe American nuclear weapons in Saudi Arabia? It's possible. There's precedent in America defending them from Saddam's invasion, and the Saudis don't seem terribly interested in manufacturing their own high-tech weapons. Or maybe they would ally with an openly-nuclear Israel? Both don't sound very likely now, but it's hard to see the Saudis just sitting idly by with an nuclear-armed Iran right across the Persian Gulf.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Who decides what it's "supposed to do"? What gives any such person the right to dictate that?
For that matter, how do you know there aren't already sites that work exactly the way you think, but you don't know about them, because they aren't as popular or well-advertised? That would imply that the way all existing well-known sites work is exactly how their users and their owners think they should work. I think private chat groups, as exist in pretty much every messaging app, are much more like this, but by their nature aren't well-known.
So by saying you want a law, as an "interesting experiment". Laws mean people will be fined, potentially lose their livelihoods, get thrown in jail, etc. Somehow I don't think the people who would be affected by such a law will find this "experiment" quite so "interesting". Particular when you are forcing every site and all of the users to do things they actively dislike to satisfy your notions about how they "should" work, when there are already alternatives that work that way.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Android app? Almost certainly a bad idea, unless you already have experience in building android apps and getting them onto your phone. Just figuring out how to build a "hello world" level app and get it onto your phone could easily take 8 hours by itself, much less setting up even a fairly basic UI that's functional. Using GSheets as a data store sounds like a bad idea too, way too much work to interface with. What I'd do is, in this order, following the steps until you think it's good enough or get tired of it or whatever:
- Open up dev tools network tab the next time you use the form. Note down everything about the request to actually reserve a spot and what it returns on success and failure.
- Put together a CLI script on your developer machine to make those requests. Iterate on that until you are able to successfully reserve a spot without using the website directly. Doesn't matter what language, Python is fine, just make direct HTTP requests, you almost certainly don't need full browser emulation.
- Hard-code in the info for your regular visitors, implement a decent CLI interface to make reservations for any of them. This is probably good enough for most people.
- Turn that script into a basic web server, running locally on the developer machine. A few simple HTML pages to interface with it you can use on the browser on your developer machine.
- If you still really want to use it on mobile, rework the CSS etc until those pages look good on a mobile browser
- You could leave it running on your developer machine or some other machine in your local network and access it from your mobile any time you're on your home WiFi. Or you could deploy it to a proper web server somewhere, probably for free, maybe using Google Cloud Run or something like that, to be able to use it on your mobile from anywhere. It'll be on a weirdo URL nobody can guess, so you can probably get away with no authorization. And the visitors are still hard-coded, so you'd need a redeploy to add or remove anyone, but that shouldn't be hard enough to be annoying.
- If you're still feeling ambitious, add a proper DB on the server to store visitor info, and web interfaces for managing them. Probably ought to do authorization too at this stage.
- For even more ambition, set it up so other residents can register themselves on your system, enter their own visitor lists, and reserve spots too. Then advertise it to other people in your building, or even people in other buildings that use the same system.
JulianRota
1yr ago
What does "fix" mean - what do you consider to be broken about it? What's the end-goal?
Of all of the things that people have ever said were bad about social media, I don't think the idea that a few people have tons of followers while most have few to none is on anyone's to 10 list.
Incidentally, I'm not sure the idea of specifically redistributing follows is meaningful, considering that basically every social media site pushes hard for you to use algorithmic feeds that show you a selection of things that an algorithm thinks you'll like or engage with rather than strictly people you follow. They can just as easily stick the random small-timers posts in more timelines and rate-limit the big accounts that you actually do follow, and probably nobody will really notice, aside from occasionally liking or following somebody they weren't already following.
JulianRota
1yr ago
It does sound like a textbook case of I Can Tolerate...'s saying that if you think you're criticizing your ingroup, and it was fun and pleasant to write and people read it for entertainment, consider the possibility that whoever you're criticizing isn't really your ingroup.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think the question hinges a lot on who happens to be more aggressive and determined that day, which isn't really answerable. But if I had to make a bet, I think I'd bet on knife.
IME most amateur fighters tend to go for overpowered knockout blows first. Bat fighter will probably start with something like a full baseball swing, which is slow, easy to dodge, slow to recover from, leaving an opening for a rush. Knife fighter will be inclined to go right in for core hits, which is probably the right move here. Knife going for glancing hits and slashes against extremities is not likely to be very effective against an opponent with a bat anyways. Knife should keep distance, feint a few times to draw a powerful bat swing, then rush in during the recovery from that, grab on with one hand and keep stabbing with the other. That seems reasonably likely to be something an amateur would do, and it'll probably take too long for bat fighter to drop the ineffective bat and at least try to fight by hand.
Bat can win, but I think bat's winning strategies are much harder for an amateur to pull off. Bat has to choke up on the bat to swing faster and lighter, aggressively give up distance and jab with the bat to keep the knife at distance, accumulate minor injuries on knife guy, and only go in for a full swing when they're partially disabled and open.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I've seen a little bit of a few things like this. Not really enough to have much to add to this thread. But I do think that one of the major issues in the way our larger culture discusses political issues is that a large segment of the "activist class" doesn't have the slightest idea of how these people are, how they really think, and how they actually respond to the "helpful" programs that they constantly dream up. They just listen to a few of these fake sob story tales or videos and go off entirely on believing that, never even pausing to consider that it might not be an accurate description of the situation.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Ah, I see. Thinking about it a bit more, I'm not sure whether it's a culture thing or a raw intelligence thing, but I think you could say that some people aren't capable of understanding the idea that some things are physical systems that are not governed by the whims of individuals but instead by their own sets of rules. So in their minds, the outcome of any interaction with such a system is actually solely determined by the feelings and inclinations of whatever expert they are interacting with.
We could say things like, the outcome of your legal case doesn't really depend all that strongly on what your lawyer or the prosecutor thinks of you. Your medical outcome doesn't really change much based on how much the doctors and nurses like you. Your car or other such thing getting fixed doesn't depend on the mechanic liking you. And so on. But I think this class of people doesn't consider these ideas and then reject them, they seriously aren't capable of thinking them at all. So maybe it makes sense to them to lie to look better to them, even though, to us, it's stupidly obvious and will clearly have no impact on the outcome besides making it slightly harder for us to do our jobs.
Which in turn makes it sound more callous and cruel to use sarcasm and mockery to try to show such people the error of their ways. Might as well knock a guy with no legs for not being able to walk. But then on the other hand, if somebody is fundamentally incapable of dealing with the real world and can't be fixed, doesn't that suggest they should be locked up in a mental institution somewhere, or at least not allowed outside the house without "adult supervision". Maybe this is all a little exaggerated and most people do figure this out eventually, it's just that the worst cases of this tend to be much more likely to commit and be caught for serious crimes and end up talking to a public defender.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Speaking of other professions, I'm not a lawyer, but I've worked at a mechanics shop, and the perspective is similar.
The more truth you tell us about how your car got broke, the faster and easier it is to fix. If you tried to use JB Weld to fix a leak, and you just cop to it - "It started leaking something, so I tried putting JB Weld on it here, but it didn't work. Can you fix it right?", we've got better things to do that judge you. The honesty is appreciated, and it lets us fix the problem faster. If you tell a stupid and obvious lie, like you have no idea what happened but the car isn't working right, it just takes longer to find, and when you later claim you have no clue why there is JB Weld all over the crankcase where it's leaking, then you only make yourself look even dumber than you would if you just copped to it. You've cost yourself time and money and done nothing at all to help anything.
Yeah, not every mechanic or shop is honest, and that can be a headache to deal with. But whether they are or are not honest, you're still not helping anything by lying about what happened.
If you want to make your mechanic happy with you, tell them exactly what is happening and what if anything you did in as much detail as possible, but don't bother speculating on what you think might be wrong. It's okay to ask for explanations or to see what's broken etc, but there's not really any point in accusing them of ripping you off.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think this is a significant enough point that we ought to consider why this doesn't seem to be happening. Notably, pretty much everybody who manages to make it into the PMC Elite one way or another seems to abandon whatever community they had previously been a part of and show loyalty only towards that PMC Elite. They only respect the support and advancement of other more junior members of that community and seem to act only to maintain and increase the power of that community.
The stereotypical MAGA Appalachian coal miner, if they manage to make it into the elite, will pretty much always adopt their values and consider their former neighbors to be unredeemable racist hicks to be sneered at and driven into the dirt.
The black person, whether or not they actually grew up in "the projects" will also adopt elite values and won't ever do anything to actually improve the life and culture of those communities. They'll spout the usual platitudes about "institutional racism", but won't do anything about it except more entitlement programs that only create dependency and more affirmative action style reforms that prioritize racism supremacy and entitlement over actually improving yourself.
Every other "community" that I can think of repeats the same points. I think the Amish are one of the few types of communities that retain strong loyalty to their own community, but they don't seek positions in the PMC Elite. There are also some super-religious Jewish and Christian communities that I think do similarly, but people of those religions who make it into the Elite also show no loyalty to any such tight-knit communities of the same or similar religion.
JulianRota
1yr ago
That would be You Are Still Crying Wolf, section 17 near the end. Which, curiously for this thread, is exactly about refuting the crazy theory that Trump is racist.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I actually think every forum, or at least every forum I actually visit, has things it's good and bad at.
HN is quite good at deep technical stuff. It's mid I guess at where tech intersects the real world. At purely real-world stuff involving geopolitics and macroeconomics, it's purely Reddit-tier. It does seem to have a noticeable sub-population of extraordinarily weird people, the type who do stuff like attempt to browse the web without Javascript, run their own email servers and use text-based email clients, continue to use IRC, etc, who seem completely unaware that they are far, far outside of the mainstream and get mad that the world doesn't cater to them. I've actually gotten to where I get severely annoyed by the crypto people who insist that all communication must be over E2E-encrypted provably-secure systems and discount all other features, concerns, failures, and attack types.
Reddit is okay for entertaining stories. Some of the smaller or more tightly moderated subs are okay for some types of information or discussion. For anything adjacent to the culture war, it's mostly trash.
But then it's not like the Motte is perfect either. We're mostly okay at reasonable discussion on tough culture war issues. The QCs showcase some of the really gold material that we manage to produce, and I'm proud to have earned a few. Sometimes it can be a bit quokka-ish though. Not a lot of room for stuff I consider fun. There's still a little sense of super weird and sheltered people sometimes, though not nearly as bad as HN.
I sometimes say only half-jokingly that it would be good to somehow require posters in a forum to prove that they can go to a bar in their local area by themselves, hang out and drink for a few hours, have a few decent conversations, and not weird out or piss off everyone around them or get kicked out or something.
JulianRota
1yr ago
So I don't really dispute any of that, but it feels like this conversation is getting a little shifted or circular, I suppose as a consequence of it being with so many people. What I'm really arguing against is ulyssessword's point that "the 'opioid epidemic' is an appropriate reaction to the chronic pain epidemic". I find it pretty hard to buy into, humans have been doing manual labor for millennia, opium has been around for millennia at varying levels of availability, but only now somehow is blue-collar manual labor so strenuous that using opiates to dull the pain is an appropriate response.
It seems more likely to me to be something like the point that sarker and TheDag are making, that the pain is actually a symptom of broader cultural disease, not a natural consequence of manual labor.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I guess I'm somewhat lucky in not having many issues with serious or chronic pain. I did get my wisdom teeth removed, and I don't think I was prescribed or took anything particularly strong for that, but I don't recall very clearly. I had to get a root canal a few years ago, and I do remember that hurting pretty badly the next day. I had been prescribed Tylenol with Codeine, which I took and worked pretty well at dulling the pain, but left me pretty zonked out. Definitely not something I had any interest in taking if I wasn't in serious pain. I think I only took that for 1 or 2 days, and the pain was mild enough after that that I didn't bother.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Looks like an interesting article, thanks! I will read later. But that, and TheDag's point would imply that any "chronic pain epidemic" is just a broader symptom of, I guess I don't really know what to call it, the broad cultural sickness we have in the West and America right now, and treating with opiates is clumsy duct-tape over the real problem that mostly won't help much.
I tried to look into this after the last time I read one of the EMP apocalypse porn novels. I get the impression that nobody really knows for sure, since it's really hard to test well. To the extent that anyone knows, they don't seem excited to publish anything about it.
Near as I can tell, EMPs tend to be hardest on conducting cables that are very long in straight lines, like multiple miles, and anything connected to such cables. I'm pretty sure that cars and other vehicles, phones, laptops that are unplugged, and other portable electronics are not likely to be affected at all. Most long-distance data cables have been replaced with fiber optics, which are also immune.
Probably the thing at highest risk is the electric grid and things attached to it. It may be rough on transformers, generating turbines, that sort of thing. I don't know if anyone has made or implemented protection cutoffs for these types of things. It's not clear to what extent it may affect household electronics - I'm not sure whether or not dangerous voltages would make it through the various types of power converters. For cell towers, the wired and over-the-air data connections will probably be fine, but the power supply may not be. I doubt the internet will stay up in the affected area, mostly due to power issues rather than data connections themselves. The trackside power supply for electric trains will likely have issues, but probably the diesel-electric freight locomotives will be okay.
So it's likely to be a bad day, but not nearly as bad as some would have you think. I doubt it would affect the effectiveness of a defending military it was targeted at much at all, other than the extent to which it caused civilian disruptions they might be obligated to address. From the perspective of an offensive military considering using it, it doesn't seem like a great strategy, since it's unclear how effective it would be, and likely to be most disruptive towards civilian activity rather than military.
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