P-Necromancer
No bio...
User ID: 3278
P-Necromancer
10hr ago
Ah, I don't necessarily disagree on any of this. To tell the truth I haven't followed these events closely at all -- my point was very narrow: 'I'm confident these claims are false, which makes it a lot harder to believe your other claims.' Not even saying the pro-Israel side doesn't do the same thing (though I can't immediately recall anything quite so blatant).
Probably best I not make a fool of myself commenting on Israel's internal politics, but sure, I'm not clear on what Israel expects their current actions to accomplish. I certainly don't like some possible answers. Your theory doesn't sound implausible to me.
If that is what's happening, it's a curious mirror of what's going on on the other side: Hamas depends on Israel's misbehavior to gain recruits and garner international sympathy while Netanyahu depends on Hamas's ability to recruit and garner international sympathy to push his voting public right. Not sure if that's actually an insight or just pedestrian inter/intra-group dynamics. (Pretty sure that was one of the reasons for eternal warfare in 1984, so it probably counts as a hackneyed truism by now.)
Yet, the loudest detractors steer the conversation towards the existence of the state of Israel instead of Netanyahu as the leader who oversaw this response. To me, that's the difference between credible detractors (Tech elite, European centrists, American Jews) and antisemites. (Progressive left, Muslim leaders). Antisemites are tempted by maximalist claims and their hate makes up for the lack of due diligence. "All Israelis are evil, always have been. All Gazans are being killed. All kids are being shot in the dick. No one is getting food." No nuance. Only hate.
Yeah, this makes sense. I object to a certain strain of common, virulent opposition with a loose relationship with truth -- certainly doesn't mean Israel's actions are unobjectionable.
I understand that no military ever actually wants transparency into any of their operations, but it doesn't seem like it can do all that much harm to the IDF at this stage; the more national and international pressure mounts to provide that transparency, the more suspicious the failure to do so will be.
P-Necromancer
13hr ago
Indiscriminate means “not marked by careful distinction : deficient in discrimination and discernment”. What definition were you looking at? It does not mean that they fire on everyone they see.
Hmm, OK. I read 'indiscriminately opening fire' as 'making no distinction between combatants and civilians,' and since they surely do fire on enemy combatants, they must also fire on civilians at similar rates. Which is obviously untrue, or no aid would be distributed. Is it your position that they don't discriminate on that basis at all (that is, they're just as likely to return fire at enemy combatants as to fire at random civilians), or that they do, but without sufficient care? (Which would be an opinion, not a fact, but whatever.)
Maybe that's my misread.
M855 ammo passes through soft tissue more readily, meaning in a large crowd there will be more casualties per shot; his point is that this is a terrible choice for crowd control. Police doing crowd control use rubber bullets etc. In fact the IDF specifically uses .22 LR in Ruger 10/22 rifles for riots in the West Bank. You weren’t aware of this? NATO is not supplying these munitions so I don’t know why you’ve mentioned NATO.
He explicitly says the rifles are OK. .22 LR is a different caliber which those rifles can't shoot. So far as I know, there is no widely used 5.56 munition that's less deadly than M855. (Well, there's less reliable/accurate ammo; this makes civilian casualties more likely, not less.) There are rounds which have less penetration, sure: hollow points, the use of which would actually be a war crime. If he wanted to argue 5.56 rifles were inappropriate, he could have done so. Instead he fixated on the bog-standard ammo, emphasizing its spectacular lethality, and, bizarrely, claiming its issue (not even its use!) is a war crime.
I mention NATO because as a rule it can be assumed that using the standard-issue munition of the world's premier military alliance -- the whole thing, not just America, who hasn't signed on to every treaty -- is not a war crime. It's additionally abundant and, due to economies of scale, pretty cheap for its quality. I'm only harping on this because he chose to harp on it.
Who said the rifles are intended exclusively for crowd control? He says repeatedly there's active fighting in these areas -- there's active fighting in all of Gaza, as he acknowledges elsewhere, but he claims these areas are especially bad. If there's serious risk of these sites coming under fire from enemy combatants, these rifles are suitable for engaging them. If there's not, then it sounds like it's actually not an active combat zone.
It was the one confirmed by numerous third party experts who dealt with gunshot wounds. I’m not sure how Israeli pundits responded to it but they may have called them forgeries.
Well, the one I'm talking about was physically impossible. I recall there were a number of 'experts' who swore by it, thereby proving that either they're not experts or they're willing to flagrantly lie to propagandize against Israel. It's perfectly possible some members of the IDF have shot children for sport -- I certainly can't prove otherwise, and there might well be other, real proof -- but they weren't the ones in those pictures.
Hm, I don’t see a single error in his testimony. Which error did you have in mind?
I note you didn't address the claim that issuing M855 is a war crime. Here's what he said:
Everyone carries a standard basic load of 210 rounds of M855 armor-piercing military combat ammunition... That, in and of itself, that action there, is a war crime.
Can you please point me towards the treaty, the case law, anything at all, that makes carrying M855 a war crime in and of itself?
P-Necromancer
14hr ago
It's the constant prevarications that make it so hard for me to take these complaints seriously.
Israelis open fire indiscriminately on civilians seeking aid.
Oh, OK, that sounds really, really bad.
That’s 14 days of meals. So, out of 64 days, we’ve provided 14 days of meals to the entire population in the enclave of Gaza.
Wait, what? If they're firing indiscriminately on civilians seeking aid, how is this number not zero? Is the claim that Palestinians are charging these aid stations under fire, climbing through concertina wire, and some few manage to escape with food? ... Or are they not actually firing indiscriminately on civilians seeking aid? I don't doubt civilians have been shot in these places -- It wouldn't even be hard convince me this is a deliberate strategy to deter Palestinians from accepting food aid! -- but that's not what the word 'indiscriminate' means.
The sites have not only become death traps, they were designed as death traps. All four distribution locations were intentionally, deliberately constructed, planned and built in the middle of an active combat zone. Some may argue, “Well, all of Gaza is a war zone.” That may be true, but there are parts of Gaza that are direct — or, determined to be active, operational combat zones where Israeli Defense Forces are operating. Those sites were built in the middle of those areas intentionally.
The things that I just described are not just opinions, they’re facts.
How is it, exactly, that Aguilar can confidently make statements of fact about others' intentions? Did they tell him that? If they did, I'm pretty sure he'd have said. Is he a mind reader? Actually, I rather doubt he's met whoever decided on the placement of the distribution locations; he can read minds at a distance, I suppose. Again, I'm not even saying that's not the intention! I don't know! But he doesn't either, and presenting this as though it's certain is dishonest.
The equipment, the equipment that we were issued, fully automatic weapons, which, in and of itself, is not a violation of protocol. However, we were issued M855 green-tipped ammunition. That’s important, because green-tipped ammunition is a steel-jacketed copper round that’s designed to — specifically designed to penetrate armor. It’s designed to kill. It’s designed to shoot through reinforced objects, to kill someone on the other side of it. That’s what all the UG Solutions contractors are equipped with right now in country. Everyone carries a standard basic load of 210 rounds of M855 armor-piercing military combat ammunition. Why would anyone need that, even if to defend themselves for their — defend their lives, against an unarmed population? It’s inappropriate. That, in and of itself, that action there, is a war crime.
What nonsense is this? Are the distribution locations in active combat zones or not? Anyway, armor-piercing rounds are, obviously, intended for piercing armor. Against unarmored targets, they're less lethal than hollow points. Unarmed civilians, notably, are unlikely to have armor. As for the capacity to penetrate cover: I thought these locations were designed to be death traps? Why would they leave convenient cover in the killing field? Anyway, I don't see the logic in permitting the individuals guarding the site to have weapons, but only so long as they'll be ineffective against a prepared adversary. (Especially after admitting there are prepared adversaries in the area.) I have to say, it seems very weird to me this would be a war crime. Let me do some reading...
Oh, it's not a war crime.
The M855 green tip (the American version of the SS109) is the standard issue round for all of NATO! It's actually not some super special armor-piercing variant, it's what they give every last grunt. Safe to say, issuing this round is not illegal.
It sure is designed to kill, that's true -- is this former green beret confused about the purpose of firearms and their ammunition? Or is he just so contemptuous of his audience that he believes they are? As I noted, they're less deadly against unarmored civilians than hollow points, but here's something I didn't know until I looked into it: using those is (arguably) a war crime! I'm deeply curious what round Aguilar believes would be appropriate; unfortunately, he doesn't say. Rubber bullets? Taking rubber bullets into a situation where you might well get shot at with real bullets is incredibly dumb, but that's not the real problem with the idea: no one even makes rubber bullets in 5.56. They don't exist. Blanks, perhaps?
Aguilar makes some other points that are harder to contest -- for all I know, they are using concertina wire inappropriately -- but I see very little reason to take anything he says seriously given the obvious errors -- I struggle not to say 'lie,' but unlike him, I'm willing to extend the charity to allow he might just be incorrect -- I found briefly skimming the article.
Maynard also suspects that the IDF is deliberately shooting children for sport, which other doctors have said in the past (I wrote a post on this a year ago or so).
Would that be the thread with several x-ray images of full power rifle rounds, with no deformation whatsoever, in the middle of children's heads? I'm genuinely asking; it might be something else. But that's the one I remember, because it was a transparent hoax.
Once again, I'm perfectly willing to believe the IDF is misbehaving in Gaza -- actually, I'd go so far as to say I do believe it, at least to some extent -- but if there's such overwhelming evidence for it, why do their opponents insist on mixing in obvious falsehoods? Just tactically, I'm certain it does far more damage to their position than just sticking to points that aren't trivially refuted.
P-Necromancer
2d ago
The labor theory of value is wrong, yes. I think you're missing a step or two between that and the Washington State Divorce Court being the proper way to assess that value. The correct question is 'What rate of pay would Jeff Bezos and his wife have agreed to in return for her assistance?' Which is unfortunately impossible to answer given that no such negotiation took place.
I suppose you could argue that he married her with the understanding that, should they divorce, their assets would be divvied up according to that process? That's technically valid, but it'd be just as valid if that process were anything else, provided those terms wouldn't have prevented their marriage; also impossible to say, I suppose. Still, I think this is the best supported position.
On the other side, one can consider what he'd have had to have paid someone else to fulfill those same responsibilities -- certainly far, far less than he ended up paying her, even if he'd had to take out a loan to do so. It's certainly possible she did something for Amazon no one else could have done, but neither accounts nor packing orders meets that bar. He likely wouldn't have taken out a loan to pay someone else to do those things (at least not very early on), but that's not actually relevant so long as the court would have forced him to pay her for her labor regardless of the success it engendered -- her compensation was guaranteed, so there should be no risk premium. But that's not what the court would do, and they both knew that at the time, so maybe a risk premium is fair.
P-Necromancer
2d ago
But 'make lots of money' is only imperfectly correlated with 'the company I work for makes lots of money.' And, indeed, the correlations between 'doing my best to make money for my employer' and both 'make lots of money' and 'the company I work for makes lots of money' are very imperfect. In practice, generating maximum value for the company is only really the optimal path for 1. the owners 2. people in roles with very clear metrics (e.g. sales) -- and then only to the extent those metrics can't be more easily gamed, and 3. those with both a great deal of control over the company and a lot of their compensation tied up in stock options/performance bonuses/etc. (i.e. a handful of executives). Some other roles (e.g. security, compliance) have strong incentives not to lose the company an enormous amount of money (in certain specific ways)... Which isn't actually the same thing, as becomes abundantly clear if you ever have to interact with these people: they'd really much rather nothing gets done if it makes the particular sorts of incidents for which they'll be held responsible slightly less likely.
Everyone else is one or more principal-agent problems away from those incentives. Expecting corporations to actually maximize profit is only slightly less naive than expecting command economies to actually optimize for the public good. Their owners want that, but only a tiny minority of the decisions are actually made by the owners, or by executives, or even by directors. The vast majority are made by bottom-level employees and their direct superiors, which, in large companies, are very detached from the company's actual profitability. They'll lose their jobs if it goes under, of course, but it's not like their personal efforts can do a lot to prevent that or bring it about -- there are a lot of these people.
The incentive is to keep your boss happy enough with you and otherwise do as you like, which might mean slacking off, or using your position to push your morality or politics, or maybe even doing a good job for the simple satisfaction of it. But it's a mistake to assume profitability is the overwhelming incentive, or even a particularly strong one, given how difficult it is for the people who really want that to enforce their will over the entire organization.
P-Necromancer
4d ago
There are cases where "if you give an inch they'll take a mile" but there are also cases where small changes are catastrophized, so at the end of the day you kind of have to take it case by case.
I don't disagree; you've only got so much energy to care about these things. Not every issue is sufficiently important to sufficiently many people to foster this dynamic.
I do not think that a broad assertion that all politics is a maximalist, existential struggle is accurate as a general worldview, nor a common enough viewpoint to be assumed.
Not all politics, sure. I'd even grant that there have been times and places where no political questions were treated that way, or at least not at any scale. But though I take the general point, surely Israel/Palestine meets that bar? That's absolutely how people on both sides describe it.
In politics, victory leading to stalling out is actually more common than you might imagine. It's partially related to the idea of "political capital", where there's actually only so much appetite/time/attention/money for change to go around. Not uncommon is the situation where a major change leaves everyone exhausted and further efforts lose their urgency, or even provoke a counter-reaction in a kind of rubber banding effect.
Sure, this is true. I think I'd categorize it as a 'both sides lose' effect: one side lost the election, the other was failed or betrayed by their chosen representative. Actually accomplishing things is hard, so this is a reasonably common outcome. (Appearing to accomplish things is easier, though, and pissing off the other side is easier still; the Trump approach, which has proven very effective in motivating his base.)
A counter-reaction, though, is entirely in line with my theory. The question is whether it truly behaves like a rubber band (in that the oscillation is damped and will eventually stop), or like a swaying top (where the oscillations will only grow until it inevitably falls one way or the other).
Honestly I think it's more fair to say that societies are generally biased towards the status quo, rather than constantly hopping on runaway trains. This is especially true the more lower-d democratic a society is! So clearly Weimar Germany is a bad example. I think people forget that politics is ultimately downstream of the actual opinions of regular people, not the other way around.
This, though, I don't think I agree with. Well, the problem was bad in the Weimar Republic and the Weimar Republic wasn't particularly democratic, but that just means that democracy isn't a necessary condition. To build out the theory a little further, my contention is that you see this dynamic where disorganized (or poorly organized) groups compete over important goals; political parties in democratic countries are an example of this, but so is gang warfare and Israeli settlers/Palestinian terrorists.
But the cases where politics lacks this dynamic seem to me to be the ones where people are least engaged; single party states, effectively single party states (in that the parties don't really disagree on anything important), local politics (though those can be astonishingly vicious at times). Andrew Jackson made America much more democratic, but he certainly didn't reduce polarization.
I suppose I'm not really sure what you mean by how 'democratic' a society is. That regular people hold moderate views? That definitely helps, but I'm not sure what it has to do with democracy. That important questions are resolved via elections? I think that makes it worse. That people believe that important questions should be resolved via elections? Maybe -- it makes escalating to violence less likely, at least. But that's still more or less true of both major parties in America despite their increasing radicalism. I'll grant it's getting less true over time, though.
A two-state solution is almost by its very nature a compromise, and as they say, the best compromise leaves everybody at least a little angry. And didn't you yourself say that true escalation comes when both sides lose? So at least in my eyes, any two state solution, if actually implemented, is definitionally a détente.
Ah, well, I think it might be assuming the conclusion to call it a 'solution' (which I did as well), because I don't believe it'd actually end the conflict.
Right now, isn't a two-state solution clearly a win for Palestine? It's not everything they want, but it's far better than (apparently) permanent Israeli occupation. It'd count as a loss for both sides if they credibly committed to abandoning their claim on the rest of Israel, which 1. would, so far as I know, be incredibly unpopular and 2. no one in Palestine currently has the legitimacy to credibly commit to anything. (Plausibly a misstep on Israel's part, but plausibly not; not like those leaders were especially willing to negotiate a reasonable settlement before.)
Without that commitment, a two-state solution is just proof that Palestine's tactics are working, which I believe would only lead to renewed enthusiasm for them, coupled with much greater capacity to carry them out.
Again though I would ask the question: would a genuine attempt at a two-state solution, under Israeli-preferred lines, be accomplished via a high degree of force? I think the answer is a clear no, but I'd be interested to hear if you disagree and think it's really a plausible end-state of naked maximalist agenda-seeking by both sides.
Establishing the two-state solution wouldn't require any significant violence; Israel would just need to pull back to the line. I'm not clear on why they'd do that, but they could. If you're asking what it would take, practically speaking, to bring that about, I suppose sufficient international pressure could do it without (first order) violence.
I believe the violence would come after, when Palestine uses its newfound freedom to reorganize and rearm before attacking Israel again. Is there indication Palestine would be satisfied with a two-state solution? There might be, I suppose, but I haven't encountered it.
My position isn't that a two-state solution is the end-state; it's that it's the pendulum swinging the other way; in fact, the middle position is when the pendulum swings the fastest. (Though, given the relative strength of each side, I'm not convinced it is the middle position; Gaza's situation pre-October 7th is probably closer.)
Furthermore, geographic national boundaries in particular are, historically, way more sticky than you might think. Just look how awkwardly persistent the British and European decided lines are in the Middle East overall, despite their in many cases obvious unsuitability to match the facts on the ground!
I think this is 1. a relatively recent development and 2. motivated primarily by technological factors. The obsession with keeping borders exactly where they are was borne out of the incredible destruction of WWI and especially WWII -- it's too high a price, and any would-be conqueror needs to be shut down hard so people don't forget it.
In Europe, at least. I'm honestly not too sure why the taboo has (kind of) held in Africa and the Middle East. I suppose the same factors exist there to a lesser extent (in that they're less densely populated than pre-war Europe, and that military technology has actually mostly turned away from mass destruction towards precision over the past half century), and the First Gulf War probably set an example for anyone thinking about it. But that was relatively late in the period in question.
I suppose the fundamental reason is that the British didn't just draw lines on a map; they established governments for each of these new states, and each of those governments had a vested interest in not losing their territory, however little sense it made for them to have it. Defense is generally easier than offense, so it stuck?
As to the messy intermingling of peoples and the resolution thereof: it's worth noting that, when the game of musical chairs stopped in Western Europe post-WWII and the borders were 'fixed,' the Allies additionally engaged in an absolutely massive campaign of ethnic cleansing; putting everyone back where they belonged, you might say. This largely targeted Germans, but it was far from exclusive to them. The fact that those nations are so neatly sorted today is the result of a deliberate, forceful effort that would absolutely be called genocide today.
Was that actually a good idea in spite of the human cost? In retrospect it hardly seems necessary, but mainly because it's hard to imagine Germans and Frenchmen struggling to peacefully coexist, which I imagine was much less hard to believe at the time. I have more mixed feelings about the similar effort accompanying the separation of India and Pakistan, because it's very easy for me to imagine conflict between Muslims and Hindus. Not that there isn't conflict between the two now; separating populations that hate each other likely makes low-level violence less common and outright war more common. Not sure which end of that tradeoff is better.
P-Necromancer
4d ago
Yeah, a real organization with rigid, non-democratic decision making processes can avoid this dynamic, at least so long as those processes hold. Japan's surrender in WWII is instructive, here: There was a cabal of officers who tried to prevent the surrender, but discipline held and they were rebuffed. The difference with amorphous groups is that there's just no one who can do the rebuffing; 'leaders' last only so long as the rest of the movement deigns to listen to them.
P-Necromancer
5d ago
But slopes are slippery! It's the literal, physical nature of a slope (and the relationship between static and kinetic friction) that, once you start to move down one, you tend to continue. The argument is, I suppose, that a lot of things people treat like slopes really aren't... but aren't they? I'm struggling to think of a case where a political movement, having achieved its proximal objective, declares victory and goes home. Actually, I'm not just struggling; the idea is absurd. Individuals can do that; amorphous groups never can.
Victory draws interest because everyone loves a winner, and to divide up the spoils -- power, but mostly cachet -- you get purity tests, which rapidly become purity spirals. The intra-group dynamics drive the inter-group dynamics: if you don't keep pushing for more, you get pushed out. This is what we see in real life: victory only emboldens movements, and a couple decades down the line, they're demanding things their forebears' mocked as slippery slope arguments. They reach and reach until, finally, the public's patience runs out... then their opponents get a turn.
(This is just one mechanism. There are others.)
The civil rights movement, the moral majority, the LGBT movement, anti-communism, progressivism, interventionism; just a handful of the many, many examples from recent history.
To put it in concrete terms: obviously bullet point 2 makes bullet point 3 more likely. Well, I very much doubt it'll follow such a clean progression; there's generally more momentum to these things. Palestinians don't exactly hide the fact that a supermajority want the last point; how could letting them organize and regroup not make it more likely? It might still be unlikely -- not like any of the other Arab nations have proven able to enforce their will on Israel -- but I think it's very hard to argue it would become less likely.
But, you argue, isn't Israeli oppression a slippery slope too? If Palestine just lets Israel establish settlements in the West Bank (or whatever), doesn't that just make more thorough depredations more likely? Yes! Both sides accuse the other of starting down a slippery slope, and both are right!
(You frame this as 'backsliding' from the two state solution; because you think it's more fair, presumably? But why would Palestine see it that way? Backsliding would moving towards an Israeli-controlled single state. A Palestinian-controlled single state would, obviously, be continuing to slide forward down the same slope: Palestine achieving it's goals.)
In Germany, the Nazis rose in large part to oppose the communists, who were, at the time, the dominant political force in the country (not in terms of votes, certainly, but in terms of organization and political violence. Which was, after all, their stated path to victory). Then the Nazis, having achieved power, ruthlessly suppressed the communists; they would do the same to them if they got the chance, they said. Which was thoroughly borne out the moment the communists did get the chance!
So how, in this model, can de-escalation ever occur? Well, one side can wipe the other out, either literally or in terms of group membership; this is how the conflict between slave owners and abolitionists ended, for example. But true de-escalation mainly happens when both sides lose, I think. The Good Friday Agreement was a tacit admission from both sides that neither could achieve their full aims. And sometimes, when the swings are too quick and dramatic, the public can simultaneously lose patience with both.
P-Necromancer
10d ago
Oh, it's absolutely ubiquitous. Some describe it as a common trademark of fascism... but I think you might actually see it more frequently from the critics of fascism. It's been the narrative on the alt-right since that term went mainstream: they're both incredibly dangerous and total losers. Hell, it's the narrative on the literal Nazis, as can be observed just a little upthread. They were not merely evil but utterly incompetent in all respects. Safe to say, I think, those same people don't believe the allies overcommitted to fighting the Nazis and really didn't have to try that hard.
But... it's not actually a contradiction? One of the more common arguments you see along this line is anti-anti-immigration: 'Nativists believe both that immigrants are lazy welfare parasites and that they steal jobs from hardworking Americans!' But groups have multiple members: there could be some of each. And often the 'strength' and 'weakness' can co-exist. Are guerilla fighters strong or weak? They can't beat their occupiers face-to-face or they wouldn't be guerillas. But guerilla campaigns have driven occupiers out many times. How about terrorists or incarcerated criminals? How about a world-champion MMA fighter... sent to the front lines in Ukraine? How about Harvey Weinstein? How about an IRS auditor? In some contexts these people are very dangerous and in others they're very weak.
I think you see it everywhere because it's often true; it's the complaint that misses the mark by equivocating over definitional boundaries until it looks like there's a contradiction that doesn't really exist.
P-Necromancer
13d ago
1 million tokens is a lot! (Gemini 2.0 had 2 million, but good luck getting it to function properly when it's that full). That is 750k words. All of Harry Potter is just over a million.
You know, I hadn't really internalized just how big this is. You got me curious about it. I uploaded something I'm working on -- 240k words, which, with Gemini 2.5 Pro, came out to about 400k tokens.
Honestly, I'm impressed that it works at all and very impressed how fast it works. Thought I'd at least have time to get up and get a drink, but it was already responding to my question inside 30 seconds. Just being able to throw compute at (essentially) reading a book feels magical, like nine women making a baby in a month.
Unfortunately, that's where my praise ends. It... has a general idea what happened in the text, certainly. I wouldn't give it much more than that. I'm used to 2.5 being impressively cogent, but this was pretty bad -- stupider than initial release GPT 4, I want to say, though it's been long enough I might be misremembering. If you ask it concrete questions it can generally give you something resembling the answer, complete with quotes, which are only ~30% hallucinations. Kind of like talking to someone who read the book a few months ago whose memory is getting a bit hazy. But if you ask it to do any sort of analysis or synthesis or speculation, I think it'd lose out to the average 10-year-old (who'd need OOMs longer to read it, to be fair).
(Also, the web front end was super laggy; I think it might have been recounting all the tokens as I typed a response? That feels like too stupid an oversight for Google, but I'm not sure what else it could be.)
Not sure where the disconnect is with the medical textbooks you say you tried. Maybe the model has more trained knowledge to fall back on when its grasp on the context falls short? Or you kept to more concrete questions? As of now I think @Amadan's semantic compression approach is a better bet -- whatever you lose in summarization you make up in preserving the model's intelligence at low context.
(Royal Road makes it so you can't export an epub of your own fic without paying, and without that option, I'd be doing a lot of copying and pasting)
FanFicFare can do this for free. It's also available as a calibre plugin, if you want a gui.
Though, bizarrely, Gemini (at least via Google AI Studio) doesn't support epub uploads. Concerns about appearing to facilitate the upload of copyrighted material? Kind of dumb considering epub is an open format and they allow PDF, but I could see how it might be spun in a lawsuit. Anyway, RTF should work, but didn't for me. Eventually got something workable out of pandoc:
pandoc -f epub -t markdown_strict-smart-all_symbols_escapable --wrap=none
Your so-and-so’s heir is the most important thing about you no matter what you do.
This is an odd framing: that heir has a (great great...) grandfather as well as grandmother. There is only one of you and (potentially) many of your progeny, so it's overwhelmingly likely that the most important thing about any given man will be his children too. And a woman (or a man) can trivially escape this 'shadow' by not having children, which is in the modern day very much an option.
I suppose the distinction is meant to be that women invest more in their children? Or that that investment has more of an impact? Or are less likely to be important otherwise?
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
Broadly agreed. I suspect many products are no longer profitable to sell in America at all and many others have a vastly reduced customer base. And, like I said, that's the actual deadweight loss here: preventing transactions that would otherwise have happened. When the tariff is paid there's no actual loss, the government just takes some of the value for itself. But a prevented transaction doesn't merely extract value, it destroys it.
My point was just the technical truth. Pedantic, maybe, but this isn't the sort of information environment where you can't afford nuance and must prioritize being merely directionally correct. I'm certainly not claiming cheap consumer imports secretly have enormous margins -- I don't know if Trump really believes that, but I don't.
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
Actually, I’d say there’s a better case for itemizing tariffs than sales tax, since the latter doesn’t actually give you any choice. The state of Texas is going to get its cut no matter which goods Amazon sells to Texans.
I suppose that's true: the seller's costs don't matter to you, but it could at least signal to you that you might be able to find cheaper options elsewhere, at least in the small niches where there is a vaguely competitive American-made option that isn't itself dragged down by tariffs on part imports.
They don’t think that. They think having to pay a tax is a bad thing. What happens after that is handwaved.
Nor do they really go anywhere. If a traditional tax hike was on the table, they’d flip out about it, too. But Trump is a populist, and has demonstrated less than zero interest in the normal legislative process, so that’s a non-starter.
Would they? I've heard a decent amount of flipping out about Trump's proposed 'tax cuts'-- scare quotes because they're almost all extensions of 2017 cuts. (He is, bizarrely, considering removing the cap on SALT again, though? I'd always considered that his single best policy move; why should the Federal government subsidize rich states' high spending?) In other words, they're complaining about the absence of a hike. Granted, most of them seem to think these cuts just benefit the wealthy (fairly ridiculous; doubling the standard deduction and the child credit disproportionately benefit the middle class) so I suppose they're at least not knowingly advocating for raising their own taxes.
P-Necromancer
3mo ago
Ah, that point was not directly relevant to Amazon's decision here. At least, there's a legible business motive in addition to the presumed political one. Nonetheless, it's a common complaint that misses the mark. Apologies if it wasn't clear that was a digression.
I'm no Republican; at most I'd say they are, perhaps, slightly better on taxation than Democrats on average. Even these tariffs aren't as bad as a tax on unrealized gains would have been, for instance, though I've got no idea how serious that proposal really was; not very, I thought, but I also thought Trump was too market-focused to really move forward with extreme tariffs either. Well, I suspect it would have been harder to pull off via executive fiat, at least. But you're certainly right they're doing their very best to tear up that lead right now.
More generally, it's hardly surprising that both sides are hypocritical on this issue: polarization means they both prioritize opposing the other over any particular principle. This is the default scenario.
P-Necromancer
3mo ago
Agreed. That's deceptive in just the same way. I don't think there's any particular movement to get sales tax repealed, though, so I suspect the motive is slightly different: advertising a slightly lower price in the hopes that marginal customers will be too lazy/ignorant to calculate the true price before getting far enough into the sale for the sunk cost fallacy to set in.
Looks like Amazon has given up on this idea; were they planning on hiding the tariff charge until checkout? At least on Chinese goods, I suspect it's high enough to overcome sunk cost reasoning anyway, though I suppose there's always some marginal consumer on whom it'd have worked.
P-Necromancer
3mo ago
I mean, it's a lie. Highly misleading, at least. It's clearly intended to communicate to the consumer that they're assuming the whole burden of the tax. This simply isn't how taxes work. The burden is split between buyers and sellers according to the relative elasticity of supply and demand. This is hard to measure in practice but you should never expect to see it go 100% one way or the other. They can list the tax as a line item if they like, it doesn't change the reality of the situation for them: if they want to maximize their profits, they'll have to reduce their margins. Of course, the maximum possible profit may in fact be negative now...
As @anti_dan says, so far as the consumer is concerned, it's no different from any other government-imposed cost, including both non-tax impositions like costly regulatory requirements and each direct and indirect tax on a business's operations: sales tax, which is often reported, but also corporate income tax, capital gains paid on their stock (which reduces share price, which reduces the amount of liquidity they can raise through sales, which can be compared to the cost of loaning that capital to get an equivalent rate), their employees' income tax (of which, again, they bear some of the incidence). Sellers love to complain about their costs, but at the end of the day all that matters to the consumer is the product they offer and the cost they offer it at.
(Though, as others have intimated, perhaps the real goal is to propagandize against the tax in the hopes they will later be able to offer the same product at a lower price. That does raise the question why they weren't already doing this for all those other taxes, however.)
For that matter, where do all these people who think taxes being paid is a bad thing go when the discussion turns to income tax, or payroll tax, or social security? I'm not convinced the marginal government dollar isn't net-negative, but Democrats don't generally hold that position. The money actually paid into the tariffs is no better or worse than any other source of tax dollars: the downside is all the transactions that don't occur because of the tariffs. I suppose that's harder to communicate, though.
Tariffs are generally bad. They can play a part in a net-positive strategy, but these obviously don't: the tariffs are the whole strategy. Are they bad enough to justify lying to make them look worse than they are, or bad in different ways? I'm not sure.
P-Necromancer
4mo ago
Google lets pages from sites with millions of words blatantly copied off of chatgpt take the first result
Wait, really? I don't think I've ever seen this; certainly not in the first result. Do you possibly mean in the ads? If not, do you have an example search term?
Maybe I'm just easy to fool, but I honestly don't think I've been impacted by (text) AI slop at all. I imagine it fills out the bodies of those recipe blogs no one reads, but I've been skipping over those since they were all artisanally crafted slop. I'm reasonably confident almost all the fiction I read was written by a real person -- as far as I know, SOTA text gen still isn't able to maintain continuity over tens of thousands of words. Maybe as an assistant for editing or filling out short exchanges, but at that point I wouldn't really call it slop. (And, if it is good enough that I really can't tell, why should I care?) I'm certainly not buying bottom-of-the-barrel self help ebooks off Amazon, or whatever trendy topic people are generating books for.
P-Necromancer
4mo ago
Apologies for the digression, but I feel compelled to point out there are legitimate economic reasons why certain jobs are valued over others that are in their totality more important to the maintenance of civilization. It is, at least, not purely aesthetic and cultural.
Imagine a society with two professions: farming and weaving. Of the two, farming is obviously the more important -- it doesn't matter how nice your clothes are if you starve to death. And, for the sake of argument, let's say that weaving is the harder of the two, requiring far more education/training/practice.
Farming is both more useful and easier. So everyone should be a farmer, right? Clearly not. If you have no farmers, adding one is massively valuable: he directly saves many lives. But if you already have many farmers, adding another one just increases variety slightly, or reduces produce prices. If you have no weavers, adding a weaver is pretty valuable. Less so than the first farmer, certainly, but the most important uses for cloth -- bandages, maybe, or protection from the elements in harsher climates -- are important, and obviously that's where the products of your only weaver will go.
So you want some of each. How many? Not an easy question, but here's an algorithm that should work: given X farmers and Y weavers, would X-1 farmers and Y+1 weavers be more valuable? Or the reverse? Swap one worker in the indicated direction and then repeat until neither change improves total utility. The average value of a profession decreases monotonically with worker count (if you cut one farmer, the rest will adjust such that only the least valuable farming work goes undone), so this simple algorithm should always find the optimal arrangement.
This is all just a long winded way to say that jobs (and all other goods) are valued at the marginal return rather than the average, and that's a good thing. The point of a wage is to incentivize workers to adopt a certain profession, and you want to allocate workers to where they can produce the most value given the current state of the market. If nail factory workers aren't paid well, that's because we already have enough nail factory workers. You don't compare the total value of nails to the total value of [some other better paid profession], you compare the marginal value produced by an additional worker in each field, because that's the number that indicates where the marginal worker should go.
If that poor wage results in a large exodus from the profession, fewer nails will get made and more and more important uses for nails will go unfulfilled... such that it becomes worthwhile to pay nail factory workers more. Everyone -- factory owners, consumers, and workers -- just need to follow their individual incentives and the result naturally maximizes total utility.
As for prestige: to some extent I think you're right that it's about self-actualization. Teachers and musicians and journalists are much higher status than their wage predicts, and petroleum engineers much lower. But these cases are interesting because they diverge from the baseline; wage is the baseline. After you've stripped away all the cultural/philosophical cruft, you'd still expect to see the observed phenomenon.
P-Necromancer
5mo ago
Ah, I can see how that's unclear. Here's what I meant:
Suppose that the bankruptcy process were repealed. Debtors can still run out of money, obviously, but there's no established legal process to discharge insolvent debts. Further, suppose that both creditors and debtors are unhappy with this change, as your prior comment did. My point was that in this scenario, there's no reason they couldn't just add a bankruptcy clause to their loan contracts. The actual process is identical, it's just that instead of it being codified by law, it's codified by contract, which the courts enforce just as they would have a standard bankruptcy.
(In practice this is somewhat complicated, as bankruptcy proceedings generally involve more than two parties, not all of whom necessarily have agreements with each other. This isn't an insurmountable issue if everyone really does like the process as it stands; every creditor could agree to abide by the decisions of a bankruptcy court.)
When I said it's implicit, what I meant was that contracts are currently written with the understanding that bankruptcy is possible. That is, it's implicit in the lending contract. There's no need to write such a provision because the courts will enforce it regardless. It's not that both parties want their contract overridden by the state. It's that, given they know the state will override their contract in this way, there's no need to make it explicit in the text. If all parties really do want the possibility of bankruptcy to exist, where the process is defined is just bookkeeping.
This isn't intended as a gotcha; in principle it should be very surprising to find a case where the practice of consensual contracts excludes a Pareto improvement, so it's important to determine whether this is such a case. I don't think it is, but it was worth exploring.
As an aside, I'm not a particularly committed libertarian either. Even were the theory air-tight for rational, aligned agents (which it may or may not be), ignorance, foolishness, and principal-agent problems often lead to entities making bad contracts and I think we're better off for the ability to nullify them under some circumstances, even given the costs associated with people anticipating that possibility.
P-Necromancer
5mo ago
If, as you say, all parties want it, then, were it not the law, it could simply be written into the contract. Contracts often have exit clauses or explicitly defined penalties for noncompliance. Loans generally don't because they're written in the context of a legal environment that guarantees exit via bankruptcy; it's implicit.
I'm not sure all parties do actually want bankruptcy protections, but either way I don't see how it threatens the theoretical basis for preserving the sanctity of contract.
P-Necromancer
8mo ago
There's a strictly superior solution: repeal the Jones Act and use the resultant economic gains to fund shipbuilding directly. 3% of the US GDP, the top level estimates; $880 billion. This is 27 times the navy's current shipbuilding budget; 22 times the total US shipbuilding market. (Yes, the vast majority of it is already warships.) Oh, and it's 3.4 times the entire budget of the US Navy. Needless to say, this would completely eliminate any issue of decaying capacity. For that kind of money, we could build 60 new aircraft carriers each year (and then sink them all because it'd be impossible to man them) and have enough budget left over to nearly triple our normal construction.
Of course, if such a proposal were put to the public, I believe we'd rapidly find we do not value our shipbuilding capability at $880 billion. The Jones Act is a near-total failure in its stated aims, but even if it were a fantastic success, even if it only cost the US economy a tenth as much as it actually does, it still wouldn't be worth it, and it only survives by hiding its true costs.
(Not a fan of tariffs either, of course.)
P-Necromancer
9mo ago
Really? No one's made the standard case against unions?
(I've been too lazy to actually make an account here for three years, though I participated occasionally in the old place. This, finally, has pushed me over the edge.)
Say you're an autoworker in a nation that doesn't participate in trade (or that the labor lobby has persuaded to engage in sufficient protectionism the rest of the world can't possibly compete). Would you rather the auto industry be unionized? In principle, yes. (In practice, unions are so dysfunctional the answer might well be no, but let's put that aside and assume for the moment the union will genuinely work towards your interests.)
It'll make the industry objectively less efficient:
- The union will torpedo labor-saving innovations
- Collective bargaining makes it much harder for employers to remove poor performers or reward high performers. At best they'll be permitted to act on irrelevant or gameable metrics, like seniority or overtime hours
- As a result, there's very little incentive for any employee to do more than the minimum
- Strikes obviously reduce productivity, and negotiations waste everyone's time and attention
- Someone's gotta pay the union organizers their six or seven figure salaries. Stapling a whole second bureaucracy onto a company isn't exactly cheap
These factors aren't transfers from the greedy capitalists to the deserving workers, they're just lighting money on fire to bully the capitalists into making those transfers. But so what? It's not coming out of your pocket. You'll make higher wages with much better job security. You can just slack off and collect a better wage than when you were working your ass off! Sure, cars are a lot more expensive, but you're only going to spend a small portion of your salary on cars, so you still come out ahead.
So far so good, right? In fact, it's so good that the factory workers want in on the action, and they unionize. Then the farmhands, and the janitors, and the retail workers, and the accountants, and... Soon enough every industry in your nation has unionized. And the funny thing about workers and consumers is they're actually the same people, depending on the good or service in question. It's easy to see that you're in fact worse off now than you were when there were no unions: all that money you lit on fire has to come from somewhere, and the only people putting money into this whole arrangement are the customers.
But at least the capitalists are mad too?
Unions are government-backed cartels. That's not, like, an insult, it's just factually what they are. (It's also an insult.) I'm baffled how people who are eager to point out the problems corporate monopolies pose (most often with a very generous definition of monopoly) don't see that unions are bad in exactly the same ways and much worse in others. (Monopolies actually don't have to burn that much money to maximize their profits.)
Uncharitably, it's tempting to say they just care more about hurting the capitalists than helping the workers, or that they're happy to defect in full knowledge they're taking advantage of our insane laws on the subject to rent seek. Charitably... I'm struggling to come up with a more charitable explanation than ignorance, which isn't very charitable. I suppose Democrats cynically supporting them as a source of partisan advantage might be more charitable, provided you allow they think their partisan advantage will be good for the country?
(As far as 'fairness' is concerned: things are worth what you can sell them for. This isn't some special standard invented to screw over workers, it's how literally everything else is valued. And note: that's the marginal value, not the average value of the whole class of the product. You can see this easily by observing that food is pretty cheap despite the value of food as a class being effectively infinite for everyone. Collective bargaining is no more 'fair' than Nestle buying up all the water rights and charging you every cent you have for privilege of not dying of dehydration.)
Now, I'm not saying unions should be banned. There are... vaguely union-shaped things that actually work pretty well in some circumstances, like worker co-ops or law firm partnerships. (After all, these are examples of workers organizing and bargaining as a collective, right?) Trying to draw up definitions that capture the necessary subtleties wouldn't be easy, and I have no faith in the legislature's ability to do so. They're currently protecting them, so I think that's plenty fair.
Fortunately, I don't think that's necessary. Just strip their ridiculous legal protections and businesses will make their own judgments, hiring law firms that provide genuine value while firing rent seekers. In this particular case more work might be necessary, but organized crime is a solved problem.
Hmm, alright, I can extend some tolerance towards sloppiness in extemporaneous verbal remarks. I still think most of the ammo paragraph is highly misleading nonsense, but I'm willing to file it under verbal diarrhea and take your interpretation at face value. And, sure, the razor wire might be a war crime; like I said, I didn't look into it.
As to the meat of the matter: The Rome Statute you're citing is this one?
(If I've somehow gotten the wrong one: Sorry, and don't bother reading the rest of the comment.)
(Both 8(2)(b)(i) and 8(2)(e)(i) have the same text; one is a list of 'other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflict, within the established framework of international law' and the other 'Other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in armed conflicts not of an international character, within the established framework of international law.' Not wholly clear which applies myself, but the rule is the same.)
(Israel hasn't signed this statute, but I'll concede the point if the behavior is a war crime by any international standard with substantial support.)
This is... not a very strict clause. I, perhaps naively, thought the standard was much higher. Especially since this is the infamous ICC which the US and Israel refuse to subject themselves to.
As best as I can tell, this statute doesn't distinguish between lethal and nonlethal weapons at all. (Not just this clause; I searched the whole thing for 'lethal' and various non-lethal technologies, and read all of 8(2)(b).) It's just as much a war crime to 'direct attacks' with a baton (or .22 LR rubber bullets) against civilians in general or 'against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities' as with a machine gun. Conversely, if the individual civilian is taking direct part in hostilities, it doesn't seem that they're entitled to any protection under this clause (other clauses and statutes certainly limit what might be done with them even then, but normal infantry rifles with normal ammunition certainly isn't forbidden by 8(2)(b)(xx)). It also does not distinguish between armed and unarmed civilians who are taking a direct part in hostilities.*
So when he says
That's not supported by the statute. They might not need those rifles to defend their lives against an unarmed population, but they're not forbidden from doing so. If they're 'defending their lives,' the individuals threatening them are certainly taking a direct part in hostilities -- have blown way past that standard -- and so may be shot. Even if they accidentally hit other civilians in the process of shooting them; that's not 'intentionally directing attacks' at them. That could run afoul of 8(2)(b)(iv):
But I think it would not in general. The attack must be launched knowing it will cause incidental loss of life or injury, which applies to a missile strike but generally wouldn't to aiming at a particular person and missing. Maybe it'd apply to over penetration? Even then I'm not sure you know it'll happen and that the collateral damage will be clearly excessive.
Concerningly, I'm not even seeing any protections against negligence (except in the narrow sense of 8(2)(b)(iv)) or even deliberately structuring the sites so as to maximize the probability that incidental loss of life that is not clearly excessive will occur. (I suppose this arguably could include issuing standard rifles to soldiers with crowd control responsibilities, provided you could somehow prove that was the intention. Not easy at all, especially if there's any meaningful chance they'll encounter armed, organized opposition.) Perhaps the court would be willing to fill in the gaps there, but it's not in the statute.
If they deliberately shoot civilians who aren't fighting, yeah, that's a war crime. And he's alleging that has happened, fair. But the nature of the rifles is orthogonal to its status as a war crime.
('Not a war crime' is not the same thing as 'morally correct,' or 'tactically wise.' I address only the first, as that's the question at hand.)
* I'm pretty sure? There is 8(2)(b)(vi) that forbids:
My read is that someone who is attacking without weapons has not surrendered in any sense, even if laying down one's arms is a sign of surrender in general.
More options
Context Copy link