PokerPirate
5mo ago
The Menorah is a minor religious symbol and does not hold the same status in Judaism as the cross does in Christianity. The Torah is probably about as important to Jews as the cross is to Christians, and the Torah is not regularly displayed in public spaces.
It's true that Menorahs on public grounds have always been culture war, but I think everything else in your post is gross exaggeration.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
Are these 3d printed guns remotely useful in combat? I can't imagine any plastic parts---let alone printed plastic---standing up to the pressures/temperatures created when firing a bullet. And AK47s are already dirt cheap.
I could see a 3d printed gun being useful for an easily concealable, single-shot assassination weapon, but that's not what a jungle guerrilla needs.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
I'm trying to challenge your statement:
And unlike the traditional Christmas displays which genuinely are now fully secularized, these Menorah displays are deeply religious in nature.
I don't see how you can argue that a "traditional Christmas display" (such as the angels/trumpets linked in the OP, or the still common nativity scenes) is "fully secularized" while a Menorah is not. My point is that the Menorah has no more significance in Judaism than these symbols have in Christianity, and I'd even argue it is much more minor than something like the nativity.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
I lived in North Korea in 2015 and 2016 in order to teach computer science at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. I have a pretty detailed journal of my trip posted online. From that I think you should get a decent sense of what life as a university student in North Korea is like.
Unfortunately, Trump instituted a travel ban to North Korea in 2017 (and Biden has kept the ban in place), so I haven't been back. I still have regular zoom calls with the faculty/students there. Some examples of successes that have come from this work are facilitating only open source contributions from North Koreans and helping North Koreans fix their internet infrastructure. But this sort of work is obviously much harder without being able to go in person, and these days I have much less insight to what the average North Korean thinks.
In my opinion, "no longer pursuing reconciliation with the south" is a huge deal. This pursuit of reconciliation was one of the main pillars of legitimacy for the Kim regime. Whenever I talked to a North Korean about their country, they always brought up that they want reunification. Literally on every street corner in Pyongyang were maps of a unified Korea and propaganda posters saying things like "We want to hug our brothers in the South". So I am very curious how this will be spun for the domestic audience.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
Ehh... I think you have a bit too much of a "soldier climbing over the top at the Somme" notion of physical courage. The other examples [1] of physical courage in the prompt don't have nearly the chance of resulting in a "cheap" death, but are still associated with physical courage. I think a more poignant military-adjacent take is that all these examples of physical courage can be explained away by "training" your body to react a certain way in the face of danger so that you don't need courage in the moment. For example:
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Fire fighters practice running into burning buildings everyday. This may seem scary to an outsider, but after you've learned to do it safely, it's a perfectly normal thing to do. You rarely see firefighters meaningfully risk their lives for strangers, and the captain would certainly scold them for breaking protocol afterward if they do.
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Steelworkers don't start on their first day 10 stories up. They've been slowly building the building floor by floor, so that by the time they're 10 stories up, they're confident in their balance. And any violations of safety protocol are going to get them quickly fired.
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The underdog boxer and the mugged man standing up for themselves are certainly putting themselves in real danger. But it's not the sort of danger that results in a "cheap death" so much as potentially very painful and longterm injuries. I'm sure that most people who do this also have trained for it in someway, but I can't know for sure.
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The mother has trained her mind/body for years through countless small acts of service to her children in order to value their lives above her own. "Mundane" sacrifices like waking up for years at midnight, then 2am, then 4am to feed a baby and change it's diaper make throwing your body infront of fallen debris a no brainer. These mundane sacrifices don't seem at the surface to be too related to physical courage, but I definitely think they end up resulting in actions that seem physically courageous.
[1]: for reference, I'm referring to
The courage exercised by a soldier climbing over the top at the Somme, by a firefighter running into a burning building, by a rock climber attempting a difficult route with shaky fall protection, by an underdog boxer stepping into the ring in a fight against the odds, by a steelworker calmly welding ten stories in the air, by a man refusing to give his wallet to a mugger wielding a knife, by a mother using her own body to shield her children from falling debris.
PokerPirate
7d ago
Just make IoT doodad manufacturers liable for bad things that happen with them and the problem will sort itself out, no state intervention with the potential for universal surveillance and totalitarian control needed.
This is a very common opinion, but if you delegate the assignment of liability to the court, then you will get even more problems about state overreach.
Consider the following scenario: A consumer buys some smart lights for their house. The smart lights are hacked, and hacker uses these smart lights as a proxy to launch ransom-ware attacks against hospitals. The hospitals are collectively "forced" to pay $100 million in ransom to continue their operations. Who is liable in this case? The consumer who didn't put the smart lights behind a firewall? The hospitals who had employees fall for phishing emails? Or the IOT company for not updating the security of their devices? If you don't have legislation defining what makes someone liable, then unaccountable judges will be forced to legislate from the bench about who is liable and who is not. If you don't like the decision, then you can't just vote them out of office the same way you can with legislators.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
As we get closer to the point where LLMs can spontaneously generate 5000-10000 word pieces that make plodding but cogent arguments and engage meticulously with the existing literature, huge swathes of the academic journal industry will simply be unable to survive
I think you're wrong about this being a good thing. Currently, all the best journals in most allow anyone to submit. Sometimes you get people outside "the cathedral" getting really novel ideas published and changing fields. Once it becomes too easy for hoi palloi to submit, journal editors will start relying more and more on the author's credentials. Not from Harvard/Yale/Oxbridge? Then you're totally out of luck.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
Those are extremely important lessons, but I'm skeptical that Art of War and On War can actually deliver them. I went to the Naval Academy. Everyone was "required" to read these books. We also had various practical exercises related to how to achieve military objectives. I saw no correlation between the people who actually read those books and did well academically and people who understood how/why to achieve military objectives.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
That's more-or-less my point. It's all ultimately mundane to the people who do it regularly.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
I hate the dentist.
I'm not scared of the dentist, I just hate everything about the office visit. I hate having to schedule appointments months in advance. I hate having to arrive 15 minutes before the appointment only to wait for 30 minutes before I'm escorted to a chair and another 10 minutes before the dentist sees me. I hate that the dentist is always trying to upsell me on tooth whitening products, and their business model is full of moral hazards. I hate that the dentist only provides "dumbed down" explanations of everything and can't answer my questions in any detail.
Nevertheless, I feel a need to go every few years in order to remove tartar from my teeth and verify there's no cavities. (I'm still not really sure why I should remove tartar from my teeth, though, as no dentist has been able to explain this to me other than it's "just what you should do because bacteria".)
/rant
PokerPirate
3mo ago
The market already has solutions to this problem, they're just normally used for highly skilled staff like programmers. One very common structure is to issue stock options that only vesting after a certain period (like 4 years), which strongly incentives workers to stay with the current firm until vesting. Another common structure in the academic market is that university's will purchase a house for a professor with a 0 interest rate loan that gets forgiven over the period of 10-20 years. But if the employee leaves early, then the loan reverts to a standard (or even much higher than standard) interest rate.
The US actually has done this is the past, but domestic political opposition has resulted in the projects being cancelled. Two particularly famous examples are with North Korea and Iran.
In North Korea: In 1994, the Clinton administration and North Korea signed the Joint Agreement Agreed Framework that resulted in North Korea stopping it's nuclear program in exchange for 2 US-built nuclear power plants. The details are complicated, but essentially the new power plants were a proliferation resistant design and North Korea agreed to regular international inspections by the IAEA that would ensure no nuclear material was diverted to weapons development. The Bush administration, however, effectively canceled the agreement. The stated reason for the cancellation was that North Korea was not abiding by the terms of the agreement and was continuing to develop nuclear weapons in secret. The North Koreans claim that the US was the first to break the agreement by failing to construct the power plants and deliver other agreed upon aid.
More recently in Iran: Obama signed the JCPOA in 2015 with Iran. The idea of the treaty was that the US would supply Iran with "medium enriched uranium". At 20% enrichment, this would be sufficient to power Iran's domestic nuclear power plants and manufacture medical isotopes, but would not be sufficient for weapons manufacturing. In exchange, Iran would agree to dismantle it's infrastructure for uranium enrichment. In 2018, however, Trump withdrew from the JCPOA. Although Trump made claims about Iran failing to uphold it's end of the bargain, this was essentially a move to appeal to his domestic base.
In both cases, we have democratic presidents agreeing to nuclear treaties that would at least in theory prevent proliferation (and in my opinion would have). Then republican presidents dismantling those treaties. This type of pattern is very common in American international relations, and makes foreign countries (especially those not very closely aligned with US interests) very hesitant to enter longterm agreements with the US.
This vacillation in American foreign policy has long been known, and both Iran and North Korea were very hesitant to enter into these particular agreements for fear of the US not following through. Both countries, however, were under lots of internal stress at the time of the agreements (North Korea due to the breakup of the USSR and subsequent 1992 famine, Iran due to sanctions and the various middle eastern color revolutions), and they probably would not have entered these agreements if they were in a more favorable negotiating position.
(I was a nuclear officer in the US navy, and participate in unofficial diplomatic efforts with North Korea.)
PokerPirate
7d ago
Most of the issues raised by your hypothetical can be resolved by the content of the contract signed by the parties.
I do not want to live in a word where people buying a $10 device from walmart have to sign a contract.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
I'd love to hear what you think is "expensive" if you call daily devotion to those mundane tasks of firefighting/caring for an infant/etc "cheap".
PokerPirate
5mo ago
I'd love a source for the wargaming story if you have one. I don't recall similar stories from my reading of nuclear history books.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
I remember watching the Harry Potter movies before reading the books, and was totally confused by parts of movies 3, 4, and 5. (These are some of the longest books, but don't have correspondingly larger movies than the first two.) Lots of other people I know IRL feel similarly.
GOT is different because they got a whole season to explain a book instead of just a movie.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
Operation Ivy Bells is the go-to example of the astounding success American spies have in the technical arena. Basically we tapped an undersea cable the Russians used for top-secret military communication from 1971-1983ish, and we knew EVERYTHING that the Russian navy was doing because of this wiretap.
It's also the go-to example of how easily Americans sell out their own country. An NSA analyst who was in debt sold the secrets of this multi-billion dollar program to the Soviets for a $5000 payment. (The analyst received a total of $35k for other secrets as well.) The analyst wasn't even recruited by the Soviets, he sought them out because he was in debt.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
About 10 years ago, I found a recording on the internet of a Catholic military chaplain blessing the little boy atomic bomb before it went off to destroy Hiroshima. Stupid me forgot to save the reference, and I've been searching for it in vain ever since :(
PokerPirate
7mo ago
I think the editors don't allow links in news stories because it harms the website's pagerank to have outbound links to other (often competing) webpages. This is one of the many subtle unforeseen harms caused by google's monopoly on search that I haven't seen people properly discuss.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
How does one actually sign up for these types of trials? I've long admired the conscientious objectors who got injected with infectious disease to help medical research instead of fighting in the army, but I have no idea what I should do to do something similar. Something like donating a kidney is more obvious how to do, but also seems like there's a lot more hurdles since it seems to happen so much less.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
The legalese consent forms doctors go over with patients are a joke.
My wife also recently had laser eye surgery, and had to go through signing dozens of pages that describe the complications. Of course the doctor went over with her at a high level what the forms meant, and she didn't read them, and just signed anyways.
I really wish that we could just sane 1 paragraph (or even better bullet point) list consent forms for everything, not just medicine.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
Do you have any particular reading recommendations about these quaker antics? I spent a year as apart of a quaker meeting, and always heard about the anti-slavery stuff, but never from anything like a primary source.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
Ehh... I think you're being inconsistent/missing the point.
You previously said:
Fire fighters running into burning building, or a mother using her body to shield her children from falling debris, might look impressive from the outside but it is ultimately mundane.
and then called these things "something of a cheap thing", to which I wanted to know what you think is "expensive".
The "fire fighters running into burning building, or a mother using her body to shield her children from falling debris" absolutely have to "live with the long-term injuries and the PTSD" just as much as any infantryman.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
I not only don't care about them, I fundamentally don't understand why people do.
There's a pretty simple explanation that already aligns with your stated values: Caring about the homeless guy on the street can convert him into a productive member of society (maybe one of the people working at USPS's sorting center).
There's certainly a fine line between "caring" and "enabling" that needs to be debated, but my impression of most of the YIMBY crowd is that their "care" for the homeless guy stems from the same rational self-interest that you're describing.
I don't see how you can reasonably construe this speech as a problem.
Plenty of Americans describe themselves as "Irish" or "German" or whatever without trying to imply they are less American. American's do this so much that there are thousands of memes making fun of us for it. So I see getting bent that a Somali-American calls herself Somali as just a thinly veiled boo outgroup.
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