TeknOShEeP
15hr ago
Engage maximum cynacism mode! No nukes are needed. In fact, nukes are overrated. Two squadrons of B-52s can drop the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb via conventional ordnance, except those can all be individually targeted down to an arbitrarily precise degree as smart bombs, and so are actually far more devastating. 80% of Iraq's oil is clustered in the southeast, you just blow any civilization near them off of the map, occupy the oil fields, and declare a 200km buffer zone between your occupation area on top of the oil fields and the rest of Iraq. Anything or anyone that enters the buffer zone will be destroyed without warning.
Literal robbery? Absolutely. But perhaps more humane in the long run that the almost quarter-century clusterfuck we have now.
TeknOShEeP
1d ago
There are rules of engagement that are to ensure a country does not win the tactical battle and thereby lose the propaganda war (see Vietnam, and being currently attempted by Israel in Gaza).
And then there are rules of engagement that are simply ass-covering for the REMFs who ordered the operation to begin with (see Afghanistan, Iraq).
And finally, there are rules of engagement for powers who follow Machiavelli's advice to kings (see all sides of WWII, the Mongols under Ghenghis and Kublai Khan, and Rome at its peak).
War is a terrible thing. The modern ideal is that it is to be "civilized" by more humanitarian rules of engagement, but I'm not sure this is true. What I am sure is true is that the current blend of caregory 1 and 2 RoEs used by the US manages to be about the worst of all possible worlds.
TeknOShEeP
6d ago
Maybe, but he burned a lot of bridges with people who would make very good attack ads. Like 40 year career, apolitical professionals ended up hating his guts and can make a very good case for why he made Americans less safe, and would happily do so on national media outlets. Perhaps I'm underestimating the capabilities of the DNC propaganda arm, but especially with his, erm, demographic disadvantages with certain key voter segments, I dont think he would stand a chance.
Well, without doxing myself too much, its mostly aerospace related matters, specifically involving certification of new aircraft, new rules for airports and air traffic controllers, and how the US would harmonize its regulations with other national and supranational regulators (like EASA... okay mostly EASA). The list of sins is long- it was never clear who was actually making a formal decision (lots of 'here's what i think, but xyz all need input'), despite a formal decision being requested. Some paperwork remained outstanding for 4 years. Certain statutory limits on how long the government has to respond to requests and filings were routinely ignored without apology or explanation, to the point we seriously considered suing the FAA and DoT. It also became obvious that several key administrators were completely AWOL and had delegated their entire function to assistants, and when this was brought up directly to him, we got an out of office (I believe it was his paternity leave stint, which is charming, but as a cabinet secretary the buck stops with you, respectfully you dont get to take months of paternity leave), our concerns about serious government malfeasance were never addressed in even a perfunctory manner.
My experience with the previous two secretaries of transportation, as well as the current one, are nothing at all like that. Night and day difference, and I know there are many other people in similar positions who have similar feelings.
I never met with him personally, but the issues i was involved with were the kind of things that would require his approval, or st least input, and that really never happened. In contrast, i have emailed Secretary Chao before and recieved a personal response about three hours later. Secretary Duffy appears to be much the same.
TeknOShEeP
6d ago
So I shared many of your feelings about Buttigeig, and felt that he would have done well at the top of the Democrat ticket, and then I had to deal with his office and him professionally as the secretary of transportation, and now I have to disagree in the strongest possible terms. While he has charm and charisma, as a professional executive head of a functional body, dude is fucking incompetent. In my experience he was totally unable to make an independent decision without 17 layers of ass-covering consultation, totally unable to tell when brown-nosing subordinates might be completely full of shit, and worst from a political perspective, totally unaware of when optics might demand his presence or at least general visibilty, such as when a major transportation disaster has occured, and the Secretary of Transportation might plausibly be expected to have input.
If the DNC wants to lose badly in 2028, I can think of few better ways that having Buttigeig be the nominee.
TeknOShEeP
6d ago
If Trump dies, I do not think there is any obvious candidate to inherit the MAGA kingdom.
Is it not Vance? It seems to me that he is being groomed for the top slot in a way most VPs never are. Also, AFAIK he's in pretty good with the MAGA base.
TeknOShEeP
6d ago
To the extent that genetics (and epigenetic phenomena) express themselves in our behavior, yes.
This is not a condemnation of any individual person, but blank-slateism has been rather conclusively debunked. We are all, to a certain extent, products of our genetics.
TeknOShEeP
8d ago
Thanks for the review, it reminded me of why i got about 200 pages in and never bothered to finish it. Definitely drove home why having a good editor is important.
TeknOShEeP
8d ago
conservatives, i.e. the party of law and order, be a fan of measures which promote public safety?
Define public safey. Because the moment authorities in the US cracked down on anti-lockdown protestors, but then allowed BLM protestors free reign (because "racism is a bigger threat than COVID) it became transparently obvious that either lockdowns had nothing to do with safety, or that those in charge of determining what constituted safety had no idea what they were doing. Or plausibly both. For mild evidence in support of this, I refer you to Sweden which had more mild lockdowns thsk most of the US, and achieved better outcomes.
right in the US, especially in its current MAGA incarnation, is just as gleeful in its authoritarian tendencies
It's fairly obvious that you get your US news from lefty sources, but a few moments of consideration would show that mostly what the MAGA agenda is about is deregulation, sprinkled with some mercantilism. I understand there is a great temptation to slap the evil "authoritarian" label on things you don't like, but getting rid of laws is not authoritarian by any possible stretch of the word. The few genuinely authoritarian actions, like banning red dye 40, have mostly gone unnoticed.
TeknOShEeP
8d ago
No, race realism is also wrong, the actual reason is class/subculture for which you are using skin colour as a proxy, due to the US having a underclass primarily composed of black people. I live in a European country
Respectfully, I have never met a European native who properly groks US white-black race relations, nor the class structure in the US. They both differ in very significant ways from the European experience. Suffice to say, no, its not a class thing, it is a race thing.
there is a social class that behaves in identically disruptive ways on public transport, despite being as white as the rest of the population.
We have those in the US too. They are pretty much universally despised and regarded as being the source of their own problems. The fact that the judgement comes so easily against those with white skin, and yet any level of mental gymnastics will be done to excuse sinilar actions from those with non-white skin... is interesting. (BTW our current Vice President comes from that class, and wrote a very interesting book about his childhood and escaping the destructive cycle. He is quite forthcoming that most of the harms are self-inflicted.)
TeknOShEeP
9d ago
The fact that its a big, amorphous coalition that has differing values just indicates the retaliation has to be stiffer than might otherwise be required, and that appropriate targeting is required.
The problem the left has at the moment is that moderates just don't matter- they are drowned out by the extremist voices, and policy proposals become about pandering to the loudest wing nuts.
Cancel all of the far left nut jobs, and you give space for the center left to actually have a reasonable conversation.
I think its pretty big stretch to say cancel culture actually lost the left any elections. Maybe didnt have as much of an effect as they were hoping, sure. But outside of some cheap "they tried to cancel him! Next they'll cancel you!" propaganda, I dont know what concrete bemefit it actually provided to the right.
TeknOShEeP
9d ago
I think you dismiss justification #3 too easily. Some degree of "Tit-for-Tat" has long been recognized as the Game Theory correct move. If the right just moves on and says "okay, cancel culture is done" then they have let the left have a decade plus of abbhorent, anti-civilizational behavior for free. This shouldn't happen. Hard lessons are the best learned, and a few years getting their noses bent out of joint and prominent leftists fired from media jobs and cancelled off of social media may actually force some self reflection on the left (and about a trillion posts worth of whining about facism, but that will probably happen anyway).
If the right just lets sleeping dogs lie, then the norm becomes "cancel culture is a weapon that only the left gets to use, some of the time." In the long-term interests of free speech, this should not become a norm.
TeknOShEeP
9d ago
What you're proposing is basically a massive country-sized white-collar union.
Yes, we have a name for that: a politcal party. We could create a new one, or maybe just get one of the existing ones to pick up the idea in exchange for support at the ballot box.
I'm not sure where the idea that politics has to be about high-minded ideals instead of basic collective self-interest, but its crept in somehow and is disastrous in its effects.
TeknOShEeP
11d ago
Incorrect, and known to be wrong since the time of Adam Smith - specialization is limited by the extent of the market.
You are talking about a generalization that doesn't apply to the specific situation- right now the the specialization exists. You can pay money to get it. As an example, FAANGs poach each others workers all of the time. But if you, out of a lack of affordable specialization, turn to alternate solutions, then maybe that specialization was not actually as valuable as once believed.
Are we to believe that there's no loss or inefficiency involved in keeping your accounts in a paper ledger rather than a database? What about the applications that are simply impossible without database engineers?
Database engineer is just a job title, and maybe some certs. I know at least three control systems engineers who took much bigger offers to become database engineers because the fundamental math behind optimization is the same for both disciplines, and they are all extremely successful in their new roles. When a FAANG says they cant find an American database engineer and need to parachute in an H-1B, that is, to put it politely, bovine excrement. At best it is incompetent recruiters, and more likely a flat out lie.
TeknOShEeP
11d ago
At some point, however, the price will exceed the value of the work, and the work just won't get done.
Which is a perfectly acceptable business tradeoff.
You see this with minimum wage employees getting replaced by kiosks as the minimum wage goes up
Yes, and I have happily stopped any transactions I would ever have with these sorts of places. I'll still patronize my more local chains (in the vein of In 'n out but better), or even national ones (like Chick-fil-A) that don't treat their employees like cogs. Same with grocery stores. If a business can't cope with rising costs of labor than it deserves to go under.
at the top, I expect you'll simply see progress crawl to a halt (and no, that's not a good thing).
Gonna start an engineering smug war here, but as I see it "tech" progress has already meaningfully ground to a halt outside of LLM babble, and even that is debatable. Ever better targeted ads do not leave the world better off. Recruitment pitch to all of you young programmers stuck in FAANG limbo- go look outside to those clunky old manufacturing, transportation, energy, and industrial companies. They are desperate for good embedded systems engineers, and you can do some fantastically cool shit that will actually make measurable differences in the average person's life.
TeknOShEeP
11d ago
But if the lack of labor drops the value of the output... the output was never valuable in the first place. Say you are having difficulty hiring a database engineer, and eventually you give up and find another solution. Turns out you didnt actually need any database engineers at all.
I do actually think there is something to this, as "tech" seems to be completely infested with solutions (and programmers working on said solutions) searching in vain for a problem. Adding in more people making more "solutions" is not a cure for the condition.
TeknOShEeP
11d ago
There are plenty of roles where demand exceeds supply, however
Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase. In this case you can make a very simple argument that H-1Bs are depressing American wages.
About a single hundred thousand, not all of those American
If you limit your pool to CS graduates, yes. But I humbly submit that essentially any engineering or math graduate can be trained fairly easily to do junior programmer job at a FAANG, and i personally know many who have taken that route. That at least triples your available talent pool.
TeknOShEeP
11d ago
Eh, again YMMV but speaking to my experience and that of my colleagues and family, I cannot point to an H-1B that I would say is good for the country. So yeah, I would say its universal abuse (this is not a universal judgement about the character of people receiving those visas, many are fine folks put in a sub-optimal situation).
100k absolutely does not wipe out Apple's backend developer. Thats between 25-33% of their salary, not including benefits. It makes them more expensive, so you have to be more careful, but this is big tech we are talking about, they have more money than God and are not afraid to sling it around.
TeknOShEeP
11d ago
He also tried to get rid of the SALT tax exemption in his first term, which is probably the single most progressive piece of tax policy pushed in the past 70 years (and perhaps the only thing AOC agreed with him on).
Prediction: in 50 years historians will look on Trump like they are now looking on Nixon- unexpectedly the most progressive president of their cohort, and completely unrecognized for it in their time.
TeknOShEeP
11d ago
All the H-1B workers I've met at FAANG were great workers, no different from native born Americans, and they were not paid less.
Then respectfully, their jobs should be going to American workers. There is no role in any FAANG company (unless you mean NVIDIA instead of Netflix) where there are no qualified Americans. As an industry "tech" does not have any super secret squirrel sauce that you can't find employees for in most first world countries, its just about how many you can find and what you pay them (chipmaking is a different ball game of course). American universities are graduating hundreds of thousands of them every year. But its easier for a company to import H-1Bs (and even pay them the same!) who's loyalty you own and who on paper have the skills you need than hire domestic talent that might on paper need training and experience.
But a country should have labor policies that benefit its citizens, maybe even at the expense of other countries citizens, thats one of the points of being a country in the first place.
TeknOShEeP
11d ago
Yeah, I think one of the ones I called an EB-1A is actually an O-1 as he has family back in europe that he will return to. But same concept- the genius visa exists for 95+ percentile individuals, and frankly i dont think we should be recruiting below that at the expense of our domestic labor.
TeknOShEeP
11d ago
I disagree. H-1B is not just "certainly abused", it's universally abused. I'm not saying that H-1Bs are all morons, but some are, and the not-morons are, while competetant, not above replacement level. America generates highly skilled in-demand workers from its domestic population in sufficient numbers to fill any role an H-1B would fill, its just that corporations jave not wanted to spend the time and money to develop the pipeline.
Also, 100k is almost the perfect amount of money to do what you say you want- if your talking about a highly skilled worker (lets be honest, a coder at FAANG or similar) than 100k per year is not actually that big of a deal compared to the rest of their compensation package. It will prevent companies like Cognizant from just chain migrating half of Bengaluru to provide substsndard IT services, and will also prevent scummy hospitals from hiring immigrants instead of domestic medical workers, but isn't stopping Apple from hiring some uber talented backend developer.
TeknOShEeP
11d ago
H-1B allows us to do it by attracting the best and brightest from other countries.
Thats not what H1-Bs are for though. The EB-1A is the "genius visa", and it does not appear to have the $100,000 fee.
H1-Bs are for filling "specialist" roles that "cannot be filled by Americans", and are universally acknowledged to be heavily abused. While I have only run into a few H1-Bs in my industry, none of them impressed me with their acumen or work ethic, and frankly i would have let them go if I had control over it. The EB-1As Ive worked with though have all been frigging rock stars.
TeknOShEeP
17d ago
To me Buttigeig managed to utterly disqualify himself by being probably the worst Secretary of Transportation America has had in at least a quarter century. He essentially was AWOL for at least a quarter of his stint (though given the SecDef was also able to go AWOL for medical reasons, perhaps this was an unannounced policy of the Biden admin?) and offered the weakest possible response to any of the notable transport disasters that occured under his watch.
What policy he did managed to push seemed entirely focused on DEI rather than any actual effectivity or improvement, and in doing so he managed to deeply piss off a number of otherwise apolitcal career professionals, any number of which would be happy to offer damning soundbites to the media outlet of your choice.
The lesson here is if you get a cabinet post as a pay-off for dropping out of the primary, be like Hillary and actually get shit done (we can argue about whether the shit being done was good or bad, but no one was debating that she wasnt capable). If you pull a Pete, your career is dead.
I think that would be a fair assessment. There is certainly a wide gap between being a fairly local politician and trying to run a campaign on a bigger stage, and then actually delivering once you've won the race. In many ways, the skills don't translate, and cabinet secretaries are one of the posts where it can be most obvious (not guaranteed though- regardless of how you feel about the moral and philosophical implications of her actions, it's hard to deny the Clinton got shit done as Sec State, Cruz seems to be doing similarly).
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