ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
14d ago
So, suppose Iran does agree to let US soldiers do exactly that. However, they renege shortly after: various observers accuse them of not honoring that commitment and of continuing clandestine pursuit of nuclear weapons. And, critically, the US does not respond with massive bombing but only strongly worded letters.
Would your prediction be falsified? And would that be enough to make you score this war as a loss?
ThenElection
14d ago
What, concretely, does Iran not being allowed to do those things look like?
Or are you merely predicting that Iran will publicly pinky promise not to do those things?
ThenElection
14d ago
- Iran will not be allowed to maintain a nuclear weapons program
- Iran will not be allowed to continue manufacturing missiles to bomb its neighbors
- Iran will not be allowed to continue funding paramilitaries to harass and terrorize its neighbors
Can I take this as a concrete prediction that, henceforth, we will never hear an American or Israeli leader accusing Iran of doing any of those things?
See, the SoH toll is a good thing!
You leave off another Trump victory: for years Iran has sanctioned the global economy, refusing to trade with it or accept investments from it. Trump has forced them to drop those sanctions and open themselves up to the world.
ThenElection
14d ago
I don't understand how anyone, regardless of his position on the war, can defend Trump right now.
Main defenses I'm seeing:
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This was actually a win, the biggliest win in the history of warfare. Trump utterly destroyed Iran and they came to the table begging for forgiveness.
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We were tricked by the Jews.
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The ceasefire and horrible terms are just part of Trump's 5D chess; he'll renege when the time is right and bring us to a true victory.
Comparatively little "we could have won if we were willing to man up and roll in the dirt with the cheating Iranians, but the backstabbing liberal media and pencil necks in the DoD prevented us" so far.
ThenElection
15d ago
I'm grateful that the terms Iran delivered were fair and not too onerous. Hopefully we can all move on quickly from this disaster.
ThenElection
15d ago
I mean I followed powerlifting and streetlifting spaces for a while and there were strong women who could do shit like bench 200, squat 400-500, etc while being pretty lean.
When people say men are generally much stronger than women, there's usually the implicit caveat that it's women without exogenous testosterone.
That said, holding height constant, and comparing a natural woman who regularly lifts heavy to an average man who doesn't work out at all, I think the woman would be able to come out on top, at least sometimes. But with those restrictions, you've limited the population to something like the top 1% of women. And if the man works out at all, she's never coming out on top in a purely physical conflict.
ThenElection
15d ago
it's not like handing uncontested power back to the progressive "adults in the room" is likely to go particularly well. Probably less badly but that's not a very high bar to clear.
We are in agreement. I might gesture at "let's hand power to people who would do better than either," but unfortunately I don't see a way from here to there.
ThenElection
15d ago
If a life is worth $10M, that's $100B in damages over a couple years. Not small, but by the end will likely be dwarfed by the Iran War.
Though, your example does bring to mind another that probably will be comparable: COVID and the response to it. I'm not sure what proportion of the blame to place on progressive litmus tests for that, but it's certainly substantial.
ThenElection
15d ago
The most notable progressive belief that serves the same function (feigned confusion toward or rejection of male/female definitions) is mostly harmless, though; worst case scenario, it wrecks women's sports, which no one actually cares about anyway. The Trumpist version has given us the highly escalated Iranian situation, which is much more costly.
ThenElection
17d ago
I think a strategy of keeping most of your investments in SPY, and then occasionally (every couple of years, but only when a real opportunity presents itself) making strong, reasonable bets during major events where you have high confidence can get you outsized returns (e.g. I almost doubled my net worth during the first couple months of COVID).
The issue is that psychologically, waiting around for those types of events is really boring. And success begets failure, as you really want to start looking for opportunities where your edge is smaller or realistically non-existent.
Someone submitting code that broke the Google search button would cost the company on the order of a million per minute; it's only natural that Google would pay a lot to minimize that risk. Of course, there are automated processes in place to prevent and mitigate those kinds of mistakes, but that makes the work more complicated than messing around with some CSS. And even that doesn't cover all the work involved in something as seemingly simple as maintaining a button--accessibility, brand consistency, i18n, framework migrations, etc. This work is very lame but also very necessary, and not something a random trucker could do or even (unfortunately) the average CS grad could do.
Also, just informationally, as others have pointed out it's pretty much impossible for any SWE (not even the head button changer, who's probably some L7 taking home a million per year) at Google to take a decade to accumulate a million. Maybe five years or so, depending on your career progression, especially with the bull market of the past decade.
ThenElection
18d ago
One plausible outcome is TACO, leaves the SoH under effective Iranian control, and loudly proclaims victory because he blew up a bunch of shit.
And sadly that is one of the better ways the current situation might develop.
ThenElection
19d ago
That is extremely compelling, if not what I would call reassuring. Thanks.
ThenElection
19d ago
That does shift my opinion toward the laundry explanation, thanks. That's a lot of lint.
ThenElection
19d ago
I'm agnostic on what happened, but knowing the base rate of laundry fires taking out carriers in the US military would be useful information.
ThenElection
19d ago
We've done the middle two very comprehensively.
Indeed, we've totally obliterated the Iranian military at least once a week since the war began.
ThenElection
21d ago
I've heard the quip than Don Quixote was the first postmodern novel.
ThenElection
21d ago
The first time I ever enjoyed Shakespeare was in a tavern that served food and booze while putting on the performance. Can't recommend highly enough (no tomatoes thrown, alas).
ThenElection
21d ago
Hoofprints in the snow might not tell you something is a horse. But then you see a tuft of shoulder-high fur caught in the brush, then a stirrup, and then, hey, it's Brunellus.
I suppose the broadness of the term "postmodernism" is one of its weaknesses, but reasons I'd argue for it:
- It's a meta story: the story itself is framed as being a lost manuscript.
- It's a pastiche: high literature, philosophy, theology meets genre detective fiction
- Intertextuality: abundant references to an expansive group of external texts
- Thematically, it's all about no one overarching institution or system (even rationality and empiricism) having a monopoly on truth.
- A major element is signs: we don't have direct access to the thing in itself, only references to the thing. Hence, the name of the rose, not the rose.
Keeping a notebook while reading Gravity's Rainbow is not how you should be reading it; you'll inevitably be bogged down. The jazz analogy is right, but perhaps not how you mean it: it's a kaleidoscope, and the fractured lack of a coherent narrative is itself what you're supposed to get out of it. It's an experience, not a textbook.
I'd also not overly index on Gravity's Rainbow as postmodern literature, just as it wouldn't make sense to overly index on Finnegan's Wake as modernist literature. You could just as well choose Pale Fire or the Name of the Rose as exemplars of postmodernism, and those are excellent and have a highly readable narrative.
As to their value, I enjoyed those two exemplars immensely; if they bring value to your life, then they have value. Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest have the unfortunate status of being i-am-very-smart books, and if read as that, you're not going to have a good time or get any value out of them.
You are entirely correct that Cormac McCarthy is unsurpassed in 20th century literature, though.
This assumes that the Wuhan lab knew The Truth about what was going on. Another possibility: no one in any position of authority had a clue about the reality of the situation (not at all unique to China), they panicked and freaked out, and then one way or another dropped or pulled the database. Could even be a low level employee just covering their ass. Likely good for your expected longevity to preemptively do that, even (or perhaps especially) if you're unsure what the database contains. Getting rid of all evidence aligns the interests of the Chinese state with your own: they're more content to run with it than any alternative, and the benefits of exculpatory evidence would pretty much only go to high level Chinese officials, while evidence of blame would be used to string you up, quite literally.
On balance, I think a lab leak is more likely than not. But many people err on the side of ascribing more competence to Chinese institutions (to e.g. execute on a conspiracy) than actually exists: in some ways, it's comforting to think that institutional competence exists somewhere, even in a mortal enemy, because it gives hope that someone, somewhere knows what they're doing.
ThenElection
27d ago
Has it achieved any goals? At what cost?
I'd also score "we never really thought about what our goals are" as not achieving goals. Right now, the main goal seems to be an open Hormuz and stable markets... Which we had before the war started.
I remind you of your prediction:
If we agree that Iran will continue to have a nuclear weapons program, except you think that's a massive, total victory that obliterated Iran and made it into a complete cucked loser, and I think it's a loss, we don't disagree on anything concrete, just different perspectives on what victory and loss mean.
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