VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
People in 1st world countries really don't want to go to work mass-manufacturing explosives.
Is it this, or that there hasn't been much demand for capital production of mass munitions in decades? The last war that used them in bulk was what, Vietnam? Every Western war since has been dominated my high-complexity munitions that often seem designed to separate the explosives from the fiddly bits. You can presumably build JDAM kits on any electronic assembly line.
I don't know much about the explosives side of things, but my understanding of history is that the shells are made in one process that isn't special, and then filled. There are some dangerous parts there, but I suspect it's similar to videos I've watched of amateurs making high power solid rocket motors: you want to be smart about safety and choose a remote site, but it isn't necessarily messy or dangerous if you're smart about it --- but those guys aren't worried about enemy action. Also the chemistry is presumably a bit different.
ETA: The HPR and explosive folks presumably both have similar linear-ish scaling concerns: if you want 10x production, you really don't just want to buy a 10x bigger mixer. Past a fairly small scale, it means duplicating lots of equipment and space because you want to bound the size of the boom if something goes wrong.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
It was ATF, not the FBI, but the attempts to entrap Randy Weaver demonstrably were part of the radicalization of McVeigh, although Waco was probably a larger factor and as far as I'm aware wasn't "entrapment" per se.
I think that's strong evidence that the body count is probably positive, but it's always hard to consider counterfactuals --- maybe some would have radicalized anyway.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
ADHD is real, in the sense that it is a useful term for a problem that exists in a spectra.
Aren't the stimulants used to treat it at least moderately effective in non-diagnosed individuals at improving concentration and attentiveness? I have at least heard anecdotes of college kids using those off-label for performance reasons (studying). I assume the accomodations (extra time on tests) are moderately too.
Do you have any thoughts on where we draw the moral line for "you get to use these, you over here don't"? To use an analogy, if we had drugs that made kids grow taller, I don't see a problem with at least making them available to, say, ones predicted to end up under 5 feet, but there would be a huge moral hazard of 6'5" kids whose parents claim they're still "short" because they really want them to play in the NBA. I don't have an answer here, either.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
Punching someone when they're standing on a concrete footpath presents a vastly higher risk of death than punching someone when they're standing in a field or on a dirt track.
Only mostly in jest: "The ADA and its consequences..." (the ADA has driven a lot of paving of previously-dirt walking paths).
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
IMO it'd be nicer to just agree not to hit each other at all rather than arguing over how much is too much.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
Doesn't this describe a fair amount of "gang violence"? We generally (for worse, IMO) look the other way about that, through some combination of what you described and ignoring it for political reasons, be it "we don't care about [redacted]" or "it'd have a disparate impact to prosecute those crimes".
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
This why I have a protocol when encountering an 'IRL' problem: de-escalate and remove-oneself from the situation. This will usually keep you safe.
I think this is true at the individual scale, but, for various reasons, in aggregate results in substantive loss of territory that seems worth noting. This can take the form of "When we had a kid, we moved out of San Francisco because the streets didn't feel safe for a toddler" to "Nobody goes to the park anymore because gangs aggressively harass anyone else trying to use it". Sure, de-escalation is a good idea, but rolling over at every perceived threat cedes the commons to wannabe tyrants: people should be able to go to the park, or walk down the street with their kids.
That said, it'd be better if that level of enforcement of the social contract weren't left to the whims of private parties. That is notionally part of why we employ police.
There is probably an interesting observation here somewhere on the difference in social contracts between Tokyo (or Paris, Berlin, or London circa 2005, maybe?) and San Francisco or Portland.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
Doesn't Bitcoin suffer from the same sort of limits here that other decentralized protocols do, though? I'm not particularly aware of the link layer details, but mining requires a relatively consistent link (not high bandwidth, but minimal latency) to discover blocks mined by others. And issuing a transaction requires getting that data to enough of the miners to get it into a block. Offhand I'm not sure if both of these operations are generally "decentralized" today like DHT torrent links, and how robust those are --- it's been a while since I looked, but I think "absolutely distributed" is still an open research topic.
I will concede that's probably hard to block absolutely, but a sufficiently advanced adversary could at least make using it more painful.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
I figured the worst 30 seconds would get prominently featured in attack ads targeting federal workers, especially essential ones. "This is what [your incumbent] was doing while trying to delay your paychecks" would seem pretty effective: IIRC one (blue) federal union's leadership has already started complaining.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
Arguably, the huge increase in the standard deduction is the biggest simplification of the tax code since Reagan. After the 2018 (Trump administration) changes there, the number of filings taking the standard deduction went up from 70 to 90 percent.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
Ozymandias built a pretty amazing temple and monument complex, but all I’m seeing at the moment is a disembodied stone foot sticking out of the trackless desert and it’s hard to be impressed.
One of my favorite random facts is that after Shelley wrote the poem, the mummy of Ramses II (in Greek, Ozymandias) was discovered and is currently in a museum in Cairo.
Kuwait in 1991? Arguably Operations Praying Mantis and El Dorado Canyon, too.
Some might consider Kosovo / bombing Yugoslavia to have been successful, too.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
However, this would not be in the best interests of the US.
Certainly of a lot of voters. But some countries run on intentionally-devalued currencies --- China has been accused of this before. It doesn't drastically change the balance of internal trade, but makes your products more competitive globally for export, presumably allowing investment at scale for a longer-term payoff. The pluses of a valuable currency only show up if you're buying global commodities (oil prices), imported luxury goods, or taking international vacations (which is favorable only to the monied fraction that is going on those vacations). It need not directly hit anything valued in terms of "hours of domestic labor", like construction.
ETA: you're probably right about USB cables, but I'm not convinced about phones and computers, which are mostly automated production lines.
This entire shutdown is in the court of like 8 Democrats in the Senate.
I'm modestly surprised the Republicans haven't pressed them to give a standing filibuster. I guess it would give them a pulpit to speak, but it also has the optics of "we're trying to reopen the government and they're standing up there reading children's books" (Ted Cruz once read Green Eggs and Ham during one), or even just rambling poorly at 3:00AM while the majority of the Senate is ready to end the shutdown (and go to bed).
But maybe there is a strategic reason to not do so. Or a long-standing gentleman's agreement not to.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
and uncontroversially illegal unless Trump is working within authority delegated by Congress
I think to hear the administration tell it, Congress has: there are various laws on the books (for decades, in most cases) that allow the president to set tariffs for "national security" (that has never been a loophole before /s), negotiating trade policy, against countries that discriminate against US trade, and for generic "emergency" purposes (also a common loophole).
I'm not going to completely side with the administration here, but I don't think the claim that Congress hasn't at least intended to grant the authority is questionable (and I'm not going to take a side on whether Congress should have done this here). The delegation questions are interesting, but I don't expect a massive judicial rollback of "emergency" powers as the most likely outcome: I think the idea of giving the president this authority wasn't really questioned, and previous presidents have used them without as much controversy.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
omitting someone because he got into a fight with the federation.
Joey Chestnut has entered the chat. Although he was allowed back into the championship (and won) this year.
Mostly a funny anecdote: I don't follow the competition generally.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
I think that's true in the short term, but children are also, as much as I dislike the phrase, "an investment in the future": if we decide to stop having kids (experiment ongoing in South Korea, among others), we can save so much money in childhood education and improve industrial output. Surely this won't have any consequences on a longer time horizon. /s
I'm not sure how I'd recommend aligning the incentives more broadly, though.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
perhaps also shortsighted that the writers of the 22nd amendment
Honestly I think their biggest sin was writing in the passive voice. The amendment text is rather unclear as to who is empowered to keep such a person from becoming elected by the electoral college. To be fair, it's a bit of a problem with the qualifications listed in the original text too: SCOTUS had to weigh in on whether each of the states got to decide that independently (apparently not, at least for those details). It's unclear what is supposed to happen if some state decides to put him on the top of the ballot (I suspect SCOTUS would weigh in, but I don't know what they'd decide), the voters choose him, and the electoral college convenes to elect him.
This would all be much clearer if it included something like the 18th's "The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." And if such legislation had been drafted and passed, I suppose. Then we'd get an answer to "which birth certificate forms can [state A] expect to certify that a candidate was born a citizen in [state B]?" (or even the John McCain case) and similar seemingly-trivial-but-devil-in-the-details questions like "Are you sure this is the same Donald J. Trump born in 1946 that was president previously?".
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
I'm increasingly of the opinion that standard economic measures like GDP are flawed insofar as they only capture production and not reproduction, when it's pretty clear that the latter means a lot more in the long term.
I've occasionally mused that we should have a separate GDP term that captures "investment into The Future (tm)", specifically with an eye to things like capital investments that are net efficiency improvements. Something like "how much discretionary spending are spending above and beyond the cost of keeping the economy going?" But I think as a measure it's poorly-defined because "The Future" isn't necessarily something we all agree upon: is California's meandering, super-expensive high-speed rail project such a capital investment? I think it's easier to defend that (most) healthcare spending isn't a long-term investment because in many cases it's just fixing something that maybe didn't need to be broken: in an ideal world (let's assume Fully Automated Gay Space Communism, but that's probably a less-universal ideal than when Star Trek TNG was still on the air) we'd have relatively few doctors because people wouldn't get injured, at least as often.
But it's a hard metric to fully define. I'd be interested in reading more if any economists are looking this direction.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10d ago
I'm curious what you'd peg as the "Golden Age" here, because complaints about the Internet going downhill have been evergreen since the endless September of 1994 began.
I'm not sure where I'd put the peak generally: in a few ways it's actually better than back then, if you're looking for scientific papers (open access at least exists as a concept) or niche hobby groups. The small-town "trust" feel does seem gone --- that analogy aligns with my "closing of the Western Cyber Frontier" narrative I've wanted to try putting to long-form words some time.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
11d ago
Will it be Obama or Trump?
Why not both? It seems boomerlibs do blame everything on Reagan, but boomercons like to blame Carter and/or "the hippies" similarly ("JFK started the closings of asylums, and the ACLU was for it"). Two screens and all that.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
11d ago
I think it loosely has an assumed connotation of "generally agreed upon", even if the word doesn't directly imply that.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
12d ago
And people are still making JD Vance couch jokes referencing a completely fake quote from his book. Many of those same fine folks were concerned about "misinformation" within the last few years.
I still expect someone to field a miniature CIWS that can be mounted to anything larger than a pickup. Some combination of passive IR search and short-range phased array radar could probably counter the drone tactics I've seen so far. You wouldn't need a round larger than 22LR to take down the drones I've seen, as long as a computer is aiming it and you get enough rounds downrange.
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