VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
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User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
running his church in Manhattan in the 1990s and 2000s and raising the kinds of objections he got constantly from New Yorkers who engaged with him and more traditional Christianity in that context
I feel like the older I get the more evidence I have that religion (and sadly, bigotry, although I'm not going to comment on the relationship between those) are a kind of zero-sum quantity in human nature. We can recognize them when we see them, and make efforts to move away from them, but those are doomed to just ooze out in other, often less well-understood places. New Atheism thought it had defeated God, but it really just built its own idols and called them something else. I don't think years of progressive anti-racism activism has managed any broader changes than merely changing the acceptable set targets of bigotry (in "proper" circles) in the modern era (in: Jews and rural white people, out: everyone on the "progress" flag).
And I say this as someone generally neutral on religion: I have my own beliefs I'm content with, and I'm happy to let-live with reasonably wide bounds on others'. And I find racism and bigotry generally to be pretty abhorrent and I'd love for there to be less of it in the world. I'm just not sure how to actually fix human tribalism and it's downstream failures. But I'm open to suggestions.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
I think existing laws as applied to corporate insiders writing the quarterly reports before publishing and to soldiers and government employees about revealing sensitive/classified information are probably defensible, although modern times may require some extra head-knocking training that specific types of transactions like these fit the description. I bet this guy had to sit through a training about not leaking classified performance stats on the WarThunder forums.
As for applying the laws to our representatives, that sounds IMO like a good idea, but we'd have to convince them to vote on doing so (or use the amendment process, perhaps).
For bonus points, consider the French guy who found some of the temperature sensors used for city weather predictions markets and started betting on them before applying localized heat. Is that "insider trading"? It seems at least adjacent.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
degrades ... readiness
This is true in the short term with stockpiles and deferred maintenance, but long term (12+ months, at least) is less clear if investments are made in production rates and improved tactics and technology. For sufficiently large conflicts, day zero stockpiles are less a deciding factor than production and distribution rates.
Tokyo, one of the best big cities in the world is filled with apartments
Honestly, my takeaway when I visited, expecting an unending sea of apartments was that I was surprised at how many freestanding (small footprint) single family houses Tokyo has. They exist within walking distance of even the densest city centers. Plenty of them only slightly larger in footprint than the single car garage they stand on top of.
Also lots of small multi-family houses, seemingly where a single small-footprint house was presumably replaced with a five story (ish) walkup.
Tokyo is constructed very differently from European Metro centers, and both are quite different from American ones.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
It's not that unusual: Assange was charged in the Eastern District of Virginia, despite never having touched US soil. Kim Dotcom never did either, and was also charged in Virginia. I don't think this is a particularly uncommon fact pattern, and also shows up in enforcing international sanctions regimes.
And even when the fact pattern supports a locus within a specific district, I think there are very real questions about whether Virginians, and New Yorkers are uniquely qualified to decide "[defrauding/attempting to overthrow/saying mean words about] the Federal government" sorts of cases even if the office in question physically sits there.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Have you read the WWII CIA sabotage manual? Starting on page 28 sounds a lot like what you're suggesting. Of course, it's meant to plausibly sound like normal organizational issues.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Sure, but plenty of crimes with ambiguous jurisdiction, especially international ones, are consistently tried in NY or DC. What did Maduro do in New York, specifically, that justifies a New York jury deciding his fate? Plenty of SDNY press releases include "across the United States".
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Is there a reason a state should generally allow private actors to play "undercover informant"? Citizens aren't generally encouraged to start writing dossiers on each other even if they did say they were going to turn them over to law enforcement. Doubly so for not-even-illegal activities, some of which are constitutionally protected.
Seems at least arguably a road to privatized secret police, although I'd steelman the reverse by saying that Target should be allowed to have a loss-prevention department and take evidence to the real police. Open to other thoughts on the principles here, though.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
The outsized sway of DC and NY juries on federal law enforcement has seemed like a viable opportunity for reform, but I haven't seen any political operatives (conservative, presumably) actually talking about it.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
If they're not all aware of each other's status, that just looks like an earnest Klan meeting. Didn't it come out that a majority (or near majority) of the Malheur occupiers were informants, including some of the leaders?
Honestly, some required coordination of this sort of thing might make some sense, but I'm sure it's a confidentiality risk to investigations.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Does that imply as strong of a correlation between the two incomes of a two-income household as it seems at first glance? Something like "the average 1% individual earner is married to a top 5% individual earner or higher" seems like it would follow unless the distributions are particularly oddly shaped.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Everyone always talks about "Medicare for all", but "Medicaid for all" is probably more achievable: people with existing insurance options probably aren't going to drop it en masse because it's definitely a downgrade in provider selection (read: quality) and availability. Heck, more than half of Medicare beneficiaries now opt to use those dastardly insurance companies as intermediaries rather than traditional Medicare.
But I haven't tried to figure out the costs of doing this, this post is mostly an observation that the two nominally-similar services have different valences with the nation and politicians.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
The VRA and related court precedent demands a mutually-contradictory set of requirements on drawing districts. That Gordion knot is maybe going to be (partially?) untied by the current Louisiana case.
Although my personal thinking is that eliminating geographic districting in favor of something more like slate-of-candidates parliamentary systems is probably the cleanest of the available options. None are perfect, though.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
I have a corner of the extended family that includes a man who, after his kids were grown, divorced his wife and remarried someone slightly older than his kids and had a full second family. They are nice folks that clearly love each other and I like them, but I can tell it's been rough on them in various ways due to the age gap: the dad hit (practical) retirement age while the youngest kids (one with special needs) were still in middle school, and I know the wife has had to start working, presumably to close the budget. I know she's been having to take care of him (now in his 80s) physically too since before the last kid left the house, and I can't help but occasionally think about how she's actuarially likely to be widowed in maybe her early 60s, and how she'll handle that long-term.
Nothing against them personally, but I think they'd have been happier overall if they were closer to the same age and met earlier. I wish them well, though. Life throws things like that at you sometimes. I hope it goes well for the GP here, too.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
the power of Holocaust as a story is weakening
When I was a kid, the Holocaust was still in living memory enough that tattooed survivors were showing up to school classrooms to tell their personal stories. At the time, the last WWII vets were retiring and still alive to tell their stories. The entire era there is passing out of living memory and I suppose it isn't surprising that the emotional and political valence of those events is changing as the torch is passed.
I don't think it was ever possible to maintain that story forever: it's hard to sell multigenerational grievances generally, and worse when the aggrieved party seems to be doing "mostly fine, actually" (opinions may vary) in the present.
But I do look at these changing attitudes and wonder what will happen in the next decades as other traumas fade in the collective memory. We're already seeing politicians first elected during the civil rights movement dying in office in their 80s, for example, and Vietnam veterans aren't as able to get out and protest as numerously as they used to.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
blacklivesmatter
Sometimes it amazes me that the BLM crowd is so content to throw their weight behind the Palestine crowd, elements of which are also funding actual genocides of Black people in Sudan and Nigeria. But the self-centered-ness of the political activist class isn't that surprising, I guess.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
The idea that AI would need a detailed world model seems to run contra to the "It became self-aware at 2:14 AM Eastern Time" doomsaying. Skynet wasn't supposed to be rate-limited by interactive world manipulation.
And honestly I haven't seen as much motion as I'd expect on the world interaction front. Where are my automatic burger flipping robot arms? There are lots of thankless low-skill (but not no-skill) jobs in at least the food industry (meat packing, for example) that have pretty bounded motion and requirements, but I haven't seen anywhere near as much motion in those areas as I would have expected.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
I don't know enough about movie script copyright to know the exact details.
Given a time machine, you can just plop proof of the existence of the work before Disney created it and claim it (perhaps pseudonymously) as your own. Bonus points for doing it in the most embarrassing way possible: "it has come to light that Disney plagiarized the script for The Force Awakens from a 1992 Usenet post of the same title to alt.stories.starwars, which got one reply to the tune of 'lolz that's some terrible fanfic, man' at the time."
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
It is at least weird to me that Trudeau is dating Russell Brand's ex-wife. But I've never seen anyone else comment on that specific angle.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
11d ago
"There's some chance that any human will go berserk and turn into a serial killer, so by living among humans, you've signed up for the possibility that a serial killer will kill you"
Isn't this basically true, though? It's certainly not ideal, but people are generally against constructing the sort of society in which this statement isn't true. See regular political fights over gun control, or even driving laws. Lots of people (tens of thousands in the US) die annually at the hands of plain 'ol human failure modes.
Even if you could semi-reliably identify those that will "go berserk", you'd have to wade through a bunch of legal questions to actually do something about it under current law.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
11d ago
Google used to have a link to cached pages in the search results. They also used to penalize (in site rankings) showing different pages to the search crawlers and regular browsers (I assume by spot checking the difference). I remember spoofing the GoogleBot user agent at least once to bypass a paywall, though.
The digital frontier isn't what it used to be: that ship seems to have sailed.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
11d ago
The online extreme left (Piker, et al) seems to be leaning that direction, but the left-leaning normies I know IRL think the conflict is dumb but wouldn't wish harm on US service members. Several of them are veterans or immediate families thereof, for one.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
12d ago
Iran has hit Oman at least a few times in this conflict, despite Oman not (currently) hosting any US forces. Oman was also one of the more neutral in it's public statements (IIRC they congratulated the new Ayatollah), although I don't know if that stance has changed in the last few weeks.
I thought the "blunt melee weapons only" conflict with India a few years ago was at least notable. I'd call it funny, but there were more than a few deaths reported.
The Nine Dash Line isn't winning them friends in their neighborhood either.
ETA: Also their international fishing fleet often accused of stealing from other nations' waters.
I'll observe that the history of Christendom has no shortage of examples of both types of this behavior here: it's not like rank hypocrisy is a modern invention.
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