VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
28d ago
This doesn't mean I think it's wrong. It's just that I think that the conclusions you'd have to draw from it being correct are just so awful for me.
I have always drawn a sharp distinction between technical questions and political ones. To me, "Is HBD true?" Is distinctly the former, while most any question about actually applying that knowledge is the latter.
I'm not a strict utilitarian: I think we can and should have guiding principles in how we approach political questions, regardless of the technical merits. I can think of plenty of likely true technical facts that, applied, lead to all kinds of evil: "Replacing retirement and social security with mandatory euthanasia centers increases paperclip production long-term GDP" might be true, but I find any attempt to enact such a policy morally abhorrent. But I also don't think we need to willfully blind ourselves to the idea as a whole to avoid enacting reprehensible policies: we simply make a moral choice not to do evil.
There will be disagreements about the morality of some cases, but I think there is a legitimate (near-)universal consensus that killing people at retirement is wrong. Much of the Culture War seems to revolve around the moral edge cases (abortion, for example) and largely binary views on morality.
In short, I don't think you should need to concern yourself with whether or not population-level statistics apply to you, and in return we as a society should agree to, in general, ignore those statistics (willfully, if necessary) when interacting with individuals on principle. Because that's the egalitarian society I would want to live in.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
27d ago
In the states I have had lunch with literal army vehicles and national guard on the street corners.
Where are you seeing this? It's not at all common in the US, excepting major disasters where the National Guard gets called out. Admittedly, New York sees the state of the subway as such a disaster currently, but my American sensibilities are always thrown when I've come across gendarmerie in Europe: our cops mostly don't dress in camo or bring out long guns unless they're actively using them. But uniformed soldiers patrolling airports and tourist hotspots is common in other First World countries I've been to.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
21d ago
Wasn't Snowden on record as trying to go somewhere else (Ecuador?), but ended up at the Moscow airport when the lawfare began?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
22d ago
It's worth mentioning the Dutch famine in the winter of '44-45, which was largely caused by the German occupation, and during which the Allies (and others) tried to get food into the area.
But that's really just an interesting relevant anecdote and doesn't really disprove your general point.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
15d ago
And then gets hits by sales taxes anyway when he spends his money in the future.
I have occasionally mused that a truly-progressive sales tax could be interesting: tax total expenditures up to, say, the median cost of living at one rate, and marginal expenditures above at a higher rate. This would probably need some allowance for amortization on bigger purchases. The idea being to tax the wealth when it's spent, and intentionally incentivising capital investments rather than conspicuous expenditures.
But it's a very wonkish policy proposal that would be hard to sell to the broader public, I think. And probably has quite a few details that would need ironing out.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
15d ago
The volume and scale of ammunition required to keep the guns firing with an overmatch to make very slow gains over relatively basic trench systems created a tension of how much is needed versus how vulnerable you are moving that much ammo forward.
I think this statement also vindicates decades and billions of dollars of American research and deployment of precision guided weapons: the logistical tail is greatly reduced when you can just, not fire the huge fraction of dumb rounds that would miss anyway.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
27d ago
US should also try for the 'science->military' feedback loop.
I realize it's not hugely discussed, but isn't this (to some extent) still the case? The US has no shortage of scientists working on military(-ish) technology. Those National Labs all work for the Department of Energy, which, as Rick Perry found out, has surprisingly little to do with energy qua energy, and a lot more to do with nuclear power and defense research. There's also DARPA and similar programs that are more explicitly labeled "defense", and plenty of research grants from the intelligence community and the various services. Even NASA is distinctly defense-adjacent and their funding usually comes with security requirements. And "securing defense supply chains" has been a big reason for funding projects like the CHIPS Act.
It's not exactly a new example, but ARPANET was, for a long time, a defense project, and DARPA was funding a lot of the early self-driving car research. It's hard to see the current picture more clearly (I certainly don't claim to), but there's plenty of reason to hold results like this fairly quietly. I also won't claim that it's done optimally at a good scale, but the idea that science and military aren't linked currently is at least missing some of the forest for the trees.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
20d ago
I'd bet you have to be more careful with what ends up in "trash": no amount of combustion is going to remove lead or mercury from the waste stream. And I'd bet it's at least possible for combustion to do gnarly things like oxidize chromium into biologically hazardous states. But I'm certainly not an expert on waste processing, although machine learning for single-stream waste sorting does seem like a potentially useful use case.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
16d ago
To be clear, it didn't really upset me much: I still liked the show quite a bit overall. But now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I've seen a WWII movie written from a British perspective. The war has a very prominent place in American (and Russian) culture, but I'm not sure if I've seen a purely British take on it.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
Rust is clearly the systems language of the future. It can be just as fast as C++ and has a much nicer syntax/doesn't have weird idiosyncracies (ok, the last point is debatable).
I'm not completely sure I buy this vision of the future. Rust has some very good ideas, but there is so much quantity behind legacy C/C++ systems that it has a quality all of its own. And it's not the first time claims like this have been made: I'm old enough to remember Java being sold as "just as fast as C++" and safer (debatably true for some workloads today, less true at the time), but it hasn't displaced C or C++ despite major efforts. And despite the supposed memory safety, I have actually encountered java.lang.NullPointerException in the wild (production code) plenty of times. C# also promised a brave new garbage-collected world. If I were older, I'd probably point to Ada, which was originally developed for the DoD to write safe, modular programs in the late 1970s (IMO an underappreciated language, to be honest) and still gets some use today.
Rust has some good ideas, but fundamentally it seems to be pretty similar to C++ in terms of what the languages want to be. My loose prognostication is that the sheer Borg mass of the C++ ecosystem will learn to interoperate with, embrace, and extend. The C++ committee is clearly steering this direction, and it seems only a matter of time until the base version of the language offers, say, a borrow checker. There has already been plenty of (slow, but steady) motion towards that sort of thing since C++11 (shared_ptr, more recently span). It seems to me only a matter of time before someone posts a patchset for GCC or Clang that adds -Wborrow-checker.
There's something to be said that the current backwards-compatible syntax for modern C++ will get unwieldy, but there has already been public discussion of attempts to make breaking revisions to it: see Sutter's proposal for cppfront. This sort of thing isn't unheard of: early C++ was implemented as a generator for C code. Javascript has all sorts of code compatibility tools, including CoffeeScript, which seems to have fallen out of favor since the JavaScript ECMAScript standards committee decided to start publishing again and making real updates. I just can't see full rewrites in Rust of major application code, but I could find it plausible that the backend object models of the languages will converge until they interoperate fairly seamlessly. Or that C++ absorbs all the good ideas and Rust remains around in a vestigial, nostalgic fashion like Perl or PHP in 2024.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3mo ago
This will definitely end up erasing a lot of Native American culture from our interpretation of history.
You know, I've had the same thought about things like renaming sports teams. Not that the previous name of the Washington Commanders wasn't offensive, but that we've established a de facto rule that mentions of Native American culture or history are offensive, but also that nobody got fired for just completely ignoring the topic. It already feels like public awareness of real native traditions and people has dropped tangibly in the culture over the last few decades of my life because attempts to bring it up are soured by (IMO bad-faith, shallow) criticism that it's "problematic" or doesn't cast enough native actors. Not that there's nothing at all to those claims, but I think they end up being overall counterproductive, and in practice are just erasing it from the culture completely.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
15d ago
Possibly. I think you might be able to track net cash outflows, rather than purchases directly, to cover most of it, but that admittedly only works for people that use banks and would have trouble with people who get paid and pay in primarily cash. But the existing income tax system has those problems too.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
23d ago
Unless I'm missing something, it seems like there is no good business reason for an email queue to be 3-4 days steady state.
Your question is reasonable. I've always assumed (without evidence) that "steady state" isn't perfectly steady, and overprovisioning to get to zero backlog constantly would be expensive. Both short-term day-to-day noise and seasonal effects (few warranty claims on snowblowers in July) could make volumes unpredictable, and a couple of days slack would let you schedule shifts based on volume.
Although as Oracle pointed out, it could be a contractual obligation. I've certainly had interactions with, say, insurance where I've been quoted 60 days to evaluate a claim, but gotten a response within a week.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
29d ago
Visible-source seems to have helped track down the whole story, as did the development discussions that happened in public (though what about e-mail/discord?), but the initial discovery seems like it was entirely separate from any source-diving, and a lot of the attack never had its source available until people began decompiling it.
There isn't any evidence directly supporting this, but I saw a claim that this entire claim of discovery ("slow SSH connections") could easily enough be parallel construction prompted by The Powers That Be (tm) aware of this effort for other reasons -- which range from "we know our adversaries are trying to insert this code" to "we run our own audits but don't want to reveal their details directly". Even in such a situation it's a bit unclear who the parties would be (nation-state intelligence agencies, possibly certain large corporations independent of their respective governments). The obvious claim would be something like "NSA launders data to Microsoft to foil North Korean hacking attempts", but "China foils NSA backdoor attempts" isn't completely implausible either.
That said, I can only imagine that sneaking a backdoor like this into proprietary build systems would be even less likely to be detected: the pool of people inspecting the Windows build system is much smaller than those looking at (or at least able to look at) libxz and it's (arcane, but somewhat industry standard) autoconf scripts.
Also, this is the sort of thing that I have a vested interest in as a long-time personal and professional Linux user. I have the skills ("a very particular set of skills") to follow the details of issues like this, but there isn't yet any organized way to actually contribute them. I'd be willing to spend maybe a few hours a month auditing code and reviewing changes to "boring" system packages, but I'd never think to look at libxz specifically, or to get enough "street cred" for people to actually take any feedback I have seriously. And even then, this particular issue is underhanded enough to be hard to spot even when an expert is looking right at it. Does anyone have any suggestions for getting involved like this?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3mo ago
The Biden administration is taking measurable steps to halt the flow of illegal immigrants (up to you if it's a genuine change of heart or just cynical ratings management)
As a voter, this seems to be an ongoing vibe from the Biden administration, and I'm not sure I like it. It feels like they're focus grouping every decision and trying to sweep tough-but-necessary decisions under the rug without actually having to make a stand on the issues. When it works, it feels pretty competent, but on several issues it's recently felt like very limp-wristed leadership when they try to claim "we're working on it" while they point generally to actions they've been intentionally hiding under the table.
Look at the shipping issues in Yemen: the administration gave out lots of "final warnings", and it seems that even when they finally decided to strike back -- after what, at least to me, comes off as an unreasonable number of shots fired at American ships to tolerate -- they did so weakly enough that they've had to repeat their attacks several times and still haven't resolved the conflict. I get that there's a suite of left-wing activists (many now protesting the administration's handling of the Gaza war) that were pushing for peace in the Houthi-Saudi war, frequently accusing the Saudi coalition of genocide, and that it broadly looks like the US is having to pick up that battle where they left off. There are people in their coalition in favor of unrestricted immigration, too. But their actions in both cases seem chosen first to limit outrage from the extreme corners of their voting bloc, and actual effectiveness is a much lower priority. If it was actually working, that'd be one thing, but I think the average concerned voter was looking for something more decisive (see Operation Praying Mantis), rather than a slowly-escalating quagmire. Similar to the Obama administration's "red lines" in Syria, it looks weak to me as an observer.
But on immigration specifically, the Biden administration came into office and specifically and publicly undid many of the policy decisions of its predecessor ("remain in Mexico", "build a wall"), claiming those were unnecessary and cruel. But here we are a few years later, and they've had to walk some of those back: they're building a wall and at least moving toward involving Mexico in the process. But they can't acknowledge that, maybe, their opponents might have been partly right on the issue (because, in a large part, of their coalition with "Orange Man Bad"). And while they claim to be working on solutions, I haven't seen anyone propose either reforming the asylum process in question. Could we surge resources to handle the backlog of cases and hear every case in, say, 24 hours? Could we increase the standards to promptly toss out a large fraction of the cases that will eventually be denied anyway? AFAIK the asylum system is entirely defined by Congress and Executive fiat and surely gives some legal leeway here. I honestly don't have any good suggestions for preventing physical crossings or handling deportations of the unwilling, but surely someone has some.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
18d ago
It's bonkers how much you pay for plywood smaller than 4'x8'. Basically a "Hah hah, you don't have a truck" tax. It's fully double per square foot for a 2'x4' sheet versus a 4'x8' sheet.
At least my local Orange Box store has a couple of saws they will use to rough cut things like this. There isn't always someone on hand to operate it (I've had to wait either in line or while they paged the guy in the store) but they don't charge for a simple "make it fit in my car." I will admit I have to spend more time planning my cuts on the panels as a result.
For long boards, I've usually just waited, but I have considered bringing a handsaw to make it work for small jobs. If I ever need a lot, they do rent trucks by the hour, but I've never tried that.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3mo ago
If nothing else, the electoral college shields the country from various shenanigans that would happen if you opted for "sum vote totals from fifty different systems": Every state is incentivized to muck with its vote totals, especially with plausible deniability, and it's unclear what enforcement mechanisms the states would have to keep each other honest. IMO voter ID rules and election hardware security become even more contentious when every vote cast nationwide effects the outcome, and, say, Alabama "accidentally" certifying totals with three extra zeros at the end probably doesn't violate their laws. At least right now, the EC bounds state voting issues to only their own electoral votes.
Everyone adopting the Maine system is tolerably close, and doesn't have this problem. I think it's a reasonable choice.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
Eventually, they just ceded the space altogether, and refocused on SUVs and trucks exclusively.
This is true of the Detroit motor companies, but I'm not completely comfortable calling that "Japanese automakers defeating American manufacturers": I've known lots of friends and family that drive "import" brands that were wholly built in America. And looking at the job postings for Honda and Toyota, it looks like there are no shortage of design engineering positions around the US either. At one point 30 years ago, it may have seemed imminent that American auto manufacturing would have gone extinct, but looking at it from a 2024 perspective, that conflict seems to fall on different lines: Detroit and its largely rust-belt, union factories versus more recent construction sunbelt at-will manufacturing funded by globalized brands.
I think some of this relates to the economics (and international trade politics) of transporting assembled cars versus franchising a new factories elsewhere, but while there would be some egg-in-the-face for Detroit if BYD, JAC, or Geely start selling lots of cars onto American roads, but if those cars are largely built by American hands and at least partly designed by American engineers, it's conceivably not that different from where we are today. The economics of Chinese Communism probably complicate this somewhat, but, as the kids say, it's complicated and it's not completely unfair to point out that the US government owned a decent chunk of GM for a while. I think it's plausible it could get horse traded by political leaders into a victory for globalism (similar to how the "Japan takes over the world" trope has been negotiated down to seemingly nation-less multinational corporations and occasional infusions of pop-culture), but I wouldn't bet heavily on that outcome today.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3mo ago
Realistically there is a small but hopefully-growing set of folks advocating to strike the PACER paywall completely. Perhaps the pricing made sense when it involved paper copies, but no other federal branch of government demands fees for seeing the law these days.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
Cottagecore and associated cultural trends are 95% LARP. Obviously, there are a few people who really are into it, but my observation so far has been that this is far more likely to mean "I moved to an exurb and picked up a horticulture hobby" than anything remotely resembling actual rural or off-the-grid living.
I think you're right that the overwhelming majority of people aren't going to seriously take up off-grid living, but I think we are seeing a slow shift in the zeitgeist around the margins. Sure, someone who fills Pinterest boards with cottagecore styles and buys a potted plant isn't personally making a huge shift, but I do think from talking to friends and co-workers that we're seeing a bit of a rebound into, for lack of a better term, touching grass: hobbies, IRL social groups, and such. It's less clear to me whether it's countering the broad, growing online-ness of the last two decades, or more specifically the stark digital isolation of 2020 (likely both), but the social status of "being online" has, to my eyes, peaked as of a year or two ago.
The Internet has completed a full cycle from being the exclusive domain of weird academic types, to primarily high-paying tech workers, to everyone's parents, and I wouldn't be surprised if the median (American) internet addict already has or will soon have a lower income than the average American. Admittedly, that's ill-defined: it's hard to escape the Internet completely, but it feels to me like constantly burying one's nose in a phone playing games or watching videos is becoming a low-status behavior. Less so for email, reading books, or texting friends, but I've seen people engaging in analog activities (writing, drawing, photography) get explicit positive reactions.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3mo ago
Guarantee citizenship for half a decade of service, or something similar.
As far as I know, a year of service already guarantees citizenship qualifies for naturalization. Although starting to depend on foreign fighters is generally pointed to as one of the points of decline in the Roman Empire.
Of the bunch, I suspect the US can, for now, afford your Midas option, or at least ways of making enlistment a more competitive time investment for young folks. It seems the current vibe is more "joined because I can't afford college" in a time when student loans and increasing incomes are providing alternatives. Plus there could be more investment in making veterans high-status, although that's probably too right-coded for the current administration to target -- and social status isn't easily enforced in a top-down fashion.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3mo ago
Half-baked thought: all of those industrial accidents don't involve victims aware that it's happening. I can imagine that, while it can sneak up on you, being told you're going to die invokes all sort of deeply-rooted vestigial instincts. Industrial workers in confined spaces aren't generally trying to hold their breath or escape. This may apply to some of the times lethal injection goes poorly as well.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4mo ago
Our current president said to a largely-Black crowd at a campaign rally that Romney would put them "back in chains".
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4mo ago
We go back to having white men be 70% of characters in all entertainment media, and another 25% are white women with zero character traits beyond 'sexy and horny for the main character'?
I think it's at least worth noting that the racial demographics of the United States were substantively different in the '50s-'80s (about 85% of the country was considered "white" by the 1960 census, and most of the rest was black) such that, while white characters may still have been overrepresented in those eras (not doing a formal study here), the background expectation should be much different today, where closer to 60% of the country fits that description. Complaining that the culture of yesteryear looks like the people of yesteryear seems a bit misplaced, in my opinion, although I don't have quite as strong of thoughts on current television demographics.
This, of course, doesn't apply to the gender breakdown of leading roles, so your mileage may vary.
These statements aren't strictly contradictory, although both are probably stronger claims than I would make. One lesson I've only recently begun to understand about WWII is that, at the scale of warfare required, seizing territory and, by extension, it's populace, gives fodder for larger armies.
This doesn't come up for discussion of American (or even Commonwealth, really) involvement in the war because the Western Allies weren't conscripting from recently-annexed territory, but the German army was much larger for having conscripted Czech and Austrian soldiers. It's not inconceivable that the same units currently armed by the West could be, after a surrender, rearmed by the Russians and marched west.
The only reason I don't find that situation hugely likely is that I'm pretty sure that most anyone can see that, in the case of a true hot war in Europe that NATO was involved in, the result would be a pretty decisive curb stomping on the scale of Desert Storm. Which is, to my mind, a huge argument for maintaining that technical and armament superiority, and also for Europe to step up their commitment to those alliances.
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