VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
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User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
22d ago
Have you looked at the numbers for pumped storage? A kilo of gasoline stores enough energy to raise a similar kilo of water more than four thousand kilometers. The sheer volumes you'd need to lift to match the energy density of a single floating roof tank (or oil tanker) would be absurd, and you'd need to scatter pumped lakes the size of Lake Mead all over the country, and even then probably couldn't handle seasonal variation. Not to mention that reservoirs are themselves not that environmentally friendly or that there aren't many good sites to start from that aren't already used.
IMO generating hydrocarbons is the most viable storage technology (plus it works with existing supplied energy infrastructure), but even there robust, scalable chemical processes are lacking. Hydrogen is easier chemically but harder to store.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
23d 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
23d ago
I've long thought the jurisdictional arguments would make it difficult: to my knowledge, Assange is not a US citizen, nor has he set foot in the US. I can accept that the actions happened as-published, but it seems, well, inconsistent to allow nation-states to extradite people with such a limited claim to jurisdiction. If such a principle were evenly applied, would the US seriously consider, say, a Russian demand to extradite OSINT twitter accounts? Or is it just a principal that applies to citizens of close allies (Australia in this instance)? Would it even be considered if the roles were reversed?
It seems we'd be better served writing it out explicitly and reciprocally: "it is against [local country] law to actively spy on [allied country] outside of the national intelligence apparatus" doesn't sound completely crazy, but I don't think it is written anywhere.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
24d ago
Destruction of the Rafah Ghetto
Why is the obvious World War II comparison of Rafah to the Warsaw Ghetto? I can think of a number of other plausible comparisons that are probably worth considering. This is, admittedly, a rather hot take, but why not compare Rafah to Berlin in 1945? After the Third Reich invaded most of Eastern Europe, including rampant raping and pillaging across the countryside, and that entire campaign of deliberate ethnic cleansing and genocide, nobody looks at the Allied decision to demand complete, unconditional surrender as unreasonable, or that they kept fighting all the way to Berlin. Nobody argues that Stalin was deliberately unprepared at the start of the war to justify flattening Germany and running parts of it as a puppet state for Soviet gain. Nobody of import says "countless German civilians died because Roosevelt and Stalin were unwilling to enact a unilateral ceasefire at the Rhine and the Oder." Nobody serious mourns the Volkssturm civilians (frequently children) that were handed primitive weapons for futile resistance, without also recognizing the broader context of the tragedy of the entire war. And I'm not even going to even try to deny that the Red Army was infamous for its war crimes against civilians in the East, or the decades of subsequent political repression the Soviets brought to Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
The Axis powers entered the war in the late 1930s even though almost all modern historians consider their possibility of overall victory bleak. Maybe they could have bargained for an advantageous quick peace, but even Yamamoto has (possibly-apocryphal) quotes about expecting to lose a longer war. Hamas had even lower chances of winning in October. I'm not convinced that this merits assuming that either power, as the "underdog," merits obvious sympathy, although that seems to be in vogue these days in certain circles. Heck, if you look at ratios of civilian casualties -- as I've seen some argue makes Israel's actions unjustified -- America had almost none (generally counted as a few thousand if you include territories and civilian ship crews). The British claim 70,000. More civilians than that died in the Battle of Berlin alone, and Allied bombing campaigns killed hundreds of thousands. Not to mention the nuclear weapons.
I have trouble embracing the progressive worldview on Gaza because those same principles, applied to WWII, would have me side with the Axis powers. And I am quite certain that the world is a better place because the (Western) Allies won the day. Not that they are perfect (ha!), but I'll certainly stan them over the major Axis players.
Not that I'd wholly endorse Israel to hit Rafah like Zhukov hit Berlin: I don't think the situation really warrants it, or that the situations are immediately similar. Heck, I won't even try to argue that Israel hasn't committed atrocities in this situation. But on the other, it seems about as reasonable as comparing Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto, and I'd be pretty amused to see some Tankies argue that the Red Army was in the wrong.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
24d 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
24d ago
When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems?
Sometimes there are reasonable facts behind the complaints, but have you seen the litany of things "white supremacy" and "patriarchy" are casually blamed for?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
25d 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
25d ago
You're not wrong. The self-selection process for the times I've seen it work is likely an essential part of it working at all. Self-actualization is something that requires internal motivation, and can't be forced. But it can be an aspirational picture.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
25d ago
There is something undeniably effective about just having very different people sit down and talk/interact with each other in a non-violent setting. Not that I really disliked either set of people before visiting them, but I felt I definitely understood them better afterwards.
When I was younger, I did a fair number of programs that involved getting grouped with other people you didn't know and having to work together. It was also an eye-opener for me. The rural/urban divide was certainly present, but not the only divide: having been raised in a straight-laced, middle-class, white collar household that I thought knew how to do physical labor, the blue collar work-hard-play-hard approach to life wasn't something I expected.
I have occasionally mused in the last few years that mandatory national service after high school would probably improve national cohesiveness. Not for militaristic reasons (although those aren't completely invalid), but also because being forced to meet and work together with very different Americans would be good for the country as a whole. And there are some useful life skills that some would never pick up otherwise. Even if it's just cutting trails in National Parks/Forests or whatever.
But I'm not sure how I could convince the median voter to go for it: probably half don't trust the country to be left in charge of their kids, and a similar portion think their kids are too good to spend months of their lives on something outside of their worldview.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
29d 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
29d 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.
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.
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