VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
The US has more money but no legal prostitution.
There are a few counties in rural Nevada. But otherwise practically true.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
what they have produced can only depreciate as it’s copied, leaked, or imitated. My god. We’ve finally found the promised deflationary asset.
I feel like I've heard this sentiment described for the better part of two decades now. While I'm sure there are some, um, connoisseurs of older content out there [1], the generalized death of new content production due to cheap copies of existing content floating around seems to have never arrived. Similarly for open source not leaving software developers unemployed, or file sharing not destroying the music and movie businesses.
- Genuinely, does the fantasy work when "wow, she must be in her 60s now" is a thought kicking around in your head?
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I have seen some reasonably compelling anecdotal evidence that FtM correlates very strongly with eating disorders ("take hormones to avoid getting curves!") and also with childhood sexual abuse ("I don't want to be seen as a woman if this is how they're treated!"). And also that those two are nontrivially correlated with each other.
Not trying to imply that this fits all cases, but it read as quite believable to me.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Do you think he wants to run for office? It worked for Trump.
On the other hand, this would be for parodies of the "Developers! Developers! Developers!" speech that was mocked online. But that was a quarter century ago, wow.
Starship isn't really made for the moon either.
The last couple years have had several notable tipped landers (more the norm than the exception, almost). That SpaceX plans on landing something that enormous and tall on the moon directly seems to be asking for trouble. It lacks robust mechanisms for lots of things (the LEM had a separate ascent engine partially because of concerns about the descent engine getting damaged on landing --- and a ladder), and honestly the Starship HLS and Artemis mission plans look like something a kindergarten class drew up: single sourcing not one, but two novel heavy lift launch vehicles (see Akin's Law 39, twice over). Build a permanent space station because you'll need to resupply (Gateway), then dock a single-sourced comically large lander that doesn't really need resupply anyway.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Or Desert Bus.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
You can teamkill and there are no guardrails against it.
Some of the most fun moments I've had with friends in HD2 involve hilarious team kills. From the accidental "Uh oh, got sniped and dropped the orbital bombardment on our present position" to the intentional "Why does someone always call a bombardment on our extract point as they get in the chopper, sometimes hitting stragglers?"
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I have long thought that modern medicine could use a bit of an adversarial model on whether specific treatments are strictly necessary. Briefly, doctors are incentivized, at least slightly, to treat patients that may or may not benefit from the treatment. As examples, I'd point to the occasional fraud charges brought on accounting of billing Medicare or Medicaid for unnecessary services, and occasional horror stories of long chains of medications for symptoms of other medications for an original prescription from three doctors ago that has never been reconsidered.
As a weak contrast, I've heard stories from more centrally run health systems where "have tried seeing if it gets better on its own?" was a much more common question. Not for all situations, but "wait 12 weeks to see a doctor" comes across similarly, if not direct medical advice.
That said, I don't think modern health insurance is a good adversarial system. But maybe we do save a few unnecessary procedures (and presumably put hurdles on ones that are necessary).
Similar industrial policies (with some degree of squinting) seem pretty common: Japan and Korea have their quasi-government conglomerates with strong political ties. The Nordics have state-owned enterprises. Norway also holds lots of shares in its wealth fund. Airbus is partially held by several European governments.
That said, I intentionally don't (didn't?) own INTC because it really needs some leadership and strategy changes to remain competitive.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
My hypothesis is that the modern hyper fixation on federal politics is bike shedding writ large. It's easy to have a strong opinion on federal issues (name one). Local politics deals with practical, boring questions about zoning, school bonds, and such. We spend way too much time arguing over the easy-to-understand bits (what color should the bike shed be), not on most of the details of governing.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I've always favored assigning voters to districts by valid dice roll. Nothing up my sleeves there, must be fair.
Is statistical joke, if unclear: each individual district becomes a random sample of the whole and converges to such, such that this is the worst possible gerrymander. But I didn't do anything obviously against the rules like taking race into account.
I'm not the election law lawyer you're looking for, but in short I'd say "it's a mess". Longer: the law in question is Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, accompanied with a bunch of court precedents, of which the Gingles test. Per Wikipedia:
Under the Gingles test, plaintiffs must show the existence of three preconditions:
- The racial or language minority group "sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district";
- The minority group is "politically cohesive" (meaning its members tend to vote similarly); and
- The "majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it ... usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidate."
There is some relevant more modern precedent, but that's the basic part. IMO it's not a good answer because it effectively dilutes the no-longer-majority votes that end up in that district (in largely the same ways, just reversed), and because putting too many minority voters in one district is "packing" which is also disallowed.
This is what happens when you don't have a constructive example of what should exist, just congressional and judicial legal wrist slapping saying "no, but not that".
ETA: Hopefully someone else can give a more complete answer.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
There's a reason a bunch of the longest house tenures are Southern Democrats who essentially sit in Rotten boroughs.
A non-trivial number of these are effectively required to exist by the Civil Rights Act.
Look, I’d absolutely prefer a norm of independent redistricting.
Several states have "independent" committees to draw district lines, but still manage to have drastic swings between party votes (let's use "votes for presidential candidate from each party" as a good, but imperfect proxy) and congressional representation. California comes to mind, but certainly isn't alone. I've even seen this defended with "but reds choose to live in dense blue areas, so we can't draw lines to create majority-red districts". Note that the Civil Rights Act requires, and we manage to generally, draw districts that are majority-minority (Q: if neighborhoods broadly ever become effectively non-segregated, can we throw up our hands and say this isn't possible?). The Louisiana SCOTUS case recently included peripheral questions about whether two disconnected historically-Black areas (one urban, one rural) could reasonably be drawn into the same district for this purpose.
Honestly, I've come to the opinion that in this day and age, good geographic district boundaries just aren't a solvable problem, and that we should probably move to proportional slates of candidates by state like some parliamentary systems do. This has its own problems, but I think if limited to one house of Congress would balance reasonably well. Pity that existing law disallows such schemes, I believe.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
If resources are what you're after, "at the bottom of a decent gravity well" seems like one of the worst places to be. Maybe there are other reasons to like planets, but shipping lots of mass between them seems expensive.
IMO asteroids are a far more interesting near-term target.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Or German besides living in the Midwest? Neither do I.
The presence of German culture in the US was pretty much forced out of the popular consciousness in two waves in the 1910s and 1940s for obvious reasons. It used to be a common language, even with German-language newspapers. Somehow the folks that get very upset about "destroying subcultures" never notice that example. You can still find bits and pieces around: Oktoberfest and such, and amusingly in elements of polka in Norteño music.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Now, a red-blooded red triber will for sure be cheering if some Indian Googler who retweeted an "America is helping Israel establish neocolonial apartheid" tweet gets unceremoniously deported,
This is a weird scenario partially because Indians themselves (well, some) likely have at least interesting views on the situation between the Indian minority in South Africa during actual Apartheid (not entirely from within the borders of modern India), and modern day India's relations with Israel largely vis-a-vis it's relations with its Muslim neighbor Pakistan.
History and society is complicated.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
It's maybe a depressing take, but I'd bet that aging and age-driven mortality is hugely multivariate as the result of at least a dozen factors that have all been locally optimized under a "needs to work at least one lifetime" metric. One could imagine a poorly[1] engineered car hitting it's warranty limit and immediately having all the wheels and seats fall out at once, without a simple "one weird trick" existing to maintain it indefinitely. I'm more hopeful for a bunch of weird tricks, though.
- "Poorly" here meaning not the car I want to own. But in practice, engineering things to last "just long enough" is often technically impressive, especially in other contexts. Boeing used to test it's new wing designs to failure to check that they weren't overbuilt (read: could be lighter).
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
The modern ACLU continues to employ a prominent lawyer who has literally gone on the record supporting banning certain books.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
They've gone so far towards being egalitarian they've become anti-egalitarian.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
- George Orwell, Animal Farm
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
You probably know more of the specifics than I do, but it was at least in some places (notably the Soviet Union and Sweden) seen as controversial at the time.
Ansys has a very high opinion of some of their products. I've heard others complain that some tools for VLSI (silicon chip design) are in similar price ranges too.
I wasn't paying the bills, so I don't have a specific price in mind.
EDIT: Huh, looks like they got acquired by Synopsys, one of the big expensive VLSI tool vendors. Not terribly surprising. Floating licenses help, too.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Heh, I'm pretty sure I've used software packages more expensive per seat than the engineers to run them. But yes, salaries are generally the largest. I'm sure pure mathematicians use a lot of chalk too.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Sure, but I have trouble believing that picking vegetables has as much profound randomness as self-driving cars: part of the reason the latter is hard is that it encompasses a huge range of general human knowledge ("Was that a shadow of a bird or an animal running across the road? I should watch out for deer in this sort of stretch"). Even sewing a shirt (I've done it) doesn't have that wide a range of random appearances.
It might be a bit more fair to include minor league and semi-pro teams, but the number is probably still small unless you somehow counted college (and maybe high school) athletes. That would also bump the revenue to compare with somewhat.
Pro sports salaries are, like OF revenue, very unevenly distributed.
More options
Context Copy link