VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
So apparently European values are that they get to influence others thinking and no one else does.
Looks at last few thousand years of history. The answer has pretty clearly been yes until maybe 1945. And even then, I'm not completely sure whether that was a change in values or just the rhetoric used to express them in polite company.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
We also don't have any jurisprudence I'm aware of on how rules for "foreign propaganda" mesh with the First Amendment. Could FDR ban publishing Der Stürmer by German sympathizers in 1942? That looks a lot like an act of Congress restricting the press, but honestly you'd have trouble getting me to march in support of the publishers. What about in less-declared conflicts? Did the Soviets ever try to just publish Pravda above-board in America?
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Part of the problem here is that for all its claims to be a valid currency (medium exchanged for goods and services) the most important factor is user buy-in. Gold is at least rare, shiny, and has practical uses. Fiat at least has governments willing to issue it, pay with it, and expect taxes in it. Bitcoin has, I guess, a decade of history and meteoric rising valuations.
Which isn't to say that we couldn't rapidly lose trust in fiat or gold either (goldbugs when the philosophers stone is invented, or asteroid mining), but I do have doubts people would take Bitcoin as seriously if the US Treasury owned a majority stake in it. Although I suppose that feels less existential to crypto as the idea has matured and people hear about it.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
On one hand, allowing countries to subvert foreign elections seems obviously bad [1]. On the other, throwing out election results based on foreign social media posts seems liable to create a valid threat of a denial of service for elections absent something like The Great Firewall (which is itself a potential threat to open society).
I see why both sides would presumably be frustrated by this, but I don't have a real Platonic ideal of an alternative to suggest. Governance, at least good/fair/democratic governance, is hard.
- For some value of bad that is pretty nebulous. For all the allegations in the US in 2016, the actual posts entered into evidence in followup investigations were IMO almost embarrassingly bad and not really shown to be effective.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
UnitedHealth bid a lower cost for the contract, won it, and promptly started denying most claims on the first pass. Only clinics which sent appeals would get paid, and almost always did.
The scummy behavior isn't just on the insurance companies: [redacted] went to a medical provider that decided to code every (scheduled!) specialist office visit with an ER facility fee, and the insurer just shrugged and said it wasn't their problem and wouldn't do anything about it until the out-of-pocket maximum, even though they would have covered such fees for a real ER visit (conveniently, this happened to save them money). Not really much you can do unless you have a competent HR department on your side, which I've been fortunate enough to personally have in the past, except pay it, call and complain until they reduce the charges, and/or leave poor reviews.
I'm not sure I'm qualified to make good suggestions about how to improve medical billing, but it's pretty clearly a mess of opaque charges. Trump in 2019 forced providers to publish price lists, which I'd have though might improve things, but it doesn't really seem to have. Active price-fixing is generally bad for all the well-known reasons even if more uniformity in prices for, say, appendectomies would make arbitrage easier. Are there any real proposals with a sound economic basis for improving things? As much as I don't like throwing up my hands in not understanding complex systems (and deferring to Chesterton on the subject of fences), I don't exactly have a better suggestion at hand.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Inside you are two wolves investors: the first sells the stock on the expectation that a short-term leadership vacuum will hurt profitability; the second buys the stock because the first sold on basis that the long-term fundamentals are unchanged. And they're both bewildered that the price seems unmoved, I suppose. I guess that means this isn't a taxable event.
The other obvious lawfare strategies would be to find a red state prosecutor with whatever nebulous nexus to bring state charges not subject to the pardon according to lots of blue media ink ("lied to a patrol officer about the nature of his travel"). Or to use the pardon to compel unfavorable testimony (voids the fifth amendment right to avoid self-incrimination) or face even further charges.
Not that I'd endorse these, they just seem the logical escalating responses.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
it makes sense to require eg engineering students to take some English and history classes for gen-ed reasons.
Snarkly, I think it makes sense for humanities students to take some math and physics classes for gen-ed reasons. I see lots of pontificating from the self-declared "educated" classes that clearly lack an understanding of calculus and other entry-level numeracy concepts.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I would believe its purveyors may claim that, but I've never seen "critical theory" come to a positive conclusion about any real pretty much anything. There is a lot of pontificating about how pretty much everyone suffers from pervasive, say, racism, but I don't think I've ever come across "actually, X is good enough" except about some perfect hypothetical. I don't really see much depth to the field (happy to consider otherwise) beyond tearing imperfect things down and wanting to replace them with nothing.
As someone raised Christian it pattern matches really well into "all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God" (true), but lacks the radical forgiveness that is supposed to accompany that phrase.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Which raises concerns about how "critical" it is in the first place.
"Critical" in English has a few surprisingly different meanings. After all this time, I've realized that "critical theory" is "critical" in the sense of "inclined to criticize severely and unfavorably", while I might have naively assumed it meant "of, relating to, or being a turning point or specifically important juncture" (both quotes from Merriam-Webster).
IMO we should find a new name for "critical thinking" that less strongly suggests it should be about tearing things down.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Think 1 meter of sea level rise in the next 100 years, assuming no mitigation.
Sea level has been rising (possibly slower than that) for several thousand years. We know this because there are underwater archaeology sites like Doggerland and Heracleion (that one may be more a matter of localized geology) where people at one time lived on dry land.
Admittedly the rates of rise may be changing, but assuming a null hypothesis of completely static sea levels seems wrong too.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Yes, that's what I was trying to describe. Front-end web development is a lot heavier on "user experience" and, for lack of a better term, art, while something like fintech C++ developers are concerned about absolute minimal latency (processor cache misses, pipeline hazards, memory access patterns), and your automotive embedded developers are tuning physical control systems. My guess would be that user-facing developers, especially for non-business users, are more likely to lean more progressive because they really do need to worry more about accessibility (internationalization, screen reader support, color-blindness-friendly palettes) than kernel developers, which seems to me to at least loosely fit the people-focused vs. thing-focused spectrum that seems to already have a bit of a political valence.
From personal experience, the vast majority of competent and brilliant software engineers are either progressive or turbo-liberals.
By "turbo-liberal" here are you including libertarian types? They have existed as a consistent minority within software development since at least ESR's day, but I don't think they're as party-aligned as they might have been at the time.
I do think there's probably a poorly-researched difference in political alignment across the software spectrum: there are big differences in how front-end, back-end, embedded, and medical/aviation/automotive/defense (validation!) developers are tasked with thinking that probably selects for political persuasions. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if more left-leaning developers are prone to be more involved with public development (open source, conferences, etc), while self-driven solo developers (Linus circa 1993, Carmack, and such) have a different bent.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Is that a function of education time/costs? Employers are willing to take on apprentice welders and electricians, but the educational hurdle for an NP is several years of training before someone becomes employable. Pilots need (preferably paid) hours to hit minimums for airline work. Nobody seems to be willing to hire to train engineers or lawyers either because those are harder to learn (earn licenses) while working at more entry levels.
It seems to me as someone who only uses the healthcare system but has friends who went into medicine that there is a huge fraction of medicine, mostly in general practice where we already have a shortage of doctors, that consist of handling the same dozen ailments over and over again. How much time do pediatricians spend diagnosing ear infections in kids and writing notes to send them back to school and prescriptions for amoxicillin? Or GPs asking the same lifestyle questions and giving the same advice ("quit smoking, lose weight, get more exercise"). The AMA cartel would have you believe that it takes years and years of specialization to handle this, but it seems that most of the front end stuff really can be handled by someone like an NP who knows those dozen ailments well, and most importantly when to ask for a more expert opinion.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I think you're right that the zeitgeist has a lot to do with it. I remember at the nadir of my dating life (before Obergefell) looking in the mirror and asking why I couldn't find an awesome woman. And at least very briefly thinking that I'd be a good one myself (fit, tall, all those cool male-coded interests: what's not to like?). But it wasn't a popular idea to consider at the time, so it got shoved aside never to return and things got better for me within a few weeks. I'm occasionally thankful it didn't get further consideration at the time.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Do you have any recommendations for finding good hobby discords for, I dunno, underwater basket weaving? I see a decent number of active Facebook groups for such things, but Discord seems to have poor discoverability.
Is there a way to do C++ without header files?
I wouldn't recommend it as a permanent process, but when I'm sketching things out I often define functions within class definitions in headers. You can almost get to a point where you only have header files, but there are a few caveats (circular dependencies, static member initialization, inlined code size) that prevent me from liking it for bigger projects. But it can be helpful if you haven't finalized interfaces since there is only one place they are defined.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
If option A means potential prosecution and option B means a possible hike in malpractice insurance premiums, option B wins every time.
Definitely most of the time. But abortion seems a topic of generally much stronger opinions than euthanasia, and at least one doctor there (Kevorkian) was willing to go to jail for what he believed in. As far as I know, nobody is actually in jail for violating post-Dobbs abortion rules in the US, which I find surprising.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I think the implication is that left-leaning doctors are, either deliberately or quite possibly inadvertently, engaging in something like Washington Monument Syndrome with abortion cases: in the same way that the first cuts to the NPS prominently close the Washington Mall, marginal non-emergency abortion restrictions are read to apply to even life-or-death cases that should be pretty clear.
I wouldn't put huge weight in it, but there are plenty of examples of partisans reading opponent's rules maximally uncharitably. The fight over school library books comes to mind: this is probably choosing a side, but every rule that is charitably "stop putting the works of Chuck Tingle in the kindergarten section" is read uncharitably to ban (unabridged) copies of The Diary of a Young Girl.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Was there some operation where an organized group directed by the Mexican government (or whatever group controlled the territory) came in and killed and kidnapped a bunch of random Americans?
Are you familiar with the story of Mexican separatist Pancho Villa and the Battle of Columbus, NM (1916)? That led to an uninvited US expeditionary force wandering around in Mexico looking for Villa, but only finding his subordinates.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
If, as the right (persuasively) argues, it is racist towards Anglos / French / Germans to flood these countries with migrants, ending their former status as (de facto) ethnostates, then opposition to Israel as a Jewish state is likewise antisemitic.
This is funny to me because I usually approach the thought experiment here from the other side: If, as the left (IMO not completely persuasively) argues, that it is The Right Thing (tm) for the residents of Springfield, Ohio to accept a bunch of Haitian refugees seeking asylum granted by a far-off government and to think otherwise is obvious bigotry, then why can't we tar Palestinians who reject living next to Jewish refugees (who were in 1948 fleeing far greater persecution than Haitians in 2024) granted part of the land by a far-off government (the UN in New York) similarly? Surely only an antisemite doesn't appreciate whatever the Israeli equivalent of a taco truck is!
Of course, in the real world these things are more nuanced, and I don't really find either case completely compelling: there are legitimate arguments against poorly-controlled immigration, but IMO far fewer in favor of violent ethnic cleansing campaigns against immigrants. Although the parallel between Hamas and the Klan as anti-immigrant militias seems at least interesting to consider.
I don't know that I want to stan RFK here, but the status quo isn't inherently better: public health generally has a lot of egg on its face, not just from the pandemic. Attempts at COVID vaccine mandates seem pretty ham-handed in hindsight given their lack of long-term immunity. The FDA approved, over the advice of its own scientists, a very expensive drug for Alzheimer's that wasn't even found to be effective. Literally the current assistant secretary of HHS was found to have put political pressure on WPATH to remove age limits from gender medicine in its guidelines at a time when many Western countries have reviewed the literature and are questioning the practice for youth.
I get where you're coming from, but I find myself questioning whether putting RFK in charge will actually make things worse. At least he'll get push-back against crazy policies.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Definitely some of that. More than a few have been second (or more) generation, and a couple of those have talked about working for their parent's classic immigrant businesses (gas stations, laundromats, that sort of thing), so I don't think their ancestors all arrived with high-tier degrees.
Captain Planet was never particularly subtle about being political agitprop for kids: I think I understood that even at the time, and I'm not even one opposed to rational environmental protection laws. I think this to some extent merits the Ohio meme: "Wait, all kids shows have some element of propaganda to them?" "Always has been."
I remember my parents looking down at Power Rangers because it was kinda violent (dunno, haven't watched much because of that, although kids really do act out scenes from TV shows and such). And The Simpsons because the humor was often lowbrow, which I have more complex thoughts about.
Although I would highly recommend Bluey if you're looking for something modern.
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