VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
"ending the war with one phone call"
Amusingly, this is pretty much the one thing that I think could happen (which is not a claim that it will). We frequently reference a left/right divide on "violence as a continuum/switch", and the piecemeal "escalation" we've seen from the Biden administration is very much on the continuum side and pretty clearly doesn't really scare totalitarian despots. Viewing it as a switch, and then credibly threatening to throw the switch if necessary seems like it would be more convincing: "Come to the negotiating table and accept my minimal terms, or I pull out the Gulf War playbook and destroy all your remaining Soviet stockpile. Tanks are already staging in Poland."
Is there a danger of nuclear war there? Maybe. But if you let that spectre drive all your decisionmaking, you'll find yourself cosplaying Neville Chamberlain in pursuit of "peace" all the way to a world war. I don't like war. It's terrible. Always has been. Always will be. But eternally shying away from it has its costs too.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
I've seen some really interesting commentary that it seems to have displaced anorexia, and in many cases the resulting recommended treatment looks a lot like affirming anorexia. Testosterone is really effective at reducing those feminine features (adipose tissues in all the right places) that anorexics often obsess over reducing or eliminating. Both seem in practice to be strongly correlated with abuse survivors.
I'm not going to say that's the whole story, but the anecdote from a trans-questioning feminist recovering from an eating disorder I remember seemed to justify at least some concern.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
The US doesn't have an explicit requirement to register your current address. I guess it's on my driver's license and that's supposed to be updated when I move, but those aren't required, and that's done at the state level. And some people have multiple residences, so you can't cue it on move-in dates.
It's interesting to talk with people from other countries about this, because the US doesn't track its residents anywhere near as closely as other countries I've been to. A hotel in Europe will consistently ask for my passport. In the US, they frequently only ask for a credit card, with maybe an ID only to check that I am the person with the name on the reservation.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Federal law already considers murdering a pregnant woman and her unborn child to be two murders. It was slightly controversial at the time, but hasn't quite (yet) been read the way you suggest.
The Trump-Raffensperger phonecall is closer
I would agree that this was a bad action, but, being very charitable here, Trump calling the Georgia Secretary of State to "find [number] of votes" doesn't seem different in substance from the Gore Campaign in 2000 calling the county authorities in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia Counties (all very blue districts!) and demanding they do a recount to ensure all their votes were counted. We don't have readouts from the sitting Vice President calling county election officials, but "find the votes" doesn't feel completely out of the question. Maybe the fact that Gore was trained as a lawyer would have prevented him from saying it explicitly, but implicit doesn't feel much cleaner here. Ultimately the election there was decided by SCOTUS (admittedly, on party lines) ruling that the disparate recount standards applied to different counties (read: only districts where finding ballots would be expected to tip the results a specific direction) violated equal protection under the Constitution. Rather uncharitably: Gore was found to, in violation of the Constitutional rights of the voters of Florida, conspire with partisan county election officials to change outcome of the statewide election, which would have tipped the electoral college.
Here you can even see The New York Times opining that absentee ballots which tipped the election should have been discarded for things like missing signatures and late postmarks. Strange they seem less interested in the legality of mail-in ballots cast in 2020.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
unable to issue all of its citizens with photo IDs.
Honestly, the IDs themselves are probably the easy part. With birthright citizenship, it's not like we have a conclusive list of citizens even scattered around the country in fragments. It's plausible someone was a home-birth that was never registered with the government, or a child of citizens born out of the country and never registered. And we don't have unique identifiers for our citizens: The SSN is the closest (and terrible for a variety of reasons), but there are people who, for religious reasons the government respects, opt out of having an identifier assigned to them (separate from opting out of Social Security itself for religious reasons, like the Amish).
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
For the record, I do find the entire January 6th debacle pretty disqualifying. I don't live in a swing state, so I guess my marginal vote doesn't really matter here, but I do find it a pretty solid reason to decide not to vote for Trump. I think he could have handled it better (without really personally buying into the theories of voter fraud swinging the outcome) if he had accepted the outcome, but channeled right-wing frustration with the trustworthiness of the system into an effort to root out voter fraud, with the aim to produce something disrupting the Biden administration like the entire Russiagate boondoggle dragged his own term. "I'll hand over power, but I'm going to make it my personal effort to make known to the American public how you cheated" is, I think, closer to the Overton window and could have been pulled off.
On the other hand (you asked for a steelman), January 6th is but an incremental escalation over the lawfare that surrounded the 2016 election. Unprecedented campaigns to cause faithless electors, and even attempts by Democrats still in good standing to reject the Electoral votes of the entire states of Montana, Wisconsin, Michigan, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. For all the discussion of having Congress reject specific votes in 2021, motions to do so were made in 2017. Kudos to Biden himself for rejecting those like Pence did, but Jamie Raskin, Pramila Jayapal, Barbara Lee, the late Sheila Jackson Lee, Raul Grijalva, and Maxine Waters literally tried (and failed, although you could accuse them of trying half-heartedly) to overturn an election and nobody seems to care enough that they all have remained politicians in good standing afterwards. That this escalating debasement of federal elections was allowed without any real repercussions seems to raise legitimate questions about whether the concern about the sanctity of elections is truly about the elections themselves, or selectively imposed only when the oligarchs dislike their outcomes. See also implications that we should throw out actual ballot returns because Russian propagandists might have made a few messages that voters might have seen. Once you're convinced it's who, whom? (both sides very clearly do this), it's easy enough to dismiss pretty much any concerns as politically motivated.
It seems like it would have been a good time to run a very clean "return to normalcy" campaign, but Biden was just last night saying "lock him up" at a political rally, and hasn't exactly been the centrist I feel like he campaigned as, which sours me quite a bit on his chosen successor. I'm not going to say exactly how I'll vote, but I'm pretty openly disappointed with both sides here.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
I think this is really just a factor of scale that we've perhaps chosen poorly. I've visited some friends who live north of Dallas, which is quintessentially suburban, and their single-family house in the 'burbs is not directly on the main roads (a grid with about a mile spacing), but requires turning off on a couple of smaller side streets, but the zoning along the main roads is commercial, so there are half a dozen small restaurants -- admittedly, not Michelin fare -- and daycares and convenience stores within a mile or so. If OP really has a two mile stretch each way to anything (and I don't doubt those exist; I've seen layouts like that) it seems we've just spaced things poorly.
But even then, economies of scale and the availability of cars means you choose to drive to the huge grocery store, not the corner bodega, which doesn't have room to stock your favorite almond milk or more than two types of beer. Not sure how that variety is achieved by New Yorkers, but they tell me it exists.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Do you mean a flip-phone as in something resembling a pre-iPhone cell phone? They still exist: some are clearly marketed to seniors, but I suppose there are others that like them for 2003 nostalgia. In terms of actual hardware, it looks like they can be found pretty cheaply new and unlocked (<$100 US). I wouldn't try to use an old one because the mobile standards have moved on and 2G seems to have been phased out.
In terms of actual use, I'd say be prepared to get good at T9 typing. It used to be a fairly common skill.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
But you're assuming that this technology doesn't change the kind, or number of parents that get IVF.
Are there even many anecdotes of people choosing IVF as their first choice method of conception? Maybe there are some worried about serious recessive genetic disorders, although most examples I can think of there seem more focused on pre-screening before marriage. The folks I've known who have done IVF largely tried most other options first, and are out of time to have a TFR that seems likely to cause massive changes in the future. I don't know the specifics, but I hear it's not exactly as fun as the more, er, traditional method, and pretty expensive.
I guess I could see that changing long-term, but it seems like it'd be a hard sell to a couple getting married young-ish and wanting a large family.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
But then Starlink is launching ever escalating numbers of satellites. So presumably a short term slump in download speeds isn't indicative of long term performance.
There are theoretical limits to how much bandwidth they can squeeze out of their spectrum allocation based on the physical aperture (size) of the antenna arrays on each side. And they keep selling smaller ground terminals, although those might get fractional performance. Something like a cell phone (which I've seen them rumoring support for) can't really do anything other than hit up every satellite in the sky.
Bandwidth has to be shared between every user in, effectively, an area of some size (I haven't run the numbers), and at some point even more satellites doesn't help. Bigger antennas on both sides would, though.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
The most obvious anchor customer is the DOD, IMO. But neither side there is going to shout about it. Low-latency, worldwide comms, resistant to anti-satellite weapons by sheer numbers. Directional antennas are more robust against jamming and detection, too.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Surely they assemble the SRB segments in-place, but yeah it's still quite heavy. They work well for what they do, but I do question their use for crewed flights generally.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Yeah, even if they've cut the launch costs by a factor of ten, they've still launched something like 200 flights just for internal use -- around two thirds of total flights this year. And as a LEO constellation that is (at least in part) an ongoing cost to replace satellites over time. And that's presumably all getting paid for (plus the satellites themselves, the ground stations, and operations) by a bunch of users paying around $1400/yr. I haven't recently run numbers on that, but it feels at least ambitious without a deep-pocketed anchor customer willing to guarantee the bills get paid (which they may quietly have, so I'm not betting against them).
And performance degrades (something folks funding them for rural bandwidth care about!) as they start oversubscribing areas.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
I think it was pretty clearly written to encourage investment in running fiber in rural areas. Except in case of backhoes, good fiber should last decades with minimal maintenance and an frequently can be updated with only new parts on each end. I know relatively rural folks that have gotten fiber in the last decade funded by programs like this and they are all pretty happy with it.
While Starlink might meet some of the listed requirements, it seems in some ways not the investment they were trying to push, and doesn't necessarily end up with a durable infrastructure product to point to as a success even if the company folds. Free space RF also has inherent bandwidth limits compared to point-to-point fiber.
Granted at this point it seems on slightly better footing than a few years ago -- I have my doubts about it's financial case, but as a private company they don't have to publish the numbers and they do seem to sell like hotcakes.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Is probability even well-defined for a one-off event? It's not like we can random sample the multiverse on how the election actually went. At the same time, nothing is absolutely certain (supervolcano as October surprise!).
Maybe it makes sense from a Bayesian perspective: given the current knowledge of the system state (polls, voter registrations, demographics, maybe even volcanology reports) we can estimate the probability of a specific outcome. But a frequentist view seems nonsensical, even if a lot of predictions seem to present themselves that way.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
I've never managed to try it, but the literature on palm wine suggests that palm sap will ferment to a nontrivial ABV (4% or so) in just a couple of hours sitting out unrefrigerated at what I assume are tropical temperatures.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Not strictly, I suppose. Although the acceptance of "life will be better if I can move myself over there" without necessary direct evidence strikes me as at least a bit of a cargo cult mentality, it's probably not religion per se.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
IMO if even part of the IDF evidence of Hamas operating semi-openly out of hospitals is accurate, it seems likely to me that doctors willing to continue working in that environment might be heavily selected to have an axe to grind against the IDF. For example, I know what I'd expect if I started polling Catholic doctors at Catholic hospitals about the ethics of abortion.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
The idea of a mythic "promised land" is broader than a specific hill in Israel. Lots of (early) American narrative references biblical history around the concept, from the place names ("Bethlehem, Pennsylvania", and even more obvious in heavily-Mormon Utah, which features Zion National Park and a Jordan River) to the idea of fleeing persecution to practice religion safely. And it's not just White Americans -- even MLK referenced the (more or less abstract idea) in one of his most famous speeches:
I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.
I don't think it's hard to see parallels with the American immigrant narrative -- consider "The New Colossus" inscription on the Statue of Liberty, although perhaps the Jewish tradition of interpreting the history and text there varies substantially.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
and then economic migrants who are neither highly-skilled nor in imminent danger but just happen to live in poor places and would rather move someplace better
I'm modestly surprised I haven't seen the trolls of 4chan and similar try to sell this as "Zionism". It seems like it'd be effective because the term is very negatively regarded in (far-)left circles, but also kinda applies if you squint just a little bit: these are outsiders with no recent history coming unrequested to this "Promised Land" -- the American (immigration) Dream has a pretty heavy religious component between "City on a Hill" and "Streets of Gold" -- without regard to how this impacts the current residents or their long-term self-determination.
I'm not really that far right or fond of trolling, but it seems in-line with It's-Okay-to-be-White-posters.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
As much as I don't like it at a very visceral level, a state unwilling to enforce it's rules by force has, in practice, no rules at all. In modern times we seem to have acquired a very Banksian view on enforcing laws in ways that I don't think we have the material wealth to back up, or even that such a level of wealth is necessarily possible. We like fining people who can't (and won't) pay anyway and feeling good that we've phased out "cruel" punishments that might dissuade anyone not at least middle class.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
I'd agree anti-ship missiles can be targets, but the Ukraine example suggests they can be a pretty potent force multiplier for an outgunned navy. Did any analysts seriously predict that neither side would have firm control of the Black Sea? Is China equipping it's flotilla with adequate anti-missile defenses? Taiwan also has submarines and torpedos.
Not convinced it's a guaranteed win, but it's certainly a bit of an unknown.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
I don't think the PLA Navy is ready yet
Is it even trending towards "readiness"? Admittedly that's a moving target against adversaries who are also preparing thenselves, but as seen in Ukraine it may be a question of whether Taiwan can build anti-ship missiles faster than China can build targets ships, not ship-to-ship. A blockade would be terrible if it could be maintained, but Taiwan is well-positioned to at least deter shipping to most of China's ports alone, and last I checked both are pretty heavy importers of food. It'd be pretty messy, even before considering the actions of the rest of the West.
Not betting heavily on Taiwan, but if they chose to fight I don't think it'd be easy to dislodge them.
If you look at the national level, it would seem that white emigration from Zimbabwe and South Africa fits this description, but I doubt anyone would describe it as such in polite company.
More options
Context Copy link