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VoxelVexillologist

Multidimensional Radical Centrist

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joined 2022 September 04 18:24:54 UTC

				

User ID: 64

VoxelVexillologist

Multidimensional Radical Centrist

1 follower   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 18:24:54 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 64

Like if someone makes a comment implying the police are racist or something,

Honestly, it's not too hard to acknowledge that this does happen more often than it would in an ideal world (never, presumably). I don't think I know anyone who thinks police racism is a good thing. Maybe someone wants to argue that Bayes makes it worthwhile, but I don't find that terribly compelling.

That humans are fallible is unsurprising, but how to design systems that work despite human failings is the core of civil political discourse. The extreme points of repressive jackboots and Mad Max anarchy are both pretty obviously undesirable to most: How do we choose balance personal freedom and public safety? Who watches the watchmen? These seem like less charged directions you can steer such a conversation.

the Russians did not establish Nazi-style concentration camps for industrialized slaughter

I think it's worth noting that while the camps are the most well-publicized part of the Holocaust, a decent fraction of the deaths, especially early in the war were attributable to death squads with guns rounding up "undesirables."

There have definitely been recorded mass graves in places like Bucha that at least seem to resemble this sort of policy of wanton death.

Amazon is really hard to buy decent clothing from. I've tried buying stretch knit dresses, which is the easiest thing possible to fit, and they were still off and basically unwearable, high waisted for a very short, wide person in that case.

Completely anecdotally, my experience has been the opposite. But I'm looking at menswear, not dresses. In particular, I found a business casual shirt that fit me well in my closet, and I was able to find the exact same brand/size on Amazon. The first one fit, and I've since bought a few extra colors when the price is reduced (I might grump a small amount that even these change slightly over time, and that back pleats on men's shirts seem to be out-of-fashion these days). I've also bought quite a few pairs of jeans in rather the same way, which saves rummaging through the racks at the store to find the right size: there are surprisingly few longer-than-wide pairs of pants at modern American stores, but Amazon always has them in stock. Socks don't have much variation in sizing, either.

In terms of athletic wear, a few years back I bought a pair of running shorts for a good price on a whim from a Chinese brand I hadn't heard of, and they have honestly been some of the best I've used (not a connoisseur). I've since bought a few more (and a couple of other items), and not been disappointed. Sportswear in stores, especially anything sport-specific, is generally comparatively expensive in stores near me.

Admittedly, I can imagine works for me primarily because I'm trying to buy identically-cut garments, which I'd bet only works for male fashion.

In this case it's primarily that the one I have is the wrong color. Also, styles change. I tried it on, and fortunately it fits well enough that I might consider tailoring it in the future (I haven't gotten bigger, most notably), but given how often I wear them I'll probably keep it stored safely until I need it.

For the record, I agree with your take. The comment is more referencing cases in which people rhetorically imply that the country is worse off than otherwise, which I think is less clear.

I can't say I have too much experience with using machine translation, so I'm probably not the right person to give you such a comparison. It's reasonably fast and produces English prose that reads pretty naturally when I've used it.

I've been surprisingly impressed with the Firefox Translations extension, which does the ML translation locally.

I wasn't aware of the other gun crimes. The original article says "it would not prosecute him in connection with his purchase of a handgun in 2018 during a period when he was using drugs," which seems to dance around the details of post-purchase behavior, although I hardly expect to see charges filed for that either.

The one I'm most familiar with is the Texas Open Meetings Act, which seems to place some stricter requirements on "meetings" with although that would depend on the details of city governance (were these "meetings" with the mayor and city council or is the mayor authorized to directly command the police department without deliberation?) and the text messages at play. Anecdotally, I've heard that politicians are advised to not discuss business outside of announced, scheduled meetings, but charges are infrequent (although not non-existent).

Interesting: I thought there were more Filipino Spanish speakers (perhaps the ones I've met have been a biased sample). The official Census definition seems to specify Spanish for the definition of "Hispanic", but there's some disagreement from other parties on whether or not Portuguese should be included.

Whoops, I knew it was supposed to be "commuted" but must have been in too much of a hurry when typing the original comment to notice. Thanks for correcting that!

I long assumed that Twitter's character limit was maintained due to a database schema somewhere: a fixed-size Tweet structure probably makes a lot of sense, although if you're reserving 10kB for each post here I bet that would add up quick. Although with compression perhaps that's less of an issue.

the Dallas-Houston route is well served by commuter flights and luxury buses which puts an upper floor on the price tag for rail tickets.

I've long been wondering whether a better application of HSR wouldn't be to urban centers directly, but to major airports. Ideally, the airport already has transit options into the city available, are generally on the outskirts of town where routing rail travel would be easier, and, while airlines might be unhappy about losing short flights, there are lots of short connections to hubs that could probably be faster by train than an extra connecting flight. Austin and San Antonio to Dallas or Houston, Chicago to Milwaukee, Oklahoma City to Dallas, Phoenix to Tuscon. All these flights are about an hour, and fly more than half a dozen flights daily each way, many of which are, I assume, to take a much longer flight from the larger airport, because driving would take a similar amount of time and solve getting around at the destination.

Don't cancer rates vary quite a bit geographically even without nuclear fallout? IIRC Australia has absurd skin cancer rates, but hasn't seen widespread panic and fleeing from this danger. "Twice as likely to die of skin cancer" is concerning and unfortunate, but still not a huge absolute risk.

Do you have a particular recipe to recommend? I have an Instant Pot and do appreciate a good biryani.

hasn't even vented the dryer to the outside of the house

While what you're describing is probably a cheap, incorrect (and probably both damaging and against code) way to install a dryer, there are "condensing" dryer models out there that don't require vents.

Price deflation is still pretty bad because it shifts gains towards capital and away from workers.

While economists seem pretty convinced that modest inflation is preferable to modest deflation, I'm personally unconvinced that for modest, predictable rates (which plausibly excludes Gold or Bitcoin) it matters much either direction. There are examples of specific commodities deflating (specifically, "for the same price in dollars next year I can get more/better product": computers, flat-panel TVs, cell phones, even cars) and none of the promised miserly spending habits have really appeared that I can tell. Apple didn't become a trillion dollar company because everyone is patiently waiting to get a better iPhone next year rather than this year.

On one hand, yes it does seem important in the heat of the moment, even to me! Lives really are at stake, but at a societal level a few lives lost here or there are, while absolutely tragic, the sort of thing that, while we'll say we don't like bargaining with and deem priceless, in practice we'll gamble as if they don't really matter much to us. Witness, for example, fights over making streets safer for pedestrians, which many are happy to argue against (myself included sometimes) because it'll add a minute or two to a given car trip.

The Culture War also has no shortage of examples of catastrophizing on all it's extremes: witness that time that our current president told Black voters that milquetoast Republican Mitt Romney would "put [them] in chains," or how using undesired pronouns is akin to genocide, or how an admittedly-neglected immigration policy is a deliberate choice by certain figures to drive "demographic replacement." I'm not going to claim there isn't a kernel of truth to those claims, but finding common ground probably requires ceding that the bigger picture being painted is pretty biased. Of course, that position does embrace mistake theory, but I personally think we're still at a point where it's viable and nobody needs to be actively coordinating meanness.

Yeah, the school district was probably a similar situation, but I don't remember any similar dates of convenience for, say, Eid, Diwali, or Lunar New Year even though those probably had at least as many practitioners as there were Jews in the district.

I've slowly developed a shooting pain that begins in my right lower back and extends to my outer right thigh.

I'm not a doctor, but this sounds like sciatica. The internet can suggest some specific stretches that might help.

This is one of the places where I find the current left/right divide to be incongruous: the left here sees a strong need to protect people from themselves, but only in certain instances. Your argument is a general one for banning the sale of potentially dangerous objects to prevent self-harm. But at the same time we're told that the addicts shooting up heroin on the streets are Living Their Best Lives and we couldn't possibly try to take away substances that demonstrably cause harm to individuals and society as a whole, because Individual Freedoms, although we can try to ban large soft drinks. This largely holds in reverse for the right.

Fundamentally, society is a coordination problem, and those are hard and seem to lack generalized solutions. Different scales have different optima: I unironically run my household as a socialist collective (from each, to each...) but wouldn't vote for such policies in even small town government.

If so, I want to ask the DoD why they're giving people clearance to say untrue things.

For some categories of folks, I wouldn't be surprised if pre-publication review is mandatory. The DOD probably has to at least proofread any book by certain folks, even if they decide to write historical fiction. A memoir or anything close to their specialty could actually inadvertently disclose something classified. It's quite possible the folks here charged with "giving clearance" only care about a very narrow set of facts (names, places, dates) appearing.

Although I suppose claiming any degree of official statement or backing might be its own concern. But it's unclear to me this is actually claimed here: "the censors didn't censor my ramblings" isn't alone an endorsement.

Interesting! Any good papers or summary articles you'd recommend?

with the prosecutor's personal interests diverging from the interests of the public.

IMO this problem already exists with absolute immunity: career prosecutors are highly incentivized to win prominent cases. There are plenty of examples of prosecutors withholding defense-friendly evidence or otherwise violating constitutional rights. I don't see a clear reason that prosecutorial immunity needs to be unqualified: at least we recognize theoretical bounds in the extent that police officers can violate rights before civil and criminal penalties should apply.

But thank you for the explanation, this thread has definitely made me consider a new-to-me reason why the legal system may be ill-suited to policing itself with respect to the broader public's constitutional rights and general interests. I'll have to ponder on how it could be better-aligned.

Both sides would have issues with serious criminals running off to the other state.

IIRC I've seen discussion here about states issuing non-extradition warrants as, effectively, exile. It allows them to re-arrest criminals that stay in-state, but not shoulder the cost of trials or prison if they just go elsewhere. I don't know what the relative rates of such things are, but I think there are cases in which "running off to another state" is actually a desired result.