VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
These statements aren't strictly contradictory, although both are probably stronger claims than I would make. One lesson I've only recently begun to understand about WWII is that, at the scale of warfare required, seizing territory and, by extension, it's populace, gives fodder for larger armies.
This doesn't come up for discussion of American (or even Commonwealth, really) involvement in the war because the Western Allies weren't conscripting from recently-annexed territory, but the German army was much larger for having conscripted Czech and Austrian soldiers. It's not inconceivable that the same units currently armed by the West could be, after a surrender, rearmed by the Russians and marched west.
The only reason I don't find that situation hugely likely is that I'm pretty sure that most anyone can see that, in the case of a true hot war in Europe that NATO was involved in, the result would be a pretty decisive curb stomping on the scale of Desert Storm. Which is, to my mind, a huge argument for maintaining that technical and armament superiority, and also for Europe to step up their commitment to those alliances.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
22d 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
11hr ago
Lab-grown meat has made it surprisingly far given how many people hate it for different reasons
Notably, several countries in Europe (searching tells me France, Italy, and Austria, among others) are also looking to ban lab-grown meat, although their reasoning looks a lot more like the controlled-origin laws from what I can tell. IMO there's something to the "this is how we've always made it" that may merit protection, although I'm personally more ambivalent on the subject. Or the various labeling disputes for the current generation meat substitutes, which I think probably merit clear labeling.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
16d ago
The volume and scale of ammunition required to keep the guns firing with an overmatch to make very slow gains over relatively basic trench systems created a tension of how much is needed versus how vulnerable you are moving that much ammo forward.
I think this statement also vindicates decades and billions of dollars of American research and deployment of precision guided weapons: the logistical tail is greatly reduced when you can just, not fire the huge fraction of dumb rounds that would miss anyway.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
17d ago
You know, I can acknowledge that the pattern you're seeing exists, but I've never taken that much umbrage at it, probably because I mostly limit my content to older, or really highly reviewed stuff. Similar, to the question of whether the demographics of the cast need to match the source material. But I did come across an instance of it recently that bothered me a little, and felt notable.
I really enjoyed Masters of the Air: it was really excellent on most of the axes I care about -- screenwriting, visuals, acting, and such. But at one point, during an ensemble shot of the American air crews, I thought to myself "those guys all look British," so I looked into it on IMDB -- most of the main cast are British or Irish. Even the Tuskegee Airmen weren't played by African-American actors. Some of that might have been due to pandemic restrictions, or using local actors for logistical reasons, but it felt off. Not that there aren't lots of Americans of such descent, but a group of (white, 1940s) Americans should look more diverse than that: I had a [redacted] whose family had recently immigrated from [Europe, not Britain] that served and died in a B-24 over Germany.
Maybe it's that it's intended as a historical account, but it feels like it cheapens the narrative ("heroic American airmen bring the fight to Nazi Germany"), and it's not as if the British weren't there and similarly heroic at the time. A similar series portraying RAF Bomber Command would probably be pretty interesting!
That said, I would recommend the series overall as a worthy followup to Band of Brothers and The Pacific.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
Ah. I would personally agree they're at least different enough to warrant a separate discussion. I was just surprised (and wrong) that a sitting justice today would use that as a hypothetical. Makes more sense now.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
15d ago
Possibly. I think you might be able to track net cash outflows, rather than purchases directly, to cover most of it, but that admittedly only works for people that use banks and would have trouble with people who get paid and pay in primarily cash. But the existing income tax system has those problems too.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
18d ago
It's bonkers how much you pay for plywood smaller than 4'x8'. Basically a "Hah hah, you don't have a truck" tax. It's fully double per square foot for a 2'x4' sheet versus a 4'x8' sheet.
At least my local Orange Box store has a couple of saws they will use to rough cut things like this. There isn't always someone on hand to operate it (I've had to wait either in line or while they paged the guy in the store) but they don't charge for a simple "make it fit in my car." I will admit I have to spend more time planning my cuts on the panels as a result.
For long boards, I've usually just waited, but I have considered bringing a handsaw to make it work for small jobs. If I ever need a lot, they do rent trucks by the hour, but I've never tried that.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
13d ago
Only boring people are bored.
I was talking with [a child] the other week, who was complaining about boredom (in the absence of screen time) and observed that I remember being bored when I was a kid, but as part of growing up, I'm never bored as an adult. There is always something (many things, actually) I should be doing, and never enough hours in my day. And I even have to take care to use my hours wisely: not all interesting things have equal long-term value: I've largely retreated from video games except in a social capacity with IRL friends far away, instead working on improving myself (exercise, learning languages, art, hobby skills, reading), and valuing getting things done that provide long-term benefits.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
17d ago
In a rather similar vein, I really enjoyed the narrative and dialog in Firewatch (2016), even if, in some ways, it's more of an interactive novel. It's probably not for everyone, but the menu option to play with only a map and compass is an interesting vibe, too.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
There is a long history of fighting with questionably-motivated conscripts. I'm not convinced individual interest really matters: they seem to either get thrown to the worst fighting on the front, or to quiet rear defensive positions. On the other hand, as far as I'm aware, Vichy French and Norwegian troops didn't see much combat action on behalf of the Axis during WWII.
I think you're right that after two years of brutal fighting, there is too much animosity for that to work today, but early in the current invasion Russia was fielding all the troops they could conscript from separatist regions, so it's not completely out of the question, I think.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
17d ago
To be clear, it didn't really upset me much: I still liked the show quite a bit overall. But now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I've seen a WWII movie written from a British perspective. The war has a very prominent place in American (and Russian) culture, but I'm not sure if I've seen a purely British take on it.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
29d ago
Plenty of bad behavior happens among the Silicon Valley elite.
As much as I find the statement itself reprehensible, I think there's a kernel of truth in an infamous quote from a former president:
And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.
High status lets people (almost exclusively men, in this case) get away with a lot, in part because people are willing to put up with more to be with someone high status: Christian Grey's romance plays don't work for anyone who isn't a hot, young billionaire. The quid pro quo is implicit, and rarely spoken about, although I seem to recall a few blow-ups in recent memory where it seemed part of the drama involved (by deceit or misreading) mistakes about how high-status one party was.
And nobody really complains because it's hard to declare that behavior with "groupies" (for lack of a better word) is categorically non-consensual.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
22d 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
1d ago
How do I capitalize on the fact that the social fabric is fraying at breakneck speed?
I think this is more complicated than that in terms of market strategy. If anything, my feel for the zeitgeist is that this statement is true, but also that the median (Western) human is becoming acutely aware of this fact and it's starting to change behaviors. More than a few friends, even tech oriented ones, have done things like moving to tight-knit rural communities and taking up growing vegetables and raising chickens.
I don't have huge confidence in this, but I think there may be a groundswell of interest in deliberately investing in social fabric. This could conceivably go badly for tech companies: something like "social media is like alcohol: okay in small amounts, but everybody looks down on that guy that drinks beer for breakfast. Abstaining isn't frowned upon." Although I would be interested in something like Facebook was in 2010 that was primarily focused on actual social connections and not "influencers" or anonymous-ish groups.
There may be some business opportunities for explicitly creating Third Spaces, but what shape new ones would have is much less clear. Most of the general examples of those (gyms, coffee shops, bars) aren't in short supply, but also don't feel like they really are establishing communities anymore (or maybe large chains can't do local culture).
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
16d ago
And then gets hits by sales taxes anyway when he spends his money in the future.
I have occasionally mused that a truly-progressive sales tax could be interesting: tax total expenditures up to, say, the median cost of living at one rate, and marginal expenditures above at a higher rate. This would probably need some allowance for amortization on bigger purchases. The idea being to tax the wealth when it's spent, and intentionally incentivising capital investments rather than conspicuous expenditures.
But it's a very wonkish policy proposal that would be hard to sell to the broader public, I think. And probably has quite a few details that would need ironing out.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
23d 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
28d ago
This doesn't mean I think it's wrong. It's just that I think that the conclusions you'd have to draw from it being correct are just so awful for me.
I have always drawn a sharp distinction between technical questions and political ones. To me, "Is HBD true?" Is distinctly the former, while most any question about actually applying that knowledge is the latter.
I'm not a strict utilitarian: I think we can and should have guiding principles in how we approach political questions, regardless of the technical merits. I can think of plenty of likely true technical facts that, applied, lead to all kinds of evil: "Replacing retirement and social security with mandatory euthanasia centers increases paperclip production long-term GDP" might be true, but I find any attempt to enact such a policy morally abhorrent. But I also don't think we need to willfully blind ourselves to the idea as a whole to avoid enacting reprehensible policies: we simply make a moral choice not to do evil.
There will be disagreements about the morality of some cases, but I think there is a legitimate (near-)universal consensus that killing people at retirement is wrong. Much of the Culture War seems to revolve around the moral edge cases (abortion, for example) and largely binary views on morality.
In short, I don't think you should need to concern yourself with whether or not population-level statistics apply to you, and in return we as a society should agree to, in general, ignore those statistics (willfully, if necessary) when interacting with individuals on principle. Because that's the egalitarian society I would want to live in.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
20d ago
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Does it specify which species of bear? Black bears are common in the lower 48, and I've run into them before: I've even heard of people aggressively chasing them off. Not cuddly, but some of them aren't that much bigger than a large adult human. Grizzly and polar bears are much larger and dangerous.
I think the distributions of danger here are relevant: a 99th percentile dangerous human might well be much more dangerous than the equivalent black bear, even if the median black bear doesn't even get seen because it avoids humans. The median human is, I would guess, a net help in a survival situation, or at least tries to do so. In my experience, people evaluate risks like that very differently.
Somewhere in here is a decent joke about cougars in the woods: mountain lions are quite dangerous if they decide to kill you, but so are divorces.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
This is a good point, and I don't really have an answer to the question. Most (but not all) common carrier laws I can think of only require that utilities accept all comers -- AT&T can't deny phone lines to sex ships -- but some also go so far as to define specific performances like service areas -- AT&T doesn't run wire to my house specifically.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
14d ago
but how much does seniority matter in the SC?
Formally, I believe the task of writing the decisions is given out by the chief justice (if in the majority) or the most senior justice. I've seen some suggest that Roberts keeps some of the potentially-spicier cases for himself and writes more moderately than, say, Alito would. There are also fairly often cases where a new justice has to recuse themselves because they either previously judged the case on a lower court, or sometimes argued for one side. Neither of those is a particularly large concern, I would think. Their opinions are, to my knowledge, formally given equal weight otherwise.
I don't know about informally, where I suspect it matters for at least some time for a new justice.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
Even one day in prison would be a cruel and unusual punishment for the "crime" of having a common cold.
Who made this argument? I'm not generally of a "it's just like the common cold" take on the pandemic, but I'm assuming a SCOTUS justice would at least see the parallel hypothetical about house arrest for (potentially) having a contagious disease. If nothing else, it seems like an interesting set of tea leaves to read about how future cases might go.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
21d ago
Wasn't Snowden on record as trying to go somewhere else (Ecuador?), but ended up at the Moscow airport when the lawfare began?
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.
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