VoxelVexillologist

VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 3d ago

Abortion was made a constitutional right by first finding a roght to privacy, and then discovering abortion being made illegal violates this right (but only in the first trimester).

It's worth noting that doctor-patient privacy somehow also only extended to abortion, and not, say, to Kevorkian or medical marijuana.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 3d ago

Every single information and/or discussion channel/forum is getting shittier and shittier. I posit that in addition to algorithms maximizing engagement or minimizing whatever, it's also the userbase.

The true old timers will tell you that they wish September '93 would end.

Not that I disagree, but the observation is hardly new, and yet we're nominally still here. I sometimes wonder if it's bias in the observation, but maybe there are objective measurements somewhere.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 10d ago

It definitely annoys me that "access to the financial system writ large" has become so utterly critical to doing anything useful that it immediately has a totalizing effect on what anybody can do, anywhere in the world, even on the internet.

You're not wrong: despite general libertarian sympathies, I do think there is a role for utility-type regulation in a number of new critical roles that didn't exist a few decades ago. Credit cards and cashless payments are certainly one.

I'd toss out email and online identity infrastructure as another that doesn't get much press: I've come to realize that my dependence on my Gmail account (which I've had since it was an invite-only beta) would be almost impossible to replace. Maybe with a lot of work I could replace it with one provided through Microsoft, but that wouldn't really fix the problem. Practically hosting your own email is basically impossible, from what I can tell, due to spam blocking mechanisms. Given Google's propensity to sunset things (or really, the level of risk of corporate spontaneous failure), I think it'd be a pretty serious crisis if their email and identity servers went down for a day. Or worse, permanently.

I'd point to the common carrier rules for other utilities as a reasonable example of what could be done. I think expanding those to include things like credit card payments and email would be possible. However, those have their own concerns with fraud and such that might prevent applying the existing rules as-is.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 18d ago

which is why they unfroze billions of Iranian funds and reduced sanctions (in what now looks to be a serious blunder).

It continues to surprise me how many of these blunders date back to the first weeks of the administration. I'm not a huge fan of the previous president, but many of Biden's first actions included repealing the "remain in Mexico" policy (which seems linked to ongoing trouble with immigration), making nice with Iran (which didn't prevent October 7th, and seems hotter now than before), and passing the final round of pandemic stimulus (which we were told wouldn't cause inflation).

It doesn't exactly inspire the most confidence in me.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 11d ago

but Biden needs the progressive left to win this election

Unironically, I don't think this was true two years ago. If he'd have played Bill Clinton's playbook from the 90s and governed as center-left, I think he could have a high enough approval rating that we wouldn't be taking a rematch of the 2020 election seriously. But it seems, to me at least, that the current administration doesn't want to moderate its positions to appeal to the median voter: I'm hard pressed to think of many cases where it's been willing to push back against progressive partisans.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 21d ago

Have you looked at the numbers for pumped storage? A kilo of gasoline stores enough energy to raise a similar kilo of water more than four thousand kilometers. The sheer volumes you'd need to lift to match the energy density of a single floating roof tank (or oil tanker) would be absurd, and you'd need to scatter pumped lakes the size of Lake Mead all over the country, and even then probably couldn't handle seasonal variation. Not to mention that reservoirs are themselves not that environmentally friendly or that there aren't many good sites to start from that aren't already used.

IMO generating hydrocarbons is the most viable storage technology (plus it works with existing supplied energy infrastructure), but even there robust, scalable chemical processes are lacking. Hydrogen is easier chemically but harder to store.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 19d ago

The death toll seems to have come to a grand total of zero.

You know, for all the frequent concerns about AI killbots, modern smart weapons have, in practice driven what is, to use your term, kayfabe. I could point to how concerns about nuclear mutual destruction, while technically a valid concern, have thus seem to have caused a (fragile) truce on Great Power conflict. It seems that one outcome of true "smart weapons" would be the establishment of this sort of kayfabe, like in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "A Taste of Armageddon," but with no actual deaths, just our robots going at each other with the owners of the losing bots ceding the conflict, because of the implication.

Now that I think about it, the post-WWII era already has quite a few conflicts that are settled not by outright conquest, but by leveraging power into situations where one nation-state could clearly squish the other like a bug, and the loser taps out like a wrestling match, rather than a mano a mano fight to the death. It seems that some of the more enduring conflicts that exist (Israel/Palestine, for example) continue because the "losing" side refuses to tap out, and the rules of the international arena don't really consider such cases.

But it leads us to weird things like today's events, where one clearly-outgunned side is clearly and deliberately firing live ammunition at the other, and the fired-at parties seem to be left batting down the ammunition, and wondering whether it's worth the trouble to flatten the other side.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 24d ago

There is something undeniably effective about just having very different people sit down and talk/interact with each other in a non-violent setting. Not that I really disliked either set of people before visiting them, but I felt I definitely understood them better afterwards.

When I was younger, I did a fair number of programs that involved getting grouped with other people you didn't know and having to work together. It was also an eye-opener for me. The rural/urban divide was certainly present, but not the only divide: having been raised in a straight-laced, middle-class, white collar household that I thought knew how to do physical labor, the blue collar work-hard-play-hard approach to life wasn't something I expected.

I have occasionally mused in the last few years that mandatory national service after high school would probably improve national cohesiveness. Not for militaristic reasons (although those aren't completely invalid), but also because being forced to meet and work together with very different Americans would be good for the country as a whole. And there are some useful life skills that some would never pick up otherwise. Even if it's just cutting trails in National Parks/Forests or whatever.

But I'm not sure how I could convince the median voter to go for it: probably half don't trust the country to be left in charge of their kids, and a similar portion think their kids are too good to spend months of their lives on something outside of their worldview.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 24d ago

You're not wrong. The self-selection process for the times I've seen it work is likely an essential part of it working at all. Self-actualization is something that requires internal motivation, and can't be forced. But it can be an aspirational picture.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 23d ago

When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems?

Sometimes there are reasonable facts behind the complaints, but have you seen the litany of things "white supremacy" and "patriarchy" are casually blamed for?

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 1d ago

It's funny to me how both sides of the battle of the sexes will endorse the Mike Pence rule, while also mocking the other side for adopting it.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 29d 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.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 28d ago

In the states I have had lunch with literal army vehicles and national guard on the street corners.

Where are you seeing this? It's not at all common in the US, excepting major disasters where the National Guard gets called out. Admittedly, New York sees the state of the subway as such a disaster currently, but my American sensibilities are always thrown when I've come across gendarmerie in Europe: our cops mostly don't dress in camo or bring out long guns unless they're actively using them. But uniformed soldiers patrolling airports and tourist hotspots is common in other First World countries I've been to.

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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.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 14d 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.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 14d ago

From what I can tell, early computer operators were not infrequently people (many women) who had previously worked as human computers. The story of Dorothy Vaughan of Hidden Figures fame comes to mind.

But I also suspect that the tasks these operators were doing differed quite a bit from the very abstract notion of what a computer is today. It makes sense to hire the folks that were previously manually crunching, say, your numeric integrals for artillery shell trajectories to operate a machine that does the same, because they already specialize in breaking that problem down into discrete operations that can be done by hand. That seems qualitatively different from writing an operating system or building a web app, partly because the digital computer was still seen by most as a machine that replaced the human computers.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 28d ago

US should also try for the 'science->military' feedback loop.

I realize it's not hugely discussed, but isn't this (to some extent) still the case? The US has no shortage of scientists working on military(-ish) technology. Those National Labs all work for the Department of Energy, which, as Rick Perry found out, has surprisingly little to do with energy qua energy, and a lot more to do with nuclear power and defense research. There's also DARPA and similar programs that are more explicitly labeled "defense", and plenty of research grants from the intelligence community and the various services. Even NASA is distinctly defense-adjacent and their funding usually comes with security requirements. And "securing defense supply chains" has been a big reason for funding projects like the CHIPS Act.

It's not exactly a new example, but ARPANET was, for a long time, a defense project, and DARPA was funding a lot of the early self-driving car research. It's hard to see the current picture more clearly (I certainly don't claim to), but there's plenty of reason to hold results like this fairly quietly. I also won't claim that it's done optimally at a good scale, but the idea that science and military aren't linked currently is at least missing some of the forest for the trees.

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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.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 9d 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.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 22d ago

Wasn't Snowden on record as trying to go somewhere else (Ecuador?), but ended up at the Moscow airport when the lawfare began?

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 22d ago

Destruction of the Rafah Ghetto

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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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 10d 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.

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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.

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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.

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