VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
12hr ago
I was surprised when I visited that there are single family houses within a mile or so of the densest parts of downtown Tokyo. They are packed close, and might qualify as a "tiny house" in other parts of the West, but they exist.
Also that the Tokyo subways (multiple systems!) are privately run.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
19hr ago
In theory it should be pretty obvious if someone tries to scan their ballot at the voting machine multiple times
In my precinct, the scanners don't give the ballot back to you --- it goes directly into a box that gets retained for recounts and hopefully random sampling. They also scan both sides so it doesn't need to be a specific orientation.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
21hr ago
Er, no, the electoral college makes this problem worse. It serves to magnify the votes of certain districts over others
Note that this is by the choice of the states. Two states divide their EC votes in ways I think are probably better, but the game theory is that for each state, first-past-the-post maximizes the utility of marginal local votes, presumably maximizing the attention (up to and including "pork") that politicians give to them, especially in swing states. I think unilateral disarmament there probably requires Congress to force them all to do it together.
OP's point was that the EC distributed vote count is robust against single points of data corruption: each can only swing state outcomes, not national. Related: I think the Interstate Popular Vote Compact would only last until some state (maybe not even a party) threatens to certify ten billion votes, and challenge the standing of other states to question its counting ability.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Even then, nonlinear acoustics is a legitimate field of study, and you might want to verify no lower intermodulation products are appearing from thin air as it were. But IIRC that's mostly with higher amplitude sounds.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
It is wild that vinyl, tapes, and CDs were physical artifacts that still had "git branching hell" syndrome.
In many ways it was worse: in analog, you lose fidelity on the original every time you make a copy. You see this a bit wit accumulating recompression artifacts on images, but professional production pipelines manage to limit this. But on film it has historically made effects shots look "worse" than others (more copies), leading to some unintuitive choices. Kubrick in 2001 in some parts did multiple exposures of the same film to minimize compositing noise (most notably the darks washing out to shades of gray), which is why it looks good even by modern standards.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
I think you're replying to a joke in the obsequious, sycophantic style of current-gen AI.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Copy the original's homework. It's not rocket science.
I've never done video editing, but this strikes me as the sort of human task prone to predictable classes of error. Given a decent amount of schedule/budget pressure ("this is due by the end of the week") and the number of times the same (or very similar) footage has gone by, I'd bet it'd be easy to miss in a final self-review pass. I try to avoid it, but I've managed to accidentally watch test-only code changes make it embarrassingly far into the code review process.
I can only assume TV is worse: "Watch 40 minutes of this episode on high alert for a single missed shot. Yeah, you know the entire script by this point because you've watched every second multiple times over, but you have to focus." is exactly the sort of task I'd expect myself to fail at. And I assume even worse depending on how you broke up the whole series and might be reviewing larger chunks.
I think a large team would help, but I doubt the remaster tasks are given to a large group, and probably not to the most capable editors either. How many person-hours is remastering a single 40 minute episode?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
I feel like the best, if imperfect, comparison is to look at how the art community reacted to the development of photography (ironically here including film). Maybe it did decimate the ranks of realist oil planters (sad, actually), but I'd hardly say the art world hasn't survived.
That said, photography led to a lot of less-photoreal art styles that I won't claim to be a huge fan of (see "modern art"). I do see a human-rendered painting of, say, a landscape to be more interesting than a large photo print, but I do see lots of photos on walls too.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
IIRC the population of Manhattan specifically is down substantially over the last century, even if NYC has grown slightly as a whole. It's hard to compare like-to-like.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
Semi-seriously, it would be funny (and not really wrong, at some level) for people to start suggesting we adopt Japanese or Korean schooling methods because they show better outcomes as the mirror to everyone suggesting European-style healthcare systems for the same reasons. And part of that is that, as I understand, their systems are structured more like you're suggesting.
Although there are plenty of other concerns (fertility, for example) in adopting that wholesale.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
Historically, anxious over-extension (ex: last 100 years of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Versailles treaty) often backfires.
Your examples aren't wrong, but I think the right here is more likely looking at the New Deal or Great Society. Despite decades of hand wringing from (parts of) the right, Social Security isn't going anywhere. Neither is the Civil Rights Act or Titles IX: they are, if anything being leveraged by the current administration in their (claimed) efforts towards egalitarian outcomes.
I do worry about your last point, though.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
That language policing is carried out with enthusiasm by those who detest regular policing.
They're even against language policing when it polices them: see all of the discussion about "correct" English and how marginalized groups speak correctly in their own dialects (AAVE, for example).
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
I think there is some irony here in that most of the (left, I assume) folks up in arms about the Trump administration taking kinetic actions against drug smugglers probably also take a very dim view of Western actions during/leading into the Opium Wars [1]. I certainly think China is at least viewing this all through a lens that sees that history more prominently.
- "Why did the Qing have concerns about undocumented European pharmacists? Because they went woke."
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
Do the several hundred civilians killed during the US invasion of Panama count as average South Americans killed directly?
Presumably not, because Panama is not part of "South America" by most definitions I'm aware of. But that's a geography argument, and not a moral one.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
Nobody likes non-flagged libertarians.
There are a couple of relevant conventions about stateless persons, but those seem to mostly boil down to "don't make people stateless" and even those aren't universally accepted. But Western nations are more prone to letting them live indefinitely in airports than issuing death warrants for private persons. Boats, on the other hand, don't even get that protection.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
To what extent do the Saudis project power?
They seem to have a lot of pull with other Arab and Muslim nations, which is probably at least partly due to their control of Mecca. Allies with soft power are also useful at times.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
deniable Russian troops in Syria got in a dustup with the US military
The Battle of Khasham, for those interested in reading more.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
Second Geneva Convention of 1949
To apply, wouldn't the crews need to belong to "Members of crews, including masters, pilots and apprentices of the merchant marine ... of the Parties to the conflict..." (literally "the following Article")? Are these boats Venezuelan-flagged vessels? I strongly suspect they're not because that would have raised a whole bunch of other arguments (literally acts of war) that haven't been brought up.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
This development, at least where I live in Scandinavia, is already underway.
I'd be curious how this aligns with populations that are starting to decline: it seems at some point you'd have a housing surplus unless everyone takes up second homes. I'd look to Japan, but their housing market is weird by Western standards. I know in the US it's often a location issue: there are cheap ghost towns but no employment prospects near them.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10d ago
In much the same way that I think fillibusters should require actually talking continuously for as long as they want to hold the Senate up.
I guess I'm modestly sympathetic here to the idea that the Senate gets to make it's own rules, and that time on the Senate floor at least should be precious. I can at least understand the chamber deciding on the current rules, under which I believe the presiding party could demand a talking filibuster, or choose to pivot to other business.
I suppose I could also be sympathetic to the Executive setting it's own clear rules (by Executive Order, I suppose) for official decrees, but in this case it seems the process isn't really that clear, as are the limits on delegating specific powers.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10d ago
Courts have read some very expensive definitions of "franchise" (see Gingles, which is admittedly under SCOTUS review at the moment), and it's not impossible to see something like a policy of "must make as many majority-minority districts as possible" (which isn't that different from the Louisiana v. Callais case previously mentioned) would probably get past at least a few blue judges, although probably not the current high court.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10d ago
Culinary fashions have changed, at least. I've been to a few semi-fancy restaurants (usually catering to an older clientele) and felt "blast from the past" about some of the menu choices: tortilla chips weren't standard at Tex-Mex places in the 60s, relying on demi glace or hollandaise on an otherwise-bland entree, or tossing some steamed vegetables on the side. On the cheaper side, I've been to small-town diners that, while IMO fine, seem to be someone's home cooking scaled up and offered for guests without formal chef training. I get the sense from movies (not a great historical source) that this was pretty common in the past, but that the bar has mostly shifted upwards or gotten more specialized.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10d ago
As an interesting thought experiment, consider GDP per capita denominated in any of the following:
- Square feet of median available residence (rental or purchase)
- iPhones: not that different from exchange rates, but drops to zero if you go back far enough.
- Minimum/average wage: how many hours of other people's labor can a median person purchase?
- Calories: subsistence farming, you say?
- Some other basket of desirable goods: airplane tickets? Kids toys?
Honestly, I think these same sorts of metrics relative to percentile income are the right way to answer OP's question. And notably (3) seems like a driver of lots of major changes: employing other people seems to have been much cheaper in the pre-mechanization era: the extra cost of elaborate hand-carved decorations for your cathedral over a bare-bones space of the same size might be closer before power cranes to lift stone blocks: the cost factor there seems much worse than it used to be.
But it's also not clear to me what percentile in the past employed staff directly. Even today, personal assistants are a thing, but the salary tier to justify one has probably risen too, and even though more people can buy iPhones, the number with "staff" is relatively constant.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10d ago
IIRC there have been a few cases where courts have found one administration (Trump's) can't cancel a previous administration's orders
I believe most of these have been APA related: you can't cancel them arbitrarily or capriciously, and there are required notice and comment periods before enacting (some) changes. Of course, then there was the DACA case where apparently the APA comment period was required to cancel something that never had such a period to enact --- we were close to dueling federal (nationwide) injunctions demanding "X" and "not X" in ways that are probably very related to the SCOTUS decision to limit nationwide injunctions.
I'm not sure offhand if it's strictly covered, but as a thought experiment it'd be interesting to see if the APA were to allow, say, changing the comment period: "whoops, the next administration needs to wait 4 years to enact policy changes, conveniently including changing the comment period back." Or the rules as passed by Congress aren't constitutional, I suppose. I wouldn't endorse such a wrench in the works, but I won't be surprised if it gets tried.
I think mass transit stans, despite sharing some sympathies that we could actually build better public transit, really tend to miss that (paved) roads are a really configurable system. Roads are switched packet networks to the broad/multicast media of rail and such. I can drive point-to-point at a time of my choosing (or stream a TV episode) rather than wait for sufficient demand to justify a bus and professional driver (or watch new episodes Wednesdays at 7:00 Eastern! But I'm busy then!). And this is from someone that generally hates driving. The same network delivers all but the heaviest freight to nearly anywhere and is relatively cheap to build and maintain (rail is much more specific about grade requirements, for example).
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