ares
Commander, USN (ret). Former Googler. Computer programmer.
User ID: 2527
ares
1yr ago
When I was a teen, it was called “surfing the web”, which I think was a great metaphor for the free-form movement across websites as you followed whatever path interested you. Nowadays I feel like we are (or at least I am) much more constrained to single sites that are ruthlessly optimized to keep you from venturing away. But I was surfing over the weekend, riding the big wave from the US Supreme Court’s bump stock ruling. About 2/3 of the way through I started turning it into this post due to some culture war implications, but those turned out to be false after digging deeper. So now I’m looking at this long, rambling post, which will soon expire as “old news”, and have decided to share it. Maybe someone else will learn something, at least.
In Sotomayor’s dissent in the recent bump stock case Garland v. Cargill, she writes (on page 26 of the pdf):
When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires “automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” §5845(b). Because I, like Congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent.
A guy on X/Twitter astutely pointed out:
The real irony about Sotomayor's dissent is that US law about ducks is actually incredibly specific. If anything, the adage "if it looks... etc" is the exact opposite of the statute. There is an annually updated list by which protected ducks are classified by 7-8 different parameters. It's over 1100 entries long. There's also a list of explicitly unprotected waterfowl that has hundreds of species, too.
I always had a feeling like the US has some absurd animal protection laws, especially around birds, though I never new the details. I like cats, and when I worked at Google I was part of a cat-lovers group (effectively a mailing list) that was mostly for just sharing pictures of cats but occasionally ventured into cat-activism. I wasn’t in Mountain View, but those who were had set up a catch, neuter, and release program for feral cats nearby. This also included some feeding stations. The Audubon Society got a burr in their bun that people were caring for cats somewhere, and found a few Burrowing Owls that lived near the places where the cats lived. This isn’t an endangered species, but California calls it a species of “special concern”, and that’s enough to get the State to catch and euthanize all the cats in question. Here’s how the New York Times spun the story.
So I had this feeling about stupid bird laws. Seeing the X/Twitter post led to some good ol' fashioned web surfing towards the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, including this article. Choice excerpts:
In 2002, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia declared that members of the military violated the act by unintentionally killing protected birds that flew into a live-fire training area.
In 2011, federal agents from the Fish & Wildlife Service threatened to imprison a Virginia woman because her 11-year-old daughter had rescued a woodpecker from a cat. Following nationwide scrutiny, the Fish & Wildlife Service declared that the mother’s citation had been “processed unintentionally.”
And in 2012, several oil and gas businesses in North Dakota were prosecuted because 28 protected birds had flown into state-sanctioned pools of fluid and oil.
That second one seemed suspicious to me: imprisonment for rescuing a bird? Digging deeper it turns out to be true enough. News story and government release.
According to WUSA, eleven-year-old Skylar came upon a baby woodpecker just before a cat was about to make the bird his next meal. The aspiring veterinarian told the TV station, “I couldn’t stand to watch it be eaten.” So Skylar asked her mother if she could care for the bird and then release it. Mom agreed, and the family went on its way, stopping at a home improvement store in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Rather than keeping the bird in the hot car, they brought the woodpecker inside the cool store.
It was there that one of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s undercover (!) agents spotted the mom–daughter crime duo. Nervously, the undercover wildlife woman held up her badge and proceeded to reprimand Alison and Skylar for illegally taking and transporting the bird.
When the Capos got home, they released the woodpecker and notified the Fish and Wildlife Service. Two weeks later that same agent, accompanied by the Virginia state trooper, showed up at the Capo residence and, according to Alison, delivered a citation stating that she violated federal law, owed the federal government a $535 fine, and could be imprisoned.
Incidentally, Politifact rates Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner’s criticism of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s behavior here as mostly-false.
Now, the culture war angle that started me actually typing all this up. I have historically rolled my eyes at complaints that wind turbines kill birds. I don’t care that much about wild birds, and as much as I think “renewable energy” is a scam, the “it kills birds” argument seemed like a desperate attempt to find something bad about wind turbines that environmentalists would care about. Then I saw a post (that I haven’t been able to find again) claiming that enforcement of these bird laws against green energy companies sure has been a lot lighter than against everyone else. So I did some digging. The bird lovers and tree lovers use the same studies for their estimates of yearly bird deaths from turbines: between 140,000-679,000. When oil and gas businesses in North Dakota accidentally killed 28 protected birds, they got taken to court, even though it was eventually thrown out.
The wind turbine companies? Well, actually, they’re getting hit pretty regularly, too. ESIEnergy was prosecuted. Duke Energy Corp was sentenced in 2013 to $1 million in fines and restitution and five years probation following deaths of 14 golden eagles and 149 other birds at two of the company’s wind projects. PacifiCorp Energy was sentenced to pay fines, restitution and community service totaling $2.5 million and was placed on probation for five years... from the discovery of the carcasses of 38 golden eagles and 336 other protected birds.
AP whines that there are fewer criminal cases being brought against bird killers and that The Biden administration on Thursday proposed a new permitting program for wind energy turbines, power lines and other projects that kill eagles although I couldn’t find the actual proposal.
So I guess the US government is pretty consistent in flipping-the-fuck-out if you harm birds. Though there are movements towards giving green energy companies a break on these laws, it doesn’t strike me as different than all the other laws and subsidies and special treatment green companies already get.
Anyways, I’m thinking of buying a bump stock, but really want an FRT. My local Fudd gun range recently changed their rules from a complete ban to allowing automatic and simulated automatic fire as long as one of the chairmen was present “to ensure everyone’s safety”. I think the board just wanted to get to shoot automatic guns, but I’ll take what I can get. The range rules explicitly prohibit shooting birds and other animals that wander into the firing range, which I appreciate a little more now.
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1yr ago
a teacher left Jennifer Crumbley a voicemail saying that her son had been looking at bullets on his phone in class. “Lol I’m not mad you have to learn not to get caught,” she wrote to her son in a text.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Looking up ammunition on your cell phone is completely normal behavior, and I do so occasionally to keep an eye on prices. If I was somehow back in school, where administrators and teachers are stupid and afraid of all things firearm related, then the correct advice is absolutely "learn not to get caught". Why is everyone under the impression that this text message is damning?
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8mo ago
Mildly interesting: Tweet from a guy who saw JD Vance rush out of the mini golf course at the time
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7mo ago
There could be benefits. Some immediate thoughts about challenges:
The current military procurement process is adversarial: the government creates the most detailed and specific requirements they can, and companies bid as low as they can to meet those requirements. So if a company can find an oversight or shortcut to deliver something shitty while still meeting the letter of the requirements, they (mostly) will. If, in the process of designing and delivering a new ship, its discovered that a new radar is 6" bigger than was originally planned so it has to be moved, you better believe that the company making the ship will get extra time and money in order to make that change, with rules for changes and delays and payments clearly spelled out in the contract. Those incentives don't translate well to commercial shipyards and designs. For a company like Maersk, they can develop a business relationship with their shipbuilders. They can say "Yeah, shipbuilder A is cheaper, but they're assholes to work with on maintenance. It'll be better to pay a little more to go with shipbuilder B who really takes care of us." When the government/military awards contracts based on existing relationships, it's called corruption (unless someone writes a detailed report proving the cost/benefit of shipbuilder B, which does happen, but is a lot more work than just doing the obviously correct thing).
It's still a very small market for military ships compared to commercial ones, so there will always be a bit of a premium there.
Military contracts are frequently political, with Senators and Congressmen ensuring those jobs and dollars go to their constituents. Changing this will be painful.
Even if everything was public spec, the military still has an incentive to maintain control and security over the entire building process. You can have innocuous objects planted in sensitive areas that may give foreign militaries valuable information. It's difficult enough to prevent Sailors from doing stupid, intelligence-leaking things when the design and building of ships is mostly controlled. I'm reminded of the German mathematicians' response when they discovered the Allies had broken the Enigma machine: they knew it was possible, but they were surprised we had gone through the trouble to do so. The incentives to sabotage or infiltrate US Navy ships are so great that I can't even imagine all the crazy schemes foreign militaries would try if they had more access to the construction process. If you mildly irradiate some of the steel used to build the ships hull, maybe you could detect that radiation signature at the ports it has visited in order to get a better understanding of US ship movements, deployment schedules, and maintenance periods. Subtly reducing the quality of some bolts or welds in key locations could cause major damage (and therefore loss of operational capability) long after a ship is delivered.
A known trend in military procurement is that America is addicted to cramming as many missions into each platform as possible. The Pentagon Wars focuses on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, but I think it's worse for ships. Why was my landing ship, dock doing oil platform defense in the Gulf of Oman? Because we could, and we were already over there. Does it make sense to design amphibious troop carriers so that they can also prevent hostile insurgents from sabotaging oil platforms on the open ocean? Fuck if I know. Doesn't seem like it should, but that's how America does it, and we do have the best Navy in the world. Commercial shipbuilders can iterate and improve on straightforward things like reliably carrying cargo, but US warships need to do a bunch of everything. A tradeoff between, for example, an additional missile launcher versus a better stealth profile is a political decision as much as an engineering one.
The US is also very sensitive about naval losses. Strategically, we've known for a long while that lots of small ships win against fewer big ships, but there's no way that we'd accept losing a missile boat and a few sailors as a matter of course, nevermind sending sailors on suicide missions. So we can't even really optimize our fleet for winning a near-peer naval engagement. The free market, in turn, can't really optimize for something when there isn't a consistent view of what's "better".
Again, there could be benefits to moving to a more "open source" shipbuilding model, but there would also be plenty of challenges, and I don't think it's clear how the scales would tip until we start hammering out the details.
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11mo ago
At some point I hope to make an effortpost about innumeracy, and how people who work with numbers are grossly overestimating the ability of the average person. This old Unz post really stuck with me. The example Level 3 question is literally read a table and pick the smallest number in the appropriate row. Back in 2012 less than half of 15-16 year olds in the USA were able to answer a Level 3 question correctly. I'm a numbers guy, and I really struggle to imagine the perspective of someone unable to do that. And that's half the American population (perhaps a little less, as some people could learn with age)!
wanyeburkett's thread you linked makes a similar/related point. patio11 has some good insights. There's also a good discussion to be had about whether giving these innumerate people an LLM that can understand numbers and complex processes for them is good solution or if that would just encourage more complexity.
The Libertarian Party of Colorado has declined to run Chase Oliver, the national Libertarian candidate, and will instead put Robert Kennedy on the ballot. Colorado is solidly blue (screenshot) according to the prediction markets (screenshot), but the polls (screenshot) are showing that Kennedy is hugely popular in the state.
Whether it's Biden, Harris, or door number 3 on the Democratic ticket, I think this has potential to split blue votes and turn my accursed state red for one brief, shining moment.
I think that may actually be The Libertarian Party of Colorado's plan. Kinda refreshing to see a political party actually playing 2D chess for once, instead of Candyland or whatever the hell the Democrats and Republicans are playing.
Edit: updating with screenshots of prediction sites since they might change
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8mo ago
Eternal September is a real thing that happens to communities when too many newcomers arrive and don't adapt to the existing culture. We literally have a rule asking to not link to here from high participation platforms. This community is small, and the mods already have to work very hard to keep the current quantity of us cretins obeying the rules.
We just saw a sliver of attention to our little Rationalist corner of the internet by a US Vice Presidential candidate on the most popular podcast in the world. Even if he's not pointing people directly to this site, I think it's completely valid to believe that there are ways where fractions of fractions of Joe Rogan listeners find their way here. "What was that article Vance mentioned?" "I liked that article, where could I discuss it?" "No talking politics on Reddit? Where else could I go?" And we get a few thousand new users. Sure, that's unlikely, but that's not a criterion for making a claim here.
If you disagree then please engage with the substance instead of doing so with mockery.
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1yr ago
When I was a young SWO on deployment to the Horn of Africa for anti-piracy operations, we regularly came upon skiffs in open waters with a dozen Somalis crammed on. We'd drive our big warship close, then our VBSS team would take a RHIB over to see what they were doing. They always had one or two fishing poles and a few rotten fish aboard, having jettisoned their weapons as soon as they saw our big warship approaching. "We're fishermen" they'd tell us through a translator, in open ocean on a 12-foot boat with 20 men onboard. Well, one day one group of Somalis decided that they were not going to jettison their weapons, and instead opened fire on one of the ships in our ARG. They launched at least one RPG and somehow completely missed the giant, boxy, unmoving ship that was right next to them. The VBSS team shot them until they surrendered. We zip tied the Somalis, brought them onboard, and gave them a fair bit of medical care (and not just for the holes we'd seen fit to add to a few of them). So now we had these Somalis onboard, locked in our medical spaces (because while the US Navy apparently takes inspiration from jails when designing their berthing, they don't actually make any of those rooms secure for holding criminals). This was back when the US didn't recognize Somalia as a country, so our State Department was having the darndest time figuring out what to do with these guys. We drove around for a week, maybe more, before a deal was brokered to give them to Yemen. They were dropped off and (according to the scuttlebutt) promptly executed.
This was almost 20 years ago, and I still think about it regularly. Should it have gone different, from the moment the Somalis surrendered? Would have been a lot cheaper and easier to have just shot them all there and sunk their skiff, with the same outcome. But that's morally wrong, and not in keeping with the rules of war. We shouldn't've given them to Somalia; they're not a real country (still aren't, IMO) and they government would most likely use the pirates' lives to extort bribes from whatever warlords or families they could, and then free or execute them (flip a coin). We shouldn't've put them into an American jail or Gitmo because they weren't worth it.
The conclusion I keep reaching is that the Somalis (and, to bring it back to the point at hand, immigrant criminals) are a time when "don't flip the switch in the trolley problem" is the best answer. We can know that the "justice" they'll face in their homeland (or Yemen) will probably be unjust, but it's not us doing it and that absolves us of some of the moral responsibility - enough to make it the least shitty of a bunch of shitty choices. We remove them from our control and return them to a place where a government will claim jurisdiction over them, and if that government doesn't afford all the legal protections that we do for our citizens, well... that's on their government. And I know there would be extreme cases when we shouldn't give them over to the other government, like shipping our Jews off to the Nazis or our Lienz Cossacks to the Soviets (oops). But those seem like the extreme cases. As a rule, I think "make the other country deal with their citizens" is the right answer. Our State Department has the power to make every country on Earth do that, assuming we have the political willpower. I worked closely with the State Department later in my career, and there is no doubt in my mind that they're capable of brokering that deal. If the US is ever told by another country that they won't take possession of their citizens who have committed crimes in the US, it is only because the US State Department has decided against spending the effort/money to convince the other country.
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11mo ago
I don't think it will lead to introspection by most people on the left; most people in general are incapable of "are we the baddies"-type introspection. An escalatory course of action is likely to lead to a change in behavior by the left because when it's widely known that (doing whatever left-coded thing the right is able to push outside the overton window) will cost you your job, friends, social status, etc. then most people will stop doing that thing. The masses will make posthoc rationalizations for why they were justified in their prior behavior but now they know better.
If the right continues to "take the high ground", there's no reason for the masses to ever change their behavior or beliefs. The right would have to wait until the majority of the left decides to perform that "are we the baddies"-type introspection, and that will never happen.
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11mo ago
That's actually a really helpful perspective for me. Funny enough, I had the following conversation with my 6 year old this morning:
Son: I like your new tattoo. Kids like tattoos.
Me: Well this is a permanent tattoo. You can only get temporary tattoos until you're 18.
Son: I'll do that! Will you drive me?
Me: When you're 18, you can drive yourself.
Son: I could drive?
Me: Yes, but you'll need your own car, and they're expensive.
Son: How much does a car cost?
Me: $10,000. You'll have to save up!
Son: I'm going to count my money now. gets his cash box where he keeps his allowance, and spends the next 5 minutes counting out the $45 he has in there
He has no concept of the difference in scale between the $10,000 and the $45 he has. He was counting it, and if he got to $10,000 then he would get a car. He didn't this time, so he needs to keep saving. I find his focus, sincerity, and innocence sweet for a 6 year old. I'd find that level of numeracy terrifying in a 16 year old, but apparently that's where half of all Americans are. "My 6 year old's understanding of numbers" is a theory of mind I can grasp.
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8mo ago
I'm trying to come up with a joke about Trump choosing to go out in a "hyperbolic" chamber/suicide pod, but I can't quite get there. "We really have the best pods, don't we, folks? This isn't just ending, it's ending with a flair, with class."
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1yr ago
Given how stupid the COVID-19 response was, I've lost faith that anything with the slightest bit of ambiguity or cost+benefit can be handled reasonably by our society. Wind turbines generate electricity, externalities be damned. Hell, I'd label the entire anti-nuclear movement "virtue-signaling", and we haven't "examined ourselves closely" for the 80 years that's been going on. I blame it on 2 parts conflict theory, 1 part Moloch.
Killing birds is a tragedy of the commons. From my reading of history, nobody has found a good way to actually ensure a proportional response to a tragedy of the commons. We either threaten to jail people for rescuing woodpeckers, write some sad articles that change absolutely nothing, or funnel money into mismanaged non-profits. Even when a fairly simple law by Congress could save tens of millions of otherwise lost books, we can't do that because it might benefit Google.
Take the blackpill and accept that this probably won't get fixed. Ensure you and yours are benefiting from this foreknowledge. When I take my kids to see their grandfather (we're far apart so this is infrequent), we always take a walk into the nearby forest to see the family of bald eagles that have set up a nest there. And they've seen fields of flowers, and we have a huge physical collection of old books. My kids don't fully understand why their weird dad is obsessing about these particular things, but they don't need to.
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7mo ago
And this one is just fun: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-ships
Hadn't seen that one. Amusing. Having served on a landing ship, dock, which is very similar to the landing platform dock discussed in the article, I will say that the history of the USS San Antonio is pretty average in terms of mechanical issues and cost overruns. My ship had similar problems. I think they have probably gotten enough of the kinks out of the Arleigh Burke Destroyers (74 active ones right now) where they'll have 1/2 to 1/3 of the issues that small run ships like the San Antonio class (13 ships) will have. Still an order of magnitude more than an equivalent sized civilian ship. The US Navy tried to take all the lessons and technology they could from the civilian shipbuilders, and the resulting Littoral Combat Ships were a complete clusterfuck. The automations and efficiencies never really materialized, and instead you had a Frigate-sized ship with 1/3 the crew and 2-3x the number of systems that would break down.
There are some valid reasons why warships will be more expensive than cargo ships. Generally, you don't have to design a cargo ship to be able to still deliver its cargo after getting hit by a missile. There are a lot of "Program of Record" systems that are developed (mostly) independently from the actual ship (definitely lots of them made by companies directly competing with the shipbuilder) that all have to get integrated. And the market for warships is much smaller than for commercial vessels. Everyone knows about the bloated and corrupt US military procurement process, and it's very difficult to trim the fat because 1) we can't stop or even significantly slow down procurement without unacceptable risks to military readiness, and 2) many very smart and wealthy people's entire job is to make sure the current system continues to give them and their companies contracts, and they do that by complicating the entire processes while obfuscating their shortcomings. Anyone claiming there are simple solutions is either a liar or an idiot.
Still, it's great to contrast what the free market gets you versus what comes out of that military procurement process.
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1yr ago
You raise good points (here and below), and I'm sorry I glossed over that part. I tried not to let the real story get too much in the way of the one I was telling, but I forgot that this is the sort of forum where I can't get away with that.
This occurred back in 2005-2006: hunting Somali pirates before hunting Somali pirates was cool. Our ARG was initially deployed for OPLAT (oil platform) Defense over by the Gulf of Oman, but there were a few hijackings and we were redirected to the East coast of Somalia. Back then Somali piracy was in its infancy, and the world hadn't really reacted. International Maritime Law on piracy wasn't prepared for their tactics, and our JAG plus his more senior lawyer bosses ashore gave us some pretty shitty conclusions about what we could and couldn't do legally. We couldn't do anything to the skiffs while they were just driving around because as much as we knew they were pirates, the JAGs didn't believe the USA could prove it. They always claimed they were fishermen. After a hijacking, it was a civil issue between the ship owners and the pirates. We were only able to actually treat them like pirates if we caught them in the act of piracy, which of course we never did because, see ref A, we were a big warship that could be seen from 15 nautical miles away. Anyways, we had at least 1 large maritime vessel hijacked while we were in the area, and we couldn't do anything about it other than watch. I heard that got the ball rolling on actually updating the international laws (or, perhaps, the US Military's creative interpretation of those laws) so the US could actually do something about the pirates, but I never did much followup to check because I was never out on anti-piracy operations again. The Navy did send me back to the Horn of Africa for other stuff (such a shitty part of the world), but that's completely unrelated.
So who we caught, according to our JAG, was not a group of pirates. They were a group of fishermen who fired small arms and an RPG at a US Naval Vessel. Maybe I was wrong to mention "rules of war" since they weren't uniformed combatants, but we don't kill people who have surrendered and don't pose any more threat to us. After lots (lots) of training on the lawful use of deadly force, my gut tells me that shooting them all and sinking their skiff after they threw down their weapons would have gotten everyone a court martial. I can't cite which specific way they'd be charged, though. It's been too long, and at the time I was a lowly JO who wasn't privy to the actual JAG opinions or conversations about it.
Captains get a lot of leeway in judicial decisions on their ships, but they are generally smart enough to listen to their JAG, and JAG said no keelhauling. So the fishermen/pirates got about 10 days of excellent medical care, good food, comfortable beds, (relative to Somalia) and then were promptly executed by Yemen.
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8mo ago
Pawn stars meme: Best I can do is bomb threats from Russia to Georgia.
No, our Georgia this time.
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1yr ago
deploying troops domestically which we've only seen in living memory a few times in the 60s and once in '92 for the LA race riots.
This is not true. On active duty I worked a number of years doing DSCA. I was one of the "troops" (Title 10, as opposed to Title 32) that Trump would hypothetically deploy, and we went all over the country, all the time, careful to not do "law enforcement" but still working very actively in providing security, supplies, support, coordination, and all sorts of other stuff. There is a clear and legal way for the US Military to "deploy troops domestically" for emergencies, and a reasonable interpretation of Trump's remarks would be that he considers the current situation an emergency that would allow that type of legal mobilization.
When you hear States or cities declaring a "state of emergency", that's (generally) the magic phrase to unlock Federal support. Talk to the long term employees at USNORTHCOM and they're still pissed that Louisiana took so long to declare a state of emergency after Katrina, which prevented USNORTHCOM from providing support for the first few critical days.
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1yr ago
How's everyone feel about OneDrive integration in Windows, or Google and Apple cloud in their phones?
Two is one, one is none, and three's a spare. I run multiple backup solutions on my data because I do not want to lose a bit if any one of them breaks.
For phones, I think you're pretty much stuck with Google or Apple owning your data. That's a large vulnerable surface of your Google or Apple account, so ensuring you set up 2FA (and not via phone number since those can be easily spoofed). I use a hardware key. I'll have to reassess if I ever decide I'd like to start committing felonies, because both of those companies share your data pretty freely when there's a legitimate request from law enforcement. That'll include GPS and location data, and "person who always brings their phone with them decided to leave it at home on the night in question" is very easy to tell from the records. Also important not to google incriminating things. The military uses cell phones a lot when targeting bad guys. Most of them had good OPSEC but their wives never did. My military career was mostly in intelligence, and being resistant to the techniques we used is just not practical for anyone who doesn't believe their life or freedom is in serious jeopardy from the US government (ala Snowden).
At home I'm using a ZFS array to protect against hard drive failure and bit rot. I have a TODO for exploring backblaze, AWS, and other places for offsite storage of large unchanging data sets since I want to keep my data in the event of a house fire. I keep my important stuff on Google Drive mirrored to my ZFS array. I have a VeraCrypt file that holds anything I want to backup but not let Google read. Examples of things that someone might not want Google to read include TOR accounts and bookmarks, "hacking" tools and scripts that have been used in violation of the CFAA, and cryptocurrency keys. Not that I have any of those.
Having seen how Google handles data privacy and security from the inside, I'm not at all worried about their cloud integration from a security perspective. I trust Apple and Microsoft similarly. The company is not going to blackmail you with your nudes or leak your social security number, and employees can't access those things on your account without getting caught. The company will cooperate with any and every government if they feel the request is legitimate, as I mentioned. I keep that in mind, but don't actually want to join up with the Proud Boys or kidnap the governor of Michigan, so I'm comfortable keeping my files with them. I am quite comfortable keeping my SSN and bank account information on my Google because I have the hardware 2FA key (and no other 2FA allowed) to protect against account takeover. The government and law enforcement can already get my SSN and bank account info if they want them. And if Google deletes my account, no biggie because I have a local copy of everything.
I moved my email off gmail and don't have a plan for email backups yet. Another TODO.
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8mo ago
There are plenty of stories of wildly successful people who were failures in their early to mid lives. There are almost no things that are too late to turn around.
Winter in Alaska is tough, though. Someone in the Rational spaces (maybe Eliezer) noticed that his SAD light was rather, well, sad. He bought a ton more of them to actually get lumens equivalent to daylight everywhere in his living room, and it turned to be all he needed. So if the SAD light helps you, but not enough, why not try more dakka?
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9mo ago
Good advice. Children are unrelenting like nothing I've ever experienced. I made a list and pinned it to a screen on my phone of reasons the baby could be crying, because when you're sleep deprived it's impossible to recall:
- Sleep/tired
- Dirty diaper
- Gas
- More food/milk
- Bored/play
- Hot
- Cold
- Bath time
Using this list saved us many hours of crying with realizations like "oh, yeah, he's still wearing his warm pajamas"
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8mo ago
In the US military, there's a tradition of senior leaders serving food for a single meal, like Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. Example 3-Star Admiral serving Thanksgiving dinner. In my 20-year Navy career, I have never heard anyone be critical of someone's choice to participate in this sort of event. I heard (and contributed to) whining as a Junior Officer because our CO decided the entire Wardroom would be doing it, but in the end we all did it and enjoyed ourselves. I have heard multiple sailors complaining that their CO didn't do it. I have never even heard of anyone be an asshole to a senior leader serving the food, although punishments are pretty quick for unjustifiable assholery to food service workers even when they aren't Admirals.
But even when people aren't being dicks to you, I will testify that it's quite humbling to be serving food to your entire command. It's good and valuable to get your head out of the big - often intangible - problems of your regular senior job, and focus on all the little things that have to come together in order to get plates of food for a stream of sailors. It's humbling, in my experience, going from worrying about writing official memos or following up on a logistics request, into just having to deal with ensuring that there's another tray of mashed potatoes ready for when we run out of this one: you absolutely can fail at the latter even if you have a Masters degree and 70 people reporting to you. It reminds you that for all your skill and power, you're still beholden to basic reality. It brings into sharp focus how no matter how brilliantly the potatoes were ordered and shipped, no matter how cutthroat the price negotiations were, if you don't do the basics of cutting them up and putting them into a mixer, cooking them, and having them ready to go when they're needed, then its all for naught.
If human nature hasn't changed too much, I would bet Saturnalia gave the masters a similar humbling experience.
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11mo ago
My conspiracy theory story, told quickly because I really should be working right now: I was assigned to Carrier Air Wing Five. While we were deployed, our CAG (HMFIC) was quickly and quietly relieved due to "loss of confidence". All the officers were pulled into a conference room and we held a quick ceremony where DCAG (number 2 in command) assumed responsibilities for the Wing. Never saw CAG again.
It turns out that he was sleeping with the base XO's wife. They were both married with kids. Infidelity is a common reason for getting fired in the military (perhaps the last place in America where that's true). But immediately after the change of command, the rumor mill was still a little unsure about the specifics and I wanted to know more, because when you're stuck in cramped quarters with the same people for long periods of time, gossip is high entertainment. So I googled. And whoa boy did I find some conspiracy theories. My favorite was that he was relieved because the US was going to attack North Korea in a week, and the CAG wouldn't do it, so they replaced him with someone who would.
As you may recall, the US has not launched an unprovoked air strike on North Korea. The conspiracy theorists were just throwing shit to the wall and hoping some stuck.
I like this post, and I think it's important to understand what has happened and what is possible for a US conspiracy. But it's also important to keep a very strong bayesian prior that each particular conspiracy theory is incorrect.
ares
1yr ago
- DDT is a great insecticide, and the environmental impacts were grossly exaggerated. The egg shell thinning, in particular, was a lie. I would bet that the banning of DDT has resulted in the deaths of over a million people from insect-borne diseases.
- I'm unsure about CFCs.
- With all endangered species, the response of "threaten to jail people for rescuing woodpeckers" has been somewhat effective at actually saving them. I know people who have made their land inhospitable to some specific endangered turtle because if anyone found one of those turtles on their land, the land would lose its value and become a liability. My ideal, impossible solution would be some way to actually incentivize saving endangered species rather than just severely punishing everyone we can catch.
- I am not happy with the regulatory environment for American automobiles. I want mini trucks. I hate how CAFE has resulted in exactly 2 sizes of consumer vehicles available: either a "passenger car" or a "SUV/truck/van". I do not like the increased car prices from all the rules. I hate the regulatory capture that prevents new car manufacturers from threatening established ones. There is less smog, yes, but it's not like the way we did that in the US was without cost.
Actually, the example I had in mind when I wrote that was drunk driving. Our penalties for drunk driving are wildly disproportionate to the actual cost to society. We give far lower sentences to people who endanger or accidentally kill others by different means. We went with the extreme penalties to force a culture shift, and it worked. But it's not proportional. It lacks the beauty of the Invisible hand that solves so many of our other problems. It's not that we've never solved a tragedy of the commons, it's that I don't think we've ever solved it well.
ares
11mo ago
That does not match my predictions of social behavior or my reading of history. People do not pick sides based on which they view is more of a hypocrite; they pick sides mostly based on what's socially acceptable. The Peace of Westphalia was not negotiated because the Catholics "turned the other cheek" so much that the Protestants felt guilty. It was because everyone got tired of the killing.
The responses to StickerMule's milquetoast post-assassination-attempt call for unity tell me that the left is not close to being tired of the metaphorical killing.
JD Vance was on the Joe Rogan podcast, and references Scott's Gay Rites are Civil Rites. It happens at 23:45. As TracingWoodgrains says, the Eye of Sauron approaches.
I apologize if I can't add much more insight. Are there going to be left wing smear articles explaining the evil Rationalists that have the ear of JD Vance? Or is there so much chaos right now around the election that this will get passed over, widely unremarked upon?
Threats to our community aside, it's pretty awesome that a VP candidate referenced one of Scott's articles.
Edit: Andy Ngo is boosting this part of the interview, focusing on the trans children discussion, without commenting on the article.
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