ares
CDR in the US Navy Reserve. Former Googler. Computer programmer. I'm here mostly to read.
User ID: 2527
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3d 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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6mo ago
You could do some military jobs!
- Leave Papers, Please: Reviewing and processing leave forms (penalties for approving too many, or approving ones with errors)
- Sweeping the same 50 square feet for an hour, making sure you look busy the whole time even though you've finished after 10 minutes.
- Navigating a warship at night through a busy shipping lane, trying to keep your closest point of approach (CPA) greater than 2000 yards for every ship out there so you don't have to wake the Captain, whose standing orders require you to tell him if you're ever going to have a CPA under that.
- Polishing your dress shoes
- Mess crank: like Cooking Mama, but you have to cook 10x the quantity, some of the ingredients are rotten, and you can't tell the difference between tablespoons and teaspoons.
- Leverage an LLM to determine how effective your speech is after telling your division not to get any DUIs over a holiday weekend. Additional levels could be to convince them not to buy a Dodge Charger at 26% APY, and not to send half your paycheck to the Filipino prostitute you met at the last port call.
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6mo ago
(Points if you can guess roughly how far into the linked NPR article you can get until the author writes the sentence "That really started to change in 2020, when police officers killed George Floyd in Minneapolis.")
Goddamnit I thought you were kidding. That really is in the article. So zero points for me, I guess.
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4mo ago
We had a similar issue with a neighbor playing loud music, which we resolved thanks to a bit of luck. This won't map perfectly onto your situation but may give you some ideas.
First we texted, and we also walked over a few times, asking them politely. We suspected the neighbors were inconsiderate but we started with polite and direct confrontation anyways. After that didn't work for a few weeks/months, we'd text once asking them to turn it down and call the police with a noise complaint when they didn't. This worked out great, because the neighbors (being inconsiderate assholes) had some friends over and decided to start revving their motorcycles in the driveway very loudly at the exact same time the police came by because of the noise complaint. That ended up getting them a court date, which we learned about after they complained to us about it.
Whatever happened in court, they no longer blast their music late at night.
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9mo ago
Colleges have 4 competing goals. Figure out which one you want and decide from there. Want a career that will make you lots of money? Figure out how you want to do that and get those skills and certifications and whatever else you need, no college necessary unless it's part of the certification process. Want to be a Renaissance Man, with a life enriched by an understanding of history, literature, art, etc.? State college might be appropriate. Want to contribute to human knowledge by doing Science and writing important papers in important journals? Find a school with at least some prestige in your field of choice and be prepared to play a lot of politics and be poor all your life. Want to be part of a grand social experiment of dismantling the patriarchy and white supremacy helping ensure equity across America? Well, don't, but if you must, then pick one of the many schools that makes that their priority above any actual education of its students.
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3d 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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1mo ago
Hence, it's good advice to "learn not to get caught". I don't parents think telling High Schoolers not to do highly inappropriate stuff has a history of being effective.
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4mo ago
One of the common failure modes of liberalism is to assume that being good means being nice when the truth is that sometimes the best and most compassionate thing you can do for someone is to tell them "Get your fucking shit together dude"
This calls to mind "The only Theodore Dalrymple article anyone reads", as Scott Alexander described it. It starts:
Not long ago I asked a patient of mine how he would describe his own character. He paused for a moment, as if savoring a delicious morsel.
"I take people as they come," he replied in due course. "I'm very nonjudgmental."
As his two roommates had recently decamped, stealing his prize possessions and leaving him with ruinous debts to pay, his neutrality toward human character seemed not generous but stupid, a kind of prophylactic against learning from experience. Yet nonjudgmentalism has become so universally accepted as the highest, indeed the only, virtue that he spoke of his own character as if pinning a medal for exceptional merit on his own chest.
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9mo ago
Could you point out where in that article (or elsewhere) there is any important insight provided by the mainstream of constructvism? I do not have a positive view of constructivism as a useful way to analyze the world or predict future events, and that article further cemented my view since it mostly seems like a posthoc justification for obviously-true statements whenever it's testable: "Constructivists argue that states can have multiple identities that are socially constructed through interaction with other actors." is untestable, "500 British nuclear weapons are less threatening to the United States than five North Korean nuclear weapons" is obvious without constrictivism.
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9mo ago
Not to detract from any of your points, but as a 20-year US military veteran, I believe you have a gross overestimation of "military levels of fitness" and "ready for deployment". Add caveats of "specops" or "infantry" or "Marine" and I'd agree, but holy shit you would not believe the fatbodies I've had to work with in a warzone.
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9mo ago
I'll believe it when I see a cop lose their job for a similar donation to someone left-coded.
Hey, what do you know, I just migrated off Gmail last week, and would love to talk about my experience. I'm now using ProtonMail (https://proton.me/mail) with a Proton Unlimited subscription, and have my own domains through Cloudflare. Here's what I did:
Step 1: Create a free-tier Cloudflare account and transfer/buy a domain or three. I have had (mylastname).tech for a while, which makes my email address firstname@lastname.tech, and I like that. But if you want to buy a .vodka or .christmas domain for your primary email, go for it. I was using Gmail and Google Domains, but with Google Domains shut down I had to migrate, and ultimately Gmail doesn't play nicely with Cloudflare so I needed a new email solution. Domains will generally cost $10/year.
Step 2: Create a Proton account and buy at least Mail Plus so you can add your custom domain. You can do parts of this with a free account, but I decided it was worth paying a little for the extra features, especially the ability to send mail from my domains.
Step 3: Proton has a wizard that guides you through setting everything up to receive email from your domain, and a help center article with pictures specifically for Cloudflare. The steps include setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC so your emails don't get sent to spam, and enabling the catchall address so that you get all emails sent to your domain.
Step 3a (optional): You can also configure Cloudflare to receive your emails and forward them to your proton mail address. This gives you Cloudflare's protection and tracking. This is what I did, and this is what you'd do at the Proton free tier.
Step 4: You may experience some pain, because you get to change your email address on all your accounts to point to your new domain. I had already done this a while ago. The nice part about this step is that you can create a new email address for every place you interact with. I use amazon@mydomain.tech for Amazon, themotte@mydomain.tech for here, and linkedin2@mydomain.tech because I was starting to get spam at my old linkedin address and it's easy to set a rule to autodelete them now. But it's not actually that painful: you can change a few of your main accounts and worry about the rest later, because...
Step 5: Forward your Gmail to your ProtonMail. I did this in the Gmail settings, but you can also use ProtonMail's EasySwitch tool to do it for you.
Step 5a (optional): Set up a tag in ProtonMail for emails forwarded from Gmail, then rule to automatically set it. Any time you get an email that's not actually from Google the company telling you about your Google account, that's a reminder for you to update whatever account it is. Or, as I'm discovering, a reminder to unsubscribe because why was I actually subscribed to this shit in the first place?
And that's pretty much all I needed to do. I'm creating occasional filters, folders, and tags to sort things how I want, but it's been a very straightforward and easy process. And now I'm not tied to ANYONE. If Cloudflare and ProtonMail go out of business or decide to blacklist me, I can move my domain to another registrar and pick a different webmail host, and my online accounts will remain mine.
Edit to add additional thoughts: I continue to use a KeePass database for password management, and since it's encrypted at rest I am comfortable using Google Drive to backup and sync it. I'm not planning to switch to Proton's password manager since I like the open source option. I haven't moved my calendar yet, and that might involve moving my wife over to Proton since we share calendar items all the time. I may never do that. For now it's easy enough to just open the Google calendar when I want to see my schedule.
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3mo ago
Neoreactionary internet denizen Jim has an old post where he coined the term "generational loss of hypocrisy", and I wish it was used more widely. His given example sucks, which is probably why. I'll try to convey some other examples without waging the culture war or consensus building, and feedback is welcome if I fall short:
- As described in your post, where Soviet politicians give lip service to things because they're expected to, and the newer generation of politicians believe them sincerely.
- Jim's example is people expressing shock that a female prison guard would aid the escape of male prisoners she was sleeping with. He claims "everyone knew women were like this". Personally, I find the leap from "women like bad boys" to "women will break their bad boys out of prison" too large, and that's why I'm sad that there isn't a better defense of the concept somewhere.
- Trends of work and play preferences for men and women. Boys and girls play differently (paywall bypass), but after a generation of trying to remove the stigma of boys playing with dolls, Damore got fired for his memo. Set aside the arguments of the actual culture war issues and look at the "generational loss of hypocrisy": The belief that "boys shouldn't play with dolls" is very dated, and its believers are mostly in retirement homes now. While the Baby Boomers will (broadly) approve of letting children play with whatever toy they want, they also (broadly) believe that there are gendered preferences, and going against those is abnormal. They just don't say that last part out loud. By the time we're to Generation X, there's significant support for equity as defined by the social justice movement, and expressing the unsaid beliefs of the Baby Boomers creates a hostile work environment to the point where you will be fired.
- Some climate change scientists and activists present short timelines for catastrophic destruction. There's a history of extreme claims from environmentalists since, for example, Earth getting destroyed after whales go extinct gets more donations and support than statistics, charts, and threats of "loss of biodiversity" that most people just won't internalize. People in power pay climate change lip service and make a donation, but generally don't behave as if the world actually is going to suffer these catastrophic effects any time soon. Buying houses at sea-level is an example of this hypocrisy. Greta Thunberg took the proclamations at face value and is upset that people in power aren't backing up their talk with action. Criticisms of AOC's Green New Deal include plenty in the category of "You're taking climate change too seriously": if the more catastrophic predictions are correct then it would make sense to take significant economic loss now in order to prevent it.
- Police/prison reform. Though I'm not very knowledgeable on the history of these movements, I think a lot of the older generation knows that some people are just anti-social criminals who shouldn't be free (related study), but the newer members of the movements has been pushing for the actual abolition of prisons and police.
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3d ago
Thanks. A military career is good for, if nothing else, giving you a good story or two to tell.
Hard to search if you want to get it right. I can imagine a State Department convincing some Central or South American country to accept all immigrant criminals of uncertain Hispanic nationality in exchange for a few hundred million dollars of "humanitarian aid", or whatever euphemism we want to use. "Oh, my dear illegal immigrant rapist, you refuse to tell us your citizenship? Off to an El Salvadorian jail, then." A State Department (under the Executive branch, remember) that is not doing this must think it's not worth doing. I've had this thought in the back of my mind during all the politicking on immigration.
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3d ago
I don't disagree with you, but I feel like you're glossing over the parts that make this a complicated issue. Extradition treaties are complex, and don't exist between all countries. In many cases I'm glad that the more-free West can be a sanctuary for political "criminals" from the East. If Yeonmi Park jay walks, I don't want her sent back to North Korea to be executed, and I'd go so far as to say that yes, we do have an obligation to not send her back. But if she murdered someone in a State without the death penalty, should we put her in jail for life? What if it's reckless homicide? Or a refuge whose political persecution is less clear? I don't know where the lines should be drawn, and would love a good mistake-theory discussion about it. What we seem to get from the US government, though, is conflict-theory soundbites arguing for all-or-nothing solutions.
I was pleasantly surprised that ChatGPT was able to produce real court cases where State Courts have ruled on Constitutionality:
- People v. LaValle (NY, 2004)
The New York Court of Appeals struck down the state's death penalty law, citing the Eighth Amendment and the state's constitution. The court held that the death penalty statute violated constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. - Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins (CA, 1979)
The California Supreme Court upheld the right to free speech under the First Amendment and California Constitution, allowing individuals to gather signatures in shopping centers despite private property rights. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the decision. - State v. Santiago (CT, 2015)
The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that the state's death penalty law violated the Eighth Amendment due to its arbitrary application and evolving standards of decency. - Commonwealth v. Wolfe (PA, 2016)
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court addressed federal Eighth Amendment issues regarding sentencing juveniles to life without parole. The court applied the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Miller v. Alabama to ban such sentences. - State v. Gregory (WA, 2018)
The Washington Supreme Court ruled that the state's death penalty law violated both the Eighth Amendment and the state's constitution due to evidence of racial bias in its application.
Older LLMs would regularly hallucinate with this sort of question.
Edit: link updated to include follow up ChatGPT conversation, which included State courts that weren't State Supreme Courts ruling on Constitutionality:
- People v. Mann (NY, 1992): Ruled on the Fifth Amendment.
- People v. Lovelace (IL, 2002): Applied Fourth Amendment protections.
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9mo ago
I'm not educated on these terms and this whole school of thought, and right now the gap between my understanding of how the world works and what you've linked/described about Constructivism is too great for me to understand your points. I do not see a reason why I'm not allowed to conclude that nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea should elicit a different international response than nuclear weapons in the hands of Great Britain without the constructivist need to claim that the nature of the nuclear weapons is different between the two. Like, I can change my opinions, reactions, and decisions between a good adult friend and the 14-year-old across the street when each asks to borrow my car. I'm allowed to do that without needing to believe that my car has changed. And there are inherent truths about nuclear weapons and cars that would be true regardless of social context: nuclear weapons make a big explosion when successfully activated, and cars have 4 wheels. A society that believes the will of a supernatural entity is the only cause of fire is unable to modify a nuclear detonation through prayer no matter how important the supernatural entity is in their society. A society that believes the number 4 to be bad luck and that refuses to allow anything to have that number of wheels is allowed to collectively say a car has 3 wheels, but that doesn't make it true.
Where are you getting your definition of "realists"? In the colloquial meaning of "realist", I don't see why they would conclude that a country whose government has committed genocide would be less likely to intervene to stop another genocide. The obvious conclusion seems like it could be reached by observing the real world, with real, testable things that really exist, regardless of social constructs. Measure: has each country committed genocide, and have they intervened to stop another genocide. Calculate: historically, what's the chance a country that has committed genocide will intervene to stop another genocide versus one that hasn't. Predict: given two countries, one that has committed genocide and one that hasn't, which is more likely to intervene to stop this particular genocide. The answer is independent of social context.
Again, I'm ignorant here. I want to understand why there is any benefit for believing that social context changes the reality of objects, or that we're not allowed to consider any actor as different than any other actor without constructivism. Because the downstream effects of constructivism I see are awful: college professors claiming that aboriginal interpretations of the world are just as valid as the scientific method, and the superweapon of unfalsifiable "lived experiences" that trump rational debate. I want to stop those things, and from my perspective shunning constructivism - making it costly and embarrassing to believe and support - seems to be a good solution. I don't see any loss, because what you're saying constructivism adds all seem like common sense that we could figure out without that structure.
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23d ago
I do not have any experience with Linux certification programs. I do have experience with Linux, programming, sysadmin stuff, and government jobs/roles/contracts that require certifications. I also have experience with hiring, and with convincing large organizations to pay for training. With those caveats, I think something like Linux Foundation Certified IT Associate would be worth looking into.
Benefits:
- From a reputable org, so has some value on a resume
- Not too deep for a new-to-tech employee
- Covers the basics of what you've described
I would not count on the credential to be especially useful to your company unless you know of a project or customer who requires it already. The trend I see is for organizations to focus a lot more on actual ability rather than certifications until the org get really big, and often not even then. Government jobs/contracts are the exception, but if you're doing those then you would already know which certifications to work towards.
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1mo ago
Kulak, I love your stuff, but you're being a whiny bitch. Correctness is important. Quit making excuses. Proper grammar is a gift from the writer to the reader that makes the writing easier to understand.
Pay $20 for Claude or GPT-4, or get an open source one (WizardLM-2 came out today), and feed your posts through it tuned for copy editing. Not hard.
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3mo ago
I do not believe there is broad support for the effects of significantly limiting factory farming: less meat available and far higher prices.
Most Americans aren't political, don't care about broader issues, and just want to hang out with their friends and "watch the game". They care about social signaling, so they'll say they're against factory farming when that seems like what they're supposed to say. I would not count on them to maintain that stance once the effects of significantly limiting factory farming become apparent.
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3mo ago
That sounds like regular old depression. There's plenty of info out there about how to deal with depression. For me, getting some sunlight on my skin every morning and working out 4x/week for 30+ minutes does more for my mental health than anything my psychiatrist recommended.
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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