charlesUF
1yr ago
I don't know if some sort of epic crisis would be beneficial or not, but on a broader level I think its fairly obvious that leisure and abundance makes people unhappy. We are built for the struggle, not the relaxing. Our minds are constantly scanning for threats and opportunities. We form coalitions to fight enemies that don't exist. We amplify small differences to supply the enemies we are subconsciously certain must exist somewhere. We're evolved for challenges we almost never face. Its not a coincidence our most coddled classed of humans are also our most miserable. We're a violent species with no one to kill to solve our problems. The culture 'war' is a luxury conflict.
charlesUF
1yr ago
“What makes a country a country?” is one of the primary questions of political science. The usual glib answer is “Other countries recognize them as one”. This of course leads to “What makes other countries recognize them?”. There are a few short answers for this, and some disagreement, but one of those short answers is pretty indisputable. Aside from claiming to be a country in the first place, the government seeking that recognition must maintain a monopoly on the use of organized violence within its claimed borders. Military invasion and conquering of a country is the direct material refutation of this sort of claim, but its not just a foreign army that can despoil your violence monopoly. There comes a point as this violence monopoly slips that the polity effectively ceases to be. Somalian recent history has a good example of this. I don’t know how bad things are in El Salvador and I don’t trust US media to report honestly, but there comes a point where a government either has to take steps like this (or even more brutal) or pack it up and flee to Miami with as much as they can steal on the way out. This latter option has been historically pretty popular. This government, in this moment, is choosing the former. It still wants to be a country. Even the most authoritarian states are still countries: they have an intact violence monopoly, you can negotiate with their gov’t as a unit and expect it to at least have the state capacity to follow through on its agreements if it chooses to do so. A gang of the most Western educated, culturally sensitive, US foreign policy compliant, says-all-the-right-things, paragons of democratic virtue living saints who don’t have an effective monopoly on violence is not a country at all.
Are there some innocent people in these prisons in El Salvador? Almost certainly, and that really sucks for them. OTOH they’re lucky the current gov’t there even bothers to use prisons at all. Locking them all in buildings that are then lit on fire has been a historically attractive option for countries that found themselves in similar situations in the past. AFAIK no one has uncovered any mass graves yet. This approach seems balanced given the easily available alternatives.
charlesUF
1yr ago
My employer has a Cape Town office with a good number of employees that we speak with regularly. We use ZA (Zuid Afrika) to avoid confusion with our South American operations.
charlesUF
1yr ago
I had no idea he was even making the Dilbert comics anymore. If pressed I'd have guessed he stopped some time in the early 2010s. I've read his blog on and off since the 2016 election and he almost never discussed Dilbert and when he did it had a decidedly in-the-past tense to the whole discussion.
charlesUF
1yr ago
My understanding of the term TERF is Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Nothing about my observations of Rowling pattern matches with "Radical Feminist". She doesn't even seem like a normal feminist except when its useful for her ambitions or some other instrumental goal. On second thought maybe that is a description of a normal feminist.
I'm not familiar with this National Action, so I looked them up. Everything about them is written with negative mood affiliation so it should be easy to find out how nasty these people are. The results I think are further evidence this is fake, aside from the insanity of a group like this identifying themselves in a threat, they've never done anything like this before. In fact, actual crimes committed by members are fit a easy to discern pattern. The majority of arrests of members of the National Action are for....being members of the National Action. Apparently the UK can forbid membership in groups like this with criminal penalties apart from actually committing crimes. I'm not British though so what do I know, maybe most folks in the UK like laws like this. IMO status offences enshrined in law are no better than the beliefs the proscribed groups are advancing. Its illegal to simply exist while claiming to be a member. The next biggest bucket of arrests are for words, either spoken or written. None of it is paper letters mailed to people or direct threats against specific individuals. Mostly its internet shit-posting in support of the actual crimes of non-members, like the murder of an MP. While they were 100% uninvolved in the murder there is a desperate need to connect them in the UK press. Also it appears that being a proscribed group puts you outside the protection of the UK's already insane libel/slander laws (nothing on Japan's though). The only actual crime that I would consider a real crime, in that it did demonstrable damage to a person or property, was an attempted murder by someone claiming to be a member after the fact. Some one was also arrested for possessing items with the intent of damaging property but was never charged for it. This simply isn't their MO at all. In addition, since the majority of their crimes are for saying or typing illegal words, there is a pretty good corpus of their work. None of it is written anything like this letter. They write like chavs speak, likely for an obvious reason.
charlesUF
1yr ago
Whether we judge something as "effective" requires establishing a goal or ideal state to measure against. If the entire goal is to remove racial disparity in honors classes, then this will work. By all means throw out the baby and keep the bathwater. The actual effects of these actions are: parents that can afford it remove their kids from the district and send them to private school or move the entire family to a new district. These kids were always going to be fine. The poorer kids, and especially the (inequitable) number of racial minorities who did manage to get into these programs are back with the dumb and disruptive kids, the opportunity to imagine a better like, or at least a life around a smarter class of people, is likely gone for these kids forever. In short this program provided better outcomes for some, but not enough, of members of the desired groups, so now it helps none of them at all. To be fair to the kids.
charlesUF
1yr ago
Or for yet another example, faced with the foregoing, some universities just outright offer "non-STEM-major" classes. I'm personally aware of this happening in the sciences rather than math--like, "BIO 101 for non-major general education credit, or BIO 110 for STEM majors"--but I have heard of similar things happening with math.
I did this in the late 90s. Took a physics and a geology class both explicitly for non-stem majors. My main take away was that the professors loved teaching those classes and were open about how much more they liked us as students than their stem students. They also happened to be good professors generally. Rest in peace Dr. Aaronson.
charlesUF
1yr ago
In they Army they used to say of COs: “Subalterns cannot marry, Captains may marry, Majors should marry, Colonels must marry”
charlesUF
1yr ago
I also do a moderate amount of hiring, mostly for finsec stuff. We do have a team that does a general "internet sweep" for the online footprint, if any, of the applicant. Nothing we find will help the applicant, only hurt them. Our idea candidate has a Linkedn and maybe a boring Facebook page. No FB is as good as a normal, boring one. People who are extremely on-line under their real identity are generally a pass unless they have high levels of talent or the majority of their on-line activity is directly related to their field of expertise. Crusaders can be ok if their goals are our goals too. Twitter warriors are a hard pass.
Its a strictly military manual, but the Strategikon is pretty good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategikon_of_Maurice
It was attributed to Maurice but there isn't good evidence he wrote it, or even a single author did. While there are a lot of similar guides for military issues produced throughout the Roman period, the Strategikon comes from time and place of incredible pragmatism. Things weren't going great for the empire and they needed smart and effective, no bullshit professional officers. Its an interesting historical text as well as it is much concerned with educating future officers about the neighboring peoples they were mostly likely to fight, their dispositions and technological levels, the terrains of the empires, and economics.
He describes Persians as deviant but obedient and "persistent in work and fighting in the name of their homeland".
Scythians, Turks and Avarians and similar are nomad people; sinewy, superstitious, reckless, committed to a desire for abundance. They are good at horse riding and archery. Also, they own a lot of horses. They can stay on horseback for a very long time, but they are not skilful while they are walking, nor very hardy.
Francs, Lombards and their lookalikes value their freedom very much. They are fearless and bold in battle. They are dissolute in attack and disobedient to their leaders. They are greedy and bribable. They can't stand the heat as much as cold, they are easily ambushed, their camps are very unorganized.
Slavs, Ants and their lookalikes have the same customs and don't let be enslaved. Slavs act with slaves better than other nations; after certain period of time a slave will be released and he can go back home or stay and live as an equal member of the Slavic community. They easily bear extreme weather conditions and a shortage of food; they are good at crossing water, as well as hiding under the water (by using concave canes). They are friendly with foreigners and their hospitality is well known - revenge for the guest is considered a duty. They are easily bribed, they are discordant, and they cannot stand each other. Slavs are skilled with arms and nimble in tight and wooded areas, but unorganized in more open battles. The author praises Slavic women who are honorable after their husbands died"
charlesUF
1yr ago
I work for a large international corp with people all over the world. As we want our business to be successful we enforce punctuality with in iron fist. You'll notice a direct correlation in that list between punctuality and economic health.
To editorialize if I may, if someone tells you they will meet you at a certain time, they don't do it, they have lied to you. The cultures that don't respect punctuality really have a high tolerance for dishonesty and you see it everywhere in the culture, not just in issues of being "on time". I work in anti-fraud and our algorithms consider, among many attributes, the nation the transaction originates in. If you made a list of countries that are permissive with being late and another list of countries by likeyhood of fraud, its largely the same list.
charlesUF
1yr ago
2nding this, Bing has been ok for a while. Their image and video search are superior to Google and have been for a few years now.
charlesUF
1yr ago
Buddhism, Taosim, even Judaeo-Christian religions posit that we have some essential essence or soul that guides us
just a nit pick, but Buddhism explicitly rejects this and that rejections forms the basis of the separation of Buddhism and other Hindu associated religions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatt%C4%81
I work in anti wire-fraud, prevention, detection, and recovery after the fact. I've worked with multiple doctors that I am confident couldn't complete a 1040ez if their life depended on it. Yes, I know their own finances are to complex for the ez form and using an accountant is probably a good thing for them. My point is most people are only competent at a small number of things they do a lot and this is very seldom one of them. On a related note doctors make fantastic scam marks. They think they are smart, they often really aren't ,they have money to take, and personality types that make them resistant to reporting it or getting help until they've lost A LOT of money.
charlesUF
1yr ago
I had to reread this post a few times as I forgot the overall topic of the discussion as these bullet points are a near perfect guide to preventing a misleading/deceptive Wikipedia page that you personally agree with from ever being fixed by good-faith editors trying to make factual corrections. Getting the article in question into the preferred slanted state is a different and often more difficult undertaking usually requiring a fair amount of clique building and clout amassing within the community, but once its where you want it this is basically playbook for defending bad-faith edits on Wikipedia from any principled sieges. As a long time contributor over there this so perfectly describes a great deal of other editors I've known over the years its appalling. Well done.
charlesUF
1yr ago
Reno is about a 4 hour drive and has pretty good ranges, both indoor and outdoor. My grandfather was an avid collector but lived in San Jose, so 2-4 Reno trips per year were a big chunk of his vacations.
charlesUF
1yr ago
Do you have any hot takes on the ammo shortage? I compete in pistol and I've definitely noticed the empty shelves for common rounds. I've not had any trouble getting match rounds, or to say any more trouble; I've always had to order it and wait.
Relatedly, do you thing home-reloading is viable for hobbyists? The range I practice at has a productive reload business so I've never needed to look into it. Good reliability too based on some stories I've heard.
charlesUF
1yr ago
I work in shipping. You are largely correct about the transit-time mattering. The date the USPS cares about is the post-date; when it gets hit with the stamp at the first sort center of its journey. It gives you a chance to redirect some shipments still "in-flight" so to speak.
The USPS actually has the best website of all the major US carriers. If you fill out their forms they actually do the things they say they will 99% of the time. This is very, very, very much NOT the case with UPS/FEDEX websites. Their self service tools are largely worthless.
In the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) after the rise of Islam there was much concern with Christianity's dearth of rules and codes of conduct compared to the ascendant Islam. The belief of the day, which everyone assumed as true, was that the fate of the Empire was directly linked to the proper religious conduct of the people and Emperor. The only logical explanation for the Muslim military's victory over the Empire was Loss of God's Favor. It actually took two centuries before the Roman elite even recognized that Islam existed as a separate distinct religion (the historical record of the Arab's themselves also lacks good evidence of Islam being a fully formed, distinct religion for about 2 centuries after the death of Mohammad, when the very earliest accounts of his life first start appearing. This is not a can or worms I'm trying to open here). Many in the Empire's elite considered them to be Jewish heretic fundamentalists. Either way God obviously let them win so there has to be a reason(s). Multiple attempts to flush out of a more attractive set of personal conduct guidelines and criminal law based on the Old Testament while keeping within the Empires traditions were launched after various military defeats. Its both a very broad subject and one that lacks much satisfying primary sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_law#Middle_Byzantine_period has a very incomplete overview laundered through modern understandings.
More options
Context Copy link