defmacr0
12d ago
Even with post-Nixon reforms, we still had stuff like Iran-Contra, which should worry anybody;
Also Ruby Ridge, the MOVE bombing, Waco siege...
defmacr0
12d ago
Here, there is settled definition of the word kidnap. You have google. Read it. It is the unlawful taking of a person. There is zero evidence ICE is routinely kidnapping people
I know it's not always avoidable, because it only takes one party in an otherwise good-faith argument, but whenever a discussion starts going like this, there's like a 90% chance it's a complete waste of time.
The other poster made a factually absurd claim with zero evidence
I think it's pretty clearly in the territory of a reasonable Russell's conjugation to describe what ICE is doing. However, I think for someone to honestly back up the connotations that the phrasing implies, they are to some extent required to also express a libertarian stance on other forms of policing. You can't really call ICE raids "kidnapping" but then also think it's ridiculous if I call someone a "kidnapping victim" for being arrested for tax evasion or some other non-aggression that the state declares to be a crime.
I don't really believe that the original commenter passes this bar, but by itself I think it's about equally as silly as if this site started banning people for stating that taxation is theft.
defmacr0
12d ago
Also, making a modest but closer to certain than expected 10% gain on your low-volatility play is probably a lot less likely to trigger an SEC investigation than a massive bet right before some big announcement.
To release some kind of statement, say his heart is with the kids and the widow.
I would be surprised if more than one in a thousand lawyers wouldn't strongly try to dissuade you from doing this, even if you really wanted to.
General side-note, but it would be nice if we could figure out a way to let people express human decency in a way that doesn't potentially create legal liability
defmacr0
13d ago
One of the fundamental results of machine learning theory states (very informally) that every learning algorithm has both a bayesian and a frequentist interpretation.
Is there any specific theorem you're referring to here?
In any case, I also get the sense that equally it seems like everything in machine learning has a third information theoretic interpretation. For instance the correspondence between variational bayes and coding theory with the bits-back argument (link). I sometimes wish I had a personality better suited to working as a researcher (and perhaps a few more IQ points) and to really have pulled on all of these threads. Not to make it sound more mystical than it really is, but I've always had a gut feeling that there are some powerful, unifying ideas beneath this weird amalgamation of concepts from statistics, information theory, statistical mechanics and computer science we're seeing in the development of learning theory.
The two problems just aren't really that comparable.
Let's go with these numbers: https://www.freeingenergy.com/are-solar-panels-really-full-of-toxic-materials-like-cadmium-and-lead/
this says 4400 tons of lead are contained in 92GW of solar panels. So that is roughly 4400 tons of lead for 30*years*92GW of energy. I assume this is peak capacity, so at a capacity factor of around 20% we get 4400 tons of lead for 0.6TWy.
Wikipedia says:
A typical large 1000 MWe nuclear reactor produces 25–30 tons of spent fuel per year.
Which gives 15000-18000 tons of HLW for 0.6TWy or about 4x the amount. The numbers are very much comparable, and I think I was pretty fair to either technology. Presumably, PV has more production waste due to the much larger volume of stuff and I don't care enough to research things like the impact of mining waste for things like the copper content in PV modules vs. Uranium mining. If we also, say, limit the analysis to Germany where the PV capacity factor is 10% or bias our valuation of baseload energy production more highly, or we include battery waste it's not too hard to get numbers where Nuclear comes out on top.
Because nuclear waste remains dangerous for that long.
I feel like you're refusing to engage with the argument. Lead and spent nuclear fuel have pretty much identical environmental risk profiles after a few decades. It's just that the other energy technologies are much better at diluting their waste throughout the environment.
you, me and our descendants will have to deal with those problems but the people in power right now won't.
Would it be safe to be in the vicinity of the chemical storage area of the Rotterdam port if civilization collapses tomorrow?
I am an environmentalist who does actually care about this issue. You're right, that is a big problem - but I'm not particularly moved by claims of hypocrisy when I have actively protested against this kind of thing in the past.
I'm not accusing you of any personal ideological hypocrisy of not being against mining pollution enough. It's just that the theoretical possibility of some post-civilizational-collapse humans being poisoned two hundred years from now, because the concrete box, that we store spent fuel in, eroded away is a laughably insignificant concern. Where are the policy initiatives for deep geological storage of solar panels and solar panel production waste that guarantees no environmental damage for the next X thousand years? Why is nuclear power singled out as the one human activity where we have to spend billions to make sure that no living being in any possible future timeline thousands of years in the future is harmed by some byproduct? Why do we not simply accept that in every country there is one warehouse that requires some minimal continued maintenance effort to remain safe to people in the immediate surroundings? Remember, numerous other such buildings exist right now. Would it be safe to be in the vicinity of the chemical storage area of the Rotterdam port if civilization collapses tomorrow?
defmacr0
1mo ago
even if you just handwave away the problem of storing dangerous radioactive waste that lasts for millenia and hope it doesn't leak into the rest of the environment
The whole nuclear waste discussion is immensely frustrating to me. Yes, depleted fuel remains dangerous for a long time, but the implication that we therefore need to also develop containment solutions that last for millennia is completely and utterly bonkers. The part that most scares people about radioactive substances is that they can cause injury and death by just being present in their vicinity. However, spent fuel is dangerous to the touch for a few decades at best, after that, the health and containment concerns are identical to those of any other chemical waste (basically, making sure it does not come into contact with the food supply and drinking water). Except, there is a universal method to detect radioactive contamination. Compare this to detecting chemical contamination, where one could run hundreds of tests and still miss the presence of a lethally toxic substance. Some toxic waste, particularly heavy metals, remains dangerous indefinitely. However, you never see any heated political debate about ways to permanently isolate entire waterways. The only reason we even have this discussion with nuclear power is because the physical amount of high level waste is tiny and because it's one of the only energy sources where most of the waste it produces stays neatly contained in a single building.
I don't want to be needlessly antagonistic, but the nuclear waste argument needs to die and whenever anyone brings it up in a discussion I also die a little inside.
defmacr0
1mo ago
First person that comes to mind is Thomas Massie. The guy resonates with me on many levels and I do see him as a role model. His life story of making it as a successful electrical engineer, going back to homesteading a piece of land with an off-grid house he built himself and being one of the few politicians that I know of that seems to genuinely not have sacrificed his personal integrity.
Beyond that I would say Terence Tao absolutely deserves any and all recognition. But honestly, picking a celebrity, I have a bit of trouble. I guess gut feeling I'll also pick Whitney Webb as one of the best reporters on Epstein and his networks.
defmacr0
1mo ago
I have a friend who pretty closely fits the description. I don't know if he fully deserves the conservative label I suppose, but he's an atheist and strict vegan. He's pretty well read in Western philosophy, though he seems to gravitate towards thinkers that I'm personally skeptical of, especially Hegel, though I don't really care enough to study him and other historicist philosophers to really have a substantive debate with him, beyond the bad vibes i suppose. Relatedly, he seems to occasionally be sympathetic towards some socialist economic theories, where we have the opposite situation in terms of how well-informed I consider myself vs. him. However, on all the other culture war issues he's way in the conservative camp.
On the dating thing, I think he should realize that if a woman likes and respects her man, she will adopt his values or at least change to become more compatible with them. Speaking also from personal experience, having impossibly high standards like this is also a way to rationalize avoidant behavior, stemming from anxiety about interacting with the opposite gender.
Though the WWI u-boats were pretty bad. But I guess so was the rest of WWI too. http://vlib.us/wwi/resources/archives/texts/uboatu9.html
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