professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
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User ID: 1157
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
I am not sure that a society that can't do "moon mining" isn't an industrial society
I was building off Gattsuru's example with chips and rockets; Industrial Revolution era England is the eponymous industrial society with much lower requirements than a modern industrial society.
I am more interested in "now that we have Einstein and all the other guys, how far could we slide without losing that."
Maintenance is quite hard and some forms of knowledge are easier to lose than others. See again, the Congo and Empire of Dust. At the higher scale than that, high-quality machining is apparently quite difficult to automate and a form of knowledge that's easy to lose.
Precise details and Fermi estimates will depend on exactly what technologies you want the minimum viable industrial society to have, of course.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
The New York Times seemingly does, and if Pikers become the future of the party, I'm counting Platner as close enough, people like MattY will reliably delete any tweets to the contrary. He will do and say whatever he thinks The Party needs, and indeed, does already support Platner regardless of his... foibles.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
But are all 6000 grants funding things as contemptible as Columbian trans operas?
I'm guessing around 5900 of them but who knows. other commenters have provided some further examples involving much higher dollar amounts.
AFAICT USAID had a small handful of truly defensible grants that rationalists like Scott and Kelsey really liked defending for a couple weeks, but then they got bored and moved on like the rest of us. or maybe they got drowned out in the volume of shitty grants like the culture war stuff or like caravaning migrants through the darien gap.
isn't something most politicians would defend
we disagree on this, I suspect. Perhaps also some passive/active distinction around "defend." Most politicians are happy to ignore it and bury any reports that demosntrate how much there is, but as I recall Tim Walz got pretty snippy about people trying to investigate it.
It's categorically different
ah, there's always some reason. Can we just admit it's partisanship?
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
people thinking an open fraudster and convicted felon might do more fraud and more felonies
Not the best callout since there is a significant and influential strain of liberal-progressivism that doesn't think you should judge people based on past behavior.
well, if they're rapists and murderers and serial assaulters, those guys you can't judge. for political enemies they should always be assumed evil to the core.
thinking an open liar might tell lies
lol. Matt Yglesias still has a job! Shall we coin YDS? Does every journalist and 2020-era bestseller get their own acronym?
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
clearly i've forgotten how to argue here and how many people will pretend not to understand things.
thank you for improving the context.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
damn i really chose the cheapest of the bullshit line items and everyone got to pretend that it was a meaningless amount instead of a synecdoche for a larger set of problems.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
The infamously prone to squabble center, left, and far left?
In the sense that there's a rounding error of liberals that are really, truly willing to oppose progressives and leftists, they're interchangeable. They squabble, absolutely, but no one to their left is an enemy.
They'll fire a Mexican construction worker for making the OK sign, while thinking odious weasel Hasan Piker is the future of the party. Racism is fine as long as it has a progressive gloss. Advocating for violence is okay as long as it has a progressive gloss. Having a full-on Nazi tattoo and saying women are responsible for getting raped is peachy if there's a D next to your name, but god forbid Elon move his arm in a silly way.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
Pardoning his son was easily the most despicable act in Biden's presidency
Pardoning his son was one of the few human acts Biden did as president, and he shouldn't have lied about it.
All the other political pardons were despicable.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
Woke ended in 2019
What definition of "woke" are you using that doesn't include the Great Uprising of 2020? Or that there's still not a single elected Democrat willing to say anything less than trans maximalism.
Eh, maybe Fetterman has. So there's one but also kind of a joke.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
Consider the sheer volume of people you need to create, say, a viable rocket to reach the moon and return. Several different kinds of engineer to create the circuits and fuel and engine and craft, right? Support staff. Miners to mine coal and ore, refiners and smelters to make steel for parts and silicon for chips, drillers for oil and refiners for the fuel, construction workers to build their homes and the launch pads and everything else, farmers to grow food to feed all the miners/drillers/refiners/construction workers/support staff/engineers. Doctors to care for all of the above. Et cetera- what about entertainment? Other desires? Is reaching the moon the sole telos of this civilization, and every job aimed at that goal? If not, the scale balloons as people take other jobs towards other goals. And I've left off huge numbers of other factors and 'needs.' Some could be left out or leapfrogged, but not easily.
An industrial civilization is a massive pyramid. One can imagine an ideal civilization perfectly following a tech tree with no deviations and no waste at a smaller population number, but one can imagine six impossible things before breakfast.
There's some Greater Variability there too. Written language only developed independently a few times, so think of Sequoyah- once the idea was demonstrated he sat down and spent years developing the Cherokee syllabary. He had the ability to create written language, but not the spark. In the thousand years before him, how many of his people had the ability and not the spark, and how many lacked even the ability? A bigger population gives you more rolls of the dice to generate people who even have the possibility of doing new things.
Or look at the Congo and Empire of Dust. Or Google Maps of certain parts of Johannesburg 10 years ago versus today. Or Detroit, 1950 versus today (though in some ways it's recovered from rock bottom). Without the right kind of support, the right sort of culture, an industrial civilization decays quite rapidly, and maintaining that requires a lot of people.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
these petty amounts
One grant is a petty amount, but a memorable synecdoche.
Are 6000 grants a petty amount?
Is the total of Medicare fraud, home health fraud, home child care fraud, disability fraud a "petty amount"?
Nobody "serious" seems to give a shit about fraud when it happens on their team or by their favored constituencies, but I'm quite certain that all the other kinds of fraud are orders of magnitude more expensive than whatever Trump has done. His is concentrated and gaudy; the other kinds are diffuse. Cutting off a finger or two versus death by a thousand cuts.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
Yes, good point, my understanding is that was the total number of current grants before they got slashed.
Definitely not the total number of lifetime grants.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2d ago
$47K is quite small.
It's one memorable and culture-warry grant out of 6,000.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2d ago
the current Democrat oeuvre is illegitimate, whatever that means
It's not the word I'd choose but given the 2020 and 2024 elections, neither candidate was chosen under what I would call normal circumstances. For that matter 2016 was memorably biased by the DNC but probably not in a way that substantially mattered.
if they’re getting ahold of the country, are they really so unpopular
Absolutely! That's the horror of the two-party system and substantial polarization.
Even in 2020 Dems as a party were net-unfavorable, but slightly less unfavorable than Republicans. My understanding is favorability has not improved, but the gap may have increased a bit.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2d ago
Presumably a joke about USAID funding all sorts of nonsense and no one has really tracked through everything they did like navigating the Darien Gap, but the closest specific example is probably the Columbian trans opera.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2d ago
American taxpayer pays either way, that's how the government works.
I dislike the system but I'd rather pay people abused by the IRS than a bunch of NGOs trailblazing through the Darien Gap or campaigning for more two-tiered justice system or whatever.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2d ago
"they cut food support to pay for his friends" is gonna hit pretty hard
seems to have had no effect in massachusetts politics cutting school funding.
Food and gas prices hit hard, and Republicans are going to lose on that.
Nobody really gives a shit about corruption, though.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2d ago
Congressional stock trades, which involve like 1/100th of the value of what Trump is doing.
Nancy Pelosi's net worth is $280 million, so if we boldly say that's all corrupt stock trades it's more like 1/6ish of the new slush fund.
mostly i think it's funny that the guy motivated by obama's mic drop is largely rerunning the obama playbook cranked up a notch.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
9d ago
It's as if they wanted to make an example of him.
The sentence and hate crime conviction rather demonstrate that.
Sort of an interesting contrast to the usual narrative that you get light sentencing for killing someone with a car: both Fields and Darrell Brooks (the Waukesha parade attack guy) got sentences centuries longer than the 1992 WTC bombers. Car-based terrorism seems to accrue more charges and sentences than other forms.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
9d ago
I am emphatically not saying that the MV Hondius should have be dealt with using Hegseth's patented double-tap method
Eh... Anyways, the difference is that for a certain kind of mindset, "punishing" everyone is more acceptable than "punishing" a subset. Yes this is terrible and braindead; no I don't know how to solve it.
You might as well say "sooner or later, that naive tourist walking through the slums will get murdered for his wallet by someone, so I might as well stab him right now".
A utilitarian Argentine government should pay people to at minimum threaten tourists that want to go to the hantavirus garbage dump. They should just kill the birds that seem to be the main attraction.
Currently, while some people near me claim that this will be the next pandemic, I am taking the fifth until Scott publishes one of his trademark 'much more than you wanted to know' articles
I don't really expect it to be the next pandemic, but I don't think a current-Scott will be as useful or forthcoming as any of several eras of old-Scott. Maybe I'm too cynical there, Kelsey's been a bit spicier than she used to be (low bar to hit!), but... should he publish such an article it will be after most useful points. At best we catch a tweet, or if you're closer to him you hear it first or second hand conversationally.
the WHO tells us that everything is fine, but these are basically the same people who told us that masks will not prevent COVID
Current WHO recommendation is that everyone on the ship is high-risk, should be tracked for 42 days minimum, and should wear N95s. This is less than ideal but better than I expected.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
9d ago
The officials outright recommended that "going out in the nature is a very good idea now".
Good for y'all. The US version was that public parks that had gates were chained shut, people were fined for going to the beach, etc. In the UK your neighbors would snitch on you for being outside.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
15d ago
the guy who got life in the United the Right accident
While it is effectively LWOP, he officially got a sentence more than twice as long as the guys that did the 1993 WTC bombings, which killed 6 and injured over a thousand. Absolutely absurd, radicalizing sentencing.
Some of them have even had sentence reductions and could die as free men if they make it to 100, assuming they don't get more reductions over the next couple decades.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
15d ago
It might return to pre-2000s levels if the online trend goes down
Bit of a wording quibble but I would count that as dying out; pre- and post-2000s transness seem like quite different phenomena with quite different motivations, even if they rhyme somewhat.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
15d ago
What an amusing topic to invoke the concept of "sin" under. Beautiful, really.
There's apparently no public-facing list exactly, you have to dig through various databases and hope it's accurate. Someone like DataRepublican has probably done some of that work on twitter but it's not the kind of thing I'll be spending project time on.
My goal is less to redefine corruption, and instead suggest that the difference between caring about one versus the other is almost entirely partisan.
From my perspective as a taxpayer, Trump is undignified, but fraud costs a helluva lot more.
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