gattsuru
1yr ago
There is a strict "did Trump commit insurrection (or aid/comfort enemies) as defined by 14th Amendment" option. It has some benefit in the sense that the dicta could cordone off efforts to disqualify people other than Trump, although I expect it's even less appealing to Roberts and a good few other people on the conservative side of the bench, especially with how mushy it'd have to go between factual analysis and legal analysis.
That said, I think you're being insufficiently paranoid. There's a lot of problems with any result that doesn't either clearly disqualify him, or clearly mark attempts to disqualify as violating a clearly established statutory or constitutional right, that are far bigger than Trump or the 2024 elections.
gattsuru
1yr ago
- The Supreme Court isn't in a position to decide whether Trump is ineligible, just whether or not states are individually allowed to make that decision for themselves,
Did the Colorado Supreme Court err in ordering President Trump excluded from the 2024 presidential primary ballot?
And to be explicit, from the petition for certorari
The Court should also reverse the Colorado Supreme Court’s holding that President Trump “engaged in insurrection.”
First, the events of January 6, 2021, were not “insurrection” as that term is used in Section 3.
“Insurrection” as understood at the time of the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment meant the taking up of arms and waging war upon the United States. When considered in the context of the time, this makes sense. The United States had undergone a horrific civil war in which over 600,000 combatants died, and the very survival of the nation was in doubt. Focusing on war-making was the logical result...
Moreover, nothing that President Trump did “engaged” in “insurrection.”
SCOTUS could narrow the question, or people could make the argument he was disqualified for other reasons (emoluments fandom go!), but "can Trump disqualified under the terms of Section 3" is absolutely within SCOTUS' ambit and the upcoming oral arguments.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm hopeful, but there's a risk that Roberts may not be choosing from the full possibility space, but from a small number of best alternatives to negotiated agreement. And a lot of those leave states (and worse!) to just decide to not let a candidate on the ballot (and worse!).
I think Red Tribers believing that some people are inherent violent schizos is a stronger claim, but it's a different one from "violent schizophrenics attacking people on the subways".
((And even that runs into framing problems. There are people that think capitalism causes literally every case of schizophrenia, but the more common take among liberals and even some leftist is more the Ozy mealy-mouthed 'they're bad unless 'supported''.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
I think quite a few Hobbesian social conservatives think that violent schizophrenics should be institutionalized well before they're at the points we see them as violent or schizophrenics in the modern sense, and with enough throwing them into loony bins, we can live in a world where the are zero or near-zero. Like, I interacted with Clayton Cramer on this topic back when he was writing My Brother Ron (albeit more in regards to Bellesiades), and while that wasn't all of his position, it was a pretty sizable portion of it.
There are more narrow versions of this claim that are meaningful -- only Red Tribers believe this can only be resolved by armed police, or realize that some portion likes to hurt not because of the deserving-target's pain but for the feel of blood on their fingers -- but their narrowness turns them into policy matters.
gattsuru
1yr ago
With a few quibbles (cfe "immigration" here), I'd probably agree with you.
But it still means that talking about how we absolutely must handle and solve the problem of schizophrenics will get them to happily nod, think you agree with them, and then turn right back to Housing First arguments.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yes. You don't see it as often from your perspective, but if you go into progressive spaces taking your own libertarian bent, you'd absolutely encounter a ton of Blue Tribers certain that the smallest change to welfare or building regulations will result in an endless violent mob that can't be reasoned with nor danegelded with some small payoff, or the country turning into a clone of Somalia, respectively.
gattsuru
1yr ago
You're not wrong in the general sense that each Tribe had cultural perspectives that are invisible to the other, and probably that the Blue Tribe's limitations there are smaller given the overwhelming cultural dominance of the Blue Tribe. ((That said, I'm not sure these gaps are as complete as people think: go to weird places and you'll find people who touch both spheres. It's just that the movers and shakers aren't.))
But your example seems weird:
One of those fundamental Hobbesian bits of insight that liberals see to lack is the understanding that violent schizophrenics attacking people on the subways is not some aberation, it's the default, and if you aren't going to do anything about it someone else just might.
This is absolutely something liberals and the Blue Tribe have as a perspective, and indeed even the most ivory-towered of them will fairly consistently blame conservatives for 'not grappling' with it in a genuine way rather than just shoving it out-of-sight. They just believe that the Correct solutions are near-completely opposite from the Red Tribe ones: favoring Therapy and voluntary treatment for the literal-schizophrenics and improved material support for the non-clinically insane. I think these things are wrong, but they're not really a gap in awareness, just evaluation of information.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Nobody falls into being a doctor either, yet you'd probably prefer to be treated in a majority-white hospital to a majority-black hospital.
Are you making the HBD-IQ('skill')ish argument, or the Damore difference-in-interest one? I think the latter is non-applicable and readily shown to be non-applicable, at least for current numbers of pilots. The former... I could be more persuaded for doctors, though I'll caution that places like King/Drew or individual cases like Patrick Chavis run into trouble isolating or controlling other variables, and the data may simply not exist.
((In turn, though, one of the other variables for King/Drew and Chavis was/is lack of willpower to enforce against bad actors when such enforcement would bring accusations of racism. Which leads to problems even presuming equal capability on average.))
But I think airline pilots run into, or at least close to, the same issues as I listed for the continent-level scale question:
My main problem is that it's easy to come up with an X-factor broad enough to explain the wide berth of problems and disparity present, or closely-defined enough to match the traits we see in the real world, but that trying to achieve a reasonable synthesis gets rough. These traits will necessarily be motioning around the shadow of the thing rather than the true borders, but I'm hard-pressed to believe you'd get the same borders when starting from American test scores, Haitian test scores, Brooklyn politics, or Haitian politics.
Are airline memory items closer to free recall or serial rote learning? Reading landing charts closer to symbolic manipulation or to reading symbols? Reading an weather radar as pic-vocab or inspection time? Not getting overwhelmed by alerts or alarms closer to odd-man-out or reaction time? You can come up with a hundred combinations, and there's certainly some number that will have a racial component in some studies simply by chance, but it's easier to come up with ones that are either nonsensical or wrong or both.
If the administration of airlines, air traffic control, pilot training and so on was ruthlessly meritocratic, then I'd agree with you that there'd be no difference in skill between black or female pilots and white male pilots, since they would all have passed the same tests and be above a certain benchmark.
You can have a pass-fail test and still some subgroups that are more skilled than others, even if they're all above a certain benchmark, though as long as that benchmark is set reasonably it is less concerning, as others have already gone deeper into the math. And while aviation has (thankfully!) moved away from the sort of heroics that saved part of UA232, there are still a lot of incidents and near-misses with current (and I'd argue pretty aggressive!) benchmarks.
But I don't find any of that nearly as disturbing as people who believe, enough to say publicly, that ability won't make a difference.
Colgan Air 3407 was a 2009 aviation disaster, where regional commercial airliner on final descent to Buffalo New York stalled and crashed, killing all on-board and one person on the ground. For those interested in more precise details, the NTSB report is here, while MentourPilot has a video breakdown of the timeline and personnel here.
The majority of US airline disasters leave an impact on airline regulation and aviation in general, if sometimes not quite enough, or only after a delay. While far from the most deadly western air disaster of the the time, or even the worst western stall-related crash of that year, CA3407 had an unusual impact. Where older historical reports are filled with tragicomedic disasters and near-misses, the majority of recent accidents tend to rest on extremes, where either mechanical problems coincided with areas well outside of training focuses encountered pilots who made heroic efforts, or where pilots operated with long periods of outright disregard for safe operations, with perhaps a scatter of situations where bad practices mixed with mechanical error.
Instead, CA3407 fell due to a few seconds of phenomenally bad judgement by its captain encountering a spurious stall warning. Stalls are caused by insufficient lifting force on the wings, usually due to insufficient airspeed or high pitch (more rarely, extreme icing). Stalls and especially low-altitude stalls reflect fundamental aspects of flight, and pilots will do simulator (and sometimes real-world) drills both directly focusing on them, and on weather conditions that can induce them, such as microbursts. They're probably just up there with single-engine-out procedures for matters that a pilot should know by heart.
The normal behavior for a low-altitude stall is to give as much engine power as possible, with wings level to the horizon, until airspeed recovers. Instead the captain instead increased speed to a lower threshold and then pitched up well above the horizon -- a behavior that would have doomed a stalled aircraft had that warning been correct, and in normal landing profiles initiated an extreme stall. Worse yet, the time between the initial spurious warning and impact with the ground was less than half a minute; the aircraft was probably only recoverable in the first five to ten seconds, making takeover of effective command by the first officer impossible. While the first officer may not have been physically able to override the pilot's erroneous control behavior, if she had been willing to defy protocol and procedures, her response of lifting flaps was likely not harmful but neither procedurally correct nor helpful.
Like most incidents, there was no one single cause. The NTSB mentions pilot fatigue (and first officer illness), weather, flight manual inconsistency, and the combination of a first officer new to commercial flying with a pilot-in-command who had just moved to a new aircraft, among others. Training at the time would emphasize maintaining altitude during recovery, which made historic sense when terrain and obstruction information around airports was not always great and aircraft power profiles looked different, but was increasingly outdated around modern airports and unrealistic in modern aircraft.
But pilot capability was the big one. CA3407's pilot-flying and pilot-in-command had many hours experience, but also had a spotty training and especially checkride record. Checkrides can be considered the 'tests' for aviation certification, where the pilot flies along with an FAA-registered designated pilot examiner to undergo certain practical tests. The pilot in command here had four checkride disapprovals (effectively failures) across his career. While individual disapprovals at checkrides are not uncommon and do not necessarily indicate serious problems if corrected, these tests are neither convenient nor inexpensive to set up, and a pattern of first-attempt failures can, to quote the NTSB report:
"However, the captain’s established pattern of first-attempt failures might have indicated that he was slow to absorb information, develop skills, and gain mastery or that the training he received was not adequate. This pattern might also have indicated that the captain had difficulty performing required skills while under the stress conditions associated with a checkride."
((Though the FAA does not necessarily agree here; it holds that there is almost no correlation between checkride failure and later citations... which is a bit streetlamp-examination. But where CA3407's pilot would be in the bottom 5% of commercial pilots by simple count of checkride disapprovals, I absolutely agree that this isn't proof he was in the bottom 5% of commercial pilots by ability.))
This issue gained additional poignancy in public awareness due to the voice recorder conversations shortly before the crash, where the first officer discussed her unfamiliarity with icing conditions before being hired to Colgan, and the pilot mentioned his own employment history with the company.
Flight certification is heavily controlled by a new pilot's logged flight hours, with different licenses and certifications requiring certain thresholds or conditions of hours in a pilot's logbook. These hours aren't all literally flying, with some complex rules about what simulator hours can be logged in different grades of gear. Since an hour of flight can cost 100-300 USD/hour (and even BATD/AATD simulator time isn't free), including fuel and aircraft maintenance, optimizing hours someone else is paying for matters a lot.
Before 2009, one common route for new pilots involved self-funding their way through the private pilot's license and commercial license with instrument cert, which usually meant 150-300 hours, then zooming off to whatever regional airline needed first officers. While those first officers would not (and could not, legally) be pilots in command for the next 1200-1350 hours of flight, they would still get experience as pilots-flying and have time with various airline training and currency checks. Only then could they apply for an Airline Transport Pilot license, necessary to operate as a pilot in command. In theory, this would give a lot of experience in a variety of environments, most closer to 'real' pilot operations and some of which (like icing or flying near New York City) general aviation avoids like the plague, while still having the eyes and hands of an experienced pilot nearby to watch, and to catch any obvious faults.
After 2009, that was illegal. In response to CA3407, Congress passed the Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of 2010, which along with mandating a system for employers to more readily learn about applying pilot's past records (not finalized until 2021!), mandated that both the pilot and copilot of a commercial scheduled operating have an ATP. While a few exceptions were carved out (a new license, the ATP-r, was made available for pilots with a four-year pilot's degree, or two-year pilot's degree, or military flight training, at 1250 hours, 1000 hours, 750 hours, respectively), this rule remains today, and it has had no small effect on both the availability of airline pilots and their possible career paths. That's not as vast a change as it appears at first glance -- almost every airline had stricter hour minimums for hiring -- but it still significantly increased the number of hours a pilot would have to get on smaller aircraft first.
The argument is that many first officer roles would look to have a lot of varied flight experience, while not actually flying a plane most of those conditions. Pilots had to get a certain number of hands-on-stick landings to maintain currency, but a pilot-in-command would and often should take over landings and takeoff from a first officer in bad weather or awkward conditions. Especially in recent years, a lot of time would be flying the computer to set autopilot controls and monitor instruments mid-flight. To the extent small problems might show up, it would be very hard for documentation of those problems to show up if a pattern of. By contrast, flying a contract plane or as the flight instructor leaves you responsible for the safety of flight, and even recovery of a serious incident can and often is recorded.
And that argument is controversial. For CA3407 specifically, both pilots had significantly more than 1500 hours at the time of the crash, and while the pilot had earned most of his pre-Colgan hours at a flight school emphasizing bigger birds, the first officer had earned a lot of her hours as an instructor in a flight school. It's not clear that the theoretical argument applies, and there are some arguments against it. While not all arguments against are all well-founded (the rule is a little more complicated than allowing you to just log a thousand hours of tethered hot-air balloon time, even before considering that even overseas airlines would laugh you out of the office: pilots everywhere hate ballooners), some are more reasonable (flight instructors and flight schools will avoid many of the critical conditions and some aren't great about required incident reports, general aviation equipment in even newer aircraft is vastly different than even old airlines). While some groups like airline pilot unions have been strong advocates for the rule, there's reason MentourPilot and AOPA argues against it -- and there's more general-aviation pilots wanting in than airline pilots pissing out. Funding 1500 hours or a 4-year-degree in aviation is ludicrously expensive, and while some commercial operations remain legal for commercial-equipped pilots, the whole ecosystem is a mess, with a glut of flight instructors and contract pilots mixed with shaky demand for training and contract work. On the other side, when airline pilot demand is high, this has lead to flight 'clubs' or 'schools' that exist solely to burn hours and gas at the bare minimum of familiarity, or even airlines 'hiring' near-threshold pilots to build their last fifty or hundred hours in a rush. These markers are (and even pre-2010, were) disfavoured in airline hiring practices, but their increased prevalence makes them harder to filter out. The limited availability of pilots has even lead to consideration of tradeoffs against other forms of fitness, such as boosting the mandatory retirement age or decreasing flight medical rules. I'm generally against it, albeit not very strongly.
Ultimately, if this rule is a test of merit, it's a weak indicator, and selected more for convenience and politics than as the best option.
But enough about such culture war questions like pilot training requirements or FAA reporting guidelines. You know what nobody hates each other about yet? Race and (dis)ability!
Wait.
The FAA promotes diversity, and has for some time. Insert the joke about autistic people and transportation obsession here. The matter, however, got some increased traction after A Certain Someone on X Twitter highlighted a few sections of a Boeing DEI statement, and this quickly turned into discussion about what exactly that might mean, especially as diversity might include air crew entirely of one race for a flight (Canada, not US). And to be fair, there are no small number of nuts to pick who blame DEI for every fault, or popular idiots who think everything the FAA does involves their eyeballs, or who are using the matter as a poorly-camoflauged way to hate black people.
I am and long have been skeptical of the racial explanations for entire continents, and especially given the selection effects present for pilots, I am skeptical of any claim that African-American (or female, or gay, or whatever) pilots are categorically different in skill. Especially in the modern day, the Damoreish arguments don't apply: no one falls into commercial aviation, and everyone who tries to work in the field is fascinated by it to a large extent. What does it matter, here?
Because I have seen people say things like "The worst case for DEI is ending up with the lower end of the top 1% of candidates - where the difference between the best performer and the lower performer is measured in tenths". And there's some fair discussion whether the pilot of CA3407 was merely the lower performer, or so low he should not have been considered.
But that's not the option on the table. All the children in Lake Wobegon can be above-average compared to the country; not all of the country can be above-average compared to itself. Individual businesses or (possibly) entire fields could, perhaps, attract the 1% of subpopulations, and still remain at 1%-level capabilities: there are enough African-Americans in the United States that the top 0.1% could fulfill all pilot demand, even though I expect the majority have better things to do with their time and abilities. Piloting and the FAA are not the only places looking to fulfill DEI objectives. They are not the only one of ten commercial-pilot-sized places looking to fulfill DEI objections.
To be fair, there are other groups discrimination in hiring DEI hopes to help. We might just be downscoring half of qualified applicants in a crowded field, on matters completely and totally unrelated to their merit, rather than six out of seven.
There are ways to credibly challenge whether this is a problem. Perhaps training or experience matters more than innate ability; perhaps structure . Perhaps eventually everyone becomes a minority in some way; perhaps the position of modern equality has minorities as most equal.
But to suggest that the difference can't matter is to overlook literal piles of charred corpses. To complain that one extant metric is not optimally tied to merit while glossing over a new one that is disconnected from it does not strike as serious engagement.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I don't have a particularly good model of this as kink or lifestyle, but I don't think they're looking at it as a sexual experience in the "wow, what a great orgasm" sense, rather than desiring the end state, either as a description for extreme infertility/submissiveness/'nonmasculinity' (when moderated by hormone therapy), or as wanting to reduce sexual desire (in the case of some eunuchs).
(cw: male pain, contrasting)
That said, the lines between those two categories can be vague and complicated.
You're absolutely right that finding a proper contrast is fraught with confounding variables and near-impossible to do satisfactorily, and I don't claim to have a definitive answer. I started with the big picture and zoomed in by just examining whether I would have been able to pick Epps' case out of a pile, and nothing about him stood out.
I don't know that's true -- as I pointed out, the sole 1752(a)(2) conviction makes up only a tiny sliver of 1/6 convictions, the majority of people sentenced under it (and even those sentenced only under it) excluding Epps received prison sentences, often long incarceration. I haven't gone through too large of a group of broader cases, but both the procedural posture and the prosecutor behavior do not show up in a psuedo-random selection of cases on similar grounds. The majority of simple cases, even with pleas, received two or more years of probation. Those which received short probation either entered the Capital grounds later out-of-view of more violent protests, could make not-laughable claims of confusion about what areas were restricted, some medical or age-related concerns, or some combination of the above. Not all sentences above that 12-month line involve knowing statements that an action would be illegal, or disclaimer of responsibility (like Epps' deflection toward antifa), or a person bringing material preparations for physical violence (like Epps' tourniquets), but all are much more common above than below, and often used to justify home detention or short incarceration.
((And that's outside of the likely-spurious stuff. Epps doesn't show up on the DC FBI case list by name or case number as of today, which is just an organizational issue that'll... probably get fixed soon, and even if it doesn't is probably more the FBI being lazy than anything malicious.))
There's ways to square that circle: perhaps Epps was just better at playing his cards, or drew a prosecutor who was less willing to push harder (and to be fair, the sentencing request aimed for six months incarceration, just doing so very badly and without highlighting publicly-available information against him), or just got lucky on judge assignments ([Boasberg does seem to use a light hand even for morons), completely coincidentally. There's still a circle to square, here, even before adding in the media and congressional coverage.
But I think my deeper point is worse than even that.
I could pick Epps out of a stack, but I could also pick another thirty-odd people out, without much effort. Some of them have had comparable conspiracy theories, and some haven't even had significant media coverage: Loehrke seems in the first category, Haffner in the second. Doyle (sorry, her courtlistener is all Pacer-locked) received bizarrely short probation for someone who went in through a window and was turned in by coworkers. There's even a trio including a lawyer who managed to get comparable or even lesser sentences after going to trial, albeit some data weirdness on the courtlistener and DC DoJ page about them. With a sufficiently large dataset, there are always going to be outliers, and indeed many of the same things that made Epps a plausible fed also would have made him a normal outlier.
There's a fair complaint that this reflects too many degrees of freedom in the questions we're asking -- just as Wansink could always find something in a dataset, so could we find something here -- and to an extent that's even true. They're all weird, and weird in different ways, so you could trade off whether Doyle's sentence or Epps' advocacy or a handful of active-duty-military CAC-holder's military connections or a dozen other things are all The One Thing that matters most, and that you can makes the signal less relevant for Epps. But it still remains a signal.
That theory is too incoherent to evaluate properly because it requires simultaneously assuming 1) J6 protestors had no plans to engage in violence and 2) J6 protestors could be prodded to commit violence
I don't think that's a good model of the complaint, as it mixes to many different types of behavior together. All bad acts invite conspiracy theories at some level, especially when highly promoted in public awareness, as a way to shy away from the ramifications, but January 6th was not just bad or violent, but also involved people doing the single most identifiable things available, while also committing violations of a very distinctly different and not-especially-well-known set of laws.
The results would have been drastically different had J6 protestors planned for and had a fatal fistfight with counterprotestors on the Mall, or got shot trying to take the Washington Monument in some misguided belief it controlled space lasers emitting the magical smoke informing us of the next President's gender, or tried to storm Area 51 to force the US military to air strike DC, or done something stupid with the Secret Service trying to 'protect' Trump. Hell, even as someone who wrongly believed conservative protestors wouldn't riot, I'd caveated at the time that I'd expected something on that level (if, uh, more on the fatal fistfight side).
It would have still been bad! But we'd not have a thousand-plus cases simultaneously going through the legal system able to prove every part of the crime solely through video evidence and cell phone data present for the entire area they could have committed the crime, if only because it'd be really hard for a thousand people go Brutus on the Washington Monument staff, and a lot of them would flinch if you tried.
I don't particularly buy the conspiracy theory, because I know enough about crowd management and the sorta garbage people these protests invite. Zip tie dude neither planned at length how to kidnap a Senator and settled on zip ties, nor was a fed who brought them from home just to make a particularly photogenic picture, but grabbed them from a police officer and did as a moron does.
But while it's hard to prove the difference between people being lemmings and being lemmings-following-a-fed, it's easy to come up with possible evidence that would demonstrate a larger portion who had been planned these particular violations of the law beforehand. A lot of the evidence that could disprove this theory would be very interesting on its own merits! Do we see that?
gattsuru
1yr ago
At least from a bird's eye view, nothing about Ray Epps pleading guilty to misdemeanors (505 out of all 1,265 J6 defendants also did), avoiding jail time (282 out of 749 convicted J6 defendants also did), or avoiding pretrial detention (70% of J6 defendants also did) seemed unusual.
... I'm on team don't break the law, fuckos when it comes to January 6th, but this seems to have a lot of overlap with past discussions you and I have had regarding the Molotov Lawyers and similar enforcement messiness, and come with many of the same problems. There is a genuine weakness when people point to two arbitrarily-selected examples and make a broader comparison without looking deeper, but it's very easy for demands for more scrupulous data to swing into isolated demands for rigor, or to require information that doesn't exist anywhere.
You put a lot of emphasis on the median conviction and sentencing for J6 defendants, and that's nice in the sense that it's readily available information. Yet the median (and mode) conviction and sentence is dominated by either 40 U.S.C. § 5104(e)(2)(G) (included in at least 412 sentences, "willfully and knowingly parade, demonstrate, or picket in any of the Capitol Buildings") or 18 U.S.C. § 1752(a)(1) (included in at least 115 sentences, "knowingly enters or remains in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so"). Some of those were included with other convictions, including more serious and/or violent ones. There's a lot of interesting space to be discussed in the broader context of what extent this is a typical enforcement action for this class of violation of the law, but it's not clear much of the necessary data exists anywhere (how many people weren't arrested at a previous capitol protest?), and very clear that it doesn't actually matter since quite a lot of people want strict enforcement because of the specific Trump- election-related context.
There's still a bit of quibbling still about Epps within that context but it's necessarily going to be quibbling.
((Epps plead to 18 U.S.C. § 1752(a)(2). There's some trickiness about comparing to other 1752(a)(2) convictions, of which the FBI describes just over 100, because the vast majority of those included other convictions -- just over a dozen were sentenced solely under 1752(a)(2), like Epps, only three of whom seem to have received probation, and one home detention. Even where the plea agreements are comparable, allegations are not, in either direction.))
As AshLael points out at length, Epps is neither accused nor alleged to have gone into restricted capitol grounds. People are claiming that Epps planned and encouraged a riot, and likely communicated with a number of others planning a riot. You correctly point out that not all those who've done that class of behaviors have been charged or even arrested, (though in turn I'd caution that Fuentes at least has been long-suspected of being a fed or CHS or informant or whatever, even before 2020). Those who have been charged and convicted with an emphasis on their encouragement of others to enter the capitol often also committed other acts, or had past criminal history, or both.
But, to borrow a phrase, "[n]either you or I know enough about this case". It's certainly possible that the videos Revolver has publicized were the sole and only circumstances where Epps did any communication to other people encouraging bad acts, that the context of those acts makes incitement charges implausible, and after a long history of totally-normally-for-Trumpist arguments woke up on January 7th with a hell of a hangover and immediately went full anti-Trump. It's also certainly possible that he's just a generic garbage person with a long history of generic garbage stuff that the FBI just finds below its standards, who blanched when actually in a riot rather than talking about it on IRC, and who squealed as soon as the spotlight focused on him. It's also possible that he's a garbage person who turned human source, who spent a lot of the months before January 6th planning and encouraging violent activities, and we'd never be able to see it. Or a wide variety of more- or less-charitable ways that less garbagy CHS get recruited.
((To be absolutely clear, my bet's on garbage person, because there are absolutely a ton of rightie garbage people. But I wouldn't be a lot of money, because no small number of garbage people end up with feds leaning on them to get bigger scores.))
Comparing him to Palm doesn't illuminate much, here; comparing him to the more general morass of rioters is even less useful -- even just for the specific question of whether Epps has been treated unusually or even uniquely, since whatever Yavoich did was nothing like what Epps is alleged to have done. Nor does it tell us anything about the extent matters look suspicious.
((Similarly, both the 60 Minutes and Congressional interviews don't impress; the questions are softballs and Epps still can't give very credible explanations.))
Now, maybe there's a fair criticism that people are holding this belief non-disprovably, based on little evidence, despite extreme unlikeliness. And while there are things that would make the Epps-as-fed claim much less likely, such as if a video dropped from the sky clearly showing him yelling not to enter the capitol, they're probably going to be exactly as persuasive as they are unlikely to be found. Indeed, there's ways that this can go full non-disprovable: in the previous thread, /u/jkf mentions "MaroonPB" as one of the people Epps was talking with before the riot broke into the capitol, and it looks like that guy was later ID'd and arrested as Ronald Loehrke. But he's still awaiting trial, after being released on recognizance, despite entering and leading some of the charge into the Capitol itself: is this evidence that January 6th rioters are being given the kid glove treatment and the FBI just wants to be absolutely sure about what appears to be a slam-dunk case? Or is it a sign Loehrke too is a 'fed' of some kind? Will we only know after his trial/plea and sentencing?
((Or is there some superposition here that would only collapse after conviction and sentencing, and maybe not even after that? After all, one of the fed informants for the Bundeys ended up with a pretty lengthy sentence himself.))
((Loehrke's codefendant, James Haffner, I can't figure out the current situation for, including if he's still being detained, and the man (allegedly) sprayed a chemical at capitol police.))
And were feds and human sources rare among the nutty right, I'd even agree with you. But they're not. You yourself have previously commented on a case involving J6 'ringleaders', where some of the defendant's own witnesses turned out to be (undisclosed-until-figurative-eve-of-trial) CHS. There's a fair discussion to be had about how this sort of evaluation needs to be handled, or how to discuss events where none of the data sources are especially trust-worthy, or what Bonferri knockoff we needs use to handle this sort of discussion with over a thousand examples to cherry-pick from.
But emphasizing the FBI's summary sheet isn't doing it.
gattsuru
1yr ago
California hasn’t attempted to physically prevent the DEA or ICE from enforcing federal law within California, it’s merely declined to assist.
California, maybe, but Massachusetts got pretty close.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, sushi's a blast, and one that people expect to be a lot harder than it is. Even without a rice cooker it's pretty easy; with one it's almost set-and-forget.
There's a few types of commercial roll that are either extremely messy to make well (eg tempura spatters oil a lot), finicky to prep right (real crab), or just obnoxious to supply (good luck finding a variety of sushi-grade raw fish), but if you're working with cooked or smoked fish and vegetables, you can easily get closer to 1-4 USD / roll and be grinning the whole time.
I feel like your recipes are significantly more adventurous than most Americans are in the kitchen.
They're adventurous, but they're very forgiving. Wrong ratio of sushi seasoning to rice, or use long-grained rice? Still pretty good, if a bit messier to pack together. Forget the egg in your cornbread mix, or didn't preheat your oven for tamale pie? Will come out a little denser, but it's fine. There's a lotta goofs with risotto that will disappoint an Italian grandmother -- some purists will argue against meat or mushroom at all, and even to normal people overabsorbed rice is 'wrong' -- but it'll all still be edible and delicious. All of the recipes can be 'over'- or 'under'-spiced by at least a tablespoon and still have a decent flavor profile, with shakshouka's cumin being the most sensitive.
About the only one I'd have to warn about novice cooks about are the meat skewers: if you cube or slice your meat too thick, or don't preheat your oven or grill, you end up with a really narrow time window where the veggies haven't been charred, but the meat's not mooing(bleating, whatever). Dunking veggies in the marinade before skewering them helps a bit, along with adding some flavour to the mushrooms, but it is still a failure mode.
I'm bad at cooking, but I'm also not a terribly picky eater, so it mostly works out. Some fun bachelor recipes:
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Tamale pie. Get a shallow oven-safe pot or burner-safe pan, brown ground meat, toss in canned veggies (usually corn, green beans, cubed tomatoes) and beans, spice to taste or use a generic chili spice packet, simmer for five minutes while mixing. Smooth flat, then layer top evenly with cornbread, bake until golden brown. Top with sour cream and salsa. Serves well with spinach, zucchini, or watermelon salads.
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Bachelor Risotto. Cook short-grained rice with beef, fish, or veggie stock at a 1:1 ratio, either stovetop or rice cooker. If stovetop, add two more unit stock as it boils down. Brown slices of kielbasa sausage or smoked sausage with canned sliced mushrooms and a bit of garlic. Dump them in with butter and a parmesian or cheddar cheese to taste. Serve with ricotta, goes well with roasted chicken or vegetables.
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Skewers. Pick a red meat to your preference, marinade for about an hour. Whole mushroom, tomato, sliced onions, on a stick. Grill if possible, drizzle with oil and bake on a pan if not. Serve with browned naan or pita, fruit chutney if you can find a decent one.
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DIY Sushi. Cook short-grained rice without rinsing it first. For each one cup raw rice, make a seasoning at a ratio of 2 tbps rice vinegar, 1 tbsp sugar, 1/2 tsp salt (or you can just buy pre-mixed as 'sushi rice seasoning'), mix it into the cooked rice. Spread over a nori seaweed sheet, add strips of smoked salmon, cucumber, cream cheese, (avocado and mango if in season), roll (you can get 'bamboo' mats specifically for this, but in a pinch a hand towel in a plastic zip-lock bag works as well or better. Cut into slices, or keep as a sushirito. Serve with pickled ginger and wasabi, soy sauce or eel sauce. There are dessert variants, but they're a little more finicky.
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Shakshouka. LemonDrop does it fancy, but you can absolutely one-pot it like the Tamale Pie.
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Savory pies. Either cut pie crust dough into pieces to make hand-pies, or spread all over one piece to make a single giant (and admittedly a little messy) pastry. I've got a version of this with chicken, apple, and goat cheese I like, but would recommend trying your own.
And yeah, for a lot of the last decade-or-so, it's been far easier to get away with ordering takeout all the time, especially for smaller families or singletons. There's just wasn't that big a margin between fast food or even some lower-end sitdown restaurants until recently, unless you make big batches.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, that sorta work is absolutely wonderful; while I find AppliedScience one of the easier people to watch, NileRed is a blast, and there's a small army of amateur scientists and researchers and builders. I've also definitely got a lot of sympathy for the 'science is hard' perspective, where even clear-cut stuff still depends on a lot of hard-to-define knowledge: the field as a whole has a lot of chicken-sexing. It's not even the difficulty distinguishing between replication failures because of those sort of problems, and where it's just made up, that gets me.
It's that there's often cases of clear jumping-up-and-down-admitted bad behavior with seemingly little serious personal impact, and only rare opportunity for actions within the existing and tremendously well-funded system to point it hidden bad behavior. Unfortunately, I don't think video (or prediction markets, as presented elsewhere in this thread) can really help with those issues.
gattsuru
1yr ago
And to be fair, this is a problem not limited to weirdos with very strong feelings about the skin color of dwarves in Dwarf Fortress. XivModArchive was inspired in part by limitations and restrictions going on at NexusMods, and quickly had to deal with everything from anatomically-correct mounts to the "they're actually adults, they just look li- shotgun".
[Previous discussion here or here or here or here or here)
There's an interesting Atlantic article here. I don't particularly believe or disbelieve its central thrust -- that ice cream has a variety of possible health benefits -- for reasons I'll get into later, but one particular quote is rather startling if considered in any serious depth:
“The conclusions weren’t exactly accurately written,” acknowledged Dariush Mozaffarian, the dean of policy at Tufts’s nutrition school and a co-author of the paper, when he revisited the data with me in an interview.
St_Rev pointed out that this is actually academic misconduct, but it's worth spelling how obvious this has been for over half a decade, even as no one called a spade a spade. Mozaffarian's conclusions say, in front the paywall, that "Higher intake of yogurt is associated with a reduced risk of T2D, whereas other dairy foods and consumption of total dairy are not appreciably associated with incidence of T2D." Behind the paywall, we instead find that not only did his methods give as good a set of results for ice cream, they gave better numbers in most, on a pleasant and cheerful chart that the peer reviewers either did not read or did not find incompatible with the paper's summary. So at least one author, with no small career or current-day position considers this the sort of thing that you casually joke about to a national-tier journalist, who in turn considers it not particularly worthy of highlighting.
Surely this is some schmuck that doesn't matter, widdling away his days in a glorified broom closet, writing papers no one cares to read at all?
Well, no. PubMed shows 125 papers citing "Dairy consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes", Google Scholar gives over 400 citations. St_Rev points to his efforts on a hilariously bad and hilarious broad Food Compass proposal, though at least that proposal largely hit a dead end. But he's gotten appointed to federal boards by Presidents. That's not automatically going to make him the next Wansink, who managed to change contents of store shelves across America based on numbers he just made up -- it's not even like Mozaffarian's known misconduct is even a small fraction as bad! It's a nitpick, ultimately, and one that may eventually not even fall to Mozaffarian as opposed to some coauthor.
But it's not a nitpick anyone cares about.
Now, that's just nutrition science. Everyone knows the entire field's garbage, whether or not it drives policy; the literature is filled with hilarious stories like this, and not just starting from inside.
What about medicine and materials safety? Those who've read [Scott's recent review of Rob Knight's From Oversight to Overkill will have seen a small mention of research misconduct:
This changed in 1998. A Johns Hopkins doctor tested a new asthma treatment. A patient got sick and died. Fingers were pointed. Congress got involved. Grandstanding Congressmen competed to look Tough On Scientific Misconduct by yelling at Gary Ellis, head of the Office For Protection From Research Risks.
The full story is a little boring, so to tl;dr: Doctor Alkis Togias proposed a study where healthy volunteers would first reduce some parasympathetic nervous system response using hexamethonium bromide, then use to methacholine induce asthma attacks. By doing so, they could better understand the role the parasympathetic nervous system had on asthma.
((name recognition is !!fun!!))
While methacholine was commonly used for this purpose, hexamethonium was not; it had started out as an anti-hypertension drug and had largely fallen off the market as other, better drugs in that class arrived. This wasn't exactly a treatment, contra Scott, so much as an attempt to test specific models of asthma. In many ways that made the death of a volunteer in the trial more shocking. It's not entirely clear what exactly happened -- Ellen Roche first reported feeling ill before the hexamethonium exposure -- but it's pretty likely that the drug was a large part of why her lungs failed. What drove the sizable regulatory response, though, was that the risks of Hexamethonium Bromide exposure were Known in older literature... kinda.
Togias had four studies safe showing use of the drug, some for similar pulmonary research. Older papers pointing to some were harder to find at the time, but even if located it's not clear how relevant they'd be. The studies he did locate were small studies, totaling only 20 participants, but not only were they allowed under similar IRB reviews, they didn't describe even minor complications.
... with an emphasis on "describe":
It's not clear how robust the other three studies were, when it came to accurate description of the observed behavior, but that single study would have given 10%, alone enough reason to take a closer review. (Lest this come across as a defense of Dr. Togias, one of his own patients had this class of side effects just days before Mrs. Roche's fatal exposure; Togias did not report those complaints nor wait until the ill patient recovered.)
In the intervening decades and in response to the death of Mrs. Roche, medical studies have expanded the extent side effects are reported to review boards. If you wonder how well that would have help someone reading through the papers, who did not have access to the internal review board records of distant schools? Well...
Space is an in thing right now, so what about space? 1I/‘Oumuamua is a space thing, that got into a lot of news reports as the first interstellar object, including this paper in Nature arguing that it was an ice comet with some interesting traits. In response, Avi Loeb argues instead that the calculations used in the Nature paper are entirely incorrect. Which happens, if true. What's more interesting is how Loeb claims Nature responded, when faced with a question of fact:
By now, the Nature paper was celebrated by science journalists worldwide. When I informed one of them about the temperature miscalculation earlier today, he told me that his journal will not post a correction to its original report in order “not to confuse the readers.”
Now, Loeb is a bit of a nutjob eccentric advocate of thinking outside the box. And we only have his word that his physical models are more correct, or that Nature editors say what he claimed.
Of course, if he is a nutjob, he's a nutjob feted by a hefty list of big names and organizations, including Harvard and the President. More critically, he's got no shortage of papers in high impact journals, both conventional papers and op-eds in Nature, none with asterisks. So either Nature isn't willing to correct a paper whoopsied thermodynamics, or is willing to publish this style of author, or both.
Well, it's not like normal people do anything with space. Outside of speculative fiction and some astrophotography, few of us are ever going to need to think more than a few hundred miles away from terra firma. Even for scientists working in the field, it's not like anyone's putting Freeman Dyson's blueprints to action. So there isn't much value riding on things, really, beyond people's egos.
Speaking of egos, anyone heard of the Hirsch-Dias feud in superconductors? Jorge Hirsch is best-known for the proposing the H-index metric in academic publishing, but more charitably also for a number of models to explain high-temperature superconductivity. Ranga Dias is the leader of a team working out of the University of Rochester, doing high-temperature high-pressure superconductivity work, some of which conflicts with Hirsch's models. If you read a pop-sci article about carbons-sulfur-hydrogen superconductors, metallic hydrogen, or lutetium hydride, his lab's the actual group in question. The two don't like each other, and it's been a recursive mess of papers seeking retractions being removed. Right now it's looking mostly like Hirsch called it, though there are still some Dias defenders, in no small part because a few of the challenged works were replicated or 'replicated' by other labs collaborating with Dias. The latter option is a damning indictment of international condensed matter research.
I don't own a diamond anvil. There's only a few major labs around the world that do, and of those not all experiments are trying to replicate this stuff. Why would anyone care?
(Outside of diamond anvils being pretty expensive to use as glorified magic-8 balls, and teams of physicists not being cheap either.)
There was a snafu around a different proposed superconductor in August, with significant coverage and attention after a coffee merchant on Twitter gave pretty long (and somewhat overstated) list of possible (if not likely) benefits. Somehow, the grapevine produced a feeding frenzy as increasingly varied hobbyists tried to mix the stuff up, sometimes literally in their kitchens. It turned out to not work, to the surprise of absolutely no one who's followed superconductor revolutions in the past. Indeed, the biggest surprise is that this seemed to be an honest and weird result which simply failed to pan out, rather than the typical fraud or instrument error.
Dan Garisto criticized this while the various LK99 replication efforts were cooking, as science as a live sporting event, where hype distorts funding and attention to near-random focuses. It's a little awkward a criticism coming from Garisto, who's a 'science journalist' himself with no small impact on where people focus (and it's not clear Scientific American proper lives up to his standards, but it's not wrong: several labs looked at and spent a couple days reviewing a series of papers that otherwise would have only received minimal attention. That's why we're pretty sure the initial experiments were performed as described, but mismeasured diamagnetism and semiconductor behavior. There's still some people looking at LK99-related research, and I might even put it very slightly more likely than all of Dias' work panning out, but that's damning with faint praise.
The alternative to serious replication isn't "we saved time on something from testing something that was useless." It's not knowing, one way or the other.
Which gets me to my actual point.
EDIT: Not just that ice cream clearly harmful or healthy, or that hexamethonium bromide's harms were or weren't known, or Dr. Togias was or wasn't responsible for Mrs. Roche's death, or 1I/‘Oumuamua is or isn't a comet, or carbons-sulfur-hydrogen or LK99 superconductors work or don't work. It's not even that we don't know about these things, or would struggle harshly to find them. I can give answers, to some small extent and with little confidence.
It's that you shouldn't or can't treat these massive systems as much more earnestly engaged in finding those answers than some rando online, and you shouldn't trust that much, either.
(For the record, probably not great or bad barring diabetes and the numbers are a selection effect, dangerous but undocumented, not really but should have tried harder, it's a rock, no, no.)/EDIT.
As a concrete example, I'll point to this paper. I have absolutely no idea if it's real or not. The entire field of covetics has an absolute ton of red flags, most overt in the sheer extent and variety of claimed benefits, but also the extent some papers look like someone just shook a can of 'nano' prefixes onto the summary to spice things up. On the other hand, while Argonne National Labs does that buzzword-sprinkling too... well, Argonne doing it is a pretty strong point in favor of it not being completely made up. For whatever it's worth, there is no wikipedia page, and Dan Garisto (and Scientific American) haven't found it worth examining.
But describing it as copper++ or aluminum++ is... if a bit of a exaggeration, not much of one. For a tl;dr, the proposed material trades off some additional manufacturing complexity (and ultimate bend radius) against vastly improved hardness, flexural strength, corrosion resistance, heat- and electrical- conductivity, even some weird things like capacitance. There are few fields using these materials where this would not have significant benefits.
If real.
Even if 'real', to any meaningful extent, it may still not be useful: there's a lot of manufacturing constraints, and the very traits that make it impressive-sounding may make it too annoying to work with. Great conductivity is a lot harder to use if the material can not be reasonably drawn as wire, for example. Excellent corrosion resistance doesn't help if it's tied to vibration microfractures, as early titanium development discovered.
But even before those considerations, there's a bigger problem that I'm not sure I can trust any of this more than some random youtuber mixing up the stuff. The literature has a lot of conflicting claims, which might be a process matter and might be more serious fucking around; the real-world progress of the lab supposedly doing the most with the stuff (maybe holding the patent?) literally involves a RICO suit. Weird behaviors like that are common-place in scientific and industrial developments that end up working out! They're also a lot of skulls.
In an ideal world, I could feed the academic literature into a big spreadsheet, average things out, and get a nice number. In this one, I can get a number; I'm not sure it wouldn't look like this.
And this is a case that matters, in the way a lot of science really matters. You could, as an individual or small business -- pending licensing agreements -- make or purchase a batch of this stuff, today, and implement it, perhaps with a sizable amount of trial and error, and if it were real, find significant benefit.
Would you want to make that bet? Because in a revealed preferences sense, no one has yet. And while every business decision is a risk, there's reasons this risk seems undesirable, despite hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars worth of past efforts supposedly promoting public understanding.
What happens if someone does? I'm not sure even successes would be well-documented, but the academic disinterest in negative replication, even from fellow researchers, is well-known. I don't expect it would be taken any better from industry randos, were tired businesses in a huge rush to document their failures. Would even moderate success be something that could be meaningfully presented through academic means? How much could any mean, if an author or publisher can choose to drop any detail they want from discussion and still be taken seriously long after?
Or is this the sorta sphere where magics, in both the optimistic and pejorative sense, just float forever slightly out-of-reach?
gattsuru
1yr ago
gattsuru
1yr ago
This is widely considered to have attracted the Eye of Sauron and prompted the current crackdown once Microsoft realized what was going on and put the squeeze on platforms hosting Khanon's reverse proxy builds, also instantly disabling most Azure keys "in circulation".
For API tokens specifically, there was also a big security-sphere report on insufficiently-secured keys in December that's probably gotten Microsoft breathing down HF's neck, even more than the individual tokens running about. Though it's probably a mix of all those causes and more.
I can even pretend to have a scientific interest here, because for all the degeneracy I'll dare to venture that the median /g/oon's practical experience and LLM wrangling skills are hilariously far ahead of corpos.
Yeah, there's some absolute hilarity going on, here, far short of Gwern-level prompt engineering. That said, at least in FurryDiffusion there's been a lot less interest in jailbreaks recently, less because it's gotten hard, and more because people have gotten the feeling that they're helping OpenAI/MS/whatever further lobotomize lock down the various models. And the extent some apis are getting locked down, even for SFW stuff, is getting ridiculous.
That said, the difference in capability between a 70b model running at 2quant/2.4quant GGUF and Claude isn't huge. That's not quite cheap to run, especially if you want more of the model in GPU, but it's still literally something you can slip into your backpack. The local world is a ways behind Falcon/ChatGPT4-turbo, but especially for people writing async (ahem), if/when comparable models leak or are developed, some people will be running them at home on a local space heater in days.
Still, with the seedy undercurrent getting more and more noticed, I thought I could post some notes from the underground, plus I'm curious to know the opinions of people (probably) less exposed to this stuff on
the latest coomer techpossible harms of generative AI in general.
It's also worth noticing how much incidental exposure people are getting, or going to get. Linus groupies are about as normie tech-savvey (ish) as it gets, and they've got people confusing disclosed AI for real influencers (or, uh, at least as 'real' as any influencer is).
We're in a universe where car dealerships will put the akashic record behind a chat window that can't manage to sell you a car right. Forget the expected stuff: you're gonna get some weird shit (cw: recursive thotting).
gattsuru
1yr ago
Depends on your metrics.
The official numbers for 1-year pregnancy rate give around 22% normal use, 4% perfect use for withdrawal, as compared to 13%/2% for condoms and 20ish%/2% for natural family planning. These numbers are a little 'fake' -- they're selecting from a much-more-fertile-than-average demographic, exactly what separates perfect use from normal use varies a lot by method and study, a few methods (esp outercourse) get treated as always-perfectly-used, and there's not really a comparable number for no-contraception-at-all besides a very approximate 80%ish -- but they're still directionally useful.
gattsuru
1yr ago
You can purchase 'lambskin' condoms from most big-box stores in the United States, usually under Trojan NaturaLamb, since they're popular for people with latex allergies or who find latex condoms uncomfortable. That said, they're a) a bit more expensive per-condom, and b) do not reliably protect against most STIs, so they've fallen out of popularity in the casual sex crowd. Also smell a little different.
I think they're available in the UK/EU/AU, as well, but I haven't see them available at convenience stores the few times I went looking.
While extraordinarily unlikely, it's at least procedurally possible for SCOTUS to provide dicta far broader than a ruling itself, such as defining Section 3 insurrection specifically or requiring specific types and grades of behavior that isn't present here. People can (and probably will!) still defy that! cfe my Bruen rants. But it's an option that makes those things defiance.
That's fairer, and while the timeline for an insurrection trial is wildly implausible, there's nothing preventing people from taking some other federal conviction and (even implausibly) reading it as a Section 3-disqualifying behavior.
I wish I was that optimistic: this weapon doesn't get put away just because the highest-profile target disappears, and it doesn't stop on November 6th or even January of next year.
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