gattsuru
7hr ago
Coyotes are pretty well-hated and oft-culled because of their attacks on pets and livestock, though, and there's also the 'dingos ate ma baby' option of simple incompetence. That said, if you really want to go nuts on coyote conspiracies, the degree that coyote populations have exploded and the individual coyotes themselves have gotten much smarter in <10 generations is a real fun question.
For fun conspiracies I actually believe:
- Piggate wasn't real. For all it Took Down A National Government, Cameron was already a political dead man walking before the drop, and it was just a really convenient way to force him out without actually engaging with the political controversies that had undermined his party. The same behavior is totally consistent with an already-unpopular prime minister getting smeared by a schmuck he'd pissed off badly enough, and then found that none of his 'friends' were willing to pay the political capital to back him up.
- There was a coverup one direction or the other for the Bloomberg Supermicro thing: either a lot of people who could prove it were told not to do so at the risk of destabilizing international relationships, or a lot of people who could disprove it were told not to do so lest they destabilize US financial markets (and get blackballed). I'm not very confident on this one, but it's just such a weird goddamn story.
- A number of serious industrial or transportation sector accidents were really Reinvented Suicide As A Group Activity, but various incident analysis groups have instead used them for purposes ranging from getting unrelated political goals to deflecting from local political or social problems to just shaking down foreign businesses for cash. There's been a handful of these situations where jurisdiction friction has lead to them getting 'caught' -- aviation is particularly prone to it, with SilkAir 185, EgyptAir 990, and the recent Air India 171 -- but I think they're far more common than anyone wants to admit or even mention publicly, especially since there's a risk that publicizing them could incentivize further or larger attacks of the same kind. Basically, most large countries have a bunch of CEAF 5735 in a thousand different fields. The SL-1 incident is the safest one to mention, but there's some electrical and chemical processing examples from the tens to hundreds of deaths.
- A lot of 'advocacy organizations' related to industry regulations are wholly-owned government groups, and are explicitly-but-nonpublicly threatening to bring the weight of those government orgs to bear if targeted companies don't agree. Yeah, boring, almost too obvious to be worth mentioning for the obvious cases, between Ofcom and NCOSE existing, and
XTwitter's recent fine in the UK. But there's a lot of these orgs running at <100 person levels regulating through smoke-filled backroom deals; a lot of what's 'weird' about the modern era is just the ability of those orgs to impact companies with large impacts but not the large scales of pre-internet companies.
gattsuru
21hr ago
I'd be surprised if we don't still have at least discount theatres in twenty years playing movies that have been out on 'conventional' digital services for months or years -- without the weird cost behaviors downstream of the studio system, movie theaters have sizable fixed asset costs and trivial operating costs -- but they're definitely going to be labors of love.
Weird that it's become one the more implausible Mystery Science Theatre 3000 assumptions. Or, hell, Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death bits.
gattsuru
1d ago
It's unfortunate that the most serious predictive engagement with the question of an AGI breakout remains a novella with the framing of a My Little Pony fanfiction. That's not as damning a praise as it sounds at first glance, but it's a strange issue given how much ink has been spilled and how omnipresent the technologies have become since 2012.
gattsuru
2d ago
Gorilla Tape's one of those things that seems like a marketing scheme -- I'm not very impressed by Gorilla Glue -- but it's genuinely worth keeping around. Some other fun options:
- VHB tape. Doesn't have any of the nice benefits like easy reapplication or simple tear. It just sticks things together, and never lets go, and it's just freakishly strong and vibration-resistant. Temperature cycles, weather conditions, high winds, literal fire, doesn't care. I have bent quarter-inch aluminum plate trying to remove things that had been stuck on with (too much) VHB: outside of some careful solvent use, the only real safe way to remove the stuff is to saw it off, and it will leave residue.
- Gaffers. Yes, it's hilariously expensive for glorified duct tape. If you absolutely, positively, need it to last less than six months on any smooth surface, and come off without leaving residue no matter how absorbent the surface material, there's no competitor.
- Camper Mounting Tape. This is a fun one because it's useless for adhering two things together. What it does do is provide an easy, fast, seal. Waterproofing? Slap. Vibration dampening? Slap. Need a weak vacuum to hold overnight? Slap.
- Self-fusing silicone tape. It can't replace every possible use for vinyl or pvc electrical tape -- it's very bad for sealing off actual connectors, or for small areas, or anywhere you can't wrap fully around the surface -- but >90% of situations, it's just so much more reliable for long-term application and several times more pleasant to actually work with. Zero residue, great UV and chemical resistance.
gattsuru
2d ago
I can't imagine what a similarly-constructed paper from a progressive view would even look like. The only half-decent analogue I can think of is if the progressive response contained poorly cited infographic statistics, in which case it would at least gesture toward empiricism and the ways of knowing endorsed by the psychological sciences.
We did have recent Darwin discourse, if you want in-the-wild examples.
I'm not sure that 'the ways of knowing endorsed by the pyschological sciences' are anywhere near what you want to motion toward as a different class of thing, or that it's clear from either the rubric or the typical essay in this category of course that such empiricism is actually supported or required, given the quality of academic psychological research. Maybe if schools weren't treated the Stanford Prison Experiment like a real experiment rather than a play it would have bite.
But ignoring that for now, there's a lot of pretty well-regarded sources that are respected in modern psychology and have little more than ipse dixit behind them. I'm extremely skeptical that a writer pulling from Julia Serano to talk about trans rights would have gotten this style of response, but they've got about the same experimental foundation.
That's... kinda the problem. If the quality of thought and writing from the graduates of these programs were better, you could just motion about this slop being slop. But then you look at the professor's response, and it's not like it's doing any better, either! Look at the middle lead from the professor:
You argue that abiding by normative gender roles is beneficial (it is perfectly fine to believe this), but to then say that everyone should act the same, while also saying that people aren't pressured into gendered expectations is contradictory, especially since your arguments reflect a religious pressure to act in gender-stereotypical ways. You can say that strict gender norms don't create gender stereotypes, but that isn't true by definition of what a stereotype is. Please note that acknowledging gender stereotypes does not immediately denote a negative connotation, a nuance this article discusses.
There's a lot of this whole disagreement that makes me want to slap everyone involved -- including the student -- in the face with an embossed copy of "https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cFzC996D7Jjds3vS9/arguing-by-definition", and I get that a) they probably haven't read it, and b) the professor has to write comments on a lot of bad essays and is only getting in national news for the worst. But look at that claim, and compare:
Gender roles and tendencies should not be considered “stereotypes”. Women naturally want to do womanly things because God created us with those womanly desires in our hearts. The same goes for men. God created men in the image of His courage and strength, and He created women in the image of His beauty. He intentionally created women differently than men and we should live our lives with that in mind....
Gender roles and tendencies should not be considered “stereotypes”. Women naturally want to do womanly things because God created us with those womanly desires in our hearts. The same goes for men. God created men in the image of His courage and strength, and He created women in the image of His beauty. He intentionally created women differently than men and we should live our lives with that in mind.
Yes, this is just ipse dixit and incompetently written, but it's not making the argument that the professor is criticizing; to rephrase it in left-friendly terms the student's argument is that a lot of what people present as the result of stereotypes are really underlying interests (aka the Damore), and people would enjoy their lives better if they were allowed to act in alignment with those goals. This might be (almost certainly is) wrong! But it's not the same as "to say everyone should act the same". Worse, the professor's contradiction between "everyone should act the same" and "while also saying that people aren't pressured into gendered expectations" is a textbook philosophy error.
Or, later, compare the professor's:
Additionally, to call an entire group of people "demonic" is highly offensive, especially a minoritized population." You are entitled to your own belief, but this isn't a vague narrative of "society pushes lies," but instead the result of countless years developing psychological and scientific evidence for these claims and directly interacting with the communities involved.
to
Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth. I do not want kids to be teased or bullied in school. However, pushing the lie that everyone has their own truth and everyone can do whatever they want and be whoever they want is not biblical whatsoever.
The latter is written very poorly, so for a casual reader, the confusion is understandable. But diagram the sentence out. "Society pushing the lie" "is" "[D]emonic", not an entire group of people. There's a fair critique that the student isn't engaging with the argument being presented, but in turn, it's undermined if the academic measuring this stuff can't do much better.
gattsuru
4d ago
This rather famously resulted in some awkward loopholes around the capybara. Thankfully, 1800s Catholics had not yet discovered the swamp rabbit.
gattsuru
4d ago
gattsuru
4d ago
There was plenty of consensus that he was "bad" in some nebulous way, but when I asked repeatedly what was wrong I was only ever given vague runarounds and examples of posts that proved my point like this one, where I disagree with Darwin's political point, but in terms of debate etiquette and rule-following his detractors are massively worse than he ever was.
No.
gattsuru
6d ago
That's the most obvious problem:
The Washington Post had reported that a second strike was ordered to kill two survivors from the initial strike and to comply with an order by Hegseth that everyone be killed.
and
"Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes. Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated," Leavitt said.
Are not completely incompatible, but they're very far from confirmation, and in some ways very specifically in contradiction ("ensure the boat was destroyed"). And Hegseth's specific denial isn't much reason to be generous -- he's a politician! -- but it by definition can not be confirmation.
More subtly, "double-tap" has a specific meaning. While no one's using the strict 'hitting a bomb site to hit first responders' bit, here, it matters very heavily whether the second shot was solely targeting survivors or targeting material; this distinction would be a major difference in between a war crime and a legitimate (if not necessarily ethical) strike. This, likewise, wasn't confirmed by the White House.
I have just linked to a long criticism of one of Unikowsky's previous spiels, from before your current sockpuppet joined this forum, in the post you're responding to.
To be explicit: yes.
EDIT: and, yes, I read the rest of this particular stupid substack. And his previous one, because someone thought it was useful in an X argument. And the one on McMahon. (I didn't and am not going to bother with the 'ai go foom for legal arguments'). The man's got one form.
gattsuru
6d ago
Was the order to kill everyone issued after the first strike, or before it? Was the order to initiate the second strike to kill survivors, to destroy remaining parts of the boat, or to prevent recovery of drugs? Were the survivors showing clear signs of surrender such that they could be easily captured without any risk or serious cost to other military goals, or were they trying to coordinate over radio for a pickup by their compatriots? These things all matter, and as far as I can tell, none of them are even considered in the original Post reporting so far.
I don't know what the situation is. I don't trust The New York Times any further than I trust WashPo, and I don't trust any politicians further than I could throw their house, and somehow admin members speaking anonymously managed to be even less trustworthy.
And I'm very far from an expert on the laws of combat. But I notice the certainty of others, and how little they argue for how they know what they 'know'.
gattsuru
6d ago
Necessary starting caveat: Unikowsky is an absolute putz when it comes to anything Trump-related, and his analysis should be recognized as on the "ought" side of any is-ought divide, and, more damningly, an "ought" that will not apply to any case where he doesn't like the victim.
gattsuru
6d ago
I will caveat that the Second Geneva Convention only applies between contracting parties by its own terms, so unless Venezuela wanted to do the funniest thing, it's not clear how binding it would be here. But the United States tends to flip back and forth about whether it wants to apply the same rules regardless, and it'd probably be a good idea.
gattsuru
6d ago
Most of the concern is whether or not they're even carrying drugs, something that the admin has not been forthcoming with evidence for...
There's not a ton of quad-outboard motorboats using that style of travel and large numbers of garbage-bagged wrapped cubic containers, as shown in the videos the administration has provided, and other countries have claimed to recover cocaine from the aftermath, but even if you don't trust either administration's assessments, from that Right-Wing Rag:
to the extent that they even send back survivors instead of prosecuting them.
I'd be a little interest to understand what, exactly, that would work like.
Is the response to that calling them terrorists and murdering them anyway? People who sell drugs are not killing people, because drugs can not kill people in the same way guns can not just kill people.
The United States government ventilates the skulls of American citizens in predawn raids, while wearing masks and without clear 'police' markings and without any of the 'blaring messages saying to turn back' bullshit. I can't promise that absolutely every single person who suddenly cares about drug traffickers seems to have found their conscience, here. But if you've got an example, I'd like to see it.
Until then, that argument holds no water. That ship has sailed, exploded, and sunk to the seabed.
((That's doubly true given the common mix and mislabeling of various drugs by illegal sellers. Someone who decided to do cocaine only 'decided' to do fentanyl in the revealed preferences sense of not finding a better drug dealer.))
An easier way to think about it is with a lesser harm, like if someone were to proclaim we should start rounding up Nestle and Coca Cola shareholders for victimizing poor Americans with obesity, because offering high sugar snacks and drinks is damaging their health. It's the same logic, they provide an addictive product that Americans use to hurt themselves with so are they not corn syrup terrorists?
gattsuru
6d ago
It depends very specifically on the exact orders, to far greater detail than available from current reporting even if you trust it. From 7.3.3.1 of the same document:
Incidental Harm Not Prohibited. The respect and protection due to the wounded, sick, and shipwrecked do not prohibit incidental damage or casualties due to their proximity to military objectives or to a justifiable mistake. Combatants who are wounded, sick, or shipwrecked on the battlefield are deemed to have accepted the risk of death or further injury due to their proximity to military operations. Although the presence of the wounded, sick, or shipwrecked on the battlefield does not serve to exempt military objectives from attack due to the risk that such personnel would be incidentally harmed, feasible precautions must be taken to reduce the risk of harm to the wounded, sick, or shipwrecked.
gattsuru
6d ago
(Hegseth is joking about it)
Direct link. I don't think this supports claims that he's joking about the second strike.
((Also, new Turing Test: how do RPGs work.))
it looks not only like the US killed some shipwrecked survivors of an attack (which is generally considered perfidious, right?)
I am very far from an expert in this topic, but perfidy is stuff like attacking while under a flag of surrender or parlay, or the use of protected symbols for that purpose. Double-tapping survivors of an attack might be a violation in other ways, such as violating the concept of hors de combat, but that gets a lot more complicated; even attempting to escape can leave a combatant as 'in', and being incapacitated does not mean that you act as a human shield for other nearby legitimate military targets.
That's separate from whether it's good: it's possible for something to be a war crime and tots not a big deal (eg, the famous Doom health pack examples), and it's possible for something to not be a war crime and still show a significant moral lapse.
gattsuru
6d ago
If you're arguing in favor of cisheteronormativity, you probably should be at least aware of the Freedom of Form-style arguments. It, and a thousand weirder variants, are each individually too uncommon to be really necessary to counter or even counterable, but they or stuff like them underlies a lot of the nonbinary and what-you're-probably-seeing-as-ROGD stuff.
I don't know of any good summary articles, but there's also a bit of a will-to-power one: what Defense Distributed's 3d printing and Cathode_G's DIY nitration mixture said to gun control exists for hormonal modifications. You don't really have the ability to make things weird, just difficult. Never underestimate minor inconveniences, perhaps, but it points to policy limitations.
gattsuru
6d ago
The book (series) is an incredibly grimdark. It's mostly notable now as a culmination the trend of other fantasy retellings, but I can't really recommend it, for a lot of the same reasons. A lot of the people going to read it after seeing the movie are going to be pretty disappointed. That said, the characters are pretty well-explained and have clear motivations: they're just universally petty and selfish motivations. It's very much an exploration of the cycle of harm and motivations of evil.
Popocatepetl's got a Bulveristic take that works for the movies, but for the book, it's a Carrie story. It's not about how you could get everything you could want, and how it's just bad people's faults you didn't. It's about that anger and outright hatred burning in you, and having just cause in your targets, and it not really being your fault, even if your methods are wrong. I don't like it, but I'm not outside of the appeal.
gattsuru
7d ago
Part of this is the standard stuff. Among mainstream publishers, and mainstream awards, there's a ton of pressures against recognition of new male authors (and, increasingly, even previously well-recognized ones); the male authors who are successful tend to take a cult following approach that leaves them less benefit from begging for reviews, or write in ways that don't really pull reviews, or not be willing to play the social media game.
((for a low culture war example, I will defend literally every Timothy Zahn book, even the kinda-trite Quadrail series. But the well-received and genuinely strong pieces get low-double-digit reviews. If you've read one of his books, what is there to say that doesn't detract other readers from the story?))
An increasing emphasis on novella-length novels by standard publishers at higher prices on one side and Kindle Unlimited on the other has also put some weird pressures into the mainstream system. I don't have a very complete mental image, but from what I have seen, a lot of conventional ways for workday authors to make a living publishing conventional stories that can take off been smothered or at least greatly reduced, the remainder have increasingly become the domain of the greats, while most of the novices and introductory writers -- even within the -- have gone to edistribution approaches that make it hard to get mainstream applaud or concentrate a large number of readers. The few who can tend to be Jemisins, as skilled at handling the social side as they are at writing character play, and that's traditionally not an area men have focused.
There's also just the flow and the fixtures; you're seeing the detritus accumulating at points of friction, rather than the motion of the waves. The Puppies tend to call them SFWAs, but there's a decent amount outside of that set, and a lot other other incestuous interactions (how many Goodreads-Top-Tens would you expect to be LA Times Critics At Large? Might surprise you!).
gattsuru
8d ago
Yeah, this is one of those Universal Human Experience things; having post-puberty children of the same gender (and sometimes even opposite gender) sharing rooms is either unspeakably verbotten or absolutely normal, sometimes within the same social class just fifty miles away from each other.
It was kinda awkward for me and my brother, even (maybe especially) because neither of us had come out, but it's also just something you deal with and it's not that big a deal.
gattsuru
8d ago
I'd also consider bringing prosecutions that would be incompatible with active executive orders, for acts committed while those executive orders were active, to be a bad escalation. Not an unprecedented one, but because such a modification doesn't count for ex post facto stuff a space that has a lot of There Be Dragons.
gattsuru
8d ago
Leaving aside a specific fandom that has other reasons to favor original art, KendricTonn on X Twitter has been able to make it work, and he's part of a non-trivial circle doing so just to a degree that's visible to normies.
((And also woodblock printing, which is kinda in a complicated place on the 'is it original, or is it a print' thing.))
I don't think the economics make easy sense at scale, but there's enough of it that it could in a fully-automated-world.
China actually started up a molten salt 'thorium' (eg, starting with uranium, then moving to thorium) reactor last year, with the first full thorium cycle this November. I'm not optimistic about its effectiveness, but that's more because it's a lot more complicated than it needs to be, rather than net energy or net cost problems.
A lot of the various cost problems with nuclear plants reflect political willpower, rather than actual material costs. That's most serious in the United States where we've intentionally made them several times harder to produce at the same time that the control and construction technology has gotten much much better, but most western governments have done something similar. (or just had politicians launch rockets directly at the construction sites.)
There's a revealed preferences sense where, if you can't solve those political problems, you can't produce power at price, and it's not entirely wrong. But it's misleading to treat it as a physics problem.
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