pbmonster
5mo ago
it would cut against the idea of any kind of 'Christian exceptionalism', where male-female monogamy is a unique Christian innovation, rather than a Christian re-statement of a universal principle
This idea is a bit foreign to me, are there people actually arguing that?
Monogamous marriages are much older than Christianity. Ancient Greek and Roman societies universally had monogamous marriages (in the sense that marriage was between one husband and one wife, and men were not allowed to have concubines living in their household). The entirety of the old testament describes pretty much only monogamous marriages for commoners (and royals pretty much did what they wanted anywhere, anytime - including in Christian kingdoms much later).
pbmonster
5mo ago
Sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one: most people are naturally heterosexual monogamists. They quickly pair bond and prefer living with a long-term partner to the alternative.
Social norms reinforce this model, because it works - both for achieving social stability (groups of single young men are dangerous) and for getting the most children to adulthood (the father being present is a huge advantage).
All baser instincts are a threat to this model, so there's an expectation that they are suppressed (or at least kept secret).
A little too overdecorated and playful
Wait, I thought you liked baroque!?
But yeah, I know what you mean. I mostly wish they would build Gründerzeit apartment blocks lining entire streets again. The bombastic staircases; the gigantic ceiling height; hardwood double doors through thick, solid walls; beautiful, tall, overdecorated windows... they built entire cities like that.
pbmonster
5mo ago
our best and most beautiful buildings are usually survivors from the late middle ages, or baroque, and you can't exactly build that way anymore
Oh, come on. Gründerzeit architecture looks fine.
Chronologically, Jugendstil was next, and it's German form is also far better than the atrocities they built after. But yes, others did it better, particularly the Spanish.
pbmonster
5mo ago
PMC is less ill-fitting than priestly
Have you read Scott Alexander on Priesthoods? I think he makes valuable points there, and its the reason I like the priestly analogy. The PMC in general is absolutely not a single priesthood - there's to little general "intra muros" priest-priest communication happening, since they don't actually share any dogma. "Real" priesthoods (medicine, individual academic research fields, engineering, politics, ect.) have much more internal interactions than interactions with the outside "parish", and they care much more deeply about those internal conflicts than they do about what the rest of us think.
pbmonster
5mo ago
First look, those still only have 2K displays. A whole lot of modern screen time (even doom scrolling) is text interaction, and if you smear 2K pixels across a 100°+ field of view, you're not doing anything productive with text for any length of time.
The Vision Pro has double the pixel per line, uses tricks to increase pixel density where it matters most, and you still wouldn't really want to look at text with that headset.
not disorienting, renders text readably even with small fonts at a distance
Come on, that's a 2K display stretching its pixels across a 100°+ field of view. At that point, you can't even read instruments in flight simulators or racing sims, not to speak of productively interacting with text. And it turns out that even a lot of tpyes of doom-scrolling heavily rely on text interaction.
Those headsets will get competitive for a lot of tasks when they get to the level of a cheap office monitor 3' away from your face, and that's around an order of magnitude more pixels (per line, two orders more pixels in total). The Vision Pro has 2x the pixels per line, uses tricks to increase pixel density where it matters, and is still far away from looking at a shitty full HD display.
not disorienting
I hate interacting with people or real objects while wearing one of those. To make this go away, you need transparent displays or really good pass-through mode. The latter is less than ideal, because turns out most other people really hate talking to someone wearing a headset - no matter if you paint a face onto it or not.
pbmonster
5mo ago
That being said, this has been the dream of silicon valley and cyberpunk for several decades at this point, and they've never gotten it to take off.
The hardware simply isn't here yet. The headsets are tethered and yet still too heavy, they are sweaty and disorienting, they don't have enough resolution for quality text, they give people motion sickness because the framerate/sensors are to slow.
Solve each of those hardware issues (most need an order of magnitude in improvement), then you can start with software. Do that part semi-well, and you've killed both phones and personal computers in one stroke.
pbmonster
5mo ago
Those exact arguments where used in the case of Russia. They were far from autark before they attacked Ukraine, but that doesn't matter. If you have your propaganda dialed in, your population is sufficiently willing to go along, you can deal with embargoes and even blockades for years.
Yes, the deficit would explode, quality of life would decrease. There would be rationing, followed by an inefficient adaption of domestic production.
China needs far less ore if they stop being the worlds factory floor. They can mitigate the missing oil by continuing electrification, by relying on Russia to break the embargo and by starting coal liquefaction if they really have to. They have more than enough arable land to feed their population.
pbmonster
5mo ago
I can't imagine the US firing nuclear weapons first in most instances
I think the US has threatened in the past that it would respond "with any and all means available" to an adversary sinking a carrier group. I can't find the quote now, it might have been in response to nuclear torpedoes. But imagine a scenario where an entire carrier group is sunk by a barrage of conventional hypersonic missiles... I'm not sure they would tolerate even the slightest risk a second carrier is sunk.
pbmonster
5mo ago
China is hugely dependent on foreign trade, which functionally stops as soon as they’re in a conventional war with the US.
The EU was arguing like that in favor of Russia for 30 years. But trade did not stop the Russians.
And for China, your points are true today, but Xi thinks in decades. At that time scale, it's all hypotheticals anyway.
- It's possible that China gets its domestic consumption off the ground, making it less reliant on trade.
- It's possible that the belt and road initiative leads to a massive increase in land access to trading partners.
- It's possible that a variety of maritime drones, drone carriers and autonomous missile boats make aircraft carriers the battleship of the 21st century.
- It's possible that the US turns inwards, and doesn't intervene in conflicts with Taiwan, or even in conflicts with Japan and India.
In all those cases, the US would want at least a strategic industrial base left at home for geopolitical reasons, and having it would out-weight the short-term loss that tariffs would bring today.
pbmonster
5mo ago
The term "conventional" here was used to differentiate it from "nuclear" war. There's several types of conflicts between China and the West where no capitals are being bombed.
pbmonster
5mo ago
The basic economics case against tariffs seems air tight to me. Tariffs seem like a classic policy failure to me.
I shared this opinion, but Noah Smith blackpilled me on tariffs. The tariffs might be sold as economic policy to the base, but they are not. Its pure geopolitics.
Xi Jinping's economic policy has been very successful in deindustrializing other countries. He has paid dearly for it, and now sits on absurd industrial overcapacity in everything from steel to batteries. But that doesn't matter. The pay-off is huge - not only is half the world absolutely depended on China economically, in case of a conventional war, China could force a stale mate and then it can out-last and out-produce the entire rest of the world, combined.
And just like Xi paid dearly for this policy, maybe the west also needs to pay to counter it. Tariffs will be paid by all US consumers, and it's very possible they will get poorer for it. But that doesn't matter.
pbmonster
6mo ago
Oh yeah, you've got to plan this, no way around it. But that's exactly what the military's there for, and they neither need a large chain of command to achieve that goal nor does it require a lot of resources. And totally surprising them will be very difficult, so first getting the charges and then the machines into position will be part of the posturing long before the marines even get into their helicopters.
But seriously, first blowing holes into the lock gates, then blowing the destroyed gates of their hinges and then blowing the drive units will be bad enough, especially if there's ships in or between the locks. There's a lot of force behind an 80' waterfall. And lead time on bespoke stuff like those huge gates is often measured in years...
pbmonster
6mo ago
Yeah, and even if you go by context, it doesn't work. I'm active in conversation - but not talkative. I prefer to ask questions, and have other people do the talking. This often means I steer the conversation and keep it going, but hearing what I say isn't that interesting to me.
pbmonster
6mo ago
Probably?
From an engineering perspective, the Panama Canal is a system of 12 locks. If you want to destroy it, you need a handful of green recruits and a small amount of demolition charges. It's over before morning.
If you want the repairs to take years, you additionally need a few demolition crews experienced in concrete embankments. Drills, more charges, and every hour the marines don't take the locks adds a several months to the repair time.
pbmonster
6mo ago
he's a terrible public speaker.
The funny thing is, he's an OK public speaker in some older interviews, he even has some charisma. Which means either he gets more nervous now that the stakes are higher, those interviews do a dozen takes per question or he legitimately fried his brain over the last couple of years.
pbmonster
6mo ago
I'm looking forward to seeing the results and the analysis!
For what it's worth, on page one I was a little irritated with your two-word pairings several times. I'm often one, but not the other - so if asked on their own, I would have given different answers. Examples are:
- "Active, Talkative"
- "Down-to-Earth, Unimaginative"
- "Amoral, Carefree"
I'm not sure it's all bad faith and malice. I don't want to downplay the amount of uncertainty with the geopolitics and economics of renewables and storage, and the facts still change quickly.
For one, the vast majority of production capabilities (solar, wind, batteries) is in China, of course. (Trade) war would put all developer timelines in peril. Also, it's not so sure how energy pricing on a grid heavy on renewables and storage will shake out. Sweden stopped building several large wind projects because of their economics: if it's windy, all the wind parks ruin the spot market for each other and don't make money. Is it's not windy, they don't make money. Storage could change that, but of course installing to much storage to quickly could result in the same thing...
So in a way, nuclear is a classic conservative position. We know almost everything about how a nuke-heavy grid would look like. The geopolitics are far safer. We know exactly how much over budget each rector would land.
And I also believe it's important to dream big. Maybe the trump admin deregulates nuclear in a big way. Maybe some republican states move in concert, and also deregulate and unify their remaining regulations. Maybe there's a subsidies project on the scale of what other countries have been pumping into renewables. Maybe there's a Manhattan project 2.
And while I'm a firm believer in solar+batteries, I would welcome it. We really could use all hands on deck when we Electrify Everything^TM...
I don't know any highly technical pro-nuke experts, but construction physics has the analysis on the regulatory landscape
pbmonster
6mo ago
In 2025, I see the good-faith conservative pro-nuclear stance as mostly a reminiscent stance on "what could have been". It would have been absolutely viable, it would have been the better decision. Noah Smith describes the sentiment well in his introduction here.
But in 2015, this wasn't clear at all, yet. There is a long history of even experts catastrophically underestimating the exponential growth of solar and battery industrial capacity (that first graph is powerful). So in today's discussions, there's always the chance that conservatives are comparing 2015 nuclear against 2015 solar + batteries. This is a much easier proposition to defend.
But yeah, last year the US installed over 40 GW nameplate capacity of new solar. We won't ever be below that in the next 5 years, either. Grid-scale storage of this much solar might also shortly be a non-issue, since forecasts are that the world economy will produce at least 8 TWh of new lithium batteries this year. That's several hundred percent over demand, and it's hard to describe how insane that development is. That's enough batteries to put a 50kWh battery into every single new vehicle built in 2025. Since we're not doing that, batteries will get cheap enough for grid-scale storage.
Even with conservative estimates for the capacity factor of those new panels, that's the equivalent of at least 7 new reactors completed, each year. I don't think there's any case where we relax regulation sufficiently and then plan, develop (if we want to do any of the cool - small modular, thorium, ect. - things pro-nuke people want) and finance that many new reactors per year, even if we grant a 10 year lead time.
pbmonster
6mo ago
I'm not sure exactly how to pull this off given my girl wanted almost constant communication while she was here and was very needy.
Discuss this in detail before she leaves. Set realistic expectations. I was in the exact situation 15 years ago, we didn't discuss that, and as a result still get stress flash-backs when I hear the classic Skype ringtone.
pbmonster
6mo ago
My question is, can anyone recommend a piece of software that will prevent my computer from connecting to the internet for a fixed period of time? The workflow I'm envisioning is, I get home from work, sit down at my laptop, disconnect the Internet and set this up such that I can't reconnect for an hour or ninety minutes or whatever.
This is easy on Linux or MacOS with a short command line script. Run the script, it kills the wifi or locks down the firewall, and undoes that step 90 minutes later. You can't undo it unless you have admin rights and remember the command to undo everything without using the internet.
So maybe consider getting an old macbook/Linux laptop and keep the setup bare-bones. Comes with the bonus of far fewer distractions, too.
You could also run the same thing on your router directly, taking the whole house offline. It probably supports scheduled internet disconnects out of the box and you can find that option in the web GUI, but most routers run Linux anyway and you just need to get access to run your own scripts.
pbmonster
6mo ago
The Physics Ph.D in a Manhattan office building high-frequency trading corn futures doesn't see anything except numbers on a screen, but corn farmers in Iowa (and consumers of corn like chicken farmers) benefit greatly from accurate and liquid futures markets in corn.
You can have extremely accurate and liquid corn futures without high frequency trading, and without sucking thousands of man-years of the highest human capital down the drain. We're not arguing about banning future markets, but I'm pretty sure corn farmers still can grow corn if you take away synthetic collateralized debt obligations and other modern financial vehicles.
pbmonster
6mo ago
No sarcasm, just a misunderstanding. I assumed we're talking total mitigation costs, you almost certainly were talking about the yearly budget of the project.
I agree, with $10B per year you can design a new airframe, build a few hundred and then fly them around the clock, resulting in a few dozen megatons lifted to the stratosphere per year. That certainly would get some results.
A quick hack you can use is to instruct it to use "radio etiquette", and not to respond with a full answer until you finish a transmission by saying 'over'.
The way it is coded, it will be compelled to respond every time you "send" it a prompt (which happens automatically when you pause), but you can instruct it to only respond with e.g. a single '.' (which it will read, but that's only one syllable) until you say 'over'.
Funnily enough, it's role playing conditioning will automatically also result in it saying 'over' after every answer.
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