@pusher_robot's banner p

pusher_robot

PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS

0 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 September 04 23:45:12 UTC

				

User ID: 278

pusher_robot

PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 23:45:12 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 278

The amount of energy being expended over Trump's recent visit to a McDonald's is kind of interesting to me. It seems to have generated an extraordinary amount of media and online attention. On the supporter side, they are hailing it as a brilliant and deeply meaningful activity, simultaneously trolling Harris and celebrating the dignity of unskilled labor, and generating deeply Americana visuals. On the detractor side, they decry it an illogical and bizarre stunt, that it was fake because the store was not actually open, and compared it to Dukakis in the tank. Some have even doxxed the owner who wrote to the state to complain about labor regulations.

Meanwhile, McDonald's corporate HQ sent what I think is a very good memo to franchisees explaining the value of their goal of political inclusivity and how that manifests as allowing visits from anyone who asks and being proud of being important to American culture.

I think this is interesting because symbolically, it's something that cleaves much more at the red tribe/blue tribe dichotomy than the Democrat/Republican one. I think a lot of blue-tribers disdain McDonalds and consider it trashy, but can't really say so too loudly because the poorer members of their political coalition enjoy it. Trump has been mocked in the past for having the poor taste of actually liking McDonald's food as well as catering a White House dinner with it, widely seen as trashy and disrespectful. The imagery of Trump looking for all the world like a store manager from 3 decades ago I think also triggered some nostalgia - or perhaps post-traumatic stress - about the current state of customer service.

I don't have too much more to say and offer no predictions. It just seemed interesting as one of those things that seemed to trigger something unexpected in people for reasons that go way beyond the substance of the actual event, and figuring out what's resonating with people in either a positive or negative way, and possibly why, seems like a good path towards predicting future trends.

Given that he was an El Salvadoran national, where else could he be removed to? Are there other countries stepping up to accept deportees on El Salvador's behalf? If the answer is a legal catch-22 where he gets to stay despite being eligible for deportation, then I have no choice but to reject the legitimacy of the process that produces that outcome.

Isn't the through-line that connects these things together just good, old-fashioned Gnosticism? The religious view that the material world is evil and that the subjective relgious experience is primary is all that is needed for to connect propensity to suicide, disgust with the material world, obsession with purity and disease, and antinatalism.

There might be some psychological root to that as well, given that it seems to pop up many times through history, or some kind of philosophical prion that warps the perception of reality of anyone who comprehends it.

I've been thinking about whether there are some plausible underlying causes to the sort of political and social chaos that has blessed our recent times and whether there are some things that can be done to improve the health of the civic body. It seems to me that perhaps the biggest problem we face is demoralization.

What is the source of this demoralization? I'd guess there are several. The first is the fruition of a generational demoralization campaign run by the left against America. This started mainly as comintern agitprop and Soviet psyops, and has been gradually adopted across left-progressive institutions, including, critically, higher education. This is the source of a wide variety of anti-American memes, from America being a dystopian late-stage-capitalism hellscape, to America being the most racist and bigoted nation which owes its existence to slavery and can never be free of its guilt, to American bullying and anticommunism being the root cause of suffering and oppression the world over. Centrists who wonder how public perception of their economic well-being is so divergent from what the statistics show, need only watch and internalize that damned Newsroom speech.

There's also the role of the media to consider, which, aside from being heavily leftist to begin with, also has a completely separate set of incentives to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They owe much of their existence to people obsessively following the news out of anxiety and panic. Beyond even pandering to prurient "if it bleeds, it leads" elevation of the worst kind of daily grotesqueries, there are multiple cataclysmic "end times" narratives that almost every event can be linked to, from climate collapse to the rise of fascism to race war.

Then there are the entirely self-inflicted wounds. In multiple ways and in multiple places, incompetence is tolerated, failure is rewarded, and sloth is celebrated. While institutions may see their own self-preservation as an accomplishment entirely worthy to justify their own existence, outsiders do not. The conduct of the GWOT was bad, the handling of Covid was bad, the administration of local urban governments is egregiously terrible. That these things go not just unpunished but unfixed is corrosive to public confidence. When even public art is instituted not to enliven the spirit but to deaden it, loss of hope should not be surprising!

The symptoms of demoralization manifest in ways that will seem familiar to us, I think. As people lose faith in institutions, they will become angry, fearful, and paranoid. They will choose the defect option across more and more choices. Demoralization increases time-sensitivity, when the future is discounted as likely to be worse than the present. Socially, people become alienated and transfer that dissatisfaction to their own lives. Fertility decrease is, in my opinion, downstream of this as well. Internationally, isolationism and collapse in confidence is the inevitable result. Why would any decent person who has internalized that their nation and their society is fundamentally believe in actions taken by that government on their behalf?

So what can be done to reverse this demoralization? To a certain extent I am afraid there is no putting this genie back in the bottle, save for a sufficiently grave external threat. Certainly academics would never agree to not criticize America, no should they. Freedom of speech grants everyone the right to air their grievances. But would it not be a worthy effort, on the eve of our semiquincentennial, to counter this with praise? This would perhaps have to come from the government itself, and patriotic propaganda risks a slide into jingoism, but is it not, after all, a valid function of the government to advocate on its own behalf? We once did this as a necessity against the creep of communism, but since the fall of the Berlin Wall, efforts perhaps seemed unnecessary.

Some great works would also be helpful. Literal moonshots, Manhattan programs, monumental bridges and dams, mind-bending radio telescopes and supercolliders - these all seem like relics of a previous time. Even now when we decide we want to do something spectacular and potentially society-altering, like a HSR line or a solar megaproject, it fizzles out in a mire of bureaucratic planning, lawsuits, and safetyism. Wouldn't it be inspiring to set out to something amazing and complete it on-time and on-budget? Once people realize that such a thing is possible, might they not start supporting many more such works?

Sorry if this all seems melodramatic. I freely admit that it's not something I've researched and am confident has a factual basis. It just seems to me that what's missing in most of the discussion of our problems is hopefulness and confidence that the future will be better than the present and much better than the past. In the same way that many economic indicators are, at bottom, about confidence in the future, I think many social indicators are as well.

Suppose that El Salvador decides he is rightfully imprisoned and doesn't feel like releasing him? How far do you think the court can go to mandate foreign policy to effect his return? Economic sanctions? Military blockade? War?

She is well known for having scolded previous participants including Mike Pence, so I strongly suspect the goal is to portray her dominance by both interrupting Trump and throw him off balance and theteby goading him into a nasty retort, and also to contemptuously scold him if he interrupts her. I'm sure the idea is to exploit female sympathy to the maximum extent possible. It didn't work that great for Clinton though, so I doubt it's worth the bad PR of reneging a fair agreement.

ETA: I previously stated that I much preferred the debate with no talking over and everyone I discussed it with expressed the same. They should keep to these rules purely for the benefit of the viewing public if nothing else.

Looking for new books as I approach the end of the Harry Bosch series.

A genre I really enjoy is "competence porn," in which a character or characters overcome challenges and trials via being really good at what they do, either against the uncaring Universe or against an opponent who is also really good at what they do. This was always the appeal of Star Trek, and in books I've enjoyed Andy Weir's novels, the earlier Took Clancy books, Bosch and Reacher, Starship Troopers, Sherlock Homes, and nonfiction like The Right Stuff and Failure is Not An Option. Looking for suggestions of a similar nature.

It seems apparent to me that digital computer technology in the Star Wars universe is roughly equivalent to human technology circa 1977. They exist and can be used to perform some tasks, perform data collection and analysis, and perform various forms of numerical control. But any electronic devices shown virtually never contain any advanced form of digital processing, and displays and controls are mostly analog or have rudimentary capabilities.

The one exception is the droids, seeming to possess artificial intelligence more advanced than we have with our vastly improved computational capabilities even today. Such computational power as they seem to exhibit implies powerful, tiny, and efficient digital electronics.

However, that is a case of us projecting our own AI developments onto the fictional world. I believe the most parsimonious explanation is that the droids are in fact cyborgs, that consist of a lab-grown and conventionally trained organic brains, embedded in a mechanical body.

Points in favor:

  • This handily explains the discrepency between the capabilities of electronic devices depicted and the capabilities of the droids.

  • We already know that medical technology in that world is more advanced than our own; e.g., Luke's replacement hand and Vader's elaborate mobile hyperbaric chamber. The most salient example is General Grievous, who, but for a few organs, is practically a droid already. Based on this it is reasonable to conclude that bio-electronic integration is more advanced than our own.

  • This explains the relative paucity of droids generally. They are expensive and somewhat rare because they take nontrivial time to grow and especially to train. They cannot be programmed like computers beyond simple instincts but must be trained via reinforcement feedback training to learn the jobs they are expected to perform as well as basic information about the world and how to behave.

  • This also explains why droids have very different language capabilities, based on the lab-induced growth of the language center of the brains. Presumably a mech droid like an R2 unit has a stunted one adapted for a tone-based pidgin, possibly adapted from a bird brain, and a droid like C3PO has a much larger one. Threepio also probably had to spend more time actually learning language nuances. With more advanced medical technology, it is plausibly possible to adapt the structures of the organic brains of a wide variety of species to select the traits most favorable to the droids you want to produce.

  • This also explains the seemingly genuine emotions the droids have. They exhibit these even when not interacting with humanoids, so this is not a case of performing emotions for the benefit of their owners. In reality, these are actually real emotions from real brains, expressed cybernetically.

  • This also explains frequent less-than-computer performance from the droids in tasks involving computation as well as their never being shown to perform tasks that should be trivial for a digital computer, such as high-speed communication between each other or between themselves and another piece of electronic equipment. Their ability to recall facts is also less than perfect and appears to be similar to how organic memory works.

There are a few pieces that don't fit and may be counted as points against:

  • C3PO, despite having his language enhanced, also appears to have computer-like ability to perform calculations, e.g., the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field. However, this may only be a piece of recalled information, and as it turns out, he was probably not correct. In another case, R2D2 performs a similar probability calculation on the odds of Luke's survival, though as a tech droid it is plausible has a cybernetic pocket calculator embedded in his toolkit of a body. Such calculators are compatible with the circa 1977 level of electronics.

  • Droids are never shown to eat or consume any organic substances that would sustain their organic brains. However, this may simply never be shown, and it is possible that they have the capability to generate to synthesize ATP in a closed loop purely from the stored power we see used to charge them up as with R2D2 on Dagobah.

  • It would seem plausible, with this technology, to place these trained brains into ships and facilities, to act as integrated operators, but we typically see that things are always operated by humanoids. For example, why are there no self-flying TIE fighters? There may be several explanations. First, being partly organic, droids would require periods of rest and be subject to some of the same limits of focus and attention as humans, so their supremacy at given tasks may be minimal in the first place, and if you are going to have a slave, it would make sense to make as general purpose as practical. Second, if electronics are limited to circa 1977 levels, it is likely that droid vision is greatly inferior to the Mk. 1 eyeball, a considerable limitation in many applications. The brains may not easily be adapted to perform motor control of things not closely analogous to body parts, and as stated in Andor, it is highly probable that due to their self-replicating and self-training nature, fully organic humanoids are less expensive than trained and purpose-built droids, particularly for an organization like the Empire capable of conscription.

  • On a couple of occasions, a droid is seen communicating with a "computer", either internal to the ship or the Cloud City facility. These are suggestive of computers that actually do have droid-level intelligence. However, it seems likely that these are colloquial terms for cyborg agents and not digital computers. There are non-primary resources that suggest that the Falcon does actually have a salvaged droid brain integrated into it, which apparently has some sensor input but is not shown to be capable of directly controlling the ship. Luthen's ship Fondor is directly shown to have what appears to be a droid integrated into the ship as well, which evidently is capable of some control over ships systems, though never pilots it during critical moments and is implied to be a ship full of unusual and expensive upgrades. The Cloud City "central computer" talks to R2D2 over what is probably, given the speed of communication, a simple analog language channel like a telephone, and again is probably just a droid charged with administering simple facility operations such as work dispatch and security lockouts.

Probably the biggest counterargument is the droid army depicted in the phantom menace. These appear to be simple electronic robots and crucially they shut down when the central command center was destroyed. However, the cyborg theory is still salvageable if we assume that the organic brain in each battle droid is designed to be tiny and grown quickly in large quantities, and deployed with minimal training beyond instincts, explaining their dimwitted nature and inability to do much more in combat than advance and fire. Because of this, they could not be relied upon for reliable operation outside a command and control structure issuing a constant stream of detailed commands, likely from a smaller number of more advanced and remotely positioned command droids, and therefore it would make sense to engineer a simple failsafe shutdown mode in the event that command and control is lost that cannot be overridden by the local wetware. This would also explain why they were never used much in other conflicts – the trade federation had a unique combination of high wealth and low manpower, and while they were somewhat effective in combat, humanoid soldiers with initiative and capable of independent operation would invariably be superior soldiers. The more advanced combat droids were presumably capable of independent operation, but likely much more expensive than conscripts or even a volunteer army, with the resource better used on more advanced weapons and vehicles, as shown in the Republic Army.

So if droids are expensive and have these limitations, who would want one? They would be useful in several scenarios:

  • Where manpower is limited or unreliable, as with the droid army
  • Where they can be superior at specific tasks, such as mechanical maintenance and repair (R2) or translation (C3PO) or brute force (K2SO, IG88)
  • Where they need to work in harsh or unpleasant environments (R2)
  • As a personal servant with high up-front cost but lower TCO (C3-series)
  • As helper pets (B2, mouse droids)

In conclusion, what we see in the Start Wars universe is a world in which computer technology is circa Earth 1977, but with much improved medical technology, energy storage and production technology, and both gravitic and FTL technology (possibly related and possibly not). As a result, there are some substantial holes in their technology for computer processing and automation, but these are filled somewhat by the existence of cyborg slaves, which are manufactured using organic brains specially grown and requiring considerable training, but can perform basic and specialty tasks in harsh conditions and without pay. They will still have personalities and emotions, based on the characteristics of the brain and the training received, but are in nearly every case considered to be property.

So, if all the really bad things about fascism are not the ones that we are doing, what exactly is bad about fascism?

One thing that might be likely is for him to get to appoint a SCOTUS justice. Sotomayor could and probably should retire and let Biden appoint her replacement while the Democrats control the White House and Senate, since there's no telling how long it might be before they control both again. A quality pick would be a good legacy.

I wonder how long it will take for the real gang members (if there are any being deported) to wisen up to the fact that murdering an ICE agent (or just a random civilian bystander) will immensely improve their outcomes (if they survive the encounter). Then they get a nice long trial in the US.

Why? Is there something that would prevent the U.S. from deporting immediately and letting El Salvador prosecute the case?

This is the most important point. You can't appeal to a "Rules-based order" by handwaving the rules, which explicitly do not guarantee Ukraine's territory against Russian perfidy.

Sure, but he's not under U.S. jurisdiction. I don't see that we have any obligation to bust him out of prison over the objection of El Salvador.

Someone convicted in a U.S. criminal court (and provided reasonable time to appeal) has been provided with ample due process.

That's just the normal state of democracy, I think.

They seem to be coming around though!

https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1906727995307381025

Summary: TracingWoodgrains ran a poll for both left and right respondents, asking if they'd rather have their opposite running the world vs. China.

For left respondents, China won handily, opposite for right-responders. Obvious selection bias and all, but troubling. The days of substantial fifth-columnism may be returning.

Couldn't resist just dwelling on this for a second too. Now, obviously no-one has to buy into avant-garde views of gender/sex, but to be simply unable to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women betrays a quite remarkable lack of intellectual imagination, and, frankly, intelligence.

This is completely missing the point. Most people who are not academics do not live in a world of intellectual imagination, they live in a world full of practical concerns, and these questions need to be boiled down into yes/no policies, procedures, and judgment calls. When a teenager with a penis demands to use the girls locker room, you cannot handwave the issue and appeal to imagination! Do Democrats understand that they are running for control of the government, and not the English studies department?

Of course, there are some on the American right who would be only too happy to dismantle the post-WW2 alliance system in favour of a more narrowly transactional approach, even at the cost of global influence and leadership.

What "influence and leadership" does the U.S. have that is not transactional already? EU seems to believe U.S. "leadership" consists of them making decisions and us paying for it. Our "influence" in most other countries consists mainly of bribery in the form of foreign aid and trade concessions. This is all transactional already! What soft power we do have comes from cultural output completely independent of and irrelevant to our foreign policy establishment, and that has all gone to absolute shit anyways.

From my perspective it seems like we're the Sugar Daddy who is promised that we're really, truly, loved and fun to be with, so long as the wallet comes out. They'll say nice(ish) things about us exactly as long the checks keep flowing. One second later, we're monsters who are killing the entire world.

If you are a non-minority non-veteran, those jobs are all but closed to you.

At this point it seems like the idea that elections are rigged is functionally unfalsifiable.

So is the idea that elections are not rigged. The real argument is over priors.

ETA:

Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses?

Most posters are talking about regaining trust, but I'll point out that's not part of the question: you could achieve the result of "nudging" people to accept the results - at least publicly - by much more harshly punishing nonacceptance.

Under Article I, legislation must be passed by Congress. The President only has the power to veto or not.

If eating the seed corn causes starvation, why is my belly full?

I don't think they are especially angry, but older liberal women especially seem to have an unfortunate tendency to speak publicly as though they are talking to children and struggling to make themselves understood, rather than struggling to persuade. Maybe this is a factor of mistake theory vs. conflict theory, but I think it really annoys people, like trying to make yourself understood to a foreigner by speaking English, louder and slower.

If the Court has a better plan, then they should order it and get it over with.

Obviously the 6th Amendment does not apply if the government is not prosecuting them, and a deportation proceeding is not a criminal trial. Foreign nationals being tried by foreign courts have no 6th Amendment case with the U. S. Government.