quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I mean, what country can you point to where lots of citizens choose public transportation over automobiles for non-economic reasons?
Personally, costs aside, there are a lot of European cities where I would rather travel by public transport than driving a car. Driving a car in a big city is not my idea of a great time even if I do not get stuck in a traffic jam. Then there is always the problem of finding a parking spot, which can quickly eat up any time savings from being able to take the most direct route with the car.
Currently, I commute by car because my commute is 10min by car, 20min by bike, or 30min by public transport. If public transport was 15min instead, I would prefer that -- 5 minutes of being at home is not worth 15 minutes of watching videos while on public transport to me.
For people who go to the city for a drink, taking a car is not a great option, obviously.
I will grant you that once cars are fully autonomous, a lot of the downsides will disappear, as the car can keep you entertained en route and then dropping you off before searching for a parking spot. Still, the amount of people you can transport with a metro if you have a train every two minutes is rather impressive, and I do not see cars with one passenger per vehicle replacing that.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
One possible way to explain exorbitant CEO salaries would be conspicuous consumption on the part of the company, especially to attract investors.
"Look at us, we are paying 100M$/a to our CEO, not necessarily because we believe that the marginal dollar of his salary is a good investment, but simply because it is a performance expected of us, and paying less would signal to our investors that we are not a solid company to invest in."
If you are king, and there is a widespread belief that good kings keep war elephants, then that is a great reason to spend huge sums to keep war elephants, even if you privately believe that spending the money on infantry would be more efficient.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Regarding pensions, I think having private companies pay out pensions to employees is silly. It also distorts incentives, with the state more willing to rescue a company because the pensions of a lot of former employees depends on it.
Instead, the retirement part of the paycheck should be invested either by the employee directly or by a specialized company (under strict regulations, basically "hang all the C-level executives if the company folds during a finance crisis" or something). I am fine with an insurance model, where people who live to 100 get their pensions subsidized by people who died half a year into retirement. I am not particularly fine with my deductibles directly paying for current pensioners (which is the case in Germany), and all I get in return is a vague promise than politicians will make future generations pay for my pension in turn.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
You could double that spending [e.g. 2% GDP] and easily get everything from domestic batteries to chips, from steel to rare earth metals for it. It's an absolutely enormous amount of money, after all.
While I do not doubt that for 2% of the US GDP, you could get some batteries, a decent range of chips and possibly REE refining, I think that for full independence from foreign markets at near-equal performance, even 100% of the GDP would not be enough.
Modern production chains are incredibly complex. A lot of products which are viable if your target market is a few billion people are not viable when your target market is just 300M. Remember when the 2011 floods in Thailand drove up hard disk prices for a year or two, because HDD manufacturing had naturally clustered in the Pacific rim?
Gains from scale are real and significant, they are what is powering the global economy. If someone in the US decides to build a game console which is made out of ore mined in America and manufactured and assembled in the US, that would require investments of many billions and result in a product which would be 10x as expensive as its international competitors.
If you want full autarky, join the Amish.
A better question would be which parts of the production chains you see as strategic important and especially vulnerable, and then think whether it is feasible to onshore these (or subsidize a friendly country building them). At the end of the day, the American people will survive if China will refuse to sell them the latest iPhone, after all.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
One question would be how related not paying a lot to the CEO is to the CEO destroying the company. I mean, there have been CEOs which have made disastrous business decisions, but are their cases where we can say "if only the company had been willing to pay 100M$/year instead of settling for the kind of incompetent fool you will attract if you offer only 50M$/year"?
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Personally, I would not put any more stock into that announcement than in the announcement about the autism-paracetamol link. Trump has been known to chicken out before.
I am also unsure what the CCP really wants. Perhaps getting full access to ASML products is really the hill they want to die on. Or they could be satisfied with a bunch of AI chips. Or it might be about Trump's tariffs.
My understanding is that REE refining infrastructure is something the US could easily sink a whole lot of money in before getting anywhere, even if the goal is just strategic and not competing on the REE world market.
That is kinda the difference between REE and chip manufacturing: if you can only build chips which have a feature size 10x larger than the latest TSMC fabs, there are still a lot of niches you can compete in. If you can only refine REE at 10x the costs that China has, you will not be able to compete once they undo their embargo.
I think the market-based way the US could handle this is to commit to buying a certain amount of REE which is refined without tech from China per year for their defense sector for the foreseeable future. Of course, future presidents may not honor such a commitment. The alternative is that the US directly invests in such firms.
Personally, I think Trump will try to give the CCP what they want, especially if it is just some AI chips instead of the capability to build their own.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think the main point where having more planes helps is if the airspace is contested. Fighters carry a limited number of air-to-air missiles, and once they are out their ability to interdict airspace even to inferior enemies seems questionable. Any nation fighting an existential war and having problems with air superiority would likely be willing to pour a sizable chunk of the GDP into planes (or drones).
I agree that nobody is keen to re-enact the battle for Britain, and as long as you have air superiority, how many planes you can have in the air at once is much less of a concern. And if a large-scale war were to break out, the primary concern would be how fast you can ramp up the production of iodine tablets, at which point I tend to lose interest in the timeline.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Fair. That being said, I think she is mostly building a strawman. I have contact with plenty of technical people (though not from SV), and I never got much in the way of condescension for being a physicist. The only people I have heard making jokes along the lines of "oh, you have a PhD, should I help you to tie your shoes?" are my colleagues expressing self-irony.
Of course, it helps that I (mostly) know what I am talking about, and possibly also that I am a guy.
A lot of big tech companies were conceived in academia, Sun and Google come to mind. I really do not think that the tech sector looks down on academia, I am very doubtful that Google would hire anyone who expressed the opinion that graph theory and big-O calculus are just masturbation for academics in their ivory tower who have no idea how the real world works.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
But "sit here for hours and never move from this exact spot" is antithetical to their nature, and the 10,000 years of jobs they've done for us thus far.
Agreed. I think another aspect is the hypocrisy of it. Using pain to condition a working dog who has a job like herding is one thing. But this dog's job is literally "be in the video stream and look friend-shaped, so that viewers will continue to watch". It is very much unsurprising that people have an emotional reaction to the dog getting shocked.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
From the "waffles" link:
noted race scientist Scott Siskind
Wow, Meredith really knows how to win the hearts and minds of her readers.
Actually, that article is full of money quotes.
Data work doesn't really count either, of course: it's too close to science, and science as a concept is feminine and obviously not technical.
Especially computer science! Felt really awkward being the only guy in a lecture with 400 people. But it got better when I studied physics, there were typically a few other men in the room. </sarcasm>
this is why Linus Torvalds, despite having some serious issues, is not beyond redemption, whereas Raymond and Stallman have fallen into perdition: Torvalds was motivated first and foremost by wanting a working open-source kernel, whereas Stallman and Raymond started with the ideology, and this is why Hurd still doesn't work
Glad to know that Torvalds is not beyond redemption, hope does not get more than a few years of sensitivity classes.
Also, ESR and RMS had different ideologies, with ESR favoring 'open source' for practical reasons while RMS free software movement started from the dogma that closed source software.
Also, while what Torvalds accomplished is super impressive, to reduce Stallman's impact to "haha, Hurd" seems plain wrong to me. That guy build fucking GNU, after all. And you would think that given the gist of the article ("knowing arcane runes is overrated"), she would appreciate that RMS founded the organization which invented copyleft, which is very much an active ingredient in much of the GNU/Linux ecosystem.
Sure, ESR is less impressive than the other two, but he did sell F/OSS to the suits (wait is that term elitist?) and writes NTPsec, which seems a lot more useful than what Meredith is doing.
we have to fight through a massive pile of Venture Capitalist money and the likes of Curtis Yarvin to do this.
Oh no. Not only Musk and Thiel with their billions of dollars, but the final boss battle will be moldbug. How can they possibly hope to survive?
Sorry for being a bit emotional, but that text really pulled my strings.
Very charitably, she is not entirely wrong. Gatekeeping for the sake of gatekeeping is bad. Long ago, a decade or so after I started programming C, I gave Python a try. Today I use it when I find it appropriate. I no longer consider it absurd to have programming languages which are usable by people who do not understand how pointers work.
Still, I think a huge part of what outsiders consider elitist in computer nerd and hacker culture is mostly striving for excellence. Outsiders often are "I don't care how it looks or what it does, as long as it (superficially) works". This is anathema to any craftsperson who takes pride in their craft.
Nobody (I think) goes to a meeting of a Poetry society and reads their poem and then goes "well, it was grammatically correct, and it conveyed how I felt about my cat dying, so if you do not like it, you are just a bunch of elitist pricks."
Apart from some minor technical details, there is no difference between the skill of a brain surgeon and someone who once tried to butcher a rabbit, after all.
My final observation is that the insistence on stuff being as simple as humanly possible is exactly what placed the left-leaning ex-Twitter users in their present conflict with Bluesky.
During the exodus from Twitter, there were two different main destinations: Bluesky (theoretically an open protocol, de facto a single platform), and Mastodon (an actual decentralized system, where different servers can have different content policies while their users can still engage with each other). Naturally, the anti-tech left moved to Bluesky, because it was slightly more convenient. If they had listened to the hackers, they would have told them that placing the people who write the software in charge of the servers (and thus content moderation) is generally a bad idea, and that it is worth the increased complexity to avoid such a situation.
Now they find that they have merely moved from one golden cage to another one, and that the developers of that one are also not as much into censoring speech as they are.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Obviously the broadcast spectrum is in limited supply and has to be regulated somehow. In times when the number of channels which could be transmitted were sharply limited, I can also see why the government wanted some control over content rather than leasing frequencies to the highest bidder.
This is also where public service broadcasters (like the BBC in the UK or ARD in Germany) come from: if you only can carry one or two radio or TV stations, then letting some private company transmit would give them a lot of power over public opinion. On the other hand, you also do not want the broadcaster to be beholden to the government. Hence these semi-independent structures which are funded through (often unpopular) mandatory fees payed by the citizens. By contrast, there was never a bottleneck with newspapers, because any kiosk could easily stock dozens of them.
While a whopping 16% of Americans still get their TV signal OTA (in Germany, the number is 3%), the state of the art technology to get video to the consumer is the internet. 90% of US households have broadband internet access. The only thing left for the regulators to do is to enforce some basic net neutrality (i.e. consumers pay for bandwidth, their ISPs does not get to bully content providers for preferential treatment) and let the court system handle illegal content.
All this OTA and cable stuff with complex rules around it, as well as European mandatory fee broadcasters and licensing requirements for streamers feels incredible archaic to me. Like squabbling over government mandates related to horse-drawn mail coaches when cars and the interstate network exist.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Pass a law requiring prices and salaries to be advertised after tax.
The difference is that Starbucks charges everyone they sell a coffee to the same sales tax, but different employees are very likely to pay different income taxes. In Germany, you get tax credits for being married to someone without much income (Ehegattensplitting, also known as Herdpraemie (stove bonus)) and having kids. Depending on circumstances, you can also deduct a lot of different expenses from your taxes.
The closest practical solution to your proposal I can see is that jobs are required to advertise what a fictional reference employee (18yo, able-bodied, single, no kids, no other sources of income or deductible expenses) would get as a paycheck. Of course, for a single parent who already has another part time job, the amount they will make will likely be different.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
From your link:
The new regulations create Beijing's version of US rules which block countries from selling chip-making equipment to China.
The US has used those measures to slow China's development of powerful chips that could be used for artificial intelligence (AI) with military applications.
Interestingly enough, I think that chip production does not require tons of rare earth elements. Even if the REE prices increased by a factor of 100, I am not sure if the chips themselves would be much more expensive. Of course, for ceramic capacitors the story is different, and a lot of other tech in data centers uses REE as well.
I think that the US (and it's loose allies, like Taiwan or the Netherlands) leading in chip feature size is them being ahead in a race which is relevant (at least if you believe that AI will not simply fizzle out, and care about who builds the paperclip maximizer).
By contrast, I am not sure that having cheaper REE extraction tech (which China likely has) is much of a game-changer. The price of Neodymium is a few hundred dollars per kilogram. As you need about 1kg for an EV, changing the price to 1000$/kg would increase the price of EVs slightly. For headphones, the relative price hike is probably even smaller.
That being said, investing in US REE refining is probably not a solid business decision. Sure, while China blocks exports your product is competitive, but as soon as they put their stockpiles on the market, you will no longer sell anything.
I think that the best thing you can do as a nation if a competitor controls a market of strategic importance is to (a) have a strategic reserve and (b) pay companies to produce the product at prices far above what the market would pay in moderate quantities, so that once an embargo happens you have some tech which you can scale up. (Arguably, (b) is also the strategy most countries use for military hardware. In three decades, Europe produced 609 Eurofighters. By contrast, in the six years of WW2, 800 thousand airplanes were produced by all combatants. The point of paying astronomical sums for a few Eurofighters is not that they will be very useful, but that if one ever finds oneself in the situation of wanting to spend a decent fraction of the GDP on fighter planes, one can ramp up the production in a few years rather than spending decades developing new planes.)
As a negotiation strategy with Trump, I think China's approach is decent, and as an European I wish them wholeheartedly success in standing up to Trump's protectionism.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Oh yeah, and we already try teenagers "as adults" anyway, especially when they break the above laws, so clearly this is just ageism.
Okay, your position is consistent. I think it is widely unpopular (the right would be upset about 14yo's getting transgender surgery, and the left would be upset about them buying guns and shooting up schools, and both would be upset about 14yo's doing onlyfans or having a sugar daddies), but it is consistent.
Rights are not "bestowed". Men have those rights because they are capable of the organized violence required to force their recognition. Every one was fought for.
I agree that "to bestow" was the wrong verb. A good verb would be "to recognize", which conveniently avoids the discussion if rights are somehow real or just a legal fiction. (As a non-cognitivist, parse "persons have a right to life" as "boo on killing persons".)
I think you are not historically wrong about how rights came to be. "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" and all that. In it's pure form, this leads to feudalism. A warlord/noble/thug claims some lands, as well as the commoners on it, and as long as nobody else is is willing to fight his troops for it, whatever he claims is his right.
But I think that if you recognize only the rights of the ones who are willing to kill over them, this sets really bad incentives. You do not want to organize a society in a way where the winning move is to be the person most willing to flip the gaming table and wage a few centuries of war. Where making fun on Mohammed is illegal because his followers will react with violence while making fun of Jesus is allowed.
The obvious alternative is the Schelling point "one person, one vote". Sure, it started as "one man, one vote", and curiously enough this reflected the egalitarian qualities of musket combat, where a poor guy with a musket can shoot a rich guy with a musket just fine (at least compared to how unequal that combat would have been earlier, when the poor guy would have arrived with a spear and the rich guy would have been a knight in plate armor on a warhorse).
Still, this is a good Schelling point because it is widely seen as fair. If you award votes by actual fighting power, so the Borderer gets two votes and the pacifist Quaker zero, this will incentivize defection. (No, you do not have to worry about having to measure the fighting power of people, because more opportunities to measure it than anyone could possibly want will come up naturally.)
Add to that that wars between peer powers have become a lot more ruinous around 1900.
The traditional might-makes-right answer to the suffragettes would have been: "If you want the vote, prove that you are serious about it by killing a few millions of us." I am not sure how this would have turned out (the objective is to be more trouble than giving in to you is, which can be accomplished just fine without fighting openly), but my guess is that it would have gone badly in the long term, at least once the civil rights movement came around. Empirically, countries where people tried to decide the question of them having certain rights or not through violence (e.g. the Troubles), have fared rather poorly.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
14yo perpetrators
Adult perpetrators get adult punishments. That society is abdicating its duty to train its young men and women and delaying -> denying them a significant chunk of the prime of their life does not change this basic biological fact.
Are you arguing that 14yo's are adults, and society should treat them as such in legal matters?
So they should also be old enough to buy smokes, weed and vodka, own guns, drive cars, have full control over their finances, shoot porn, vote, enlist, gamble in Vegas, make medical decisions without their parent's consent (think transgender surgeries), supply and use sperm banks, hold political office, perform for Epstein?
From a physiological perspective, 14yo's are not adults. the median 14yo guy fighting the median 18yo guy will be a lot more one-sided than 18yo-vs-22yo. Still, that is not very relevant to the legal aspects: we generally do not bestow rights based on how good you are at beating people up.
As far as mental development is concerned, 14 is still in the throes of puberty. Some people will, for better or worse, be as wise at age 14 as they will ever be. Personally, I was not prone to life-ruining bad decisions (except for avoiding bad decisions), but I was not certainly stupid about lot of things. Still, I think that plenty of 14yo's would be prone to making life-ruining bad decisions if we let them, which is why we limit the decisions they can take.
Of course, the 18th birthday cutoff point is completely arbitrary. an 18yo will still be more prone to bad decisions than a 25yo, but we can hardly deny people the benefits of adulthood until then. Still, the worst youthful bad decision tendencies will be over by age 18. Personally, I would support the Terra Ignota majority exams. If you are some wunderkind who can convince society at age 10 that you should be allowed to drive a car and own a gun, then by all means let society also punish you for your crimes as an adult.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
So you support the death penalty for attempted felony murder for 14yo perpetrators (given that you are annoyed that the CP5 are still breathing).
Our different ideas about standards of evidence aside, do you have a lower limit on the age a perpetrator in a similar situation? If an 8yo brother of one of the CP5 had tagged along and taken a minor part in the act as you believe it took place, would you also hang him? What about a 5yo who just finds an unsecured pistol, says "bang, you are dead" and shoots someone?
Or take the severity of the crime. Most of the other 25 were not accused of crimes as severe as the CP5, WP talks of muggings. So the 14yo mugger gets the noose, should the 14yo pickpocket hang next to him? Or the copyright infringer? At what point should society decide that a kid is beyond redemption?
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Trisha Meili wasn't murdered, she ended up living.
I stand corrected.
The fact that the police managed to convince the juries that four of the five had committed rape beyond reasonable doubt certainly places an upper limit on the trustworthiness of their investigation. Given that the police did have DNA evidence and knew that none of the CP5 had anything to do with the semen, going for rape convictions seems downright malicious.
I will also note that DA Morgenthau (who recommended vacating the judgements) does not seem like a pink-haired 'defund the police' type (WW2 veterans generally are not, in my experience). Typically DAs are very reluctant to recommend overturning convictions, especially ones secured by their own assistants.
I assume that it is possible that he recommended that because he thought that given all of the convicted we had already served their time, fighting to keep the none-rape parts of their convictions was a fools errand (especially since it was obviously CW fodder and he would have to argue that only the rape part of the confessions were wrong and the rest was fine, which would be a tough position to defend), rather than because he personally believed that they had never touched Meili.
That Reyes came along later and raped the woman who was lying there unconscious and nearly dead
From WP, Reyes killed one of the four other women he raped. As far as I know, none of the other alleged victims of the CP5 had life-threatening injuries, which is likely why their case focused on Meili. It is not like we have a medical examination of her from just before she was raped. Given that the when the cops tried to blame the CP5 for the state Meili was found in, they might have exaggerated the injuries inflicted by the CP5 as well.
Potentially, they groped her and left her with a mild concussion, and the rest was Reyes doing. Or they did everything except the rape. Or they never met her.
Meta: I think that the CP5 case is great culture war material, even a scissor statement. Also, I find this discussion enlightening. I come from my niche, get blowback for what I considered an uncontroversial fact, think to myself "why do these idiots not believe in DNA evidence?", but try to argue halfway politely, get polite responses and eventually a more subtle picture emerges from the arguments. (I mean, @KMC is still completely beyond my understanding, in the appreciation of DNA evidence, the quality of evidence for the attempted murder charge in hindsight and the general morality of imposing the death penalty on 14yo's for attempted murder.)
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I mean this is extremely inflammatory especially as coming from elected officials.
Did you mean from an elected official who is not Trump?
Saying 'Republicans want to redo the civil war' is very different from saying "let's redo the civil war", from where I stand.
Sure, they are longing for an escalation, but they have also learned in the last decade that being a divisive leader who takes a shit on his opponents every chance he gets, always doubling down rather than backing down is what the electorate prefers.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
First, the context was clearly the CP5 case. Timing matters. I think that most here would agree that a lefty posting a "resist fascism" meme within hours of Kirk being killed would be worse than a lefty posting the same meme a week earlier. Personally, I was disgusted by the pro-Palestinian demonstrations a day after the oct-7 attacks, when I week earlier I would been wholeheartedly meh about it.
Second, I disagree with Trump that an emotional response like hate will lead to better justice outcomes. I want judges and juries calm rather than emotional when they make their verdict.
Third, the world is not populated by easily distinguishable cooperate-bots and defect-bots. Your perception of the behavior of other people is always affected by noise. Under such circumstances, tit-for-tat is no longer the optimal strategy, and you want to build in some amount of forgiveness to avoid getting into a defect-defect loop with someone like you. Sure, any forgiveness option will lower your performance against defect-bot, but maximum effectiveness against defect-bot is defect-bot, and it does not perform particularly well. (This also happens to be the gist of the message of Christianity, as far as an atheist like me understands it.)
In particular, the fact that Trump was (as I have extensively argued here) wrong and overconfident about his "murderers" being defect-bots -- an opinion he likely formed with no in-depth knowledge of the subject -- is a cautionary tale.
Sure, we could simply task the police with shooting anyone who looks like a defect-bot to them, and that would tremendously cut down on the costs of the justice system as well as the rate of reported crime, but it would not lead to a much worse equilibrium than our present system, both due to innocents getting killed and such a system being ripe for abuse.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
See my reply here.
Again, it is technically possible that they aided Reyes in raping the victim alone, then killed her, and for some reason decided to shield him (and only him) in their confessions by claiming he was not present. Perhaps he was a member of the illuminati, and the defendants who were afraid enough to betray their buddies were nevertheless more afraid of him than of a murder sentence, and had taken the steps to coordinate a false version of events -- which lead to them spending decades in prison -- so they did not have to implicate him.
Or it could be that Reyes is psychic and edited himself out of the memory of his accomplices after the deed.
Or perhaps a bunch of forensic experts formed a conspiracy to falsely exonerate a bunch of murderers and get them millions in restitution instead, and falsified the DNA evidence after convincing Reyes to confess. Perhaps they did it to make Trump look bad a decade later when he would start to become a political force.
Here is what I think likely happened. CP5 was a big, political case. Trump published his attack ad on the mayor. The mayor knew that he needed a conviction, and made it clear to the police that he wanted a guilty verdict. For a cop, this is the kind of case which will make or break your career. They found the likeliest suspects that they could find and convinced themselves that they were guilty, which was easy because it was in their personal best interests to believe it (as opposed to telling the mayor that they had been unable to find the killer). Confirmation bias did the rest.
They did not follow good epistemic protocols, like having different cops get confessions from different suspects, and then check the confessions for consistency, or determining if the suspects had perpetrator's knowledge.
In their mind, there was no need, because they already knew that they were guilty ("police instinct" and all that), and their job was simply to paint a picture which would convince any bleeding heart jury.
They very likely cut corners in the process, skipped legally mandated safety checks. Even if you are a cop who will mostly play by the book, this case was to important to leave it up to chance if the real, circumstantial evidence would convince the jury. So you 'forget' to give your suspect the Miranda warning. Perhaps you beat a few of them up to get them to confess, after all, these scumbags just murdered a girl, and you are not even breaking their bones. Or you prompt them with the same story which they should confess. Who cares if you find out in which order they raped her, the important thing is that you present a version of the story which will get them sent to prison, not contradictory confessions which will confuse the jury. Simulacrum level two, not one. Perhaps you even plant a bit of evidence to help justice along.
And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it were not for the fact that the boffins developed a new forensic technique which is far more reliable than any amount of confessions.
In a way, the case exposed the whole rotten underbelly of the US criminal justice system. I wonder how many other 'criminals' are still sitting in prison because the same dirty cops played the same dirty tricks on them. (While I believe that most convicts are in fact guilty, I also believe that US cops do not have a culture of good epistemics and calling out the ones who use illegal shortcuts to paint a nicer picture.)
The reason why every kid learns that the only thing you say when arrested is "I will not answer any questions and I want a lawyer", no matter if you are innocent or guilty, is because US citizens can not trust the police to be interested in determining the truth, especially if they are already detaining you.
The fact that they are still breathing is an affront to justice
Oh come on. Now every state that does not execute prisoners is inherently unjust?
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Generally, I place very little trust in confessions, little trust in eyewitness accounts and a lot of trust in technological evidence.
We know that Reyes raped her. It is reasonable to assume that this was the same incident in which she was also murdered. We know that there is no DNA evidence linking any CP5 to the rape, which is at least strong circumstantial evidence that they did not rape her.
The accepted standard for criminal convictions is "beyond reasonable doubt". So the prosecutor had to convince the jury that the police had reconstructed the crime correctly. I doubt they told the jury "or perhaps some unknown third party raped her, we don't really know". We know that the police had done no such thing.
So we have cops who extracted confessions which were later falsified in the details, and sold them as the truth. This puts really sharp limits on the trust we can place on the police investigation.
Now, it is technically possible that they were randomly directionally correct and framed the guilty party minus one. But even if they were, the penalty for investigatory misconduct in the US is generally that the gathered evidence gets thrown out, which sets the correct incentives.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I do not think that the South seceded because they thought that Lincoln would shoot them up a la John Brown. They simply seceded because their elite's wealth was dependent on slavery, and it was clear that Lincoln would abolish slavery. Slavery was first defeated at the ballot box, and the cartridge box only did its part after Fort Sumter.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
From where I stand, the main difference between blue and red seems to be that one generally does not like to deport illegals, and the other is only deporting illegals in sectors where it will not wreck the economic sector of their constituents.
Also, prosecutorial discretion is basically the name of the game of Trump's DoJ. Why waste taxpayer money on prosecuting crypto traders when it is so much more lucrative to make them just buy Trump's shitcoins and see their legal trouble evaporate?
The idea that it is imperative to enforce any law on the book seems silly. Sure, I would prefer if laws just got struck (ideally automatically unless the legislature re-ups them) when they fell out of use, because selective enforcement is a tool of the tyrant, but it if a law is bad then it is better to ignore it than to enforce it.
The US had sodomy laws in force until the SC put an end to them in 2003 (and are still kept on the books by 12 states, including your usual suspects). Blasphemy laws remain on the books in six states, also unenforceable
I may be going out on a limb here, but from the context of Lawrence, it does not sound like even Texas had a big Butt Sex Prevention Task Force in 1998. My guess it that GWB mostly did exactly what you accuse the blues of doing: not enforcing a law which he found not to be politically relevant to enforce.
So Peter Thiel, the SV investor, has recently given four lectures about the antichrist to a very select audience. While recording was apparently forbidden, someone recorded his lectures (or generated plausible recordings with AI) and sent them to the Guardian, which decided to quote extensively from them.
From my armchair atheist perspective, he does not seem very coherent.
I am not sure I follow. WW3 will be unjust, but trying to avoid it will lead to an unjust peace? (Given later quotes, that is the gist of it.) Of course, the only one who talks about Armageddon in 1 Thes 5 is Paul (in the previous verse), a figure which is traditionally not identified with the antichrist in Christianity.
He continues more coherently:
For someone who is skeptical of x-risk, he seems to be rather scared of nukes:
First, IIRC, recent research has not been kind to the nuclear winter x-risk hypothesis. Depopulating most of North America would be bad, but not literally the end of the world. If only some people in Madagascar survive, then they can in principle build the next technological civilization over the next 1000 years or so.
Also, is Armageddon not a required part of the apocalypse and thus a good thing?
From the article:
They quote him:
Killing the top N followers of an enemy ideology is certainly what the Nazis would have done. Thiel must hate the ICC really badly when he would prefer a general precedent of "the victor gets to murder however many enemies they like". Also, {{Citation needed}}.
This out of the way, we can focus on the important stuff, like "which person could be the antichrist?"
Here he loses coherence again. The figure of Dr. Strangelove was a former Nazi working for the US government (think von Braun) who was also an enthusiastic developer of nuclear weapons (think Teller) around 1964. Isekaing him to the age of Galileo and Newton (when science worked very differently than under the DoE) seems like a strange proposition to make. Like describing someone as the Eisenhower of the antebellum South.
That are leading figures of the climate movement, rationality/AI safety, and e/acc. Now, I may not be very up to date with e/acc, but lumping Andreessen with the "luddites" seems a questionable choice. But then, characterizing Greta or Eliezer as "wanting to stop all science" is almost as ridiculous. The Greta generation likes their technology. While there are certainly proponents of de-growth, for the most part they seem to be arguing for greener alternatives (e.g. solar power), not for getting rid of the benefits of industrialization and plowing the fields by teams of oxen. Realistically, this means researching green technologies. Eliezer wants to shut down AI capabilities research which would push the frontier towards AGI, sure. But apart from that one, fairly narrow subject, his writings suggest that he is very much for pushing the borders of knowledge.
Notably missing among the horsemen of anti-science are the anti-vaxxers (like RFK) and the Christian right who oppose stem cell research and CRISPRing fetuses.
Anyone missing? Well, so far he has not shat on EA.
Full disclosure: if you had asked me in 2000 if I thought that Bill Gates was the antichrist, I might not have rejected that possibility out of hand, given Microsoft. But he is not talking about Microsoft, but about the stuff which Gates does with his ill-gotten money, like fighting infectious diseases in developing countries. You know, the Disney villain stuff.
Claiming that science and atheism are incompatible is kind of a big thing to claim to make. I am as convinced an atheist as anyone, but I would still not call science and theism fundamentally incompatible. Having beliefs that do not pay rent in the anticipation of evidence seems bad epistemic practice, but as long as you limit yourself to unfalsifiable claims (e.g. of the 'not even wrong' kind), you can add whatever you want to the scientific world view. (Nor do I believe that being a theist makes you evil, per se. Theism increases the risk of some moral failings and perhaps lowers the risk of others, but the correlation is not so robust that I would really care about it.)
Of course, claiming that Dawkins and Gates are atheists stuck in the 18th century is very ahistoric. Almost nobody was openly atheist in 18th century Europe. The real blow to the theist world view came in the 19th century, with the origin of species. All the scientific discoveries of the 20th century were did not help religion, either, steadily pushing back the areas of human uncertainty which are the natural habitat of the priest.
The guardian also quotes him on Musk and Trump and Vance, but I think my post is long enough as it is.
As with Musk, the remaining question is did he turn weird, or was he always weird?
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