rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
No bio...
User ID: 1473
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
With the disclaimer that I haven't watched RoP at all: isn't "cramped" a pretty good description for medieval Europe? Most commercial activity had to fit within the city/town walls, and the manpower needed to build the walls was proportional to the square root of their area. The old European cities I'm familiar with don't really have "squares" in the modern sense so much as they have random areas where buildings are set back and these became public areas or markets. For example, in old Vienna the only space I can think of is in front and to the sides of the Vienna cathedral, and in the City of London the only green space is around St. Paul's. Presumably these were staging areas for construction when the cathedrals were built, after which they became public spaces.
Ships were very expensive in the middle ages, too, but I think you are right about the number being far too small: well after what we would consider the medieval period, the battle of Trafalgar (1805) only involved 73 vessels, and we think of it as the breaking point of the Spanish fleet. But according to this website, the British navy of 1650 had 74 vessels. Wikipedia says that "In the 11th century, Aethelred II had an especially large fleet built by a national levy." but Aethelred II opted to pay Danegeld following the Battle of Maldon in 991, at which the total strength of the Norse was supposedly 2000-4000 men. That would have been at most 100 longships. And the Norse King Canute the Great is said to have had 1,200 Snekkja (41-man longships) in Norway in 1028.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
... And thus am I outed as a non-Tolkie.
Godor is but a shadow of Numenor
But that hit home. The RoK makes Gondor out to be comparable to imperial China in its constructions, and so Numenor was presumably vaster and richer than Rome. For an island nation presumably richer than Rome and presumably with magic to only be able to swing together five ships... yeah, that would break the immersion.
Thank you for the explanation.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
If one listens to Peter Zeihan, the war was motivated by Russia's long-term unenviable defensive position: there are virtually no geographical barriers within the Russian heartland, and with population set to fall, defending Russia is an expensive proposition (young men in productive economic activity or in civil defense; pick one). Hence all the wars since the early 2000s to reunite Russia with strategic and defensible passes that were part of the USSR: these can be garrisoned at much lower manpower, leaving the heartland to economic activity.
Or if one listens to such Russian writers as Alexandr Dugin, rejection of Western hegemony and reconquering of Soviet nations is just part of the Great Geopolitcal Game.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
You really think the Chinese can’t figure out how to get a few latest generation ASML machines? I doubt it.
I don't think it matters if they get an ASML machine. What they need is the support contract, and that is part of what is unavailable to "Chinese military companies".
To put it another way, if someone gave you (and generously, your friends) a space shuttle and all the relevant infrastructure, would you be able to launch it within five years? There's going to be some critical knowledge of the cockpit or the refueling system or the inspections process that you can't figure out.
With ASML, we're talking about machines the size of a shipping container, with mechanical parts that are calibrated to move wafers at the nanoscale, but which otherwise dampen vibrations, high-performance lasers that won't even work in a standard atmosphere, which require a continuous flow of high-purity chemicals only made in one or two countries, and all depend on proprietary software which probably gets custom modules built and delivered based on the needs of the customer whose fab it sits in. If the servos or beam-line or vacuum gets misaligned, or get slightly over-spec on dust, or some chemical formula changes slightly, or some part burns out prematurely, then it's not going to get the 5 nm resolution which it was sold for.
So yeah, I think this is the end of Xi's China. They can go through a trade war, their economy can sputter along, but China's industrial development is doomed to go the way of the USSR: pulling off epic feats of engineering and brainpower just to keep their existing (high-speed) trains running, while the West gets to start reaping the benefits of software eating the world.
Well, of course the West will still come up with 50 different philosophical and political reasons to justify shooting itself in the foot, but when it does its gun will be equipped with computer-controlled sights.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
This is true, but only to a point. "Today I went to Allie's house and had dinner with them," has a very strong connotation to me that Allie is married and dinner was with the couple, rather than dinner being with a singular person who uses "they" as a pronoun.
But I maybe I've been under a rock for too long.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
They could as well just blockade the entire island until Taiwan gives in.
Blockades are an act of war, so they would earn some of the sanctions that are currently reserved for Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
More importantly, the US has a history of being dedicated to freedom of navigation in the Taiwan strait. So if CCP really wants to enforce that blockade they are going to have to start by attacking ships of the US Navy. Unlikely.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
I'm a bit out of the loop. Are warrants required in the US, or is there absolutely no oversight?
Where this gets very interesting is when the database gets dense enough and DNA testing gets good enough to identify anyone, even people whose not at all in the database. "The state of Pennsylvania is looking for a male suspect age 20-25, height 5'10" to 6', with blue eyes, blond hair, sharp nose, and small ears, in the Amish community."
Also, give the population 10 years to acclimatize to this, and people will start asking why we don't do DNA testing for nonviolent crimes.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
The most convincing argument for trans conversion therapies comes from outcomes. Trans activists will tell you that to not provide gender-affirming care to minors is encouraging kids to kill themselves.
So I looked at the literature. There has never been a randomly controlled study on gender-affirming care as currently practiced (according to trans activists, it would be unethical?!), and for the studies that remain, it seems like outcomes (suicide rates) are comparably improved for adults who undergo surgery and who undergo supportive social transition.
But hey, if you want to end your germ line, that's up to you.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Unfortunately in the context I heard this Allie was not a known referent (to me), but a person who goes by they. I fear the experience made me a bit jaded.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
The article you linked is from early January 2022. In 2021 (the Omicron wave!), excess deaths could attributed to Covid directly or to the general failures of the healthcare system as the system was dealing with Covid (including people hesitant to seek care due to Covid concerns).
Frankly, your link makes me more skeptical of you.
you better believe no respectable institution is even going to be looking at vaccine side effects, not with their grant money controlled by the NIH.
There are 25+ countries in the world with functional public health establishments. Surely one of them is actually doing follow-up studies on vaccinated vs. unvaccinated populations. I'm sympathetic to the idea that the vaccines were a population-level experiment with unknown 4+ year side effects, but ... it's been two years now. We should start seeing signals.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
I actually agree with you that the cause of "excess deaths" is always worth looking into. In the context of the discussion about potentially long-term vaccine-associated mortality rates, however, it sounded like you were establishing a bailey: "There are a lot of excess deaths which have not been investigated, therefore vaccine effects are likely." My apologies if that was not your intent.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
But national sovereigns don't internalize the costs of their mistakes or reap the rewards of their enterprise like private proprietors do.
Really? I can think of more cases where sovereign nation-states do "internalize the costs of their mistakes or reap the rewards of their enterprise like private proprietors do" than I can think of cases where they don't, unless by "sovereigns" you are referring to tinpot dictators who "externalize" failures by blaming their failures on foreign actors. Poor social policy can f-- up demographics, which weakens the state. Poor farming policy leads to crop failure. Poor educational policy leads to low labor productivity. Failure to safeguard the borders leads to loss of territory. Failure to balance the books leads to national default, usually by way of hyperinflation (with a singular exception in the USD, which is supported by its use in international trade). Environmental pollution can be externalized, but it's much easier for an individual land proprietor to externalize pollution. Honestly, I'm failing to see how nations are different here.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
It was bungled, but I'm skeptical face played any part in that calculation. Doesn't the rationalization "the lives of 10 sailors is worth our nuclear submarine secrets" have enough explanatory power?
I'm skeptical the Kursk was about national pride at all, although I would believe you if you told me it was corruption or officer-level CYA. Nuclear submarines, their limitations, their strengths, their uses, and their construction are highly prized national secrets, to it stands to reason that the Russian Navy would be reticent to welcome foreign aid, let alone rescue subs or divers from NATO navies, which would no doubt be beaming video direct to Langley.
To put it another way, from the perspective of Russian Naval command, the secrets of the Kursk are arguably worth more than the lives of the crew (even before accounting for corruption and CYA), as those secrets protect all the other submarine crews. But telling that to the public in so many words is a great way to ruin future crew recruiting efforts.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Ok. If you are specifically talking about the people who rule nations, I can agree with you that cost externalization is rampant on the basis of the many nations that have been financially ruined by their wealth-extracting elites.
However, there are whole categories of private proprietors whose business models are explicitly extractive. Notice how most of the pre-Covid profit of large corporations was due to "financialization," which translates to roughly "taking out low-interest loans on our assets, guaranteeing short-term profits." You may also notice how most private equity deals are structured to merely externalize long-term costs onto subsidiaries (and other investors) while extracting short-term profits, or how whole sectors of the economy will lobby for special protection. What is a farm/CHIPS subsidy, if not externalizing the cost of business?
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
If you're actually raising a child, would you tell that child at some point in their life that you had had an abortion previously?
I am in the situation of being the baby that was supposed to be aborted, but contractions started and so I was born instead. It wasn't really a choice on my mother's part: she needed to undergo chemotherapy and they couldn't do it while she was pregnant.
I think I first understood the import of this story in late middle school, and it didn't have much of an effect on me: I was surprised, but my parents love me and our relationship didn't change. I probably went back to thinking about what teenage nerds think about. Now that I think back on that story it just makes me feel lucky. But I'm an outlier who leans toward stoicism, positivism, and "life is tough. Get over it". YMMV.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
As a single point of data, a far-left millennial friend of mine (who probably thinks I'm a stealth conservative based on the conversations we used to have about feminism) blew up when I said I had started a diet and begun to lose weight: "Dieting doesn't work," "I've noticed you have some toxic ideas about weight," "I've heard you making insensitive comments before," etc. They then recommended I read a Health At Any Size activist's autobiography to engage with these ideas because she's "very eloquent."
The book was mostly personal and second-hand experiences of trauma due to people pointing out morbid obesity and its negative externalities. There was a whole chapter about doctors and the medical establishment being shaming and misguided. I scanned the bibliography for any academic papers (now on my reading list), but most of the references were to articles from the likes of Huffpost. Then I gave up on the book.
As regards the issue of obesity, I do think the problem is systemic: the US population has lost its ability to cook proper healthy food at home, has lost the last remnants of a culture which despised "gluttony," and has been brainwashed by Big Ag to think that eating more and more is normal, and that it's all genetic. Meanwhile Big Ag has hired flavor scientists to engineer hyperstimulus into food, hires lobbyists to keep politicians from addressing the problem in any meaningful way, and pays useful activist idiots to write books about Health At Any Size.
However, as an individual, I don't have many options other than to tune out the propaganda, establish my own system, and live my life of moderation. If that makes me "toxic" and "insensitive," ... fuck it. I'm not sacrificing my pursuit of excellence for some moral fashion.
But code is just math, math is just code, and protein folding is just the intersection of the two!
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
There is another aspect to this. If you allow the victims a say in the punishment it increases the probability of victim intimidation for certain crimes, especially if the legal punishment is weak. The victim of a house invasion for example has to worry that requesting a higher sentence will result in their house being invaded again as soon as the perpetrator is out of jail. In Korea this was recently an issue as a 12 year old rape victim decided not to pursue charges against her home invading rapist, who was looking at 2 years in prison.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
What's the point in forgiving someone who is dead? We're not going to forget mass murder, and we're not going to prosecute anyone for it either (now that they are all dead or prosecuted). So why forgive? What does it even mean to forgive someone you don't - and can't - know personally?
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
I'm annoyed at the reporting requirements too, but the mirror image of money laundering is tax evasion, and governments are very motivated to prevent tax evasion by any means possible, up to and including totalitarian monitoring of all money flows.
With respect to the specific requirements to report foreign accounts: the reporting requirement is clearly stated in tax instructions and up to a few years ago the IRS was remarkably lax about requiring people (with less than $50,000 in their accounts) to report on time. The form for reporting foreign accounts even included checkboxes where one could state one's "reason for reporting late": "I forgot" and "I didn't know I had to" were valid options.
Granted, I'm still a bit confused by the reporting requirements and process for large wire transfers.
It's amusing how his reasoning is similar to @pointsandcorsi's (although much more careful and conservative, especially with forecasts) and thus passes for academic content, yet pointsandcorsi's output merits a permaban on an obscure forum.
Huh? @pointsandcorsi was banned for a comment in a thread about James Webb, and it was a week-long ban, not a permaban (as evidenced by their most recent top-level post which started this thread):
https://www.themotte.org/post/240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/44716?context=8#context
Is there some other event that @pointsandcorsi discussed that I missed?
Oh, I see. They were banned for this post.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Five years ago (pre-LLM) the Chinese were already been working on AI for automating court judgement on the theory that it would be more efficient and fair. Lawyers and law are one of the major areas in which next-generation LLMs have the potential to be very profitable.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Maybe affordable unit requirements mess with this? idk
"New residential development" in NIMBY cities (as opposed to rural America) usually means tearing down existing single-family homes on large lots and replacing them with high-density housing on small lots, which consists of multi-floor, multi-family apartments, at least 20% affordable or subsidized units, and no yards. While the developer makes a lot of money on these due to the high-density, the price paid per household is almost always lower than the area average, the area loses some of its greenery, and the average social class of the area falls.
I think getting rid of the affordable housing requirement would result in some developers focusing on large high-density, high-cost, high-quality condos near in-demand areas, but the affordable housing requirement puts a limit on unit sizes and quality overall, and makes NIMBY the equilibrium position of a neighborhood.
The current course of Western (and Eastern) democracies sponsoring Ukraine in absolutely humiliating Russia is the safe, nuclear-war-minimizing strategy:
If NATO directly (tanks-on-the-ground) intervenes on behalf of Ukraine, then it risks initiating a direct Russia-NATO conflict. This is much more fraught with nuclear risk than the current status quo.
If NATO does nothing (because of nuclear threats), then Ukraine loses the war. Russia is validated in its belief that forceful territorial expansion works, and is empowered to attempt further expansion. (Future Russian wars of expansion have the same risks of nuclear escalation as the Ukraine war). If, as Peter Zeihan argues, the geopolitical goal of Russia is to secure its borders in the face of declining population, then we can predict that Russia will keep pursuing wars of expansion until it can secure the Polish and the Bessoarabian Gaps. Thus the result of letting Ukraine lose the war is likely a direct Russia-NATO conflict, just delayed a few years. Again, the nuclear risk is higher than in a Russia-Ukraine war.
If Russia uses nuclear weapons, NATO does not have the option of non-retaliation. To do nothing would legitimize other nuclear powers in the use of their nuclear arsenals to secure territory: North Korea against South Korea, China against Taiwan, Israel against Iran, ...
However, if Russia, facing defeat, resorts to (tactical) nuclear weapons, there are non-nuclear retaliation options on the table. In particular, UN sanctions and trade embargoes become almost guaranteed. (I hear Putin and the Russian oligarchs envy the life of the Kims and their generals in Pyeongyang.) Russian shipping is very vulnerable to NATO submarines, etc...
The current status quo, with NATO selling arms to Ukraine, avoids all these risks, so long as Ukraine doesn't push toward Moscow. There is a long history of Russia and the US arming partisans in (proxy) war, and arms sales are nothing new. To skip over the relevant historical examples of the Korean, Vietnam, and Russia-Afghani conflicts, just a few years ago there was a Russian mercenary battalion which was decimated when attempting to assault a US outpost in Syria, and despite the conflict being much more direct, the situation didn't escalate.
More options
Context Copy link