roystgnr
8mo ago
(really the only Turtledove you need tbh)
Come on; the trick to this game is to "Use simple lies that seem believable."
roystgnr
8mo ago
Were you picturing the resources all being used on Earth? Spread among a Dyson cloud of colonies, that much energy is a nice standard of living for quadrillions of people. Concentrated on Earth the waste heat would vaporize us.
roystgnr
10mo ago
I'd say you should be using a recovery plugin for your browser ... but if you go that route, make sure you check that it works here. Typio Form Recovery works for me on Reddit but not on TheMotte.
roystgnr
10mo ago
They're definitely going to be paying off some of the R&D that way. Starshield has its own separate satellites and its own network, so you'd think Starlink revenue would still have to cover marginal costs for the commercial sats, but even if Starshield never needs to piggy-back on the commercial network, I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX is getting extra cash to guarantee the presence of all that (from an asat perspective) "chaff"...
roystgnr
7mo ago
I’m saying that constantly referring to them as “the invaders” instead of The Russians is performative.
No; it's precise. Most Russians, even considered by nationality, have not invaded Ukraine, and something like a third will admit to pollers that they don't even support the invasion. There's little reason, when concerned with the armies who have invaded Ukraine, to use a less precise term for them. When considering Russians by ethnicity the distinction becomes even more important: many have been among the victims of the invasion. It might be an understandable accident to lump them together with their killers when speaking imprecisely, but why would anyone ever want to do so on purpose?
their “resistance” to Russia’s invasion is going to lose them their nation, not keep it.
That's not how game theory works.
Do you think that, if they'd allowed their capital city to be taken by the columns of invading tanks, that would have allowed them to keep their nation? Don't you think that's quite gullible? Putin made no such promises, and it's not even safe to trust agreements he does make.
Zelensky’s adventure
This word choice is performative nonsense. Nobody thinks that shooting back at the people sending bombs and missiles and tanks and soldiers to try and conquer you is an "adventure".
It's weird that you assign so much agency to the Ukrainians here, and yet I haven't seen you assign any to the invaders. Since your concern for the Ukranian men isn't feigned, surely you agree that the choice to invade was an atrocity, right? Even the most ardent honest pacifists will agree that starting a war is more evil than fighting back instead of surrendering.
generation of lost men
Ukraine has had those before. If we assume for your sake that the low death estimates there are correct and the high death estimates of the current war are correct, the war has to get about 30 times more deadly before the death toll of opposing Russia exceeds the death toll of being controlled by Russia.
roystgnr
14d ago
We've already synthesized "real" meat that may not be as good as real meat. Grain-fed beef can have an omega-3:omega-6 ratio several times worse than traditional grass-fed grass-finished beef, but everyone eats grain-fed since it's half the price. Time to fix the problem with a ban?
roystgnr
4mo ago
VAERS doesn't report vaccine-related deaths. It reports post-vaccine deaths. The easiest way for those to skyrocket is to suddenly administer a lot more vaccines to a much older population.
roystgnr
6mo ago
That's what most of the Confederacy was fighting over. Most of the Union was only fighting over preventing secession. Evidence includes the presence of slave states in the Union, the Emancipation Proclamation explicitly excluding those states, and that quote where Lincoln literally said "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it".
It's awesome that the Civil War ended up abolishing chattel slavery in the US anyway, but that seems to have been a final "screw you" aimed at the Confederate slave states and John Wilkes Booth fans, combined with a "we really need to make sure this doesn't get out of hand again" aimed at the Union slave states, not a foreordained victory of steady principles.
That said, there were many awesome people in the Union who were in the fight specifically because of their opposition to slavery ... but admitting that, I have to admit that there were probably people in the Confederacy, and far more people in the South afterward, for whom "Southern pride" was about something other than "the right to own people". Even clearly-not-pro-Southern "The Onion", when trying to speculate about modern root motives of "The South Shall Rise Again" pride, imagined an end state that would "build us a bunch of big, fancy buildins and pave us up a whole mess of roads", not "resume slavery". We had the "General Lee" car in a movie as late as 2005. Was everyone upset because this was an obvious dog whistle from the populous pro-slavery faction of the Hollywood community? Of course not! They were just upset because the movie sucked.
Today we're well down a vicious signaling spiral, and maybe it's too late to stop or unwind that. If your favorite color is blue, and a crazy person says "but only racists like blue!", you're going to laugh and ignore them. But if that goes viral and the most sensitive half of the population decide they don't want to risk any association with racists so they disavow blue ... well, now blue-lovers really do have twice the rate of racism as the rest of the world, don't they? Maybe the 25th through 50th percentile are kind of creeped out by a real correlation, and learn to love green ... and now racism among the holdouts is 4x overrepresented and still rising! Eventually the last remaining people who admit they like blue are either unrepentant racists, stubborn fools, or confused autists. Maybe the remainder are all pathetic by this point, but the last two at least deserve more pity than disdain.
roystgnr
6mo ago
And, y'know, there have been multiple instances of Israel selling US weapons to the PRC.
This is a good criticism. Lead with this next time.
Osama bin Laden explicitly cited that alliance as his motive for the Twin Towers.
"Why aren't we doing what the mass murderers want!?", on the other hand, is not a good criticism. Bad game theory, bad morality, really undercuts any presumption of objectivity. A lot of jihadi ideology traces back to Qutb getting pissy about dancing; should we ban subversive media like "Footloose" to keep them appeased?
roystgnr
7mo ago
I don't think IDF's less-than-stellar first response says anything about their strategic capabilities
It says something about a decline in intelligence capabilities. Not sure whether that's in the hands of Mossad or IDF or whatever, but it's a sad decline from "can find and exfiltrate Eichmann out of a decade of hiding ten thousand miles away" to "can't notice thousands of missiles and mobilized raiders prepping an attack 2 miles from your border, timed for the 50th anniversary of another surprise attack".
I'd agree that doesn't necessarily say there's been a similar decline in warfighting capabilities, though. Except ...
the nukes are without doubt functional
Can I press X to doubt? High explosives generally degrade within several years, so you need constant stockpile maintenance, and it's been four or five decades since an Israeli nuclear test, assuming everyone's suspicions are correct on that score. I wouldn't even bet on 0% of US warheads being duds if they were fired right now. Although I certainly wouldn't want to be one of the Philistines who tests their Samson Option, I could easily imagine some zealot talking themselves into believing that it's not really a danger. The US carrier group sitting off their coasts is a much less hypothetical threat; I don't know what Hamas was thinking by attacking civilian targets with Americans among them.
roystgnr
9mo ago
Who else gets treated like this during a product demo?
Everyone? We just passed the 25th anniversary of the time Windows 98 crashed during a live demo. Google it and skim the millions of results. And Bill Gates used to be hated at least as much as Musk is. Today if you heard Gates ranting about "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" you might wonder if he was working on an anti-Anopheles-mosquito gene drive to end malaria, not just trying to crush open computing standards.
roystgnr
11mo ago
I guess it is about "honor, fairness", in a sense; you're right. I'd be fine with "old-fashioned" "masculinity", challenging someone to 'take this outside' and holding a fist fight where everybody knows what's going to happen. A sucker punch isn't that. The fact that the risk of fatality is avoidable and isn't consensual seems to be as big a deal as its magnitude. A highly-lethal response to an innocent less-lethal threat is almost tautologically a utilitarian mistake, but for discouraging murder via a more effective means of self-defense I'm fine with at least a couple orders of magnitude of "more effective", because "don't risk committing murder" is a great way to unilaterally avoid the risk of getting killed by your potential murder victim and so I don't see a pressing moral need to provide a "well I guess you should be able to safely risk maybe becoming a murderer" alternative.
We are both just quibbling about numbers at this point, right? If an attacker fires a handgun, and the defender only has a rifle or shotgun available, are they just out of luck because the former are less lethal (I'm seeing as low as 11% from other sources) than the latter (above 30%)? How about if the attacker just has a bat, or a rock? What if you're having trouble figuring out what the attacker has because you just got concussed by a sucker punch? At what point does "if you don't want to face potentially-lethal force, don't start potentially-lethal force" become a more sensible rule than "just shake off the concussion and calculate probabilities", to you? I'm not entirely on board with 0.1% ("not sure" in my original comment wasn't just rhetorical), and I get even less sure with 0.01% and less still with 0.001%, but at some point in the other direction "whoa, this kind of assault regularly murders someone" is a very bad thing that is good to point out and good to discourage, don't you think?
roystgnr
29d ago
Same Keynes, but different context. I'm actually curious about what @CloudHeadedTranshumanist meant by that qualifier - that even if Zendaya might not be the most beautiful in many particular judges' minds, she would clearly be the most widely-perceived as widely-perceived as beautiful?
She toned it down for Spider-Man: Homecoming (where her character wasn't supposed to be a Love Interest yet), with just hair/wardrobe/body-language choices that you'd think would be another "Hollywood Homely" trope but which worked okay, but even there claiming only 3/10 would be silly.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Add ocean fertilization and enhanced weathering to your list, assuming future research doesn't have any surprises and they really are reasonable ways to sequester carbon in the medium-term and very-long-term respectively. Even if plants don't notice a drop in sunlight (or they notice but are happy enough about the extra CO2 to be fine anyway), we're already about 20% of the way from pre-industrial CO2 levels to "people complain about stale air and drowsiness" CO2 levels outdoors, and indoor air relies on CO2 diffusion to outdoor...
But frankly I'd wait before starting anything. In the US the biggest obstacles to doing anything are: (1) about a third of voters don't think climate change isn't yet causing any harm and (2) phasing out fossil fuels is going to be a massive challenge, both economically (it will be a third phase of history, where the first two were "underpopulated and dirt poor" and "burning fossil fuels") and technologically (we need a massive expansion of fission and/or massive improvements in grid battery costs), so we're probably going to need a stronger political consensus. If we go for the geoengineering too early then that consensus is always going to be split between "we fixed it" and "no, the priests just sacrificed a virgin and pretended that that's what made the drought end".
roystgnr
2mo ago
especially as the 14th amendment has made the states subordinate to that federal government.
The 14th has made the states subordinate to the Bill of Rights, but I wouldn't say that's the biggest step in state subordination. It was several decades earlier when the Supremacy Clause made states subordinate to the federal government in matters covered by the Constitution's short allowlist, and it wasn't until several decades later that cases like Wickard v. Filburn expanded federal powers from "short allowlist" to "do anything you feel like".
roystgnr
3mo ago
Anyone who gets married 3x isn't a good husband
As an absolute statement this can't be right. The range of reasonable exceptions, from "the wife soon contracted a terminal disease" to "the wife turned out to be untrustworthy" is wide enough that there must be men who have had awful luck from it twice.
As a specific case, though, things like "the wife didn't get along with the mistress" or "the hooker turned out to be untrustworthy" are not in that range.
roystgnr
4mo ago
The real question is how do you make something like it resist parties.
With approval voting, or at least a Condorcet method. Duverger's Law isn't the only force leading to partisan politics but it's a pretty overwhelming one.
roystgnr
7mo ago
That's an large and important distinction, but even here I'd point out that a "culture" isn't a homogeneous thing. You don't pose for thousands of photos of something you expect to keep secret from everybody; you do so because you can observe you're part of a subculture, large enough to control a prison with several thousand prisoners, which assents to the photo contents. Turned out the assent wasn't universal enough to stop photos from leaking, which is another point in our culture's favor, I admit. The fact that Hamas fighters don't expect to be knifed in their sleep by any lone-wolf ashamed countrymen, much less put on trial and jailed as war criminals by a majority in power, isn't a point in theirs'.
roystgnr
7mo ago
slavery as an institution was dismantled/ended throughout peaceful steps everywhere in the world but the US
There were other exceptions, including brief but serious backsliding time and again, but for the most part it took no major wars.
But how much of the war in the US was because abolitionists were more violent, and how much was because slavers were more powerful? In many parts of the world, the first peaceful step toward abolition was that the British Navy asked you how many pieces you would like to be in. Then, where slavery survived on ongoing trade (slavery in most of the Americas had become dependent on an order of magnitude higher imports; mass slavery in most of Africa was being funded by the exports), ending the trade left the institution unviable. But in the US slave states they were "producing" (forgive that I can't think of a word that's ugly enough here) their own new slaves, and slavery was still going strong for generations after international slave trading had been prohibited. The Union turned out to have military superiority over the Confederacy, but not so obviously as e.g. the Royal Navy vs Dahomey, so "just confront the slavers and await the inevitable negotiated victory" wasn't an option in the US. Less capacity for hypothetical violence means having to use more of that capacity for actual violence.
Even in parts of the US where slavery was ended via peaceful steps, look at the cost. Compensated emancipation was used in many countries, but only for DC in the USA; Lincoln couldn't even convince Delaware to do the same. If it had been used for the whole country, the price would have been a majority of a year's GDP. Gradual emancipation worked in most of the Northern States, but with that mechanism the awful price was paid by the slaves; e.g. Pennsylvania freed future children of slaves in 1780, but the last slaves there weren't freed until the legislature "rushed" the process to its end in 1847.
roystgnr
8mo ago
either party can get 45% in polls just for a block of wood baring their label.
Polarization is sufficient to explain this. There were a lot of Democrats who were utterly unenthused about Hillary Clinton (especially after the primaries) but held their noses to vote for her; likewise I know Republicans who voted for Trump despite disparaging him beforehand and drinking to dull the pain afterward. Many of them would have done so even if their other party had managed to put up a good opponent, because negative views of the opposing party as a whole just kept going up. (Is there any much more recent data than that 2014 Pew report? A quick hunt isn't finding me anything post-2016.)
I suspect it’s down to big data managing to dig deeply enough to predict and identify potential voters and messaging good enough to attract those likely red or blue voters with targeted advertising.
Does that explain the data? Those Pew graphs do seem to roughly show Democrats' polarization rising from the late 90s and Republicans from the early 2000s, which I guess is right around when I'd guess a significant fraction of Democrats and Republicans started getting their news from the internet. (at which point, who needs Big Data? people like to bubble themselves among sources they already agree with...) There are so many possible explanations, though, I think I'd need more than one piece of very rough evidence.
roystgnr
10mo ago
Is the reason America is so successful that it's got good strongman selection mechanisms
Possibly. Our success is mostly due to economic output (compare the different nations' military production during WW2, for example), and though our "may the best man win" economy isn't perfect, it's a lot better than "may the best man be chosen by the Ministry of Best Man Allocation and carefully follow the List of Best Man Best Practices".
via the presidency?
Not possibly. Have you seen our presidents?
roystgnr
10mo ago
Any regime where you're not part of the selectorate would do.
But be careful what you wish for. The only thing worse than a regime thst cares what your kids think of it is a regime that doesn't care what your kids think of it.
roystgnr
11mo ago
I'm almost at your point; though I still feel sad for a thief getting himself killed, I don't feel angry at the driver or anything. If you were to upgrade the thief to "armed robber" I wouldn't be sad to say goodbye to them.
But if you were to downgrade the thief's antisocial behavior, instead? IIRC there was some point in my childhood where I noticed the classic Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist trope starting to fail for me. In theory the protagonist is supposed to be just enough of a jackass that you can appreciate how hilarious it is when he gets his comeuppance, and I can still enjoy that for Eric Cartman (or Montgomery Burns, now that I think about it) levels of horrible, but watching the suffering of a mere Jack Tripper or Michael Scott is painful.
I assume that "laid" was a typo for "paid", but it's Hunter, so I'm not 100% certain there...
Either way, could you link a source for this?
Honestly, I've wanted to reply to like half your comments with that same request. There's so much playing Telephone on the internet and so many people playing it poorly that my first instinct is to filter out anyone who makes a surprising claim without either an identity plus word-for-word quote or a hyperlink to the claim's source. It's bad enough when places like CNN so often do that, but if TheMotte commenters can't be held to a higher standard than mainstream reporters then what are we even doing here?
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