roystgnr
27d ago
Most ironically, he was too liberal. This was the characteristic of Joe Rogan that was damning to them and that elicted the reaction that was damning of them. He may never have been too immoderate for them in the modern sense of "liberal"=="leftist", but he was far too much for them in the older sense of "liberal"=="open minded". While the modern left was discovering the delicious joys of shunning and deplatforming, Rogan was still stubbornly letting any idiot with any wacky or problematic ideology come to him and make a case for it to him and his audience. The last straw for them in 2024 may have been that, when he offered to let their idiot take advantage of his liberalism, at a point where she clearly needed it, she simply chose not to accept!
It's possible that she was doomed either way, that she had good reason for insisting on an hour interview surrounded by her staff rather than multiple hours one-on-one in his studio like all his other interviewees, but if that's the case then what they needed instead wasn't a liberal version of Joe Rogan, it was a didn't-finish-at-the-bottom-of-the-Democratic-primaries version of Kamala Harris.
roystgnr
2mo ago
since the dawn of civilization
Ownership greatly predates humanity, much less civilization. Stick a bunch of GPS collars on wolves and you can see which territory each pack "owns". Establishing a Schelling point of "this is ours, that is theirs" is what naturally evolves to reduce negative-sum conflicts over rivalrous goods as soon as you have a species whose minds can handle such a distinction, which is much earlier than you get a species whose minds can handle (much less invent - Schelling was writing less than a century ago!) the underlying game theory.
If anything, civilization started out with a step backwards in the conception of ownership. The early "palace economy" city-states, where you gave your production to the ruler(s) and hopefully enough of it was eventually doled back out to you, are much more accurately described as a way to "Usurp rights over resources ... by fiat and, if necessary, by fraud and/or force" than anything capitalists typically do. It took a very long time before the study of economics (famously named "the dismal science" in a pro-slavery screed, because it "finds the secret of this Universe in 'supply and demand', and reducing the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone") managed to successfully convince most economists that individual ownership can be more fruitful than collective ownership, not just more moral, and I'm afraid it still hasn't managed to become convincing to most non-economists.
paranoid who don't understand the concept of sharing
The above wiki link is one place to look to see why this is positively wrong, but here it's normatively wrong as well.
roystgnr
8mo ago
AFAIK their data is fine; the proposal was for 100/20 Mbps down/up, and Starlink currently only promises 25-100 down and 5-10 up on their standard plan; even the priority plan is still 40/8 at minimum.
The timing of the data is what had everybody stunned. In the FCC's START DATE FOR PERFORMANCE MEASURES TESTING last year they say, "For the carriers participating in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), pre-testing will begin on January 1, 2025, and testing will begin on January 1, 2026." You'd think this was a first draft, but I can't find the final version with "unless we don't like you in which case we started testing in 2021 and what are you going to do about it" added for accuracy. Must have been a version control snafu.
roystgnr
3mo ago
On the one hand, the Comanche territory didn't come within 500 miles of Austin until after they had Spanish-descended horses to conquer it with, and it's pretty ridiculous and racist for the bleeding-hearts to bemoan the fact that Texas doesn't belong to those conquerors rather than to their conquerors' conquerors. I'd paraphrase it as "Those Natives are all alike, right? Who cares when one of their tribes is dispossessed by another of their tribes; it's like flipping a two-headed coin!", except that would suggest a verbal rationalization and I doubt anyone made it past a non-verbal gut feeling.
On the other hand, despite the ridiculous intention of the land acknowledgement, I feel like the Comancheria people would have been the sort to appreciate what the land acknowledgement means de facto. "You took this land from us, and you're not giving it back, and you're so confident about your conquest that you're willing to rub it in, at public festivals, while our descendants live among you? Impressive. Kudos!"
roystgnr
8mo ago
Whoa, whoa. That $2.7B isn't what's being poured into the launch system, it's what's being poured into the launch tower. The money that's gone into SLS is more than ten times that (or a touch less if you don't adjust for inflation; development started in 2011).
To be fair, the Mobile Launcher 2 tower is indeed mobile, and its Ground Support Equipment includes plumbing for liquid hydrogen, a cryogenic that makes even other cryogenics look easy.
To be snarky, ML2 doesn't even have any giant robot arms.
roystgnr
11mo ago
There should be a lot of distance between "this is a bad shoot, the cop should be prosecuted" (maybe? but a pot of boiling water definitely counts as a threat of "great bodily harm"...) versus the hopefully less controversial "this is a bad shoot, the cop should never hold a gun again after being fired and his replacement should be trained much better". Screaming that you'll "shoot you right in your fucking face" is not how you deescalate the muttering person, screaming "drop the fucking pot" is not the order you give when you think that flying boiling water is a danger, and walking closer to the threat is not the way you keep everybody safe when you have a long range weapon and the threat is a heavy object held in the hands of a non-professional-shotputter.
roystgnr
2mo ago
The Comanche Wars article will helpfully add for context the fact that "they also shared parts of Comancheria with the Wichita, Kiowa, and Kiowa Apache" (for some value of "shared"...), and explains that those wars were because "The value of the Comanche traditional homeland was recognized by European-American colonists". They do say that the wars "began in 1706 with raids by Comanche warriors on the Spanish colonies of New Spain", but you have to find the article specifically about the Shoshone to learn that "Some of them moved as far south as Texas, emerging as the Comanche by 1700."
I still don't get why pushing for the moral legitimacy of the Comanche conquests is a thing. I'd think the idea of a "traditional homeland" should have deeper connotations than "we conquered your neighbors more than six years before we tried to conquer you too!"
roystgnr
8mo ago
it's just immediately taken for granted
It's funny when you see the SpaceX progress in this direction taken for granted even by critics of SpaceX. When they lost that booster on landing recently instead of being able to refly it for the 25th time, people started talking about how wasteful that was. Does nobody know what happens to every single rocket booster actively being flown by everyone other than SpaceX? Rocket Lab reflew one engine once, and they're hoping to refly a whole booster in the near future, but other than that? Vulcan? Splash. Long March? A cloud of toxic smoke next to a Chinese village. Artemis I? A multibillion dollar fish habitat.
roystgnr
7mo ago
Kamala Harris was a good candidate who ran a good campaign.
This interview was not of a good candidate who ran a good campaign. She was handed a damn multiple choice question with pre-written softball answers, and instead of just picking A over B, she wrote in Potato. If she'd been facing an opponent whose net approval rating doesn't hover around -10 then she would have lost in a landslide.
Though I wouldn't let the Republicans off the hook here either. Do they even have any nationally well-known politicians with a positive net approval rating?
roystgnr
10mo ago
Harris, I think just genuinely has a very different idea about what democracy means
She has a very different idea about what constitutional democracy means. Back during the pre-2020 Democratic primary debates, when Biden was trying to explain that an executive order could be unconstitutional, she was laughing at him for it and explaining that Congress not passing a law they want is sufficient reason for a Presidency to write it themselves.
He got worse after that, but I haven't seen evidence that she got any better.
roystgnr
8mo ago
HRC would never have gotten "deplorables" past a focus group, even if they'd missed all the other hints in her speeches that pointed in the same direction.
She had more than enough intelligence that she could have done a competent job without anyone double-checking her every word; her problem was that she was aware of her intelligence and she let that awareness fester into contempt rather than compassion for those not so endowed. That is a failure of character which she should have worked on, but of all the people in the world she was probably the most painfully aware that it's possible to be a great politician and a decent president without bothering to work on your failures of character. She just didn't realize that voters who will forgive failings like "contempt for your spouse" still won't forgive failings like "contempt for us". I think it was someone on TheMotte who pointed out that true meritocracy can be actually much worse than ending up with an incompetent candidate, if a competent person picked on merit would be using their competence in opposition to your values rather than in support of them.
roystgnr
11mo ago
And if you can't accept that, fuck you.
The demand to be able to curse anyone who disagrees with you with nothing to throttle you isn't really supporting the pro- "classic 'law-and-order' conservative" and anti- "demonize rather than argue" stance you're claiming here. The moderation here is correctly identifying some of your posts as bad, even when agreeing with your conclusions, because it actually is pro-order and pro-argument and anti-demonization.
roystgnr
11mo ago
I could easily imagine a strategist thinking "we don't need someone on that roof, we've already got snipers on two other roofs covering it", without thinking ahead to the snipers' dilemma of "there's someone on that roof now - is it one of the local cops from the building below? did our own plans change? just how suspicious does that guy have to look before I kill him?"
But the trouble is, that's not what the "strategist" reported thinking; her official thoughts were "That building in particular has a sloped roof, at its highest point. And so, there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside," and the trouble with those thoughts are that they are the most obviously false excuses that I've ever heard, and yes I am including all the "gosh he just fell out of that window" stories about Russian politicians. Sometimes people really do fall out of windows; at this point the odds are a quadrillion-to-one but who knows? But if you say you're keeping your teams off of roofs where the slope is too high, after there have already been many photos published of your teams at the same event on roofs with higher slopes, then that is an outright lie.
I still suspect that this lie was an attempt to cover up incompetence, not an attempt to cover up conspiracy - conspiracies being pre-planned, you'd expect one to come up with a less ridiculous cover story! - but lying in the middle of the investigation is still the point at which the failure here crosses the line from dereliction of duty to betrayal of it.
roystgnr
2mo ago
Humans don't even want political opinions that differ greatly from ours to exist. In a democracy those opinions might spread to the median voter and then be imposed on us against our will, and even in an oligarchy or autocracy there's always the chance that they will persuade the leaders or inspire a revolt against the leaders and then be imposed on us against our will. The use of language to navigate intratribal factionalism is probably older than homo sapiens. It's really hard to treat a question dispassionately as an intellectual issue, rather than as a signifier of loyalties, when everything we think and feel screams that there might be too much at stake.
Consider LessWrong, possibly the most concentrated population of high-functioning autists intelligent high-decoupling people on the internet, people deliberately trying to learn how to better discuss issues rationally in an unbiased fashion, the sort of "hey, I see what the problem is" people that normies joke about: their main conclusion about politics was that anybody who wanted to apply their intellect to any other issue should talk about politics as little as possible in the process.
If you want to apply your intellect to politics, though, where do you go? Well, here I am, I guess? I wish the place was more popular among thoughtful left-wing participants, and maybe there's some way to improve that, but in the meantime I'd rather be somewhere that often repels people with opposing views than somewhere that often expels them.
I think a more subtle issue (though I hesitate to call it a problem) here is that we also select for a particular subset of right-wing participants. Obviously anyone who's a Witch on one issue or another has reason to come to a place like this they won't be expelled from, but also there's a bit of strain between @Goodguy's claims of "assume that social conservatism is correct" and "wordily show-offy". At least 5 years ago, the modal Motte survey respondant was "ambivalent about religion, seeing it as a weak force for good", but that's reflective of a very peculiarly modern type of "conservative". At least in the US (also a modal Motte user characteristic in that survey), the modal social conservative is instead one of the 40% of Americans who would agree that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so". I know there are a number of faithful theists here, but in all the random discussions I've seen of anthropology and human genetics and so on I've never seen anyone jump in with the "no, it wasn't a parable, the first humans were created from clay 6kya" rebuttal that's a plurality belief among Americans. I'm not really interested in rehashing (from my perspective) that debate, but I hope that people are here who would be on the other side and are simply avoiding bringing it up for similar reasons, because that's still a huge and politically important mass of people, whom we can't avoid talking about, and whom I'd therefore like to occasionally be talking to.
roystgnr
8mo ago
we mostly grew up with the idea that we might live in a two-party system with drastically opposing ideas
Where by "we" you mean the first world, anyway. I saved this pamphlet excerpt explaining the idea as soon as I read it for the first time:
"One of the most difficult concepts for some to accept, especially in nations where the transition of power has historically taken place at the point of a gun, is that of the "loyal opposition." This idea is a vital one, however. It means, in essence, that all sides in a democracy share a common commitment to its basic values. Political competitors don't necessarily have to like each other, but they must tolerate one another and acknowledge that each has a legitimate and important role to play. Moreover, the ground rules of the society must encourage tolerance and civility in public debate.
When the election is over, the losers accept the judgment of the voters. If the incumbent party loses, it turns over power peacefully. No matter who wins, both sides agree to cooperate in solving the common problems of the society. The opposition continues to participate in public life with the knowledge that its role is essential in any democracy. It is loyal not to the specific policies of the government, but to the fundamental legitimacy of the state and to the democratic process itself." - "What is Democracy?", U.S. Department of State
Great lesson to teach the democratizing developing world, but we might want to start printing up extra copies to hand out to other Americans too.
roystgnr
10mo ago
insult, if it even is one
Your alternative theory is that Walz is praising what a maverick and iconoclast Trump is?
"Weird" used to be something we could rely on the (American, at least) left defending, sure. All hail the outlaws, Spielbergs and Kubricks! Keep Austin Weird! We just commemorated the 25th anniversary of "The Weird Al Show" with the release of "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"! "Queer" has been reclaimed as a term of pride!
Seeing how many people are eager to throw that attitude away now that the left is on top is a gross, Orwellian, "Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others" betrayal. It's throwing every actually-weird kid out there under the bus just to score a few political points. I used to think that seeing Animal Farm as a universal story made me a big cynical skeptic, unsurprised at how movements will throw away their support for the little people after they get solidly entrenched in power, but I'm still dumbfounded at watching people throw away principles as a way to push their polling lead above 2%.
I hope it's a flash-in-the-pan meme, not true newly-bipartisan support for anti-weirdness. Imagine how much harder it's going to be to dissuade bullying in the future if it becomes clear that so many victims weren't upset because they were righteous, they were just upset because they were envious.
I haven't been this disappointed since I discovered how many fellows on the anti-censoring-Communists left weren't strongly anti-censorship but rather just pro-censorship and pro-Communism.
roystgnr
3mo ago
There's a quip about literacy, usually misattributed to Twain, that goes something like "The person who does not read has no advantage over the person who cannot read."
IMHO the same applies more strongly to numeracy. I would dare to hope that Starmer et. al., at least passed Algebra, and perhaps Calculus ... but what even was the point, if, when they have concerns that can be informed by mere arithmetic, they don't even consider using that? I'd like to offer kudos to you for offering a better analysis than I've seen so far from politicians or journalists, but I wish that were a greater compliment than it is.
roystgnr
5mo ago
Elon's choice of hand gestures last week were probably a spastic/autistic mistake that should be ignored, possibly a 4chan-mentality troll that should be disdained, but almost certainly not a Neo-Nazi signal that should be feared. Social skills are not up his alley and being cheered by huge crowds is a bit new to him and this isn't the first time he's flailed around on stage like a 5 year old with too much candy, it was just the first time the shape of the flailing was something that could trigger left-QAnon.
But Elon's choice of wording in that tweet, I can't think of any excuses for. Managing an orbital launch provider is up his alley. He knows those astronauts aren't stranded and are able to leave at any time (on his company's capsule!) in an emergency. He knows that when they were semi-stranded (the Starliner made it home unpiloted fine, just with a level of risk that was unacceptable for humans) it was Boeing's fault, not Biden's. He knows SpaceX was already made Plan A to bring those astronauts back, before the Biden administration ended, and they're just waiting for the next crew rotation. He knows they haven't been there "so long" compared to other ISS long-term crew stays (though this one I would just call a "distortion" rather than a lie; they have been up there quite long compared to their original quick out-and-back plans). And he knows that the last couple months of delay are due to a SpaceX delay, with the new Dragon capsule for Crew-10 taking a little longer to finish than planned.
For years Musk seemed to be somewhat resistant to even the powerful brain-melting effects of Twitter discourse. I'm not sure what combination of MAGA-inner-circle discourse and way-too-much-Twitter discourse and too-much-Ketamine discourse has finally gotten to him, but I wish he'd snap out of it and back away from whatever it is.
roystgnr
8d ago
In 2025 no one is getting a struggle session for DND.
Sure they are; the struggle sessions are just run by the left now.
roystgnr
29d ago
Generation X appears to be sitting on their 3% mortgages very, very quietly.
2.25% (15y refinance), and I won't shut up about it!
(You've got to let me have this one; in hindsight the biggest financial decision of my life was "I guess gwern makes some good points about this 'bitcoin' thing, but I just can't bring myself to buy any fake money tokens for nearly a dollar a piece!")
roystgnr
1mo ago
They kept track of death rates among the unvaccinated vs vaccinated (vs boosted, etc.), and it definitely looked like you wanted to be in the group whose first exposure to Covid spikes was of the artificial, non-exponentially-reproducing variety. Vaccine effectivity dropped off with time fast enough that there was no way to stop the disease from spreading, but at least we might have somewhat reduced the fatality rate from more of those first virgin exposures.
The obvious problem with those numbers is that this was anything but a Randomized Controlled Trial, and who knows what other differences those population groups had. IIRC I could find the data age-adjusted, but not controlled for anything else. There's a paradox where, if you tell everybody that e.g. square dancers live longer, you may soon find that square dancers really do live longer, not because it's better than other forms of exercise or whatever, but because now all the people who are doing a lot of other things to take care of their health have started square dancing too. Perhaps people who resisted taking a Covid vaccine are more oppositional toward other sorts of public health recommendations too, either with regard to Covid (letting themselves be exposed more easily) or to other contributing factors (obesity, smoking, "toughing out" serious infections, whatever).
The more subtle problem is that it's hard to tell how Covid-19 would have evolved in the presence of a more universally vaccinated population. Death rates fell way off with the Omicron variant, but would the virus inevitably have evolved in the same way at the same speed?
All I get is, "Of course they worked, it's obvious. You're stupid."
Ask if they think the FDA should have allowed the vaccine to be freely distributed and/or sold after it was first invented, in March 2020, without spending the next several months waiting on slow-but-legally-mandated testing methods and FDA approval before they could ramp up production. It's a little hard to get up on a "not trusting the system and taking the vaccine makes you a stupid anti-vaxxer" high horse when nearly half of the US deaths came during a time period when the system would have jailed anyone who gave you the vaccine.
roystgnr
9mo ago
I take it you missed the dialogue about that solution? If you're wise you'll remain ignorant and stop reading this comment now.
Okay, but don't say I didn't warn you.
Wired tried to explain that although "some white users worry that calling attention to their race by texting a pale high five (or worse, a raised fist) might be construed as celebrating or flaunting it", "The yellow emoji feels almost like claiming, “I don't see race,” that dubious shibboleth of post-racial politics, in which the ostensible desire to transcend racism often conceals a more insidious desire to avoid having to contend with its burdens."
And NPR let you know that, although "some white people may stick with the yellow emoji because they don't want to assert their privilege by adding a light-skinned emoji to a text", "there was a default in society to associate whiteness with being raceless, and the emojis gave white people an option to make their race explicit", so even if you're "just exhausted [from] having to do that. Many people of color have to do that every day and are confronted with race every day" - so is it really fair for you to get to ignore it?
Indeed, "the default yellow is indelibly linked to The Simpsons, which used that tone solely for Caucasian characters (those of other races, like Apu and Dr. Hibbert, were shades of brown)."
(No mention of the other characters who were non-Caucasian and yellow or lighter, for some reason.)
roystgnr
10mo ago
I mean just look at this graph:
Wow. The launch industry divides pretty evenly 9 ways now, huh? There's "everybody else in the world combined", there's China, then there's "SpaceX on Sundays", "SpaceX on Mondays", and so on.
roystgnr
30d ago
my tentative conclusion is that they were fine with cannons
One of the coolest parts in Paine's "Common Sense" was the suggestion that we could get by without a standing navy if only we subsidized merchant ships who use some of their cargo space for cannons, to deter piracy without a dedicated navy but also to make it possible to organize a dedicated navy quickly in the event of war. The question wasn't "should people be allowed to own cannons?", it was "are we getting enough of the positive externalities of people owning cannons?"
There was a wonderful period in between the ancient "Divine Right of Kings" and the modern "Divine Right of Governments" where intellectuals seemed comfortable with the idea that governments are just made of people. Five years ago I'd hoped the left might get back to that point, since "Defund The Police (who can't be trusted) but also Ban Guns (using Police, the only ones who can be trusted with guns)" is just too clearly oxymoronic, but in hindsight my definition of "clearly" may have been overly expansive. English grammar doesn't have the concept of "transitive adverbs", which is a shame since English vocabulary has transitive adverbs.
Arguably the primary targets are boys just becoming men. From an example published a few days ago:
(after similar anecdotes about 9 other prestige outlets)
The chief editor of the New Yorker is still a white American man, mind you. He replaced a woman in 1998 (back when that was still more unremarkable than Problematic) and he's probably still safe there today. If you try to take away an old man's job then you're certain to engender conflict with a powerful man. If you take young men's jobs before their careers really get started, the young men tend to just go away and find a different career. It might take a decade before people even start to notice.
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