sansampersamp
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User ID: 751
sansampersamp
8mo ago
Somewhat symmetrically, does the WSJ follow-up with woman where she states the cat returned alive and well after this report was made change your view?
sansampersamp
8mo ago
It has been fairly devastating. I grew up camping around Australia's top end, across the Litchfield tabletop plateau and Kakadu escarpment and floodplains. True frontier country. Before the cane toads made their way up from Queensland, we often saw quolls poking around the firelight edge. When the cane toads first arrived, they were scarily thick on the ground, you couldn't go for a piss in the night without seeing four of them (and this is in remote, wild areas -- not constrained to places with human activity). You see fewer cane toads now, since the monitors, kites and wedgies learned to flip them over and eat them safely, but I never saw a quoll again.
sansampersamp
8mo ago
That's an odd reading of yud there. Rats pull heavily from game theory and a (perhaps the) prototypical game theory question is how to avoid losing the prisoner's dilemma. Continually hitting the defect button is losing. You are flushing utils down the toilet. If a rationalist should win here, they should find ways to obtain credible pre-commitments and not ferret around for a way to get one over down the line.
sansampersamp
8mo ago
seeing voting as a general public duty of all citizens also helps sidestep some of the cynical and destructive framing that the ideal voting system is one that permits votes from those sympathetic to you and prevents votes from those who are not
besides simple access, voting day holidays also help enshrine the importance of the vote and strengthen the sense of community beyond politics. Also on a more pragmatic level it solves the polling location issue because you can use public schools
sansampersamp
8mo ago
first bloody them and then offer them generous peace and allow them to save face or beat them up really badly and punish them with harsh punitive peace
..
the worst of the two approaches - punitive peace with no real enforcement mechanism
You're correct that 'peace without victory' was an utterly unworkable ambition, but compounding this sin the US then largely acted to undermine attempts to enforce German debts at the same time it called in the debts owed to the US by its allies. Part of this was buying too much into Keynes' doomsaying book, and part was early cold war posturing and power balancing, but at the end of the day Versailles was hardly excessive or vindictive and it was eminently reasonable that France should seek reparations having borne all the destruction while the war's loser got off comparatively lightly. It was modest compared to the treaty of Brest-Litovsk Germany had enforced on Russia the year prior (german gains in land and population here far outstripped what they lost in Versailles) , and should be seen partly in reaction to the 3B franc indemnity imposed by Germany on France in 1871. Per Stephen Shuker, it's likely Germany ended up paying no net reparations at all, having paid its immediate bills with American loans that were subsequently defaulted on in the Great Recession. Contra Keynes, who believed that Germany could not afford the ~2B marks per year for 30 years, Mantoux estimated German rearmament spending as exceeding that seven times over for each each year between 1933 and 1939.
Sally Marks' Myths of Reparations identifies two main failures in the allied prosecution of Versailles. The first was enforcement as you mention, but the second was the failure to make it clear to the German people (who again, had lost a colossal war escaping most of the destruction) the psychological reality of their defeat: “An Allied march down the Unter den Linden would have humiliated Germany briefly, but in retrospect that might have been a small price to pay”.
sansampersamp
8mo ago
The low probability of your vote being decisive is obviously balanced by the enormous (world-historical) impact in the case that your vote is decisive. Besides, you aren't the only player of this game, and a party losing an election by 20 points has obvious implications for that party's assessment of it's positioning and strategy in the next election, that a loss by 2 points does not, even if the electoral outcome is nominally the same.
sansampersamp
8mo ago
I believe voting is a duty and I'm happy it is compulsory in Australia. The simplest argument is that:
- The legitimacy of the government is a public good, from which other public goods (safety, unity, prosperity) flow
- Democratically elected governments are legitimated through democratic participation and definite mandates across actual majorities in the population
- You have a general duty to further the public good in scenarios where one can do so at little cost to oneself
- You have a duty to vote
Broader majorities are also better for political operation and discourse. The unactivated voter is less interested in ideological marginalia and more interested in simple material concerns: jobs, crime, schools, security in retirement and so on. Political messaging in high turnout environments must convince the median citizen that his interests are best served by voting in one way or another. A politics of low turnouts is a politics where messaging seeks not to convince the unaligned, but to drive turnout among those nominally on your side already, which means escalating the perceived stakes beyond reason, deference to single-issue groups with GOTV infra, ballooning campaign budgets, and the time spent fundraising to feed them.
sansampersamp
8mo ago
Solar panels and battery with an islandable inverter that you can physically disconnect from the grid. EMP shielding won't do much if your electrical assets are on the wrong end of 100MV of induced transmission wire.
sansampersamp
9mo ago
Imagine that the electorate of a democratic country (call it Exemplavania) comprises two political groups, A and B, constituting 40% and 60% of the electorate respectively. As a result, Exemplavania's government is run largely in accordance with the interests of group B. However, group A is significantly more powerful than group B in terms of its capacity for violence. Under what circumstances is this arrangement sustainable?
I mean the obvious one here is that the vast majority of people in group A are loyally partnered with people in group B above and beyond abstract political commitments, though it's funny that "people care about their spouses" is an observation that has somehow failed to enter into the calculus here.
If you follow the political science lit and consider political cohesion and group conciousness as downstream of linked fate, it's going to take something drastic for an individual to see their fate as linked more to their sex or political party than their family unit.
sansampersamp
11mo ago
Was this justified along notionally originalist grounds? I know the role of president was a democratic palette-swapping out of the king to some extent, but sovereign immunity is easier to write off when those who enjoy it are alienated from actual political power/legitimacy.
sansampersamp
11mo ago
My admittedly light reading into it is that a lot of the consternation about exercise not yielding particularly encouraging fat-burning benefits for the effort is really only relevant for high-intensity exercise. Returns diminish hard beyond zone 2, so the platonic ideal exercise for weight loss is high-volume but relatively gentle and non-strenuous. In fact higher intensities may even yield negative returns to the extent longer recovery time cuts into time you could just be back on the bike, or probably more realistically as a weight-loss prescription, cause unfit people to bounce off it as unpleasant.
Diet-wise, though, I think it's easy to project your normal onto others. I'm similarly pretty lax about what we cook (I barely flinched at the insane amount of butter one apparently needs to make a good syrup for crepes suzette a few days back) but on the other hand it is largely all cooked by us. We just never have oreos etc in the house or are in the habit of 'snacking' in general -- the idea of a midnight snack is a bit odd to me, but some people clearly do otherwise.
sansampersamp
11mo ago
there are a few rivers near port hedland which has rail connections to the major pilbara ore mines
sansampersamp
11mo ago
yeah, a bayesian network lets you just specify the conditional probabilities directly between nodes (nodes being character features here).
https://pgmpy.org/detailed_notebooks/2.%20Bayesian%20Networks.html
While I'm inclined to agree with shamilton's take here that high renewable mix makes nuclear less likely to be economically feasible, not more, I do wonder if there's a play to stick a reactor in the pilbara to run an electric arc furnace. No one would care out there and it helps cut the primary fp knot of Australia being the only producer of iron ore worth talking about and China being the only buyer.
sansampersamp
11mo ago
IRV is simpler to tally and audit in low-tech scenarios because the votes themselves are the physical record of the count, an advantage it shares with FPTP. In FPTP, you sort and bundle votes into e.g rubber bands of 20 and boxes of 1000. You can easily verify a count by checking that a box indeed contains 1000 votes, and they've been sorted appropriately. It's easy to update your count report just by seeing you have X boxes and Y bands.
Approval voting, Score, Borda etc require you to maintain a store of the counts independent of the physical ballots, which introduces more room for human error and complicates recounts/verification. You need to increment up to N counts for a race with N candidates, and even approval voting has 2^N-1 ballot variations that complicates sorting.
If you're thinking of terms of low-tech boxes and counting processes, IRV is an intuitive extension of FPTP because you're just opening up eliminated boxes and resorting them. Practically, it's rare for this process to go particularly deep or be particularly sensitive, and the count of votes rarely exceeds twice the votes cast.
I think we're now able to have do much better than IRV and I think there are potentially clever ways you could do tear-off perforated ballots to make the counts under approval/range more reliable, but a lot of (sometimes conspiratorial) questions about the popularity of IRV miss that it was an intuitive and practical solution at the time. If Australian preschoolers can vote on schoolyard activities with IRV, I'm sure American adults can manage.
sansampersamp
11mo ago
In my view, elections do not improve governments by selecting high quality leaders, but by increasing the legitimacy of power
Big reason I'm a fan of compulsory voting (though I think it does moderate politics as well)
sansampersamp
11mo ago
That shouldn't matter, even if you have e.g. 45% D, 30% R, 15% L, 10% C in first preferences, minor parties get eliminated first and their votes are added to the R tally.
sansampersamp
11mo ago
Convincing them that voting constitution or libertarian is a valid option would throw races to the democrats where normally republicans are guaranteed to win.
Presuming they preference republicans ahead of dems, what is the assumed mechanism for this?
sansampersamp
11mo ago
Ranked Choice Voting describes a kind of ballot design where candidates are preferentially ranked, Instant-Runoff Voting describes one way to decide a winner from such ballots.
Australia's had RCV/IRV for federal elections since 1918, and voting in federal elections has been compulsory since 1925, so it's been around a while. There's definitely better ways to decide winners than IRV from a theoretic, Bayesian regret perspective, but what's often missed about the historical popularity of IRV (and particularly its enduring path-contingency in Australia) is that it's dead simple to administer and tally compared to otherwise better methods such as approval/range. IRV solves (or solved) many of the complexities handling preferential voting in simultaneous counts across multiple voting locations in an auditable, non-destructive way (which remains one of the advantages of FPTP, for that matter). Relatedly, Australia's always voted and counted by hand (no voting/counting machines) and has generally done so quite efficiently.
It's a perennial topic that tracks the election cycle, can't say I've noticed it getting particularly more air time this go around. While there have been a few higher-profile instances of election swinging against dems seemingly contingent on certain third party candidates, I don't think it would broadly advantage one party over another in any enduring sense. As long as gun rights and tax are highly salient and polarised (and as weed becomes less salient), I'd imagine most libertarians would preference the GOP even as Green party voters would preference the dems. The net result would likely be a wash, and the bigger impact would be intra-party, e.g. moderating dems by letting them shed extreme positions to a clientalised periphery.
So I don't think the partisan appeal of RCV/IRV tracks strategic advantage necessarily and is mostly just borne by cultural affinities where lib educated types are more interested in theorycrafting on the government as an institution and happier to knock over fences doing so.
The fact that it's largely an affectation of educated wonk types rather than strategically advantaging dems qua dems means that it's actually one of those issues that may be easier to implement obliquely/non-politically in a cross-partisan way, to the extent that wonkish types are relatively more present in the republican electeds than their base.
Yes, but part of that is the tools they have available. Trumps cabinet had the option of being obsequious or resigning, and without any real mechanism for removing him that didn't involve cosigning with the dems, they spent their energies on ever more creative legal theories on his criminal immunity as if he's Louis XVI. Australian politics proves if you give a politician a knife, they'll happily stick it someone's back, and while they can obviously get a bit stab-happy it's a genuine boon to have the privileges of leadership be conditional on the continual, sustained confidence of the led.
American journos are certainly more timid and status/access-conscious than Australians, which is why Jonathan Swan's interview stood out so much, and I'd definitely put that down to cultural over structural factors, so I'm sure there's a bit of both at play.
Reminds me of a presser I went to with Madeleine Albright and Julia Gillard in Sydney ages back. Questions addressed to Madeleine Albright, per her aide, should be prefaced only with 'Madam Secretary'. Questions directed to the prime minister, of course, were addressed to 'Julia'. It's hardly as simple as one country being more deferent to authority than the other.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
yeah, Australia also lacks the paranoid style, but that's always been idiosyncratically american in the anglosphere, going back to Hofstadter's 1964 essay and probably beyond
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Yeah, I think failure to model differences in culture and the political incentives at play led to a lot of bad external predictions. In reality the lockdowns were stop-start in response to new infections being detected. It wasn't surprising domestically to see covid powers dialled back because it had essentially already happened a few times by that point (and the publicly accepted rationale was buying time for vaccines)
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Better in what sense? The political discourse is absolutely better, and I would say our political institutions are much more stable and effective at the general business of government: running elections, writing and enforcing laws, handling the myriad edge cases and emergent problems that crop up constantly in complex systems.
Australians are more culturally authoritarian than Americans in one sense, but there is less perceived distance between citizenry and government. Where in the US the government is seen as oppositional to the citizenry in many respects (independent of party affiliation, e.g. with cops) and must be constrained via various 'checks and balances', an armed citizenry and so on, authoritarian stances taken by Australian government are parsed domestically as Australian society exerting its will over itself. This difference in perspective is why you had many people in the US (including some on this forum) convinced that the Australian government would never end Covid restrictions or freely give up Covid-era powers, and that our politicians who implemented lockdowns would pay a steep political price for it.
I don't think someone would need a particularly high reading grade level to understand that statement, is this what one would expect someone with low reading grade would take way from Eisenman? Eisenman is saying that comfort and harmony do not constitute the totality of either aesthetic preference or human experience, and just like someone might listen to metal or prefer picasso to kinkade, buildings may accomodate and respond to a broader spectrum of experience. Eisenman's most famous work is the holocaust memorial in Berlin, and it's a good example of both a deconstructive minimalism (removal of ornament and complex form for simple geometry), and pursuit of typically discomfiting vibes: instability, envelopment, angularity. Stripping away detail raises the salience of other aspects of the way the memorial is experienced, e.g. the way the acoustics narrow and quiet, and how temperatures drop as you descend, and how your descent has no clean demarcation between inside and outside, over and under. How the relation to other visitors shifts from the communal ("I am one of visible dozens visiting the memorial") to the incidental ("I bumped into a specific other visitor, who then turned the other way and is again out of sight"). Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial achieves a similar minimalism that is well suited to these kind of structures, which accomodate what Etlin called a 'space of absence' -- visitors can interact with what isn't there, or against what they may have expected to be there. What is appropriate for recognition of tragedy is not necessarily what is appropriate for the home, but our lives have tragedy in them and one of the most difficult and essential functions of art is to articulate and reconcile us to that tragedy.
The first result I see for your 'brutalist high school' search is this Nikken Sekkei project. My own high school's gymnasium was a massive concrete aggregate structure repurposed from a 1917 abattoir, so I am open to arguments my aesthetic baseline is not standard here, but I'd expect kids to mostly regard the scarred-meteor interior there as incredibly cool.
Philosophical perspectives in architecture have also largely moved on from Eisenman's deconstructive minimalism in the (an) opposite direction somewhat towards Heidegger's object-relational ontology/phenomenology via Harman. See Mark Foster Gage's Killing Simplicity.
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