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sansampersamp


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That's not the correct way to calculate your posterior. The probability that hydrate plugs are to blame given that the pipeline has indeed blown up should be very high.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You could have looked harder




That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers.




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
An attempt to publicly verify some of the few specifics that can be verified, specifically that the explosives were set during Baltops via an Alta-class minesweeper (of which Norway has three) and that the explosions were triggered by a Boeing P-8 (of which Norway has five). The vehicles' positions at the time (accessible via historical ADS-B and AIS records) don't line up with their claimed use.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I hadn't seen this the last time I looked into the hydrate plug thing, but it seems pretty dispositive?




The Swedish claims are largely why I've adjusted my view of the hydrate stuff down from maybe 60% to 40%. I don't think it's enough to discount it completely, just because the details from the Swedish Public Prosecutor (Mats Ljungqvist) at the investigating authority (aklagare.se) have been pretty woeful. It's been impossible to find anything substantive even going through all the swedish language reports.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Per my other comment, I'd expect the pipes on the seafloor to be at >10,000 kPa at <5C, sufficient for hydrate formation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Looks like under about 4-5 MPa you are safe




Seafloor temperatures in the Baltic Sea can be about 0-5C, so you may be looking at the wrong part of the graph. From here, you have an average gas pressure of 16,300 kPa and temperature of 5C, which puts you clear above the line. (in the average case, to say nothing of in extremis)


This article also says that the rupture was found when pressure in NS-2 dropped from "dropped from 105 to 7 bar overnight". 10,500 kPa at 5C.




But the hydrate plug thing was also promoted only by basically one I-am-very-smart type IIRC?




If you want independent, pre-2022 corroboration that this is indeed a thing, you can see here


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think any of my hypotheses for the NS incident are above 50% probability, tbh, which is not a particularly confident place to reason from. Accidental clathrate gun is like 40%, some combination of West state actors is like 30%, leaving another 10% each for Ukraine, non-state actor explanations, and  Russian sabotage. Despite the ink here on sonic buoy-activated detonators, nothing about this necessitates a particularly complex or expensive operation. I do think that conditional on the US being behind it, it is unlikely that Germany was not also in on it. It cuts through a particularly thorny knot for German leadership, taking a decision out of their hands that had no good political options. It also could have been an unwritten part of the July 2021 agreement reached between the US and Germany that had Germany commit to decertifying the pipelines in the event of Russian invasion.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The pipe was pressurised with gas (which was almost certainly very slushy in parts). If the Russians wanted to make sure that the pipe was in a ready-to-supply state (or if some gazprom official had been making representations this had been the case), plugs are cleared through careful depressurisation and slowly melting them. Depressuring unilaterally too quickly could create a pressure gradient over any hydrate plugs and accelerate them off down the pipe.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Look up the compressibility of methane hydrate.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I don't think the blockage theory can explain N.S. II blowing up -- wasn't it non-operational at the time?




The hydrate plug theory is basically that leaving a pipe non-operational for a long time and then trying to unilaterally unplug it was rolling the dice on spectacular failure.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There was a bit of a discussion back then on how it was fairly difficult to simultaneously predict that:


    

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    Russia would imminently invade
    

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    It would go incredibly poorly for them
    

    • 



Though the people who were well calibrated against both these were perhaps unsurprisingly, the blob and blob-adjacent boomer types with the Janes subscriptions.


In terms of credibility signals, I hardly care about Getting It Wrong as much as I do the endless cope and dissembling, claiming that the eschaton is coming the next month or the next, and how much do we really know &c &c.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 8, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My Euro grand tour a few years back was 9 months, with the following itinerary (many stops to see friends or travel along with others for a small stretch):


1. Paris, 2. Versailles, 3. Amsterdam, 4. Haarlem, 5. Berlin, 6. Prague, 7. Budapest, 8. Vienna, 9. Florence, 10. Venice, 11. Rome, 12. Split, 13. Hvar, 14. Ljubljana, 15. Bled, 16. Munich, 17. Antwerp, 18. Brussels, 19. London, 20. York, 21. Edinburgh, 22. Copenhagen, 23. Hamburg, 24. Basel, 25. Dijon, 26. Lyon, 27. Marseille, 28. Nice, 29. Monaco, 30. Eze, 31. Zurich, 32. Jerusalem, 33. Tel Aviv, 34. Barcelona, 35. Lisbon, 36. Bordeaux, 37. Paris





Stops 1 through 11 were done over a couple of months in a group of five, who were on that tighter timeline. I think it works pretty well, and we did exclusively trains for that section.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I believe Elon bought Twitter cause he saw the potential for Twitter to be a powerful center for civic discourse




I don't really think you can square the vision of Elon as particularly ideological (for free speech, technolibertarianism or whatever else) with a lot of the revealed policy decisions, and this includes actions and positions before the Twitter acquisition. At the end of the day, he's just not a particularly ideologically committed person. He'd like to be seen as such, and post-rationalises a lot of his decisions in that frame, but the underlying interests just seem like the usual, not-very-deep collection of personal and material.


This isn't a case of Elon setting a new policy, and then the policy being enforced. Elon's hitting the button himself after some personal slight or bad experience and then the policy is hastily written after the fact. See elonjet or the various journos getting knocked off (even taking spaces itself down). Before this, look at the breaking point for him on Covid policies (e.g. shutting down his factories), or with Trump's council of advisors, or his unwillingness to extend his supposed free speech principles to criticisms of China. Hell, he's now picking up the crusade against the independence of the federal reserve -- which he'll wrap in some principle or another but really comes down to the dire serviceability of the Twitter debt.


The main reason he initially bought Twitter wasn't altruistic, it was because the company was stagnant and overstaffed  and had leadership that was largely content with that. For various reasons, Elon's succeeded in wringing significantly more productivity per dollar out of expensive tech talent in other domains. Now it turns out he's massively overpaid and is looking to offload shares at the original purchase price to various MENA autocrats.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 4, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So far I've used it for:


    

  1. 

    Lesson plans (mock trial of Odysseus)
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Supplying grant application filler
    

    3. 

  3. 

    Automate some accounting forensic tasks (what is this transaction)
    

    4. 

  4. 

    Poking around some quantum physics concepts for hard sci-fi worldbuilding
    

    5. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm in one such 'comparable' country, Australia, and voter ID is not mandatory (you don't need an ID to board a domestic flight either, which is nice).


One aspect in which the Australian political system is more unique, however, is the fact that everyone is obliged to vote in each federal, state, and local election. There are many benefits to this (overall it lowers the temperature and mitigates extremism while making mandates meaningful), but institutionally, one of the biggest is that the corrosive debate over who should be 'entitled' to vote does not exist. The vote should be sacralised to be beyond base, Machiavellian partisan machinations.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not sure what the import of what felons were historically able to do is -- historically most of any kind of person would not be able to vote, if anyone could vote at all.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				USA Election Day 2022 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
midterms, not presidential


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 13, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The recurring theme seems to be that it's a less than optimal way to counterbalance frictions in the voting process that don't exist in countries with more efficient elections. If there was much less on the ballot to vote on, and if polls could be provided with sufficient density on a weekend, the case for universal mail voting would be less likely to stack up.


Related to the point around 'dramatically increasing election funding' per @urquan below, a lot of what reduces the number of polling places on the margin, is the cost of hiring venues for each new location. Moving elections to the weekend makes it vastly easier to cheaply expand polling places, because you can use basically every public school at cost, which are already ideally distributed across the electorate.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 13, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
nouning


(ironically 'nouning' is an example of verbing)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 13, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Once immigration from the subcontinent reaches a critical point, hopefully you'd start seeing cricket become the new sport du jour. Where the gentlemanly pace of the traditional formats might be offputting, the T20 format is more amphetemised than baseball.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				USA Election Day 2022 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
apologies for misreading your reddit post then


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				USA Election Day 2022 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I agree that it didn't come out of the blue on 2016, though I'd consider the view that it is largely a reaction to 2012 to be an agreement that it is actually quite recent.


For all the hay made of The Party Decides that became fodder for Getting It Wrong come 2016, to actually drop the conspiratorial lens on all the DNC leaks paints a picture of an astoundingly ineffectual institution.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				USA Election Day 2022 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
On what point? That 2016 was a significant inflection point or that centralised control under the dems were not also weak (but perhaps stronger than today). Your linked post largely agrees on the importance of 2016 (even if painting it as the apotheosis of an ongoing trend) and doesn't address symmetries or lack thereof.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				USA Election Day 2022 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not sure there was that much difference between them before 2016. The DNC is by no means a kingmaker either, and the experience with Sanders' campaigns has only served to weaken it further. Of course, both parties are astoundingly weak compared to peer countries'.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				USA Election Day 2022 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Just another reason why primaries are a bit of a mess. Strong party elites who can clear the field of detritus straightforwardly improve their party's chance of winning, but what little control the GOP once had over the process has evaporated post 2016.