sansampersamp
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User ID: 751
sansampersamp
1yr ago
It may be preferable to have the democratic legitimation of the government to be a foregone conclusion, but as political actors have interests that extend beyond simple legitimacy I think we'd still be stuck with political campaigners for the time being.
While there are various obvious ways you can reduce the number of people who are statistically disenfranchised, for want of a better term, I think less examined is the way this can be compensated for to reduce alienation. It's not like parliamentary systems don't have safe seats.
Yes, though if you model political discourse across parties, politicians, media and voters as the emergent aggregation of various goal-oriented strategic activities to win elections and sway policy, then that discourse is constrained by political structures. These political structures mediate how different kinds of moves in the discursive space actually achieve political ends and which are more useful than others. My larger point above is that the US has political structures which incentivises various rhetorical moves which result in a political discourse that is particularly annoying.
e.g. the sentiment that this election is of truly existential, catastrophic import makes strategic sense when a party's marginal voter is someone who already agrees/aligns with the party but needs to hit a certain activation threshold to actually cast a vote. Propagating this sentiment does not make sense if a party's marginal voter is going to vote regardless but whose alignment between parties can be competed for. The structural factor of compulsory voting impacts what political messaging is more viable (and this calculus applies not only to politicians and the media, but activists on twitter as well).
Leaving aside for now whether either approach is more generative of good policy outcomes and a functioning government, the latter is certainly less annoying.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Imagine how annoying they are if you'd prefer Biden to win.
One underrated thing about living in Australia with compulsory, ranked choice voting, is that our political discourse is blessedly free of this kind of self-indulgent signalling. We obviously have our own domestic foibles (per Walter Cronkite: too many journalists, not enough news) but more generally: structuralist comparative analyses of political discourses strikes me as something both rich and relatively understudied -- especially in wider conversations about polarisation, epistemic closure, radicalisation, new-media landscapes and so on. There's been some research on how the US primary system exerts a centrifugal force on candidates (e.g. adams/merrill), how polarisation necessarily sustains marginal turnout (e.g.), and so on but I haven't seen a holistic structuralist take on all the factors together in those conversations.
There's clearly some lensing/closure effects that makes these kind of sentiments in the US particularly annoying when mediated through social media and the Algorithm, but the actual underlying cause seems much more rooted in the inability of the political system to a) co-opt and recuperate extremists (or more broadly, those whose views aren't represented by mainstream parties) and b) handle and mitigate swathes of society whose potential votes are rendered statistically meaningless (both in reducing this alienation in absolute terms, and alleviating how it feels on the ground).
Australia has a few structural advantages in this regard that makes the political discourse significantly less annoying than America. RCV lets minor parties absorb fringe or special-interest positions, while necessarily funnelling their preferences inward to more major parties (effectively defuses the 'no one represents me' line and complaints about picking the lesser of two evils). Compulsory voting makes political expenditures targeted not at maintaining turnout in single-issue, activism-bound constituencies (abortion, guns, most obviously in the US) which allows these factions to be more effectively clientalised by major parties: ideological activism groups must be catered to in the US to avoid demoralising them as turnout engines. In Australia where they can't deliver turnout, these special-interest activism groups can be much more easily captured -- someone particularly interested in abortion might get upset when the libnats loosen access, but they're hardly going to preference labor over it.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
There's a bias towards the left-most response in likert scales, too (undoubtedly contingent on writing direction)
https://sci-hub.se/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pfi.21800
sansampersamp
1yr ago
The EMP pulse is an electric field pulse, up to 50,000 volts per meter for the nuke scenarios. The longer the wire, the greater the voltage differential over the wire (up to the depth of the field pulse as it passes over a few nanoseconds). The biggest risk to a house is this voltage built up over the electrical network hitting the house, heating up wires and destroying appliances.
A whole-house surge protector is the simplest investment here but even with that isolation, it'd take just a single stretch of 10m x 2mm gauge copper parallel to the electric field to hit 500kV and heat up by some 50 degrees c more or less instantly, which is enough to pose fire risks.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
That's one of the most absurd products I've seen. A diesel generator is going to be absolutely fine, it's the wiring in your house you need to worry about. Zero need for a faraday cage to be more complicated than a metal box, either.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
A lot of the structural issues might get enough of a consensus together if it comes off the back of an especially catastrophic failure. The (frequently observed) tendency for the US government to shut down is addressed more or less completely in other systems by this being a trigger for snap elections until a coalition can form capable of funding the government. Similarly you could imagine the executive excess and some of the more creative theories on presidential criminal immunity to be punctured if something truly egregious in a cross-partisan sense occurred.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Just preregistering their trades a week or so in advance would probably be sufficient.
Mandatory retirement ages seems like the least objectionable, lowest-touch policy that would reduce the impact of any singular sc appointment.
While it'd never get amendment consensus (though may not need it) I always liked the epps/sitaraman proposal of just appointing by default any circuit judge to the supreme court and randomly empanelling 9 of them to hear cases in a given timespan.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
The faster-paced discursive soul of the sub is in the daily discussion threads: https://neoliber.al/dt
Last I checked NL's daily discussion threads were actually by an order of magnitude the most active on all of reddit. The ping groups for special interests are part of that.
If your post wasn't posted to a ping group it'd be easy for it to get lost.
There's a post-ironic reclamation of the term over in /r/neoliberal which is similarly more on the 'state-capacity libertarianism' train (see tyler cowen) than austerity, though besides the austerity associations SEP has a fairly even-handed take. The sub's sidebar scratches the surface of the many attempts to navigate all the polysemy and pull out something coherent (see, e.g. genesis of a political swearword) but ideology would only be half of the coin. The other half would be the culture, particularly the internet-situated culture of it all which shares some genealogical roots with 2000s EA/rationalism/atheism/dev/techno-optimist blog culture but largely inflected via yimby/urbanism and the economics profession (the sub is a political shit-posty spinoff of /r/badeconomics). This differentiates them from the standard run-of-the-mill SSC readers by drawing much more from economists, particularly Acemoglu and Robinson in Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor (though SSC's anti-ancap faq remains seminal). There's a Fukuyamist thread running through there as well, that marks their foreign policy apart from the more isolationist tendencies typical to libertarianism.
For another angle, Liam Bright also identified the sub, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as a synecdoche for one of a few different trends in anglo-american analytic philosophy here.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
All of our major social welfare systems are under heavy load, including our infrastructure, education, and health care system.
I'd always assumed Australia and Canada had broadly similar skill-based immigration policies, so it's surprising for me to find out that the average Canadian immigrant makes less than a Canadian native when in Australia they typically have a wage premium.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
How quickly did you think that the story is entirely made up?
Here:
Working remotely at my parents house, I spent a year rising up in my firm, and then because of my niche knowledge set, I was recruited to become a Partner at a very large venture capital firm.
This trajectory strikes me as wildly low-probability for a socially reclusive remote 29-year-old, absent some impressive 'extra-curricular' excesses. Also 'very large' seems slightly off as a descriptor for a successful VC.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Villain character is revealed to be in fact a hologram projection. The real body is plugged into a big computer thingy - and you need to fight through all the villain's robot defences to get at the vulnerable meat and bones-self. Of course, once you get there the villain is different to how they portrayed themselves.
Will a cairn terrier be instrumental revealing the projection?
I read the parent post as trying to navigate character diversity without it being allegorical, but from the trans-allegorical perspective there are a few games that have already attempted something in that space, with the allegory being varyingly central/subtext. Celeste for example is canonically a trans narrative but is broadly more universal than that: climbing a mountain as allegory overcoming internal conflict and self-hatreds, first as running away and then as conquest/achievement.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I think it's worth considering that one of the most well-written games, by a considerable margin by my estimation, is the nigh-literary Disco Elysium. It's a game that doesn't shy away from ideological conflict, hell, ideological conflict is the game; it's the mechanics, it's the setting, it's the engine under the internal and external dialogue trees and conflicts. Hell, the pale functions less well as a climate change allegory than it functions as a manifestation of nation utterly drowning in ideology, until it all becomes static, noise, meaningless.
The characters are 'diverse' to be sure, but they're too real/inhabited to read as cynical box-ticking, so maybe the answer is just to create good art. If create good art and the characters are in honest service of that art, the internal narrative for their inclusion will be so compelling and self-evident that shoehorning them into culture war narratives will seem silly and reductive. It's when you don't have any reason for your cast choices that you invite a bit more scrutiny.
To sum up the options you've given here it seems pretty obvious based on what kind of game you want to make:
- If you want to make a game that is directly or allegorically about race, then race (or characteristic X) is necessarily salient and needs to be in there
- If you want to make a game that has deep world-building then characters arise naturally out of the world
- If the setting is shallow/incidental and there's no allegory then your character choices aren't grounded by in-world or thematic/allegorical considerations and your choice is arbitrary, in which case why not give yourself more character design space and give players a wider range of roles to inhabit (whether assonant/dissonant with their actual identities)
There are ways to develop sub-themes out of larger themes without making them full-blown allegories, too, e.g. there's room to explore transgender issues within transhumanist Deus Ex settings, that just add some colour/complexity/dimensionality to it with out going all the way.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
openmeteo has good keyless apis for such things
https://open-meteo.com/en/docs#latitude=44.0029&longitude=-69.6656&hourly=temperature_2m,dewpoint_2m
sansampersamp
1yr ago
a large bout of “military Keynesianism” and a major war would cure the country’s seemingly insurmountable economic problems
Keynes played no small role in the start of World War 2, but contrary to how this anonymous FDR advisor is supposedly invoking him here, it was due to his outsized concern with the economic destructiveness of the post-war order as being too harsh on Germany. The Economic Consequences of the Peace significantly shaped the perception of Versailles in the US as being incredibly unfair, though this was largely a myth. A young French economist, Étienne Mantoux demonstrated that Keynes' dire predictions had fallen apart almost immediately:
In opposition to Keynes he held that justice demanded that Germany should have paid for the whole damage caused by World War I, and he set out to prove that many of Keynes' forecasts were not verified by subsequent events. For example, Keynes believed European output in iron would decrease but by 1929 iron output in Europe was up 10% from the 1913 figure. Keynes predicted that German iron and steel output would decrease but by 1927 steel output increased by 30% and iron output increased by 38% from 1913 (within the pre-war borders). Keynes also argued that German coal mining efficiency would decrease but labour efficiency by 1929 had increased on the 1913 figure by 30%. ...
Keynes also believed that Germany would be unable to pay the 2 billion marks-plus in reparations for the next 30 years, but Mantoux contends that German rearmament spending was seven times as much as that figure in each year between 1933 and 1939.
Despite this, Keynes' book became a significant influence on the subsequent post-war policy of the United States, to strip back many of the reparations owed by Germany. This both enabled Germany's rearmament while lending credence to false, conspiratorial narratives of economic persecution. Summed up in a review of Förster's The Treaty of Versailles: a reassessment after 75 years, excerpted:
To begin with economics: it is even more clear now than it was at the time that, in terms of its resources, Germany could have paid the sums demanded of it. Indeed, as Schuker has argued in his 1988 book, American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919-1933, if one takes into account the reductions in the reparations burden initiated by the Dawes and Young Plans (in 1924 and 1929 respectively), American credits to Germany for fulfilling its liability, the default on these obligations, and the de facto cancellation of outstanding reparations payments in 1932, it is reasonable to conclude that Germany paid no net reparations at all.
Keynes' narrative on the war has been particularly sticky in the US education system, to the point where his takes are reproduced uncritically even to this day. Mantoux fought for the Free French Forces and died in Bavaria, 1945, eight days before the German surrender.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I think more than these questions, it's the vast resources that have been marshalled to save these people that's been challenging me. A quick skim through the wiki article lists 9 ships and 5 planes with back-office coordination across 3 military branches and 4 countries. Despite this, the occupants are nearly certainly lost, and would be so even if the vessel had been located by now. The near-zero probability of a rescue was very quickly made apparent to everyone.
It is interesting, to say the least, which imperilled lives cause governments to move mountains without a second thought or rational hope, and which lives may be lucky to see a dime and only then after the case has been proven in a half dozen impact studies and feasibility examinations and pilot programs. Probably one of the more perverse urgency/importance failures yet, but one can't really go around saying the government is too good at reacting to acute crises.
sansampersamp
2yr ago
To put some numbers around it:
The internal cross-section of the pipe is approximately 1m2, so each bar of pressure differential will push a plug with 100kN of force. That's enough to shoot 10 tons of hydrate at g-like acceleration. Sounds difficult at the best of times.
Also the plug is stuck until it isn't. When you depressurise you move back across that phase diagram until the solid sublimates, which happens radially from the outside, in. The plug is stuck until it shrinks from the walls enough to move (upon which you don't want it to move) and can be melted and cleaned up with pigging and glycol.
sansampersamp
2yr ago
Ok what sort of explosive? What sort of materials?
If the Hersh account is correct, it should be RDX residue (readily identifiable via spectrometric methods). Another frustrating area where the slightest detail from the Swedish office would shed a lot of light (ammonium nitrates would raise the probability of non-state actors, on the other hand).
sansampersamp
2yr ago
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.
sansampersamp
2yr ago
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.
sansampersamp
2yr ago
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.
sansampersamp
2yr ago
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.
I still marvel occasionally at the fact that a solid third or more of the political discourse around the 2019 election revolved around minutiae regarding the refundability of tax credits attached to retiree superannuation accounts. Just weeks on weeks of it, probably lost Shorten the election. Australia may not be a particularly intellectual country imo, but the proverbial 'pub test' here presumes a baseline level of Tocquevillian political literacy/sophistication far beyond what most countries could hope for. I don't think that's necessarily because we're particularly special as a people (perhaps a little bit), but we have some very well-constructed institutions that curb some of our worse impulses.
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