sansampersamp
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User ID: 751
sansampersamp
3yr 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
3yr 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
3yr 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
3yr 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
3yr 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
3yr 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
3yr 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
3yr 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.
sansampersamp
3yr ago
Per my other comment, I'd expect the pipes on the seafloor to be at >10,000 kPa at <5C, sufficient for hydrate formation.
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
sansampersamp
3yr ago
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.
sansampersamp
3yr ago
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.
sansampersamp
3yr ago
Look up the compressibility of methane hydrate.
sansampersamp
3yr ago
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.
sansampersamp
3yr ago
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.
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.
sansampersamp
3yr ago
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.
sansampersamp
3yr ago
So far I've used it for:
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Lesson plans (mock trial of Odysseus)
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Supplying grant application filler
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Automate some accounting forensic tasks (what is this transaction)
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Poking around some quantum physics concepts for hard sci-fi worldbuilding
sansampersamp
3yr ago
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.
sansampersamp
3yr ago
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.
sansampersamp
3yr ago
midterms, not presidential
sansampersamp
3yr ago
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.
sansampersamp
3yr ago
nouning
(ironically 'nouning' is an example of verbing)
sansampersamp
3yr ago
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.
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
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