sansampersamp
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User ID: 751
sansampersamp
10mo 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.
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
1yr ago
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.
sansampersamp
1yr 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
1yr ago
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'.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
While true in a technical sense, this is softened a great deal by:
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Germany already rhetorically committing to wean themselves off Russian Gas within a couple of years
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The pipelines currently being turned off by Russian shenanigans (so the official projections for the winter are unimpacted)
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A difficult political problem (see: protests to open NS2) no longer is theirs to make and defend
Messy enough to demand something covert, but no military could get away with literally burning their boats now, even if it was actually the right thing to do
sansampersamp
1yr 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
1yr ago
The costs for using nuclear weapons (pariah status worse than the DPRK at best, utter annihilation at worst) make them rarely a positive square on the reward matrix, unless the alternative is equally grim. This makes them particularly bad at anything that isn't critical deterrence. See Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy by Sechser and Fuhrmann, chapter here.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Single-family homes seems like a poor example compared to the other ones, since the main thrust of the pro-density activism is loosening control -- giving people more scope to do with their property what they wish
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Euro gas futures markets have been chilling out for a bit, ironically.
The reason why it doesn't make much sense as Russian bluff/escalation is that the only important costs borne by Germany are political costs -- the cost of making difficult, painful, but ultimately strategically correct decisions. Taking that decision out of German hands is a gift. Blowing the pipeline ends the game, no more concessions to be extracted or cracks to leverage. However much Germans suffer this winter is of vastly less strategic import to Russia than the unified front of sanctions against it. That suffering is only a chip to be traded for relief on the latter, and is near useless on its own.
Art and artists went through a similar crisis with the advent of photography -- what does it mean for technical skill when you can replicate a master's work with the click of a button. Art evolved, new categories developed and so on. The role of the artisan in art has been a bit contingent for ages, accordingly. It's not like Ai Weiwei welded all those bikes together himself, or that the interesting bit about Comedian was the subtle technique in its execution. Artists will come out the other side of this as they came out from photography -- much changed, and with new debates and reflexivity. (One interesting example is to compare paintings of water, ripples on streams etc, before and after photography revealed exactly how light played on and through the ever-changing surfaces).
I, for one am keenly anticipating the advent of the AI equivalent of photorealism -- replicating AI-generated aesthetic tells in the manual medium.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I don't think Ringo or Weber are particularly popular? The current bestselling sci-fi book published in the last year is Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith, per Publishers Weekly (Adam Christopher). Behind that, Becky Chambers and Silvia Moreno-Garcia are shipping the most volume for non-star wars sci-fi properties published in the last year. This hardly seems like there is a lot of volume on new books from 'politically incorrect' white male authors. Closest thing is maybe Ernest Cline with Ready Player Two last year?
As most producers and consumers of fiction now are women, by a fair margin, I don't find this too surprising.
sansampersamp
1yr 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
1yr ago
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.
sansampersamp
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr ago
I see 40% voter turnout for the 2018 midterms, which were a record high. I'm not sure what's projected for these ones.
We compel eligible people to vote here in Australia, and overall I'm a massive fan of it. Part of that is that politicking does not need to drive turnout itself, so ironically the half-panicked "please vote, please vote" stuff doesn't feature.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
And more flexible setbacks, and mixed-use, and less arduous parking minimums, etc etc. Even if you think the position is too minimal or cynical, the net result is certainly not an expansion of state power.
As a formal note, causation does not require correlation. Consider speed as a function of how much a car's accelerator pedal is depressed, and look at someone going up and down hills while keeping to the speed limit. The car's speed is not correlated to how much the pedal is depressed despite the obvious causal link.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
The web service equivalent of not backing up your database, or having an open backdoor hidden somewhere in leaked source code.
To twist the analogy slightly, imagine getting an email from someone saying they have such a backdoor and want to be paid. Do you pay them? What if they just ask for more and more? Where's the SOAR playbook for that?
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Some real work has to be done to flesh out exactly why Putin ordering the use of nuclear weapons makes that preference cascade less likely, not more.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Unconventional assets (stealth) are rather scarce and whether they're truly stealthy to a peer adversary is a rather open question.
Have to admit I was expecting a link to some Russian wunderwaffen instead of a 1980s tracker that can be completely foiled by turning your radar off (like anti-radiation missiles haven't been a thing for decades).
The strategic air defense network they have is expected to require weeks to months of reducing till bombing can proceed in earnest with conventional assets.
This RUSI link from January is a fun throwback too, I imagine the assessments of Russian IADS have changed somewhat since then. Note that it doesn't say it would take months to carry out effective SEAD, but: "The question is not whether the Russian IADS could eventually be degraded and rolled back, but whether NATO forces could do so quickly enough to avoid defeat on the ground while deprived of regular close air support in the meantime."
Not a particularly relevant concern re: Ukraine.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
It's difficult for me to think of a lower status take than consternation about, say, the casting decisions in the Little Mermaid remake. There's a few layers to that -- the content is for children, and these live action remakes are kind of shameful to have any investment in even before getting to the politics that is easily read as a kind of adolescent, race-fragile myopia.
With low-status, I mean something a little more subtle than just oppositional to the general social mores that might define my own social circle (or how I might ascribe that to a kind of cosmopolitan hegemony writ large). There are plenty of subcultures which define themselves oppositional to the dominant culture without degrading themselves in the process. There are orthogonal axes here that signal a kind of noble worthwhileness outside simple questions of alignment, and these takes seem to me to naturally occupy whatever the distal pole of magnanimity and taste is.
The ensuing conversations can accordingly be less of a debate and more of a slightly embarrassing condescension as if one is explaining social niceties to a child -- not a particularly productive frame for bringing others to one's worldview. What can be read as conciliation or reluctance to gore sacred cows, from one side, may simply be efforts to find tactful ways to bring an embarrassing conversation back to a kind of civility.
It was a very well-executed movie, probably the best action movie (in a platonic sense) since Fury Road, notably another 80s revival. The plot is straightforward and functional, yes, but complex, political plots with twists and turns and grey villains and sociopolitical commentary have been in vogue over the last 20 years. A reaction against that towards simple plots that uses a strong emotional core and characters to hang the action is unsurprising, as is that being tied up in our current nostalgia moment. This is a subset of, but not strictly equivalent to the IP mining that is also going -- Star Wars reboots are part of this nostalgia moment, the Marvel empire is not, while Stranger Things is an (early) part of the former but not the latter. Within these 80s nostalgia plays, much of it has been pretty terrible (Ghostbusters, Star Wars, etc) but a few have been quite good (Maverick, Mad Max, Karate Kid). The lack of a political context or complex villain (the enemy given as minimal detail as possible) is a deliberate choice to not detract from the emotional conflicts in the film and the characters' struggles.
With the success of Maverick, I'd expect to see more minimal, character-centric action movies, and dogfighting films in particular (shown to be very underserved). More scenes where the hero returns victorious to cheering crowds, more nondescript villains.
I think a potentially unremarked-upon aspect of the film I appreciate is the tone it's saturated with -- it's more mature than the original without thinking that mature necessarily means dark, or tortured, or politically intricate. Where the former was testosterone and surface-level id played for face value, there's a world-weariness to the sequel. Maverick's tentatively rekindled relationship with Jennifer Connolly's character plays out the same kind of nostalgia -- real, bittersweet wistfulness nostalgia, not 'remember AT-STs' -- that suffuses the whole film. The characters feel deeply bound by their history in a way many other reboots completely fail to emulate. What cockiness was just a sharp expression of young competition is now just a wry, self-aware habit. Maverick can't be anything else, the only difference is now he knows it.
ENTSOG map, for reference, with the breach occuring around Bornholm Island. Also to note, gas hasn't been flowing through either pipeline anyway: NS2 approval got spiked with the invasion, and NS1 has been shut off since the first of September, with the official excuse being a Russian turbine needing to be replaced and not being able to due to sanctions (though this is isn't true -- Canada, the repairer of such turbines, carved this out of their sanctions). Volumes have been flatlined since then, per the Nord Stream site. Accordingly, any recent projections of European gas scarcity (whether optimistic or pessimistic) shouldn't have been dependent on flow through Nord Stream. One such recent model has the biggest short term salve being energy generation substitution to coal, for example.
It's also very unlikely that Russia is responsible in this light -- the pipelines were already not being used via their equivocations over the turbines with Canada. Throwing Germany's steering wheel out of the window for them is not likely to yield them any concessions in the gas standoff, or poke at any weak points to unravel European solidarity over sanctions. This was likely West-aligned, but beyond that, who can say? These pipelines are notoriously vulnerable, I'd only be moderately surprised if it turned out to be a non-state actor (if only because overland pipelines are much easier targets, even if they don't have as much symbolic mindshare as Nord Stream).
One thing I do wonder is if they even get repaired now? NS1 potentially -- with its fate so uncertain whose to know -- but there isn't even a legally functioning entity on the European side to take responsibility for NS2. Who's justifying that expense?
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