sansampersamp
No bio...
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.
sansampersamp
3mo 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
9mo 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.
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.
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
3mo ago
Just preregistering their trades a week or so in advance would probably be sufficient.
sansampersamp
8mo 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
It's a bit weird tbh to mention US aid to Israel without mentioning the Camp David Accords, since the ongoing aid was essentially the cost of brokering peace between Israel and Egypt (who similarly is the recipient of 1.3B in military subsidies a year). The Accords were a massive, historic achievement, fracturing the Arab bloc and bringing Egypt back into an uneasy harmony with the West, after Suez threatened them being a fixture of the Soviet sphere. The aid sent to Israel and Egypt is of little consequence for what it has bought. Mearsheimer, of course, is too much of a natural contrarian to recognise that though, as we can also see in his dim opposition to Western involvement in the Ukraine crisis (despite it being a course of action that is almost expressly prescribed by the offensive realism he put his name to).
sansampersamp
1yr ago
The US joins the war conventionally is about the minimum I've seen communicated. Since a non-strategic nuclear first strike by Russia in Eastern Europe or the Baltics is probably the single most examined scenario by the US post-ww2, I'd be surprised if the playbooks don't have the timings down to the minute and statements prepped like a newspaper's obit drawer.
sansampersamp
10mo 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.
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?
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
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.
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.
sansampersamp
9mo 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
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
Every war in history has ended in a negotiated settlement in which the winner keeps the territory and prizes they took.
The UCDP Conflict Termination dataset (link, paper) has this data:
Between 1946 and 2005, only 39 of 288 conflicts, or 13.5%, ended in a negotiated peace treaty
Most wars fizzle into low-level unresolved stalemates without formal concessions or recognitions. Only half or so of interstate conflicts end in a ceasefire or peace agreements (typically the former).
In suggesting a negotiated solution, one should also be aware of the statistics and factors regardings the durability of peace agreements, and particularly the tensions over incompatible interpretations of Minsk II that failed to be resolved in the Normandy format talks that initiated this conflict.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I don't remember, was it you or someone else early into the war, there was a post with phrasing like «I'm sure Russians too have analytic centers with very smart people dedicated to planning this stuff, and we're seeing the result of one hyperintelligent network beating another, but it's a high-level play, full of feints and moves we cannot comprehend with our limited info».
I have a pretty good memory for that stuff, this is the comment you're thinking of. My reply downthread:
There's actually an idea in FP that essentially all wars are due to someone being very wrong in predicting how the war will go. If both sides know that an invasion would stall into a bloody mess, it won't happen. If both sides know that one side will confidently win, then they can extract concessions without fighting. It's only when one side is confident they will win with acceptable costs, and the other side knows they are wrong, when war happens.
Similarly: the worst hand in Poker isn't 27o -- it's KK when the guy across from you is holding AA. The former player just folds. Latter player loses his stack.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
There was a bit of a discussion back then on how it was fairly difficult to simultaneously predict that:
-
Russia would imminently invade
-
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.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
The NFT hype bubble has seemed like its followed a similar trajectory, just that it's the crypto VCs and devs doing the fleecing rather than the hedge funds. It seems like both prey on a similar kind of conspiratorial young male too (the GME/IMX crossover into the NFT space was pretty much inevitable in this light).
My wife and I watched that LulaRoe MLM documentary a little while back, and, as a part of it was observing that MLMs were overwhelmingly joined by lower-to-middle class women looking for a ticket out of drudgery, she noted that the flip side of that coin was probably all the dodgy investments men go in for. I have to agree, and it's not hard to see parallels there either, especially with the kind of forced, paranoid positivity of the HODLers.
I can't say I'm all that sympathetic. Everyone is a cynical investor making trades on the way up, hyping it up to service their portfolio/downline. Then when it collapses and they're in the red, suddenly everyone is just someone who had a dream whose pure innocence was abused by the real cynical actors somewhere else.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Despite being the perfect candidate for corrupt neglect, I don't think I've seen anyone pin their nuclear strategy arguments on the potential state of Russia's nukes. This seems like a massive strawman in that regard.
The argument for why they won't use nukes is based on an inability to construct any kind of payoff diagram for the Russian chain of command in which the nukes square looks preferable to the alternative (given mutually acknowledged tail risks).
The penalty for emboldening dictators is not worse than the penalty for encouraging nuclear war
Permitting nuclear weapons to be used coercively (i.e. folding to nuclear threats) does both in this instance. This is an iterated game.
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.
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
If I were writing a LOTR prequel show and had "don't upset the fans" sticky-noted to my monitor, delving into what Tolkien actually had planned for is probably going to be my bible (over fealty to "are we correctly preserving the divine feminine" etc).
Funnily, the Sarah Connors and Ellen Ripleys [1] are more of an 80s-90s picture of "strong female characters", though that view gets regurgitated by the (mostly male) reddit/IMDb film culture -- usually to put down a female lead lauded as strong that may come off as too vulnerable or indirect or reliant on others. There is certainly a painful way to write these characters, most commonly seen in Disney's attempts to discharge its guilt in its live-action remakes [2], but most prestige screenwriting has much better developed and complex view of what strong female characters can be now, particularly in TV and four-quad, family media.
Yeoh's leading role in Everything Everywhere All at Once is probably one of the best characters and is interesting as a direct subversion of the strong female action star. She is given the capability for extreme violence, to shed the family she resents for true independence, and to live a thousand lives where she is successful in all the ways she wished for -- but it doesn't bring any success. She succeeds when she fully embraces the typically feminine virtue of kindness that she finally recognises as expressed, purely, vulnerably, bravely in her husband.
[1] For Alien, at least. In Aliens Ripley's character is more genuinely feminine-coded with both her and the big bad xeno cast as conflicting mother roles.
[2] An issue more of competing interests between fidelity and addressing problematic elements than anything -- either shrug and replicate it or go full on with the inversion. If Cinderella is criticised for being a bit flat and without agency, it'd be a more fun movie to make her and the prince a bit dim but destined for happiness if the godmother can only pull it all off against the odds.
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.
More options
Context Copy link