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.
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
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 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?
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
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
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
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.
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
what do you have with a glass of wine with friends over while dinner finishes cooking? Olives have a pretty indispensable niche as ready-to-go antipasti, regardless of their utility as a briny ingredient.
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.
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.
sansampersamp
5mo 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
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
For a long time, RP or mid-atlantic was the hegemonic "no accent" English for newscasts and politics. This accent is a contemporary RP, but with a mild Chinese accent on some words (e.g. foreign as for-eeyn).
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I saw some screenshots complaining that it had been used as a honeypot for Jan 6 attendees, which while hilarious if so, strikes me as a bit 'too good to fact-check'.
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.
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
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
While conviction certainly plays a part, it's not particularly confusing if you look at the geography. To turn Kherson into a grinding urban conflict like Mariupol would mean Ukrainian forces entering the city. This would mean Ukraine separating Kherson from the Antonivka Road Bridge that is the only point of supply or evacuation. Any notional preparations to fight a siege in Kherson would therefore only be relevant if Russians had reached the point where they had lost this key bridgehead. Any Russian forces staying in Kherson would be doing so with the knowledge that they would either die or be captured there, once Ukraine closed in.
The timing also makes sense. Given recent Ukrainian advances, there was only about 5km left until Ukraine could comfortably saturate the sole escape route with M777 or 155mm equivalents, after which withdrawal would become much more dicey.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
In this sense it’s in Russia’s interests to make Ukraine disperse their soldiers across the whole territory.
A withdrawal from Kherson would have the exact opposite effect, as falling back behind the natural boundary of the Dnieper will effectively shorten the front and enable both sides to redistribute any forces West of the Zaporizhzhia-Melitopol axis.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I'd agree just going off the father-by-proxy stuff
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.
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