xablor
1yr ago
Is this a game for people with compromised shoulders? If I can't do an overhead press without subluxing, will driving stress that failure point again?
xablor
1yr ago
"Interactive Theorem Proving and Program Development: Coq'art: The Calculus of Inductive Constructions", and it's kicking my ass to a humbling degree. I'm spending, conservatively, 15 minutes per page, in chapter /one/. I don't know if I'm dumber since I was in undergrad, or if this is my true info onboarding rate and I did undergrad wrong, or what, but this isn't boosting my ego at frigging all.
This is the same Macgregor that's been predicting Russian forces having free run of all Ukraine east of the Dniepr Real Soon Now for the entire duration of the war? The one whose consulting firm got casualty and death estimates wrong by a factor of (E: at least) four? The one who likes to plug gold?
Yeah I don't think his thoughts are worth much. Maybe as some kind of entropy source for a prototype AI tasked with writing movie plots?
I caught this exchange after the previous thread had mostly closed, and I'd like to push back on the claim a little.
BinaryHobo:
I remember talk about just using the excess power to pump water up hill during the day and running it through turbines coming down at night.
Did anything ever come of that?
The_Nybbler:
The physical conditions necessary to make hydro storage practical aren't common.
(How do we do the fancy quotes with user, timestamp, and maybe a link? It'd be useful here.)
It's true that hydroelectric power sources, as in dams, have saturated the supply of naturally-occurring American sites. You need a river in a rocky valley, and there are only so many of those to go around, and once they're used up, it's very hard to create more of them.
What haven't been exhausted, and in fact what can be readily found or exploited, are height differentials in general. Hills, mountains, exhausted mines, deep valleys with no water supply, all offer significant height differentials, are naturally occurring, and can be readily built out into large-scale closed-loop pumped-hydro storage, with a closed reservoir at one extreme and a closed reservoir at the other, and a reversible turbine to generate potential energy in times of excess and power in times of deficit. Should those be exhausted, off-shore dropoffs are an enormous resource of the same, at the cost of more difficult installation and operation in every regard. And if we exhaust THOSE, water towers at sea or underground reservoirs on land can be constructed as well.
All of this, of course, is dumb and America should just take the leash off nuclear, as argued here. (I've not read it yet, but I expect it to make the points I would inline here.) That we haven't yet is a shame and a testament to our collective idiocy and Puritan hangover.
xablor
6mo ago
Spongebob-grade thinking: since we're already being practical but evil in talking up mass civilian displacements, why not Simply(tm) move the population of Gaza to the West Bank, annex Gaza, and freeze Area C settlement in place or abandon Area C? This removes all need for Area C settler shenanigans, enables mass filtration and registration, re-establishes Israel as both massively powerful in the region and comparatively generous about it in tangible terms that an honor culture understands, moves Hamas militants and sympathizers into an area both more amenable to policing and a population with a chance of assimilating them into prosperous coexistence, simplifies the security situation by removing an unfriendly border...
This is, of course, an evil act in many ways, and I don't endorse it as a plan of action, but it's been bouncing around my head and I wanted it out. Why's it impractical and more expensive than necessary?
xablor
1mo ago
This surprised me, are you sure it's true? I seem to be able to buy quote-unquote CARB-compliant generators online, or at least generators that have a sticker claiming it, and the price premium for extra emissions controls appears to be small. There are also provisions to run a non-compliant generator in declared emergencies.
xablor
2mo ago
Thanks for the correction. My understanding was that IRGC more or less supported anything destabilizing Israeli presence, continuation, and competence, lots of casual internet sources seem to back it up. Is that an emphasized element of the total truth, not mutually exclusive with your claim? Is your claimed support from the US leakage from aid efforts, or how's it work? I can't see it being a first-class element of US foreign policy.
xablor
4mo ago
Personal bugbear: Superior Labrum, Anterior to Posterior. The labrum is a bowl of cartilage that provides passive stabilization of the shoulder joint, which in humans is significantly less structurally sound in exchange for a greater movement envelope. The labrum can be torn by heavy exertion at the edges of the envelope or by the proximal head being driven through the labrum, as in holding your arms rigid during a car crash.
xablor
7mo ago
"The Manga Guide to Linear Algebra", and I hate myself a little more with every page I turn. I'm going to complete it, because I want the knowledge and the skills, but the process constantly rubs my nose in my lack of bandwidth in onboarding even basic definitions, much less keeping abstract structures in my head well enough to even see their implications, much less their interactions.
Related, and secondarily, a video course in convex optimization (is that out of scope? If you lot can brag about classic literature I figure it's on to brag about forcing myself through technical content.) I won't detail it except to say it's humbling; playlist at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8WsPW41L6l7rviIGvIkY0-jn-tM3YSNi if you're curious.
I've rediscovered the US's official congressional record, at https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/crec . For whatever reason it's compiled as being distinct from the hearing transcripts, at https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/chrg . It's a weird mix of infuriating and humbling, seeing the egoistic grandstanding around things as subtle and varied as the BUILDER act, substantially modifying the National Environmental Policy Act, and as tiny and high-context as tribal treaties from the 1800s interacting with permitting to add a convenience store to a reservation casino. Something about the scale of impact vs the scale of the people involved? These aren't great souls, whether in Congress or the experts they bring to testify, and they're largely not able to make sweeping impacts due to the combined momentum of history, lobbies, budgets, and a few hundred Congressional cats to be herded.
I just wanted to see Jamie Tucker say "shitter" on the record, man.
xablor
7mo ago
There really aren't ANY apps that just pass the API costs on to users? It's been months, surely that's enough time to figure out an instrumentation layer and a payments provider integration.
xablor
8mo ago
Off-the-cuff gradualist proposal to play with, and maybe be an existence proof: fedgov only guarantees 95% of a loan balance, measured as an amount of approved loan principle. Or whatever amount is needed to see a signal emerge (is part of your point that the minimum amount to see that is too large to be viable?). This paired with, I dunno, earmarks for grants for some of those who are impacted, to add palatability to lefty opposition and keep incentives straight for borrowers.
What doesn't work there?
xablor
5mo ago
Why's Georgism gone sour for you? I've only been tracking it loosely and casually, not to the point of going hunting for counter-arguments to it, and I'm certainly not qualified to generate them on my own.
xablor
1yr ago
This is very cool forum site, kudos to Zorba et al for their hard work and a smoothish launch.
In the vein of navigating through read comments to new ones, it would be cool to be able to see how many unread comments a collapsed comment has beneath it. Maybe this could be pushed to user-side logic? How does the unread-comment counter work for the thread index page?
xablor
4mo ago
Happy new year, all. More geopolitics that I don't understand:
Why doesn't the US or some other nuclear power Simply (tm) operate nuclear power plants at a profit on foreign soil on behalf of the local government? This would defuse narratives of the tech tree being made inaccessible to developing nations due to climate change campaigns. It would also promote nuclear non-proliferation and defuse narratives of preventing access to effective power technologies due to the risk of dual-use tech development. Finally, it would stabilize local power grids in regressing states and promote both stability, enabling eventual growth, and loyalty/dependency on the operator in the region. For the cost of single-digit billions of investment, the US (frex) infuses money into American industry, develops the region, and effectively infuses an extra quantum of stability and pseudo prosperity into regions that desperately need it, while extending and securing American hegemony and economic entertwinement/influence.
xablor
1mo ago
How do I read your plot? It seems to be intended to communicate a function of one dimension, distance from the center, but it's given as a 2D plot structured to include radius. What other information is present?
xablor
7mo ago
Not so, source. Seems like it's a pressure tactic from the unions:
Earlier this month, a bargaining group representing hotel owners filed unfair labor practice charges against Unite Here Local 11 with the National Labor Relations Board. According to the complaint, the hotel workers’ union is demanding that the hotels support the Responsible Hotel Ordinance.
And there’s more.
The hotel owners say the union is also demanding a 7% tax on guests of unionized hotels, which a union official said could fund affordable housing for hotel workers.
Technically, unions can’t bargain with hotels for a tax increase. What they’re probably doing is trying to strongarm the hotels into backing, or not opposing, a new initiative for a tax increase. That would probably cross the line into an unfair labor practice.
xablor
1yr ago
I'm a technologist, I'll propose a tech solution off the top of my head: containers for digital media (video, audio, hell why not text documents or tweets) that's trusted for public decisions must be cryptographically signed and checksummed by the originating device before it hits userland, and further signed by a trusted location service that claims the capturing device was actually present. Media without the container is considered not possibly trustable. Unpacking the container and doing ANYTHING to the contents, without the private key of the originating device, becomes detectable. The entire problem reduces to a) key management, which is merely moderately hard at scale, but made easier by centralized management for many (almost all?) mobile device, b) the trusted location service, c) protection against extracting the signing key of the originating device. Obviously this trades off significant amounts of privacy, but if you're submitting your film to the MSM to influence public opinion, that's maybe acceptable.
Taken together, this should push the cost to get media trusted by the MSM to state-level attackers.
xablor
7mo ago
I'm seeing speculation that it's leverage in a labor dispute. Since the union brought the proposal, they can withdraw it at will. Therefore the hotels should accede to their demands or the hotels will risk the proposal getting put to a popular vote.
Apparently union construction labor is known to bring lawsuits against projects that don't use them, in the same vein.
xablor
8mo ago
Inspired by college loans discussion earlier, I'd like to apply a policy engineering lens:
- What are the minimal changes necessary to get an epsilon away from the current model of "government guarantees the entire loan amount with no conditions and it's not dischargeable in bankruptcy, with private lenders available" and towards a model that incentivizes better behavior in schools and students?
- Politically, what gets the nose under the tent most effectively, allowing further reforms?
- More generally, it seems difficult to implement a series of small reversible reforms to explore a space; what drives that in a government implemented as largely autonomous opaque agencies, and is it itself reformable?
xablor
1yr ago
An excellent summary is given here .
Tldr, largely copypasta:
-
The American Nuclear Regulatory Commission uses a model of damage to humans by radiation called Linear No Threshold, in which no amount of exposure to radiation is safe. This contradicts casual observation (we live with and robustly tolerate background radiation), observed cellular mechanisms (detection and repair of small DNA errors is routine), and a small number of human longitudinal studies and animal studies.
-
American nuclear reactor operators are as a consequence required to minimize the risk of even innocuous, low-level radiation releases, which makes cost reductions as a result of the usual learning curve and technological advancement impossible.
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Culturally, there is little education on the risks of small and medium-scale nuclear incidents, and so public opinion is by default against radiation leaks out of proportion to the actual risk. The book being summarized contrasts this with airline accidents, which kill hundreds and are handled as a risk to be minimized, not eliminated.
-
The NRC is incentivized to run the approvals process as long as possible, since it collects fees from license applicants, rather than number of nuclear power plants under oversight or number of GW-hrs generated by nuclear power per year. This naturally drives up the costs of site licensing and design approvals.
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There are many avenues for anti-nuclear activists to cause delays in the construction of a nuclear power plant, causing massive uncertainty in construction schedules and costs.
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A model reactor must be licensed before construction begins, but model reactors are often invaluable in experimentally finding failure modes to be accommodated, but all possible failure modes must be addressed before even a model reactor is approved for construction.
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Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima incidents have accumulated massive cultural scar tissue opposing more nuclear power plant construction.
Tldr of tldr: ignorant public, regulatory incentives, uncertainty in capex and opex spend.
xablor
1yr ago
The goal here is storing energy for use later at a net loss, not harvesting energy for "free" like a dammed river reservoir that sometimes gets rained on. Inefficiency is acceptable, although to be minimized.
xablor
5mo ago
Haven't read the replies yet, but I'd like to point out that your incompetence theory holds water again if there are factions within CIA with differing capabilities. My glance over Legacy of Ashes suggests that the analysis/research and operations groups are culturally quite distinct centrally, meaning de-facto siloed. Only the analysis/research groups are at risk if the WMD claim is revealed to be bogus, and only the ops groups are able to convincingly plant evidence in the field. Shit rolls downhill onto the specialist team evaluating WMD risk in MENA/AFRICOM, skipping the chain of command above them, so there's no incentive for a figure to arise who can make a market to resolve in bridging them.
xablor
7mo ago
Another round of naive techno-optimism :
I ran across this interesting tidbit from Los Angeles news : the March 2024 ballot includes a proposed Responsible Hotel Ordnance to provide vouchers to homeless people and to require hotels to report vacancies daily and accept vouchers if they have room. The pro and anti reactions you'd expect are in full swing, with the unexpect-to-me wrinkle that the hotel worker's union organized the petition campaign. Bill text here, courtesy of LA city clerk. There's some historical context here in that Project Roomkey was (is?) a COVID-era initiative to rent idle rooms from hotels and motels during the pandemic downturn and use them to house homeless people, under the reasoning that this would reduce the risk of transmission among the homeless population by controlling their living conditions and reducing contact rates.
I mention this only to set context for my actual topic: for purposes of high-density commie-block-style housing of the feral, incompetent, and non-economically viable, how difficult is it to build rooms that can't be damaged beyond repair by an adversarial occupant? Online discussion points out the inevitability of a lawsuit after someone trashes their residence in a fit of, uh, exuberance, and the comparisons to open-air prisons write themselves, but I'm interested in the actual engineering challenges of building an individual space so well that a tenant can't render it unfit for use, modulo bleach, power-cleaning, and replacing some Ikea furniture. I figure the key is to keep the interior of the room entirely sacrificial, and to have the room's border act as a firebreak for damages, so that even if the occupants render everything inside into unusable scrap, it doesn't propagate to your service trunks in the hallway. What's this cost? What are the regulatory hurdles? Who's solved this before, and how well?
Thanks much, I'll review.
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