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xablor


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 15 19:44:04 UTC

				

User ID: 1217

xablor


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 15 19:44:04 UTC

					

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User ID: 1217

Import Indian modafinil? It's only skirting law, I believe, and the package might get stopped, but it is legal. Or find a source for the hepatic prodrug armodafinil, I think that's unregulated if you don't mind the QA issues.

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.

How precisely can the strike package planners control/predict when and where missiles are going to be during the strike? Functionally this isn't much damage dealt, but maybe it could be trying for an intelligence objective instead, probing locations and stores depths of anti-missile batteries?

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.

It seems like it'd be as 'simple' as making it a requirement for electing a Senator or Representative, per https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-i/clauses/750 . (Article 1, Section 4, "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators. The Congress shall assemble at least once in every Year, and such Meeting shall be on the first Monday in December, unless they shall by Law appoint a different Day.") That lets implementers get experience and debug the spec, establishes a reputation, and makes extending it to the Presidential election more a question of 'why not' rather than 'why'.

You've run elections as part of the implementation of the electoral process, or as a consumer of the data and metadata resulting from the electoral process? I have to imagine campaign staffs would want to know the breakdown of motives of non-voters between Vegas, dead, protesting, and lazy, that would turn out for them but for some factor, so they can correct that factor - or, offensively, make them worse for the opposition.

No, see, this is exactly what I was hoping to elicit, and thank you: a composite version of my dad with similar ideology that can make the non-vapid arguments that he can't. I don't think he's even heard of game theory, or knows why defecting is bad, or finds results using it as an argument compelling. I'm sure that stronger arguments for his position exist, and I've got a couple sketched in my back pocket that I'm withholding to avoid bias, I'm just trying to get them from a wider audience than my own head.

If you operationalize "personal loyalty to Trump" as "conformist authoritarian tendencies", then we've had a profiling instrument for that for awhile courtesy of Bob Altemeyer at U Manitoba: https://theauthoritarians.org/ . You can take a version of his research questionnaire at http://openpsychometrics.org/tests/RWAS/ to get the flavor of personality type that it's trying to detect. (No it doesn't capture every way there is to be authoritarian, yes woke is left authoritarian, it still seems relevant to answer the question at hand.) Couple that with "amount of pushback against direction from superiors" as an item of quarterly personnel review to set up evaporative cooling dynamics, have semiannual shit tests and purity spirals, and I bet by year 3 of a Trump admin you could get at least some of them to rerun Jonestown. Maybe have a not-legally-binding oath to Trump personally, just to engage the monkey brain a bit harder.

This would probably do terrible things to your talent pool, mind! It's basically building a cult around the Presidency, with direct interpersonal dynamics rather than parasocial ones like we've already seen with the Trump cult of personality. Selecting for that trait seems like it starts trading off against general competence, independence, ability to be delegated to, pretty quickly.

Naive policy engineering again, American electoral reform edition:

Team Red claims to want "reinforced" elections, where the risk of people casting a vote who shouldn't be able to is minimized or eliminated. A common proposed mechanism is to use state IDs to validate that the holder has the right to vote in that state or federal election, and (I imagine) to enforce one-vote-per-person. They prefer the decision to be biased in favor of minimizing false positives at the cost of increased false negatives and possibly true positives.

Team Blue opposes this with rhetoric about wanting to maximize access to the electoral systems at all levels. They prefer to maximize true positives and minimize false negatives at the cost of false positives, the symmetric opposite of Red, as in all things.

Left unstated is the assumption, seemingly held in common by both Red and Blue, that people who have a hard time obtaining state IDs are likely to vote Blue.

A compromise solution seems to exist, and I don't understand why it's not being pursued: increase funding for voting accessibility programs, in exchange for tighter requirements for voting authorization. Have, literally, a list of people who were born in state, can't be accounted for as having left the state, and authorize a spend of $10k or whatever to find them and Get Them Registered No Matter The Cost.

One thought: spending on this is a continuous value, whereas a policy state IDs as a bearer authentication token are boolean. Fine, hold state IDs out as a carrot, and offer improvements in, I don't know, signature matching in mail-in ballots.

In summary, two symmetrical problems exist, there exist opportunities to progress towards solving both of them, no serious efforts are being taken. Why? Per the meme, are they just stupid?

I am once again begging for a compromise solution, here. Maybe drop everything that gets classified as a bare link after the first five? It's not like it's hard to classify things at scale, now.

FVEYS might be the one group in the world that actually doesn't spy on each other.

I thought this was known to be false, as another layer of end-run around restrictions on SIGINT against citizens? If eg MI6 spies on an American citizen on American soil and relays it to NSA with the expectation of reciprocation, it's not NSA doing the spying, and therefore totally in the clear.

"Among key issues that remain unresolved is automation that workers say will lead to job losses." from [Reuters] (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ship-queue-grows-us-ports-dockworker-strike-enters-third-day-2024-10-03/). Which I suppose was predictable, no way operators were going to lock away that growth option, human perf can only scale so well by adding workers. It seems be only a candidate agreement, though?

Oof. Good on you for following your ethics, but that is harder. I can only speak for my own situation, I hope it helps as a sketch:

I'm designing food supplies for 3 days, which lines up neatly with integer bulk quantities of food I can buy. I'm targeting 1800-2000 calories a day, 150-200 grams protein, about 300 grams carbs, the balance is fats. My level of talent and energy to invest is minimal. My 3-day buy is:

  • 5 pounds of boneless skinless chicken breast, usually packaged as 6 breasts. This can flex between 4.5 and 6 pounds, which lets me easily buy from what's in the cooler.
  • 5-pound bag of russet potatoes.
  • 2-pound (? Maybe just 1) bag of rainbow carrots.
  • Enough broccoli heads to end up with about 1.5lb of florets. Allegedly you can coin the stems, I've not tried it.
  • 1 or 2 heads of cauliflower.

This assumes stocks of olive oil or EVOO and spice blend on hand. I use 2 large baking pans, because I don't have a lot of counter space.

Batch 1 is chicken:

  • Preheat the oven to 425. While that's running, prep the batch:
  • Pat the breasts dry of juice, array them on the pan
  • Lightly coat with OO, you want a thinnish layer, say just short of dripping off, but enough to adhere the spice blend and help cook
    • I have a mister that should help with this, but instead wants to squirt a stream of oil all over, not fog it. I don't have a solution for this beyond keep the stream moving and vary spacing until the result looks right.
  • Dust with spice blend
  • Set timer for 25-35 minutes, depending on weight and preference. 165F in the center is what USDA will tell you to achieve; I think this is high because that's what's needed for instant sterilization, not an accumulation of sterilization over longer times at lower temps.
  • After starting batch 1, immediately prep pan 2:

Batch 2 is broccoli and cauliflower:

  • Use a paring knife to prep the veg as you like. For me this is just cutting florets of both up, medium size.
  • In a second pan, arrange artfully. Some piling is acceptable; if you need this, oil the veg that would get covered up.
  • Apply OO, fairly heavily. I'm not going to say soak, but you want enough for all exposed veg to be wet.
  • Apply spice dust

Wait out the rest of pan 1's cooking time with a beer and entertainment. When your timer dings, cycle pan 2 in immediately, turn the heat to 450 and let it climb, set timer for 25 minutes, and give pan 1 the rest of your beer to cool. Move the chicken out into a storage platter, move the platter to the fridge to start chilling, and pour out chicken juices wherever you find acceptable, perhaps a beer can or the trash. Roughly swab out pan 1 and prep batch 3 in it:

  • Sink wash potatoes, sink wash carrots. Remove blemishes, top and trim.
  • Coarse-chop the carrots to ~1.5" long. Or maybe don't even bother if they'll fit your tupperware and you're feral enough, it doesn't seem to change much.
  • Arrange on pan 1 as you go.
  • Apply OO, you can be pretty light here if you want.
  • Apply spice dust

Wait out batch 2, cycle in batch 3, bake for 40 minutes. While it's cooking, pull the chicken out and start portioning out. For these portions, one day is enough volume to fill one 8-cup Rubbermaid container and one 4-cup Rubbermaid container, as here.

This is, you'll gather, not haut cuisine, and that's somewhat intentional, in order to encourage the food-as-fuel mindset.

Passive cooling vest is stalled, yet again, some more. I can't muster any interest in the DIY vacuformer as an instrumental goal, fitting up the vacuformer components as an immediate goal, or the cooling vest as an end goal. This sucks. My brain sucks. How can I possibly expect to achieve anything ever if I can't keep a want in my head for more than two weeks?

I'm embarrassed, since I claim to care about transparent election integrity but haven't heard of ERIC beyond this. Can you whip up a precis? I've only found https://www.npr.org/2023/10/20/1207142433 and https://www.npr.org/2023/06/04/1171159008 casually.

But Election Day totally should be a federal holiday.

Concur, as an insufficient start.

Two factors that I find repel me from voting are

  • the effort needed to develop a ranking over the candidates
    • sub-problem: develop and keep current opinions on the decisions I expect them to make
      • ex: What are my opinions on The Wall, what will Trump likely do?
      • ex: Do I even need to have an opinion on whether tips should be taxed, or is it fluff?
    • sub-problem: identify issues in the world to have a preference on that aren't in the discourse
      • ex: What are the odds of John Bolton's opinions on Iran getting into Trump's cabinet? Do I like them or not?
      • ex: Jake Sullivan's conservatism about escalation in the Russia-Ukraine war? Do I like them or not?
      • (I don't know actually know Harris' cabinet rumors well enough to have thoughts about them.)
    • sub-problem: for each issue, develop a score for each candidate for/against on that issue.
  • the ugh field around the actual physical implementation of the act of voting, executive dysfunction, and the difficulty of bootstrapping into knowing how to accomplish it.
    • App idea: a checklist manager for taking part in the polls you want to. You need to register to vote? Here's the form and the types of evidence to gather, press a button to have a copy and a stamped envelope mailed to you, paid half-and-half by each party. Daily reminders and follow-ups on the tasks and sub-tasks. It's two weeks before voting day, did you arrange the morning off? Probably this is already a thing; I hope it is. Maybe I should make it if not.

Between perfectionism, procrastination with a fun and infinite problem, and a multi-month process requiring advance planning and grit on the day of to wait in an hour-long line to poke a cranky ATM, it's very easy to round 1/3E8 of the cost/benefit from a given federal outcome to 0 and not bother. This is effectively charity to a process that's worked more-or-less well enough so far, all outcomes are within bounds, going with the flow is entirely tolerable.

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.

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?

I got a notification that I'd gotten a reply to this post from @Belisarius , but when I went back to find it in another tab it didn't appear in Comments or the thread. Are they blocked from posting? Did that post have to be approved?

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?

DM'd

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?

It's been a visible technique in psych inventories I've taken to invert ~half the Likert questions-scale questions, which seems like correcting for precisely this type of bias. I haven't seen it in political polls I've taken. I infer that it's a Best Practice for those who really care about such things, or at worst net-zero cargo-culting, and that invoking this bias is a useful technique for those who want to engineer a biased survey.

This has bugged me too, to the point of asking in the past why Blue and Red teams didn't coordinate to both get what they want: money and a makework program for Blue, better voter ID for Red, more faith in voting infrastructure for both the Uniparty and the plebs.