xablor
1yr ago
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.
xablor
1yr 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
2yr 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
8mo ago
Taking other replies into consideration, I would suggest instead getting kids very good at developing intrinsic motivation, something along the lines of operationalizing and scaling the writeup here, instead of applying top-down selection without access to the contents of the student's head. I think this means refactoring your instrumental goal into "detect native talent applicable to a specialty, if any, and supply every resource towards maximizing development towards it if it's desired." This reflects my bias towards individualism and market-based solutions rather than top-down assignments, especially given the massive uncertainties we have around intellectual development timelines.
Very belated followup to a maybe-too-dismissive response and promise for followup here. I feel bad about leaving that branch rudely untaken and not following through.
Bluntly, criticism as from SlowBoy and KMC was correct, 'corruption' in the sense of using power to drive personal gain was the wrong word, and I should have spent more time finding a better way to express the tangle of traits in Trump that I dislike and that drive me away from favoring him for 2024 President.
I would endorse maybe half of the class/aesthetic criticisms laid against him by the total commentariat (crude, boorish, unrefined), the cultural-conservative portion of moral criticisms (venal, dishonest, weather-vane, pandering), all of the epistemic ones, few to none about intelligence and raw perception (stupid, senile, psychotic). I like Ezra Klein's podcast ep "What's Wrong With Donald Trump" as laying out the raw impressions that drive me away, and support his induction of the base disorders being basically narcissism and total disinhibition. These two factors couple to a lack of intellectual humility ("my gut tells me more sometimes than most experts ever have" or something similar in the podcast was a line that struck me) that verges on disconnection from consensus inference and prediction, but not perception, that I think also drives a disgust reaction for me. Practically, his anxiety to be liked drives people-pleasing in historical US competition and opposition that is excessive to the goals of diplomacy, and his refusal or inability to engage with the existing machinery of state and its tribal knowledgebase is a crippling defect, even accounting for parachuting in friendly top leadership like Project 2025 wants to.
I look forward to reading Bob Woodward's trilogy on the topic and believing a third to half of it, and whatever Milley has produced about his experiences and believing two-thirds of it.
xablor
9mo ago
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.
xablor
1yr 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
2yr ago
This one is extremely impractical, which you’d see if you even did a back of a napkin estimate.
Source. They've tested successfully, physically, to 1/10 scale. I haven't gone and found the paper, I'll admit; I'll give it a shot ASAP so we can argue productively.
In the meantime, if the napkin math is so easy, share it with the class?
xablor
2yr ago
Is there a pinned thread somewhere for feature ideas/requests/feedback? My Motte-fu is weak.
xablor
8mo ago
I'm not privy to Israeli policy discussions and I haven't even studied the topic intensely, so this is necessarily facile and off-the-cuff, sorry. My impression of the terminal goals of the Israeli government are, in no order:
- TG1 Prevent a reduction of the current extents of Israel.
- TG2-1 Minimize population and property loss due to present enemy action
- TG2-2 Minimize the likelihood-damage product of future enemy action
- TG3 Extend the borders of Israel to include current-day Gaza and the West Bank
- TG4 Promote the prosperity of the Jewish people
- TG5 Promote the personal power and prosperity of Israeli leadership
- TG6-1 Maintain good relations with their current backers and alliance network
- TG6-2 Promote prosperity of their current backers and alliance network
- TG6-3 Increase the alliance network
- TG7 Human benevolence
This is only a quickly brainstormed list of generic goals of good governance with some extra ethnocentric emphasis, plus TG3. I used a pairwise comparison chart to figure out my guess at their relative priorities:
- TG2-1
- TG1
- TG2-2 TG4
- TG6-1 TG5
- TG6-2
- TG3 TG6-3 TG7
Which passes some sanity checks: defense above prosperity, land growth in conflict with not annoying allies and human benevolence and at the bottom since they can afford to play a long game, personal graft about middle priority, minimizing present loss prevention over minimizing future loss prevention.
These goals and goal priorities give us a number of possible compatible goal scenarios for the current conflict, which roughly map to the same old list of options from the policy wonks:
- GS1: Mowing the lawn: reduce the current iteration of Hamas, keep a tight upper bound on the ability of whoever replaces them. This has failed dramatically, and so rejected in favor of other goals, but I included it for completeness.
- GS2: Regime change, resulting in two states: the publicly claimed current approach, installing the Palestinian Authority with no border changes.
- GS3: Palestinian population displacement: not really viable, since no one else will take them
- GS4-1: Palestinian population elimination: Conventional genocide: physically viable, not at all politically viable
- GS4-2: Palestinian population elimination, eventually: Genocide construed liberally, including suppression of Palestinian civic bodies and suppression of reproduction. Compatible with a lot of other scenarios, and maybe covertly viable, but the potential scandal and time scales needed make it probably politically non-viable.
- GS5: Palestinian mass internment, Gaza annexation: something like what happened with indigenous NA tribes and the reservation system. Palestinians are restricted to even smaller areas.
- GS6-1: Gaza annexation, permanent Palestinian subjugation: Irael extends to include current Gaza, Palestinians become second-class citizens on a permanent basis.
- GS6-2: Gaza annexation, Palestinian incorporation: Israel extends to include current Gaza, Palestinians become citizens of the resulting joined state.
I've probably missed a few. The current 'gated community' proposal seems consistent with GS2, GS5, GS4-2, GS6-1, and GS6-2. Establishing a safe zone and expanding it gradually doesn't seem avoidable in GS2, GS6-1, and GS6-2. I don't see a way to distinguish which end goal is being pursued at this time, but the obvious experiment seems to be to wait and see what the conditions are in the safe zones, to rule GS4-2, GS5, GS6-1, GS6-2 in or out. If the safe zones are expanded over time, and their populations increase over time, and abuses are minimized with good mechanisms to detect them, that seems like decent evidence that we're in the GS2 timeline. Personally, I expect GS2 in the near term, and GS6-1 evolving to GS6-2 within 50 years.
What do you think of this framework? Do you agree with my proposal to distinguish which timeline we're in? Does extending the framework somehow give us more options for analysis or prediction?
xablor
8mo ago
Shower thought: conditional on a Harris win in 2024, what are the odds that Trump runs again in 2028? I want a return to the dynamics of pre-Trump elections, where at least the candidates had the decency to act embarrassed at being shown to be corrupt, so the fewer times he gets at bat the better.
He'll have the existing huge demand for populist wrecker policies and style that most politicians can't supply, so the crowd will want him back. The crowd wants him back, so it seems like his narcissism would pull him back in, but his age might preclude it, and a loss might drive him away from Presidential elections via sour grapes.
I don't know much of his psychology, and of course there's four years of unknown unknown developments until then. What other factors can you all identify? How do we beat them all against each other to get a spread of probabilities?
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.
xablor
1yr ago
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.
xablor
1yr ago
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.
xablor
1yr 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
2yr 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?
I'll pile on for naltrexone as a happy user. I use it per the Sinclair protocol, detailed at https://www.sinclairmethod.org/what-is-the-sinclair-method-2/. Modern psych training is to prescribe it daily in the morning, which makes my meds shrink worry about me when I say I'm doing something different, but she's happy enough to see me keeping a log with numbers going down, and "once daily as I leave work because that gives me an hour before drinking" is close enough to her "once daily in the morning" for her to shrug.
I will endorse it more as a method to get back to a healthy relationship with alcohol, and enable abstinence if you want it, without slips causing a relapse, rather than a cold cure for addictive tendencies that lead to alcoholism. Probably if you do get abstinent with alcohol this way, it'll be by going California sober and substituting with other psychoactives, which could include psych meds. The Caliph has a good writeup at https://lorienpsych.com/2021/02/23/alcoholism/, as you'd expect.
I will say that it's to AA what scalpels and antibiotics were to leeches, in my opinion. It's a shame that the euros are ahead in this regard.
xablor
8mo ago
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'.
xablor
9mo ago
"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.
xablor
9mo ago
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?
xablor
9mo ago
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.
Why Not Simply: Gaza, some more.
As I understand it,
It seems that one way to defuse Hamas' tactic of using a civilian populace as an all-purpose shield and moral justification is to separate Hamas-ans from Gazans, prevent the Gazan class from providing aid to Hamas, prevent the Gazan class from attacking Israel, and then avoid mistreating the Gazan class. In other words, stop-the-world filtration:
(Yes I know it's evil, but it's less evil and seems back-of-envelope more practical than what they're doing now)
I don't understand why Israel isn't doing this, and prefers to do horrific things to civilians and take the international consequences on the chin. Is it just because it's reinventing concentration/filtration camps, and not even Israel can handle the international blowback of that tactic at that scale? Is the scale impractical? Is the expense impractical? Is the needed bandwidth of processing humans not doable within Israeli manpower constraints? Do they simply not care that much? Do Gazans prefer to live freely in the current war zone that much more than food, board, and light prison regimentation? Is "after combat operations end" too fuzzy of a line to trust? Is there no trust in being released after internment, or good conditions during?
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