xablor
7mo ago
Wait, I'm confused. Multiply that out for me? If you demonstrate a fair die and I bet evens every time, why isn't that +EV? Transaction costs? Or are you leaving unstated that it's one round, few rounds, or rare rounds (enough time between rounds to invalidate assumptions)?
xablor
4mo ago
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.
xablor
6mo ago
Seconding the nasal irrigation with salty water, maybe also very dilute topical disinfectants like povidone iodine. There are lots of weird little crannies in the sinuses, and a biofilm like a stuffed-up nose is a great place to host a self-perpetuating infection.
xablor
8mo ago
Placeholder reply: I have thoughts on this, but I don't want to divert the evolution of the discussion yet.
xablor
9mo ago
No movement on the passive cooling vest. I'll get access to my beloved workshop again next week, maybe that'll restore some enthusiasm? It would at least remove a step, by removing analysis paralysis about DIYing a vacuformer.
xablor
9mo ago
Florida, which in latest polling is a weak Trump advantage; I don't know if the senators Matter. My interpretation is that a flip is more than possible by November, so it's higher-impact this year.
xablor
9mo ago
I'm currently refreshing on Factorio in preparation for the expansion, let's coop?
xablor
10mo ago
"Electric Machinery Fundamentals 3e" by Stephen J Chapman, because a) I'm tired of thinking starter-generators are magic, b) I want to design and build a microturbine APU so I can get a BEV power armor without having to handle my dad's range anxiety.
Also David Chapman's Vividness website-book-blog-thing at https://vividness.live/ , he's been on my radar for a long time and I've never followed through.
xablor
8mo ago
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?
xablor
8mo ago
I'm abandoning "Introduction to AC Machine Design", "Electric Machine Fundamentals" answers the same questions for me and isn't making me want to refresh on the entire dependency tree of vector calculus first. I did get "Principles and Applications of Electromagnetic Fields" for the Aspirational pile, though. "How to Keep House When You're Drowning" remains inspiring and comfortable. Factorio continues to eat me.
xablor
9mo ago
A work perk, actually. It's pretty badass and has toys I could never dream of affording, like a Tormach CNC mill with all the trimmings and a 3d printer farm, as well as the vacuformer I was making progress with. I was too casual with leaving some non-compliant tools around, so copped a month ban and a requirement to retake the safety training.
xablor
9mo ago
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?
xablor
9mo ago
Also, my day job (programming) seems to use the same part of my brain as writing
This is hard. The best move I've got is to brute-force my sleep schedule to be awake at 5 or so, addy up (back when I had access), and use those crack-energy disinhibited hours while there are no distractions from the world to get some work done.
xablor
9mo ago
Struggling with "Electric Machinery Fundamentals" and "Introduction to AC Machine Design", making good time on "How to Keep House When You're Drowning". ACMD has a hilariously math-heavy approach that I imagine I'd appreciate if I were still a student with vector calculus competence, but I honestly doubt I ever was, and I don't think my degree program ever required an EM Fields course, so it's an intimidating slog that seems to only serve to back up the engineering equations given in EMF.
HtKHWYD, contrariwise, is gloriously pragmatic, and I like both the content and the presentation quite a bit for how pedestrian it is. Lady has a skillset to communicate, communicates it, communicates fine points and failure points, and does nothing else. I appreciate that.
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.
- sub-problem: develop and keep current opinions on the decisions I expect them to make
- 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.
xablor
9mo ago
My passive cooling vest project has metastasized, since I've lost access to my primary shop facility with all its wonderful free-to-me toys. Accordingly, I'm building a vacuformer, demonstrated at https://youtube.com/watch?v=RWxCvMzvxlQ . I've got parts and tools in stock, I just need to execute.
Also, Factorio is eating me again.
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
7mo 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'.
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.
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