xablor
1mo ago
Why Not Simply: Gaza, some more.
As I understand it,
- Hamas is the mostly illegitimate government of the Gaza Strip.
- Hamas is Iran-backed and hostile to Israel and Jews in general, with the dissolution of Israel and the expulsion of Jews from the region as explicit long-term goals, and general mayhem and violence as immediate goals.
- Israel is treating the further existence of Hamas as an existential threat, and, catalyzed by the 10/7 attack, has launched an embargo and military campaign in Gaza in order to eliminate Hamas as a continuing threat, analogous to the US's military efforts in reducing ISIS in MENA.
- Israel is more powerful in total than Hamas, and only sometimes more powerful locally; Hamas is more powerful in total and also at all times and places in Gaza than the Gazan civilian populace
- Consequently, a common Hamas strategy has been to strike at Israeli targets and ensure that attempts at reprisal maximally injure Gazan civilians. It is in Hamas' interest to maximize the suffering of Gazan civilians in order to maximize Israel's loss of face internationally.
- In order to reduce Hamas' effectiveness as a military force, Israel has enacted a siege, which is disproportionately impacting Gazan civilians since Hamas is using large stockpiles located in underground tunnel networks. Food and medicine intended for civilians is easily taken by Hamas agents, by force if needed.
- The conditions for lifting this siege are Hamas' elimination as a viable opposing force, meaning starving them into submission, meaning probably starving civilians to death first.
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:
- accept all who surrender, Hamas and civilian, starve/shoot/bomb/propagandize those who don't.
- house those who surrender in a temporary facility, observed and audited as needed. Control movement inside, monitor information in/out/within.
- provide food, infrastructure, and medical aid to whatever standard is demanded for the duration of the surrender. 3a) lots of time here to process and investigate covert Hamas members
- After combat operations end, repatriate.
(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?
xablor
8mo ago
Because ‘voting accessibility programs’ are just funding for democrat political machines
I mean. Yes? That's the point, to give both sides part of what they want. Democrats want funding for democrat political machines.
tighter requirements for voter authorization are totally off the table for democrats
This I'm more ignorant on. There really aren't any minority sub-parties that don't care about the topic that can't be peeled off?
xablor
6mo ago
claims to want contrast; immediately rules out backlit full-color LCD displays
claims to want speed; indicates preference for a display tech with second-long rewrites
What gives? What are you reacting to to call these your needs? This smells like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem .
That said I used a commodity offering from Sony back when they offered them; they're closing their eReader line down, so it's moot-ish.
xablor
1yr ago
Ethics question: how evil would it be to develop a payload for a mechanically suitable off-the-shelf remote-control multirotor drone that would enable a remote user to pierce a car or truck tire and render it irreparably leaky?
For numbers, let's say:
-
the drone is viably controllable up to a quarter-mile from an off-the-shelf controller station (read: phone or lap, maybe with a radio dongle)
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the drone is not autonomous outside basic flight stability and safety features to other humans, so it has to be guided to a tire and the knife triggered by the user
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the knife can be triggered 4 times per flight
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the drone's battery and knife can be replenished within a minute by the user
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the knife is captive, so it can't hurt anything the drone isn't immediately adjacent to, and magically can't be modified to do otherwise by end users.
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the drone and ground station are readily replaceable for <$10K, so accessible for a small organization or an org with donors, but not a typical individual.
This is prompted by my trying to inhabit the viewpoint of modern dirtbag left activists, such as those who protest by gluing themselves to roads and suchlike.
Factors I can think of offhand:
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This enables grassroots enforcement of no-car, no-truck zones for the anarchistically-inclined
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This makes destruction of property safer for the perpetrator
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This enables wider-scale destruction of property viable for a single user
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The payload designer isn't hard to replace, since the payload is easy to design, but the payload only needs to be designed once and then plans distributed
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Obviously, this makes hit-and-run violence easier and safer, but that rate is already low and dropping, but maybe someone out there is only held back from a spree by having to be present for the attacks in person? If so, why aren't they a sniper on a spree already?
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Once the payload is built, how much harder is making the entire thing autonomous? To the degree of "here's a car-shaped thing, slice the tires"? "Here's a geofenced area, slice the tires of all car-shaped things in it"? "Here's a geofenced area, slice the tires of all cars without a badge"?
xablor
6mo ago
I'm actually a little surprised that someone hasn't tried to displace him to cash in on his silliness with an aggressive article like "Sit Down Mr Macgregor, It's Time to Stop Talking". Maybe there's enough grifting niches out there that there's no need to usurp an incumbent, just set up your own pitch next door? Maybe it's unexpectedly high risk and an attacker needs to build a network of allies before making an attempt? Maybe it's just too much work to thoroughly compile a list of failures and mistakes - there was that one guy who became "the global expert on Moldbug", with more than enough material to discredit his theories, and he didn't make a move. Maybe it's easy to take someone down, but uncertain that you'll be the one to pick up the freed niche.
Presumably there's people willing to say a message - they may even believe it! - and people who want that message said, and a finite budget allocated to getting those things said. Or maybe there's a finite amount of attention in the world to hear the mess. In either case it seems like, assuming there's an equilibrium to disrupt by discrediting someone already in the ecosystem, there's money to be made. So why hasn't someone made a move? What are the dynamics of this grift economy?
I'd imagined that the site would be diplomatically (edit: and militarily) privileged somehow, so that the US could operate and secure the site, and quietly have a standing plan to irreparably scram the plant and make the equipment useless in case of being overrun. My ignorance shows in lack of details, I'm afraid.
Iran, for the use case of providing nuclear power without exposing nuclear tech to a hostile power. The various countries in and including South Africa, for sponsoring stability and prosperity, since Warographics tells me they've been notably incompetent and corrupt in administering their domestic infrastructure in the last decade and might welcome some foreign investment slash paternalism.
xablor
8mo ago
What compromise could the right offer the left that they would want?
Did you actually read the (offhanded, I admit) proposal? It was short. It involved creating a state-level capacity to locate disenfranchised (read: poor, illegal, disabled, low-executive) people and extend state services to them. Inside five years it'll be the premier way to access lumpenproles to buy votes from them. What compromise is possibly better than actually, actively, implementing your opposition's agenda for them?
EDIT: You reacted to it, so you must have. I am confused.
xablor
8mo ago
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?
xablor
1yr 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
1mo ago
Thanks for weighing in. I think I acknowledged this, that's the bit about "Yes I know it's evil, but it's less evil and seems back-of-envelope more practical than what they're doing now". The current Israeli actions also implement war crime criteria pretty well, so clearly they're up for that class of action either covertly or accepting it via negligence. The point of the question is that my proposal seems to be strictly superior in both humanitarian and logistical terms but isn't being taken, so I'm looking for reasons the that seeming isn't correct.
xablor
3mo ago
What prevents the client state from building sufficient capacity to not rely on the foreign plant? It's economically unfavorable while they can't get their shit together, sure, but that just means hard, not impossible or actively prevented. Or is your thought that the nuclear plant would be operated at a loss and price out other sources to cause dependency?
xablor
7mo ago
You might be encouraged by recent work in current-gen small modular reactors. Oak Ridge National Labs is standing up 6 of them, a few efforts got approved to start construction, and the US military is obviously interested given their focus on expeditionary logistics.
xablor
1yr ago
I haven't gone and found the paper, I'll admit; I'll give it a shot ASAP so we can argue productively.
I've casually found:
xablor
8mo ago
Can we add an iterator over new comments since the last time a user loaded a thread? They have their own unique CSS class, looks like, so the server-side logic already exists to detect them. This might even be doable purely as a client-side bit of JS.
xablor
1yr ago
I bet the Naltrexone is prescribed daily? You might consider using it per the Sinclair method (protocol when you're defending it to your doc), where you dose an hour before drinking. This blocks the reward from drinking more intensely and more precisely than once-a-day dosing.
xablor
1yr ago
That was my thought, yeah. Some style of Derringer-style action with a captive spring-loaded blade or piston, which is what drove the small handful of pierced tires between visiting a human.
xablor
2mo 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
1mo 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
Is there a pinned thread somewhere for feature ideas/requests/feedback? My Motte-fu is weak.
xablor
6mo ago
You can't control a process if you can't measure its parameters and outcomes. Record yourself during interactions and review later, if you have warning. Maybe jot down notes about encounters that you feel went especially well or poorly?
Small-scale shower thought, since I don't want to wait until Sunday: a belief is an entry in our knowledge base that we know we have, and that we act on. A so-called alief is knowledge that we act on but don't know we have (Wiki gives the example of being scared when standing on a tall balcony with a glass bottom that you trust intellectually - you're safe, you know you're safe, the body is scared anyway). What, then, is something we don't believe but take action as though we do believe? A policy? A trusted hypothetical? A religious law? This is a mode of thinking that I lean on a lot, that seems to be a lot more frequent than for most people.
I got to this thought by completing the 2-variable square, with "known to the process doing introspection" as one variable, and "used in actions in the world" as the other. Given the vague and brief description above, what other frameworks can we fit alief and belief into that reveal other kinds of -lief?
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