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
6mo 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?
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
3mo 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.
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?
xablor
4mo 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
6mo 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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
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
5mo 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
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
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
6mo 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
25d 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
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
1yr ago
Is there a pinned thread somewhere for feature ideas/requests/feedback? My Motte-fu is weak.
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
4mo 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
16d 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
1mo 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
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.
I read Freddie deBoer on Everyone Can't Do Everything , and I'm trying to have some thoughts on the topic. It's not going well and I'd appreciate contributions and reactions.
In summary, school Halloween celebrations have been canceled at some locations due to equity concerns, due to some students not being of a culture that has Halloween: students without the tradition aren't able to enjoy it, and so no one at the school should enjoy it. Another, different, example of the same impulse is to let a fully blind child onto the field to play peewee football with the aid of radio instructions from the coach. These examples are then bent to serve his argument that schools at all levels should not be designed with the goal of educating every student presented to them, since some students lack the native talent to succeed at them: some check out at 12 and can't read even after high school, some are fit for vo-tech trades but not theory-laden engineering, some few are capable of world-class physics research (or fintech), and all are poorly served by promoting the view that success at any level is merely a matter of effort and perseverance. It's arguably cruel to hold out the possibility of high success to unfortunates who are incapable of it under any circumstance. This leads to lots of poor outcomes: wasted time in schools, devaluation of all markers of achievement as standards are lowered to pass all who show up, credential inflation. That said, he acknowledges the possibility of achievement beyond one's talent with dedication, and offers no real prescriptions beyond protest at the state of affairs.
Raw thoughts, no real ordering: kids who drop out explicitly, not just implicitly, have no place to go other than back home as a drag on the family unit (impractical) or into the workforce as menial labor (viscerally revolting, childhood is for more than that).
attainment, the ability after training to accomplish a task, seems intuitively to have many more factors than just talent and time of exposure. Off the top of my head:
So, very different skill-acquisition timelines are possible. Here are some prototypes I can imagine:
All of these are just-so stories, I'm not very happy with them as argumentation or intuition pumps, and they don't advance a point, but I don't want to waste the time spent typing them out. I guess they demonstrate a few points in the broader space of possibilities and show that life outcomes aren't just f(talent, instruction hours).
I can only resist solutions-oriented thinking for so long. What does a student know, when? What ideas are they prepared to build on? How well do they recall a given fact, when? How well do they manipulate interacting facts? What fact, in other words, do we present to a student, by what channel, with what phrasing, at what time? How do we determine this? Economically, how do we structure delivery of these functions for good scaling? I guess I'm redefining "private tutor" here, with functional breakouts to slot automation in as useful. What about providing education after schooling age?
Teaching staff aren't just presenters and test designers, of course. They're required reporters of signs of abuse, first-line mental health responders, mentors, coaches, disciplinarians, college advisors. Similarly schools have had extra functionality piled onto them over time - childhood food distribution, extracurriculars, a refuge for children from a poor home life, a facility for permissive parent figures, I'm sure there are others.
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