VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
a President ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival
You know, we never did get case law as to whether or not Obama could lawfully order the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki (or his underage son), both of whom were American citizens outside the US. I have long thought it would be an interesting legal case if some state tried to claim jurisdiction for a murder trial, although I concede that he wasn't exactly a good guy. Sure, the DOJ wrote a memo suggesting it was a lawful act, but I don't see a good clear line between drone striking a citizen advocating the violent overthrow of the US Government and "assassinating a political rival."
I've seen lots of domestic advocacy for violently overthrowing the US Government in the last few years: can the President unleash the Predator drones on the next CHAZ protest? Is it that he was outside the country? That's not hugely comforting to anyone who travels overseas. Given that he was over the age of 35 and born a citizen, if al-Awlaki had said the magic words "I intend to run for President of the United States," thus cementing his status as "a political rival," would that magically require calling off the drones?
On the gripping hand, war (although in this case not a war declared by Congress) is messy business, and ordering attacks to cause deaths is part of the name of the game. I don't really have a great answer there. But yes, there are probably some situations in which the letter of your claim might be arguably true and no criminal trial would occur, although domestic military actions would probably swiftly lose the court of public opinion, which sometimes seems like the only one that really matters at the end of the day.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
by propagating myths about a stolen election?
Although 2020 was probably an outlier in the volume of shouting and shenanigans about stolen elections, I'm pretty sure partisans, even moderately respected ones, have made "stolen election" claims about every presidential campaign since at least 2000.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Because the purpose of the payment was to benefit the campaign.
I still haven't seen a decent theory for why this payment is specifically for the campaign, while it would seemingly be perfectly legal any other day of the week for a Totally Upstanding Well-Known Businessperson and Public Figure.
Is it shady? Absolutely, but "running for office limits your otherwise-available personal publicity campaigning" seems a bit questionable under the generally-favored strict scrutiny for free speech questions. Which is part of why Citizens United came down the way it did: the government claimed then-extant election funding rules allowed them to ban books.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
The thing that most surprised me about visiting Tokyo is that there are (tiny footprint) freestanding single family homes within walking distance of even the densest areas. It isn't all apartment blocks as far as the eye can see, although those are there.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Now that being said, there are places like New York which just don’t have much to be done, due to density.
Some of that is also due to changing standards of living: Manhattan has fewer residents now than a century ago.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
When governments burn the future to save the past they do it with housing
Not strictly related, but I was musing the other week that, to some extent, anti-natalist policies and sub-replacement birthrates provide a "burning the seed corn" sort of economic stimulus that looks good on paper -- for a generation or so. You get an immediate benefit from freeing up childcare workers and educators for more immediately-useful tasks.
I don't have any hard data for this, but it feels like what Japan and Korea, and likely soon China too, are going through. And the West may not be too far behind.
I mostly use it as an offsite backup for unchanging things like family photos and such (a few hundred gigabytes total), not as primarily-accessible storage, so I use STANDARD_IA which is a bit more expensive to read. I think I've determined that it'll cost an extra month or two to actually pull the entire backup were that ever necessary, but at the scale in question that's still pretty reasonable. Cost is somewhere around $100/year.
I did do some finagling on the bucket setup and access token permissions to make the contents versioned (can't be completely overwritten) and prevent my CLI instance from deleting things accidentally.
From what I hear, the AWS S3 API is basically the same as many of its competitors (dunno about the CLI tool), and I have friends that swear by BackBlaze (which is free to retrieve). I figure if AWS has much more incentive to worry about bit-rot than an HDD in the closet, and if they starts losing data we're probably in a shooting war or something catastrophic.
On the other hand, I've had family members burned by storing things in bank safe deposit boxes in the past because of issues at the bank, while their houses were safe. Could have been the other way around, sure, but with digital data it's easy enough to make copies.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
I have a TODO for exploring backblaze, AWS, and other places for offsite storage of large unchanging data sets since I want to keep my data in the event of a house fire.
In terms of very basic functionality, I was pleasantly surprised to find that AWS' basic command line interface supports something at least comparable to rsync, and setting up my own backups for this sort of data was pretty trivial. If you want to encrypt it locally (server-side is an option, but wouldn't really work with my threat model), that might get a bit more complicated, but I was originally expecting it to require actually writing scripts.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
With a few notable exceptions all on one side of the political aisle, the threat of a contempt of congress charge is toothless unless the issuing subpoena bends over backwards about following all rules, and unlikely even then.
If the House really had stones, they would threaten to zero out the budgets of offices evading their investigations. And follow through as necessary.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Biosphere 2 is not a good model for a planetary colony
That's probably true, but I think it is a reasonable model for a long-term space station or asteroid colony, which has long seemed to me more appealing than planets, especially in the short term. The bottom of a gravity well seems like one of the least economically useful niches, unless you really can't find enough raw materials on moons and asteroids, or unless you have a serious proposal for terraforming.
More to the point: if you want to build a space colony, starting iteratively on closed-loop environs (assume spin gravity, which I've been told is practical for station designs not much larger than the ISS) seems a low cost, relatively low-risk research effort we could be doing more of today.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Israel is much more likely to ramp up attacks on Palestinians if a state is announced because they understand that this is their last chance to do something about the issue before the rest of the world decides whether or not to defend Palestine. They know a state means weapons pointing at them and they won’t have it
I think you're not completely wrong, but "statehood" is a whole gamut that manifests in a variety of ways in different circumstances. To some, I'm sure statehood means internationally-defined borders, but this isn't universally given: to use that standard, neither Taiwan nor South Korea have statehood. Others might suggest it means the right to raise its own military to defend those borders, but there are plenty of non-militarized small states (how many legions does Monaco wield?). Or the right to engage in international trade, but there are plenty of sanctions and de-facto blockades across the world, and no shortage of fortified walls and fences. Or some degree of popular sovereignty, but there is no global shortage of despots.
To me, at least, the notion of statehood also comes with responsibility both to one's people and in the scope of international relations. It means preserving a monopoly on the use of force -- if unsanctioned militias in Texas started shelling Ciudad Juárez, we'd expect the US government to respond with force, not shrug and tell Mexico to deal with it. It means providing for one's people -- international aid is acceptable in the short term, but is expected to be a stepping stone to economic independence, not an inter-generational affair. It means not invading one's neighbors (with some caveats for "just war"), and following the laws of war when violence is truly necessary.
It seems that, to a large extent separably, Gaza (and to a slightly lesser degree, the West Bank) have de facto statehood: there are borders. There is some degree of law enforcement. To be clear, that statehood is often failed statehood: there doesn't seem to be a monopoly on violence, especially across its borders. And to a large extent, it seems to me that the broader international community, largely in the name of "aid" props up this failed state and makes things palatable enough for its residents to maintain the status quo. It seems to me (perhaps as I've gotten older) that indefinite carrots often just enable bad behavior, and that long-term gain may require some amount of shorter-term pain: high unemployment (I've generally seen numbers close to 50% pre-war) seems like a fertile breeding ground for fanaticism in ways that might be less appealing when there's a sense that there really is something to lose -- and my observation there isn't unique to Palestine, either.
Now, I'm hardly in a place to dictate Israel's foreign policy, but I think it would at least be interesting to consider a unilateral recognition of a state of Palestine as an open-ended starting point for peace negotiations. Sure, it gives something to Palestinians (most directly, it would probably require defined borders in the West Bank), but it also gives them a platform to expect things in return: they could feasibly dictate that such a state would be non-militarized in exchange for security guarantees, demand that firing weapons across its borders be treated as a criminal action (extradition?), and provide a roadmap to gradually removing blockades in exchange for extended periods of peace. I'm not sure that would actually improve the situation given the religious fanaticism at play, but it seems like it would provide something to point to as a reasonable defined goal to point to, although I'd expect at least some criticism along the lines of "Bantustan."
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Also meta: if we allow really long posts, it might be nice to somehow allow folding the long post but not it's replies. You can fold the whole thread, but sometimes I just want to see the new replies.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
It seems like some of the precursor missing technologies are obvious, but comparatively few are working on them. I'm thinking small-scale closed-loop habitats: Biosphere 2 was cute, but it mostly failed as an experiment and wasn't even a reasonable size for space colonies. I think we're quite short of the required technology, but it seems a fairly easy experiment to run iteratively on Earth to get there.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
seems like there's no reason humans WOULDN'T push out into space as far as they possibly can if the cost of doing so was brought within reason.
As a thought experiment, I'm curious what sort of frame of mind you think would convince people to leave Earth en masse to start a space colony. I grew up watching Star Trek, so I like the idea, I just can't really reasonably picture people of 2024 electing to go live their lives in such confined quarters. What are we missing to make that palatable, or am I just not the target audience? Maybe "fully automated", but we can't even deliver that terrestrially.
The reasons previous generations packed up and left their homelands are pretty well documented: religion, economics, escaping conflicts, and such. I don't see as clean a mapping there into moving into space, but I'm curious to hear ideas. Are we waiting for a cult explicitly based on sending it's followers to live in the Promised Land Sea of Tranquility?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Say what you will about Jobs on a technical level (not an iPhone or Mac user myself), but the real genius was positioning the company as a reliable luxury brand that produced reasonably friendly, polished products.
The iPhone was not the first capacitive multi touch phone to hit the market, but it was the first to really gain consumer mind share. I was around to witness "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." on Slashdot in response to the iPod, but despite owning a Nomad myself it's debatable technical superiority meant little in the market.
And I will give Apple credit that their engineers are still really good, and product management keeps a surprisingly small stable of unique parts for a company their size. Without Jobs they seem a bit listless in terms of focus on new product lines (maybe AR will work for them?) but continue to innovate more gradually, and drag the rest of the PC industry along with them: their homebrew processors are supposed to be pretty good although I haven't tried them.
I don't think Jobs was himself a great engineer, but solid product management is underrated and deserves credit.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
In addition to this, there are some less-obvious pernicious possibilities: running the factory to make rockets is, itself, a cost, and doesn't scale amazingly well with respect to cost or quality. One could conceivably develop reusable rockets, meaning you could reduce (first-stage) production from every couple weeks to a couple new units a year, which sounds like a cost savings, but suddenly you need to reorganize your employees and roles are no longer as specialized, your QA folks are dragged into an unfamiliar task every six months, and a lot more time is spent churning on unfamiliar tasks. And good luck running a "do it the same, right way every time" quality program when nobody immediately remembers the last one: suddenly your high-throughput factory is now making bespoke aerospace parts like old-school space programs are famous for, and costs rise accordingly.
I'm not saying that has happened, but it's at least a possibility.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
In the U.S. we generally view tick-tock as China spreading ideologies that weaken our nationalism (transgender, river to sea Hamas stuff).
I think it's important to note that "ideologies that weaken our nationalism" doesn't specify an inherent political direction, and seems to look more like amplifying scissor statements to make us mad at each other. I think the modal example looks less like high-level direction to allow trans athletes in women's sports, and more like observing that people have surprisingly strong feelings on the issue (fairness vs. inclusion) and constantly highlighting the issue in ways that maximize outrage on both sides.
In much the same vein, I thought a lot of the 2016 Russiagate coverage was inherently counterproductive. Sure, maybe the Russian intelligence apparatus wanted Trump to win to stoke discord in American politics, but from where I sit it looks like we devolved into political infighting almost more over the specter of such meddling than from the actual political actions themselves: The rumors and investigations of their involvement seem to me have been far more pernicious for American unity than any of the direct actions.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
Roundup unknowingly potentially causing cancer
Is there any good evidence of the harm of glyphosate in reasonable quantities? I haven't done a literature review myself, but I've seen reports of questionable research on the "causes harm" side, but also that it's anecdotally safer than most of the alternatives.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
People don't like being told things like...
The classic example that comes to mind here is "Have you tried eating healthier, getting more exercise, and losing weight?"
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
As for where all these black people came from, if I remember your family history correctly, I am afraid you will have to blame your ancestors.
If we were truly to accept this argument, we could strictly limit affirmative action to ADOS, rather than all Americans of African lineage. On the other hand, maybe this could be acceptable: it would rule out race-based favoritism on behalf of, for example, Barack Obama and Claudine Gay.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
That's fair. I was thinking more when the case originally blew up in the media and the facts that came out at trial (the injury details) weren't as clear.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
IMO neither "Stand Your Ground" nor "Duty to Retreat" neatly solve all cases. I don't think there's a general solution to what I'd call the Thunderdome Problem ("two men enter, one man leaves") regarding how the justice system should, absent other evidence, a dead body and the survivor's claim of having been attacked. I, at least, don't think the criminal justice system either categorically believing, or disbelieving the survivor's claim counts is sufficiently fair.
It may be the case that Thunderdome cases are sufficiently infrequent to not matter generally, but some of our more scissor-y examples of claimed self-defense violence (Zimmerman, perhaps most notably) do seem to fit with that pattern. It seems plausible to me that people are applying their personal biases toward the general case to sufficiently fuzzy specific cases.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10d ago
It's a minor thing, but I wonder about the coding of AK-pattern rifles (this case) versus AR types. I know right-leaning folks who own AK patterns, but every example of the right bringing guns to a protest seems to prefer ARs. I assume the American-designed AR is more 'patriotic' than a foreign platform? The AK specifically has all sorts of 'adversary' connotations.
But I suspect there are some here far more familiar with the thinking.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10d ago
This isn't a new problem, but probably is the highest-profile case. I remember hearing a podcast episode about "the default voice of Tiktok" a few years back (2018?), who was suing because the scope of the project was unclear when she signed up (IIRC it was pitched as an academic project), and because, according to her, widespread, easily-recognized text-to-speech using your specific voice is a career limiter for other voice acting prospects.
Not really directly related (there are better answers below), but the DOJ argued in Yates (2015) that a fish was a "record, document, or tangible object" destroyed for the purposes of Sarbanes-Oxley when a fisherman under investigation threw undersized fish back into the Gulf of Mexico. RBG wrote the 5-4 opinion that "tangible object" for the purposes was required to be one that is normally "used to record or preserve information": not a fish.
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