site banner
PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   2627 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 5, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

So - looking at The Palisades Fire - everything that is made of concrete/brick or stone is standing, everything else is gone. Is there any amount of fire damage that will convince the US residential construction companies to finish reading The Three Little Piggies book, when they have obviously stopped at the house of the second piggy?

Platform framing is great because it doesn't require specialized equipment. You might want an auto crane for roof trusses, but that's like half a day of work per house. Otherwise it's just power tools and Mexicans.

There are a few options for earthquake-resistant concrete housing.

  1. The fanciest one is AAC working as permanent formwork. Can we done with Mexicans if buy them a long enough vibrator, but there aren't enough AAC factories in the US (there's just one, I think)
  2. Then there's a concrete frame infilled with AAC or bricks. Requires some removable formwork, like plywood, a concrete mixer and a concrete pump.
  3. Finally, you can make prefab concrete panels and assemble them on site. Requires an auto crane and a welder, but you still want to pour a concrete ceiling to tie them together, so see point 2.

All three are quite feasible if California straight up bans combustible single-family homes, then construction companies will invest into new construction methods. Otherwise it makes more sense to reuse the technology used in the rest of the lower 48 states.

AFAIK it's much easier to build seismically sound structures out of wood than brick or concrete.

Also while the walls of stone buildings may still be standing, considering the absolute devastation of the insides, it may have been better for them to burn to save on demolition costs.

I'd say "look, there's clearly only one wolf whose lung capacity is presumably limited. It's probably cheaper in the long run to keep building houses out of sticks, especially in non-wolf-threatened areas. Also shooting the wolf would be cheaper than building every pig a wolf-proof house"

There's almost certainly a few areas in the US where building much heavier/different structures makes economic sense due to fires, floods, or hurricanes, but it's so expensive that building cheaper elsewhere probably makes more sense unless you already have far more money than sense. (Especially in flood zones)

I hate to sound like an urbanist, but I'm looking at The Summit housing development near the fire, and if people want to build in the forested hills and grasslands outside of LA and SF, they can probably bear the cost of occasionally rebuilding their $6M mansions. Them choosing to build in such a risky location shouldn't affect the viability of those (horrible but cost-effective) 4-over-1 apartment complexes in denser areas.

Personally I'm well aware my tinder shitbox inna woods would be a lost cause if there was ever a wildfire here, and budget for it accordingly. But it hasn't happened yet, and I could build 3 or 4 of these places before the breakeven point. It's the price I pay for not having to walk on nothing but concrete, which I'm convinced sucks the soul from my body.

How much different is the cost of an insurance claim for a stone shell whose insides burned vs building a new stick framed home from scratch.

It doesn't really work that way, again unless the house is literally surrounded by/within a bunch of big trees. Houses usually burn in wildfire due to brands/embers falling on flammable bits that are exposed, or grassfires burning right up to flammable siding and catching that on fire.

It's normal for towns to have trees and greenery on the streets, which conveniently double as tinder.

There's usually lawns and such in between that and the houses though. (or should be, if you have a town somewhere that can also get wildfires.

The safe zone for human survivability if overrun is much smaller than you might think, for reasonable fuel loads -- nevermind the inside of a building.

The burned out neighbourhoods you see in wildfire footage almost always got that way by the houses themselves catching fire one at a time -- in the Kelowna fires aftermath you'd often see the odd house where the builder decided to spring for a tile roof untouched right in the middle of a burnt out street.

Even just wood-frame with the exposed bits clad in non-combustibles gets you most of the way there, provided your house is not literally in the middle of untouched forest. (which is a difficult position, in the worst-case scenario, and really needs firebreaks)

Steel/clay/concrete roof is priority #1, and stucco (or similar) siding helps some too -- we struggle to implement these in Canada for labour cost/expertise and style reasons, but I don't really see how either of these are an obstacle in California? (Earthquake-proof concrete OTOH gets pretty expensive I think?)

Any recommendations for "brain off" YouTube channels?

I find all TV / Netflix is insufferable nowadays. Sports, of course, being the exception.

I'm looking for YouTube channels that are entertaining / mildly interesting that Mottizens enjoy.

I really enjoyed listening to the elder scrolls lore podcast

https://youtube.com/@imperialknowledge?si=qfNilNJUaUAtsjQn

It's not as much of a watching thing.

For truly mindless I go for wood spinning and epoxy pours.

I like this guy Bright Sun Travels who reviews cruises and resorts. I have no idea why, but it’s very relaxing to listen to someone with plausible-autism explain amenities calmly for 40 minutes. It’s truly brain-off because it has no impact on anything I will ever do.

  • YMS, and specifically his watch-along videos: either by himself (last night my girlfriend and I watched the highlights of him watching The Weeknd's vanity project The Idol and laughed ourselves silly) or with his pals (their watch-along of seasons 3 and 4 of 13 Reasons Why was great comfort telly during Covid and I watched the whole thing several times).
  • Errant Signal. His long rambling videos about video games are very comfy watches, even if his woke left opinions occasionally disrupt the vibe. I've watched his System Shock 2 review two or three times.
  • Super Bunnyhop, as above (but without any wokeness or leftism). I've watched his reviews of Resident Evil 4 and the RE 1 remake more times than I can count.
  • The Internet Historian. I've watched The Cost of Concordia at least ten times.

Are you me? Errant Signal and Super Bunnyhop are classics, I've watched a bunch of SBH's videos a million times. It's kinda sad that he stopped doing mainstream game review/analyses and did more passion project topics and then everyone stopped watching his videos.

Gundam Battle Operation 2 gameplay: 42-Year-Old Gamer and Spider-Chieftain

I never got the appeal of Mecha. What’s good about it?

I’m right there with you, I like giant robots but mecha just feels odd. I attribute my feeling to growing up on Transformers; I’m used to my robots having souls and so seeing people sit inside of them and pilot them has the same sort of creepy feeling as those stories where human beings turn out to be robots piloted by tiny aliens.

(Mecha has always been more popular in Japan and the Transformers began as a line of mecha robots with human pilots, but the American adaptation went in the complete opposite direction and turned them into living characters.)

I considered them one in the same, I suppose I need to finally get around to watching Evangelion to develop a taste.

one in the same

*one and the same

Do you get the appeal of tanks, warships, planes, and similar military vehicles?

Yeah!

Is it gundam-style mecha that seem unappealing, or legged war machines generally?

I'm not much of a gundam fan myself, but I really love giant robots and grittier mechs, for basically the same reasons I love more realistic war machines. They're big and complicated high-tech amalgamations of concentrated power, and the extra complexity of arms and legs just enhances their appeal.

Legged war machines, but;

complicated high-tech amalgamations of concentrated power

This is appealing. However all the surrounding media seems to juvenile and I didn’t catechize myself on any of it when I was young, so it’s hard to get into.

Makes sense. On the OP's topic, I'm a fan of Tex Talks Battletech, a series of long-form history/lore videos for Battletech. If you're looking for something to try, I'd recommend his vids on the Charger and the battles of Twycross and Tukkayid. If those work for you, the Amaris Civil War is a fantastic longer-form treatment, and the rest of his battletech series are as well. The heaping helping of tangential silly memes is just the cherry on top.

all the surrounding media seems too juvenile

Again, it depends very heavily on the series. I don't think anyone would call Armored Core juvenile.

You know that "big machine is like an extension of my body" thing? This, but taken as literally as possible.

It’s like construction equipment, but without the boring limitations of reality.

Well, you just watch the cool-looking giant robots zoom around with reactionless thrusters, swing energy swords, and shoot giant guns, interspersed with some human-focused drama. (Note that different series can have vastly different appeal. For example, I enjoyed Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam and Mobile Fighter G Gundam, but was not able to enjoy Mobile Suit Gundam (ugly animation) or Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ (overwhelmingly stupid characters).)

My personal favorite mecha to look at probably are Zeta Gundam (sleek and with a cool fold-out thruster on its back), Delta Gundam (sleek (unlike its overly edgy child Delta Plus) and with a cool shield (unlike its parent Hyaku-Shiki)), and Kshatriya (four shields and two free arms, without an ugly backpack contraption like Full Armor Gundam's).

ryukahr streams Mario Maker and Kaizo Mario gameplay. low-key, mildly amusing fluff.

The Creepcast is two youtubers reading creepypasta, and reacting to/critiquing the quality. I usually listen to a straight recording of the story in question, and then listen to their version as a sort of commentary track.

At the risk of oversharing, I lost my mother over the weekend and while I give my wife the advice that she shouldn't feel guilty for not forcing herself to be somber and mournful every single moment, I myself can't escape feeling like people would think me callous or unfeeling if my actions and demeanor didn't match their perception of what someone mourning their mother should be, so I do ultimately force myself to act differently just to not cause any unease. Am I overthinking this?

I don't think I cried at all when my mother died, due to a combination of:

  1. She had been ill with a terminal neurodegenerative disease for a few years at that point, so we all saw it coming.
  2. I had moved across the country over a decade earlier, and since then had only seen her for a week or two so every year, so we'd grown apart.
  3. Honestly, I just didn't enjoy being around her much in the years leading up to her diagnosis. She wasn't mean or anything, but she was much more negative and complained a lot more than she had before. In retrospect, I think it's likely that this was a preclinical effect of the neurodegeneration.

I was sad, but in a sort of abstract, detached way, and not in a way that was deeply painful.

I'm very sorry for your loss. Everyone processes grief differently, it probably hasn't really hit you yet. Don't let anyone tell you you're doing it wrong, my cousins gave me a complex about that when I was six or seven years old and it sent me on a shame spiral for years.

I think it has hit me, it wasn't that much of a surprise that it happened so I've been preparing myself mentally for a while. She had metastasis all over and while for a year and a half medication kept it from progressing, we knew from the moment she had that diagnosis that she had years left, not decades.

I am not performatively emotional at all (that lack of outward emotion is a family trait) but I get the feeling maybe people might think I don't actually care just because I seem to be outwardly normal?

My sincere condolences, something like this would have scarred me for life. You not showing excessive emotions isn't wrong, it's ok to grieve, don't overthink it. Take care.

Thanks for your kind words. I hope something like that would not scar you for life, because ultimately burying their parents is something most people have to go through (and it would be a much sadder world if the opposite were more common).

Sorry for your loss, firstly.

Second: yes, you're overthinking it. But here's a reassuring (under-compressed) metaphor - recreational drugs differ in how fucked up you actually are versus how fucked up you feel. Some match closely (eg booze), others don't.

The first and only time I ever used a strong opioid off-label, I was surprised by how sober I felt internally versus how intoxicated those around me perceived me to be. I thought I had been essentially fine, until my wife helpfully explained in mortifying detail after how completely out of it I'd been.

This is pretty much how my experience of close bereavement went. In the days and weeks immediately afterward, I thought guiltily that I was feeling less bad than I ought to. I felt bad about indecent flashes of feeling okay.

And the funny thing is of course, with the benefit of almost a decade's hindsight, I had been a mess. I really was impacted well over the minimum decent bereavement threshold. I was by no means at all some indifferent icicle, though a diary I kept at the time is (almost) funny in how much I kept returning to that question "I'm not grieving enough, am I, why not, what's this thorn in the flesh, etc".

My experience was that it took at least 6 months before I could do my job competently and about 2 years to where I was generally at baseline. And still a decade on I think of that family member no less than 4ish times a day, often more.

And importantly, I really just had no insight into how affected I was at the time

That's a good point regarding drugs. I don't know how much of a mess I might seem to others though. She died on saturday. I was back to work on monday, and I'm only planning on taking time off in so much as it would help for administrative tasks that result from her death. I loved my mother a lot, but I feel no impairment, no need to take a breather. Maybe it's a family trait, neither of my parents families are very performatively emotional. Within hours of it happening, my brother and I were calmly and casually discussing the logistics of the funeral, inheritance, etc... The only moments when I get choked up thinking about it is when I put myself into some else's shoes. Maybe it's also having internalized enough stoic philosophy that dampened my emotions. I don't know.

I think your reaction is pretty normal. When my dad died my family focused on logistics of internment, and my primary task was sorting out where he was on the taxes and getting an estimated return filed (it was close to the regular filing due date). I got 3 work days bereavement and while I used them all, it was mostly because of travel to/from my folks house. I expect it'll be similar when my mom dies.

On the other hand, I think if my husband pre-deceased me, I would need more than 3 days to figure out how to manage. And if my daughter pre-deceased me I am not sure I would ever really be functional again. I wonder if my dad had died while I still lived in his home if I would have been less emotionally pragmatic than I was.

Nominated for AAQC.

I keep thinking of this observation I once saw that when you're drunk, you don't realise how drunk you are (but it's instantly obvious to everyone else), but when you're high on weed, you become paranoid that everyone around you will notice (but in reality most people don't).

Sorry to hear about your mother. Make sure to be very kind to yourself and don't be surprised if emotions come out of nowhere.

Anyone with any mature experience of death understands that people process it in different ways. I've never seen anyone judged for not performing grief in the 'right way' (except for obvious rude or garish behaviour at the funeral/wake).

Consider at least trying to not be performative (which is to say; be yourself) and see how it goes. If you get several people disapprove then you can always change back to the 'right way'.

I'm sorry for your loss.

Everyone reacts differently, based on temperament, life circumstances, etc.. When my mother lost a parent suddenly, she was cheerful-ish and busy with funeral arrangements right up until she suddenly burst into tears. When my father, nearing old age himself, lost a parent after a long period of decline, his only particular wish was this people didn't push him to have strong emotional reactions to an event he'd known was coming for 20 years.

I think @FiveHourMarathon is right and that outwardly adopting a version of your set cultural expectations for mourning is probably a good thing and will allow you to mark the moment emotionally without constantly second-guessing yourself, but there's no gain from forcing yourself to feel otherwise than you do, or from over-analysing.

Condolences. Yes you are overthinking it. When my mother died, I was in such a shock that I was actually trying to tell jokes and cheer my friends that were grieving for her at the funeral. My grief came in full force probably two weeks after the funeral, but I was incapacitated for a couple of days. It is pretty individual.

You're probably overthinking it, but I'm familiar enough with it. The best thing you can do is find someone you respect and trust, and put them in charge. Traditions for mourning, though often ultimately excessive, were good in that they have you a set process to work on. Try and find your set process.

Recommendations for True Crime books?

I got violently ill over the holidays, and in my mix of delirium and tedium I re-listened to Tom.O'Neill's Chaos about the Manson family murders, and really enjoyed it. Now I'm in the mood for more in the genre, but I'm having trouble finding ones that don't completely blow. Tom did a great job in Chaos of blending the lurid with the Nancy Drew with solid reporting. I'd want something just like that if it exists.

A bit niche, but having read several books about the OJ trial, here are my evaluations:

The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin. This is the "official account" of the trial, such that one can exist, and it's pretty good, but not great. Toobin starts with the premise that OJ is guilty and paints the entire case in the light that the defense was acting borderline unethically and the prosecution and judiciary incompetently, and that the jury were all idiots. While this all may be true, Toobin is a journalist, not an attorney, and nothing in the books suggests he did the kind of research necessary to justify his snarky tone. B+

Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case by Alan Dershowitz. Easily the best book about the case, though it's not so much a blow by blow account as it is a series of meditations on what it says about the criminal justice system. Dersh takes no stance on guilt or innocence (despite being an appellate advisor for Simpson) and explains why most of the criticisms from various media commentators are off base. A

The Search for Justice: A Defense Attorney's Brief on the O.J. Simpson Case by Robert Shapiro. Shapiro was OJ's lead attorney before he was informally elbowed out by Johnny Cochran, and he spends most of the book explaining the case from the defense side. While he doesn't apologize for anything, he doesn't really make the case for Simpson's innocence that well, and he doesn't really give any insight into how the defense strategy led to the acquittal. It's adequate, but that's about it. C

O.J. the Last Word by Gerry Spence. Spence is one of those criminal defense attorneys who handled three slam dunk cases in his life and acts like he's some kind of genius for having never lost. After starting this book I'm certain I wouldn't want him defending me if I were ever in trouble. He was actually approached about defending OJ but backed out after Shapiro made it clear he'd be part of a team and not acting solo. I actually only made it about 50 pages in as it was unreadable. F

Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O. J. Simpson Got Away with Murder by Vincent Bugliosi. I didn't actually read this, but I watched the 7 hour video supplement that includes interviews with the key players and clips from the actual trial and news reports. I don't imagine that the book covers anything that isn't covered in the video, so I'm counting it. Anyway, Bugliosi was so outraged by the verdict he had to go on a whinge about how everybody involved with the trial fucked up royally, and second-guesses the prosecutions entire strategy by saying that they should have spent more time pursuing the domestic abuse angle that clearly wasn't playing with the jury, whom he only just falls short of calling complete morons. It's entertaining, but if Bugliosi thinks he would have won the case had he still been with the Los Angeles DA at the time, he's dreaming. The video is more entertaining because you get the full dose of Bugliosi's sanctimonious ire. He also uses logically fallacious arguments, and he left the DA's office so he could be a defense attorney, but didn't get much work since he only defended people whom he thought were innocent. He's a prick, and if I were on the jury I would have voted to acquit just to piss him off. C+ for content, but recommended for unintentional hilarity.

Without a Doubt by Marcia Clark. Clark spends 300 pages blaming everyone but the prosecutor's office for the acquittal, and doesn't pull punches when it comes to Chris Darden's mistakes, though she insists they're still friends. She mostly blames Lance Ito for letting the defense run wild, but she's at least entertaining enough that she comes across as a cool lady rather than the icy bitch she was portrayed as in the media. She also gives actual insight into the prosecution's strategy and why she thinks it didn't work. Bonus points for admitting up front she wrote the book for the money. A-

Obviously you should start with In Cold Blood, arguably the first of the genre. Unless you've already read it. Helter Skelter by Bugliosi offers what was the contemporary take on the Manson family, though folks like Lynette Fromme and Sandra Goode say Bugliosi was making up his own narrative.

A couple recent releases:

Say Anything by Patrick Radden Keefe

Dark Wire by Joseph Cox

The Art Thief by Michael Finkel

It's not a book, but I love the First 48 for my true crime. Each episode follows 1 or 2 murders ver the first 48 hours of the investigation under the theory that murders without a leadafter 48 hours have a terrible clearance rate!

What I like is that each episode follows evidence collection, research, and interrogation. But you also get the detectives thinking in between those. They often have enough time between filming and publication to write up the court casem.

Here's my comment on Hunt For The Green River Killer from this June

I don't know if it would meet your requirements for sheer writing quality and story telling. This one is almost dry in its "this happened, then this happened, then this happened" narrative style. The good news is there's no politicization of the case, and there's no histrionic hagiography of the victims ("Susan always loved to laugh").

The specific reason I recommend it (as my comment states) is that it does an exceptional job of demonstrating how fucked up a investigation can get by seemingly doing "the right thing." So, if you have an interest in how police solve crimes, I think it offers an interesting and unique perspective.

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets is one one the all time greats

Colin Wilson, A Criminal History of Mankind. I expected it to be a general book on criminology, but Wilson was only interested in pathological murderers, which should be right up your alley.

violently ill

Norovirus?

Might have been, might have just been a wicked case of COVID or flu.

Regardless, poor outcomes resulted.

Is there an AI currently available to the public that can do a good job of producing a text in English from translating spoken audio in other languages?

Hmm.. Your best bet would be OpenAI Whisper, which can transcribe other languages. It's mostly used real-time, but I believe there are services that let you upload recorded audio. You can even run it locally if you're tech-savvy. You can also consider signing up to Google AI Studio, the new Gemini models should be able to ingest audio files and translate them.

If you're willing to just playback the audio into an open mic, you can just use ChatGPT (the mic button uses Whisper, and you can open the Voice mode that's meant for conversations and play the audio to it live).

Hm. Cheers!

What's a good book about TCP/IP networking? I am currently redoing my home network setup and I've realized my knowledge of networking is very fragmented. I know the right incantations, but I have no idea what they actually do.

  • what does "default gateway" actually do? What happens when it's the "wrong" IP? When it's blank?
  • what happens when two machines claim to have the same IP?
  • how exactly does DHCP work?
  • how does UDP go through NAT?
  • what are VLANs?

I know you asked specifically for a book, but https://learn.cantrill.io/p/tech-fundamentals is a pretty good free course about the various layers of the networking stack. If you want to go deep on the protocol-level stuff then maybe Stevens' TCP/IP Illustrated could be what you're after? It might be too TCP-focused, since you also have questions about VLANs and UDP.

Beej's guide is fairly concise but still covers all the important technical details. The sections about network programming in python can be skipped or skimmed through without missing much.

Default gateway does what it literally says. A gateway, in IP routing, is a term meaning "traffic for X network should be sent to the router at Y destination IP address". You can have potentially many routes on a system specifying what traffic goes where. The default gateway, then, is the gateway which your traffic will use when no other routing rule matches.

I'm not certain about what happens when two machines claim to have the same IP, actually. But I can take an educated guess. When you try to reach out to an IP address, your machine first needs to figure out which Ethernet MAC address it should send that traffic to (it does this using a protocol called ARP). Most likely, what would happen is you would start to see traffic for that one IP address go to both machines sporadically, depending on which is responding to ARP requests first. I'm not certain but that's what I would imagine.

DHCP works by sending out a broadcast on Ethernet asking for a DHCP server. When the server replies, it will give the client an IP address to use. That's the gist, though I don't know the exact details of the DHCP communication (I couldn't write my own software or anything).

UDP goes through NAT the same as TCP does. If you're making an outbound connection, the router will pick a port to listen for reply traffic, and forward replies to your client machine. If you're making an inbound connection, you need a port forwarded to the destination at the router level in advance.

A VLAN is a way to isolate Ethernet networks even if they are plugged into the same physical hardware. The switch you are plugged into lets you configure which ports are part of which VLAN, and only ports which are part of the same VLAN can talk to each other using Ethernet. You can also configure a port so that multiple VLANs are allowed, in which case the device plugged into the port must add a tag to any traffic it sends specifying which VLAN it is for (and it is only allowed to send traffic on the VLANs you configured on the switch).

I'm not certain about what happens when two machines claim to have the same IP, actually

Depends on the IP. If it's so called "local" IP (starts with 10., 192.168 or 172.16.) and they are not on the same local network, then nothing bad, since these addresses specifically designed for such use. If they are on the same local network, there would be trouble, not sure about the exact nature but likely both computers sharing an IP won't be able to properly use it. Usually your OS would scream at you in some way when such thing is detected. Using DHCP server is one of the ways to ensure this thing never happens.

If you have two hosts that have same IP and those are not local IPs then weird things would happen. In general, if you have NAT (which most home users for now should and would have) then outgoing connections should work fine (then again, there's no real reason for a machine used by home user to even have a non-local IP at all) but it's better to avoid that situation completely because things get weird. There are special organizations and protocols aimed at segregating IP space so nobody steps on each other's toes there. As a home user, you probably don't need any of that as the standard setup is to use local IPs for everything inside the home network and only use non-local IP for the main router egress address.

Yeah, I meant two machines on the local network. I've never tried that one before. I unfortunately have first-hand experience with machines on different networks using the same IP addresses, as one of my old employers was too cheap to buy new IPv4 subnets and we squatted on the DoD 22.0.0.0/8 subnet. Our network team had a very fun day when the DoD started using that subnet publicly, or so I heard from my old coworkers (I had left by that time).

DHCP server restarts can cause IP conflicts pretty often, especially if you're running the DHCP server on a small home/office router that doesn't persist state. Windows will specifically warn about the IP conflict, and newer (Win7+) will often try to automatically reregister with your DHCP server if you're not running in static modes; Linux has some optional standards-complaint IP conflict notifiers.

If not corrected, the usual results are inconsistent communication and higher network utilization: network switches will resolve the IP address to physical multiple ports, and this causes packets to be sent many more places than they need, and can sometimes cause TCP connections to go wonky.

((There are exceptions and sometimes even cases where you could use this behavior, but they were always rare and increasingly have been replaced by better solutions.))

DHCP server restarts can cause IP conflicts pretty often, especially if you're running the DHCP server on a small home/office router that doesn't persist state

More fun can be had if there's a rogue DHCP server on the network. Back in the days I did network admining work (a long time ago) I had to deal with such a case - turned out to be a new printer with helpful on-by-default DHCP server, but it took me a lot of frustration to figure it out because I never thought before a printer could do that to me.

What idiot thought it was a good idea to add a DHCP server to a printer? That is peak anti-social.

In an office setting, I know it would take me so much time to try to figure that out. At least in a home setting, it's far easier to remember the answer to "what was the last thing that I (or spouse or kids) attached to the network in the past day or two?"

Yeah that was my question exactly when I finally discovered what happened - who even thought it was a good idea to do this? Thankfully, haven't heard about someone doing that for a long while now.

What idiot thought it was a good idea to add a DHCP server to a printer?

It's probably so you can connect directly to the printer, without needing a router. Of course, it might be smarter to first try to acquire a DHCP lease before starting a DHCP server...

Yeah I think it was some kind of "smart" home solution when not everybody had routers on home network. A bit fuzzy on details now but that might be the idea at least. It had a normal "play nice" mode too, just for some reason it wasn't enabled by default... or maybe somebody switched it for some reason, impossible to know now.

Oh yeah that's a good time too. When I was in college, I worked in the IT department and every so often we had to deal with a student who brought in a router and plugged one of their LAN ports into the campus network. That got your port shut off by the school pretty quickly, and iirc you had to come in and promise to stop using your router to get it turned back on.

Students are something else. I am still ashamed of some of the shenanigans I did as a student, especially after eventually finding myself on the other side (not in an university, thankfully). It's a tough job to run IT in such places.

Questions like this are pretty much in the wheelhouse of things like ChatGPT. It's really good at answering these high-level questions and providing good direction with the ability to dive deeper into each of the topics.

I asked on your behalf and everything looks pretty much like I would've written. https://chatgpt.com/share/677bd93a-310c-8004-9dcc-9b36c30fde8c

My take:

For home networking, unless you're setting up a homelab, you can probably ignore VLANs. Honestly, most of these are pretty much ignorable for what I'm expecting your use case of home network are concerned.

Anything vaguely modern in terms of a home router should handle all of these pretty transparently. Without getting into packet-level stuff, DHCP from the router will configure the clients and configure the default gateway to itself as well as prevent duplicate IPs (unless you're configuring them manually). DHCP itself tends to just work out of the box. UDP NATing, similarly, tends to just work. VLANs, at what I'm expecting is your scale, should likely just be ignored.

In my case, I have a small server rack that has a couple of NASes living in it along with a few switches (1GbE and 10GbE). The switches support VLANs, but even for what I'm doing, I'm far from needing any of the functionality it would provide. The router I'm using are a set of Eeros -- they can provide a mesh network, but for me all of them are hardwired to the switch.

If you're looking to experiment from a homelab perspective, that's another story. But it could be a really fun story. A common way of getting started there to get a solid grounding on the fundamentals is doing something like setting up a Raspberry Pi cluster and playing with those. It's a cheap and approachable way to learn these concepts.

I can already set up my home network (which is currently an x86 router, a custom-built NAS, a router working as a wireless AP and another router working as a wireless extender plus all the end-user devices), I want to understand why I am doing the things I am doing. I am sorry, but your ChatGPT log didn't exactly help with that. I'll see if asking it for a more textbook explanation from the ground up will work.

Much of this is really building on many decades worth of tech and it's hard to understand the why until you understand much of the whole stack.

Here's some of the whys, from my perspective in the order I would talk about them:

DHCP: when a device joins a network, it can broadcast on the network and ask for how it should configure it's network stack. Implicit in the request is the MAC (Media Access Control) address of the interface itself which provides the physical address of the interface. The DHCP server (in a home setting, usually in the router) assigns an IP from a block it manages and gives the rest of the networking details (gateway, subnet, etc) to the client. DHCP isn't strictly needed as the clients can be configured manually in many cases. Cheap IoT devices tend to rely on it.

Default Gateway: When you're sending any packet to something outside your local network, you send the packet to the gateway and it figures out how to get the packet to the destination. In a home setting, this will just be forwarding the packet upstream to your ISP. In a larger scale setting, it's going to consult things like BGP routing to figure out where to send things to. The beauty of IP is that the client doesn't need to worry about it and it's completely abstracted into the gateway itself.

Duplicate IPs: As mentioned before, every interface has a MAC address. When you're sending a packet on the network to another machine (i.e. not broadcast), you send the packet to the MAC address. But we're dealing with IP, not MACs. To translate from an IP address to a MAC address we send out a broadcast ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) request asking basically "will the device with IP xxx respond?" Broadcasts are received by all the machines on the network. The machine with the requested IP will respond. If there are multiple machines that are configured with the same IP, they'll all respond. What happens here is usually the first one wins. This is complicated by modern switches because they learn what IPs/MACs are on each of their ports. They'll likely assume there are two routes to the same host and weird things may happen. Lesson: don't do it, things break.

VLANs: From a switch perspective, it just controls what ports can talk to which other ports. If you have an 24-port switch, you can configure multiple VLANs such that, say, ports 1-12 can talk to each other, and 13-24 can talk to each other. It's setting up two "Virtual LANs." You can have a router that attaches to both of the VLANs to handle routing between them if you want. These are typically used to prioritize certain network traffic, or for security (e.g. a guest network can't talk to your servers).

UDP and NAT: Since there's no connection in UDP, the NAT device just remembers things like "when device XX using port YY sends a packet to internet address AA port BB, I sent the packet on my port PP. Later, if I get a packet from AA:BB on port PP, I'll look that up and forward the packet to XX:YY." The key here is that all IP packets have the source IP and port and destination IP and port. When it's doing NATing, it replaces the local IP (which isn't going to be publically routable) with it's own address and port. On the way back, it just does the reverse and replaces the destination IP/port (which is how the packet got to it in the first place) with the local network's addresses and ports and forwards.

Thanks, that was helpful!

DHCP: when a device joins a network, it can broadcast on the network and ask for how it should configure it's network stack. Implicit in the request is the MAC (Media Access Control) address of the interface itself which provides the physical address of the interface. The DHCP server (in a home setting, usually in the router) assigns an IP from a block it manages and gives the rest of the networking details (gateway, subnet, etc) to the client. DHCP isn't strictly needed as the clients can be configured manually in many cases. Cheap IoT devices tend to rely on it.

How does it broadcast its request if it doesn't have an IP address?

Default Gateway: When you're sending any packet to something outside your local network, you send the packet to the gateway and it figures out how to get the packet to the destination. In a home setting, this will just be forwarding the packet upstream to your ISP. In a larger scale setting, it's going to consult things like BGP routing to figure out where to send things to. The beauty of IP is that the client doesn't need to worry about it and it's completely abstracted into the gateway itself.

The local network is defined by the network mask, right? So with 255.255.255.0 if I send something from 192.168.1.2 192.168.1.3 there's no need for the gateway to be set up, but 192.168.2.3 is outside the network and the packets will be routed to the gateway?

This makes me wonder how the packets are routed within the local network, actually. Let's say I'm sending a request from my PC (192.168.1.5) to my NAS (192.168.1.2). The PC is connected to my wireless switch/AP (192.168.1.4), and both the switch/AP and the NAS are connected to the wired router (192.168.1.1). How does the switch/AP know it should send the request to the wired router and not to one of its other LAN ports?

How does it broadcast its request if it doesn't have an IP address?

It’s certainly only a model, but answering questions like this is why the OSI model is taught to students: this is the glory of the data link layer! (Or Network Access layer in the more accurate TCP/IP model)

It’s possible, though not really useful, to run a local network over purely MAC addressing, but few pieces of software actually can. But if you’ve ever used wake-on-LAN, digging deeper than IP is how it works!

Every device is intended to have a factory-unique MAC address, though virtual machines, software overrides, and newfangled privacy features just go with the randomize-and-pray model. Since there’s a unique MAC for each device, a host connected to a local network can perform a MAC broadcast without any IP bootstrapping, and hopefully find a DHCP server to hand it IP configuration.

I really love MAC addressing and layer 2 stuff, precisely because this stuff works so transparently in most cases and so you don’t have to think about it. It’s very elegant in that way, and I like elegance and autoconfiguration; it’s the computer’s job to worry about the numbers.

On a tangent: admiration for this elegance was the driving force behind IPv6, and I’d argue the only way to understand IPv6 is to see it’s a design intended to bring the fluidity and elegance of local networks to the internet. This runs into a lot of real-world roadblocks and administrative preferences towards centralized control — yet decentralized but coordinated systems are the great triumph of software engineering and I find it beautiful even if there are real-world obstacles.

How does it broadcast its request if it doesn't have an IP address?

DHCP requests are transmitted over UDP with a target destination of the broadcast address, usually 255.255.255.255. The standard says that this packet should have a source address of 0.0.0.0, but in my experience most DHCP servers aren't very picky about that. This packet is just a message going across a wire to every receiver on the local network (ie, up until the gateway), so the ethernet card doesn't need to have an IP address at that time. EDIT: for clarity, it uses the MAC address to identify itself and so the server can properly respond to just the correct machine. This is one of many reasons that getting DHCP to run across network boundaries is an absolute nightmare. /EDIT

The local network is defined by the network mask, right?

For the purposes of TCP/IP, the local network is defined by the netmask. Physical networks (eg, having multiple routers with different subnets plugged into the same big switch) and logical networks (VLANs) can and often are different. This is a space with a lot of namespace collision, so be wary of it.

So with 255.255.255.0 if I send something from 192.168.1.2 192.168.1.3 there's no need for the gateway to be set up...

At the risk of going too deep into the (lies-to-children!) OSI model:

Before doing anything else, the sending computer looks at its ARP table, which converts IP addresses to MAC addresses. If the destination IP address is not on the ARP table, it will send an ARP request, which is a broadcast message to the local network asking if any devices have that IP address (or, if not on the local network, it sends an ARP request for the local gateway). Once it finds the address, it inserts that IP-MAC pair into the ARP table, and uses it as part of the packet and frame shaping.

The computer forms a packet, with a source IP address of 192.168.1.2/24 and a destination of 192.168.1.3/24, at the TCP/IP network layer, or layer three. The ethernet card breaks this into one or more "frames" with a maximum size called the MTU (historically 1500 bytes, but can be larger where hardware supports it), aka the ethernet/MAC data link layer or layer two. It then transmits these frames as signals to the network switch, aka the ethernet physical layer or layer one.

This switch will receive the signals, and convert them into the layer two frame. On older hubs, it would simply echo the frame out every port. On modern switches, it then inspects the frame for a destination MAC address. If the switch has records of receiving frames with a source MAC address matching that destination, it only sends the frame to that specific physical port or ports. If it has no record, it floods the frame out every port, and it's up to the receiving device to filter whether it's address properly. But the switch tables get filed with records pretty quickly

((For older computers, there was a physical layer conversion issue; this is why crossover cables existed. But almost every modern device can automatically switch over.))

but 192.168.2.3 is outside the network and the packets will be routed to the gateway?

In that case, the frame would be configured with a destination MAC of the local gateway, so the switch would look in its MAC table for the MAC of the local gateway, and usually only send the packet to the physical ports of the local gateway. This is layer two switching, not layer three routing.

It's only when the frame gets to the gateway, which reassembles the frame into a packet to inspect the destination IP address, that the gateway examines what the target IP address is, and then routes it by checking its own routing tables and own default gateway.

How does the switch/AP know it should send the request to the wired router and not to one of its other LAN ports?

There are two kinds of network switches/hubs (well, there are more, but at least two). The dumb one just essentially pretend everybody is on the same bus, and so every port gets all the traffic from other ports. This of course is only good for very simple small networks. Smarter switch would remember which IPs and MAC addresses live on which ports and forward the packets accordingly. Of course, smarter switches are more expensive than the dumb ones. For bigger networks you'd have configuration capacity in the switch to tell it which networks live on which ports.

I don't think you'll see a true 'dumb switch' (technical term 'hub') in ethernet from a major store; I haven't seen a new one since back when 10/100mbps switches were just phasing in. But they definitely existed, and it wasn't uncommon for one person to be able to bog down an entire intranet.

In the modern day, the distinction between 'dumb' and 'smart' switches is usually going to emphasize 'smart' switches as having optional routing functionality, (aka 'layer 3 switching'). This technically means that the layer 3 switch has one or more ports that can be configured into a router mode, though in practice it'll be missing a lot of other functionality you'd expect from a small home or office router (almost always missing NAT/PAT, usually not having DHCP or DNS).

How does it broadcast its request if it doesn't have an IP address?

This is where IP and ethernet get a bit blurry. ARP is operating at the raw ethernet level and it's sending out the raw ethernet packet to the ethernet broadcast address. In the packet it has it's IP and the requested IP. Implicit in the packet is the MAC address of the requesting machine. (Deeper dive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_frame)

In most cases you think "I'm IP xxx sending something to IP yyy," the reality is at the ethernet level, the IP stuff is all payload the network really doesn't care about. Internally, everything on the actual network level is working with MAC addresses. IPs are just a really convenient abstraction on top of it. (in this case "network" is the layer 2 of the entire stack -- the data link layer)

The local network is defined by the network mask, right? So with 255.255.255.0 if I send something from 192.168.1.2 192.168.1.3 there's no need for the gateway to be set up, but 192.168.2.3 is outside the network and the packets will be routed to the gateway?

That's correct. Anything on the local subnet stays on your local network. Anything outside gets punted to the gateway to deal with.

This makes me wonder how the packets are routed within the local network, actually. Let's say I'm sending a request from my PC (192.168.1.5) to my NAS (192.168.1.2). The PC is connected to my wireless switch/AP (192.168.1.4), and both the switch/AP and the NAS are connected to the wired router (192.168.1.1). How does the switch/AP know it should send the request to the wired router and not to one of its other LAN ports?

I'm going to cavalierly ignore WiFi in this because it muddies things up and deal with layer 2 of the stack and up and just treat it as a switch. This is what's in my mental model of what's happening in some detail.

  1. You try to access "nas.orthoxerox.com"
  2. DNS lookup for that. Oops, we only have the IP of the DNS server: 192.168.1.254 (making something up)
  3. ARP on ethernet to get the MAC for ...254.
  4. This gets to the switch. It'll broadcast this packet to all its ports. (Once the switch knows that a certain MAC is on a port it remembers it. Most home-grade switches can remember a few thousand MAC addresses)
  5. NAS responds and then the switch and your machine know the MAC of the DNS.
  6. DNS lookup (several round-trips to do this) -- you now know the IP of the NAS. (Since the switch now knows the IP of the DNS, it sends it directly to the port it knows it's on)
  7. ARP for the IP of the NAS. (same as before)
  8. Finally, send an ethernet packet from your machine to the NAS. (Again, from the ethernet perspective, this is sending from your machine to the NAS based on it's MAC address when we're at the low level)

If there are multiple switches between you and the destination, the broadcast just keeps going.

If you want to have some "fun," look up "ARP storm." It's likely one of the few times most networking folks (I'm a programmer) even think about things at that level.

Thanks a lot! How does Ethernet deal with someone pulling a Spartacus and spoofing MAC addresses of existing nodes?

By default, absolutely nothing... you've found one of the common attack surfaces of ethernet! You can use this to do all sorts of malicious things. You can overload the switches by just spamming them with new MAC addresses. You can intercept traffic. General denial of service attacks. Circumventing security. All sorts of mayhem.

So, ways of dealing with this... you can have switches that are configured to only allow an interface with a certain MAC to connect to certain ports. Or you can have softer ways of dealing with this by feeding information from the switch to some variety of intrusion detection system. Similarly, a switch can be configured to ensure that a device DHCPing for an address can't suddenly start using a different MAC.

There's a host of enterprise-y tech being built in this arms race if you want to fund some hardcore security-focused teams. That said, I don't think I've ever encountered (maybe because I'm not an attacker) these in the run-of-the-mill office environments. This is including working at Amazon, which is a bit persnickety on security. I'm quite sure that they're running these things in the data centers though. For something like AWS, they have segregated networks for control-plane traffic (the back-end of the services and how they are configured) and customer traffic. And for customer traffic, everything is on its own VLAN to ensure that I can't make a malicious service that would attack neighboring instances on the same machine or subnet. They also have a bunch of security in place to ensure only trusted clients can connect to services and verify the servers' authenticity.

This is one of the underlying reasons that having good physical security is essential. Once you have access to a network you want to attack, you have a lot more surface area that you can use to attack it while (preferably from the attacker's perspective) remaining undetected.

There are an annoying number of shops that used to love Cisco's port security option, which will lock down an interface on a switch to a certain segmentation of MAC addresses (usually configured in adaptive modes). It's... not as unmanagable as it sounds, though it is very unmanageable and very much something that's usually only helpful against very specific threat models and when paired with a lot of other stuff.

How does it broadcast its request if it doesn't have an IP address?

Because network communication doesn't always require an IP. Think of the network as different technologies arranged in a stack, each building on the last. Specifically, the stack generally looks like:

Ethernet

IP

TCP/UDP

Other protocols on top that (e.g. HTTP)

For DHCP, your machine broadcasts at the Ethernet level which works based on the MAC addresses baked into every network interface. It receives a reply in the same way. And even once you have an IP address, those IP packets will be riding on top of Ethernet frames which are sent out to the local network in much the same way as DHCP traffic is.

For what you're looking for, I would pick up a cheap CompTIA Net+ book and maybe a Cisco CCENT book and read through the chapters you're interested in. They're written to provide the practical understanding that a junior IT tech would need to perform basic network-related tasks and they got me through the first few years of my tech career. You can probably find a ton of them on libgen. I would steer clear of single-topic books (e g. just TCP/IP) since they go into way more depth and detail than you'll ever need (though they are extremely interesting IMO).

There was discussion here in the culture war thread on the position of black women in the US mating market. There was also a different discussion yesterday on interracial marriages.

One aspect of all of this that seems rather important or at least non-trivial to me is that there seems to be a marked difference between the obesity rates of black men and women, which seems to be something peculiar to blacks. Can anyone offer an explanation?

There have been some attempts to investigate this further academically. This study found that the difference is minimal among those with high parental education, but extreme among those with the lowest parental education (16% of men, 45% of women). Initially I thought it might be due to family formation differences, but the divergence exists beyond the US. In South Africa, the richest major African country, 2/3 of women but only 1/3 of men are obese. Strongly indicative of a genetic explanation, especially since we know some populations like Pacific Islanders are already genetically more prone to obesity.

In South Africa, the richest major African country, 2/3 of women but only 1/3 of men are obese. Strongly indicative of a genetic explanation

The entire thing can also just be explained by culture. Obese women in SA are considered attractive, while obese men are not. Both act accordingly, which is easier in SA because they don't yet eat as much highly processed food as people in the West do (and so they have a little more control over their weight, i.e. just deciding not to get fat is easier there).

This is in large part true re: South African sexual preferences. However, poor urban South Africans eat an extremely unhealthy and fattening diet, consisting mostly of the cheapest carbs available fried in the cheapest oil. Township food will fatten you up fast if you can afford it, and it's so nutritionally unsatisfying I'd guess even those with a little cash eat a lot of it. I suspect the men are significantly likely to do high-calorie-burning manual labour or be alcoholics/drug addicts, which probably explains a lot of the obesity gap in the urban poor.

The black women considered most attractive in SA are probably overweight by white standards, but not to the extent of being extremely obese the way the fattest Americans are. You can see this in SA media that has a primarily black audience and among the black elite, where obesity rates are lower.

Thanks. It makes sense. 16% of men, 45% of women is indeed rather extreme.

Is there any evidence of black people in Europe prior to the Age of Discovery in anything other than essentially zero? I don't mean non-white people such as Berbers or Arabs. I mean sub-Saharan blacks. From everything I've read by experts, there were basically none. Due to the Saharan desert being a massive barrier, there was almost zero gene flow, especially into Northern Europe which have close to 0 sub-Saharan African DNA. The British Isles are slightly higher at like 0.1% due to some North African traders (almost exclusively not black) during the Roman Empire.

On top of the genetic evidence, there's the fact that most of Europe was 99% plus white within living memory. It wasn't until after WW2 and the Windrush generation in England that they saw significant non-white people move in. But even in 1950, it was over 99% white.

Yet anytime someone chud complains online about black people in Medieval England in video games or film, you'll get academics coming out saying that it was actually more diverse than we thought and that black people have always been present in England. I can't really find any evidence of this. Even sources that want to tell this story will say something like there were 15,000 black people in England during the height of the African slave trade out of a population of 8 million and they were mostly in port cities.

Are these people just straight up lying? Are they so influenced by ideology they can't see what is obviously true or false? I honestly don't know what evidence they are looking at that makes them think what they think. And just for reference, in 1991, the UK did its first racial census. It was less than 1% black then after 40 years of mass immigration. I think England had the highest at 1.5%, but again, that's where the Windrush generation settled as opposed to Scotland or Wales. But you play BG3, and 15% of it is black and if you say this is kind of ridiculous you're a chud. Is there any even remotely convincing argument for this kind of representation?

We do have multiple letters from Queen Elizabeth I to the Lord Mayor of London complaining about the large numbers of “negars and blackmoores” in London and demanding that they be deported (they weren’t). I’m not sure if the people she is referring to would be what are now considered black people, or if they were more northern African.

That is post Age of Discovery though. The Atlantic Slave Trade had started by then and the Medieval ages ended over 100 years ago by then.

Sure, and iirc there was allegedly a substantial population of black people in Lisbon by perhaps 1510, which is not wholly unbelievable given the already substantial Portuguese trade with West Africa around that time. But that’s well into the “age of discovery”, so not really applicable to the question.

There’s a few scattered references to ‘Ethiopians’ or some other description of clearly ‘black’ people in Europe before the age of discovery, but definitely no reason to think they were a major presence.

My guess is that the sight wouldn’t have been shocking in a port town, although it might be unusual, but they would have been in random villages.

Just to point out BG3 is a bad example. The RPG setting it is based on: the Forgotten Realms is explicitly designed to be much more diverse than Europe at the same rough time frame would be, which is called out in universe in the setting, outside of BG3 itself.

"There was a time when any fool could have told you where the folk of this land or that came from, but now we sail or ride so far and often that we’re all from everywhere. Even the most isolated villages hold folk who hail from they know not where. Yet you can still tell something of where someone hails from by their hair and build and skin and manner, though any traveler knows not to assume too much from a quick glance. Remember that, and hearken"

This is from a Doylist perspective so that DnD players who want to play a Chultan halfling shaman or a Kozakuran samurai or whatever on the Sword Coast (the Europe equivalent and most popular part of the setting) don't have to have convoluted back stories to justify it. From a Watsonian perspective the historical presence of portals from the Realms to different areas of Earth plus being a high magic setting with fairly easy access to teleportation, flying ships and even spacecraft to visit different worlds is a justification. Bits of the planet were also exchanged with nations on an entirely (but not really, it's complicated) world which led to random cultures popping up elsewhere as well.

On top of all that Baldur's Gate and environs is called out explicitly as being the most multi-cultural place on a very multi-cultural world due to being the biggest and most cosmopolitan city (no matter what Waterdhavians might say). And had absorbed several huge waves of refugees from various nations in the prior several hundred years.

"Baldurians took great pride in the inclusiveness of their city. It was a place anyone could call home, or start a new life within, regardless of race, creed or personal history."

Something like The Witcher or similar may be a better example.

As for the rationale? It's simple (which doesn't mean correct of course!) games and books and movies are made to entertain people as they are at the time they are created. A deliberate choice can be made to portray historical (or pseudo-historical) situations with more modern demographics to make it more palatable or relatable or attractive to a modern audience. My wife greatly prefers shows or games which have (or allow to be created) a black woman character, In RPGs I am almost always a white man with red hair. Even outside of any social engineering one might want to do, having the broadest set of characters is probably the way to go unless you are appealing specifically to the accuracy of your historical setting as a specific selling point.

My wife loves Bridgerton, she is aware it is not historically accurate but it allows her to watch and enjoy people like her in pretty dresses dealing with English high society in a way that really never happened. Then she buys Bridgerton themed coffee creamer (which is quite good actually), and so on and wants to attend a fancy tea party in costume, so buys corsets and lace and learns to sew. It creates an aspirational fantasy of a sort.

Europe is a bad unit of analysis that lends itself to Motte and Bailey play by your opponents. Specific to the interior of England the number is probably zero, specific to east-Mediterranean port towns it probably isn't.

Ditto "black", there plenty of references to Nubians and Moores in the Eastern Roman Empire and wider mederteranian but the fact that the op specifically excluded Berbers makes me think they're ones planning the motte and bailey rather than opening themselves up to it.

That's the nature of any motte and bailey argument.

And all arguments about race are inevitably motte and bailey arguments. Just ones, taking ethnonationalism seriously, with horrible consequences for those in the bailey.

Berbers weren’t and aren’t black sub Saharans. You have the motte and bailey reversed. The bailey is there were black Africans in Europe when the motte is that they were North African Berbers, Phoenicians, and Arabs for the most part. But they use the fact that they are “African” to make them black Africans. Obviously there would be Mediterranean people in the Mediterranean. I said black specifically as in Black sub Saharan Africans, not non white people period.

the fact that the op specifically excluded Berbers makes me think they're ones planning the motte and bailey rather than opening themselves up to it.

What does this mean? Berbers are not black. As far as I can tell, none of the major Berber tribal groups have major Sub-Saharan admixture; whatever admixture they do have comes through their interbreeding with Gulf Arabs, who themselves have some African ancestry via the history of the slave trade. Ancient depictions of Berbers, and medieval depictions of groups like the Guanches, consistently show them as fair-skinned with pale hair and beards. Arguably the most famous modern person of Berber ancestry, soccer player Zinedine Zidane, could pass for a white Italian guy.

Yeah this is an example of what people will do. There were Berbers in Europe who are African. Yes, and? Berbers aren’t black sub Saharan Africans so you didn’t show anything. It’s irrelevant. They are completely different genetically and culturally.

The argument is dull. The likelihood is that a handful of sub-Saharan people made their way to Northern Europe before the age of discovery for various reasons at various times. Certainly educated people were aware that black skinned people existed and lived far south of the Mediterranean, which makes sense because they participated in the trans-Saharan trade with places like Mali and therefore would have been present as a small minority in some North African port towns which European merchants also on occasion visited. There would have been people in Northern European ports in 1400 who would have seen black people, for sure.

Anything beyond that is (pointless) speculation.

Why is it pointless speculation when there is overwhelming evidence against how it’s represented today? It seems pretty clear to me there is an agenda behind pushed and people are distorting the facts. If people accepted what you said is true then that would be one thing, but there are people who want to open up this debate so if they want to open it up then we should have it. It seems to me there is essentially a conspiracy to prove places like England were always diverse. And that’s just obviously not true. We know which groups migrated there in large numbers, and those people weren’t black. This should be settled, but there’s a lot of people who are lying and they should be called out for it and have their reputations destroyed as serious academics.

Of course there’s an agenda behind it. But that agenda has nothing to do with any actual academic question on this subject and so can’t be disproved by it. It would be like disproving BLM with real research on police brutality, or disproving communism with basic economics. It isn’t going to convince anyone who believes this stuff.

Most people who believe that stuff believe because people who are considered experts say it’s true. Then that gets pushed downstream. It’s actually an extremely small group of people pushing this revisionism. If some extremely motivated people cared about this, the only response they would have is why do care and to call them weird. I’ve actually gotten people who pretend to believe it admit it’s not true by saying that a multicultural black England with a large black upper class would mean that blacks were largely responsible for the European side of the Atlantic slave trade. There’s just not a will to call people out on obvious bullshit.

More comments

They're not above lying and some of them are clearly aware that's what they're doing.

Others give themselves more plausible deniability because maintaining credibility serves their allies' goals.

But it's all in service of the goals Moffat laid out, not truth.

Are these people just straight up lying? Are they so influenced by ideology they can't see what is obviously true or false? I honestly don't know what evidence they are looking at that makes them think what they think

My understanding is that it goes something like

MOTTE: There were a nonzero number of black people in England and so we should represent them. Look, here's a document from the 16th century that says "Lord Featherstonhaugh's goode and faithfull servant, Thomas, was a manne of darke complexion hailing fromm the distant continents" which clearly means that there was at least one person who was quite possibly a sub-Saharan African living on the island of Great Britain in the last 500 years.

BAILEY: There were probably lots of black people toiling away in England but the bigoted white English whitewashed them or refused to record them in history so we don't have any evidence, but we do know that's just the sort of thing the racist English would do, so we're justified in additing a lot of extra black characters to media. And even if that turns out not to be true, it's the right thing to do, because English history is the story of racist colonialists who abused the rest of nonwhite world, and so we should dilute, subvert, and erase history in revenge and to ensure that Never Again will whites threaten innocent POCs.

Or, more likely, they don't have an explicit theory, but think the more black people the better, and so use your motte as an excuse.

There were certainly a few black slaves and freedmen in imperial Rome. Most were probably Nubian, as travel along the Nile is easier than across the Sahara. I would not take lack of genetic traces in modern populations as clear evidence of absence, as modern Italians bear essentially no imprint of the cosmopolitan population of the classical Mediterranean. Parts of Europe under Muslim rule such as Sicily and Iberia would have continued to host some number of sub-Saharan African slaves into the medieval period and I'm sure some made their way to Constantinople as well. I have also come across the claim that Lisbon was 10% black just a few decades after the Reconquista.

If we are limiting our scope to say northern European states under Catholic rule between 550 and 1400, then I think the presence of even a single black individual there would be highly unusual and noteworthy, but the argument that some part of Europe has been inhabited by a non-zero number of individuals we would call black at most points within the last two thousand years forms a motte from which the bailey of "here are some black vikings or knights in medieval England" can be defended. I won't pretend to know the motivation of everyone making these claims, but I imagine the most informed and introspective among them believe that they are presenting scenarios from within the realm of possibility that, while not the most likely, are the ones with the greatest expected social utility in the present day.

This is the correct answer. The Almoravids were mostly Arab/North African, but had a significant number of sub-Saharan soldiers with them, and North Africa was historically the diversity region Pre-Colonialism, but this was still rare. IIRC, a black worker was among those working on Hadrian's wall (which we know because it freaked out the emperor who thought black people were bad luck). And there was Saint Maurice. And these are the motte to the "therefore, blackwash European history" bailey.

To the American users of this sub, does anyone use a HealthShare plan?

Here's an example: https://altruahealthshare.org/how-it-works/memberships/

This would, in theory, allow one to have access to health care at less than half of the cost of comparable Obamacare plans. Presumably, a large part of the difference is not getting grouped together with the drug addicts, mentally ill, and extremely fat that make up a sizeable percentage of the American public.

But what are the practical elements of the plan? When I go to the doctor, are they going to give me a hard time?

If you're healthy and actually can't afford regular insurance, it might be worth looking into. If you have health conditions or can otherwise afford real insurance, steer clear. You are effectively uninsured and won't get insurance negotiated rates, and will get a bill that the company may or may not pay. As frustrating as health insurance can be, it's a highly regulated industry with consumer protections in place. Health shares are the wild West and they aren't required to actually pay for anything.

Quite the opposite. I'm healthy but am rich enough to not worry about any reasonable health care cost I will ever have to bear.

But I don't want to support a corrupt system and pay for other people's self-inflicted lifestyle disorders.

My concern is convenience and fairness. The fact that they deny claims without recourse is a positive, since I am very unlikely to have claims denied. My worry is that I will go to the doctor, show them my healthshare card, and be denied care or have to spend hours explaining my situation to dimwitted and exasperated bureaucrats.

I guess I'll probably just have to try the HealthShare to see how it works.

No, you just tell them to ring you up as cash pay if they don’t know how to process the medishare card.

but am rich enough to not worry about any reasonable health care cost I will ever have to bear.

I don't need or want to know your specific number, but what is the number - in terms of liquid net worth - that must be reached in order to simply pay out of pocket for all reasonable medical care.

This came up for me over the holidays when my mother and father (early and mid 80s, respectively) and I were discussing healthcare costs in the U.S. My father stated that after a lifetime of diligent having-of medical insurance, things would've ended up being more cost-effective with paying out of pocket. What's curious about this is that my mother has been on variety of prescriptions for decades, my father has had surgery twice, and one of my siblings required quite intensive multiple rounds of surgery about 15 years ago. We did not grow up wealthy, but in that even more rare economic zone of "comfortably middle class" (the kind of thing that only baby boomers will ever know).

Is my father's advanced age perhaps playing tricks on his financial memory?

I don't know. 500,000? 1 million? It's definitely a number that a significant percent of Americans have exceeded. Of course, these are the exact people most likely to have generous government or corporate health plans so it's kind of a moot point.

The actual cost of most care is quite low when you strip away the layers of bullshit. Even complicated surgeries like gastic bypass should only cost around $20,000. Routine surgery is more like $5,000. Pretty cheap when compared to the astronomical cost of Obamacare-era health insurance.

I'd gladly forgo insurance except that I'm afraid that I'd either be refused care or charged astronomical sums for routine stuff. Aspirin? That will be $500. Since there appears to be no enforced regulation against unreasonable profiteering, they could theoretically charge me $1 million for an office visit. I suppose I could negotiate and simply refuse to pay unreasonable bills. The question is, how much hassle do I want to deal with.

I'll probably end up dropping insurance for the same reason I've dropped accountants and lawyers from my life: a strong preference to not pay the Danegeld even when it's easier just to do it.

I just want to say, from significant near-to-me experience- it’s very, very easy to call a medical provider and get large markdowns on the bill. They don’t fight you at all.

Thanks. That's helpful. I might just go commando and do it for my family next year. "Honey, hear me out".

But, seriously, yeah I will probably do it. No more paying for fatties, addicts, and gay orgies for this family!

I do not use a healthshare plan, but it remains a possibility for the future. I have many friends who do.

  • Doctors do not hassle about the use of the plan, but you do have to pay for many things which would be covered by an insurance plan. This would include checkups, vaccines, etc. It does not cover birth control and this is explained to me as intentional. These plans are most popular among very conservative Christians who object to paying for prep on moral as well as financial reasons, as well as a few hippies, and this demographic oddity is reflected by the leadership.
  • You will get a bill after care and have to submit it to healthshare for reimbursement/payment yourself. I'm not sure whether they give you the money and you pay the bill, or they pay the bill for you. They definitely expect you to negotiate the bill down and price shop but I don't know how much enforcement there is. Either way, this is significantly more navigating paperwork than a conventional insurance plan.
  • Not covering the obese, drug addicts, alcoholics and heavy smokers, homosexuals, etc is probably a large part of the cost saving, but members in these plans tend to really believe in the mission and I believe that they save money by price shopping a lot as well, or by expecting members to pay for certain things themselves. Prescription coverage in particular is very bad and you should see this as similar to a high deductible plan, but with no network requirements.
  • A lot of the people using these plans have hippy-ish attitudes and the doctors most used to these are the ones that are willing to see antivaxxers, or who have unusual views on nutrition, or whatever.

For context for those not in the know, prep is a drug that allows for participation in gay orgies without contracting HIV. Your US insurance is legally required to provide it at no cost (thanks Congress). It is not especially cheap to your insurer, and those costs are covered by elevated prices for users in general.

I don’t believe the orgy is required.

You know what else isn’t cheap to your insurer? Anything on this list. Those drugs reach about 30x as many people as Prep (circa 2021), and most of them cost more per month.

If you’d like to complain about healthcare spending, there are plenty of better targets that don’t rely on baiting a disgust reaction.