domain:sotonye.substack.com
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Prior to the last week, I would have assumed Iran was a hard target and thus somewhat untouchable (smaller strikes/assassinations being the limit of messing with them). It's surprising how hard they've been slapped.
But also in some ways, they are still. No one is going to be launching a ground invasion, and the regime is not looking hot right now, but still has power.
It blows me away that despite a close connection to Russia, and increasingly China, they had such terrible IADS. If you can't get invaded, the only way your adversary, who has one of the world's best Airforce's, can cause you serious issues is by air striking you into pieces.
They must have thought their missiles and proxys were a deterrent, which they were at one point. But man it kills me. In PvP video games, if things are going well/fine, you should always be asking yourself "how do I lose" and it doesn't seem like the gang in Iran did that at all.
That being said. It's not hard to imagine a world in which Israel's air campaign culminates eventually as they run low on munitions and a deal of some flavor is worked out. Then Iran spends the next 5 years rebuilding and furiously fortifying. Maybe they get some tips on anti-espionage purges from the Chinese. And then in 2030 were right back to two weeks ago status quo but this time Iran has hardened everything.
This is a devastating tactical victory for the Israelis, the strategic outcomes remain to be seen...
HereAndGone
1d ago
There’s a huge amount of trouble in learning to program the right way, where “right” goes from the seemingly-trivial “works without bugs” and “runs pretty quickly and cheaply” out to the trickier “can be easily maintained and extended” and “can be deployed without taking out double digit percentages of the world’s Windows servers.” That’s what I do, and what I aim to be good at.
So, in your view, is the current advice about "if you don't want to be laid off in the next round of IT job cuts, make sure you're promoted into a management role" since that seems to indicate "just programming on its own, no matter how good you are, is not job security"?
I do take your point about specific knowledge, but the problem there too is that if you know all about how to keep the janky, tricky systems of Company X running, little of that transfers over to Company Y which has a totally different tricky, janky system.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
I agree, but I wasn't necessarily referring to politics. I meant things like: should the person get a new vaccine, should they try a new medication, should they follow the vaccination schedule for their children, should they send their children to public schools, is this food item being sold at the store safe, etc. The FDA says red dye #whatever is safe to consume and won't make your kids adhd lunatics. Can that be trusted? Every little question related to food or medicine now is up for grabs, and people are unsurprisingly going in all kinds of directions.
Barfknuckle
1d ago
Obama and Trump 1 failed nuclear non-proliferation by not helping Ukraine in the 2014 Crimean war with everything they can, under the context of Budapest Memorandum. If the Budapest Memorandum failed to protect Ukraine's border, what is the point of giving up nukes?
The Budapest Memorandum doesn't suggest anyone do anything more than complain to the UN when triggered. It's a meaningless pinky-swear to avoid attacking them, not a guarantee of their defense. When someone brings it up at this point, years into the war, I just assume they're a support-maximalist who hopes no one knows what's actually in it.
Ukraine never had launch codes for "its" nukes and when Russia demanded them back its choices were to either comply or have the world force them. They never had any actual leverage and that's why the Budapest Memorandum was a worthless cumrag from the start.
I'm not saying he was a Dem agent, but that is something that he himself stated and it is something which should be investigated with transparency and honesty which is something I do not see forthcoming from the establishment or the media.
I think he probably started off basic Democratic voter, then whatever happened to crack his sanity he went off into his own little land of 'this all ties together in the Grand Unified Plan'. I don't think he had any ties to Walz apart from the kind of "nominated to a public board that is one of the business community tie-in things", but that doesn't mean that in his mind (and in his mind alone) he wasn't working on behalf of Walz.
I think this may be more fall-out from the last presidential campaign. If he was already cracking, and if he was a Democratic voter from Minnesota proud that their governor was the potential next VP of the USA, and he believed all the stuff about Trump and MAGA and the GOP are fundamental threats to democracy, Project 2025, tyranny, fascist nazi etc., then the defeat would only have convinced him even more that drastic action on behalf of the nation needed to be taken, and that Walz was the man they needed to put into a position of power where he could influence events (e.g. get him elected to the national Senate). It makes it even more unintentionally embarrassing that Walz came out with "this is politically motivated assassination" instead of keeping his mouth shut and just releasing an anodyne statement about "we have to wait until further information as to this tragedy comes out". Yeah Tim, politically motivated on your behalf, even though you didn't know or intend anything of the kind. Probably he was working off the same assumption that "this is a Republican guy and this will embarrass them and Trump in particular politically, which is good for our side".
If anyone can figure out how to turn the temperature down under the stockpot, please let us all know, because this boiling over of extremism is the biggest threat of all.
veqq
1d ago
is this guy not worried at all about his future employment prospects?
I've known many who openly state such views, who simply get jobs in the Middle East, Latin America, China or Central Europe. Many places are apathetic or friendly to such beliefs. (There are plenty of justifications, often internally consistent, often not, which vary by situation.)
HereAndGone
1d ago
I mean, I was looking at his Linkedin early on after someone provided a link online, and it went from "working in food production and large-scale retail" to this Red Lion Group very fast, as in "last job working for Walmart" then "now I am CEO of my own company in the Congo". (May not have been Walmart, but that kind of thing).
So with the benefit of hindsight, we can see the guy getting delusions of grandeur and going off the deep end. But that still would give us no clue as to whether he was left, right, centre, or upside-down pineapple cake, politically.
BahRamYou
1d ago
Worth note that North Korea didn't have nukes for a long time, and they stayed safe even though they did a lot to piss of the US and all their neighbors. And they still only have a few shitty low-yield nukes.
It seems like you you just have to be seen as a hard target. NK did it with mountains a ton of artillery. Ukraine was seen as a much weaker target by everyone.
It's well known that the far right nazis love muslims because muslims love to kill jews. I don't see what's surprising here. The horseshoe theory is right yet again.
Edit: also to be clear I don't necessarily agree that muslims love killing jews but it's a motivation cited by many far rightists.
phailyoor
1d ago
I admit that his writing style is weird, but there is little reason to believe it's AI generated. There are no solid tells and the only AI image he posted is a repost of the one Tucker posted. Also, his pinned tweet is something that no off-the-shelf LLM would generate in a million years.
Get better at detection. The people who see AI everywhere it isn't are just as bad as the ones who see slop and see nothing wrong.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
How would you feel if your daughter turned up on your doorstep on the arm of a McKinsey consultant or a white-shoe lawyer (who we affect to similarly desipse)? If most people's answer is positive, it's prestigious and the haters are just jealous.
phailyoor
1d ago
Show me where apprentice jobs actually pay more than comparably difficult jobs on the open market
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
The main thing I am seeing here is that (after the very real spate of political violence in 2020, which largely ended on Jan 7th 2021), the demand for political violence in the US massively exceeds the supply, in the same way that Steve Sailer used to joke about the demand for racism exceeding the supply. People on both sides desperately want their opponents to be launching the red/brown terror, both to gain political capital by criticising the other side and to feed their own vicarious martyrdom fantasies. And this desire to big up political-looking violence for partisan reasons leads to the kind of media coverage that attracts copycats, so your average unhinged shooter is now more likely to shoot politicians and less likely to shoot up a school.
This isn't new, of course. If you look at the list of attempted Presidential assassinations going back to the founding the words "insanity" and "unfit to plead" appear an awful lot.
Roughly none of the recent cases of "political" violence that blew up in the media involve any of:
- Someone with a history of Dem activism shooting a Republican
- Someone with a history of GOP activism shooting a Democrat
- A perp affiliated with an organised far-left group
- A perp affiliated with an organised far-right group Instead we see the usual lineup of wackjobs plus the occasional Islamist, and one truly weird fringe group (the Zizians).
Apart from the Islamists, the nearest thing we see to an inteligible political motivation is something like Boelter or Wayne DePape (Paul Pelosi hammer guy) - an unhinged Red Triber who consumes right-wing media and is presumed to vote Republican decides to attack a Democrat for unhinged reasons. And the only reason why this is a mostly-Red thing is that comparably unhinged Blues don't have access to guns.
This is nothing like the Days of Rage, Reconstruction/Redemption, or the early C20 spate of anarchist violence. Nobody keeps the required statistics, but I suspect it is closer to a summer of the shark.
Do you believe that Tim Waltz actually directed this man to kill state politicians to clear up seats for him to run for the Senate?
No, of course not. But you were pretty dang sure you had his motivations taped, and it seems you were wrong, so maybe a little silence from all parties to digest and consider this new information is in order:
I'm going to bet that the motivations for this assassination end up red-coded. Per CNN, the shooter is apparently a devout Christian, with him being caught on video "pointedly questioned American morals on sexual orientation". I've seen reports that he had a target list of pro-choice politicians and abortion providers. And not to put too fine a point on it, but he just shot two democrats.
You do acknowledge you were wrong about this, so I appreciate that. But I do think everyone was a bit too quick off the mark making definite pronouncements before we knew anything solidly, and I mean both left and right in this instance. We seem to have had a rash of nutjob shooters, and whatever sense their motivations make in their own heads as to how it all ties together, trying to label "definitely a right-winger because this, that, the other" or "definitely a left-winger because hither, thither and yonder" in the ten seconds after it goes public is too fast and too over-confident in "we know this must have been done by Our Enemies".
We can know, for a fact, that the 2003 Iraq War coalition didn't actually believe their own WMD propaganda. If they thought that Saddam could vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance, he'd still be in power today.
?
The Iraq War coalition was framed as a pre-emptive war on the basis that Saddam did not yet have nukes (the only WMD to 'vaporize), but that he was trying to maintain the ability to create them in the future. The theory- propaganda, if you prefer- was that he was known to have pursued them in the past, there was reason to believe he was trying to maintain capabilities while actively circumventing sanctions, and that the consequences would be in the future if not acted upon now.
It was a casus belli premised on the argument that Saddam could not vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance.
HereAndGone
1d ago
That's good, and that is the way it has to be for the world to work. So if our friend becomes the ultimate immortal, he can make sure there are no other wannabe ultimate immortals to challenge him, which leaves him as the sole dominant power. I do think he'd find it rather boring after a few centuries/millennia, unless he does have some master plan in mind for what he's going to do (and he might well decide he's going to remake the world or something equally catastrophic for everyone else).
HereAndGone
1d ago
If this latest information is accurate, then (1) the guy was a nutjob (2) he was a Dem (3) contra other comments on here he wasn't motivated by right-wing anti-abortion sentiment (if he was going to knock off Democratic politicians, then they're mainly going to be pro-choice as well, so looks like once more correlation is not causation).
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1d ago
I would find that quite interesting if true - both because I'm in the affected demographic, and because I consider MPB as one of the main pending milestone cases for radical medical life extension. In many ways it's an ideal baby version of the problem: age-related, highly prevalent, great market potential, no stigma around research, external, easily measurable objective success metric with quick feedback, doesn't directly involve any critical organs. It's quite likely that age-related organ failure involves a lot of metaphorical "hair", so as long as we couldn't figure out how to stop and reverse age degrading actual hair, I figure there is no chance that we could do this to the "hair" that might be some ion channels on the pancreas that we only have a tentative understanding of.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1d ago
My guess was USSR + SSRI, but that didnt and doesnt make sense.
One question I feel is underexplored is, to what extent would things have gone differently for a hypothetical nuclear-armed Ukraine? It seems plausible enough that in the first few weeks of the conflict, when Russia was actually aiming for the jugular, Nuclear Ukraine could have countered with a credible nuclear threat. However, if Ukraine magicked up a full nuclear triad now, would much of anything change? That is, would it be able to credibly threaten MAD to demand back Crimea and Donbass alone? (I don't think so. It seems pretty obvious that the more realistic form of their current war goals - EU and NATO membership for a rump state minus approximately what Russia has taken, plus or minus some more parts of Donbass - is too valuable to go va banque over, plus the West has an enduring interest in maintaining the nuclear-strike taboo lest the End of History gets undone any further.) Consequently, could it have credibly threatened MAD when Russia grabbed Crimea? ...when it supported the Donbass separatists in uprising? ...if, instead of doing the push for Kiev, Russia only had blitzed for the territory it controls now from the start, declaring that it wants to seize a buffer zone for Crimea and the Donbass separatists? In the worst case, Ukrainian nukes would merely have stopped Russia from making its grand opening mistake (blowing its confidence and certain classes of special force reserves on a useless operation).
Ukraine's fundamental dilemma is that while the EU/NATO exists and is friendly to it, it is very hard for it to credibly signal that it has its back to the wall; but if the EU/NATO backstop were to disappear, it would become very hard for it to marshal the will and unifying purpose to resist Russia.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I completely agree.
I would add that having defensive alliances between nuclear and non-nuclear states is a great boon to non-proliferation. Being in NATO is very much preferable from owning a few nukes, but if NATO membership was not an option for former east block states (like Poland, whose past experience with Russia/USSR would make them wary), then these states might have started pursuing nuclear weapons after the fall of the USSR.
However, the Ukraine war also shows that nukes are not the "I win" button. Instead, the button is labeled "Fuck you, fuck me, fuck everyone". Threatening to press it outside the most existential crisis of a regime is not credible, for the most part. (The death star gambit, to blow up whichever polity annoyed you most from time to time pour encourager les autres might or might not work.)
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1d ago
Whats the "ussri" name about btw?
It's a frankly terrible pun that came to me in a dream. Possibly something to do with fully automated luxury space communism, with the homosexuality optional.
I dont think Bayes theorem requires its numbers to be independent (whatever it would mean for a conditional to be independent of its condition).
Oops. Not sure how that snuck it, the whole point is to find out conditionals and manipulate conditionals.
As far as I know, beard minoxidil doesnt need to be kept up. Androgenic hair is easy to get and usually sticks around.
I believe you're right, but minoxidil takes ages to show good effect. What I mean isn't that he's forced to keep it up while at risk of losing it all when he stops, but rather that he wanted it to get denser and denser, which takes a while.
Going bald is traumatic because it absolutely traumatic and if you dont lie to yourself, it is very easily avoidable. I posted about this a few weeks ago and the response I got were not very good. If you are suffering from Male Pattern Baldness, see your dermat, pop finasteride (take it topically if you are afraid) and dont read about potential side effects, plenty get them via the placebo effect or something. I look normal now, I still did when I was receeding but getting it fixed at the right time did a lot of good to me.
It is somewhat preventable, but the results of finasteride and dutasteride vary. I started balding at 18, went on finasteride and the balding stopped it for a couple years, then hair loss accelerated, I got on dutasteride and now I'm in my early 30s and the hair loss is starting to get pretty bad.
I haven't read his paper, but given the novelty of the argument, if it were well-written and had appropriate citations, I can see why a professor might give it an award. After reading 1000 papers of "um ackshually the constitution is like, really racist and bad," something that far from left (or right) field would be an interesting change that might get a professor's attention (especially one willing to get contentious).
I also appreciate that the NYT is following their classic framing: white people using speech to say something unpopular is violence towards minorities and it's necessary to devote many paragraphs to exploring how terrified the minorities are by that speech (and you shouldn't remember how many times the NYT has claimed that actual violent rioting by minorities is the "language of the oppressed").
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