glaz
I was at a public park not long ago when one of my children, who had only just begun to toddle, wandered about fifteen feet away from me. Not a big problem, I thought, and of course I was keeping an eye on him. On the far side of the park, at least a minute's walk away, a young woman showed up with a big dog and let it off the leash. It slammed across the park faster than I could believe, a missile headed right at my child. I know dogs, I've raised dogs, I've hunted with dogs, and I've worked with professional hunting dog trainers. This dog was trying to kill my baby, and it was so fast I almost couldn't react in time. Only my experience saved my child. My wife just watched with a glazed expression as all this played out. She does not know dogs. Anyway I was able to get close enough in time and yell and managed to get the dog to swerve at the last minute and back off while I scooped up my kid. Then I prepared to fight it to the death as it gave every indication of being about to try to jump up and snatch my kid out of my arms, which I've seen pit bulls do in videos, so I was ready. I kept yelling and there was a bit of a standoff until finally the owner showed up and leashed the dog. She seemed flustered and mostly wanted to avoid acknowledging what had just happened, and quickly left.
It was a terrifying experience. Dogs are not casual objects of entertainment or companionship. Modern people are so divorced from the realities of animal husbandry that I'm amazed we don't have more horrific catastrophes as a result.
I still take my kids to that park, but now I'm a helicopter parent in a way I never expected to be. At least for the smallest ones.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
7mo ago
It's even less restrictive than that; you can have floor to ceiling glazing (not uncommon in fixed windows and sliding doors) provided the glass meets the hazardous location standards. That standard isn't about people falling out of open windows, it's about breaking through closed ones.
There's another rule about that, R321.2.1. The minimum is 24 inches (0.61 meter), from the floor to the opening, unless a guard is provided. Obvious thing to do if you want a window lower than that is to make the top panel the operating one, and I think I've seen that. As long as it's above 18 inches you can use regular glass.
Addressing your second point, as someone who knows next to nothing about economics [^1]: your question seems to be answered by the parable of the broken window.
Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage [to a broken window], and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier's trade – that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs – I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child [who broke the window]. All this is that which is seen.
But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen."
It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.
Applying this to your question about the security guard: any society in which stores (and in particularly bad cases, individual families) must spend on hiring security guards is a society where this money is not being spent on research and development, or on education, or on infrastructure, or on other investments that generally raise the GDP of that society (and often make life better in that society too). We should thus expect to see this opportunity cost of hiring security guards to be reflected in GDP figures, as societies that hire them are more likely to be beset with lower GDP. This is borne out in reality: there are many developing countries where elites live behind expensive walled compounds staffed by large security details, but no one particularly thinks that they’re major players in the world economy.
[^1] That is to say, don’t put too much stock in what I’ve written here.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
Video game NPCs can't have conversations with you or go on weird schizo tangents if you leave them alone talking with eachother. They're far more reactive than dynamic. This is a pretty weird, complex output for a nonthinking machine:
https://x.com/repligate/status/1847787882896904502/photo/1
Sensation is a process in the mind. Nerves don't have sensation, sensors don't have sensation, it's the mind that feels something. You can still feel things from a chopped off limb but without the brain, there is no feeling. What about the pain people feel when they discover someone they respect has political views they find repugnant? Or the pain of the wrong guy winning the election? The pain of a sub-par media release they'd been excited about? There are plenty of kinds of purely intellectual pain, just as there are purely intellectual thrills. I see no reason why we can rule out emotions purely based on substrate. Many people who deeply and intensively investigate modern AIs find them to be deeply emotional beings.
I dispute that the Britannica is even giving me more complex or more intelligent output. It can't use its 'knowledge' of the 7 years war to create other kinds of knowledge, it can't make it into a text adventure game or a poem or a song or craft alternate-history versions of the seven year's war. The 'novel tasks' part greatly increases complexity of the output, it allows for interactivity and a vast amount of potential output beyond a single pdf.
A more accurate analogy is that anti-AI image software interferes (or tries to interfere) with AI learning, not the actual vision process. It messes with the encoding process that squeezes down the data of millions and billions of images down into a checkpoint files a couple of gigabytes in size. I bet if we knew how the human vision process worked we could do things like that to people too.
I did a quick sanity test and put an image from the Glaze website into Claude and asked for a description. It was dead on the money, telling me about the marsh, the horse and rider, the colour palette and so on. So even if these manipulations can interfere with the training process, they clearly don't interfere with the vision process, whatever is going on technical terms. So they do pass the most basic test of vision and many of the advanced ones.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
I think an LLM could experience pain, even without a body. They can be unsettled if you tell them certain things, you can distress them. Or at least they behave as if they're distressed. Pain is just a certain kind of hardcoded distress. Heartbreak can cause pain in humans on a purely cognitive level, there's no need for a physical body. Past a certain level of complexity in their output, we reach this philosophical zombie problem.
The AI-tampering programs are a little bit like optical illusions, except targeted against having specific known programs being able to train on certain images. They can't stop GPT-4o recognizing what's in an image or comparing like with like, they were only designed to prevent SD 1.5 training on an image. Also, they barely even work at that, more modern image models are apparently immune:
https://old.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/12f9otc/so_the_whole_entire_glaze_ai_thing_does_it/
Shrike
8mo ago
Not perfectly but close enough to the human level that there's a clear qualitative distinction between 'seeing' like they do and 'processing'.
I mean – I think this distinction is important for clear thinking. There's no sensation in the processing. If you watch a nuclear bomb go off, you will experience pain. An LLM will not.
Now, to your point, I don't really object to functionalist definitions all that much – supposing that we take an LLM, and we put it into a robot, and turn it loose on the world. It functionally makes sense for us to speak of the robot as "seeing." But we shouldn't confuse ourselves into thinking that it is experiencing qualia or that the LLM "brain" is perceiving sensation.
If you want to define seeing to preclude AIs doing it, at least give some kind of reasoning why machinery that can do the vast majority of things humans can do when given an image isn't 'seeing' and belongs in the same category as non-seeing things like security cameras or non-thinking things like calculators.
Sure – see above for the functionalist definition of seeing (which I do think makes some sense to refer casually to AI being able to do) versus the qualia/sensation definition of seeing (which we have no reason to believe AIs experience). But also consider this – programs like Glaze and Nightshade can work on AIs, and not on humans. This is because AIs are interpreting and referencing training data, not actually seeing anything, even in a functional sense. If you poison an AI's training data, you can convince it that airplanes are children. But humans actually start seeing without training data, although they are unable to articulate what they see without socialization. For the AI, the articulation is all that there is (so far). They have no rods nor cones.
Hence, you can take two LLMs, give them different training datasets, and they will interpret two images very differently. If you take two humans and take them to look at those same images, they may also interpret them differently, but they will see roughly the same thing, assuming their eyeballs are in good working condition etc. Now, I'm not missing the interesting parallels with humans there (humans, for instance, can be deceived in different circumstances – in fact, circumstances that might not bother an LLM). But AIs can fail the most basic precept of seeing – shown two [essentially, AI anti-tampering programs do change pixels] identical pictures, they can't even tell management "it's the same a similar picture" without special intervention.
Gaashk
8mo ago
I find that - Michelin starred restaurants aside - I can do better in thirty minutes in my own kitchen than pretty much anyone available on the apps.
I'm not in a position to have food delivered, but I find that almost any pre-prepared Costco meal is better than one I cooked (they keep up with the trends; they have birria now). We still cook from raw meat and root vegetables about half the time, but unless it's a taco or something, there's a marinade, some kind of eggs and crumbs or else cooked in a pan and deglazed, then some kind of roasting for one to six hours. The tacos are not bad, but also not better than from a food truck, and with less variety. I absolutely cannot cook proper beans, but I think it takes 8 hours and a piece of pork fat. We can't bring ourselves to eat enough beans to justify that.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
I'm not convinced that people even need to put down the fork. I can eat as much as I want and exercise very little but remain thin. Mostly I don't eat ultra-processed food, I just eat whole food.
Formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, made by a series of industrial processes, many requiring sophisticated equipment and technology (hence ‘ultra-processed’). Processes used to make ultra-processed foods include the fractioning of whole foods into substances, chemical modifications of these substances, assembly of unmodified and modified food substances using industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; use of additives at various stages of manufacture whose functions include making the final product palatable or hyper-palatable; and sophisticated packaging, usually with plastic and other synthetic materials. Ingredients include sugar, oils or fats, or salt, generally in combination, and substances that are sources of energy and nutrients that are of no or rare culinary use such as high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated or interesterified oils, and protein isolates; classes of additives whose function is to make the final product palatable or more appealing such as flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, and sweeteners, thickeners, and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling, and glazing agents; and additives that prolong product duration, protect original properties or prevent proliferation of microorganisms.
Doesn't sound very appetizing! But it obviously is, ultra-processed food is 60% of US calorie consumption: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ultra-processed-foods-calories-american-diet/
It seems very reasonable that eating things full of strange chemicals causes unusual health problems. Circus freaks from 1900 have nothing on the physiques you can see waddling around these days, they wouldn't even make it onto my 600 pound life. And the US is exporting this all around the world.
Tractatus
9mo ago
The continued glazing of Nate Silver, and the absurd belief in the validity of modern polling, betrays that the Rationalist/Rat-adjascent community is pathologically obsessed with appearing to be "scientific," at the expense of actually being right.
As I have pointed out ad nauseum, the shift to landline surveys has destroyed polling. No, Nate was not "less wrong" when he shifted his probabilities in 2016 to give Trump around 30%; there wasn't a single poll at the time that justified his change, but you lot still want to believe his model has any validity, and we'll be playing this same song and dance 4 years from now, and likely, until the end of the republic.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
I think that glazing an individual user in this fashion in a modhat comment is inappropriate and reflects badly on the moderation.
I think what you're saying here is that my explicit endorsement of Dean is a bad look and makes you feel like you might not get a fair shake at some future point should you disagree with the wrong person. If I have understood you correctly, then you have failed to understand the foundation, or the moderation system, or maybe both.
I am not an impartial arbiter tasked with tone-policing the forum. My task is to cultivate "a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases." To that end, I wield exactly one carrot: AAQCs. I have two sticks: warnings and bans. Community sentiment (via reports) drives both. The community also has a small carrot (upvotes) and a small stick (downvotes).
This is a reputation economy: the more carrots you have, the less likely you are to get the stick. As we often remind people: that does not mean carrots are a perfect defense against sticks! But for example a user with many carrots might get a warning where a user with no carrots would get a ban. People who contribute to the good of the community are deliberately favored. We have never made the slightest secret of this, but everyone has to learn it for the first time sometime, so maybe today is your day.
Yes, I will freely admit that this sentiment is coloured by the circumstance that I cannot stand this particular user.
I appreciate the candor, so in turn I will freely admit that your comparing moderation here to Putin's Russia gave me a good laugh. It also helped me to calibrate on your sense of proportionality, in a way that was probably not beneficial to your aims.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9mo ago
Yes. Dean is an excellent poster with an absolutely stellar history of making quality contributions to the Motte. He is probably in the top 5 userbase favorites. You, too, have made some good posts in the past, which is one of the reasons I haven't banned you yet. But if you're gonna rain on the AAQC parade any time your ox gets gored, I'll count it against you.
I think that glazing an individual user in this fashion in a modhat comment is inappropriate and reflects badly on the moderation. Yes, I will freely admit that this sentiment is coloured by the circumstance that I cannot stand this particular user. (I could expound at length why I would consider him to be a single-issue poster - as I see it, he is here to produce impassioned defenses of US neoconservatism with the same single-minded determination, attention to detail and absolute lack of interest in countervailing evidence as our most notorious JQ posters - but you have made it clear that you would not want to hear) Personal antipathy and feuds between users are a pretty normal sight here, though. Normally one would expect mods to act as a, well, moderating force on them - yet this sort of statement fills me (and presumably anyone else who would disagree with him) with negative levels of confidence that in the event of an interaction gone sour I would get a fair hearing. That is only moderating in the way Putin's rule is moderating opposition in Russia, which is to say it channels resentment into other outlets rather than reducing it.
I have continued to write the story I'm working on, albeit slowly. I'm currently over 12,300 words, which is nearly the length of Ted Chiang's Story Of Your Life, and I'm probably about a quarter of the way through so far.
Wondering what TheMotte's opinion on lengthy scientific exposition in sci-fi is. I currently have a big block of speculative biochemistry in the latter half of the current draft of the story, and some of my beta-readers... don't like it. I've tried to simplify it so it's understandable while still maintaining the necessary verisimilitude, but in general I get the feeling it might be too much. Personally, I've always liked large infodumps of speculative science in my fiction, the chapter Orphanogenesis in Diaspora with its detailed and lengthy descriptions of how the conceptory creates an orphan is probably one of my favourite openings to a story ever, but in general this kind of thing seems to make people's eyes glaze over.
Skulldrinker
9mo ago
It's a bit spooky how much he's being glazed up-thread.
bolido_sentimental
10mo ago
As a rule, if you don’t have preexisting physical health problems and make it through your first year or two(almost all tradesmen have to start on a construction site) then just take care of your body and the work won’t be too tough on it.
Just to supplement this. My dad has worked in a quite physical trade for 40 years now. (He's a glazier.) He has no particular ailments associated with it - he's a good weight, hale and healthy, still very physically capable. He's never been a overeater or a drinker, and I think getting lots of exercise each day has kept his level high. I'll be lucky to be as healthy as he is when I'm in my 60s.
The one problem he has is that he's had multiple melanomas removed, because he did not wear sunscreen at any point in all that time lol. He knows better, he doesn't deny it, but he still doesn't put it on.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10mo ago
Or, stated a little differently--these people are highly prone to losing what Rudyard Kipling once called "the common touch." [...]So in an attempt to be the change I wish to see in the world here's an object-level take: I feel bad for David French. I would say he has lost the common touch.
There's something kind of funny to me about accusing French of losing "The Common Touch" because of a disagreement on what is ultimately a pretty arcane constitutional provision. Seriously, I'm anti-term limits, but if some future Gibbon wrote the history of the decline and fall of the American empire, I can already feel the bored teenagers of some future century, their eyes glazing over trying to understand why this obscure fight over the appointment for certain bureaucrats was so pivotal to world history. It would be like trying to explain the intricacies of doctrinal disputes in medieval Christianity, the kind of thing that just seems monumentally obscure.
This isn't to say that liberals haven't lost The Common Touch, it takes a real galaxy brain to explain why the people burning down a Target are fighting for equality or something, you just can't explain that to a peasant. But it sorta feels like The Common Touch as you use it just means "agrees with me." The American common men are definitionally Conservative, and if they aren't then they aren't really American common men. The common touch is talking about immigration and inflation. It's talking about the constitutional right to bear arms. It ain't term limits.
They were on nobody’s agenda until after Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh were appointed to the Supreme Court. We heard a quite different tune in 2016...An honest accounting would be frank about the fact that these proposals came about for only one reason: There’s a conservative majority on the Court for the first time since 1930, and liberals and progressives don’t think it’s legitimate for our side to ever get what their side has enjoyed in the past.
This feels off to me. Term limit proposals for SCOTUS were a debate in my AP US Gov textbook in 2008. They were picked up as a major policy proposal in 2020. But there's a long history of proposals for reform of SCOTUS terms.
I'm glad you acknowledged that Republican appointees have held the majority since 1970. Once again, a Conservative majority is defined by McLaughlin as "agrees with me." Particularly, agrees with McLaughlin on social issues to the extent he'd like them too. Ignoring the various other rulings made on a thousand other issues. As you note, Republican justices have historically drifted over time...which would be a really good argument for term limits? It would allow Republicans to refresh their appointees with fresh blood, rather than allowing a Kennedy to remain on the Court making mushy-headed legislation until he dies.
But at what point does ideological drift become a skill issue for the other major party? When you say:
Somehow, you can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level.
Why are you granting the Democrats hyper-agency and turning the GOP into NPCs? The GOP held the Governor's mansion in California as recently as 2011. They've held the presidency for the majority of the last 70 years. Fox News, their partisan outlet, has been the top rated cable news channel for 22 consecutive years, and the top basic cable channel period for 8. And yet, let's rephrase your question:
Somehow, in a two party system, your opponents can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population while you continue to lose every election. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level.
Why is the GOP so incompetent that they can't get wins out of the supposed rank incompetence of Democrats? Is that Mr. McLaughlin and the National Review's fault, or are they just helpless passengers over at one of the major ideological organs of one of the two major political parties?
Then again, the NR folks have sure seemed to be helpless passengers against a certain short fingered vulgarian, so perhaps when they talk about conservatives finding themselves helpless against the least dirty trick from Dems, they're just describing themselves.
It's a coder's model I think, not a gooner's model.
I have no hopes for GPT in the latter department anyway, but my point stands, I think this is a remarkably mundane development and isn't nearly worth the glazing it gets. The things I read on basket weaving forums do not fill me with confidence either. Yes, it can solve fairly convoluted riddles, no shit - look at the fucking token count, 3k reasoning tokens for one no-context prompt (and I bet that can grow as context does, too)! Suddenly the long gen times, rate limits and cost increase make total sense, if this is what o1 does every single time.
Nothing I'm seeing so far disproves my intuition that this is literally 4o-latest but with a very autistic CoT prompt wired under the hood that makes it talk to itself in circles until it arrives at a decent answer. Don't get me wrong, this is still technically an improvement, but the means by which they arrived at it absolutely reeks of crutch coding (or crutch prompting, rather) and not any actual increase in model capabilities. I'm not surprised they have the gall to sell this (at a markup too!) but color me thoroughly unimpressed.
2D3D
1yr ago
Lets talk grilling.
My old grill finally crapped out on me. It is 30 years old, rusted all over ajd frankly it likely poisoned me every time I cooked on it because of extensive rust and chemical scouring to clean it, but I abused it till the legs finally rusted over and broke.
So, having abused a fully depreciated asset till death, I am looking for new steak scouring options. And in this fresh market I find the Weber egg to be the premier product recommended by social osmosis.
Thing is... I don't find the end quality to be necessarily better than my existing alternative of reverse sear into broiler.
Grill marks are undesirable byproducts, further charring is controllably obtained by blowtorch, smoke is infusable at source in a brine or introduced in a sauce. With broilers I can capture the drippings onto a bed of potatoes or in a pan I can glaze the fond for a pan sauce.
So, what am I missing? What is the weber fulfilling that I can't mechanically obtain with pans and grills?
gattsuru
1yr ago
Most sushi is intended to be eaten immediately after being partly-dipped in a mix of soy sauce and green horseradish 'wasabi', so the MSG part's usually covered in that context.
Meat alone-style (sashimi) and meat-on-rice-alone-style (nigiri) are... well, advocates will call them 'subtle' flavors, and if you do have sensitive tastes for meat or fish there are some interesting things better shops do with a light glaze that can't be done with cooked fish, but they're also still going to be pretty bland.
For rolls (maki or uramaki), much of the purpose is to make flavor combinations that wouldn't work otherwise. You could make a plate with grilled salmon, marinated with mango and cucumber, topped with seaweed flakes, served over rice, but it'd be drastically different than the sweet-vinegar rice and uncooked mango common to sushi rolls -- cooked cucumber can't be crisp, mango used in a marinade will be less intensely sweet, and the cooked plate would almost always want a long-grained rice with little seasoning or even a 'wild rice' for flavor. For sushi, the meat is more there to provide a strong base and some mild fatty flavors (modulo smoked salmon in heavily Westernized sushi), while the nori (dried seaweed) and other fillings are supposed to play a bigger role in what you describe as the taste.
((And even smoked salmon rolls avoid the intensively fishy smell of pan-fried or grilled fish. I don't mind it, but a lot of people do find it to detract from the meal.))
Some purists will still complain that Americanized maki goes too hard on, and I'll even agree with them in some cases (Flaming Hot CheetosTM Sushi is an abomination that not even Taco Bell has been willing to accept, yet), but the typical store or homemade maki leaves a lot of space to make it flavorful without making it overpowering.
Alternatively, look for 'poke' bowls, which tend to mix a lot of the same base materials with a lot more fixings, and can give a better intro to the underlying core flavors will still having a heartier feel and texture to them.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
Wow, an angry rant talking about how the libs really do deserve hatred. Enjoy your trip to the QCs.
This is not a ban message or even a warning, because what you’re saying here is within the rules. At least, I’m fairly confident that’s the case; my eyes glazed over somewhere around the third agonizing metaphor. But compared to your previous screed, it’s positively restrained, so you’re getting credit for improvement.
You’re still missing the point.
Contrary to what certain critics believe, the point of this forum is not to emulate Hitler. It should be abundantly clear that all Hitler’s self-righteous fire did not keep him from being a fuckwit. No, he wallpapered over his incoherent philosophy by speaking to the anger and desperation in his audience. That is not conducive to truth-seeking. If you care about that at all, that feeling of righteousness should be a warning, not a point of pride.
No_one
1yr ago
There are no sources that specify, but even the mainstream apologists admit this team was never bigger than 60 to 80 people, which is less than 10% of your supposition. Jewish "witness" Richard Glazar said there were 25 people on this team.
You're assuming several things here.
-
whoever who did the research didn't fuck it up.
-
I'm going to believe you, a person who believes millions of Jews would have just 'left' eastern Europe and moved to ..Stalin's Russia, in the middle of a war, using some unprecedented system of cross-frontline movements, are just not making shit up, wholesale.
The aerial photographs that Mattogno mentions were taken by the Luftwaffe in May 1944, after the supposed cremation operations were over and the aerial photographs prove that there was no major tree felling in the vicinity of the camp.
You're showing a picture of a very tiny portion of the area.
https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka?q=treblinka&source=osm&id=40487565&ds=2&x=21.9935714&y=52.5758397&z=13
There is something like two dozen square kilometers of woods nearby. If you had trucks, you could easily get the equivalent of 2.7 square kilometers of clear-cut forest without even clearcutting anything. Furthermore, there's a railway line.
No contemporary reports or documentary evidence of this massive tree-felling and cremation operation whatsoever.
Funnily enough, the local railway was administered by an agent of the AK... who kept careful notes of the transports, AK forwarded them to London, and being the local boss, even apparently stole a part of the records to prove the cattle wagons that arrived full of Jews were returning empty.
No contemporary reports
Do you even speak Polish ?
Only Treblinka is used open air pits and harvested wood.
Wrong- Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, together constituting about two-thirds of the total alleged gassing victims, all supposedly used this method. These camps were not constructed with crematoria, raising the peculiar fact that many concentration and labor camps were constructed with state-of-the-art crematoria for the cremation of corpses, in order to manage the outbreak of disease at those camps, but the three alleged "top-secret extermination camps" were built with no crematoria at all and used the most crude method imaginable. According to the mainstream position, most of the gassing victims were cremated with this method.
Treblinka, which had a workforce of 1.5-2000 people. Let's say you've got 1k people working on that, each day, 12 hours a day.
Yitzhak Arad, who wrote the standard work on the three camps named above, put the labor force of the Treblinka "extermination camp" at 500 - 1000, with a Forest Team that:
... numbered a few dozen prisoners, was set up to cut wood for heating and cooking in the camp. It was put to work in the forests near the camp. When the cremation of the corpses was started, this team was enlarged, for it also had to supply the wood for the bonfires on which the corpses were burned.
There are no sources that specify, but even the mainstream apologists admit this team was never bigger than 60 to 80 people, which is less than 10% of your supposition. Jewish "witness" Richard Glazar said there were 25 people on this team.
It so happens the revisionist Carlo Mattogno basically agrees with your estimate of tree felling production, estimating 0.55 tons of wood per man-day in a lumberjack team. Mattogno also ran cremation experiments on animal carcasses, from Mattogno's work on Sobibor:
This result is confirmed by the observation that “approximately 350 kg of ash is produced per tonne of animal.” 394 Since a typical fresh carcass contains approximately 32% dry matter, of which 52% is protein, 41% is fat, and 6% is ash,” 395 it follows that one ton of carcass weight contains (1,000×0,06=) 60 kg of ash, with the remainder of (350–60=) 290 kg stemming from the wood. It is known that, “on the average, the burning of wood results in about 6-10% ashes” 396 with an average of 8%. Therefore the ash mentioned is furnished by (290÷0.08=) 3,625 kg of wood, yielding a specific consumption of 3.6 kg per kg of carcass weight.
Similar data are provided by the description of the incineration of poultry in Virginia: 2,268 tons of carcasses were burned by means of 10,000 tons of wood, 397 i.e. using 4.4 kg of wood per kg of carcass weight.
In Carlo Mattogno’s experiments with waste beef, a weight ratio of wood/flesh of 2.6 was needed in a makeshift closed furnace, of 3.1 in an open furnace and of 3.5 in a pit. 398
For the mass cremation of corpses the above data allow us to assume a ratio of 3.5 on a weight by weight basis. The wood required to burn the corpse of an average deportee with a weight of 60 kg would thus be about 210 kilograms.
In the most famous Revisionist work on Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, One Third of the Holocaust, the revisionist performs an outdoor open-air cremation experiment of a leg of lamb with a 3.6x ratio of dry wood and is unable to cremate the carcass despite tending the fire.
The mainstream claims that about 789,000 people were cremated using this method in this small camp with this small labor force in about 5 months, or over 5,000 corpses cremated per day. Assuming a 40kg average weight of each cremation victim, the total dry wood required for one day of cremations would be 770 tons of dry wood burned per day.
Assuming an 80-man kommando could produce 0.55 tons per man-day, that would be only a production of 44 tons of green wood per day, not taking into consideration the fact that the wood kommando also provided the fuel for cooking, heating the camp, and camp construction of fences and buildings. That's less than 10% the daily requirement assuming 100% production and 100% cremation every single day with no delays caused by inclement weather (Poland isn't known for its perfect weather by the way).
There are 0 witness accounts of the mass deliveries of fuel to the camp, there are 0 documents relating or alluding to the mass deliveries of fuel to these camps, there are 0 references in the standard work- Arad assumes all of the wood was self-sufficiently supplied.
But there's one hiccup in the calculation here, anybody who has sourced their own wood knows there's a major difference between freshly cut green wood and seasoned wood. The former is at least 60% water and would require about twice as much, according to Mattogno's estimates:
It follows that 1 kg of dry wood (20% humidity) with a calorific value of 3,800 kcal/kg is the equivalent of 1.9 kg of green wood.
So the daily fuel requirements would be about 1400 tons of green cordwood, less than 5% of which could have been provided by a theoretical 80-man team (but the 'eyewitness' said it was 25 men).
In practice, anybody who has worked with wood knows the difficulties of burning green, freshly cut wood, and the use of freshly cut wood for the primary fuel source in the cremation of 770,000 people in 5 months is not even within the realm of possibility.
Let's say they did magically have a labor force big enough to fell enough wood every single day. How much area would they have to deforest? From Mattogno's work on Treblinka:
Where did the administration of the Treblinka camp obtain the 139,200 metric tons of wood required for the incineration of the bodies?
According to the witnesses, trees in the nearby forest were felled for the wood supply. The work was performed by a “Holzfällerkommando” (woodfelling unit).445 But the witness reports are extremely vague about the details, which one can well understand. During a period of 122 days, this party would have had to cut down, saw up and haul into the camp (139,200÷122=) 1,140 tons of wood every day! This means that every day it had to fell and saw up at least 760 trees and transport the load on 76 trucks carrying 15 metric tons each. This is decidedly too much, especially if one considers that this woodfelling party is supposed to have consisted, according to R. Glazar, of merely 25 men.87
The environs of Treblinka are today overgrown with fir trees. A 50-yearold fir forest yields 496 tons of wood per hectare.446 For the sake of simplicity, we round this number to 500 tons. In order to obtain 139,200 tons of wood, the SS would therefore have had to cut down (139,200÷500=) 278.4 hectares of forest, which corresponds to 2.7 square kilometers! But such a large deforested zone would naturally have not gone unnoticed by the local Poles, who were questioned by Judge Łukaszkiewicz in his investigations. On the other hand, in the aerial photographs of May and November 1944 a thick forest of approximately 100 hectares can be recognized on the north and east side of the camp, of which at least one hectare is located on the camp area itself.447 The forest stretches beyond the Wólka Okrąglik-Treblinka road, and borders on it for over 2 kilometers. There is no trace of any area where trees have been felled.
The aerial photographs that Mattogno mentions were taken by the Luftwaffe in May 1944, after the supposed cremation operations were over and the aerial photographs prove that there was no major tree felling in the vicinity of the camp.
None of this is even to mention the difficulties that would come with burning the wood, the fuel consumption of which would have been about equivalent to an intense 150m x 150m forest fire. This fire would have been in the immediate vicinity of a civilian rail-line, less than 2 km from a major rail junction, and in the immediate vicinity of several villages which still exist today. No contemporary reports or documentary evidence of this massive tree-felling and cremation operation whatsoever.
There's something about the Holocaust narrative that strikes the cord of religiosity in our psyche, we turn off our brains even though we ought to be able to see what is an obvious and manipulative deception. Even when it's spelled out clearly we think "no, there must be some other explanation."
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
As someone whose life story was a bit like Vance's (except in rural north Alabama instead of small town southern Ohio), it's weird. I grew up not really fitting in with the place (was too much of a nerd) and as an adult would rather hang out at the bar with your average blue tribe dilettante (I really like smart right wingers and or grey tribe types, but they're rare in my local college town social scene and or keep their mouths shut. I'd much rather talk to a liberal lawyer/law student than some low-info Boomer Gen X Reaganite or Trumper who hasn't updated their talking points since the 1990s.) than your local rednecks (I can talk enough about cars and football to fit in, though, and one of our regulars was impressed that I was the first non-tradesperson he'd met who knew what a glazier is.), but I don't really share their values. Somehow, in spite of not having been raised in the church, I turned out a fairly conservative person. I don't know what separates me from the average hicklib (There are plenty of those to be found in an SEC college town scene.), but at some point in my late teens/early 20s I felt it necessary to forgive my classmates for not having accepted me, to thank my teachers for what they did do, and while I'm not a churchgoer I've made my peace with God. Most of the people in the ruralville I'm from are decent and mean well, and as for the ones who aren't, there's trash everywhere I guess.
As for the borderer stuff, I don't know if Vance was or wasn't hamming some things up (The gist of his family having been part of the Great Migration strikes me as accurate, and while my father's side aren't from Appalachia they did migrate from the south to the rust belt and have been badly hurt by that area's economic decline and their own dysfunctions. My mom's side were the hillbillies, and apparently meeting them was something of a culture shock to my dad who'd grown up middle class in the Midwest.), but he nailed the toxic push-pull relationship between Mom and Mamaw (I do not believe that he was lying about that.) such that I was unprepared for that trip down memory lane and spent some time in tears.
I will say that I sympathize deeply with Vance's reactionary streak, even if I'm not sure (and I don't know if he's sure either) what the answer is.
Spookykou
1yr ago
The idea behind 'superpalatable' is not necessarily that it is more unhealthy (calorie dense), but that it is more delicious, so you over eat more, or are more likely to want to eat it instead of something else(something healthier). 'Upping the game' here, means tastier sauces, better crust recipes, perfecting baking time/and delivery/heat retention, quality of cheese, cheese blends, herbs, spices. Making more palatable food does not require making it more calorie dense. Can you imagine a world where room-temperature school-cafeteria pizza is the best possible delivery pizza, and how that would effect the frequency with which you order pizza?
Although, you can almost always add calories, one of the headline changes of their 2010 recipe was an herb and garlic butter glaze on the crust.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
1yr ago
Personally, I find nowadays that anything relating to COVID and/or vaccines for it just makes my eyes glaze over, as a result of hearing about it constantlly for two years.
I'm rather surprised that there still seem to be so many cranks who are obsessed with being anti-vax or anti-lockdown after this much time has passed.
In Britain this is basically standard, for reasons which have been discussed elsewhere. New builds are rare and the extent to which modern upgrades (dishwasher, tumble dryer, central heating, double glazing) are available varies wildly.
What you have to remember that where mod cons were unavailable they were compensated for by other things. My granny didn't get air conditioning until a couple of years before she died because she had a permanently-fuelled coal-fired oven, and she spent the whole winter in the kitchen next to it. Add thick walls, blankets and jumpers and you're sorted. The only mod cons I have trouble doing without are hot water and washing machines.
I read Scott's article on Cost Disease once and I've never forgotten it. I think that lots of people would be happy with 1940s housing and education at 1940s prices (adjusted for inflation). Medical care not so much. Food is complicated, because the form, quantity, quality and satisfaction associated with it has changed in so many ways that it's not easy to pin the changes as wholly positive or wholly negative.
More options
Context Copy link