domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
Tanista
11hr ago
BSG, on the other hand ... "The humans haven't figured out what the Cylons are doing" is a compelling premise, right up until you add "the BSG writers are humans" and complete the syllogism.
RDM complained about Star Trek tropes and went out of his way to avoid them, only to then fall into the basically-unbuilt mystery box nonsense we had to deal with for a decade after Lost launched (to add insult to injury Lost probably also paid off its myth stuff much better than he did)
magicalkittycat
11hr ago
I mean I don’t think I’ve seen anyone in a position of power have concrete plans that they stuck to even at risk of losing.
Well you're not losing to begin with if the policies you think are good are the ones being implemented. Is Bernie Sanders losing when Trump got stakes into Intel? No, he was supportive, he wants government to own more businesses.
Sanders might be losing on other topics, but he wins here and he knows it.
TBH, looking at how people in power actually behave, principles are not how you understand government.
I'll agree you with there. Politics does not do a great job selecting for people who value the health of the nation over their own personal fantasies and desires. They might have some values, but if it's between "benefit myself" and "benefit the country", well we see that the first often wins out. It's a known issue of pretty much any system that those who seek power are disproportionately those who wish to use it for their own personal gain.
magicalkittycat
11hr ago
this leads off with abstractions ('the country', 'the left'), but no acknowledgement of a relationship. Even the traitor allegation is framing it as treat to the abstraction (hate the country). Even that treats the action as an initiation, as opposed to a response, as if treason is a state of being unprompted at odds with a natural/healthy state of behavior.
And how does this make a meaningful difference? Bad policy as a response to bad policy is just more bad policy. Imagine for instance if the response to leftist rent control was a rent floor rather than not enacting price controls to begin with.
This is wrong in the same way that 'the organization decided to do something' is wrong. Organizations do not make decisions. People in organizations make decisions.
Organizations, in being controlled and owned by people do in fact make decisions. Organizations are just a group. If the group members (or owner of the group if it's legally theirs) makes a decision, then the group itself can be said to have made a decision.
Of course if the people in it change over time, we expect the group itself to change but it's still just that, reflective of the humans within it.
When people make a series of decisions over time in regards to, and affecting, other people, this connection is a relationship. Sometimes the established relationship is amicable, and sometimes the relationship is hostile.
People responding negatively to a hostile relationship are not traitors. Nor does their response to hostile relationship come off as them never believing the words they were saying.
Ok I agree that when leftists implement bad counterproductive and unhealthy policies like high corporate taxes or price controls or whatever other economically/freedom damaging policies, it's understandable to react negatively. But I don't see why that would lead to the response of joining in on the self harm.
If leftists are stabbing the nation, why grab a knife and join in on the murder? Your comment doesn't answer this, it just assumes that saying "bad relationship" explains why I should want to harm our nation and our future.
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
11hr ago
assuming that services are available
Kinda the main stumbling block, tho, innit?
rmtodd
11hr ago
Battlestar was self-consciously made by former Star Trek writers to avoid problems they thought Trek had (and to be much darker in a post-9/11 world).
Specifically, Ronald D. Moore had been a writer on DS9 and went over to Voyager after DS9 ended, but left Voyager not too long afterwards due to disagreements with the producers over storylines, basically in that they were reluctant to take seriously the implications of the premise -- that Voyager is on its own, without support, and their situation should be getting more and more desperate as time goes on. There was an interesting interview some fanzine did with Ron Moore after he left where Moore more-or-less ranted on this subject at length (and I wish I remembered the name of said fanzine and knew if that interview was online). It's interesting to think of that interview in light of the Ron Moore edition of BSG, which is more or less an attempt to "do it right" in this respect for both Voyager and the original BSG (which was also rather inconsistent on the whole issue on how desperate the Last Surviving Human Refugee Fleet is -- one week everyone's fleeing the destruction of the 12 Colonies, the next week everyone's whooping it up on the casino ship like nothing's wrong...). I like to imagine that every Friday night after a new episode of the Ron Moore BSG aired, Moore prank-called Brannon Braga and said "See! That's what Voyager should have been like!" and then hung up.
Which is not to say that Ron-Moore-BSG is not without its problems, they're just different problems -- the main one being that Moore tried for a massive story arc like JMS did in Babylon 5, but didn't want to spend the time obsessively planning out 5 years of stories like JMS did, so he decided to wing it as he went along. The thing is, Ron Moore is almost good enough for this to have worked, for a while anyway; the wheels didn't start seriously coming off the thing until season 4.
magicalkittycat
11hr ago
The rest of the post makes arguments I consider weak but this bit is laughable. Groups do not, in fact, stay principled easily. That's the entire problem.
Obviously a group over time as people change out can not be guaranteed to stay the same group, and that's not a claim I make. In 100 years a FIRE org owned by Random Joe JR could be a fighter against free speech.
But currently within a reasonable timeline of being owned by the same people, their consistent behavior marks a consistent belief of the people who compose it.
bonsaii
11hr ago
The "death panel" is not a uniquely socialist horror. It is an inescapable feature of any system that deals with scarce resources, which is to say, any system in the real world.
I think you've put it perfectly here. I wasn't intending to use it as a counterpoint, instead I was just interested in how they might respond. I think a QALY-based calculation is a transparent and reasonable approach, at the very least moreso than the convoluted mess we have now, but I find a lot of people will, as you say, find the calculus unsettling.
This isn't some big secret either. I have had such discussions with dozens of families, and not a single one has had a problem with it, or withdrawn their relative to go elsewhere, as they are at full liberty to do.
I find this particularly interesting. I suppose there are significant UK/US cultural differences in this regard, because I cannot imagine such a thing going well over here (My doctor friends told me once about Daughter from California Syndrome. I don't suppose you have an equivalent over there?).
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12hr ago
I mean, the patient likely can get the treatment regardless (see also the main NYT article). Doing so with a not-yet-settled pre-auth battle is approximately equivalent to doing so without a pre-auth battle at all.
If you do it without pre-auth, the insurance company's next move will be to say you violated their pre-auth policy so they're not obligated to pay in any case. They may or may not get away with that, but it's another line of defense between the provider and the insurance money.
This isn't really true, though. If they get the treatment without the pre-auth completed and agreed (or none done at all), and the insurer ultimately denies it after-the-fact, the patient still owes the bill.
Yes, the patient owes it. But they can simply... not pay it. Especially true if they can't pay it. Then the provider is stuck with the bill, or sells it to some shady medical debt collector for rather less than face value.
stuckinbathroom
12hr ago
but I think it’s the first serious attempt to construct an arcology
Is the Kowloon Walled City not "serious"?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12hr ago
the COVID vaccines are highly imperfect and not that important for young, healthy adults or children
And yet public health officials keep pressing for COVID vaccines for young, healthy adults and children.
There is no concerted effort to suppress a spree of cardiac myopathies
Maybe there isn't such an effort ANY MORE.
When promising cures for things like aggressive pancreatic cancers are caught in the cross-fire
Are they? Or is that just marketing, because the mRNA producers are looking for applications that sound really good? What I find when searching for that is particularly unpromising -- it's a personalized mRNA vaccine to be used after surgery. Even it works, it'll be eleventy-billion dollars a dose, and you still have to have the surgery.
Grant_us_eyes
12hr ago
Vintage Story has alot of difficulty gates for survival that give you plenty to do in-game, above and beyond acquiring metals - it can also cause some emergent hilarity. Just last night while playing, what turned into a scouting mission for more pine resin flipped into an effort to capture and bring back a female goat for my domestication efforts before quickly devolving down to fighting for my life against a horde of wolves in order to capture said damn goat.
All because if you make sure your diet has enough variety, it increases your health, and I need to work on dairy production.
Fun times.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12hr ago
My sense of the thing is that a lot of advice fails due to the advice being hard to actually do. For example if I wanted to lose weight, the actual advice is the same for almost everyone: fork put downs. That’s it. If you want to lose weight, you have to eat less than you do now (for general health it’s also good to eat better foods and exercise). But of course this is hard to do. You have to resist the urge to eat, probably a lot. You have to be hungry at times. You probably are going t9 be working out a lot and thus be tired and have sore muscles. In short following the advice sucks. And if you’re busy it’s probably going to be hard to resist the drive thru on the way home, or easy to skip the gym. Is the advice wrong? Not really. But people have a hard time sticking to the “suck” until they make the habit stick.
The advice for school success, again, is pretty universal. You have to study, do lots of practice problems, read the textbook, write those papers, and in general apply your ass to chair and grind. It’s easy advice to give, and much like dieting, if you actually do it, you’ll see results. The problem, again is that doing that sucks. You can’t game as much if you’re studying and writing papers and doing practice problems. You miss out on parties. Maybe you can’t go on as many dates. Resisting those things is hard. Forcing yourself to work when you don’t feel like it is hard. And eventually most people fall off, maybe excusing a night or two for fun. Maybe not doing quite as much homework or researching just a little less. And most people won’t stick it out through the suck to get the results. Again, the advice isn’t the problem. It’s the person not sticking with the advice long enough to make a good habit and see results.
NewCharlesInCharge
12hr ago
You could make a state-funded lender of last resort for such cases.
If you're denied then the state advances the funds at the same cost that would have been charged to the insurance company. The loan becomes non-dischargeable and the state is able to garnish wages and seize assets should it become necessary.
They also assume the right to represent the patient to the insurance company and demand payment. Should the treatment have actually been approved according to the insurance policy, the insurer has some penalty big enough to incentivize them not to play denial games and to keep the lender solvent.
This could lead to interest rates being a function of insurer denial accuracy. If it's very likely the state will recover from insurers, interest rates could be very low. If insurers are exceptionally accurate and you're very unlikely to recover, then insurance rates could approach the same as any unsecured loan for a person of your creditworthiness.
This is part of why principled groups can stay principled so easily. An organization like FIRE truly believes that free speech is beneficial.
The rest of the post makes arguments I consider weak but this bit is laughable. Groups do not, in fact, stay principled easily. That's the entire problem.
FIRE was founded in 1999. The ACLU was a significantly older and more effective advocate for free speech before the anti-Trump hysteria split it between principled liberals and activists. In fact, FIRE probably owes a lot of its current prominence (and its position in your post) to the fact that it's very much not easy to stay principled
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12hr ago
I mean I don’t think I’ve seen anyone in a position of power have concrete plans that they stuck to even at risk of losing. TBH, looking at how people in power actually behave, principles are not how you understand government. Principles and ideas are not end points, but tools to get power. And if you watch politics with such a thing in mind, outside of a few crazy true believers, you can probably figure out where the chips will fall with 80-90% accuracy.
Rov_Scam
12hr ago
I was supposed to be hearing a lot about arcologies in the near future since at least 1993. I don't know that there's much call for anything self-contained, since the megaprojects of the 1960s that promised housing, retail, and office space all without leaving the building mostly went out of business when they discovered that people like going outside from time to time.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12hr ago
Ah... This is so good. I didn't know I needed to read this, thank you. The Missile Officer is a character.
anon_
12hr ago
Sure. So 1/2 the price of Concorde but connects all the major cities of the world at Mach 1.7 instead of the 0.85 of a 777?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
12hr ago
Faster Than Light. Yes, I'm late to the party.
You're a lone spaceship trying to outrun a massive, constantly advancing enemy space fleet while you must fight random enemies and avoid running out of fuel and ammo. It's a roguelike so sometimes you just get screwed by RNG.
The best part of the game is the tension during difficult moments. You are low on fuel and only have a few missiles left, and the enemy fleet is only two jumps behind you. Suddenly, as you try to jump past a star, a well-armed mercenary ship uncloaks and demands you give up your ship and your crew as slaves. As you begin to engage, a warning blares across the screen -- the nearby star is unstable! Moments later your ship is hit with a massive solar flare, causing random fires to break on your ship. Your crew scrambles to put these out, sustaining burns in the process. Luckily, you've kept your best pilot and gunner away from the fires, but BANG! the merc ship has fired a hull-piercing missile into your ship's bridge which is now rapidly decompressing. Your pilot attempts to repair the hull breach, but you're not sure he'll be able to fix it before asphyxiating. You may need to sacrifice a different crew member to perform this repair to have any hope of escape. You pause the game to consider your options...
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
13hr ago
Nobody wants to live in Antarctica. I would rather raise kids on a container ship.
Wikipedia indicates that British Antartica is only a little colder than Greenland, and actually warmer than Nunavut and Siberia. So it really isn't the most outlandish place to live, assuming that services are available.
philosoraptor
13hr ago
Anecdotally from someone who's never watched any of it, I have actually heard of all the other ponies you named save Rarity, but not Fluttershy.
Why political revenge narratives don't make sense to me.
I submit it's because you subscribe to a revenge framing in the first place, as opposed to a relationship framing. So long as you adopt a misleading framing, you will continue to be misled.
For example, when you give this paragraph-
After all if you care about the country, I would assume you want good and effective policy. If you see the left's policy ideas as bad and harmful to our future, it's not a great idea to join in on the self-harm. Unless you're a traitor and hate the country, you would be pushing for what you think is the best policy. Now people might disagree on what is best for growth, what is best for the people, and what is best for the country but we should expect them to pursue their ideas in the same way if they care about America, towards ideas they think are good.
-this leads off with abstractions ('the country', 'the left'), but no acknowledgement of a relationship. Even the traitor allegation is framing it as treat to the abstraction (hate the country). Even that treats the action as an initiation, as opposed to a response, as if treason is a state of being unprompted at odds with a natural/healthy state of behavior.
This is wrong in the same way that 'the organization decided to do something' is wrong. Organizations do not make decisions. People in organizations make decisions. Political parties do not try to appeal to, or deliberately offend, parts of the population. People within political parties try to appeal to, or deliberately offend, other people in the population. The tolerance / encouragement of such behavior is not conducted by The Party, but by the consent / support of other people within the party.
When people make a series of decisions over time in regards to, and affecting, other people, this connection is a relationship. Sometimes the established relationship is amicable, and sometimes the relationship is hostile.
People responding negatively to a hostile relationship are not traitors. Nor does their response to hostile relationship come off as them never believing the words they were saying.
...unless, perhaps, the only paradigm you can conceptualize for responding negatively to a hostile relationship is 'revenge' against abstractions.
Throwaway05
13hr ago
This is probably the best summary I've ever seen on this topic. Thank you.
From my point of view, that's incoherent. If there is an eternal uncaused cause it cannot stop existing. If it stops existing it's not the explanation for the grounding of being right now.
Let me try to give my best response to the question:
Let's say there is a uncaused cause that created matter but did not directly will our existence in a special degree. In addition to unformed matter it created Elohim , who then went on to do 95% of what is described in the Bible. I say 95%, because to accept that the God of the Bible is not the uncaused creator of the universe requires me to ignore the parts of the Bible that say He is. Most notably (but not solely) Acts Chapter 17, where St. Paul explicitly identified the God of the Bible with the uncaused cause of Greek Philosophy.
It's not clear to me what sin even is if it's not a crime against existence itself, but I guess sin is now some kind of crime against Elohim. So then he saves us from our sin by sending His son to die for us. In doing so he makes some kind of paradise afterlife possible. I feel like this soteriology needs to be worked out much further, but that's a lot to unpack and I don't think matters too much to the question.
But accepting all that, I would owe this Elohim a debt. He would be a cool dude, a role model, praiseworthy. I should probably listen to what he said to do.
Would he be as awesome as the God I worship right now? No, he would not be. Would he be a god? In the same way Loki in Marvel is a god. At least he intentionally willed my existence so that makes me belong to him in a certain way? But does he actually have the power to do that? Or is he relying on the power of the actual First Cause, and the actual First Cause could constrain him from creating me. It gets messy. I think the most confident thing I can state without doing a years worth of research into a hypothetical is that he wouldn't be as awesome as the God I worship right now.
God did not have to create anything, but choose to create out of an overabundance on generous love.
Gnosticsm can be right on some things and wrong on others. Just because Gnosticsm in general is a Heresy doesn't mean that only the opposite of what they taught is true. They taught Jesus is divine, Gnosticsm being wrong does not mean that Jesus is suddenly not divine.
Gnosticsm holds several incorrect teachings that is incompatible with what you would call Creedal Christianity. The most obvious is that matter is evil. This is contrary to the Gospel. What I would consider the actual biggest problem with Gnosticism is their belief that there is some kind of knowledge, secret words, etc, that is not publicly taught by the Apostles and their successors which is necessary for true paradise.
There were Gnostics who taught that the body is evil - so just commit sins of the flesh. It doesn't hurt anything but the flesh which is evil already.
There were Gnostics who taught that the body is evil - so flee from all bodily temptations and live an asture life because desiring things of the flesh is like desiring dung.
But all Gnostics agreed that the only way to the best afterlife was to learn some secret code phrase only they knew, to know the true history of the Divinities, to learn something only they were peddling.
That is what made them so horrible and it's also why I think the Internet has brought in a reign of atheistic gnosticsm. We spend all our time dissasociated from our bodies following the influencers that claim to have found that one weird trick to understanding Geopolitics or how to live longer. But that's another topic.
Classical Christians are not necessarily Platonist either. I don't believe in a world of forms. Classical Christians don't have to be Aristotelians either.
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