domain:abc.net.au
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1m ago
Not a bannable offense.
Indeed not, but deciding that rules are beneath you and that Charity requires too much effort, and then acting on that belief, is. My understanding is that Hlynka was neither surprised by nor in disagreement with his ban.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3m ago
Biosphere 2 is not a good model for a planetary colony
That's probably true, but I think it is a reasonable model for a long-term space station or asteroid colony, which has long seemed to me more appealing than planets, especially in the short term. The bottom of a gravity well seems like one of the least economically useful niches, unless you really can't find enough raw materials on moons and asteroids, or unless you have a serious proposal for terraforming.
More to the point: if you want to build a space colony, starting iteratively on closed-loop environs (assume spin gravity, which I've been told is practical for station designs not much larger than the ISS) seems a low cost, relatively low-risk research effort we could be doing more of today.
jkf
9m ago
"Replenish oxygen" is non-trivial on Mars/Luna though, no? (and decidedly so for any space-based hab)
just look at nuclear subs.
These take on bottled O2 at port AFAIK? This is not a thing that's available in space.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
11m ago
Israel is much more likely to ramp up attacks on Palestinians if a state is announced because they understand that this is their last chance to do something about the issue before the rest of the world decides whether or not to defend Palestine. They know a state means weapons pointing at them and they won’t have it
I think you're not completely wrong, but "statehood" is a whole gamut that manifests in a variety of ways in different circumstances. To some, I'm sure statehood means internationally-defined borders, but this isn't universally given: to use that standard, neither Taiwan nor South Korea have statehood. Others might suggest it means the right to raise its own military to defend those borders, but there are plenty of non-militarized small states (how many legions does Monaco wield?). Or the right to engage in international trade, but there are plenty of sanctions and de-facto blockades across the world, and no shortage of fortified walls and fences. Or some degree of popular sovereignty, but there is no global shortage of despots.
To me, at least, the notion of statehood also comes with responsibility both to one's people and in the scope of international relations. It means preserving a monopoly on the use of force -- if unsanctioned militias in Texas started shelling Ciudad Juárez, we'd expect the US government to respond with force, not shrug and tell Mexico to deal with it. It means providing for one's people -- international aid is acceptable in the short term, but is expected to be a stepping stone to economic independence, not an inter-generational affair. It means not invading one's neighbors (with some caveats for "just war"), and following the laws of war when violence is truly necessary.
It seems that, to a large extent separably, Gaza (and to a slightly lesser degree, the West Bank) have de facto statehood: there are borders. There is some degree of law enforcement. To be clear, that statehood is often failed statehood: there doesn't seem to be a monopoly on violence, especially across its borders. And to a large extent, it seems to me that the broader international community, largely in the name of "aid" props up this failed state and makes things palatable enough for its residents to maintain the status quo. It seems to me (perhaps as I've gotten older) that indefinite carrots often just enable bad behavior, and that long-term gain may require some amount of shorter-term pain: high unemployment (I've generally seen numbers close to 50% pre-war) seems like a fertile breeding ground for fanaticism in ways that might be less appealing when there's a sense that there really is something to lose -- and my observation there isn't unique to Palestine, either.
Now, I'm hardly in a place to dictate Israel's foreign policy, but I think it would at least be interesting to consider a unilateral recognition of a state of Palestine as an open-ended starting point for peace negotiations. Sure, it gives something to Palestinians (most directly, it would probably require defined borders in the West Bank), but it also gives them a platform to expect things in return: they could feasibly dictate that such a state would be non-militarized in exchange for security guarantees, demand that firing weapons across its borders be treated as a criminal action (extradition?), and provide a roadmap to gradually removing blockades in exchange for extended periods of peace. I'm not sure that would actually improve the situation given the religious fanaticism at play, but it seems like it would provide something to point to as a reasonable defined goal to point to, although I'd expect at least some criticism along the lines of "Bantustan."
jericho
17m ago
I believe the point is that it seems strange to call Russia "encircled" by NATO once you zoom the map out a bit.
ThenElection
17m ago
The transformer came out of Google Brain, not GDM.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
27m ago
I think what it means now is “we’ve used a thing and we’re damn clever for having done so.”
guajalote
32m ago
How is that a "legitimate security interest?" I understand "legitimate security interest" in the above post to mean something like "clear threat to the safety of Russia's citizens." I don't doubt that Russia would like to have a warm water port but I don't see how not having one poses a clear threat to Russia or its citizens.
TheThrowaway
34m ago
A warm water port is a legitimate security interest. It has been a legitimate security interest since the age of sail. It will continue to be a legitimate security interest into the future, as long as boats can float.
A warm water port belonging to another sovereign nation, whose sovereignty you agreed to respect ~30 years ago? If you want to call this a "legitimate interest" for Russia that's fine, but then it seems like you're holding the US to one standard for actions, while holding Russia to a very different one.
The_Golem101
36m ago
I mean, there's most of the rest of the Black Sea coast, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Novorossiysk that doesn't get iced up. There are fully landlocked countries worldwide, they don't get to invade their way to the coast as a little treat. Now, moving the Black Sea fleet all there would involve expanding the port facilities, but that's not impossible (they already partly did it due to the constant Sevastapol attacks). Plus, they did already de facto have that warm water port and were in no position to lose it prior to their invasion.
Meanwhile, that warm water port is now being hit repeatedly by strikes, and the Ukrainians are working down the list of Black Sea fleet vessels one at a time, which are going to be a nightmare to replace. Fortifying its claims/access to Crimea were one of the aims of Russia's invasion for sure, it's just that it seems to have been totally counterproductive from a strategic point of view.
Possibly our difference here is that there's a different meaning to legitimate being used.
Firstly, it's probably obviously not legitimate for countries to just straight up steal strategic assets or resources from a neighbour, even if it's useful.
However, powerful countries cannot accept that their security would be at a partial or full veto from a small power, especially if they have the ability to stop it, so under this threshold some could argue Russia had a legitimate right to annex the port. Maybe the US response in the Cuban missile crisis was legitimate by that standard, and a similar case. However, my disagreement here is that Ukraine didn't have the ability to threaten Russia in any meaningful way as of 2022 or even 2014, other ports were available for the fleet, and Russia's navy is at best a very minor source of their overall security. It's hard to put this as a legitimate reason to launch a full scale war to annex territory and create a puppet state (their initial war goal at least), and in reality has been totally counterproductive, partly as Ukraine has a legitimate interest to fight back and sink most that fleet now, and NATO has a legitimate reason to help them. That's the issue with fuzzy or subjective legitimacy, both sides can seem to have it.
As a final spicy take to develop that prior point: their navy is kind of... crap? Pointless? Like, can it contest the waves versus a naval power equal or greater to Italy? What's it really for then? They can do expeditionary operations to friendly countries without it, they can't do expeditionary operations to hostile countries with it.
KMC
37m ago
Well, considering Catholics did stop selling indulgences, I'd say at least some of their differences were reconciled. Of course, the major difference, who should be in charge, was not.
hydroacetylene
41m ago
It’s easy to celebrate your enemies dying. It’s hard to live go through nuclear bombardment drills while your currency hyper inflates, you live under rationing, and there’s a draft on.
And more to the point, the Twitter democrats are not representative of the average American.
KMC
47m ago
believe in chemtrails
If you don't believe in chemtrails, you don't believe in reality. It's just the conspiracy parallax, where chemtrails make you insane, but cloud seeding is just known technology. Guess what, all those kooks talking about chemtrails are right: people really are spraying chemicals out of airplanes in order to seed clouds and alter the weather.
have an extreme distrust for anything that comes out of a lab (including vaccines)
Extreme distrust is warranted when you are constantly lied to, especially in matters of public health. Those lies are obvious now, for at least one topic, and I see no reason to believe those same agencies on other matters when their credibility is thoroughly shredded. Yes, including vaccines.
You shouldn't trust pthalates or polyfluoroalkyl chemicals, both of which came out of a lab and are poisoning the environment. You shouldn't trust atrazine which is quite literally turning the frogs gay. You shouldn't trust neonicitinoid pesticides, either, or fire retardants in your furniture and on your baby's clothes.
I don't see why you are advocating for naive belief in labs.
and certainly believe in JFK and 911 conspiracies.
If you believe the Warren Commission report, then you're just plain gullible. Dulles, Hoover, and Johnson, among others, conspired to hide the truth.
All you've done is boo the hippies, but to my mind they're right often enough, and more importantly, they make a different kind of error. The authorities are more likely to tell me something harmful is safe, the hippies are more likely to tell me something safe is harmful. Those two types of errors do not produce the same outcomes.
But really, the fact that you're directing your scorn towards a known true and proven fact (cloud seeding aka chemtrails) makes me think you should be more skeptical of authority, and less reflexively skeptical of the fringe.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
49m ago
Question:
Did Protestants and Catholics have irreconcilable differences in Europe?
bonsaii
49m ago
Is the explanation for why coastal areas with ocean access are consistently richer than more inland areas really as simple as "ocean access = international trade hub = money"? E.g.,
-South India is more economically prosperous than north India
-West Europe more than East Europe
-east coast and west coast USA more than middle USA
-Japan/Korea/Taiwan more than coastal China, which is in turn more so than inland China
Is there more to it, like say a particular path dependence in each of these regions? Are there significant exceptions (either now or historically)?
jeroboam
51m ago
Where does this model of Russia even come from? The Ukrainian conflict has not exactly been a stunning success for Russia.
Now they're attacking India and China?
The whole Ukraine War rests on the faulty premise that Russia is so strong they'll invade Poland India if we don't stop them, but so weak that one more round of funding to Ukraine will win the war.
Personally, I don't really care as long as I'm not forced to participate. I'd especially appreciate it if more pro-war people actually volunteered for the Ukrainian military, or least the US one.
I remember reading about how the federal agencies involved in the Waco massacre claimed both in court and to numerous FOIA requests that they had little to no video or audio recordings of the raid or the siege, and maintained this story for years. Finally it was revealed through litigation that pretty much all the agents involved in documenting the operations had claimed to be using "personal" devices for their official documentation, with the understanding that anything useful to the agencies would be entered into the record when it was convinient to do so, and the rest withheld from public scrutiny indefinitely. This was in 1993, more than three decades ago.
Within the last few weeks, we've seen ATF agents involved in an unjustifiable no-knock raid resulting in the fatal shooting of a law-abiding citizen claim to have left their body-cameras behind. In the shooting of Bundy supporter Roy Finecum (Wikipedia, lol), FBI agents attempted to conceal having fired shots at Finecum while his empty hands were raised over his head. The record overflows with similar examples.
We discuss with some frequency the question of whether government conspiracies are possible. What we see here, as we have seen many, many times before, is that deliberate efforts to evade lawful oversight are both routine and universal. Nor is there any reason to believe that all or even most such efforts are caught; given the absurd scenarios that result in discovery, here being one email mistakenly breaking cover, or in Hillary's case an unrelated sex-crimes investigation snagging a laptop with emails on it, we are very clearly only seeing a small and randomly-selected portion of the cases. This was, in fact, a government conspiracy, directly related to one of the worst disasters of the last hundred years, which very well might have been directly caused by the conspirators themselves.
No one cares. Nothing will be done. Everyone knows it.
[EDIT] - Why not demand the emails from Google? The government spies on my emails just fine, why can't they get those of Fauci and friends?
practical_romantic
55m ago
I have recnetly been trying focusing, the thing by eugene gendlin to help me in this context. I have low self esteem and care a whole lot about how others see and judge me. That and meditation are two things that should be of help.
Meidtation to stop me from thinking about anything besides what I am doing at the moment and focusing to ensure that I can address what exactly is bothering me.
hydroacetylene
56m ago
The Ukraine war is a war of choice for Russia. I guess it’s a war of choice for Ukraine- they could in theory capitulate and the fighting would end, although no doubt the Russian army would sack a few cities and there’d be some terrorism. But the USA doesn’t control Russia or Ukraine. We can stop paying for Ukraine’s war effort, but there’s no indication it would get them to stop fighting as opposed to just going all Berlin, 1945 every few miles. And even with the Russian army’s apparent willingness to turn cities into Grozny, it’s going to take time to grind through that.
bonsaii
57m ago
The misuse of "exponentially" in particular infuriates me. I can't count the number of times I see "'exponentially' large" as if it just means the same as "really" instead of referring to specific functional relation. It's as nonsensical as saying "linearly large" and immediately indicates to me that I should probably disregard anything else said by the writer.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
58m ago
NATO forms a bright line that Russia knows it must never cross. Here is a map of NATO. Russia is encircled and powerless
I do not believe "encircled" means what you think it means. Without attacking NATO, Russia can move south through Georgia ("seeking" is not membership), Armenia, and Azerbaijan and keep going if it feels like getting into a conflict with Iran. And then there's that huge area of Russia not shown, which borders on other non-NATO countries. They could plow through the -stans to India, or go after Mongolia and China. No NATO there.
ares
59m ago
Yeah, I feel like I recently saw a US court case where someone was found guilty for breaking a law that wasn't a law when they committed the acts. I can't find it now for the life of me.
There are plenty of not-straight furries at Google, so if there's a culture/legal shift I would expect Google (and other FAANG companies) to fight tooth and nail (heh) against court orders to reveal incriminating stuff related to that. For the CTRLPew stuff, yeah, I'd back up those files and notes in a way the cloud providers can't see them. The VeraCrypt file is annoying because I have to upload the whole thing when any small part of it changes, but I'm not sure there's a better solution. I have zero trust in any company's claims of zero-knowledge, unbreakable encryption, or resistance to government seizure.
pigeonburger
1hr ago
I think you should remember that no one will invest as much time and effort in judging you as you do. Most people have better things to do than obsess over your mistakes.
I'm pretty sure that's the main reason, yes. They also tend to be more touristy and may have a better lifestyle to attract the high earners.
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