domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
TowardsPanna
31m ago
Like leaving a beaten opponent with one or two crappy cities in Civilization V. They'll denounce you at every turn for the rest of the game.
NunoSempere
32m ago
Yeah, SMOC reversal seems like a proof of concept for AMOC reversal.
vorpa-glavo
42m ago
While I fall somewhere in the "state capacity libertarianism" and "liberaltarian" spectrum, I would say my main objection to naive libertarianism is the problem of petty tyrants.
I think there's a sense in which libertarians mostly ignore the ways that a local bully with a lot of property and social influence can make a person's life a living hell. If we live in a Dickensian libertarian utopia, what exactly stops bosses from treating their employees like crap? If the bankers refuse to give you credit because of some immutable trait of yours, how are you supposed to build wealth? If everyone in town refuses to hire someone who looks or talks like you, how are you supposed to make a living?
At best, I think the libertarian just hopes that society ends up supporting a diverse enough set of viewpoints that somewhere there will be a boss that isn't crappy, somewhere there will be a bank willing to take on more perceived risk, and somewhere there will be a person willing to follow the financial incentives and hire you.
But I think similar to the old financial dictum that "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", there's a societal corollary that "Petty tyrants can make your life hell longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, the bigotry or social censure of a petty tyrant and their supporters ends up "irrational" from an economic perspective, but that can still create situations like those that necessitated black motorists creating the Green Book to help them find gas stations, restaurants and stores that were willing to serve their kind.
If the libertarian response to a black motorist who wants to use the government to make more spaces open for them is just, "Don't worry, it is in their financial interest to serve you, in the long run they'll be out-competed by the gas stations, restaurants and hotels that do serve black people", then a part of me feels like the response is incomplete.
A similar situation emerges with the treatment of untouchables in India. Even without law, people of higher casts often don't want to be in the same room or even have the shadow of an untouchable touch them. How were the untouchables supposed to end that situation in a libertarian utopia? In the real world, a lot of the way it happened is the Indian government using men with guns to integrate untouchables in schools, the same way it happened in the United States.
I'm curious if a more traditional libertarian can point to success stories of an oppressed underclass becoming a normal, accepted part of society without government intervention to force the petty tyrants to comply. I'm a little unclear on how a libertarian watchman state where all of the government enforcers are racist/sectarian/whatever, ever stops being bigoted. If you belong to a class of people whose de facto status is that you can be lynched or murdered and the local government will look the other way, is it not sometimes worth it to have a larger government that sends in men with guns to stop the local government from letting people get away with murder?
WandererintheWilderness
44m ago
Many kinds of scientists are irrationally prone to thinking their particular specialty is the most important thing evah, but AI risk is still a real thing, space exploration is still a real thing, deadly viruses are still a real thing, etc. I think the same is obviously true of the climate. Global warming isn't going to literally set us all on fire by 2035 but climate change is still an ongoing phenomenon with massive global implications and it needs to be studied. So long as you don't follow them on X, I think most scientists still produce more light than heat, if you'll forgive the expression.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
46m ago
But there's literally no reason for it to be doing that, either, when there is definitive information, easily available for reference. Its information it should never get wrong, in practice.
Yeah this is something that gets me about the frequent code-based hallucinations too. The things will make up non-existent APIs when the reference docs are right there. It does seem like it wouldn't be hard to hook up a function that checks "does this actually exist". I assume it must not actually be that simple, or they would've done it by now. But we'll see what they can do in the future.
Paging the actual Australians here, since I have no idea.
But if I were an aboriginal rights activist trying to win as much as possible, I think I would push the argument that deciding exactly how ownership is distributed amongst aborigines is a detail that only becomes relevant once it is correctly admitted that ownership does in fact belong to the aborigines, and that quibbling over downstream details is a ploy to avoid ceding the base point.
If there were no clear institutions to inherit the rights of aborigines (I would argue) then a trust or a parliament or an advisory body could easily be set up. Something like the Scottish parliament, say, or the Norwegian oil depository.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
51m ago
Iran could threaten the use of a salted bomb on the grounds of the Temple Mount, maximizing radioactive contamination. The ultra-religious have enormous political influence in Isael. This would act as deterrence in a way that targeting a major city would not, while minimizing loss of life. Al-Aqsa isn’t super important for Shia Muslims, but the Temple Mount actually needs to be the place of construction for the Third Temple.
hydroacetylene
58m ago
That or they’re employed in one of a variety of non-w2 scenarios.
So your claim is "Iran has the bomb but it is useless to them".
So why did they build it? Is it just a stepping stone to the hydrogen bomb?
Also, it is not widely claimed that Iran has bombs, which would require some explanation. Does Mossad know? If yes, then why do they not make that claim? How can it be both in Israel's and Iran's interests to keep the world in the dark? If not, then how were they able to hide it?
Does the US know? Am I supposed to believe that Trump could avoid blabbering about it? Was Trump's bombing targeting finished bombs, or was it just a charade and if so for whose benefits?
This seems plausible. 400kg of 60% U-235 corresponds to roughly 240kg pure U-235. If you start from natural uranium, you would have needed to process 34 tons to get that much U-235. If your bottleneck are centrifuges rather than raw uranium and fluorine (which seems likely), you will likely have processed twice that much because squeezing out the last 0.1% of U-235 is just not worth it.
Naively, I would expect that separation efficiency is proportional to the product of the fraction of both species, so the easiest percentage gain is going from 49.5% to 50.5%. However, you do not have to go back to 99.3%, because 85% is enough for a weapon. Plus you are dealing with much less material.
(Actually, the WP article on SWU contains the relevant formula. Producing 400kg 60% enriched U takes at least 34t SW. Splitting that into 140kg 85% and 260kg 46% takes about 140kg SW, or just 0.4% of the total separation work. Even separating it to the point where your tails are just 0.7% again will just take 1.3t SW.)
There is still some overhead, probably. Perhaps the Uranium is not stored as UF6 but in a more reduced form, and it certainly will take processing after it is sufficiently enriched. The mechanics of a bomb can be prototyped with depleted uranium, but at the end of the day you either need to test your device or trust your computer models. With regard to the latter "someone falsified a fission cross-section in literature" seems like an unlikely story, but so does "someone hacked the air-gapped Iranian centrifuge network".
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