domain:traditionsofconflict.com
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
3m ago
To be honest, 98% of all navies are crap. There's the USA, the UK, maybe the PRC and Japan, although neither has been battle-tested even against a weaker foe.
Russian navy is primarily an ICBM delivery mechanism, secondarily a delivery mechanism for other kinds of missiles and it's not very good at that. Navies are expensive, good navies are big, and big navies are extremely expensive.
ResoluteRaven
4m ago
While access to trade is the main factor, Eastern Europe and the North of India and China also share particular security vulnerabilities i.e. historical risk of being invaded and then economically exploited by nomadic tribes. That said, there aren't really any major exceptions to the trade=wealth rule that come to mind; even remote inland cities that became wealthy did so by supplying some rare resource to global markets, such as Potosi in the 16th century with silver, central Asian cities acting as intermediaries in the silk trade, etc.
Elon was long ago pushed out of OpenAI. But this is not important for the exceptional influence he had on the course of multiple industries. That he funded/cofounded OpenAI in the first place is crazy. Most industry leaders have one career, a few gifted talents hit multiple homeruns (Jobs with Apple, NextStep and Pixar, then Apple again), but Musk makes it seem like he plays a videogame for which he has cheat codes.
For the same reason all his endeavors can now crash and burn and it wouldn’t matter:
Tesla kickstarted the electric car revolution, but it is not on their shoulders to finish it. That Elon memed other car companies kicking & screaming into a future where e-cars are not anymore a mere novelty, but instead seen as inevitable, and we now have the technology and infrastructure in place (superchargers and more and more battery factories) to transition away from fossil fuels, this is the real legacy.
Similar SpaceX could be run into the ground and Elon still would have changed with it the space industry forever. Here is a quote from a recent Washington Post article (which complains that SpaceX is too successful):
SpaceX’s success in doing so has also opened the door for other commercial space companies. Without SpaceX, “I don’t think Rocket Lab would exist, to be honest with you, because they blazed the path that said space can be commercial and space is investable,” said Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s CEO.
You tried to argue that Blue Origin (or others) could leapfrog SpaceX, but in the (unlikely) case this happens this would not discredit Musk, instead this would be a triumph as his competitors would either not exist or wouldn’t be as good as without him.
On a technological level SpaceX did absolutely bonker things: Landing rockets? Landing rockets on a drone ship far away in the ocean? Using Methan as propellant? Using cheap steel? Proofing that the failed Soviet N1 concept is viable with modern tech (many inexpensive small engines instead of few big expensive engines), eliminating landing legs and instead trying to catch Starship?
Other rocket companies, Europe and China will have to copy them.
jeroboam
16m ago
Maybe we should take a step back. What, exactly, is your position?
Do you want U.S. boots on the ground in Ukraine? That's what I am calling "insane".
For myself, I've been extremely consistent in calling for a negotiated peace with Russia. In exchange for peace, I am willing to concede to Russia the territory they have already captured.
What downsides are you willing to accept? What personal sacrifices are you willing to make? Would you die for Ukraine? Sorry for asking so many questions, but your position seems so vague I can't argue against or for it.
2rafa
17m ago
Cloud seedling doesn’t prove chemtrail conspiracy theories, which almost all allege some kind of poison / mind control / chemical to keep people docile is being dropped from the aircraft. Benign cloud seeding for research purposes (almost universally disclosed precisely because it’s completely legal and there is little widespread opposition to it) isn’t it.
It's not clear how not banning him would be good for the community either. I'm not sure "good for the community" is on the table.
I miss him badly, and it's absurd to me that he's gone and I'm a mod. I originally wrote the above when I was expecting to be banned myself in relatively short order, and conversations with Hlynka fundamentally changed my perspective for the better.
It's usually pretty clear which users are heading for a ban, and I've been trying for a while now to find ways to engage with them constructively to try to stop that from happening, on the theory that the right conversation might be able to turn things around for them the way it did for me. Sometimes it sorta-kinda works. Sometimes it doesn't; I'm still frustrated that I never got to finish my arguments with fuckduck9000. In any case, the universal constant is that no one is happy with the results.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
25m ago
What do you recommend for a real non-alias email if you have a domain with a real name, say firstlast.tld, would you just use your initials before the @, or maybe email@firstlast.tld?
NATO is just an arbitrary line you are drawing right now because it excludes Ukraine. The rest you are just asking questions.
I can just as easily say would you risks nuclear war over Estonia. Population 1.3 million? That’s stupid to cause millions to die in nuclear war.
There is of course no obvious line for brinkmanship.
You pick NATO. I point to The Budapest Memorandum. So yes we have treaty obligations with Ukraine.
Ukraine of course is white. Which does count for something in US discourse.
Ukraine also has strategic reasons it’s easier to defend than waiting for the brinkmanship to occur somewhere else.
The larger population means they have more meat to throw at the problem. Drawing the line at Ukraine would mean that the next line is probably something like the Baltics. Where you would need to put German and American soldiers at risks versus Ukrainians. And if you let Russia have Ukraine then you enlarge their army as Ukrainian meat becomes Russian meat to build their army.
So yes Ukraine has a lot of strategic reasons to pick Ukraine for brinkmanship versus waiting.
My opinion is that yes Ukraine is the right place to fight Russia. Russia would take all of Europe if they could. History tells us that.
My big issue is you act like these things are obvious. But they are not obvious. And if we let Ukraine fall in 2022 there is a strong chance a test in the Baltics would come. And my guess when that day comes you would make the same argument. Russia wants the Baltics more and we should have never let them into NATO.
roystgnr
40m ago
"Leverage" seems like a straightforward metaphor to me: "to use a thing to obtain an effect disproportionate to the input effort" (yes, yes, work is conserved; in this metaphor effort is force).
But often someone using that metaphor correctly has reason to be proud, so I can see how the popular meaning might indeed have shifted to "and we’re damn clever for having done so."
czr
43m ago
I think many people would pay that premium if the car could drive itself, but they just can't crack it.
roystgnr
48m ago
Replenishing O2 from Mars air is something we did in a demo experiment (MOXIE) 3 years ago. On Luna it gets a bit more expensive; although oxygen is everywhere in the soil you'd need a lot of power to bake it out.
Other volatiles can also be found in Mars air but are even tougher on the moon. Mining dirty ice (icy dirt?) from a south pole crater does not sound like a fun way to replenish nitrogen.
Nuclear subs make O2 by electrolysis of sea water easily enough, but I think the CO2 removal (via chemical separation and dumping) must be harder, since they leave the ambient levels fairly high, and actually obtaining the O2 from the CO2 must be harder still or they'd be doing that for simplicity instead. Getting O2 from CO2 is easy enough with hydrogen and energy, but that leaves you with methane too - great if you want rocket fuel on Mars but just as much of a PITA to dump as CO2 if you're trying to be stealthy under the ocean.
gattsuru
48m ago
There were also a number of 'official' recordings that just disappeared, too, along with other disappearing physical evidence like the famous front door. With the noteworthy exception of Kahoe after Ruby Ridge, it's less that bringing any enforcement against FBI or DoJ destruction of evidence was tried and found hard, and more than trying them was found undesirable and left untried.
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?
In theory, that's the next step: the House had already asked Morens twice about his personal e-mails, producing 2k with a 'voluntary' letter in November 2023, and then getting this dump of 30k pages after a subpoena mid-April 2024, and they had credible reason to believe he was sandbagging them.
But the House investigations are not criminal investigations, nor are they the FBI or DoJ. The theoretically-broad subpoena powers are limited on the enforcement side, and there's little if any executive branch support here. With a few notable exceptions all on one side of the political aisle, the threat of a contempt of congress charge is toothless unless the issuing subpoena bends over backwards about following all rules, and unlikely even then.
And one of those rules are 18 USC 2702, which generally prohibits ISPs from disclosing stored data. There are a few exceptions -- LEO have wide cutouts in 18 USC 2517, 18 USC 2511(2)(a)ii lets FISA and the attorney general do whatever they want -- and some that apply outside of a warrant, but nothing relevant here. This is also why, even though using a personal e-mail for government business makes the entire personal e-mail subject to FOIA review in civil courts (though see caveat about "under agency control", since Fauci retired), it's almost always necessary to motion for a party to the case to disclose them, rather than the ISP or e-mail service.
So, uh, mostly because they don't want to be able to.
ares
49m ago
It's not so much that I don't think they take security seriously, and more that I think their incentives are misaligned with people's data autonomy.
That's true, but I'm just not convinced that it's rational to swear off their services because of that alone. It's a mutually beneficial, slightly adversarial economic relationship, like everything in Capitalism. I do think the math is different for people who are breaking the law or actively working on cybersecurity stuff, but what I see most often (IRL) is "Google/FAANG bad!" grunting by people who have huge security vulnerabilities and data leakage through other methods. Maybe that's sampling bias, since my social circles don't include anyone who's been to DEF CON.
Like when Google decided to make Google Photos not unlimited any more, with it also being somewhat difficult to do a mass-export of your original, full-quality photo data. And Google's usually not too bad with making takeout possible, so that made a lot of people pretty mad.
My understanding of this change was that your photos now count against your Google account's storage limits, shared with Google Drive, gMail, and all other Google services. If you have a lot of full quality photos and run out of space, you can pay for more storage or compress them. That seems completely reasonable to me. I haven't heard about difficulties in using Google Takeout. I do so occasionally and it's always been straightforward. Are complaints about that change just some combination of "free stuff isn't free anymore" and "I hate Google", or is there something legitimate there?
We put a lot of our lives on our computers, I think having control over them and the ability to make our own choices with how we use and manipulate our thoughts and memories is important.
Hard agree. Time has shown that Stallman was right. I'm glad we can still compile our own OSs from source. In a lot of other areas, I think the battle is lost. I'm living and teaching my kids to deal with the world we're in, and I don't think abstinence-only can work if you want to have a healthy social life. I won't be the guy who refuses to open the menu from a QR code when out to dinner with friends.
czr
50m ago
The problem I have with these anecdotes is that they're coming from other nerds (no hate, I'm one of them), and Elon is basically king nerd, so anything bad they say against him is like blasphemy. I personally have not witnessed Elon be competent about software (my expertise) once.
naraburns
nihil supernum
52m ago
That was the first mention of Israel, that I could recall, but the whole conversation is about Ukraine, Russia, Putin, and NATO. It's not exactly new to me, but it's refreshing to hear someone so clearly say that this is a war of choice, and the choice is being made by the USA, and their puppet states involved in NATO.
I don't understand how it's possible for you, or anyone, to believe this. Insofar as any conflict in Israel is a "war of choice," the people making that choice are, and have been, Muslim Arabs, whether inside or outside of Israel. For generations, now. If Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no more fighting. If Israelis stop fighting, there will be no more Israel. The commitment of Hamas, its handlers abroad, and most of the people living under its rule is the eradication of Israel. They have never accepted any of the compromises offered to them for more than a handful of years, during which time they have always been sharpening their spears for their next attempt.
I understand that the United States is entangled in this, as it is entangled one way or another in most armed conflicts around the world. At minimum, the American government is a well-compensated arms dealer! And I understand that the Israeli government has made a variety of foolish, cruel, and otherwise objectionable decisions along the way. Nobody in that region has anything approaching clean hands. But exactly one side of the Israel conflict is ideologically committed to actual genocide, as a matter of religious prescription, and it's not the Israelis.
Ukraine, okay! There's a conflict where American (or at least NATO) interests have absolutely been downplayed in favor of spinning a Russophobic narrative. I still tend to see Russia as the bad actor there, because I am prejudiced against aggressors, but I can accept that the United States played at least an indirect role in poking that particular bear. The United States had nothing to do with the murder, mayhem, robbery, and rape perpetrated by the Palestinian stooges of Islamist governments on October 7, and Israel's response to that attack has been, if not obviously proportional, absolutely understandable. If a bunch of Canadians, at the urging of their government, snuck across the border to rape and murder a thousand innocent Americans, I would not be satisfied with a merely proportional response; as a matter of clear deterrence, I would definitely want to see an absolutely merciless escalation.
And if it kept happening, over and over again, over years and decades, well... at some point the only thing that makes sense is to reach for the metaphorical banhammer.
jkf
55m ago
Hlynka was neither surprised by nor in disagreement with his ban.
That doesn't mean that it was good for the state of the community.
czr
55m ago
You can't disagree without offering your own pick for the invention of the century (so far) :D
That being said, I agree with much of your characterization of the iPhone, though I still say that Jobs was the only one to put the pieces together correctly. Likewise, Musk has the opportunity to do the same thing as Jobs for any of his products, especially Tesla, and I think he's failing. Tesla doesn't have near the same prestige or mindshare as Apple did after they released the iPhone, not even close. And while I do say a fair bit of Teslas on the road, it's still rare enough for it to be remarkable for where I live (and I live in a place that is biased towards Tesla).
pigeonburger
58m ago
They tend to have milder weather too
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
Replenishing oxygen on Mars shouldn't be the hardest problem there. Perchlorates (abundant in the Martian soil) can be heated to release oxygen, and as long as you've got sufficient power you can split the CO2 in the atmosphere.
A lot harder on Luna; regolith consists of reduced minerals and there isn't any significant atmosphere of any kind.
czr
1hr ago
Thanks for sharing your experience. I myself have noticed different problems on different accounts. On my main, where I spend 99% of my time on Twitter (and where I post), I do experience BOT interactions (follows, likes, DMs, but not replies), but the difference between how it is now versus how it was in this regard is a difference in degree, not kind. It is definitely worse than it was, but it's not insanely worse. The ads are different, and I noticed that some ads are even unlabeled, that is, they don't tell you that they're ads. Another thing with ads is that some of them don't handle UI interactions in kind with other tweets. For example, some ads instantly open the in-app browser whereas on a normal tweet the same interaction would be interpreted as part of a scroll action. I have never experienced the foreign language thing, that's truly odd.
On my private account that I created after Elon took over, on which I don't post and only follow a few accounts, I get 2-3 BOT follow requests per day. It's weird. Also, I had to solve like 12 captchas just to sign up; I thought that was funny.
I guess it comes down to what you attribute to the mass layoffs vs. what you attribute to Elon's sense of product and product management. I think a lot of the bad things we're seeing are due to the latter, not the former.
TowardsPanna
1hr ago
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.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr 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
1hr 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.
When has the US government lied about foreign policy in the last decade or so? The last major incident I can think of was the runup to the Iraq war, but that was an exception that proves the rule.
Are you just using "lying" here as a stand-in for "position I disagree with" or "unrealistically rosy assessment"?
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