VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
Are there as many boring tomes as I would expect working over evidence for minor policy changes? I realize some of it is probably sensitive, but I'm not sure where I would go look for things like "the anticipated implications of banning [product] in [industry]" or "the impact of marginal tax rate changes"?
Are there policy works on the government side writing these, or are there just competing narratives in the regulatory docket comments and some judgement summary of the bureaucrats in making their final decisions?
Schoolhouse Rock didn't cover regulations or notice and comment periods.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Aren't they allowed to do that still? IIRC it's only a gentleman's agreement that they offer to go do something else. There have been talking filibusters within the last decade, most notably by Ted Cruz, which included reading Dr. Seuss.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
The Internet has undergone a massive shift since then that I'd compare to a rapidly growing town: back then we didn't have quite as much variety, but you could mostly trust someone's personal page on a .edu domain and expose ports on your machine like leaving your front door unlocked. These days it feels very urban and while that has some advantages (variety of content), some really miss the small town vibe and we now all have to lock our doors, encrypt everything, and our kids keep getting distracted by the blinding lights of the casinos and seedy joints that have moved in.
I can understand wanting to have the Internet equivalent of a white picket fence in the 'burbs.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
It was certainly a common cultural trope at the time. TV Tropes has a better list than I could come up with offhand, but it's IMO most interesting as an uncommented-on undercurrent like in movies Back to the Future II, Die Hard, or Alien, but there are some works of literature that comment on it on more directly: Crichton's Rising Sun, Stephenson's Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.
I think it's an interesting example of how the zeitgeist can be wrong: Japan remains a world power, but it's projected continued ascent was oversold.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
IIRC Tom Riddle's name had to change in translations to maintain the plot-relevant anagram involving his name.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
Having not seen all (most?) of these before, would you mind providing links to the media claims and the evidence that they're incorrect for these cases?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
Oh the horror. Next thing you know, they'll be sending agents with guns into schools to tell kids not to use drugs.
This was literally done with the DARE program? At least when I was in school it involved an active police officer (armed, as US cops tend to be) going into an elementary school classroom to talk about how drugs were bad. I do remember at least one of the student questions was "Is that a real gun?".
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
Isn't part of the problem that 'diversity' is somewhat fundamentally at-odds with 'next likeliest token' (or the equivalent for image generation models)? Except for whatever thermal noise is being added intentionally (which should be small) and active efforts to the contrary (which is, I think, dominating what we're seeing), the model isn't wrong to assume that "draw a person" merits a response that looks like a modal person.
Expecting "[minority fraction] of the outputs should look like [minority]" is maybe not completely crazy, but doesn't seem to align with the math as far as I'm aware. Nor is it even necessarily well-defined: which population? Should "draw an NBA player" match the NBA's demographics? Should it draw all players equally likely, or weight towards popular ones? Do we just mean current players? These are questions that have mostly been sidestepped for representation in political arenas --- affirmative action never has been asked to specify specific percentage targets, nor do I think it could do so without controversy. But for large scale computer-automated systems, it's not hard to start running cross tabs for things and finding imbalance everywhere. Not even sure myself what to do about all of that.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
I think Australia has been successful without actively sinking boats, and the US' former "wet foot dry foot" policy seemed a IMO decent way to balance the incentives.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
Is it just me, or has the vibe of "nonprofit" shifted in the last couple years? A decade back, "I work with a nonprofit" was generally seen as a positive contribution, but it seems today there is a lot more cynicism about how those nonprofits compensate their management (sometimes heavily), and whether their mission is even good (no, the world doesn't need even more puppies).
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
I think one of the biggest things the president does there is act as a bellwether (and sometimes steerer) of the zeitgeist. I don't think Carter's malaise speech was wrong ("a crisis of confidence" reads accurate describing the present), but the economy's direction ultimately depends a lot on individual decisions like "should I open my own shop?" which are heavily weighed in by emotional factors. There is an element of self-fulfilling prophecy that I think really needs maybe-irrational confidence at the helm. IMO Carter's mistake was thinking you can just tell people to be confident.
But the policy decisions clearly do have some weight too.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
The DC police statistics do show a drop, but the chart isn't IMO clear that it was a specific inflection point. Plus I have trouble believing that the last month or two have all their paperwork completed and won't change later. But down almost 50% in the past 12 months versus the previous 12 months is good. But 2024 was massively down from 2023 too.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
or are they seeing the charts with stunning drops in carjacking and murder rates?
I haven't seen these charts. Do you have a link?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
If I wanted to steel-man the administration's choices, it seems that the very public ICE actions are intended to broadcast a message of unwelcomeness to would-be illegal immigrants. Uncontrolled traffic at the border is down, I think, in a large part due to changing perceptions here, and while many of the individual actions seem cruel, it's demonstrably effective at piercing perceptual bubbles ("Uncle Joe will let us in") more than having the VP say "do not come."
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
Bush didn’t move the needle much for conservative Christians during his terms:
Overall, I think this statement is accurate. There was pretty substantive debate over a few cases that come to mind, though: embryonic stem cell research and right-to-die in the Schaivo case. The former was banned, and seems to have been mostly routed around in research since, and doesn't seem likely to have been majorly impactful long-term (do they still ask about cord blood during pregnancy?). The latter seems to have been sliding towards acceptance (more so for "removing a feeding tube" than for active euthanasia), but could still flare up, I think.
I think those are interesting cases partially because the culture war has moved on and show we aren't strictly doomed to be at each other's throats forever.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
I still expect someone to field a miniature CIWS that can be mounted to anything larger than a pickup. Some combination of passive IR search and short-range phased array radar could probably counter the drone tactics I've seen so far. You wouldn't need a round larger than 22LR to take down the drones I've seen, as long as a computer is aiming it and you get enough rounds downrange.
People in 1st world countries really don't want to go to work mass-manufacturing explosives.
Is it this, or that there hasn't been much demand for capital production of mass munitions in decades? The last war that used them in bulk was what, Vietnam? Every Western war since has been dominated my high-complexity munitions that often seem designed to separate the explosives from the fiddly bits. You can presumably build JDAM kits on any electronic assembly line.
I don't know much about the explosives side of things, but my understanding of history is that the shells are made in one process that isn't special, and then filled. There are some dangerous parts there, but I suspect it's similar to videos I've watched of amateurs making high power solid rocket motors: you want to be smart about safety and choose a remote site, but it isn't necessarily messy or dangerous if you're smart about it --- but those guys aren't worried about enemy action. Also the chemistry is presumably a bit different.
ETA: The HPR and explosive folks presumably both have similar linear-ish scaling concerns: if you want 10x production, you really don't just want to buy a 10x bigger mixer. Past a fairly small scale, it means duplicating lots of equipment and space because you want to bound the size of the boom if something goes wrong.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
11d ago
It was ATF, not the FBI, but the attempts to entrap Randy Weaver demonstrably were part of the radicalization of McVeigh, although Waco was probably a larger factor and as far as I'm aware wasn't "entrapment" per se.
I think that's strong evidence that the body count is probably positive, but it's always hard to consider counterfactuals --- maybe some would have radicalized anyway.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
11d ago
ADHD is real, in the sense that it is a useful term for a problem that exists in a spectra.
Aren't the stimulants used to treat it at least moderately effective in non-diagnosed individuals at improving concentration and attentiveness? I have at least heard anecdotes of college kids using those off-label for performance reasons (studying). I assume the accomodations (extra time on tests) are moderately too.
Do you have any thoughts on where we draw the moral line for "you get to use these, you over here don't"? To use an analogy, if we had drugs that made kids grow taller, I don't see a problem with at least making them available to, say, ones predicted to end up under 5 feet, but there would be a huge moral hazard of 6'5" kids whose parents claim they're still "short" because they really want them to play in the NBA. I don't have an answer here, either.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
12d ago
Punching someone when they're standing on a concrete footpath presents a vastly higher risk of death than punching someone when they're standing in a field or on a dirt track.
Only mostly in jest: "The ADA and its consequences..." (the ADA has driven a lot of paving of previously-dirt walking paths).
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
13d ago
IMO it'd be nicer to just agree not to hit each other at all rather than arguing over how much is too much.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
13d ago
Doesn't this describe a fair amount of "gang violence"? We generally (for worse, IMO) look the other way about that, through some combination of what you described and ignoring it for political reasons, be it "we don't care about [redacted]" or "it'd have a disparate impact to prosecute those crimes".
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
13d ago
This why I have a protocol when encountering an 'IRL' problem: de-escalate and remove-oneself from the situation. This will usually keep you safe.
I think this is true at the individual scale, but, for various reasons, in aggregate results in substantive loss of territory that seems worth noting. This can take the form of "When we had a kid, we moved out of San Francisco because the streets didn't feel safe for a toddler" to "Nobody goes to the park anymore because gangs aggressively harass anyone else trying to use it". Sure, de-escalation is a good idea, but rolling over at every perceived threat cedes the commons to wannabe tyrants: people should be able to go to the park, or walk down the street with their kids.
That said, it'd be better if that level of enforcement of the social contract weren't left to the whims of private parties. That is notionally part of why we employ police.
There is probably an interesting observation here somewhere on the difference in social contracts between Tokyo (or Paris, Berlin, or London circa 2005, maybe?) and San Francisco or Portland.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
13d ago
Doesn't Bitcoin suffer from the same sort of limits here that other decentralized protocols do, though? I'm not particularly aware of the link layer details, but mining requires a relatively consistent link (not high bandwidth, but minimal latency) to discover blocks mined by others. And issuing a transaction requires getting that data to enough of the miners to get it into a block. Offhand I'm not sure if both of these operations are generally "decentralized" today like DHT torrent links, and how robust those are --- it's been a while since I looked, but I think "absolutely distributed" is still an open research topic.
I will concede that's probably hard to block absolutely, but a sufficiently advanced adversary could at least make using it more painful.
What fraction of federal employees keep months of savings around? I know a few that do, but I suspect that a non-trivial fraction, like a lot of Americans, live close enough to paycheck-to-paycheck that a few months is asking a lot.
But I'm sure at least some basically got a free month of unplanned vacation.
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