VoxelVexillologist

VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 5d ago

In Germany, the BSI is a federal agency tasked with enhancing computer security (except for when they are tasked with breaking computer security).

This sounds like the role NIST plays in the US. But those are also contractually enforced on companies doing business with the government.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 5d ago

To some extent we do live in that world already: your $10 electronic device from Walmart probably already has a click wrap license that you have to accept to use the product. The validity of those is perhaps subject to question, but they aren't, to my knowledge in the US, categorically invalid.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 5d ago

Does that law not equally apply to Protestants? I haven't needed it, but I seem to recall hearing that it did in my jurisdiction a while back.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 5d ago

concerning rise of Anti-Catholic sentiment in The United States

I see where you're coming from, but the history of anti-Catholic animus in the United States isn't short: you could point to reactions to Irish and Italian immigration, or more recently Hispanics. The Klan was, among many other things, anti-Catholic. Things like arson of churches (some Catholic) isn't unheard of even today.

And I say this as not-a-Catholic. On the other hand, we largely seem to have overcome this bias, and few seem worried about Biden's allegiance to the Papacy. This is probably for the better, and IMO a good model of what real integration looks like: I haven't seen any third generation Irish immigrants try to claim victimhood on the basis of Catholicism, which is probably better for society as a whole.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 5d ago

Why is it in bad taste for men to rate women's attractiveness?

It has been my experience that if you show (straight) men a group of women (across anything from a IRL social situation to just a set of headshots), they can pretty reliably sort them quickly by their own metrics of attractiveness. The rankings probably won't be identical, and they could change with interaction, but I bet at any given point most men, even those not looking for partners, are at least aware of who they find the most attractive woman in any given room.

But it's also generally verboten to discuss the rankings themselves in mixed contexts, and even most of the time in male spaces. But I have occasionally been party to discussion of rankings of celebrities. I would be curious of (straight) women think similarly, but I have no real information to go on.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 9d ago

Lab-grown meat has made it surprisingly far given how many people hate it for different reasons

Notably, several countries in Europe (searching tells me France, Italy, and Austria, among others) are also looking to ban lab-grown meat, although their reasoning looks a lot more like the controlled-origin laws from what I can tell. IMO there's something to the "this is how we've always made it" that may merit protection, although I'm personally more ambivalent on the subject. Or the various labeling disputes for the current generation meat substitutes, which I think probably merit clear labeling.

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Wellness Wednesday for May 1, 2024

VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 9d ago

How do I capitalize on the fact that the social fabric is fraying at breakneck speed?

I think this is more complicated than that in terms of market strategy. If anything, my feel for the zeitgeist is that this statement is true, but also that the median (Western) human is becoming acutely aware of this fact and it's starting to change behaviors. More than a few friends, even tech oriented ones, have done things like moving to tight-knit rural communities and taking up growing vegetables and raising chickens.

I don't have huge confidence in this, but I think there may be a groundswell of interest in deliberately investing in social fabric. This could conceivably go badly for tech companies: something like "social media is like alcohol: okay in small amounts, but everybody looks down on that guy that drinks beer for breakfast. Abstaining isn't frowned upon." Although I would be interested in something like Facebook was in 2010 that was primarily focused on actual social connections and not "influencers" or anonymous-ish groups.

There may be some business opportunities for explicitly creating Third Spaces, but what shape new ones would have is much less clear. Most of the general examples of those (gyms, coffee shops, bars) aren't in short supply, but also don't feel like they really are establishing communities anymore (or maybe large chains can't do local culture).

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 9d ago

It's funny to me how both sides of the battle of the sexes will endorse the Mike Pence rule, while also mocking the other side for adopting it.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 9d ago

Does it specify which species of bear? Black bears are common in the lower 48, and I've run into them before: I've even heard of people aggressively chasing them off. Not cuddly, but some of them aren't that much bigger than a large adult human. Grizzly and polar bears are much larger and dangerous.

I think the distributions of danger here are relevant: a 99th percentile dangerous human might well be much more dangerous than the equivalent black bear, even if the median black bear doesn't even get seen because it avoids humans. The median human is, I would guess, a net help in a survival situation, or at least tries to do so. In my experience, people evaluate risks like that very differently.

Somewhere in here is a decent joke about cougars in the woods: mountain lions are quite dangerous if they decide to kill you, but so are divorces.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 11d ago

Every single information and/or discussion channel/forum is getting shittier and shittier. I posit that in addition to algorithms maximizing engagement or minimizing whatever, it's also the userbase.

The true old timers will tell you that they wish September '93 would end.

Not that I disagree, but the observation is hardly new, and yet we're nominally still here. I sometimes wonder if it's bias in the observation, but maybe there are objective measurements somewhere.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 11d ago

Abortion was made a constitutional right by first finding a roght to privacy, and then discovering abortion being made illegal violates this right (but only in the first trimester).

It's worth noting that doctor-patient privacy somehow also only extended to abortion, and not, say, to Kevorkian or medical marijuana.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 17d ago

Ah. I would personally agree they're at least different enough to warrant a separate discussion. I was just surprised (and wrong) that a sitting justice today would use that as a hypothetical. Makes more sense now.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 17d ago

Even one day in prison would be a cruel and unusual punishment for the "crime" of having a common cold.

Who made this argument? I'm not generally of a "it's just like the common cold" take on the pandemic, but I'm assuming a SCOTUS justice would at least see the parallel hypothetical about house arrest for (potentially) having a contagious disease. If nothing else, it seems like an interesting set of tea leaves to read about how future cases might go.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 17d ago

There is a long history of fighting with questionably-motivated conscripts. I'm not convinced individual interest really matters: they seem to either get thrown to the worst fighting on the front, or to quiet rear defensive positions. On the other hand, as far as I'm aware, Vichy French and Norwegian troops didn't see much combat action on behalf of the Axis during WWII.

I think you're right that after two years of brutal fighting, there is too much animosity for that to work today, but early in the current invasion Russia was fielding all the troops they could conscript from separatist regions, so it's not completely out of the question, I think.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 17d ago

These statements aren't strictly contradictory, although both are probably stronger claims than I would make. One lesson I've only recently begun to understand about WWII is that, at the scale of warfare required, seizing territory and, by extension, it's populace, gives fodder for larger armies.

This doesn't come up for discussion of American (or even Commonwealth, really) involvement in the war because the Western Allies weren't conscripting from recently-annexed territory, but the German army was much larger for having conscripted Czech and Austrian soldiers. It's not inconceivable that the same units currently armed by the West could be, after a surrender, rearmed by the Russians and marched west.

The only reason I don't find that situation hugely likely is that I'm pretty sure that most anyone can see that, in the case of a true hot war in Europe that NATO was involved in, the result would be a pretty decisive curb stomping on the scale of Desert Storm. Which is, to my mind, a huge argument for maintaining that technical and armament superiority, and also for Europe to step up their commitment to those alliances.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 18d ago

This is a good point, and I don't really have an answer to the question. Most (but not all) common carrier laws I can think of only require that utilities accept all comers -- AT&T can't deny phone lines to sex ships -- but some also go so far as to define specific performances like service areas -- AT&T doesn't run wire to my house specifically.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 18d ago

It definitely annoys me that "access to the financial system writ large" has become so utterly critical to doing anything useful that it immediately has a totalizing effect on what anybody can do, anywhere in the world, even on the internet.

You're not wrong: despite general libertarian sympathies, I do think there is a role for utility-type regulation in a number of new critical roles that didn't exist a few decades ago. Credit cards and cashless payments are certainly one.

I'd toss out email and online identity infrastructure as another that doesn't get much press: I've come to realize that my dependence on my Gmail account (which I've had since it was an invite-only beta) would be almost impossible to replace. Maybe with a lot of work I could replace it with one provided through Microsoft, but that wouldn't really fix the problem. Practically hosting your own email is basically impossible, from what I can tell, due to spam blocking mechanisms. Given Google's propensity to sunset things (or really, the level of risk of corporate spontaneous failure), I think it'd be a pretty serious crisis if their email and identity servers went down for a day. Or worse, permanently.

I'd point to the common carrier rules for other utilities as a reasonable example of what could be done. I think expanding those to include things like credit card payments and email would be possible. However, those have their own concerns with fraud and such that might prevent applying the existing rules as-is.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 19d ago

but Biden needs the progressive left to win this election

Unironically, I don't think this was true two years ago. If he'd have played Bill Clinton's playbook from the 90s and governed as center-left, I think he could have a high enough approval rating that we wouldn't be taking a rematch of the 2020 election seriously. But it seems, to me at least, that the current administration doesn't want to moderate its positions to appeal to the median voter: I'm hard pressed to think of many cases where it's been willing to push back against progressive partisans.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 22d ago

Only boring people are bored.

I was talking with [a child] the other week, who was complaining about boredom (in the absence of screen time) and observed that I remember being bored when I was a kid, but as part of growing up, I'm never bored as an adult. There is always something (many things, actually) I should be doing, and never enough hours in my day. And I even have to take care to use my hours wisely: not all interesting things have equal long-term value: I've largely retreated from video games except in a social capacity with IRL friends far away, instead working on improving myself (exercise, learning languages, art, hobby skills, reading), and valuing getting things done that provide long-term benefits.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 22d ago

From what I can tell, early computer operators were not infrequently people (many women) who had previously worked as human computers. The story of Dorothy Vaughan of Hidden Figures fame comes to mind.

But I also suspect that the tasks these operators were doing differed quite a bit from the very abstract notion of what a computer is today. It makes sense to hire the folks that were previously manually crunching, say, your numeric integrals for artillery shell trajectories to operate a machine that does the same, because they already specialize in breaking that problem down into discrete operations that can be done by hand. That seems qualitatively different from writing an operating system or building a web app, partly because the digital computer was still seen by most as a machine that replaced the human computers.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 22d ago

but how much does seniority matter in the SC?

Formally, I believe the task of writing the decisions is given out by the chief justice (if in the majority) or the most senior justice. I've seen some suggest that Roberts keeps some of the potentially-spicier cases for himself and writes more moderately than, say, Alito would. There are also fairly often cases where a new justice has to recuse themselves because they either previously judged the case on a lower court, or sometimes argued for one side. Neither of those is a particularly large concern, I would think. Their opinions are, to my knowledge, formally given equal weight otherwise.

I don't know about informally, where I suspect it matters for at least some time for a new justice.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 24d ago

Possibly. I think you might be able to track net cash outflows, rather than purchases directly, to cover most of it, but that admittedly only works for people that use banks and would have trouble with people who get paid and pay in primarily cash. But the existing income tax system has those problems too.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 24d ago

And then gets hits by sales taxes anyway when he spends his money in the future.

I have occasionally mused that a truly-progressive sales tax could be interesting: tax total expenditures up to, say, the median cost of living at one rate, and marginal expenditures above at a higher rate. This would probably need some allowance for amortization on bigger purchases. The idea being to tax the wealth when it's spent, and intentionally incentivising capital investments rather than conspicuous expenditures.

But it's a very wonkish policy proposal that would be hard to sell to the broader public, I think. And probably has quite a few details that would need ironing out.

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VoxelVexillologist Multidimensional Radical Centrist 24d ago

The volume and scale of ammunition required to keep the guns firing with an overmatch to make very slow gains over relatively basic trench systems created a tension of how much is needed versus how vulnerable you are moving that much ammo forward.

I think this statement also vindicates decades and billions of dollars of American research and deployment of precision guided weapons: the logistical tail is greatly reduced when you can just, not fire the huge fraction of dumb rounds that would miss anyway.

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