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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3hr ago
Hm. After reviewing the situation, I have to withdraw my implication that the Baltics have gotten particularly more bold since the start of the conflict; I was assuming that the recent Ukrainian drone attacks on St Petersburg used their airspace for transit with their explicit approval, but apparently they themselves still dispute it (and the "EW misdirecting drones there from Russia" story seems no less plausible). There's a steady drumbeat of rather more belligerent rhetoric than the European average and attempts to up the tensions around Kaliningrad from them, but I guess this has been constant since the beginning of the conflict. Sorry.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3hr ago
You are conflating different levels of city functioning here. You need a far greater level of destruction to get a city in "fortress mode" that is being defended by a military garrison which is being supplied from the outside, than you need to degrade a city in functioning civilian economy mode to the point where its ability to operate military production facilities is significantly degraded. Severodonetsk, Avdiivka etc. were examples of the former: I doubt that, while they were under siege, a significant number of drones, military uniforms or even food ration packs were assembled in either of them. Instead, those workshops are in cities like Kiev, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk and Vinnitsa, where I gather civilians still can go to the supermarket to buy groceries, go to a 9-5 job in a factory (producing drones, or producing something that will be used by someone else producing drones), and stop by a restaurant for dinner after. However, would the frontline cities you listed held out for so long if the backline cities had stopped supplying them, or even if the volume of supplies had to be cut by half? This seems doubtful to me.
How much bombing does it take to significantly degrade, say, Dnepropetrovsk's civilian economy relative to its current state? I doubt it is actually all that much. We hear reports of facilities in the city being hit all the time, but usually it is repeat hits on hardened Soviet-era factories like Yuzhmash, which evidently don't have a lot of long-lasting effects (and anyhow Yuzhmash's output at this point may not be as important as that of some random drone workshop in a basement somewhere). What if everything being directed at them were instead sent to randomly chosen coordinates in the city's residential areas? Surely this would result in normal civilian life in the city becoming much more dangerous, regular businesses shutting down, and people leaving, making life harder for those who stay behind, and accordingly reducing productivity. Even having to go from "get it from the corner electronics shop" to "put in an order with the military" if your drone assembly shop is missing some widget would entail significant loss of time.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10hr ago
· Edited 10hr ago
On the other hand, WWII "terror bombing" is generally accepted to have been useful. I don't get the impression that Iran actually has been anything near "terror bombed"; Gaza for sure and Lebanon maybe, but I'm not convinced those could be compared to a hypothetical similar bombing of Ukraine because the baseline living standard in Ukraine is much higher and both surrender to Russia and emigration to Europe would be a significant carrot that is simply not available to Middle Easterners, whose neighbours can't be assed to help them and whose conquerors want to exterminate them.
Even then, I didn't mean to suggest that the optimal strategy involves terror bombing followed by a complete occupation; instead, what they could realistically hope for is terror bombing enabling occupation of some more adjacent parts (Kharkov, Zaporozhye, Sumy and the rest of Donbass are probably an upper bound on what they could achieve with a conventional terror bombing campaign against the whole country + final push without significant conscription) and the rest being so weakened and ruined that it will not be a net threat to them even if they can not extract any negotiated conditions. (EU and NATO could then repair and rearm what is left of Ukraine, but if that much population and resources are gone then doing so might wind up costing so much that it would actually weaken the bloc.)
Then there is the pour encourager les autres element: at this point there is a distinct sense that the Baltics are actively flirting with the idea of baiting the Russians into attacking them, because they figure that fighting against Russia does not actually look so bad away from the frontline and if they can secure NATO or EU support early on the frontline doesn't have to be on their territory (and Estonia's feelings about Narva getting the Vovchansk treatment probably amount to "don't threaten me with a good time" anyway). Building a reputation for indiscriminate/vindictive bombing would probably dampen that enthusiasm.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
Well, just to be clear, the primary example I was thinking of were various minorities that beat the curve in terms of criminal proclivities. Surely there is no shortage of Blue NGOs that would be happy to make an example out of the occasional randomly selected police for giving traffic ticket to a black person. Is disincentivising that a mission you want to see accomplished too?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
That's easy to say in a case like this, but would abolishing qualified immunity in the US not just result in unlimited lawfare against any government officials enforcing anything with a political dimension, which would presumably lead to said government officials becoming reluctant to do so? Expect impunity for [whatever group pisses you off the most] first, and subsequent further incineration of the commons.
Really, my sense often is that the US would stand to benefit from having its entire legal system burnt down and rebuilt from scratch. So many of your problems, including healthcare costs and inability to build infrastructure, ultimately can be traced back to the possibility of being dragged to court and having to spend the GDP of a minor country on lawyers (because if you don't and the other side does then you lose and are on the hook anyway).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
I feel like you are borderline nutpicking the "pro-Russian" side here, but then the nuts may be disproportionately visible because for the more realistic people on it there is nothing to be excited about. Therefore, let me just put down a prediction of "once again, nothing much will happen" for the upcoming quarter here. Maybe the Russians will finally grind their way through the rest of the ruins of Konstantinovka or Kupyansk (though the 90% confidence interval for that is more like 1 year from now), and maybe the Ukrainians will start yet another "successful" counteroffensive that will gain some 200-400km² to then be slowly rolled back over the course of the next 1-2 years at a great cost in life and treasure to Russia, Ukraine and the European taxpayer.
It is more likely that there will be some additional unpublicised backdoor decisions that will influence the longer-term trajectory of the war, such as the addition of further "gentlemen's agreements" about what sort of facilities may not be targeted by long-range bombings. From a purely military standpoint, I expect these to be detrimental to Russia (because from a purely military standpoint, I think the winning play for Russia more and more obviously amounts to escalation, now that NATO and Europe is further strained by Iran - blow up NPPs and make sure that any city in Ukraine that still can support a civilian drone workshop becomes uninhabitable for civilians, send your own leadership to the bunkers, and absorb the retaliation in kind with your superior bulk), but I do not have anything resembling a complete picture of how thin a thread the Russian economy and internal control system is hanging by, and if any greater mobilisation or damage to their own civilian infrastructure would actually result in them collapsing (in which case they maybe have no better option than to sit and wait out their gradual decline and hope for some deus ex machina).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
I don't know, these reports seemed suspicious to me. How would the Russians have gotten their hands on a sufficient number of those terminals that it would have made a difference to their operations? Throughout the war, we kept hearing that Ukraine had been holding off the numerically superior Russians thanks to their ingenuous quick iteration on top of the superior Western startup technology that is Starlink, and then suddenly, in one package, the story changes to "but actually, the Russians had Starlink too, but now they don't have it anymore, and so Ukraine will win for sure"; meanwhile, in reality, after a small jitter in favour of Ukraine that this story was timed to coincide with, we are already back to the same neverending stalemate we had before. The one OSINT-visible thing Ukrainians were doing that was definitively dependent on Starlink (drone boats operating in open water with real time remote control) was seemingly never replicated by Russia, even though other than Starlink no particularly unusual tech goes into it.
In the end, the more likely explanation to me is that the "Russia in shambles because Starlink was cut off" story was a successful plant from Elon's PR department, which was picked up by the usual pro-Ukraine social media channels to build hype for the random swing of momentum in their favour at the time.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
The thing with pretense is that humans are generally terrible liars, who can't credibly pretend to anything without gradually coming to actually believe it to some degree. The people pretending to care about fairness can be casually motivated by the most brazen self-interest, but the result of all the pretending tends to be that if you then take a sufficiently powerful psychological steamroller (argumentation, rhetoric, propaganda, ritual, fancy buildings with statues of blindfolded matrons) to persuade them that forfeiting their self-interest would be fair, they by and large give up.
This is why justice and organised society works at all. Without this mechanism you just get something that looks like Somalia, and even in Somalia I gather that the tribal courts actually talk people into a lot of self-destructive ingroup altruism.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
Citation needed, for such a bold sweeping claim. I have taught CS at a fairly high-tier US school for a long enough period of time, and we did not hand out As if you just "turn up". The curve was more generous than I would have liked, sure, and there were a lot of loopholes and "accommodations" and second chances; a lot of those also turned out to primarily benefit those who lacked consistency and conscientiousness, as at a "more hardcore" university you would not have gotten the allowance to strike out your lowest homework grade or have a TA dispatched to invigilate your stinky two weeks unshowered self in a separate room taking the exam two hours later than everyone else because you overslept.
You can maybe make the "feminisation" claim about school (K-12, for Americans), but even there the story seems complicated: at first glance not being smacked with a ruler if you fail to sit upright with your back straight or have crooked handwriting anymore surely makes less of a difference for the conscientious and obedient girls. I'm more on board with the "boys used to be able to engage in fistfights during recess without having the cops called, which helped them sit still later" explanation.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
That is sort of true, I think, but as long as the grounding provided by elections persists, this seems like a natural damper on any spinning out of control. Wild defections tend to be bad for the handful of things that the mercenary voters do care about, except perhaps the hype/vibes dimension; and even there, the jury is still out on whether Trump (as a candidate whose hype value was entirely built on promising to press defect) was just an outlier in this regard. (Biden surely was the least "own the cons" candidate of the last three fielded by the Dems, and he alone managed to eke out a win against Trump.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
Does this "people on both sides" framing that we see time and time again actually predict politics accurately? The internet, and really any sort of mass media, likes centering people on "sides" whose political position really does amount to this sort of mutually recursive tribalism (do whatever is most Right/Left, which is whatever pisses off the Left/Right the most, which is whatever is least Left/Right, which is whatever pisses off the Right/Left the most...); but those people's votes and political allegiances are largely locked in and the only way in which they have agency at all is producing and responding to hype (in states of low hype they might become so apathetic that they themselves fail to turn out to vote; in states of high hype they produce an infectious mood that might assume some of the reality distortion field nature). Meanwhile, somehow the system keeps equilibrating in such a fashion that neither "side" has a majority and so elections are decided by a marginal set of people who stubbornly refuse to hate Republicans for being Republican, or Democrats for being Democrat, and in fact are so mercenary that it is hard to ascribe to them any principles at all other than "gas should be cheap, my investments should perform well and my candidate should be hype rather than a loser".
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
Regarding vaporwave, I think you are missing that it is not supposed to be nostalgia for the general 90s/00s but nostalgia for the computing of the era. This was when computing was still primarily by and for 50 year old suits working in drop-ceiling cubicles at IBM or some insurance company, plus their occasional tone-deaf attempts at reaching out to wider markets. Ads for Bryce, Lotus 1-2-3 and "I'm a PC", not Budweiser. Visions of the future for stodgy professional adults already half buried with the past. Smooth jazz and elevator music is a lot closer to the soundscape of those types of lives than, I don't know, Kylie Minogue.
Movies... my experience of that era was in Germany, but older movies were definitely a separate category that was widely enjoyed and discussed, in part due to the nature of cable TV. When one of the major channels ran an old James Bond, this was an event (sometimes even announced by an ad campaign in public transport or the like), and half the kids in my class could be expected to have watched it with their parents or at least taped it on VCR to watch later.
I largely missed the MC era (though I once took a carpool ride with two chain-smoking punk students who played their techno mixtape for the whole 5 hours), but people definitely shared burned CDs and later preloaded MP3 players with those they were trying to hit on?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
This preference for following ideas through to their conclusion was often speculated to be what leads in the perception of an abnormally high number of engineers and scientists in ISIS. (I should say I never quite bought it; "Arab society does not have the Western correlation between education and secularism, and Westerners are surprised to see that expectation subverted" seemed truthy and sufficient to explain the observations)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8d ago
As recently as Obama, Democratic presidents also made a show of their Christian beliefs and church attendance, and even in the '90s 90% of US adults self-identified as Christian. Do you think the "left in the US" popped into existence ex nihilo after that, freshly importing the belief system of the Soviet Union and throwing away everything that the >=40% who must have voted for them while considering themselves Christian believed in? There is such a thing as intellectual lineage, including from systems that someone now disagrees with. For centuries, Christians and Jews had nothing but occasionally murderous disdain for each other, but Christianity at no point denied straight up copying half of its holy book from the Jews, either. For a more spicy example, many a red-blooded American right-winger is quick to point out how the Nazis were more formally a National Socialist German Workers' Party, but there is little denying that they defined themselves (at least in part) through their opposition to communism!
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9d ago
I would like to think I know both well enough to distinguish between them.
Support for both Racial-identity politics and racial discrimination are pretty much an exclusively left-wing/Democrat phenomenon in the US.
Not that I strictly agree, but I am not aware of making any claim that contradicts this, unless you think that Christianity in the US is definitionally not left-wing (which I think would be false, and the East Coast universalist-leaning denominations are my specific counterexample).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9d ago
There are more ideological inputs that went into the modern American left than just Marxism/"tankie" European communism. The universalist egalitarian HBD denial seems to be East Coast Christianity (embodied by the likes of Quakers); there is a current of native anti-intellectualism that I can't pinpoint the source of (remember how the country had to be dragged kicking and screaming into harder universal schooling by the Sputnik crisis); and "you can be anything you want!" denial of differences in individual talent is perhaps just mass-produced Hollywood fantasy.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9d ago
I don't know, I doubt we will be getting solid scientific evidence on how easy it is to get a big dog without special training to mount an unwilling human who has been tied up in "receptive" position anytime soon, but per the Abu Ghraib example + other better-evidenced Israeli misconduct I certainly would not dismiss this on "these soldiers would not do such a thing" grounds.
Of course, there's no reason it couldn't be made up, either; but then if you think the NYT would make this up or eat it up from a source without properly verifying it by whatever means they have available, I would like you to apply the same degree of skepticism to press-reported atrocities even when you agree with the direction (for many here, I guess that would be Russians in Ukraine e.g. the Bucha story?).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10d ago
· Edited 10d ago
More generally, is Polymarket still a reliable indicator of anything at this point? Between direct observations/experiences and a number of high-profile stories about insiders manipulating data sources like ISW, I get the sense that you have to put a nontrivial probability that any market outcome will be determined by shenanigans (of the "the person controlling the obscure WHO website deep link that will be used for resolving is betting too, and nobody will punish him for changing it for 10 minutes" type, or the "a small group of power users knows that on Polymarket 'pandemic' is taken to mean any disease discussed by Andrew Fauci on TV while wearing a pink tie" type) rather than anything resembling a plain interpretation of its subject.
Accordingly, 13% on pandemic could easily be dominated by a signal like "small group of users in the know sees that an account representing resolution manipulators is betting yes, and betting according to their expectation that the market will be successfully manipulated to yes".
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10d ago
I read OP as "conditional on believing in {the Christian God, hell, eternal souls, etc}, you should believe in non-eternal hell", not as "you should believe in {...}". That makes it not particularly inflammatory nor partisan (unless we have a large contingent of ardent infernalists around), and given that this is hardly well-trodden ground for the forum I don't think it's obviously below evidential standards for the topic. You might make a charge of irrelevance, but I think we have a lot of Christians or Christianity-curious people here, and for the rest of us it's an interesting enough view into a strange mindset.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
12d ago
· Edited 12d ago
Of course it would look that way, because people who are "on the receiving end of these tactics" and don't mind it will not complain about it, and it is seemingly by design a type of "tactics" that is not apparent if nobody complains.
I guess you could counter that you would expect at least some scenarios where a "bad-faith" arguer argues against multiple people, one of them complains, and another says he is actually ok with it. There is a less universalist/more provocative explanation I could have reached for right away: the accusation is only ever levelled by our right-wing majority against presumed left-wing posters, and the right-wing majority broadly agrees that uppity left-wingers should not be welcome. There are right-wing posts that would seem to meet the same criteria of "bad faith" being applied here (switching allegiance between seemingly incompatible authorities, such as TERFs/Christians/old-school atheists, based on fit for a particular argument + an apparent expectation that the poster will look down on anyone who disagrees); it's just that nobody complains about them, so it never registers.
Maybe you think it makes a big difference that the left-wing "agitator" expects to see the people he will look down on in the responses, while the right-wing "agitator" expects responses of agreement and camaraderie and will only look down on abstract people far away and maybe one or two black sheep commenters. Making a criterion that essentially says the same sort of thing is only bad if people here disagree is a way to circlejerk reinforcement, though.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
12d ago
· Edited 12d ago
How do you define "bad faith"? If it's merely "doesn't truly believe the point he/she is arguing", then I think the term is loaded and the case that it's a bad thing has not been made, because trying to make the most convincing argument for something you don't actually believe is an interesting exercise, both for the person making the argument and for any bystanders. If it is more about the "bad-faith" arguer experiencing personal disdain for their interlocutors in the process of the exchange, I think it would capture a lot more posters here than just those who try on different positions for sport.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
12d ago
I immediately thought of this old video. Back in the days I liked to try and pronounce "academia" to match the sketch's diction for "macadamia".
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
13d ago
If that's what he's doing, what's the problem? If anything I think it has been to the detriment of this place that arguments have come to be dominated by true believers of some cause, whose local feeling of success, identity and tribal interests are all tied up in "winning the argument" and not ceding any ground.
Do command and conquer games model a civilian economy...? I thought they were a classical RTS, where you just have military production buildings and maybe resource extraction and upgrade research. Even if that were the case, "it's like this in a game" is not an argument that something is not the case in real life. You have to actually articulate what you believe is different. I gave concrete examples of ways in which I believe an indiscriminate bombing campaign would lower military productivity; do you have an argument against that that is not just waving your hands about adaptation and heroism? If not having public transport and shops actually had no adverse impact on military production, why does Ukraine not shut down its public transport and shops and have the people run them produce more drones instead?
You readily, even enthusiastically concede that Russia is being incompetent. Do you think that this incompetence does not extend to their choice of targets and risk assessment, so individual decisions like e.g. throwing a dud Oreshnik at Yuzhmash instead of aiming it at the Khmelnytskyi NPP or downtown Dnipro was a competent decision? In fact, can you state your theory of why they have been bombing conventional power plants but leaving nuclear ones alone? It seems to me that you would have to go through extreme argumentative contortions to fit it with this "whatever targets Russia hasn't hit would make no difference or they are incapable of hitting them" narrative.
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