MotteAnon12345
No bio...
User ID: 1551
MotteAnon12345
8d ago
Honestly, I haven't been keeping track. Judging from Trump's first presidency, he's big on talk and short on action so I just haven't bothered. Bureaucracies tend to be permanent barring jarring events so my prior is that nothing will be done.
MotteAnon12345
9d ago
No. They'll get their information from their insurers and from the legal departments at the hospitals where they're employed, and I guarantee you that the attorneys involved aren't basing their advice on Pro Publica articles.
Fair enough.
The court addressed this specifically in IV.A. Specifically, on page 22, they state:
The Center argues that such a standard means that doctors are susceptible to a battle of the experts when not every doctor might reach the same medical judgment in each case. We rejected such an interpretation in In re State. “Reasonable medical judgment,” we held, “does not mean that every doctor would reach the same conclusion.” Rather, in an enforcement action under the Human Life Protection Act, the burden is the State’s to prove that no reasonable physician would have concluded that the mother had a life-threatening physical condition that placed her at risk of death or of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion was performed.
(Footnotes elided.)
The opinion has more exposition on this (and I assume the case they refer to has even more). It does not seem to be as unreasonable a standard as you seem to imply.
MotteAnon12345
9d ago
Really? I could believe e.g. that some fundamentalist voters (a small minority) believe that the non-viable fetus is still a living creature and therefore deserves protection. I could also believe that Ken Paxton is an attack dog who will go after suffering mothers because it's in his political interest. But the median voter? If you brought a case of a late term miscarriage, would the median voter really insist doctors wait for weeks before offering medical care?
Admittedly, I don't have great evidence for my view. I haven't looked at voter surveys on this question for example (are there any?). I do have some evidence: the Tx legislature clarified the law in HB 3058. But what evidence do you have?
And if the median voter doesn't have such a hardline view, we're back to my original question. Why would the Texas Legislature impose such a blunt guideline instead of a more nuanced one?
MotteAnon12345
9d ago
Page three of the opinion:
A physician who tells a patient, “Your life is threatened by a complication that has arisen during your pregnancy, and you may die, or there is a serious risk you will suffer substantial physical impairment unless an abortion is performed,” and in the same breath states “but the law won’t allow me to provide an abortion in these circumstances” is simply wrong in that legal assessment.
Similar wording shows up repeatedly.
MotteAnon12345
9d ago
If NATO directly entered the war with large numbers of its own combat forces, it would defeat Russia's military and drive it out of Ukraine.
That was my assumption as well back in 2022. But then the Russia sanctions did nothing, Ukraine made some good advances and then got bogged down, and the West started running out of ammo. That last part is what got me. Because that's how the West won WWII against Germany (& Japan) and then the Cold War against Russia. We outproduced them until they couldn't afford it anymore.
Right now, the situation is reversed. It's Russia that enjoys a comfortable margin in artillery, tanks, and men. The West is giving Ukraine everything that isn't nailed down and it still isn't enough. Maybe the problem is a bloated inefficient military sector? Maybe the problem is political will? Maybe the problem is that we don't care enough about Ukraine? But those are all structural factors that are unlikely to change anytime soon. My current thinking is that the West can't challenge Russia in most of Europe and Russia can't challenge us in America proper. Africa is up for grabs and China will get the rest.
The Ukraine war has proven NATO to be a paper tiger.
MotteAnon12345
9d ago
Many (most?) major "infrastructural" financial institutions are based in NYC. These are often companies nobody has heard of but nevertheless end up handling most of dollars flowing through the world. Good examples would be DTC, BNY, and JPMC. These banks don't make that much money (except of course for JPMC) but they fulfill critical low level roles like clearing, asset custody (e.g. DTC nominally owns most financial assets in the US economy!), etc... If a court wants to impose their will on any actor in the USD centric financial system, they use these institutions to do it and NYC is the place to do it at.
Argentinian bonds are a good case study here: a NYC judge was able to keep Argentina from paying off any of its bond holders (and thereby choking its access to debt markets). Obviously, the judge had no jurisdiction over Argentina itself. But he did over the intermediaries needed to facilitate any dollar payments!
MotteAnon12345
12d ago
This is just wrong. The court opinion is very clear that loss of major bodily function would be a sufficient justification for an abortion (and the loss need not be imminent, just addressable by abortion).
MotteAnon12345
13d ago
That's the thing... It's really not! You take a giant vat of nuclear "stuff" and just let it do its thing! I oversimplify but only a little. Here is an example where Devanney compares coal and nuclear plants: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/what-is-nuclears-should-cost. The radiation levels from a typical plant release (including TMI and Fukushima) are so small that sheltering indoors for a few days and throwing away contaminated milk are enough to negate the vast majority of the radiation risk. The reason nuclear looks complicated is because we make it complicated by worrying about non-risks like Tritium leaks.
MotteAnon12345
13d ago
Oh. A knowledgeable person! A question for you then: what if the US Navy abandoned requirements for secrecy and just came up with a public spec for a warship? Maybe the military bits (cannons, AWACS, etc...) could be built by the usual MIC suspects but the ship itself would be built by a commercial shipyard presumably in South Korea or something. Could it achieve something like commercial shipping results? Do you think it would be worth it? Does the ship design really need to be secret if you can have ten times as many of them?
Thanks.
MotteAnon12345
13d ago
At least from reading the supreme court opinion, that is not the impression I got. Of course, most doctors won't read the opinion. Instead, they'll get their information from rags like ProPublica so you might well be right.
But... assuming that doctors do read the SCOTX opinion, the rule is that as long as any reasonable doctor agrees that an abortion complies with the restrictions of the law, the doctors are in the clear. That sounds like a pretty lax standard to me? As in, as long as the defendants are able to produce any medical authority in good standing that agrees with them, they're in the clear.
The specific situations in the lawsuit back this up. The women in the lawsuit were not in any danger of impairment/death (beyond the usual pregnancy risks). A late-term miscarriage carries some probability of infection and it's not even clear this is a high probability (thoughts from actual doctors?). It does seem like an unnecessary risk (and imposition) to the mother imo but that's where my comments on the heartbeat law come into play. The guidelines for doctors at least seem to be clear.
MotteAnon12345
13d ago
Me in my original comment:
Most of the articles were about as bad as the one described in the above comment.
Let's not waste time on things we already agree on.
MotteAnon12345
13d ago
Thanks! That's useful. However, that document does not address the situation that the plaintiffs (and I) brought up which is a non-viable fetus that is still alive (e.g. a spontaneous late-term miscarriage).
MotteAnon12345
14d ago
Following up on a past comment on abortion by @naraburns: https://www.themotte.org/comment/250966?context=3#context.
ProPublica really found a fertile topic with this one and my liberal friends (i.e. all of them, I live in a major city) keep bringing them up. Most of the articles were about as bad as the one described in the above comment but they did lead me to Zurawski v. State of Texas: https://www.txcourts.gov/media/1458610/230629.pdf.
As expected, the lawyers on both sides need to deal with a judge instead of newspaper readers so the arguments are considerably more reasonable. The court ruled in favor of the state but some of the suggested changes to the law sound pretty reasonable to me? The one big change was to the heartbeat law: there are occasionally pregnancies which are "clearly" terminal but the fetus' heart is still beating. The example brought up in the case was a late-term miscarriage. There doesn't seem to be much of a point to delaying abortion in that case. Any comments from the more medically inclined members of this forum on how common and obvious such situations are?
Aside: this felt like an argument against judicial independence to me. Extreme cases of fetal demise can be complicated (right?). Ideally, the legal regime around them would be flexible and account for the individual nuances of every case. How could this be implemented in practice? Easy: by appointing a reliable third party to examine individual cases and make a reasoned determination. I.e. a judge! And we do this all the time! So, why did the Texas state legislature feel the need to enshrine such a restrictive standard (no fetal heartbeat) into the law? Obviously "politics" but the politics needs to come from somewhere and the source here i think is activist judges. Because judicial independence is just a nice way of saying that judges are out-of-control and cannot be disciplined in practice (as the ninth circuit loves to remind us). The only means of control left are occasional reversals by superior courts (which themselves aren't under legislative control) and extremely precise laws. In a hypothetical tyranny, judges could be subject to fine-grained discipline and therefore trusted with far more responsibility.
MotteAnon12345
14d ago
This is DoA just like all other nuclear efforts in the US. The nuclear establishment is completely controlled by the feds (specifically the NRC and a tiny bit by the EPA as well). The incentives these agencies have are positively perverse. The NRC derives no benefit whatsoever from new nuclear power hitting the market. And of course, they're completely exposed (PR-wise at least) if there are problems with said plant. Rather, they are paid licensing fees during the approval process. I.e. the longer they drag out commissioning and constructing the plant, the more they get paid. And boy do they have the tools to do this! It starts with blatantly ridiculous radiation limits and goes all the way up to changing standards in the middle of construction and forcing completed assemblies to be ripped out and re-built. It's a miracle Vogtle cost only a few multiples of its initial budget.
Until the US removes idiotic regulation like LNT and abolishes/significantly reforms the NRC, I'm an infinite seller of nuclear power in this country.
A really quick intro to this problem: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction
A far more detailed look into the problems: https://gordianknotbook.com/
The author of the above book also has a good substack. This is a good place to start: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed-nuclear
And this one is just fun: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-ships
(Aside: I have an ongoing bet with my friends that not a single new nuclear plant is going to get built out of all the current hype about major tech companies pushing for nuclear, not even a SMR. You're welcome to join it in spirit.)
MotteAnon12345
14d ago
Ten years is more than enough warning to develop alternatives and just the crazy fast ramp-up of nat-gas plants shows that power generators are more flexible than people give them credit for.
MotteAnon12345
30d ago
Quick follow up to this (I'm a licensed pilot though I don't fly that frequently).
Class B is the really important one in the usual course of business (but all bets are off when TFRs come into play). Class C and D are pretty small and used for regional airports. If you accidentally fly through one, tower won't be happy but you won't get in serious trouble for it. And they're so small that accidentally flying through them is pretty hard anyway (the only real reason to enter them is to land at the airport in the center). And if you do want to fly through them, you just need tower to acknowledge your presence somehow. Easy.
Class B is special. It's used for the major international airports. The upper section measures sixty miles across (i.e. typically the entire city the airport is a part of). It has huge amounts of jumbo jets with hundreds of passengers each. And the government has absolutely no tolerance at all for any shenanigans in there. Students are mostly not allowed in without explicit permission from their instructor. Any plane entering needs explicit permission from ATC before entering and always has an assigned altitude and vector while there that they are not allowed to deviate from (barring genuine emergencies). And violating any of these rules has severe penalties.
MotteAnon12345
1mo ago
That's the contradiction at the heart of all liberalism. They want to be tolerant. But that requires discriminating against "the intolerant." They want everyone to be equal. But that requires unequal power to impose unequal treatment on the naturally unequal. And crits want to get rid of all cultural superiority but that requires themselves to hold cultural superiority.
MotteAnon12345
11mo ago
That is the fundamental problem with Democracy. People love to bring up the list you crazy/awful/incompetent dictators but The People can also be just as crazy/awful/incompetent and often are.
MotteAnon12345
1yr ago
To be clear, as part of MS's initial investment, they got access to all the source code and all the model weights. They aren't losing anything. See https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-microsofts-gain/.
MotteAnon12345
1yr ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification
Carthage-like destruction is a fairly accurate summary of what the Allies did to Germany after WWII.
MotteAnon12345
1yr ago
The rot runs deep.
Take a look at this paper. Here's the abstract:
It is incorrect to consider tidal power as renewable energy. Harnessing tidal energy will pose more severe problems than using fossil fuels. This study provides quantitative estimates to show how using tidal energy can destroy the environment in a short amount of time. Tides are induced by the rotation of the Earth with respect to the gravity of the Moon and Sun. The rotational energy of the Earth is naturally dissipated by tides slowly. Consuming tidal energy further reduces the rotational energy, accelerates the energy loss rate, and decelerates the rotation of the Earth. Based on the average pace of world energy consumption over the last 50 years, if we were to extract the rotational energy just to supply 1% of the world's energy consumption, the rotation of the Earth would lock to the Moon in about 1000 years. As a consequence, one side of the Earth would be exposed to the Sun for a much longer period of time than it is today. The temperature would rise extremely high on that side and drop extremely low on the other side. The environment would become intolerable, and most life on Earth could be wiped out.
Do read the paper. It's not long and it's a good test of one's bullshit detector1. For the impatient:
The paper's isn't that interesting once you spot the trick. But it does bring up two interesting thoughts:
- If the NYT picked up this story, do you think they'd have the nuance to highlight the shall we say questionable assumptions in this paper? Or would they just blare a giant headline stating "TIDAL POWER WILL KILL US ALL!" (Sub-heading: solar and wind the only way forward...)? Would they even link to the original paper? I think the world's complexity has surpassed the abilities of the average MSM reporter/editor/reader. Even if journalists are perfectly honest and impartial, they are too susceptible to manipulation to be trusted. Barring a drastic change in our media, the information content of the typical news article is now capped at zero.
- How far can we extrapolate from this example? This guy's apparently a professor at Stanford and apparently he's been teaching there for some time (the paper refers to a grad-level class in 1993). And it's... pretty easy to find garbage papers. Here's another one. For a broader perspective, consider the replication crisis, accounts like this one, and digging back to the ancient year of 2009, Climategate. This is why for example I think Global Warming/Climate Change/etc... is nonsense. That we have the tools to model the Earth's climate at all is (imo) an outlandish claim (it's a complex dynamical system the size of the planet with billions of poorly understood interactions!). That we can project this model forward a hundred years (with all of its many intrinsic dependencies on other complex systems like human civilization) is another outlandish claim. And that we should restructure all of society based on these projections is yet another outlandish claim (with a side-helping of massive conflicts of interests). And at the bottom of it all are people like our dear Dr. Jerry.
1 I suppose this is technically consensus building. If you think the paper's arguments are reasonable, I'd be happy to discuss that as well...
MotteAnon12345
1yr ago
Fair point. Thanks.
MotteAnon12345
1yr ago
Good catch on white women vs. white men. I wonder what causes the difference. I do think your comment on Asians is a bit of a non-sequitur.
MotteAnon12345
1yr ago
It's not a decision by SCOTUS.
You're right. Thanks for the correction. s/SCOTUS/courts.
Thank you Joe Goebbels.
Ad Hominem? Or not even...? Guilt by association? I'm not even sure which logical fallacy this falls under.
That's the theory. But so often, particularly in the United States, we find that when it appears this is happening, the actual government has really put its thumb in. That's what was happening here.
That's... not even a counter-argument? It's little surprise the government wants to... govern!
The Gen IV designs that don't rely on water as the heat carrier/moderator (I think molten salt or liquid sodium based ones) operate at ~700C so are quite suitable for process heat. Of course, good luck getting the NRC to approve any of them.
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