Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
22hr ago
Elon Musk is on a one-man crusade to prove the EMH wrong. The valuations of his firms are so clearly delusional, and yet it persists. At this point, it seems a great deal like if you're betting on Musk you're betting that he's going to achieve financial escape velocity and katamari the economy before his political and legal liabilities catch up with him. (I'm being hyperbolic, but the valuations seem extraordinarily hard to justify).
Not that his companies should be worthless, but SpaceX currently outvalues the rest of the aerospace sector. TSLA has vastly higher market cap than auto manufacturers with an order of magnitude more revenue, income, and assets despite repeatedly failing to generate the breakthrough innovations that would justify high future expected performance. All this at a point where Musk has significantly stepped back from hands-on management of his company in favor of drugs, politics, and posting, so even if you still think Musk is a wizard (he's not), it seems questionable to base your investment decisions on that.
Near as I can figure, the total cost of materiel lost to the Vietnamese was roughly <5% of the total defense budget at the time.
Post-Vietnam, the US was in the humiliating position of having lost what was essentially a conventional war against a much weaker, smaller adversary. This prompted a number of reforms to how the US military organized and operated, leading into the absolutely crushing dominance of the Gulf War (though, ironically, most of what the US did wouldn't have helped in Vietnam).
Iran has no winning hand here
Then why is Trump folding?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
Leaving aside the fairness of "fake internet shit" as a concept, communications infrastructure is extremely real.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
I think this kind of thinking is less specifically about airpower per se and more about terminally ape-brained people applying the logic of a bar fight to interstate conflict. The idea is that you inflict pain to assert dominance, but the conceptual model doesn't scale. A nation doesn't treat a city being bombed or a leader being assassinated the way a man might treat being punched in the mouth.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
But I'm not sure if "Claude, plan an invasion of $MIDDLE_EASTERN_COUNTRY" would outperform historical planning methods.
Well, no. You need to add "make no mistakes."
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
The deal does not solve the thorniest issues between the US and Iran, including Iran’s nuclear program or its billions of dollars in frozen funds, but offers a 60-day framework for technical discussions on those issues, according to Pakistani and regional officials familiar with the ongoing negotiations.
So, not actually a deal to end the war?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
Because they've proven the concept that they can effectively close the strait of Hormuz and cripple gulf oil production with a collection of low-end weapon systems that can't be intercepted reliably enough to counter, and which they can keep producing and deploying despite significant efforts to stop them. KDR is basically irrelevant next to the vastly larger problem of massively asymmetrical requirements for achieving strategic success.
any national military in the past few centuries that got trounced thoroughly and then somehow this made them a BIGGER threat in the short term
The USA post-Vietnam
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
The "depopulation" likely refers to evacuations, not deaths.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5d ago
It was covered, the refutation is a lie put around by Redditors.
I didn't get it from reddit, I got it from public reporting on the case. If that's actually the case, my mistake, but I'll need to take some time later to check the judge's statements directly to verify.
Maybe there is some other greater benefit that renders this a price worth paying? I'm not seeing it.
Hundreds of thousands of orderly, productive citizens? Like, you bring up the costs and benefits of migration, and this has always been the slam dunk for immigration. The cost of Irish immigration was not primarily in material damage caused by Irish immigrants (which was minimal, and more than offset by the benefits of millions of additional people, not to mention the fact that they helped save the Union), but in the backlash against them by nativists (which gets to the broader problem of nativists hating immigrants more than they love their countries).
Also, I just double checked the details of the case, and Nowak wasn't stabbed with a kirpan but another knife. As far as I can tell it wouldn't be covered under religious allowances (which is presumably why efforts were made to hide it), so that detail is most likely irrelevant.
I think it is evidenced, at a minimum, by the fact that a Sikh immigrant murdered someone and his Sikh family sheltered him and advised him on how to get out of it. They don't act like integrated citizens putting Britain's interests above their prior clannish loyalties.
And I think this is taking a singular event and treating it as a trend. The friends and family members of criminals providing support to the guilty part, while unfortunate, is not particularly unusual. We'd need to have some reason to think British Sikhs are unusually bad about this compared to other Britons. If you have affirmative evidence of such a trend, I would be interested in seeing it. As far as I can tell, @MadMonzer 's claim that British Sikhs are, on the whole, more law abiding than the general British population seems to be correct.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
To be clear, when I say "an uncharitable person might think there's some folks just looking for an excuse to do a pogrom" I am engaging in rhetorical understatement - there are people explicitly doing exactly that in this thread.
Horrific murders happen with unfortunate regularity, if for no other reason than there are a lot of people and some of them are pretty fucked up. A few weeks ago some Irish rent-a-cops suffocated a man to death. If you peruse a list of people executed in the United States, you'll find a significant share of them are pretty egregious (as in, above and beyond 'mere' murder). The point of emphasizing the horrific nature of this crime in particular is to try and gin up more violence against other people who didn't commit this crime. This is the purpose of the emotive language - don't think, don't empathize, get revenge (on unrelated people).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan". But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds.
Crime committed by immigrates provides a sharp flashpoint in a way other crime doesn't. The actual scale of the issue doesn't matter. Actual crime rates don't matter. What matters is that it's not priced in.
I can't speak to Northern Ireland, but here in the US, we have a lot of crime and a lot of avoidable death. We are, collectively, shockingly blithe about it - some people even take pride in it. One black man kills another in an argument? Priced in - everyone will just assume they were gang members, and in any event black lives don't matter. Cops make the worst shoot in the history of law enforcement and suffer no consequences? Priced in - nobody's perfect. A psycho shoots up a school, leaving dozens dead? Priced in - a few dead kids is the Price of Freedom^tm. Reckless driving kills more people than ten 9/11s, every single year? You better believe it's priced in. My grandfather didn't storm the beaches in Normandy so I could drive the speed limit (or, god forbid, take a train like some sort of communist).
A immigrant kills a native? Start building the internment camps and spare no thought for human dignity or individuals' rights. Collective punishment is the only solution.
On some level, I understand it. People really do acculturate to certain risks, to the point where they tolerate seemingly unreal levels of damage, and will get viciously defensive at the suggestion we maybe need to recalibrate our tradeoffs. Crime in particular is an emotional subject, since it is liable to be construed as free-standing anti-social behavior and people react more strongly to malice than misfortune (particularly if the motives are exotic and the victim is atypical). But there's a remarkable lack of curiosity about the actual scope of the issue. The preferred angle is lurid anecdotes (hilariously, the same error they tend to castigate CJRers for with respect to police misconduct). And for some reason the logic of collective judgment and punishment only flows one way. No one in the nativist camp thinks we need to carry out a purge of professional athletes just because professional athletics has a cottage industry in sexual assault cases, or that maybe we should . An uncharitable person might think there's some folks just looking for an excuse to do a pogrom.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
If an Irish man used a religious exemption to acquire a weapon to murder somebody
That's not what happened here. Sikhs have a religious exemption that allows them to carry a knife as a religious article. If the murderer had converted to Sikhism in order to acquire a knife with which to murder someone, this argument might have legs, but it didn't.
However, the Irish were and are religiously deviant from the US' predominantly Protestant culture, have a long history of "overperforming" the nation as a whole in crime, and to this day many of them live in ethnic enclaves with distinctive social norms. Really, I'm just trying to get some clarity as to what constitutes non-integration by your standards, since you allude to some yardsticks, but don't state them clearly.
You put "building a parallel society" in quotes and I'm not sure if I should read that as scare quotes.
I'm quoting you. You are claiming that Sikhs are building a parallel society in Britain. On what basis do you claim this? So far, the primary justification you've offered is that they get a religious exemption that allows them to carry a kirpan.
Are Jews integrated in the United States? Are the Irish? Are Texans? What are the standards for 'building a parallel society' such that we should apply it to British Sikhs?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
18d ago
They don't, actually.
Like, I don't know if you interact with some unusually unpleasant set of women, are unusually unpleasant yourself, or simply have perceptual issues, but I promise that you do not need to be in the top quintile for hotness for women to not think you're a creep for existing near them.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
20d ago
I believe the law provides that a single parcel of land is only entitled to a single vote, and you don't get multiple votes for owning multiple pieces of property:
These provisions shall be construed in accordance with the principle of “one person/entity, one vote.” Where a voter is entitled to vote by virtue of being both a resident and as an owner of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote; where a voter is entitled to vote by ownership of two or more parcels of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote.
And since the division of land into parcels is presumably controlled by the government, you wouldn't be able to run your electoral hydra scheme without the cooperation of the city/county.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
27d ago
Are 6000 grants a petty amount?
Measured against the full scope of USAID operations? Yes. More importantly, however, the claimed fraud is not in evidence. USAID money going to things you don't approve of is not fraud or corruption. Musk et al. have lived repeatedly and misrepresented (or simply misunderstood, because they're incompetent) what they found such that I am very skeptical that the bulk of these 6000 cases were even problematic, let alone genuinely corrupt. Even cases of genuine large-scale fraud were exaggerated and turned out to be significantly smaller than claimed.
By comparison, we with Trump are talking about open self-dealing and abuse of the powers of the office, all happening on an unheard-of scale.
His is concentrated and gaudy; the other kinds are diffuse.
The fundamental lie of Trumpism is that if you tolerate his personal depravity and corruption then he will fix big, systemic problems. The reality is that depraved, corrupt leaders do not make decisions in the public interest, and this only becomes worse when you allow then to openly monetize their office. Trump isn't just personally corrupt, either. He also enables and facilities corruption beneath him.
This would carry more weight if Trump's approval wasn't cratering and we didn't have an endless parade of clueless swing voters saying they thought he was just going to use his inflationary policies to lower egg prices. Trump benefited tremendously from gentle, sanewashing media coverage during the election. It's example #1,032,548 of people getting suckered by the most embarrassingly transparent conman. They really ought to have known better, but it's not evidence of much but the fact that most people aren't very discerning.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
28d ago
That doesn't help the "USAID spending was corruption" case. It highlights how insubstantial the objections are and how feeble the attempts to draw an equivalence to Trump's corruption are. The argument is, essentially, that spending money on things conservatives don't like is fraudulent and that these petty amounts are equivalent to direct abuse of office for personal gain and billions in direct self-dealing.
(Underlying all of this was the incredible mendacity of DOGE and assorted fellow travelers in their claims of finding fraud/waste, such that any individual allegation can't be taken seriously without significant additional investigation)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
I can't speak to your job specifically, but more generally this presumes the regulation is a net negative. That, in turn, frequently depends on normative arguments about what regulation ought to be doing*. As such, I don't think the concept of "bullshit job" reasonably applies, even if you think compliance officers existing is a net negative for society.
(A regulation can, of course, fail on its own merits, but that's a tangential issue).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
Is being a police officer a bullshit job? Professional law enforcement is an occupation that only exists because of legislation creating it.
Graeber would say yes, though that's because he thinks any kind of security work is BS; he also thinks actuaries and corporate attorneys and executive assistants are all bullshit jobs. Conversely, he'd probably think food safety inspector was a real job. This is because "bullshit job" is an incoherent concept that people slap on jobs they think shouldn't exist. They have a variety of reasons why they might think a job shouldn't exist, but they're almost always normative claims about what things are worth doing.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
I don't think it's a problem that we keep coming up with new stuff for people to do (I think we will probably see more and more people employed doing things we previously would have regarded as too frivolous to professionalize).
My point is more that administrivia is somewhat self-perpetuating. Partly this is a function of Jevon's Paradox - as we get more efficient at doing paperwork, one of the biggest results is more paperwork. We now control and track and analyze stuff that would have been impractical to the point of impossibility 50 years ago. Contra some of my other respondents, I don't actually think that this work is useless (otherwise they'd get squeezed out by employers looking to cut costs), but I think it is unlikely to go away without a deliberate effort because it also a function of our prevailing employment paradigm.
Having mulled it over, Jevon's Paradox is probably the wrong conceptual reference. For the foreseeable future, you still need humans to do some stuff. This is real, valuable work, but it may not actually take up most of their time (especially if AI actually delivers on productivity improvements). However, their employer still expects them to be available full time, which means they expect to be paid full-time, which means their employer expects them work full time*, which means creating busywork. Sometimes this is merely stuff of marginal value, sometimes it is outright time wasting. Either way, getting rid of this institutional waste heat and shifting to a genuinely fully automated process would require that you both be able to fully replace human activity with machine activity (not simply augment it) and to step outside of how we currently organize work.
*Also the employees generally want full time employment and prefer employers who offer it
Unfortunately, busywork is also subject to Jevon's Paradox.
Building a fully automated economy is going to require conscious effort to build systems that reduce/eliminate human participation. Otherwise the meatbags will just keep making more work for each other.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
The problem I have with failure-to-deter and other sins of inaction is that unless you're withdrawing some active intervention they're overdetermined. Obama could have done more to oppose Russia post-2013/4, but so could most of Europe. The sheer indifference of most European allies colored the US' own response.
Specifically regarding failures of deterrence, it is not clear to me what critics of Obama expected him to have done other than something really outside like cooperate in suppressing the Maidan protests.
Frankly, the flip from that to Russia-gate makes me take the left's positions on international relations as deeply un-serious.
I don't think this follows. Obama's dismissiveness of Russia as a source of problems in 2012 has certainly aged poorly, but at the time the US was trying to switch focus from Europe and the Middle East to Asia-Pacific and China (it is still trying to do this) and the broad consensus was that Russia was a gas station with nukes. The flip on Russia was a direct response to Russia doing things. You should expect people to update
Although the other side seems to have never met a proposed intervention they didn't like, which is its own failure mode.
The reason why right-wing anti-interventionism will never have any legs is that the right-wing elite is full of people who fundamentally believe in the crude application of force to achieve positive results and the right-wing base is full of people who think you have a moral obligation to support the team no matter what. The result is that right-wing elites constantly try to fix problems with violence and their supporters always back them because it is practically unthinkable not to.
Better terms than what? Billions (possibly hundreds of billions) in tribute from their enemies and the ability to do it all again whenever they want?
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