SnapDragon
1yr ago
Cool, cool. So, the obvious follow-up question is, can we just keep those critical federal employees, and drop everyone else? We might even survive firing the seven critical workers who were kept off furlough to keep people away from the Washington Monument.
I'm being a little facetious. You have a point, of course - lots of government services seem extraneous right up until the point where you (or someone else in a worse situation) desperately need them. It would be great if there was an option somewhere between 0% and 100% of our current government, where the first 10% to go isn't the part calculated to maximize spite.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Sorry, it sounds like you want some easy slam-dunk argument against some sort of cartoonish capital-L Libertarian, but that's not who you're speaking to. :) I don't want NO government and NO regulations - of course some regulations are good. But that says nothing about whether we have TOO MUCH government and TOO MUCH regulation right now. Most of the important obviously good stuff has been in the system for decades (if not centuries), because it's, well, important. And even if we kicked legislators out for 51 weeks out of every 52, the important stuff would still pass because it's, well, important. I happen to believe that most of what our modern legislators do IS net-negative, and I'm afraid you can't just hand-wave that away with a strawman argument.
As for YIMBYs, bless your heart Charlie Brown, you keep trying to kick that football. Surely one day they'll win! You yourself linked an article about the dire straits we're in. "Don't try to stop or slow down the government, we need it to fix all the problems caused by the last 50 years of government!"
SnapDragon
1yr ago
I do appreciate what you're saying here. I think most people here are just used to the ridiculous media caricatures of Jan. 6, and lumping you into the same bag. I'm not a fan of Trump, but still I could easily imagine myself in the shoes of some of the random people in that crowd. They came for a protest, obviously, not planning to overthrow Congress and impose Trump as El Presidente. Then all of a sudden, they're in the Capitol building, probably having no idea why except that's where the amorphous crowd went. They shout a bit, take a few photos, and go home, then find out that they're now on a watch list and barred from air travel and at serious risk of prosecution.
Oh, and note that one of them was literally shot and killed. The media described this (and four people dying from health issues) as "a protest that led to five deaths." Which is about as honest as reporting that George Floyd "committed a crime at a convenience store that led to one death".
This isn't how we should treat protestors, left or right. You're allowed to protest! And to be clear, the peaceful BLM protestors should also not face any consequences - it's not their fault some opportunists used the protests (and media cover) as a convenient excuse to attack people, set fires, and loot stores.
Yeah, this is the most shocking stuff The Telegraph (obviously a very biased source) could come up with? The audio they spliced in does sound very panicked, but it doesn't match with much of what's happening in the video. I note that nothing was on fire, and the only thing approaching a weapon that any of the rioters used in that footage was a hockey stick (not clear what they were hitting with it, hopefully not a person). Decidedly NOT what you could say about footage of the BLM riots.
EDIT: I mean, I do agree that it wasn't "peaceful and polite". There was clearly anger, and some people went too far.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
The first thing mentioned in that article is that housing isn't being built because the government is actively getting in its way. Sure, a government deadlock will, sadly, not stop the regulators, but it'll (at least temporarily) stop lawmakers from tossing even more monkey wrenches into an already-completely-dysfunctional system. Also, "new rail systems won't get built" just sounds like the status quo to me...
I mean, I still vividly recall that during the long Obama government shutdown the only way they could actually get us hoi polloi to feel any pain was to actively shut down public parks (requiring more effort than doing nothing). When you're doing a performance review, and the answer to "so what do you do, exactly?" is "as long as you pay me I won't set fire to the building", it's time for that employee to go.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
So, I mostly agree with you - I wouldn't expect IDF to manufacture evidence, either (that's the sort of thing that plays right into their detractors' hands). But it's weird how on-the-nose the dialogue is. "Oh gosh, we're the ones that bombed the hospital, oh no." We can put aside that I wouldn't expect these people to even admit to themselves that it wasn't Israel's fault. I expect real intelligence in the real world to be noisy and full of irrelevancies and requiring expert analysis to even figure out its implications. Recording a straightforward admission like this would be hitting the covert-ops jackpot.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Huh? You posted this as if this article is definitive proof that Israel lies. Was there nothing newer than 55 years old? And all the official data in that article is consistent with a mistake that they immediately acknowledged and apologized for. The rest is a speculative conspiracy theory which, while not impossible, requires both a conjured motive for Israelis to intentionally attack their most important ally and a perfect coverup lasting for two generations.
Are you used to being in some bubble where "everyone knows" that Israel likes to intentionally attack US ships and hospitals, so this link is the kind of "gotcha!" you were hoping for? Or were you just hoping nobody would actually click it?
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Adding to the list, there's Robert Ethan Saylor, who had Down's syndrome and suffocated after being forcibly restrained by authorities. His crime was slipping back into a theatre to watch the same movie twice. A pretty similar situation to George Floyd, except one was a career criminal on meth, and one was mentally disabled. But we know which one got the national outrage. (To be clear, both just seem like unfortunate, preventable-in-hindsight accidents to me. It's just the hypocrisy that I hate.)
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Ah, our poor silly ancestors... if only they'd known the modern trick of saying they were keeping the public "safe" from "misinformation".
SnapDragon
1yr ago
So, I guess your argument is that it doesn't feel icky because you claim he's lying when he says he's doing the icky thing, and his hidden motivation is more practical (and, well, moral)? That's still beside the point - the fact that Dems are completely fine with announcing a racist appointment is the problem, not the 4D chess Newsom might be playing.
Also, I actually do think Newsom would have chosen somebody completely unsuitable, with the right characteristics, if he'd had to. We've seen a string of skin-colour-and-genital based appointments already from the Dems, from Karine Jean-Pierre to Ketanji Brown Jackson to Kamala Harris herself. I'm sure there are more, but I don't pay that much attention. It would be coincidental if all these people, selected from a favoured 6% of the population, really were the best choices. It really does seem like this is just what you have to do to play ball on the Democrat side.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Huh? The primary selection criterion, stated clearly and up front by Newsom, was "is a black woman". All other considerations, including the unobjectionable non-icky one you just changed the subject to, were secondary.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Using race and gender as the overriding factors feels icky to me as well.
Shouldn't it feel icky? It's open racism and sexism, no different than the old days of "XXX need not apply" job postings. Not to mention it would literally be illegal for a private company to hire this way. What's weird to me is that Dem elites are so immersed in identity politics that this doesn't feel icky to any of them.
Me personally? Yes, for all the things you listed. But is that really all that surprising? We're on The Motte. The only one you listed that people here would really find controversial is CP, and while I (of course) agree that creating real CP should be illegal, sharing virtual/generated CP harms nobody and should be allowed. (This is basically the situation we're already in with hentai, which is full of hand-drawn underage porn.)
But if you want issues that do challenge my stance, I'd suggest revenge porn, doxxing or the Right To Be Forgotten. So, you're right that my "free speech maximalism" only goes so far; there's always something in this complex world that doesn't have an easy answer.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
You might be interested in Greg Egan's book Permutation City, which takes this (as he calls it) Dust Theory, and runs with it to the extreme.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Well, sure, in a vacuum most people gravitate towards censoring speech they don't like. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. We shouldn't structure society around people's natural destructive impulses; we should structure society around what allows humans to flourish. And we've known for centuries that that is a free and open exchange of ideas. Not because there are no ideas which are genuinely harmful! But because humans and human organizations are too fickle, ignorant, and self-interested to be trusted as arbiters of which ideas meet that standard.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
There are a lot of really good answers in this thread, reasons why historically unions have been a good idea (even if some notable examples have gone too far), but I want to point out that they almost entirely apply to private-sector unions. In the US we also have truly massive PUBLIC-sector unions, which (as far as I know) there is almost no good justification for. Their power derives from the government, which means that when they "negotiate", the government is the one on both sides of the table (negotiating about money that, as always, isn't theirs). It's always seemed insane to me, but maybe somebody here has a good justification...?
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Oof. You know you've gone off the far-left deep end when governor Newsom, of all people, is lightly coughing and hinting that this is unaffordable. So now my California tax dollars will be going towards supporting a strike for WGA workers who, in 2020, were earning a bare minimum of $4,546 a week. (I know the numbers in the current contract under negotiation were leaked, but I'm having a hard time finding a good source...? I suspect most of the media is on the side of any union, anywhere, anytime and would very much not like the hoi polloi to find out just how rich these brave freedom fighters actually are.)
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Funny to see Kim Campbell in that list. Amusingly, you're literally correct about her being PM 30 years ago; but her entire reign lasted 4 months, and the only reason she's remembered at all is that in the next election her party went from 156 seats in parliament to 2. (Yes, TWO. T as in Total, W as in Wipe, O as in Out.) Which was really Mulroney's fault, but she was the scapegoat.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
I'm a Putnam winner, and I don't think it's all that rarefied a category. I certainly don't dismiss out of hand the idea that Elon might be smarter than me. I'm probably better than him at math/programming, but I devoted my life to it and Elon didn't. If he'd had a different set of obsessions, maybe he'd have topped some other category instead of "richest man on Earth". (Heck, I wonder how many pro gaming champions might have been Elon - or a Fields Medalist - with a slightly different set of priorities...)
SnapDragon
1yr ago
SnapDragon
1yr ago
I'm in the same position; but I suspect I'll end up giving WSL a try instead. (I've used Cygwin for decades.)
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Biology and physics are old sciences compared to climate science. And the list of amazing things we've done with biology and physics over the last 200 years is insanely long. I guess you're saying that we should give climate science the same level of veneration, even without actual results and useful predictions, because it (ostensibly) uses the same processes. But even if you pretend that climate science is conducted with the same level of impartial truth-seeking - despite the incredible political pressure behind it - that's still missing the point that science is messy and often gets things wrong. Even in biology (e.g. Lamarckism) or physics (e.g. the aether). It takes hundreds of repeated experiments and validated predictions before a true "consensus" emerges (if even then). Gathering together a consensus and skipping that first step is missing the point.
And remember, skepticism is the default position of science. It's not abnormal. Heck, we had people excitedly testing the EmDrive a few years back, which would violate conservation of momentum! We didn't collectively say "excommunicate the Conservation of Momentum Deniers!"
Regardless, I'm not saying that climate science or the models are entirely useless. Like you said, the greenhouse effect itself is pretty simple and well-understood (though it only accounts for a small portion of the warming that models predict). There's good reason to believe warming will happen. Much less reason to believe it'll be catastrophic, but that's a different topic!
SnapDragon
1yr ago
So, I don't know how pleasing you'll find this answer, but the burden of proof is on the models to show their efficacy. A lot of the things you mentioned were very difficult things to do, but we know they work because we see that they work. You don't have to argue about whether Stockfish's chess model captures Truth with a capital T; you can just play 20 games with it, lose all 20, and see. (And of course plenty of things look difficult and ARE still difficult - we don't have cities on the moon yet!)
So, if we had a climate model that everyone could just rely on because its outputs were detailed and verifiably, reliably true, then sure, "this looks like it's a hard thing to do" wouldn't hold much weight. A property of good models is that it should be trivial for them to distinguish themselves from something making lucky guesses. But as far as I know, we don't have this. Instead, we use models to make 50-year predictions for a single hard-to-measure variable (global mean surface temperature) and then 5 years down the line we observe that we're still mostly within predicted error bars. This is not proof that the model represents anything close to Truth.
Now, I don't follow this too closely any more, and maybe there really is some great model that has many different and detailed outputs, with mean temperature predictions that are fairly accurate for different regions of the Earth and parts of the atmosphere and sea, and that properly predicts changes in cloud cover and albedo and humidity and ocean currents and etc. etc. If somebody had formally published accurate predictions for many of these things (NOT just backfitting to already-known data), then I'd believe we feeble humans actually had a good handle on the beast that is climate science. But I suspect this hasn't happened, since climate activists would be shouting it from the rooftops if it had.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
| The AC example is striking, on the net it takes less energy to cool than to heat.
So, I was going to tear into you for what I thought was obvious physics nonsense. (Cooling, after all, goes against entropy, whereas heating is 100% efficient.) But after doing a little research I realized I didn't know what I was talking about - AC systems and heat pumps move heat around, and can do so more efficiently than simply pouring energy into the system. And, for whatever reason, it looks like AC typically has higher SEER ratings than heat pumps' HSPF (both being a measure of BTUs/Watt-hour). Whoops. I was about to be Wrong On The Internet.
Thought I'd post this reply anyway, rather than just being an anonymous person who learns something from your post but doesn't say anything. (Internet forums need more positive reinforcement...)
I have no idea how you're extracting these arguments from what I said. (shrug)
For the record, I wasn't trying to be mean-spirited (just "funny"), but I see it could come off that way.
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