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VoxelVexillologist

Multidimensional Radical Centrist

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joined 2022 September 04 18:24:54 UTC 

				
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VoxelVexillologist


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Multidimensional Radical Centrist

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 04 18:24:54 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What has always amused me is that we've spent quite a bit of effort nationally tamping down discrimination in the basis of national origin, but I've never seen it applied domestically.  Saying "Georgians need not apply" and rejecting job applications from those born in Tbilisi is actually against federal law.  I don't know of any case law if you do that for Atlanta.


Is there some for Puerto Ricans?  They are American from a national origin perspective.  You could make an argument that it's a language and cultural thing, but nobody is up in arms about California banning contracts with Texas (because inadequate social justice) for a disparate impact on Spanish-speaking Tejanos.


We've become so fixed on rooting out certain discrimination, but turn a blind eye to it domestically.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
True, but I have about as much faith that Tony Hinchcliffe was joking about a legitimate solid waste management problem (which is, at best, only really only funny to an audience familiar with its existence) as I do in the administration's apostrophe in the Biden transcript.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
On the other hand, much of the Biden-turned-Harris campaign's message has been focused on how Trump is morally dangerous and demonizes people.  If your message is that even people who disagree with you should vote for you because of your Moral Superiority™️, debasing yourself and even dipping a toe in the waters of open hatred makes it really easy to show the moral claims are a farce.


If you're an on-the-fence voter here -- maybe even disliking both candidates -- but leaning toward holding your nose to vote for Harris on account of "decorum", her boss calling your friends (the neighbor with a Trump sign on the lawn) "garbage" probably gives quite a bit of pause.  At least it does to me.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
To be fair, allowing the government to (we assume, fairly) sort out crap registrations is probably better than allowing organizations running registration drives the flexibility to "lose" or unfairly reject applications in a biased manner.  "Whoops, we misplaced all the [other side demographics] voters" should be avoided too.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I actually have the opposite opinion: it prevents local shenanigans from swinging the overall vote except in niche cases (which admittedly have happened at least once in my lifetime in Florida).  National popular vote means that any ballot box can be stuffed to swing the result, subject to mostly local rules on elections.


Although I will concede that it's disproportionate weighting of votes between states is probably not ideal.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


WALZ: You can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test!




Narrator: It is not, in fact, the Supreme Court test.  That would be "imminent lawless action".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What sort of spin bike are you using?  There is a reason serious cyclists (both mountain and road) use "clipless" pedals.  The name is historical: it refers to cycling shoes with a cleat that locks firmly into the pedals.  For very maximal force efforts, track cyclists then often add straps ("clips") even now.


I've seen spin bikes with the hardware to optionally connect to cleats (usually Shimano SPD mountain bike cleats) on pedals that can also be used with regular shoes.  But sometimes they just have flat pedals.


There is probably also something to be said for good technique.  Are you having trouble at high cadences/efforts specifically or more broadly?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If you look at the national level, it would seem that white emigration from Zimbabwe and South Africa fits this description, but I doubt anyone would describe it as such in polite company.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


"ending the war with one phone call"




Amusingly, this is pretty much the one thing that I think could happen (which is not a claim that it will).  We frequently reference a left/right divide on "violence as a continuum/switch", and the piecemeal "escalation" we've seen from the Biden administration is very much on the continuum side and pretty clearly doesn't really scare totalitarian despots.  Viewing it as a switch, and then credibly threatening to throw the switch if necessary seems like it would be more convincing: "Come to the negotiating table and accept my minimal terms, or I pull out the Gulf War playbook and destroy all your remaining Soviet stockpile.  Tanks are already staging in Poland."


Is there a danger of nuclear war there? Maybe.  But if you let that spectre drive all your decisionmaking, you'll find yourself cosplaying Neville Chamberlain in pursuit of "peace" all the way to a world war.  I don't like war.  It's terrible.  Always has been.  Always will be.  But eternally shying away from it has its costs too.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've seen some really interesting commentary that it seems to have displaced anorexia, and in many cases the resulting recommended treatment looks a lot like affirming anorexia.  Testosterone is really effective at reducing those feminine features (adipose tissues in all the right places) that anorexics often obsess over reducing or eliminating.  Both seem in practice to be strongly correlated with abuse survivors.


I'm not going to say that's the whole story, but the anecdote from a trans-questioning feminist recovering from an eating disorder I remember seemed to justify at least some concern.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The US doesn't have an explicit requirement to register your current address.  I guess it's on my driver's license and that's supposed to be updated when I move, but those aren't required, and that's done at the state level.  And some people have multiple residences, so you can't cue it on move-in dates.


It's interesting to talk with people from other countries about this, because the US doesn't track its residents anywhere near as closely as other countries I've been to.  A hotel in Europe will consistently ask for my passport.  In the US, they frequently only ask for a credit card, with maybe an ID only to check that I am the person with the name on the reservation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Federal law already considers murdering a pregnant woman and her unborn child to be two murders.  It was slightly controversial at the time, but hasn't quite (yet) been read the way you suggest.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The Trump-Raffensperger phonecall is closer




I would agree that this was a bad action, but, being very charitable here, Trump calling the Georgia Secretary of State to "find [number] of votes" doesn't seem different in substance from the Gore Campaign in 2000 calling the county authorities in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia Counties (all very blue districts!) and demanding they do a recount to ensure all their votes were counted.  We don't have readouts from the sitting Vice President calling county election officials, but "find the votes" doesn't feel completely out of the question.  Maybe the fact that Gore was trained as a lawyer would have prevented him from saying it explicitly, but implicit doesn't feel much cleaner here.  Ultimately the election there was decided by SCOTUS (admittedly, on party lines) ruling that the disparate recount standards applied to different counties (read: only districts where finding ballots would be expected to tip the results a specific direction) violated equal protection under the Constitution.  Rather uncharitably: Gore was found to, in violation of the Constitutional rights of the voters of Florida, conspire with partisan county election officials to change outcome of the statewide election, which would have tipped the electoral college.


Here you can even see The New York Times opining that absentee ballots which tipped the election should have been discarded for things like missing signatures and late postmarks.  Strange they seem less interested in the legality of mail-in ballots cast in 2020.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


unable to issue all of its citizens with photo IDs.




Honestly, the IDs themselves are probably the easy part.  With birthright citizenship, it's not like we have a conclusive list of citizens even scattered around the country in fragments.  It's plausible someone was a home-birth that was never registered with the government, or a child of citizens born out of the country and never registered.  And we don't have unique identifiers for our citizens: The SSN is the closest (and terrible for a variety of reasons), but there are people who, for religious reasons the government respects, opt out of having an identifier assigned to them (separate from opting out of Social Security itself for religious reasons, like the Amish).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
For the record, I do find the entire January 6th debacle pretty disqualifying.  I don't live in a swing state, so I guess my marginal vote doesn't really matter here, but I do find it a pretty solid reason to decide not to vote for Trump.  I think he could have handled it better (without really personally buying into the theories of voter fraud swinging the outcome) if he had accepted the outcome, but channeled right-wing frustration with the trustworthiness of the system into an effort to root out voter fraud, with the aim to produce something disrupting the Biden administration like the entire Russiagate boondoggle dragged his own term.  "I'll hand over power, but I'm going to make it my personal effort to make known to the American public how you cheated" is, I think, closer to the Overton window and could have been pulled off.


On the other hand (you asked for a steelman), January 6th is but an incremental escalation over the lawfare that surrounded the 2016 election.  Unprecedented campaigns to cause faithless electors, and even attempts by Democrats still in good standing to reject the Electoral votes of the entire states of Montana, Wisconsin, Michigan, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida.  For all the discussion of having Congress reject specific votes in 2021, motions to do so were made in 2017.  Kudos to Biden himself for rejecting those like Pence did, but Jamie Raskin, Pramila Jayapal, Barbara Lee, the late Sheila Jackson Lee, Raul Grijalva, and Maxine Waters literally tried (and failed, although you could accuse them of trying half-heartedly) to overturn an election and nobody seems to care enough that they all have remained politicians in good standing afterwards.  That this escalating debasement of federal elections was allowed without any real repercussions seems to raise legitimate questions about whether the concern about the sanctity of elections is truly about the elections themselves, or selectively imposed only when the oligarchs dislike their outcomes.  See also implications that we should throw out actual ballot returns because Russian propagandists might have made a few messages that voters might have seen.  Once you're convinced it's who, whom? (both sides very clearly do this), it's easy enough to dismiss pretty much any concerns as politically motivated.


It seems like it would have been a good time to run a very clean "return to normalcy" campaign, but Biden was just last night saying "lock him up" at a political rally, and hasn't exactly been the centrist I feel like he campaigned as, which sours me quite a bit on his chosen successor.  I'm not going to say exactly how I'll vote, but I'm pretty openly disappointed with both sides here.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 20, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think this is really just a factor of scale that we've perhaps chosen poorly.  I've visited some friends who live north of Dallas, which is quintessentially suburban, and their single-family house in the 'burbs is not directly on the main roads (a grid with about a mile spacing), but requires turning off on a couple of smaller side streets, but the zoning along the main roads is commercial, so there are half a dozen small restaurants -- admittedly, not Michelin fare -- and daycares and convenience stores within a mile or so.  If OP really has a two mile stretch each way to anything (and I don't doubt those exist; I've seen layouts like that) it seems we've just spaced things poorly.


But even then, economies of scale and the availability of cars means you choose to drive to the huge grocery store, not the corner bodega, which doesn't have room to stock your favorite almond milk or more than two types of beer.  Not sure how that variety is achieved by New Yorkers, but they tell me it exists.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 20, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Do you mean a flip-phone as in something resembling a pre-iPhone cell phone?  They still exist: some are clearly marketed to seniors, but I suppose there are others that like them for 2003 nostalgia.  In terms of actual hardware, it looks like they can be found pretty cheaply new and unlocked (<$100 US).  I wouldn't try to use an old one because the mobile standards have moved on and 2G seems to have been phased out.


In terms of actual use, I'd say be prepared to get good at T9 typing.  It used to be a fairly common skill.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But you're assuming that this technology doesn't change the kind, or number of parents that get IVF.




Are there even many anecdotes of people choosing IVF as their first choice method of conception?  Maybe there are some worried about serious recessive genetic disorders, although most examples I can think of there seem more focused on pre-screening before marriage.  The folks I've known who have done IVF largely tried most other options first, and are out of time to have a TFR that seems likely to cause massive changes in the future.  I don't know the specifics, but I hear it's not exactly as fun as the more, er, traditional method, and pretty expensive.


I guess I could see that changing long-term, but it seems like it'd be a hard sell to a couple getting married young-ish and wanting a large family.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But then Starlink is launching ever escalating numbers of satellites. So presumably a short term slump in download speeds isn't indicative of long term performance.




There are theoretical limits to how much bandwidth they can squeeze out of their spectrum allocation based on the physical aperture (size) of the antenna arrays on each side.  And they keep selling smaller ground terminals, although those might get fractional performance.  Something like a cell phone (which I've seen them rumoring support for) can't really do anything other than hit up every satellite in the sky.


Bandwidth has to be shared between every user in, effectively, an area of some size (I haven't run the numbers), and at some point even more satellites doesn't help.  Bigger antennas on both sides would, though.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The most obvious anchor customer is the DOD, IMO.  But neither side there is going to shout about it.  Low-latency, worldwide comms, resistant to anti-satellite weapons by sheer numbers.  Directional antennas are more robust against jamming and detection, too.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Surely they assemble the SRB segments in-place, but yeah it's still quite heavy.  They work well for what they do, but I do question their use for crewed flights generally.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, even if they've cut the launch costs by a factor of ten, they've still launched something like 200 flights just for internal use -- around two thirds of total flights this year.  And as a LEO constellation that is (at least in part) an ongoing cost to replace satellites over time.  And that's presumably all getting paid for (plus the satellites themselves, the ground stations, and operations) by a bunch of users paying around $1400/yr.  I haven't recently run numbers on that, but it feels at least ambitious without a deep-pocketed anchor customer willing to guarantee the bills get paid (which they may quietly have, so I'm not betting against them).


And performance degrades (something folks funding them for rural bandwidth care about!) as they start oversubscribing areas.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it was pretty clearly written to encourage investment in running fiber in rural areas.  Except in case of backhoes, good fiber should last decades with minimal maintenance and an frequently can be updated with only new parts on each end.  I know relatively rural folks that have gotten fiber in the last decade funded by programs like this and they are all pretty happy with it.


While Starlink might meet some of the listed requirements, it seems in some ways not the investment they were trying to push, and doesn't necessarily end up with a durable infrastructure product to point to as a success even if the company folds.  Free space RF also has inherent bandwidth limits compared to point-to-point fiber.


Granted at this point it seems on slightly better footing than a few years ago -- I have my doubts about it's financial case, but as a private company they don't have to publish the numbers and they do seem to sell like hotcakes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is probability even well-defined for a one-off event?  It's not like we can random sample the multiverse on how the election actually went.  At the same time, nothing is absolutely certain (supervolcano as October surprise!).


Maybe it makes sense from a Bayesian perspective: given the current knowledge of the system state (polls, voter registrations, demographics, maybe even volcanology reports) we can estimate the probability of a specific outcome.  But a frequentist view seems nonsensical, even if a lot of predictions seem to present themselves that way.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've never managed to try it, but the literature on palm wine suggests that palm sap will ferment to a nontrivial ABV (4% or so) in just a couple of hours sitting out unrefrigerated at what I assume are tropical temperatures.