VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
18d ago
cheap cotton and rum and tea
Sometimes I'm amused that many commodities that launched empires --- spices, tea, sugar --- are largely now available cheaply at my local grocery store. A box of tea bags is a couple bucks, and pepper is put out freely on restaurant tables. Sugar is abundant enough to cause health risks from excess!
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
18d ago
On the American side, I can see a case to be made for "stronger together" generally, but I feel like if Trump were serious about this, he's going the wrong way: winning hearts and minds would be the first step to doing so.
On the other hand, there are relatively few (peaceful) examples of nations unifying successfully. Notionally the EU seems to intend to do that, with discrete steps taken, but hasn't agreed to form, say, a single army together yet. The US Constitutional Convention maybe counts as an example, and IMO proves the point that we are stronger united as 50 states, but if you were trying to do it today, I can't imagine getting Texas, Florida, California, and New York to agree both to throw in their lot together and to let DC be in charge of them.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
18d ago
I suppose that's true, but I think the modal shoddy government decision looks more like spending absurd amounts on high speed rail that never materializes. Deaths at the hand of the government outside of wartime are pretty small in number (cops shooting people, the death penalty, maybe bad disaster planning). The PEPFAR example I'd broadly agree with, but the emotional valence of "caused death" versus "didn't save life" strikes me as not quite equivalent: if you accept that wholesale, then how many have you killed by not liquidating your life savings and giving to EA causes?
On the corporate side, you could look at Thomas Midgley, who was instrumental in popularizing leaded gasoline and freon, with drastic effects on probably tens of millions of lives. And the anti-car folks (I am not a hardcore believer) might have you found the tens of thousands of motor vehicle fatalities there in the US annually against the industry too.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
18d ago
Poor aerospace and automotive engineering can also kill. Ask Boeing how that's working out for them (hundreds of deaths from the MAX debacle). SpaceX has a surprisingly good, if imperfect, record, but Tesla seems to get a surprising number of OSHA complaints, and some of their vehicle design decisions (the emergency door release in the back seat of the 3 series, and such) suggest they don't take safety as seriously as Toyota, much less Volvo.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
18d ago
Alexander's birthplace is in modern Greece, but we've probably stumbled into two deep, opposing wells of nationalism: It's now "North Macedonia" which was IIRC a requirement to get Greece to agree to it's joining NATO.
"I deserve this territory because our leader founded the cities"
Ah, I see we have a new contender: "All cities named Alexandria rightfully belong to Greece except maybe the one in Virginia." Maybe the US should have handed Afghanistan and Iraq over to them.
ETA: Sarcasm, if unclear.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
18d ago
The International Rules Based Order was always fiction
The phrase itself reminds me of a legal maxim "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; If you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table". It seems that blaming your opponents for violating Rules is at least a bit of a fall-back when realpolitik doesn't get your desired outcome --- say, being unwilling or unable to directly force your desired political outcome through kinetic or other means.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
19d ago
We discussed flow restrictions on showerheads last week, but I think the conservative view here sees electric car (mandates) coming from the same voices that brought us water-saving showerheads, and expect similar results. Sure, there might be some modest improvement in residential water usage (which is pretty immaterial outside of California, Nevada, and Arizona), but it comes at a cost those writing regulations refuse to admit, and so there is an expectation that we'll all be stuck with terrible cars "for the environment".
See also being forced to ride the bus ("take mass transit!"), or use CFLs back when they had terrible spectra. The conservative view here fears being forced to take quality of life hits "for the greater good" by someone who has drastically different values defining quality of life. On the other hand, I think (good) LED lightbulbs have proven themselves better than incandescent in almost every way short of an Easy-Bake oven, so it isn't always a miss.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
22d ago
flooding Russia with heroin
This sounds believable given rumblings about Afghan poppy crops, but do you have any sources for this?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
22d ago
Where do you think Russia fits in on that scale? I don't have a sense for the size of drone forces on either side there.
Also drone warfare seems a pretty clear loss for the US in the last decade: I remember 15 years ago DARPA (or maybe some other part of defense) was funding quadrotor control research, but even though that looked interesting at the time, they weren't the ones to operationalize it first, and still don't seem to have (announced) plans to do so.
IIRC Coalition forces were shot at enforcing no-fly zones in Iraq a few times without escalating into Desert Storm II (that came later, and largely for other reasons). But you do need to be confident enough to shake off anything thrown at you: it needs to look more like US destroyers shooting down drones in the Red Sea without flattening Yemen in a way that, although still asymmetric, I wouldn't expect US-Russia to match.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
22d ago
No-Fly Zone
Of the bunch, I think this one is ill-defined --- just larping as if this were Iraq versus the Kurds or Kosovo: the idea of "neutrally" grounding all air assets in the area being helpful to allies that didn't have any. Both Ukraine and Russia have established air forces and the West has even cobbled up aircraft to donate to their preferred side. Maybe it seemed useful in the first weeks when the survival of Ukraine's aircraft seemed questionable, but it's not something well-defined today, I think.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
22d ago
The remaining parts of Czechoslovakia were also annexed in 1939, handing over those armaments sectors too. The best defensive positions (and fortifications) against Germany were given up with the Sudetenland.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
23d ago
university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,
My libertarian friends back in the day would have you know this line was crossed and the ship sailed the better part of a century ago. I'm not going to say I'm broken-hearted over the people that lost in the '60s, but when masked protesters [1] blocked students from getting to schools and engaged in the sorts of violence that sound a lot like the Hamasniks at Ivy League schools this past year, JFK mobilized 30,000 troops. Various Federal civil rights laws clamp down pretty harshly on certain kinds of speech in schools and workplaces (or effectively force those places to clamp down) [2], even if the penalties aren't always technically "criminal".
It feels like the broader Left is only really complaining about "authoritarianism" here because the levers controlling speech regulations that they championed are no longer under their firm control, and are no longer solely against their outgroup.
- In fact, the laws on the books in various jurisdictions prohibiting masked protests mostly date back to the time when "masked protest" meant "Klan rally".
- For most cases, I'd even agree that the speech that is banned is pretty darn reprehensible, and I'd judge anyone unironically saying, posting, or expressing those sentiments pretty harshly. But if you're complaining about restrictions on absolute freedom of speech, I'm not feeling terribly sympathetic.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
24d ago
I think you have to narrow "military" there to "combat": Dubya served in the National Guard but never deployed to Vietnam, which was a source of plenty of drama circa 2004.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
25d ago
in charge of regulating showerhead flow
Every time I'm outside the US I remark at how awesome the showers are. Probably largely a function of the flow rate. I'm sympathetic to the idea that saving water is good, especially in Western states that are quite arid, but residential water use is pretty small compared to everything else anyway. IMO it'd be better if we let the flow restrictions be required only in California and Nevada.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
25d ago
Cynical response: imagine if DOGE eight years ago had instead cut US grant funding the EcoHealth Alliance for gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China that was already banned by Congress. I'm sure they'd be whining like there was when they cut their funding in 2020, reinstated it after "prominent scientists" complained, and then finally banned it again after the OIG of HHS reported significant compliance problems.
I'm not completely certain of the lab leak hypothesis, but it seems a pretty plausible and concrete harm to consider. And I'm not going to Stan for the cuts more generally, because it doesn't really seem like they're neutrally considering value proposition either.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
26d ago
that any head of state who routinely wore military attire was most likely a dictator or a warlord.
Most of the examples I can think of that would have suggested this wear dress military uniforms: Franco, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, and such. Although I suppose there is an association of more field-style uniforms (usually with a rifle or equivalent) with something like an African coup. I don't think Zelenskyy's attire really embodies either, but that is just my opinion. The association I remember learning also involved dictators frequently giving all their yes-men medals to wear on excessively elaborate uniforms: somewhere there is a picture from North Korea of comical numbers of medals.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
26d ago
China also has looming demographic issues that are far worse than America's: I don't think it has a sustainable path to long-term superpower status because the legacy of the one-child policy will have the median age in China rapidly pass that in the US within the next decade or so. Even if, God forbid, war breaks out, how many only sons (and only grandsons) can be sent home in boxes before the Mandate of Heaven is lost? I don't know, or want to find out, but to me it'd at least be a real concern.
I think China has at least another good decade going for it, and may well stay relevant beyond that too.
the UK are now organising a coalition of the willing so maybe there are countries that want to do more than virtue signalling
While not personally holding an overly positive view of Trump's policies vis-à-vis Ukraine, I will observe that it has been quite successful in convincing Europe and the rest of the West to step up defense spending, which has been one of his stated policies since his first administration. Whether this is the actual intent (4D chess meme here) or worth the costs to American foreign relations is less clear to me.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
27d ago
IIRC US bulk crop production has expanded even though the amount of farmed acreage has declined substantially in the last few decades. It's a huge change and not one that gets talked about often.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
27d ago
the ethnic similarity of the two peoples,
I think this is very much in the eye of the beholder: Western progressives happily lump together "White" Poles and Germans, but that didn't stop any number of atrocities on the ground in WWII. They also wouldn't generally distinguish between "Black" Hutu and Tutsi in any context that wasn't directly related to the relevant genocide. From someone far away (maybe you are not, but I am), it's hard to qualify feelings on the ground. Surely those genetically similar, Abrahamic-religion-followers in the former British mandate of Palestine are getting along nicely.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
28d ago
Bell Labs existed in a weird corporate/government liminal space because it was funded by the profits of AT&T's government-granted monopoly on telecommunication through the Reagan administration. I'm not sure it's the right example of corporate research.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
29d ago
that DOGE or whoever basically just ctrl+f'd "diverse", "underrepresented", and "minority" and axed all matches.
This feels particularly pernicious because, at least to me, it seems the vibe under the previous administration (and possibly it's predecessors) strongly encouraged sneaking in these terms for effectively opposite reasons to prevent summary rejection by federal funding agencies. There are probably a bunch of projects that, in saner times, would be mostly apolitical, but are going to get sacrificed in this tribal tug-of-war. I guess the folks sneaking diversity statements into particle accelerator funding proposals aren't completely blameless, but I do feel a bit bad for those just going along with the zeitgeist.
I think that would have been possible as a goal six months ago. Less so, today. Although that would probably require more harmonization of national security and immigration concerns, I think compromises could have been worked out.
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