VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
although it's hard to measure by design
I've been wondering recently if there is a term for the science/art/engineering of organizational structures for a specific goal. I know it very peripherally in how IT security engineering starts overlapping with physical security (two factor, physical access control, social engineering attacks), but I haven't seen a collected book or corpus of "how to design your organization to align incentives and ensure people can be kept honest". Does such a thing exist? Or is it too broad and disorganized of a topic? On the gripping hand, would I even trust something based on psychology and human factors research given the replication crisis?
Unsure, but interested in reading more.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
23d ago
I can't speak to the exact systems they are using, but my laptop from 15 years ago had two levels of BIOS passwords. You could set one (and I did) to prevent booting without the password, and another to actually making changes to the system. Assuming this is similar, I'd bet it's the password to just turn the thing on, not change it.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
23d ago
because their opponent is Trump.
It's probably a little early, but maybe someone should start collecting bets on whether the next Republican candidate gets tarred as uniquely evil in the same way. Seems quite likely to me, but I guess a lot depends on next week there.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
24d ago
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
25d ago
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
25d ago
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
26d ago
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
26d ago
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
27d ago
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".
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?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
29d ago
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
30d ago
"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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
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.
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
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).
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
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.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1mo ago
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.
Are you sure? The phrase that comes to mind is "wine-dark sea". I've seen academics suggest that the notion of blue is a surprisingly modern invention.
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