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Commander, USN (ret). Former Googler. Computer programmer.
User ID: 2527
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4mo ago
Thanks for your perspective.
I've tried to get into vtubers and aside from the occasional music video, I have never been able to watch them without getting bored. Who is/are your favorites, and what is it that draws you to them?
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4mo ago
I just started into Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. So far, so good. We had to learn about his OODA loop at The Naval Academy, and I knew he was responsible for other parts of air combat strategy, so it's nice to get more details.
Boyd was born in 1927. The descriptions of his early life during the Great Depression made me happy to be alive now, and the descriptions of his positive male role models who emphasized accomplishment, integrity, and hard work made me long for days gone by.
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4mo ago
That's quite a different outlook from me; I'd love to learn more about why you think that way. I feel like I could fill a month of enjoyable dinners easily from my imagination, and a year of dinners with some web searching.
Have you ever read and enjoyed a biography? Have you ever seen a live speech and enjoyed the speaker, or even topic? Are there comedians whose sense of humor you relate to? Why wouldn't you take an opportunity to have a more personal experience from any of those people?
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4mo ago
Seems like the dinner discussion would be pretty heavy on military strategy. You wouldn't bring a more contemporary perspective into the mix with someone like MacArthur or McChrystal, or would you expect Junger to offer that?
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4mo ago
I might be in the minority perspective here, given Amadan's response, so please don't take my feedback as anything more than one person's opinion. Thanks for being receptive to it!
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4mo ago
My grandfather was a bomber pilot stationed on the Aleutian Islands during World War II. With not much in the way of local entertainment, the USO on base would provide what they could. This included a lot of books, and my grandfather either bought or stole the 20th anniversary anthology of a popular periodical that remained in his library until he died. I have a deep love of old books, but that apparently runs in my family, because upon the death of my grandmother (who outlived her husband by 10 years) this anthology was one of only two old books from their library I was able to claim.
In it, there's a wonderful article titled "My Five Best Dinner Companions".
Here is an interesting thought: You and I will give a dinner tonight, and our guests shall be five men we choose, out of all who have ever lived.
I love how, in 1924, le petit caporal is the obvious choice they feel a need to dismiss immediately. They pick Socrates, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Pepys, Montaigne, and Lincoln. Read the short article here.
Myself, any time I am given hypothetical time travel powers, I feel a moral obligation to pick Homer so we can get the missing poems from the Epic Cycle. If my sole purpose was for my own enjoyment, I'd pick Robert Heinlein, and talk with him about our alma mater, politics and space travel. For the sake of an entertaining dinner amongst my friends, though, the only option is Samuel Clemens. That is to say, if anyone wasn't entertained by Mark Twain at dinner, I wouldn't count them as my friend.
Who would you pick?
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4mo ago
FYI your comment was presented to me for janitor duty, and as I read it I marked it as Good, until I got to your last two sentences calling for Gaiman's murder. That made me change my rating to Bad. You have great points and I think it's a shame you've ruined a good post with that ending.
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4mo ago
That's a fair assessment. The actual Kennedy survey for Colorado is page 16-18 of this pdf, for what it's worth. Way too uncertain and far away to tell what will happen, but I'm enjoying my pipe dream of a once again red state regardless.
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4mo ago
I have not seen that poll; could you link to it? I know New Jersey showed a dead heat recently (amazingly), but from what I've been able to find, Colorado is still firmly in Camp Biden if he and Trump were the only options. I'd love to see something to the contrary.
The Libertarian Party of Colorado has declined to run Chase Oliver, the national Libertarian candidate, and will instead put Robert Kennedy on the ballot. Colorado is solidly blue (screenshot) according to the prediction markets (screenshot), but the polls (screenshot) are showing that Kennedy is hugely popular in the state.
Whether it's Biden, Harris, or door number 3 on the Democratic ticket, I think this has potential to split blue votes and turn my accursed state red for one brief, shining moment.
I think that may actually be The Libertarian Party of Colorado's plan. Kinda refreshing to see a political party actually playing 2D chess for once, instead of Candyland or whatever the hell the Democrats and Republicans are playing.
Edit: updating with screenshots of prediction sites since they might change
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4mo ago
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, if you can express them without breaking the rules. I think you've identified a real thing shared by an increasingly large number of people. I think about the issue frequently, but am not sure I have a full post worth of thoughts.
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4mo ago
My time is more valuable than 5e (but less than 6).
lol
do you have a favorite fitting for running out of a wall to conduit?
For the life of me, I cannot remember what kind of fittings we used there at my old job. I think we used 1" metallic conduit like this stuff all over the place, but it's been too long. I do remember we had a good system with pull strings so there was always one in the conduit: attach your pull string to the end of the cable you're pulling and to the end of a second pull string, then you pull them both and have a pull string ready for the next one if you ever need it.
On my suburban house with 4 POE security cameras, I literally just have a 1/2" hole with a bunch of ethernet cables running into my living room that has a glob of silicon caulk keeping for not letting air through. It works fine.
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4mo ago
I've done long, ourdoor ethernet and fiber runs for business. Never used an outdoor patch panel. Honestly, we never even considered it. It's not that bad to remove foam seal, run some new cables, and add it back. If you're willing to splice cables, you could run a few extra unterminated strands out before sealing it up, but given how infrequently we changed our setup, we didn't even do that. Often we'd add a hub to an endpoint if we needed a few more drops at a single location. Climate control and security are always better inside buildings than outside them.
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5mo ago
Good use for LLMs. Probably Orion.
Can there be an ideal state for humans? Wireheading is one extreme. When this forum was still on Reddit, someone linked to the MLP fanfic Friendship is Optimal, where all of humanity is subsumed into an interactive RPG run by a benevolent AI. Personally, I'd take the life of Lazarus Long, probably with less incest. Adventure, self-determination, and a big loving family sound perfect.
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5mo ago
deploying troops domestically which we've only seen in living memory a few times in the 60s and once in '92 for the LA race riots.
This is not true. On active duty I worked a number of years doing DSCA. I was one of the "troops" (Title 10, as opposed to Title 32) that Trump would hypothetically deploy, and we went all over the country, all the time, careful to not do "law enforcement" but still working very actively in providing security, supplies, support, coordination, and all sorts of other stuff. There is a clear and legal way for the US Military to "deploy troops domestically" for emergencies, and a reasonable interpretation of Trump's remarks would be that he considers the current situation an emergency that would allow that type of legal mobilization.
When you hear States or cities declaring a "state of emergency", that's (generally) the magic phrase to unlock Federal support. Talk to the long term employees at USNORTHCOM and they're still pissed that Louisiana took so long to declare a state of emergency after Katrina, which prevented USNORTHCOM from providing support for the first few critical days.
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5mo ago
No, I'm glad it's going this way because now we get more focus on the currently-stupid law. I'm hoping that Republicans can find one or two full spines between themselves and actually get a real concession from Democrats in order to pass a bump stock ban: get suppressors and/or SBRs off the NFA. Reopen the machine gun registry is another reasonable step, but that's probably asking too much for this moment.
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5mo ago
Ah, look at me getting my gun laws mixed up. They're legal as antiques if they're muzzle loading. Probably legal as a destructive device if they're breach loading. Always illegal to hunt with them.
It turns out that I spend more time stuck in traffic, dreaming of having firearms mounted on my vehicles, than actually researching what's legal and what it would take.
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5mo ago
- DDT is a great insecticide, and the environmental impacts were grossly exaggerated. The egg shell thinning, in particular, was a lie. I would bet that the banning of DDT has resulted in the deaths of over a million people from insect-borne diseases.
- I'm unsure about CFCs.
- With all endangered species, the response of "threaten to jail people for rescuing woodpeckers" has been somewhat effective at actually saving them. I know people who have made their land inhospitable to some specific endangered turtle because if anyone found one of those turtles on their land, the land would lose its value and become a liability. My ideal, impossible solution would be some way to actually incentivize saving endangered species rather than just severely punishing everyone we can catch.
- I am not happy with the regulatory environment for American automobiles. I want mini trucks. I hate how CAFE has resulted in exactly 2 sizes of consumer vehicles available: either a "passenger car" or a "SUV/truck/van". I do not like the increased car prices from all the rules. I hate the regulatory capture that prevents new car manufacturers from threatening established ones. There is less smog, yes, but it's not like the way we did that in the US was without cost.
Actually, the example I had in mind when I wrote that was drunk driving. Our penalties for drunk driving are wildly disproportionate to the actual cost to society. We give far lower sentences to people who endanger or accidentally kill others by different means. We went with the extreme penalties to force a culture shift, and it worked. But it's not proportional. It lacks the beauty of the Invisible hand that solves so many of our other problems. It's not that we've never solved a tragedy of the commons, it's that I don't think we've ever solved it well.
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5mo ago
Thank you for that link. That's a perspective I didn't have before. The development, use, and eventual banning of punt guns fits into this part of history. If they were still legal, I'm not sure whether I'd mount my 200 caliber shotgun axially on my minivan's roof or buy a truck and try to get it working on a turret.
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5mo ago
Given how stupid the COVID-19 response was, I've lost faith that anything with the slightest bit of ambiguity or cost+benefit can be handled reasonably by our society. Wind turbines generate electricity, externalities be damned. Hell, I'd label the entire anti-nuclear movement "virtue-signaling", and we haven't "examined ourselves closely" for the 80 years that's been going on. I blame it on 2 parts conflict theory, 1 part Moloch.
Killing birds is a tragedy of the commons. From my reading of history, nobody has found a good way to actually ensure a proportional response to a tragedy of the commons. We either threaten to jail people for rescuing woodpeckers, write some sad articles that change absolutely nothing, or funnel money into mismanaged non-profits. Even when a fairly simple law by Congress could save tens of millions of otherwise lost books, we can't do that because it might benefit Google.
Take the blackpill and accept that this probably won't get fixed. Ensure you and yours are benefiting from this foreknowledge. When I take my kids to see their grandfather (we're far apart so this is infrequent), we always take a walk into the nearby forest to see the family of bald eagles that have set up a nest there. And they've seen fields of flowers, and we have a huge physical collection of old books. My kids don't fully understand why their weird dad is obsessing about these particular things, but they don't need to.
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5mo ago
When I was a teen, it was called “surfing the web”, which I think was a great metaphor for the free-form movement across websites as you followed whatever path interested you. Nowadays I feel like we are (or at least I am) much more constrained to single sites that are ruthlessly optimized to keep you from venturing away. But I was surfing over the weekend, riding the big wave from the US Supreme Court’s bump stock ruling. About 2/3 of the way through I started turning it into this post due to some culture war implications, but those turned out to be false after digging deeper. So now I’m looking at this long, rambling post, which will soon expire as “old news”, and have decided to share it. Maybe someone else will learn something, at least.
In Sotomayor’s dissent in the recent bump stock case Garland v. Cargill, she writes (on page 26 of the pdf):
When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires “automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” §5845(b). Because I, like Congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent.
A guy on X/Twitter astutely pointed out:
The real irony about Sotomayor's dissent is that US law about ducks is actually incredibly specific. If anything, the adage "if it looks... etc" is the exact opposite of the statute. There is an annually updated list by which protected ducks are classified by 7-8 different parameters. It's over 1100 entries long. There's also a list of explicitly unprotected waterfowl that has hundreds of species, too.
I always had a feeling like the US has some absurd animal protection laws, especially around birds, though I never new the details. I like cats, and when I worked at Google I was part of a cat-lovers group (effectively a mailing list) that was mostly for just sharing pictures of cats but occasionally ventured into cat-activism. I wasn’t in Mountain View, but those who were had set up a catch, neuter, and release program for feral cats nearby. This also included some feeding stations. The Audubon Society got a burr in their bun that people were caring for cats somewhere, and found a few Burrowing Owls that lived near the places where the cats lived. This isn’t an endangered species, but California calls it a species of “special concern”, and that’s enough to get the State to catch and euthanize all the cats in question. Here’s how the New York Times spun the story.
So I had this feeling about stupid bird laws. Seeing the X/Twitter post led to some good ol' fashioned web surfing towards the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, including this article. Choice excerpts:
In 2002, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia declared that members of the military violated the act by unintentionally killing protected birds that flew into a live-fire training area.
In 2011, federal agents from the Fish & Wildlife Service threatened to imprison a Virginia woman because her 11-year-old daughter had rescued a woodpecker from a cat. Following nationwide scrutiny, the Fish & Wildlife Service declared that the mother’s citation had been “processed unintentionally.”
And in 2012, several oil and gas businesses in North Dakota were prosecuted because 28 protected birds had flown into state-sanctioned pools of fluid and oil.
That second one seemed suspicious to me: imprisonment for rescuing a bird? Digging deeper it turns out to be true enough. News story and government release.
According to WUSA, eleven-year-old Skylar came upon a baby woodpecker just before a cat was about to make the bird his next meal. The aspiring veterinarian told the TV station, “I couldn’t stand to watch it be eaten.” So Skylar asked her mother if she could care for the bird and then release it. Mom agreed, and the family went on its way, stopping at a home improvement store in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Rather than keeping the bird in the hot car, they brought the woodpecker inside the cool store.
It was there that one of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s undercover (!) agents spotted the mom–daughter crime duo. Nervously, the undercover wildlife woman held up her badge and proceeded to reprimand Alison and Skylar for illegally taking and transporting the bird.
When the Capos got home, they released the woodpecker and notified the Fish and Wildlife Service. Two weeks later that same agent, accompanied by the Virginia state trooper, showed up at the Capo residence and, according to Alison, delivered a citation stating that she violated federal law, owed the federal government a $535 fine, and could be imprisoned.
Incidentally, Politifact rates Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner’s criticism of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s behavior here as mostly-false.
Now, the culture war angle that started me actually typing all this up. I have historically rolled my eyes at complaints that wind turbines kill birds. I don’t care that much about wild birds, and as much as I think “renewable energy” is a scam, the “it kills birds” argument seemed like a desperate attempt to find something bad about wind turbines that environmentalists would care about. Then I saw a post (that I haven’t been able to find again) claiming that enforcement of these bird laws against green energy companies sure has been a lot lighter than against everyone else. So I did some digging. The bird lovers and tree lovers use the same studies for their estimates of yearly bird deaths from turbines: between 140,000-679,000. When oil and gas businesses in North Dakota accidentally killed 28 protected birds, they got taken to court, even though it was eventually thrown out.
The wind turbine companies? Well, actually, they’re getting hit pretty regularly, too. ESIEnergy was prosecuted. Duke Energy Corp was sentenced in 2013 to $1 million in fines and restitution and five years probation following deaths of 14 golden eagles and 149 other birds at two of the company’s wind projects. PacifiCorp Energy was sentenced to pay fines, restitution and community service totaling $2.5 million and was placed on probation for five years... from the discovery of the carcasses of 38 golden eagles and 336 other protected birds.
AP whines that there are fewer criminal cases being brought against bird killers and that The Biden administration on Thursday proposed a new permitting program for wind energy turbines, power lines and other projects that kill eagles although I couldn’t find the actual proposal.
So I guess the US government is pretty consistent in flipping-the-fuck-out if you harm birds. Though there are movements towards giving green energy companies a break on these laws, it doesn’t strike me as different than all the other laws and subsidies and special treatment green companies already get.
Anyways, I’m thinking of buying a bump stock, but really want an FRT. My local Fudd gun range recently changed their rules from a complete ban to allowing automatic and simulated automatic fire as long as one of the chairmen was present “to ensure everyone’s safety”. I think the board just wanted to get to shoot automatic guns, but I’ll take what I can get. The range rules explicitly prohibit shooting birds and other animals that wander into the firing range, which I appreciate a little more now.
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5mo ago
Autocorrect does not seem to be getting worse for me. Feels like it's been pretty consistent over the past few years, and slightly better than it was 5+ years ago.
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5mo ago
Because I care about historical accuracy when I read essays about history. I think someone's ability to judge the historical accuracy of "early human history or very late prehistory" is orthogonal to whether they view KulakRevolt in a positive or negative light. If someone does have a good knowledge of that part of human history and is in a position to judge the accuracy of the linked article, I want to hear from them! I want to know how to adjust my Baysean weights on this topic. "One person provides a link to an interesting and convincing article" has less weight than "One person provides a link to an interesting and convincing article" && "Another person says this is a good description of the history", and maybe I'd even adjust in the other direction if I saw ""One person provides a link to an interesting and convincing article" && "Another person says this is a deceptive retelling of history and provides examples". What we got is "One person provides a link to an interesting and convincing article" && "Another person implies they know about this topic and makes an ambiguous post about their view", and that's not a valuable contribution.
As an example. this popular twitter post was retweeted by Elon and seems to be resonating with many people. Of note, other twitter users argue she's just engagement farming because she's posting so frequently, but some people are just weird and actually do that.
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