birb_cromble
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User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
3hr ago
If one very seriously believes that the world was attacked by an artificial bioweapon
You're engaging in a rhetorical sleight of hand that I've repeatedly decried in the past. A lab leak doesn't necessarily have to be a bioweapon, and immediately reaching for that term limits the discussion space in a lot of ways. It also doesn't imply there's an attack.
"Lab leak" could mean "accidental release of a natural virus"
"Lab leak" could mean "accidental release of an engineered research virus".
"Lab leak" could mean "accidental release of a weaponized virus strain".
"Lab leak" could mean "intentional release of any one of the three aforementioned categories".
"Intentional release of a weaponized virus strain" represents one sixth of the possible scenarios that can be described as a "lab leak".
The other five don't necessitate the kind of response you're describing, so why are you instantly privileging the one case that you can discard and not engaging with the others?
birb_cromble
2d ago
I don't disagree with any of that.
The point I'm trying to make is that even if the Confederates were to try and disrupt Union supply lines, they'd be trying to interrupt those supply lines while Union troops were merrily burning down entire cities. They simply couldn't be in both places at once, and like you said, the Union could ignore the pain longer than any Confederate force could maintain the pressure. Sherman was not shy about pillaging the countryside, so supply chain interruptions would have been even less effective.
As for the guerilla warfare aspect, you're probably correct in the tidewater, but the battle of the Wilderness and... basically everything that happened in Kansas makes me think that a more ruthless Confederate approach probably would have had legs further inland. The Confederacy could have potentually maintained a rump government for several years.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Most historical accounts suggest that the segregated Colored Troops performed bravely and reasonably well, given their limited battlefield experience. Their high casualty rates seem to stem from how they were employed during battles, and a general take no quarter and ask none attitude between them and Confederate troops.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Highly recommend Gallagher's Union War and Confederate War on this question.
Seconding this. Great books.
American literature over-indexes on the fighting in the East. The truth is that the Western campaign was arguably the most decisive.
I've always thought that Vicksburg was probably the most important fight of the war. What's your take?
birb_cromble
2d ago
I'm not sure Fabian tactics would have worked. The Union's advantages in manpower and materiel were staggering. The combined northern military was roughly twice the size of the Confederate forces, and the Union hadn't dipped nearly as deeply into its conscription pool as the Confederates did.
Given the limited industrial base of the Southern states, Union generals could force engagements simply by targeting vital infrastructure and strategic cities, like they did during the historical war. At that point, Confederate generals would be forced to choose between engaging in a battle against a numerically superior and better equipped force, or lose more of their ability to make war with every passing day.
If you put a gun to my head and forced me to step into the time machine, my personal attempt to salvage the situation would probably depend on the date.
Starting the war 10-20 years earlier would negate a lot of the Union's advantages in manpower, industry, and logistics. It might not be enough, but it would be something. It would also offer enough time to stage a proper PR campaign against Northern insurgents like John Brown.
If I had to start on exactly the same date as Davis, I'd likely turn to guerilla actions as soon as possible. Border states like Maryland were already powder kegs. If the Northern war machine couldn't trust the civilian population from Harrisburg to Annapolis (either through organic discontent or agents provocateur), it would seriously limit their ability to move supplies and soldiers through one of the most important corridors of the fighting.
birb_cromble
3d ago
If I wanted to invest in nuclear, what topics would you suggest I start learning? I don't like to invest in single stocks when I don't have sufficient domain knowledge to make realistic assessments of the industry. Right now I'm only exposed second hand through XLU.
birb_cromble
3d ago
How are you getting that Korean news? Is it English translations or do you speak the language?
birb_cromble
3d ago
This post is a goldmine. Thanks!
birb_cromble
3d ago
It's been a lively week in finance news, so I'm going to do a little bit of a round up here.
Anthropic Delays its IPO to November, per the Wall Street Journal.
Does anyone know the cutoff date where Anthropic can no longer use Q2 financial data? I vaguely remember mid November for that date.
On a lighter note, Hunter Biden established a meme coin. Some early investors are calling it a rug pull.
How do meme coins even work? Every time I see them, I think it's just a casino. Am I right, or is there some intrinsic value I'm missing?
Saudi Aramco halts crude oil supply to European Customers
This seems... bad. I don't want to catastrophize or wax political, but various commenters here have noted that oil is a mostly-fungible global commodity. If the European market isn't able to get their crude from the Saudis, they're going to try to get it from somewhere, and that's going to take that oil off the market. How is that going to impact consumer markets? My heating oil bill has already quadrupled.
birb_cromble
4d ago
I had a homemade protein cookie from a recipe I have since lost. It was mostly a mix of protein isolate, oats, egg white, and some flavoring.
Are you on any medications? You can find a thread of mine from about a year ago where amoxicillin clavulanate caused me to wake up every morning with raging anxiety attacks for close to a month.
I also used to have similar problems when I was in the cut phase for physique competitions. I tracked it back to a blood sugar crash and calorie deficit overnight. Eating about 100 calories of slow-digesting food helped.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Harnesses will fix hallucination much like they have for coding.
Harnesses fixing hallucinations is news to me. I just spent an hour today putting a Junior's head on straight after codex sent them down the garden path for a day and a half.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Like, definitely plenty of jank, just less of it.
I was able to stand on a dead guy and ride him like a magic carpet onto the top of a nearby building.
I can hardly imagine what more jank would look like, but I'm sad I missed it.
birb_cromble
4d ago
As I work the repertoire for the band where I'm subbing, I'm noticing something interesting. They do a lot of covers of one hit wonders, but it's not covers of the One Hit.
For example: anybody who was alive in the 90s probably knows Del Amitri, but they're covering a totally different song. It's been fun seeing how a lot of one hit wonders were pretty good musicians who had the (mis)fortune of writing something outside their usual niche.
Do any of you have good examples of that? I'd love to give them a listen.
birb_cromble
4d ago
I've been playing a little early access indie game called Half Sword. It's a physics-based medieval fighting simulator where you use your mouse and keyboard to control individual arms. It's simultaneously incredibly detailed and incredibly jank. I think I'm enjoying the jank more than the detail.
birb_cromble
5d ago
This shit keeps me up at night. I work as a software developer, but I don't work "in tech", per se. I constantly hear these horror stories, and I'm just waiting for the contagion to spread to my little corner of the industry. It really makes me wonder if any of my backup plans are even worth it.
birb_cromble
5d ago
I was mildly optimistic about SpaceX until the S-1 came out. The launch business has legs due to government contracts, but the xAI portion of the business is a giant pit in the ground where they set money on fire. At this point their financials suggests they're a data center REIT with delusions of grandeur. I'm not willing to make a long term bet on that. If the stock price drops to around $70 I'll reconsider, and I'd also do so if the AI portion of their company shows improvements. Until then I'm sitting on the sidelines.
I'm out and about so I can't really dig for a source, but I'm pretty sure they already have charges set on at least some of the factories.
birb_cromble
5d ago
How often does something like this happen, where a judge refers a DA to the feds for prosecution?
birb_cromble
5d ago
It looks like the fed voted for a 25bps rate hike, with a possibility for more this year.
Even though I've been expecting it for several months now, I'm still surprised it happened. The market is responding negatively to the news
birb_cromble
6d ago
We briefly rented a murder house growing up. It was considerably under the going rate at the time - cheap enough that we could afford to live there.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Are you leaving domestic agencies off the list because you think they wouldn't do it, or because you think they're screwups?
birb_cromble
6d ago
I probably wouldn't use me as a point of comparison for anything. I'm a little below average height, and I have abnormally short legs and long arms. I'm almost custom-built for squat and deadlift.
My guess is you're proportioned more like a human than a fantasy dwarf, in which case those numbers aren't bad at all.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Spending is $2,276.17 lower than the same day last year. My heating oil bill has quadrupled for the upcoming season, so that's going to make things tricky going forward.
Nonetheless I persevere.
Go through the archives here and on /r/themotte and you can find precisely that.
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