blooblyblobl
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User ID: 232
The outcome of an impeachment is, at worst, removal from office. Nothing about impeachment appears to grant anyone authority to strip absolute immunity conferred to actions taken pursuant to constitutionally granted powers of the President while the President was President.
ETA:
Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.
I'd read that as allowing subsequent prosecution, but not somehow removing absolute immunity from actions taken while still the President. If not, you could plausibly impeach and try every president immediately after they leave office, or whenever an opposing party gets a majority in the Senate, for crimes even intended to be obviated by the president's official powers. In which case, why grant immunity at all?
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
4mo ago
what's stopping the next president from ordering the DOJ to prosecute and investigate?
Nothing, they just can't build a case if it depends on evidence precluded by simple absolute immunity.
What's stopping Congress from issuing a subpoena and hauling the last guy in?
The aforementioned simple absolute immunity.
What's stopping a federal prosecutor from opening a case and bringing charges?
Aside from bribery cases being guaranteed to fail in the absence of evidence of mental state, nothing.
For bribery specifically, you must prove the President's mental state of knowingly taking a bribe. The majority ruling explicitly forbids the courts from considering the President's mental state when determining if actions taken under the powers granted by the constitution are improper. And the president talking to his executive officers is explicitly a power granted by the constitution. So if the President says he wasn't taking a bribe, he was just talking with his officers... End of story, this crime cannot be prosecuted because evidence to the contrary is subject to absolute immunity, and is required for conviction.
What good does it do to prosecute a case if, by definition, you are guaranteed to fail?
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
4mo ago
This is susceptible to last-day shenanigans - if Congress can't impeach you fast enough, do you get away with it?
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
4mo ago
I'm not too concerned about the military implications.
On the other hand: Did Trump v. United States legalize bribing the President?
If the President has absolute immunity for discussions and actions relating to his constitutional prerogative, and bribery requires demonstrating a state of mind, typically through evidence that shows intent to bribe or be bribed, how would the Justice system examine such evidence if the President pinky-swears that it's legitimate, and is therefore subject to absolute immunity?
They do industrial espionage, they're very rich and can pay people who developed these processes for ASML, TSMC and so on more than they would get paid in the West.
In spite of their best efforts, they still have no domestic EUV industry to speak of. Contrast with the domestic advanced semiconductor industry they do have. Clearly one of these is harder to replicate than the other.
They do pay well, provided you don't mind living in a country where the government can and will disappear or execute you for wrongthink, regardless of your station or importance to the technology roadmap. Many such cases!
just built some more nuclear power and bigger datacenters?
Again, no one can stop them with sufficient motivation and willpower. But it can certainly be made to take a while and cost a boatload. As HPC systems get bigger, there are topological and latency challenges that compound on each other. And they will have to keep getting bigger, slower, and less efficient to keep up with the pace of innovation in equivalent western systems. It's not an insurmountable obstacle, but it costs resources and time. ETA: More power also means more cooling required. More power density in less efficient devices places huge demands on cooling, or forces more lateral scaling, which also compounds the problems above.
I'm assuming that the big concern with high-volume Chinese HPC is them achieving AI dominance and outpacing western innovation long-term - correct me if I'm wrong. I think, for very large AI, the software, and particularly the training techniques, have orders of magnitude of improvements awaiting discovery and implementation. This could go either way, western or Chinese advantage, with the understanding that Chinese industrial espionage is highly effective at extracting and implementing mathematical innovations in software, substantially moreso than hardware. I think it's more likely that the high costs of hardware force China to be parsimonious with their compute resources and ultra-efficient with their software craftsmanship, than that they just steamroll through the obstacles and disregard the expense.
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
4mo ago
Chinese have a higher supply of STEM grads of the appropriate intellectual level than the entire West, so 'catching up' for them is only a matter of will and investment.
And, most critically, time. EUV took decades to get to the state where it could barely be called working. Remember the mythical man-month? China's supply of STEM grads is sufficient to undertake nation-state scientific giga projects, yes, but they will be rediscovering the required physics and engineering for years. And until they figure it out, they're stuck at quad-patterning DUV yields (which aren't great below 14nm), or even worse yields on even more multipatterning. And that means more subsidies the government has to pay to top chip manufacturers to produce otherwise unprofitable chips. I know you linked to a guy who says they got the yields up above 50% and they can probably improve it, and that this could be profitable if their devices sold for comparable prices to next-gen TSMC tech, but this comes at considerable cost to power efficiency, places intense demands on the fab to customize process to fit design issues, and sucks money and time away from longer-term research to pivot away from DUV. They would spend the next ten years on the same trajectory as Intel 14nm, where they keep squeezing minor miracles out of the chip design in exchange for increasing power consumption and overspecialization. They'd keep getting tiny improvements, for years; meanwhile, Western EUV will also be improving, yields will also be slowly catching up, and costs will start falling off as the EUV nodes mature (look at TSMC wafer prices for 7nm at start vs today). The whole reason the major players are transitioning to EUV now is because they all recognize that, long-term, the future of DUV is unsustainable, and EUV is going to be less costly. Chinese fabs also know this. If China manages to stay competitive against EUV, they will be required to pay dearly for it. Lay-journo interpretations notwithstanding, this is, and has always been, the aim of sanctions - to penalize and slow access to cutting-edge technology.
I suspect that an invasion of Taiwan in which the outcome appears dire would result in the EUV machines being rendered into indistinguishable welded slag and scraps, at least in the molten tin UV source. Several hundred billion dollars and decades of research and development is tied up in the design and manufacturing of these machines. The critical trade secrets are going to be unrecognizably destroyed. If TSMC doesn't destroy their machinery, and ASML can't, the US will, covertly if possible, overtly if unavoidable. China will eventually get access to domestic EUV with enough will and investment; but without intact examples of working EUV machines to study, they're stuck on the long, slow grind of figuring it out themselves. How many years of progress will be made in western chip fabrication while the Chinese are busy re-solving EUV?
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
4mo ago
Inside the motte: maybe this is small of me, but it chagrines me every time I make it two paragraphs into a post and hit the pivot to antisemitic apologism or whatever, and only then realize I forgot to check the poster. I steadfastly don't care about any of that conversation, and it's the same conversation every time, so it's a few minutes wasted. I already know I'm going to ignore the post; blocking the single-issue poster would just cut to the chase, and would make me feel a little less dumb, on average once every week or two. That said, my blocklist is empty - it's such a minor nuisance, and feeling dumb once in a while builds character.
Outside of the motte (a selective, filtered, moderated community): to a first order approximation, the entire internet is spam, ads, and tribalism. See also: Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People. My attention, patience, and cognitive filtering capacity is finite, and the internet is an infinite noise generator that evolves (read: gets louder and more annoying) by consuming my finite resources. If there are mods, they're usually crazier than the users.
I used to have a Tumblr. I blocked every significant nexus word related to politics, most of the fandoms topics, anyone who posted anything even slightly porny, and any specific person who found a novel way to annoy me. It was great!
I basically don't use Twitter, but I know a guy who blocksany person the instant they make a questionable post. His feed is a near-perfectly-curated niche technical community who go to the same conferences and share entertaining or interesting industry stories and papers. It seems pretty great!
Blocking is a crude tool, but it's one of the few scalable solutions to autonomously build a community or interest feed on top of a dumpster-fire social media platform.
Nice flair btw.
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
5mo ago
In industrial robotics, there's two ways you get consistency, reliability, efficiency, and speed:
- Limit the complexity of the required motions
- Control the environment to deliver the same inputs as often as possible
Manufacturing automation designs machines that break complex assembly problems into many separate sub-problems that can be solved by simple motions under a strict set of inputs. Much of the complexity of these machines is in developing schemes to guarantee the shape, weight, orientation, and velocity of pipelined precursors. Nearly all will "fail gracefully" under some unplanned set of inputs conditions at any stage in the pipeline - in other words, give up and complain to a human operator to fix the problem.
The value of AI in robotics is that it can help plan motion in uncontrolled environments. This motion could be simple or complex, but most examples you'll see are simple. For industrial robotics, this might look like machine vision and simple actuators to adjust orientation of inputs, or automated optical inspection to check for defects on outputs. But the whole value of automation is improvements over human benchmarks on the metrics listed above, and given the choice between designing a general purpose robot or a highly specialized machine, the specialist almost always ends up simpler, cheaper, and better at what its designers want it to do.
Self-driving cars are one of a small handful of applications where the mechanics are straightforward, but the environment is chaotic. The moving parts are all outrageously simple, even for racecars: the wheels tilt to steer, the wheels roll to accelerate, the brakes clamp to decelerate. The mechanisms that make each of these motions happen have a century of engineering behind them, of which many decades have been spent enhancing reliability and robustness, optimizing cost, etc. The only "hard" problem is safely navigating the uncontrolled environment - which makes it a slam-dunk next-step, since the unsolved problem is the only problem that needs focus.
The average blue collar laborer is combining dozens of separate actuators along many degrees of freedom to perform thousands of unique complex motions over the course of a workday. I have no doubt that advances in AI could plan this kind of motion, given a suitable chassis - but the size and form factor of manufacturable actuators with power comparable to their human analogues are physically infeasible to compress into the shape of a standard human body. Take a look at the trends in motor characteristics for the past few decades, particularly figure 8 (torque vs weight) - neodymium magnets and solid state electronics made brushless DC motors feasible, which greatly improved the power density and efficiency, but only modestly enhanced the torque to weight ratio. At the end of the day, physics and material science puts limits on what you can manufacture, and what you can accomplish in a given volume. And the kinds of machines we can improve - mostly motors - have to translate their motions along many axes, adding more volume, weight, and cost. Comparatively, human muscle is an incredibly space-efficient, flexible linear actuator, and while we can scale up hydraulics and solenoids to much greater (bidirectional!) forces, this comes with a proportional increase in mass and volume. This actually isn't so bad for large muscles like arms and legs, but for hands (i.e. the thing we need to hold all the tools) there just aren't many practical solutions for the forces required on all the required degrees of freedom.
In terms of what could suddenly change the equation, I suppose there are a few things to watch out for:
- Room temperature superconductors could potentially increase the torque/weight ratio for motors by a whole fricking lot. This doesn't totally solve the problem, but it opens a lot of doors.
- Cheap artificial muscles could help. There are a variety of designs available today, but most are science experiments (EAPs, thermal braids), pneumatics aren't exactly cheap, and rapid cycling of high pressures through tiny valves is challenging (not to mention loud). If anyone can make an electroactive polymer that's cheap, waterproof, and can torque, we might very suddenly be in business, but I'm absolutely not holding my breath on this one. The thermal braids tend to be really hard to control precisely because getting the fibers to a specific temperature is very challenging, and there's obviously environmental limitations, but otherwise they're potentially incredibly cheap and straightforward to make. Combining twisted fibers and electrical actuation could be promising, but I don't really see anyone doing that. There's a whole lot of material science between here and there.
My bet is on neither of these things happening any time soon. Basically every university in the world has an artificial hand or two under development, and they all suck. State of the art routinely costs six figures, weighs 5kg, and moves slow on 4x speed promo videos - it's been this way for decades and it isn't really getting better. Human hands enjoy a massive, durable nanomachinery advantage
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
5mo ago
Doesn't totally answer your question, but consider disabusing yourself of the notion that there's any chance of a robotics revolution in our lifetimes. Costs of robotics go up with degrees of freedom, power density, and sensory complexity. Human hands are the standard interface for all tools used by manual labor. Human hands have 27 degrees of freedom, can exert over 100x their weight, and can regularly sense micron (irregularly: submicron) texture. >75% of all non-industrial grippers in the literature can't operate tools with index finger trigger switches. The bare minimum requirement for replacing blue collar labor is making grippers with close to human hand functionality, mass producing them on a robot that can move and work anywhere a human can, and selling it for less than the cost of a fighter jet. You'll notice that I haven't even gotten to the rest of the robot yet.
If AI is any significant part of the next few decades, your new job will be physically laboring for it. There's rather a lot to do, and plenty of now-unemployed white collar workers to keep occupied...
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
5mo ago
There's a lot of documents, and it looks like the guy has been excerpting individual records as he encounters them to show them to various politicians. The whole tranche is currently up on his Twitter: https://twitter.com/SheriffLeaf/status/1769561564993192198
The documents show:
- Source code modifications being made during deployment periods during an election - some firmware version needed to be changed, or some extra component needs to be attached at the last minute, or they suddenly need to disable parallelism on the SQL instance to keep concurrency bugs at bay, or whatever... They also talk about the software being able to receive OTA updates in places.
- Serbian nationals accessing election infrastructure on election night (Dominion has had an office in Serbia for over a decade, where they employ many programmers; however, Serbia does not allow certain rigorous US background checks that should be standard for such employees. Presumably the access is related to bugfix work)
- Emails that seem to indicate someone made an unauthorized access to Dominion backend systems several months before an election, from a suspicious location, on a company device or IP (extent or severity unknown, but may constitute a significant security breach?)
- Some of the Serbia machines are behind on SQL server vulnerability patching by as much as two years (sort of a problem since their systems and testing would heavily utilize the affected SQL variants)
- Numerous references to machines with modems installed, including some that failed acceptance testing for not having modems installed (again, plenty of good reasons for this in practice, but again, perjury)
- The Serbians discuss sending election data over the internet as one of the use cases in a conversation about certificates
- A long email chain showcasing the firmware programming process with a Taiwanese OEM (most computer manufacturing takes place in China or Taiwan, including firmware programming, so this isn't unusual, but it's laughably insecure)
- Eric Coomer suggesting no VPN usage in Cook County systems for technical reasons (I like the proposed explainer where they talk about using unlicensed trial version of something and wiping the machine every 30 days to keep it installed) - seems like they eventually got a VPN up at the end
- Eric Coomer opining on how Antrim county is full of angry conspiracy theorists, and also, gee whiz, how did that RTR misidentify the cartridges, I thought we fixed that
- Testimony from some expert witness describing the aforementioned RTR misidentification, and how it could be utilized in conjunction with SQL database management software to trivially edit tallies without privilege escalation and avoid discovery at the end unless a total hand count was kept alongside the results (see https://twitter.com/SheriffLeaf/status/1769745766703374401)
- Lots of "oh no, disaster, we suck" and "how can we paper over this mess to sell to customer" that I'm sure anyone in a customer-facing role at a tech company recognizes as business-as-usual
- Numerous small firefighting cases where something didn't work right and Dominion has to cook up an explanation, occasionally beclowning themselves in front of the customer in the process, while everyone stands around waiting for the numbers to add up - a particularly noticeable instance revolved around some weird data duplication issue
It doesn't look like everyone (or anyone, really) at Dominion is twirling their moustaches and cackling as they disenfranchise the American people. It looks like they run like a standard tech company, which is to say all over the place, constantly fighting fires and doing the needful to get their sales. I'm sure 2020 was a complete nightmare scenario for these guys, where suddenly all their customers are radically transforming their deployments and doing novel, untested, gigantic-scale absentee and mail balloting.
But very clearly they're held together with duct tape and prayer in a lot of cases, which is about the opposite of what I'd like to see from critical election infrastructure. The glimpses of the architecture they have put together with all of these machines raises some significant doubts about the security of the enterprise, particularly if rank-and-file technicians can just go pop open the database manager and flip the counts around - surely this is the kind of thing that could be trivially accomplished if one could land a zero-day on any of the long-dated Windows 7 machines floating around in their customer base.
I'm told, with no particular means to corroborate this, that ES&S is about the same.
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
5mo ago
I find it kind of condescending that your idea of sanewashing reads like a struggle session excerpt.
I think once the Dominion CEO demonstrably perjured himself by claiming that Dominion voting systems don't have modems in them (photographically, demonstrably false) and then again by claiming they weren't connected to the internet (demonstrably false again per the dominion records leaked by Dar Leaf), I decided that voting machines are completely ridiculous and no one should ever assume an election in which a voting machine is involved is fair. If there's one thing that absolutely should not be networked in any way and for any reason, it's election systems. I understand there's some potential benefits like poll book cross checks, but I have a corporate lab full of half-patched decades-old Windows appliances with network ports on them, and the vast colonies of malicious, firewalled, outbound-requesting viruses they host are an object lesson in why you never, ever connect any of this junk to any network, ever, even if you think it's a secure network. Credentialed VPNs, firewalls, even semi-isolated networks like FirstNet are just giant high-value attack surfaces full of old hardware waiting to be exploited. In a post-SolarWinds universe, I have zero confidence in the security setup of any nation-wide government networks. I have no idea what kind of security setup is established for voting machines, because I can't actually audit them myself and no one will tell me on account of "trade secrets". As far as I'm concerned, they are mysterious black boxes with labels that say "trust me bro".
This is, of course, not evidence of election fraud! But the only way to get this evidence is by hand-auditing the entire system to confirm things like:
- All the registered voters who voted actually exist, and weren't fake people electronically added to the poll books, quietly, steadily, and continuously up to election night to pre-register sufficient margin to commit fraud
- All the ballots tabulated were actual ballots, printed by the registered manufacturer, with the correct markings, and not printed in a shed by some random asshat and populated with all those fraudulently added names and no-shows in the poll books after we stopped the counts on election night due to a water leak or whatever
- All the precinct reports match the hand count totals; All the county totals match the (verified) precinct reports; All the state totals match the (verified) county reports
- The totals everywhere do not demonstrate ludicrous, impossibly large record-breaking >90% turnout/registered ratios, anomalous to the last six decades of ~50% turnout/registered ratios
- The exact source code, BOM, schematics, and system logs of all machines used on election night are fully audited by third parties, verified for consistency and correctness before and after deployment, not significantly impacted by supply chain security, etc (we're actually pretty close to compliance on BOM, schematics, and supply chain, at least on paper; but source code audits are functionally impossible, particularly when staff are live-updating source code on election night as per some of the published dominion emails. Some people even tried to do an independent audit of some source code a while back, I think in one of the Carolinas for ES&S, but got jerked around by the legal system and eventually restricted so heavily by complaints of trade secrets that the fraction of the source code audit they would be able to conduct was effectively pointless.)
- Every action taken with one of these machines is clearly observable to partisan observers who can contest wrongdoing quickly and efficiently
- All configurations and audit logs from election night are completely preserved and backed up before any kind of maintenance is performed to prevent wiping auditable data permanently
Anyway, this is a total fiction that we will obviously never achieve. But I'm supposed to trust some risk-limiting audits that don't actually come out right until a technician can do some kinda firmware update, and assume every machine works correctly. And no hand-recounts allowed, including when I pay for them and state law compels you to conduct one. And half my issues are, by judge's orders, thrown out on standing. Sure.
Hand counts get you 80% of the way to achieving all of the above, partially by omission of needless complexity, partially by design. Some other low-hanging fruit like Voter ID could probably clean up a lot of the remainder (provided you trust the ID checking process).
Look, maybe I can't prove fraud because I lack standing or the judge decided that state law says a risk-limiting audit is a hand-count or whatever. But given how basically every voting system in the nation is out of compliance with standards set forth by HAVA's VVSG, and given how the standards in VVSG are entirely voluntary and there's zero federal action taken against anyone for having joke-tier state standards that fall dramatically short of VVSG (which should be considered the bare minimum from a security standpoint), and given how SolarWinds had the whole government's ass hanging out in the breeze for ten months before anyone noticed, and given how the CEO of a major voting system company is lying under oath about internet connectivity even existing on their machines... Why should I be required to jump through a billion hoops to credibly allege election fraud when I can credibly validate 80% of my concerns with a single hand count? And in that case, why the hell use the machines at all?
Without Trump alleging all kinds of stupid shit, I wouldn't have really considered any of this. This isn't some weak sauce "the media is mean to us and so democracy is broke" sob story borne because Trump kicked and screamed and threw a tantrum when he lost. At least as I understand it, "directionally correct" means "how the fuck does anyone with any working knowledge about computer security believe any of this isn't pwned six ways to Sunday". I don't think I'm alone.
This is getting too long, but I'll briefly mention there's other tranches of how-the-fuckers who are equally annoyed by things like all the COVID-related legislative exploits, the ballot harvesting zuckerboxes in Georgia with the videos of dudes stuffing ballots, that one truck that got stolen after dropping off something that allegedly looked like ballots in Pennsylvania, the various dozens and hundreds of ballots registered to random empty lots in the Arizona audits, that one county in CO that paid for a hand recount per state law but got a risk-limiting audit and sued and lost, that one Democratic primary where the only way they allowed a hand recount was because somehow a candidate (who went on to win) got zero votes the first time and she knew she voted for herself (just a weird mistake with the scanners whoops wowee how did that happen - find me a hand count where this could happen)... Doubtless not all of this constitutes election fraud, some of it might even just be sore loser whining like you describe, but some of this is shady middle finger wagging backed up by porous arguments and judges not wanting to step in it, and I have no doubt that there are some people on this board who raise a directionally-corrected eyebrow at this stuff, instead of rolling their eyes on instinct.
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
5mo ago
Donald Trump is the idol of a cult of personality bewitching a third of the country, whose every utterance compels the leaders of the free world ever more openly to complete madness, running against a backdrop of reignited multipolar geopolitical conflicts, collapsing middle-class living standards, allegedly stolen elections and entrapped so-called insurrectionists, unbridled millions invading undefended US borders, schools erasing children's concept of gender, worldwide lockdowns, and mandatory population-wide experimental injections.
Ted Stevens is "series of tubes" guy.
Ted Stevens did not trigger existential crisis in a low-stakes, functionally-irrelevant, 90% Republican-voting state, therefore disenfranchising a third of the country by holding show trials for the most polarizing man in American history will provoke no more than eyerolls from the median Republican voter, because the median Republican voter is a holier-than-thou asshole who will cut off his nose to spite his face? Have you just emerged from a coma? The non-RINO Christian Right is framing this "mere election" as the final turnaround on the highway to the Downfall of Western Civilization. Despite all his character flaws, Donald Trump is not immanentizing the eschaton. He is an avatar of all of the insults suffered at the hands of the Elite, and with every sling cast upon him, it becomes clearer what lawlessness they will embrace to render him powerless, and how trivially they could trample over people like us who don't have a billion dollars and a TV show and buildings with our names on them. When the alternative is writing a blank cheque to godless, lawless evil, it turns out God will forgive you a vote for a felon; man's laws are not God's laws, render unto Caesar, etc.
Nobody stood up for Ted Stevens, because Ted Stevens was a nobody who stood for nothing. Trump is the last man standing. And if they bring him down, and the only ones left are sneering subservient RINO elite wannabees and a lawless brigade that makes its living destroying the lives and livelihoods of middle class Americans on principle... Well, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
5mo ago
The logistics of sending any kind of vehicle or probe to a specific asteroid in the asteroid belt for mining are so ludicrously expensive in terms of energy/momentum spend that the astrophysics community has largely treated space mining as a joke proposal for science fiction books since about the 60s - and that's before you get to the economics problems (there is virtually nothing in space worth mining and returning to Earth that couldn't be extracted more profitably on Earth in the first place). The case for space mining is a complete, unsalvageable disaster. "Short" version:
- Getting places in space is convoluted to begin with, and all trips beyond Earth orbit require carefully calculated momentum assists from various heavenly bodies. The error on these calculations is pretty large relative to the size of most asteroids. It's infeasible to pre-plan a route so specific and so accurate that one could send a spacecraft to a specific asteroid in the asteroid belt once, let alone reliably at different times. The energy and time cost for any such trip would be enormous as well.
- Long, energy-intensive trips necessitate bringing a lot with you. If an asteroid mining mission is crewed, you need food and water for many months, radiation shielding, a mechanism to avoid significant harm due to bone and muscle density losses, etc - space is extremely unfriendly, and long voyages are not desirable.
- And these trips are one-way. You will need an implausibly vast store of resources and a powerful engine to make it back to Earth in any reasonable amount of time. It's barely possible today to bring enough fuel for a two-way trip in an extremely light craft to a much closer celestial body (the moon). You'd need a bunch of fuel-only pre-flights to stockpile the resources needed to get to one asteroid and back, and substantially more than that to impart enough momentum on mined asteroid fragments that they can be shipped anywhere useful.
- Quick side note: you are NOT going to planets or planetary satellites for resource extraction. The gravity wells around planets make these almost-guaranteed to be one-way trips. I guess in principle it's not impossible to set up a planetary or satellite resource extraction operation, but it already takes civilization-scale logistics to get off of Earth - we'd be well into science fiction by the time you could practically mine planets or satellites of planets.
- You get to your asteroid, and... It's mostly silicon, iron, nickel, and other crap you can dig up back on Earth for way, way cheaper. There might be some high-value exotic elements like Californium that are kinda valuable, but how do you find any?
- You would need survey equipment, a bunch of which has to be entirely novel, since a lot of Earth-based survey techniques depend on liquid injection.
- You also need digging tools. I am actually pretty confident you can build those from mostly raw materials available on most asteroids, and even do so economically. I am less confident about the thermodynamics and robustness of such equipment being good enough to extract meaningful quantities of anything out of any asteroids.
- Now you need to do something with all the stuff you mined. Remember, there's virtually nothing you can profitably send back to Earth, and what you do find has such a limited market that your mission to one asteroid cost orders of magnitude more than the TAM for the material. There's maybe, maybe a plausible case to be made for antimatter, presuming we had a useful application for it by the time this whole mess is feasible - but I bet it would be cheaper to just invent a way to make and capture antimatter on Earth.
- So basically, you can only really use the resources you find in space. And the farther you have to ship it, the more compelling it becomes to instead just send it one-way from Earth.
- At this point it should be clear that you very much do not want to send people to mine asteroids. We could imagine instead sending autonomous mining probes...
- Except now you have lots of new and interesting different problems, chiefly that mining stuff is not at all a straightforwardly automated task, and you'd need really powerful software consuming a lot of power to coordinate surveying, mining, and payload delivery autonomously (on top of the already large and heretofore unmentioned energy expenditure just to mine in the first place, and the payload delivery expenses). You'd very likely need fabrication facilities for the entire suite of things needed, including unimagined novel requirements discovered on-site, meaning solar panels, semiconductors and lithography equipment, forging and casting tools... All of which has virtually no heatsinking and an endless bath of radiation to contend with during manufacturing.
- But suppose you actually got that insanely complex symphony of automation humming along. Great job, you can now... build more space robots, I guess. Whoopie. I suppose you could start working on even more stupid science fiction vanity projects like Dyson spheres or Matrioshka brains or whatever. If this was your plan all along, I am interested to learn how you managed to trick someone into funding the entire world's GDP a dozen times over into the first thousand steps of this plan.
I don't doubt that SpaceX will happily take the money of anyone foolish enough to ignore all of the above at their own expense and perform their services as advertised. But their business model does not depend on people with more money than common sense - their big moneymaker is, as others have noted, building a novel telecommunications network with broadband-like performance and selling it to the US government, using novel reusable rocket components that cost orders of magnitude less than the previous state-of-the-art and that can be launched quickly and regularly. I expect their next steps for profitability all revolve around expanding the use of this network to things like surveillance satellites, content providers, etc. I grant that they have some appetite for ridiculous vanity projects like the mars launch stuff, but this is ultimately a manageable marketing expense. But for anyone with some rudimentary literacy in the subject, it should be clear that space mining is not a sustainable business, and as a marketing stunt it is extremely boring (heh).
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
7mo ago
I can't help but find the timing of this to be extremely suspicious. A few weeks after the western IC warns Russia of a terror attack, a few days after it happens, practically at the same time as the Russian propaganda machine starts firing on all cylinders that we (NSFL links ahead) "beat the evil terrorists black and blue, barbecued their nuts and fed them their own ears and they confessed to being hired by evil satanic ukronazis", anti-Russian propaganda outlets start spinning tales about how the GRU with their secret spy shit ray guns are unquestionably to blame for melting the brains of US bureaucrats for the last ten years (despite the well known fact that said bureaucrats have no brains to melt - cue rimshot). I don't think anyone taking part in this whole cold war 2: electric boogaloo embroglio is even remotely credible, and I think it takes a lot more than a news theory to move the needle on public sentiment around Russia.
This is too zany, too spy-thriller, for the average person to care. I kinda doubt it was meant for us, i.e. normal(-ish) people with typical culture war axes to grind. Maybe it's a distraction to keep people from thinking too hard about the Crocus attack, maybe it's an influence op perpetrated on the western IC to build consensus about Russian foreign meddling, maybe it's a freak coincidence. The only culture war implications I can draw from this are increasing levels of paranoia in the US IC about the Russian Menace, continued wagon-circling about Ukraine policy, etc. That isn't terribly interesting to me, particularly because it isn't clear the manufactured consent is remotely in need of fortification in the US IC, so I don't have much else to say about it.
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
7mo ago
I get it now, and sorry for missing your point initially - my big lesson from interacting on this forum is that I tend to respond to the thing I know how to talk about, instead of the thing actually under discussion. Working on it.
Maybe the political parties could have a more productive dialogue with different candidates - I don't think any campaign with Trump in the mix can host meaningful debates, especially after the disastrous 2016 Republican primaries; and I'm less than confident that Biden is still firing on all cylinders. There's surely still some debate left in the downballot races, but between gerrymandering and party infighting, this year is less about debating issues and more about who should even get to speak.
I've worried for a while that the private sector has been absorbing competence on both sides of the aisle, ever since tech took off in the late 80s and early 90s. I think the kind of people you'd want to see in political contests, who'd be willing and able to actively engage in debates about relevant current issues, are pursuing more lucrative and less risky careers making targeted advertising platforms or whatever. So even if we had different candidates today, I'm doubtful we'd get quality debates.
Do you think there's an opportunity for productive debate with the state of US politics in 2024? With Trump v Biden? Someone else (who?)? Any downballot races you could point to as examples of what you want?
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
7mo ago
Alibaba has potential trade consequences that go beyond social media apps, and would be a much harder sell. It could also significantly impact the viability of Amazon, Walmart, and other large businesses that mostly derive inventories from China.
WeChat and Weibo are, outside of a handful of Chinese nationals with friends and family in the mainland, effectively already banned from the west - by China itself. These apps are crippled and uncompetitive in their neutered western forms. The Chinese experience on both platforms is widely understood to be dramatically different.
In all of the cases above, no one is targeting the median American teenager with pro-CCP messaging and anti-western memes. TikTok is.
To your point about electronics in China: if it were feasible, we'd consider it. But I think you underestimate the sheer size and cost competitiveness of Chinese manufacturing. Between their massive volumes, government subsidies, decades of manufacturing expertise built up on other people's goods, and the utterly anemic and perpetually consolidating western semiconductor market, you're talking about a trillion dollar decades-long pivot that would plunge the US supply chain into prolonged chaos.
And frankly, I already know what Trump and Biden would say in any such debate. Trump has been making his case for decades, and you'd have to be sleeping under a rock for the last eight years to know exactly what he wants to do with respect to China. And Biden doesn't really have anything to say about China - his administration can and does take reasonable steps to protect government and military supply chains from foreign powers, but clearly they aren't too concerned about the nature of our remaining trade relationships. I don't know what we'd gain from this or frankly any debate between the two sides - I think people made up their minds on Trump v Biden years ago.
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
8mo ago
Without getting too specific, I'm in a critical part of the EV supply chain. That said, I'm offering personal speculation based on publicly available information and some napkin math - there's some other stuff that informs my opinion which I can't really talk about, but it doesn't take an insider to see which way the wind is blowing.
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
8mo ago
This is just wrong. GM hasn't sold a hybrid (outside of a wacky Corvette model) in five years. The Volt was wildly successful, but it uses a now-dated central traction inverter and electrified transaxle design, which isn't a great choice for a full EV compared to per-motor or per-axle in-wheel or in-board hub motors. They might as well be starting anew. Ford at least has modern hybrid models, but they too are all central traction inverters. Meanwhile, SiC traction inverter tech has gone from impractical experiment to just about the only game in town in the last five years, which has completely rewritten the rules on the size, weight, and power tradeoffs required for hub motors. For these US automakers, modern EV tech might as well have fallen out the back of an alien spaceship, and they're clearly blowing billions on R&D trying to play catch-up on problems their competitors have already spent a decade solving and optimizing - just go look at how the F-150 Lightning was priced.
On a different note, most of the last ten years of hybrid battery development has used NiMH for its high reliability and large total cycle count, and this is yet another thing the US domestic auto industry is going to have to discard as they transition to Li-Ion.
Look at what Tesla is doing for an idea of the scale of changes needed. There is a reason they call their cell assembly plant a "gigafactory": the goal for Giga Nevada was to produce more capacity in 2020 than the entire world produced in 2014 (and on paper, this was achieved, though actual utilization fell short by around 30% for a variety of reasons). These guys crunched the numbers a decade before anyone at Ford or GM made so much as a whisper about fully electric vehicles, and determined they needed to have tens of GWh of vertically-integrated domestic battery production to get cell costs remotely close to viable at a run rate of a few hundred thousand cars a year (an order of magnitude below Ford/GM EV fleet annual expectations). In ten years, starting from nothing, Tesla's up to around 40 GWh total annual production capacity across every plant (more if you factor in grid storage capacity, which is a separate but thoroughly understated can of worms), with another 100 GWh coming online in the next few years. Ford is basically all-in on some CATL LFP partnership, having secured at least 60 GWh for through 2025 (on paper) and several other long-term deals for later; personally I think this is going to go poorly for them, reminiscent of the Foxconn debacle a few years back, but I leave room to be pleasantly surprised. GM appears to be working with LG Chem for high-nickel cathodes but on a significantly delayed schedule from their original plans. In neither case is it clear where the precursor materials are being extracted or refined, but I'd bet dollars to donuts it's mostly China. Best I can tell is these guys each expect around 120-150 GWh of annual production capacity sometime in the next few years. For reference, CATL makes around 30% of global Li-Ion supply and today has about 250 GWh of annual production capacity. I remain deeply skeptical of the US automakers' ability to execute on such lofty goals, particularly if they keep pumping out overpriced stinkers and falling behind on innovation, when their combined expectations for the next few years are to go from practically nothing to double-digit percentages of the global lithium battery supply, and all while buying their precursor materials at no-doubt strategically inflated prices from their primary competitor nation.
I'd estimate this EV investment is something like $35B in capital costs between the two of them. China is selling low-cost EVs to every other low-cost market on Earth, so once the US GHG rules kick in, it's not like Ford/GM can really continue selling ICEs at scale any more - they will be drawing down most of their existing propulsion facilities, which is something like 20% of each of their balance sheets (it's more like 25%, but some ICEs for heavy industry applications will still be required - that capacity will stay mostly unaffected). Sure, it's not $50B down the drain, but $10B and most of your ICE expertise down the drain is nothing to take lightly, let alone on top of another $15-20B in industry-redefining novel (at least to them) technology investment. And the massive capital investment, vertically-integrated manufacturing, and on-shore in-house production of battery components is exactly the opposite direction from where Ford and GM have been headed for the last 40 years.
My point is, don't underestimate the complexity or the expense of the challenges ahead for US automakers.
As an aside: The global readily available lithium supply is sorely inadequate for something as ambitious as the entire US automotive market going full electric by 2030 anyway. The WEF is projecting sixfold increase in lithium demand over 2020 figures, and even with optimistic projections on political and environmental mining and refining operation approvals, we're still talking like 6-8 years for operations to go from "we think there's lithium here" to mining and refining it at any kind of scale. And again that's with everything going right, which it very frequently doesn't: market conditions can delay financing, detailed surveys of lithium deposits can determine midway through that the deposit is economically nonviable to refine, governments can and do regularly inject arbitrary and capricious environmental demands. In practice, it can take over a decade for mining and refining operations to come fully online. Plenty are in-work right now, but it's just nowhere near enough. This fuels a lot of my skepticism regarding the ambitious annual production capacities discussed above.
Meanwhile: China is the recipient of something like 90% of Australian lithium, and between Australia, Chile, and domestic mines, China is consuming something like two-thirds of all lithium extracted on Earth. They follow it up with another 60% of the world's lithium refining capacity. Their domestic battery manufacturing companies are functionally unrivaled - CATL is routinely years ahead of everyone else on the market in metrics like gravimetric energy density, cost per cell, total throughout... China is the 800-pound gorilla of the EV industry, and since most of their cost for EVs is tied up in the battery, as long as China can keep producing better, cheaper batteries than the rest of the world, they'll trivially outcompete an unserious, labor-depleted, heavily outsourced, geriatric American automotive industry. From where I stand, at least, it looks like it will take a radical transformation of all major industry players just to survive the next decade, and without significant assistance from USG in tipping global trade scales to secure strategically valuable lithium assets and construct refineries in friendly jurisdictions, I can't see the US being globally competitive in manufacturing anything that needs a Li-Ion battery in it 20 years from now.
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
8mo ago
Can you provide a source for this claim? I don't find it hard to believe, but it warrants a lot more context than a single-sentence drive-by.
This feels familiar to the gender wage gap discussions: one side alleges their fact demonstrates prejudice and burden, the other side alleges an assortment of methodological trickery and revealed preferences...
And on the gripping hand, every major company in the US has several outreach/scholarship/early acceptance pipelines explicitly for promising young women and virtually zero such aid explicitly for men across all of them combined. I don't think there's any question that trans advocacy and institutional support exists within companies for transgender individuals - if not at all major companies, certainly at least at "high-status" ones.
Supposing you're correct that a substantial achievement gap exists between trans and non-trans individuals, this makes it all the more appealing to portray oneself as trans for all the usual affirmative action reasons, with the added bonus that, unlike pretending to be a different ethnicity, your transgender portrayal is fundamentally unfalsifiable: there is (to date) no biological evaluation that can be conducted to verify "transness." If you're a smart, talented, conscientious youth in the US, but you have trouble standing out against your enormous pool of peers and you have no affirmative action points in your favor, and you discover that you can pretend to be unfalsifiably, invisibly, inconsequentially victimized by your own body in order to cash in on a sudden surplus of free pity points (almost as good as affirmative action points, definitely better than nothing)... Even if you have to dress up, run a few circles around a shrink once a week, and pretend to be mad when people use the "wrong" pronoun, it doesn't sound all that demanding compared to what it already takes to break into a high-status job without knowing the right people. To be clear, it's not One Neat Trick to get a job or anything, it's just something that might improve your odds.
I've been begging the question, so I'll hold myself to account: what about the majority of transgender who are underperforming? Are they all faking it to stand out too? I suspect not, and I'd suggest that there's probably some social contagion and autism spectrum comorbidity effects at play, but my thinking here is underdeveloped. I have several years worth of direct evidence at my employer suggesting there exists a performatively transgender grifter class that isn't completely inept; and I think there's at least an order of magnitude more transgender people I'll never encounter who couldn't make it past the phone screening - I don't think they could keep up the grift, much less benefit from it. But even without having a very articulate theory of what's going on with the underperforming majority, I think both you and nybbler can be right at the same time, and that you're talking about two (at least, maybe more) very different cohorts, unfortunately captured under the same label.
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
8mo ago
I suppose incoherent, contradictory, frequently erroneous rambling, cheap low-effort barbs that deliberately mischaracterize forum regulars with years of coherent, level-headed history, and stubborn commitment to jackassery against a backdrop of numerous mod warnings and small-time bans is representative of an unsettlingly vast portion of the general polity. For some reason, I'm having trouble attaching these characteristics to Reagan or Bush. I don't think you're intentionally aiming to paint this major faction of conservatism as being fundamentally incompatible with the forum rules, but holding up Hlynka as an exemplar of crotchety conservatism in a thread where we explain why we banned him for being crotchety isn't making a stellar case for why we need more of that around here.
I do want to see more posters who can see the world through a Hobbesian lens, without succumbing to cynicism, tribalism, or conspiratorial ad-libbing. I can also appreciate simplifying the story around race relations and wokeness, much as I suspect such a project is doomed to fail. In the not-too-distant future I've been meaning to post at length about why the kind of conservative I'd like to see here is a particularly hard bar to clear for our forum - this ban may be a good catalyst.
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
9mo ago
I agree. I don't think many voters are impressed by some kind of self-congratulatory back-patting exercise for solving a problem the administration itself is responsible for exacerbating for the last three years. I mentioned this in a different comment, but for consistency I'll repeat it here: the more I think about it, the less I think the Biden administration wants a narrative about progress, and the more I think they just want the border and illegal immigration out of the news. They're in a bad position, largely of their own making, and now any attempt to bring the numbers down just comes off as cynical optics manipulation.
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
9mo ago
Earlier I implied that the administration wants to create a narrative about progress, but the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that they just want the numbers to go down and have everyone forget about the border and illegal immigration for a while. They don't get credit from the left or the right for reducing illegal immigration numbers: the left complains about denying the poor, impoverished families of their American Dream; the right assumes any attempt by the Biden administration to reign in illegal immigration is bad faith optics manipulation. I think at this point they're trying to stop the bleeding. I wouldn't say Biden "fell into" some political trap, so much as the administration got spooked into action by numbers and headlines they couldn't ignore, and Republicans see that kind of panic as a glowing red weak point.
Now the administration is under attack from a bad angle, and they have to respond or risk losing control of the narrative. If they had no response, this comes off as a tacit admission that the administration's border security policy has failed. As previously mentioned, over-reacting is also dangerous, since it hands the enemy obvious ammunition: "Why is Biden fighting so hard to let illegal immigrants in?" Getting a judicial ruling that explicitly negates Abbott's directives casts Abbott as a lawbreaker, and emphasizing medical emergencies portrays him as cruel, all without compelling Abbott to do anything. It plays well with the base, if conversations with friends are any indicator... prevailing left-wing opinion of Abbott can be roughly summarized as "crooked, deranged lawfare man," and pulling out "the judge said you're obviously wrong and bad" fuels plenty of sneering. Out of a handful of bad options, I think this is probably the best one.
There's also the optics of corpses piling up on the shores of a headline-news border crossing to consider. I'm sure the rank and file have enough genuine empathy in them to be alarmed and upset when Texas declares they have no obligation to rescue the injured or the dying, but this is still a pretty abstract concept - it's easy to say "people will die" without fully internalizing it. Compare with news crews finding piles of bodies and asking why Joe Biden lets Texas get away with it. That's the start of an uncomfortable conversation, and it keeps the border in the news. Now CBP has cover to keep cutting through Texas obstructions and keep the body count low.
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
9mo ago
Licht was fired as CNN's president and CEO in June 2023, after an article in The Atlantic revealed that employees had become unhappy with him over actions taken during his tenure.
So, that went well. Whether Zaslaw is still pushing for neutrality or not is unclear to me, but I'll grant that there's grounds to believe CNN is no longer a sympathetic media outlet.
In any case, here's the New York Times and the Washington Post. A brief Google search turned up similar anxiety across NPR, NBC, CBS, the AP, ABC, Fox (of course)... Even MSNBC started running interference in early January, and much like one can infer the rough outline of an object from the shadow it casts, here too we can infer the immigration-shaped issue from the article's calculated absence of context. Setting aside sympathies, record-breaking illegal immigration figures were inarguably headline news in December, and that's not a good look for Biden.
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
9mo ago
I recently read a Todd Bensman post that dropped the last puzzle piece in place. The Biden administration's illegal immigration policy (or lack thereof) just spent November and December in the spotlight, with even traditionally sympathetic media outlets raising eyebrows at the magnitude of border crossings and highlighting uncomfortable results in opinion polls. A handful of diplomatic meetings between the US and Mexico took place in late December, and in the opening weeks of January the Mexican government suddenly found an urgent need to shut down La Bestia, a train route traveling from Guatemala to the US border (technically with a "layover" in a Mexico City freight yard), and the primary corridor of illegal immigration from Central America for the entire Biden administration. Migrants are now being bussed to Villahermosa with increasing frequency and urgency, hot on the heels of the US diplomatic visit. Longitudinal flights from Piedras Negras (across the border from Eagle Pass) restarted concurrent to the diplomatic meeting (PDF, see last two pages - by migrant advocacy group Witness to the Border, so it's only an estimate, but probably close to accurate, especially for obvious signals like restarting known longitudinal flights). The Matamoros/Brownsville migrant camps were bulldozed at the end of December. There's a lot more actions taken in the last few weeks, but the upshot is that border crossings are way down, shantytowns aren't on nightly TV any more, and record-setting border crossings are momentarily a thing of the past.
I saw threads for the last two weeks wondering about Abbott's possible motivations. I believe comments like this illustrate the reason. The Biden administration is taking measurable steps to halt the flow of illegal immigrants (up to you if it's a genuine change of heart or just cynical ratings management), and the results have been observable. By picking a fight with the federal government now, Abbott shifts the frame from "the Biden administration is making measurable progress reducing illegal immigration" to "the Biden administration is fighting to make illegal immigration easier," which at a soundbyte level is a win for Abbott. Any subsequent moves the Biden administration makes to reign him in just turn into more headlines for Abbott, adding up to a serious perception problem at election day against Donald "Build The Wall" Trump. Consequently, the Biden administration wants to avoid escalation, and now they have a ruling in-hand that undermines any object-level obstruction by Texas without actually compelling Texas to do anything different.
But again, this does nothing. There's no declarative requirement for the President to e.g. invoke executive privilege. The President has absolute immunity for seeking opinions from his officers, it's not something he has to argue, he just says he was seeking an opinion and that's the end of the discussion; you can't subpoena parties or submit records of the conversation as evidence, and without that, you have no evidence of bribery. And as far as I can tell, impeachment (even after leaving office, which is out on a limb at best) doesn't strip absolute immunity. There is no legal battle, because the required evidence to prove a crime or any circumstances under which immunity wouldn't apply, impeachment or otherwise, cannot be considered by the court.
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