magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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4hr ago
If you mildly irradiate some of the steel used to build the ships hull, maybe you could detect that radiation signature at the ports it has visited in order to get a better understanding of US ship movements, deployment schedules, and maintenance periods.
Radiation doesn't work that way.
Some stuff is radioactive; it emits (ionising) radiation. Exposing stuff to radiation is called "irradiating" it. Stuff that is irradiated does not itself become radioactive, with one exception I'll come back to. This is why people do things like irradiating drinking water and food to kill germs; the water/food is unchanged afterward except that all the germs are dead, and certainly isn't radioactive.
So, irradiating the steel would maybe damage the steel (which would be detectable), but the steel wouldn't then be emitting radiation. If you want steel that emits radiation, you have to mix radioactive stuff into it (ideally isotopes of the same elements the steel's supposed to be composed of; if you put plutonium in it or something, they might notice that your steel has plutonium in it when it shouldn't). And then that radioactive steel will irradiate the port, but that won't make the port radioactive; it might be detectable (though not necessarily from very far away), and it might hurt people working on the ship, but the port won't have some trace there unless the steel is corroding (which would also be detectable).
(I feel I should note that if you want data on US ship movements in peacetime, you don't need to go to this much trouble; ships other than submerged submarines are pretty easy to spot with spy satellites, and submerged submarines are radiation-shielded by the water so this plan won't work anyway. There's also the issue that because US ships usually are powered by nuclear reactors, some of the personnel will have radiation dosimeters, which will raise an alarm if the rest of the ship is radioactive for some reason.)
The exception is neutron radiation, which does cause things hit with it to become radioactive (though they don't generally then emit more neutron radiation; they emit beta and possibly gamma). The thing is, though, you generally need a lot of it to make something significantly radioactive - enough that it'll probably sicken people, because it's also highly dangerous to living beings. Sticking something in a nuclear reactor for a few days might make it noticeably radioactive, but sticking a person in a nuclear reactor for a few days (or a few minutes) will get you a corpse. Also, the only major sources of chronic neutron radiation are operating nuclear reactors and certain transplutonic elements (curium and californium) from spent nuclear fuel that undergo spontaneous fission; people will notice if you build an unshielded and undocumented nuclear reactor into a ship, and curium/californium have that issue where they are definitely not supposed to be in the steel so any chemical analysis (for e.g. QC purposes, or if it starts rusting strangely - they're both quite-reactive metals) will immediately turn up that "oh hey, some chucklehead mixed nuclear waste into the hull of our ship" (technically speaking, curium and californium are still viable fuel, but they're chucked out as waste in a lot of current reactors).
magic9mushroom
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21hr ago
Here is a [reddit post of a full machine translation.]
I think you forgot to insert the link.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
Pepper ball guns, tazers, and lowest caliber pistols can be over-the-counter. Wilderness communities can get needs-based allocation for larger guns. And hobbyists would have to take demanding tests to qualify for the wider selection.
You know that the vast majority of gun crime is done with small-calibre pistols, right? I mean, maybe not lowest, IIRC most of it's 9mm Parabellum instead of .22LR, but generally criminals aren't looking for stopping power and range - they're looking for low noise, low cost, low recoil, and especially small size, because the use-case of career criminals is "I need this unarmoured guy 10 metres away to go away on zero notice, ideally without attracting attention" and that usually means hipfire from something that can be worn on the belt and wielded one-handed (and ideally hidden).
If you want to stay on the Pareto frontier, small-calibre pistols are the first thing to ban over-the-counter.
(Also, pistols are really convenient for suicides; longarms are less so, although not much less.)
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
There's a very-clear argument in favour of requiring prescriptions for government-subsidised medicine, because the state has much more of an interest in people consuming appropriate medications than inappropriate ones. As it happens, I just got some drugs here in Oz that are over-the-counter legal but which are far-cheaper with a prescription.
There are some drugs that you probably don't want in the hands of the general population due to third-parties being harmed (methamphetamine because murders, plus all the various drugs to pacify people that can be abused for rape or slavery); requiring prescriptions for those appears pretty logical as well (obviously, if you buy into recreational-drug prohibition as a whole, requiring a prescription for medical use is necessary to enforce that).
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
As I said to @TokenTransGirl, this isn't really my cause area and I don't have sufficient trustworthy information to be able to opine on the big Ought questions of proper treatment. There certainly exists a population that will desist if not "supported", and there almost certainly exists a population that won't; trustworthy data on how big these two populations are and whether it's possible to distinguish between them is the key determinant of the correct answer, but it would seem extremely difficult to acquire and I certainly don't have it. Some of the experiments you'd want to run don't even seem like the experimental protocol could successfully be followed (e.g. the obvious and central "what percentage of people who want transition in current Western society will resolve positively if transition is denied long-term"; in current Western society, how are you going to stop them?), and the studies that can be (and are) done frequently have huge bias issues (in both directions, depending on the allegiance of the researchers).
On the smaller questions, I oppose pro-trans censorship (both in the academic publishing system and more generally in social spaces) and I oppose people who try to portray the anti-trans movement as being inherently senseless and hateful. No surprises there. My personal stance on pronouns is "I won't use a pronoun someone doesn't like in front of that person, but I won't intentionally use neopronouns or singular "they" under any circumstances and I occasionally won't use a he/she/it pronoun if I think it's inappropriate (e.g. if the person is clearly insane in other ways and I suspect it's just a phase/delusion); I am prepared to spam names if necessary to thread that needle" (as noted above, my position on other people using pronouns is "free speech lol"), and my stance on deadname-erasure (on e.g. Wikipedia) is "fuck off with this Orwellian shit" although I'm willing to use the new one going forward.
If you want something else, ask.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
Testing.
30% vs. 90%. EDIT: backslashes don't work.
30% vs. 90%. EDIT: <plain> tags don't work. Okay, I'm stumped.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
Fairly-boring story TBH (which I have told elsewhere, but not IIRC anywhere that's not login-gated).
My mum's a misandrist (as in, she literally taught me the Y chromosome is a defect), she divorced my dad when I was 3 and got custody, and I'm effeminate in some ways. Fast-forward to puberty and she's accusing me of sexist abuse every time I turn around because now I start registering to her as "man" rather than "child". I developed dysphoria, wanted to transition.
Around this point, I ran away from Mum (who was not supportive of me transitioning; she was at the time a TERF although she's objected to transphobia since so I don't think she still is), because she confiscated my computer for a month and semi-starved me for a week, I ran amok and manhandled her (for the first and only time), and she called the police on me. Went on finasteride, got permission from a psychiatrist for cross-sex hormones, but procrastinated over the fertility problem long enough for the dysphoria to dissipate (and stopped taking the finasteride). Still probably qualify as "genderqueer" - I'm not exactly upset at having moobs from the finasteride - but the intense dysphoria, with phantom-limb and disgust at my penis, is gone. Hence, I qualify as ex-trans although not really a detransitioner.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
It's not an intentional strikethrough; it's ~ (tilde) symbols (meaning "approximately") before "30%" and "90%" being misinterpreted as a strikethrough by the software.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
Of him trying? Dunno, don't know his positions or conflict-comfort well enough.
Of him trying and it sticking? <10%, if nothing else he'd probably be impeached for that.
Thought about editing one of the above posts to note these but didn't get around to it.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
I mean, you can say #1 about everything. We can never know the counterfactual of any decision we make. We still have to make decisions. And it's not like there aren't TONS of decisions out there that people DO regret.
The issue here is that one side of the trans debate controls the education system, which means that if they're right there's no systematic error here but if they're partially or wholly wrong there's a systematic error of kids underestimating desistance rates.
I'm not going to engage you on the studies; that's not really my area of expertise. I think @ArjinFerman and maybe @gattsuru might be more interesting to talk to on that one.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
By what mechanism do you think RFK would ban vaccines though?
Unless I'm misunderstanding something about the org chart, the Secretary of Health and Human Services is among other things in charge of the FDA and could order it to rescind approval, and unless I'm misunderstanding something about US law that would mean they couldn't be traded in or administered.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
I am not naturally sympathetic to criticizing policy or personnel decisions on the grounds that they "embolden" the wrong people, but I am going to make an exception here.
I think this is a much-longer bow than you need to draw to be opposed to RFK being in charge of vaccines. Because, y'know, he might defund or ban them, which would very directly suck.
Also, remember that Twitter replies will skew in favour of opposition, because there's a thumbs-up and no thumbs-down.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
But I get the sense that most of the kids in question are quite happy with the decision. I haven't seen anything that suggests they're particularly prone to regretting it later, either.
There are a few issues with convenience-sampling transfolk in trans-friendly spaces and claiming this to demonstrate effectiveness of the treatment.
- It is not clear that those kids have a correct picture of what the counterfactual actually looks like. If you have a mistaken impression of what the "no transition" picture looks like in the long run, you might be happy with the decision in spite of it being the wrong one from a god's-eye view. To quote Aslan, "no-one is ever told what would have happened".
- Selection bias: trans-friendly spaces tend to expel or repel ex-trans like myself (usually not as a deliberate choice, but as a consequence of these people usually wanting to avoid others following in their footsteps which trips the "transphobic" response); you'll tend to find them only in places like here that don't purge transphobes.
- Survivorship bias: remember that transsexuals who do transition still have a very high suicide rate; a decent chunk of the regretters just kill themselves and will be missed by even accurately sampling survivors, despite their large contributions to the utility calculation.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
Your source says 2019-2023, not 2017-2023. The latter would only be two orders of magnitude bigger than "single digits annually".
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
Notably, there is no reason for including men.
You can make an argument regarding "mother is unable to breastfeed because dead/mastectomy following breast cancer; father can't arrange a wet-nurse and thus tries to do it himself". It's a shaky argument, but it's an argument.
It is impossible for a man to give birth.
The consensus IIRC is that:
- you can implant an IVF embryo in a man's abdomen and it's capable of attaching to something (abdominal pregnancy - in women - and placenta percreta prove this);
- you can presumably take it out again via surgery, as with an abdominal pregnancy in a woman (and live babies from the latter are known).
The reasons nobody's done it are:
- nobody knows what the different blood chemistry of a man would do to the fetus;
- Placenta percreta and abdominal pregnancy are extremely dangerous due to massive bleeding and/or organ damage, and here you're talking about causing them on purpose
- post-WWII medical ethics are too restrictive to allow something with such extreme risks as this without medical necessity, and I don't see how this could plausibly be medically-necessary
- Mengele and Unit 731, who would totally have tried it anyway on Jews/Chinese, were out of the picture by the time IVF was actually achieved.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
Well, okay then. Sorry for the confusion.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
Um. I think I might be misunderstanding your last clause there.
We treat cancer by cutting the diseased organ out, or killing it with radiation/toxins. This certainly describes the gender-transition model of dealing with gender dysphoria (with their conception of the diseased organ being the unwanted reproductive organs), but you appear to hold the other conception of the diseased organ (i.e. the brain), which would seem to suggest lobotomies or neurotoxins.
As noted, this seems kind of absurd, so if I'm misconstruing something please tell me what it is. I'd prefer not to bark up the wrong tree and unnecessarily accuse anyone of moral turpitude.
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
Thanks, hadn't picked up on small sites not being excepted. I think some of the smaller players could say "bite me" due to lacking assets in Oz, but that's not the ideal solution.
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
I think the argument is that people who have an edge and are thus gambling rationally are much less likely to be dissuaded than gambling addicts.
Probably better to just have the state assume the job of blocking compulsive gamblers from all gambling platforms (physical or not)
Zvi says that the online platforms would be unprofitable without preying on compulsive gamblers, so I'm not sure that this cashes out to a difference in worldstate.
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
- He's correct regarding the West indoctrinating the populace of places it's conquered. Or at least, I'm not seeing how "setting up Gender Studies programs in Afghanistan" doesn't fall into that column.
- The idea of war crimes actually predates both World Wars; chemical weapons were already against the laws of war when WWI came around.
- The general idea I've seen is that the peace in Europe had very little to do with the UN and a great deal to do with nuclear weapons altering the incentives (it is very hard to come out ahead from a nuclear war).
I'm not defending the rest of TB's claims, though.
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
the fact that the far right wants to delay transition until adulthood
I don't think that's specific to the far right.
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
WRT lungs: huh, TIL.
WRT heart: my understanding is that KCl does exactly that: stop the heart. There's a difference between cardiac arrest (the heart is not beating) and cardiac necrosis (the heart muscle cells are dying); AFAIK KCl does the former but not the latter. Obviously, both of these do tend to cause the other over time, but my guess is that if you took the heart out reasonably fast it wouldn't actually die.
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
Apparently most of them these days are lethal injection rather than the bullet to the head, but as I said I think the organs from the former would still be usable anyway.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
· Edited 10d ago
WP says it's not actually a firing squad; it's a single point-blank shot, apparently usually an assault-rifle hollowpoint to the head (which, credit where it's due, is about as reliably painless as executions get).
The WaPo article you cite is from June last year, and the three NYT articles it discusses (all first result on Google for their titles) are from over two years ago.
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