magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1mo ago
Are you selective with your votes or do you vote on most/all posts you see?
Selective/absent-minded.
Do you find yourself upvoting people you disagree with due to the quality of their argument, or vice versa?
I fairly-reliably upvote (and rate "high-quality" on the volunteer page) for convincing me of something, which requires that I disagreed - in the past tense. If I disagreed before and still do, well, why would I upvote it? Clearly it was untrue and/or not very convincing if I still disagree!
Do you downvote people you're arguing with or do you leave judgement entirely to the masses?
I mean, it depends. If someone's arguing with me in good faith and politely, no. If someone tells me to jump off a cliff, or someone's being disingenuous, sure, downvotes.
Do you remove the auto self-upvote on your posts/comments?
No. It's a community decision to not reward people for upvoting their own posts; the point of this would be negated if scrupulous people started undoing it.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
black features don't seem desirable on a man either
AIUI women care less about facial features (on average), so even if the direction's the same, the strength of the effect on overall attractiveness might be less.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Did you have an opinion of me before this video lowered it?
"Well-intentioned but overly simplifies things".
I am open in the comments that, while the rest of my videos aim to be nonpartisan, I do have partisan motivations for this video.
That's all well and good, but comments are typically something seen after the video, not information that's examined when deciding whether to watch it.
This is why I don't address [...] people that cannot decide on a "lesser evil".
Yes, you do. Section 3, "Does voting accomplish anything?", is basically addressing these people (though I suppose it's possible you haven't realised that this rhetoric comes from this position).
If you have some good alternate motivations I am interested to hear them, and I have been engaging with people in the comments so I can hear about them.
The reason I called your position "naïve first-order consequentialist" is that, while you deny it*, the motivation for parties to change their policies is less "what the base wants" and more "what undecideds want". If your vote is not realistically swingable (either from one party to another, or between one party and staying-home/third-party), the parties have no game-theoretic motivation to care about what you want. Naïve first-order consequentialism asks only "is choice A better than choice B?". Consequentialism with decent decision theory asks "are the choices I'm being offered contingent on how I choose between choice A and choice B, and what choice mechanism on my part gives the best incentives to offer me better choices?".
(With that said, the primary system in the USA does a hilarious job of making it very difficult for parties to behave rationally, and also one does have to vote sometimes for the game theory to kick in; a permanent nonvoter is also a sunk cost.)
The funny bit here is that these kinds of decision-theory issues are why evolution designed us to often defy shitty choices; you might be smarter than the people following their gut instincts, but that doesn't mean you're smarter than the process creating those gut instincts.
*I assumed your denial probably meant you understood this issue and were bullshitting; I suppose that was uncharitable and I should have considered that maybe you hadn't actually thought it through before trying to debunk it.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
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I notice that 100% of what you've said both in your blurb here and in your blurb on YouTube avoids the appearance of partisanship, but the actual video is very clearly intended to get people to vote for Harris. This is disingenuous.
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You have zero mention of the issue that, hey, this situation sucks and that preferential voting would help avoid these kinds of dilemmas.
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You paper over the issue that while politicians do often keep their promises, a lot of things simply aren't on the ballot. You don't even acknowledge the possibility that for some people, not voting for either major party is in fact the correct choice because there's no difference on the relevant issues. (To give an example, I tried to single-issue vote on civil defence last election year here in Australia, but I couldn't, because all parties' civil defence policies were the empty string; I eventually gave up on that and voted on other, less-important issues, but like 80% of what I wanted simply wasn't available to vote for.)
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Your description of the case for not voting for the lesser evil as an excuse for "it feels bad" is to a fair extent a strawman (also your naïve first-order consequentialist point is greatly exploitable), and reeks of using Dark Arts to shame people into doing what you want i.e. voting for Harris.
Overall, this is get-out-the-vote propaganda masquerading as a fair look at the options, I'm disgusted, and my opinion of you is drastically lowered. This is the case even though I would mildly prefer that Harris won.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
It's more a BBS format than an imageboard format.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Either Reddit's reputation has to be ruined, or you have to offer something that's technically better that becomes the first place anyone interested on a community on any topic would check out (and not just terminally online contrarians).
Technically, there is a third option, the one that's deployed frequently by SJ - "destroy Reddit's technical capability to function, such that people can't use it anymore". It's just that that's really hard for such a large platform that doesn't have many external dependencies.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Wait, was this meant to be a reply to something in the "Cultural Marxism" thread a couple of top-level posts down?
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
I think a lot of SJ positions are better described not as "culturally Marxist", but as a bizarro-world ideology created by starting with the cultural positions of Marxism (and there are quite a lot of them) and then going in the opposite direction of the traditional Western paradigm.
Tradition: "Men should be in charge of women", Marxism: "Sex divisions are a distraction and should be ignored", SJ: "Women should be in charge of men".
Tradition: "The white man is the best man", Marxism: "Racial divisions are a distraction from class struggle; be colourblind", SJ: "Whites suck".
Tradition: "White culture is scientifically superior to natives' primitive culture and we should raze the latter", Marxism: "All cultures suck and we should make a new, constructed culture designed by science", SJ: "Indigenous ways of knowing are just as valid as science; traditional Western culture should be razed".
The only real explanation I can see for this pattern is that SJ is the result of escalatory virtue-signalling (plus a game of Chinese whispers over the years with social psych accidentally and deliberately laundering ideology into "the science") oriented along the axis of "Tradition bad, Marxism good" and thus has positions that are "beyond" Marxism in some sense. I'm aware that this is a bulverism and basically calling the ideology meme cancer, and I really don't like being this uncharitable, but it's honestly about all I can come up with.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
No, he's at least partially right.
Nuclear EMP is not the same thing as an electric arc; it's a massive burst of radio waves that induces currents inside devices. Gaps do matter. That's why you need multiple layers, so that there's metal connected between any two given directions (ideally closed circuits, to cancel the magnetic component as well as the electrical one).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
"With enough layers" would be the key. Not merely wrapping with a bit of overlap, which I think the typical person would mistakenly do. Multiple layers offset or wrapped in different directions.
Yes, there's a reason I bought 60 metres of the stuff. Still under 10 bucks.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Aluminum is the fourth most conducive metal
It depends on how you're counting it. Resistivity is usually measured by dimensions, and aluminium's #4 by that measure, but aluminium is far less dense than copper/silver/gold, so if your limiting factor is weight (often the case) aluminium is the best.
But merely wrapping something in aluminum foil would leave small gaps that I think would defeat the shield.
There's leakage, yes. But everything I've read suggests that you can achieve very high reduction with enough layers, and "very high" suffices (one only needs to bring the voltage inside below that needed to destroy the device, after all - it doesn't have to be brought to zero).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
I don't think that is how EMP shielding works.
It is. Nuclear EMP is a (very powerful) radio burst; you shield against that by putting the item in a Faraday cage - an enclosure of conductive material (which, when exposed to EM fields, will generate transient currents that cancel out the field inside it; this is why phones don't work very well inside metal vehicles). Aluminium foil is conductive (aluminium is, in fact, frequently used for power transmission, as it's the most conductive material per mass short of superconductors), so it works, although because you can't exactly seal it into a solid enclosure without significant equipment, you need multiple layers at different angles and you ideally want the items to be relatively small.
(The use of metal foil to block EM radiation is the reason that literal "tinfoil hats" were invented; the physical principle's sound, although of course the schizophrenics' worry about people mind-controlling them with radio waves is nonsense, and Faraday cages need to completely or almost-completely surround the shielded item so a "hat" isn't really that effective.)
Also would your electronic need bmto be shielded before hand, so having materials to shield them later is irrelevant?
Correct, but a) some items, like the emergency radio, aren't useful outside a crisis, so you can just keep them wrapped up permanently; b) nuclear war usually comes out of an existing military conflict, which means that upon hearing about said conflict (WWII was not secret; the Cuban Missile Crisis was not secret; Able Archer 83 and the Soviet concern about it was AFAIK not secret) you can wrap things up then against the possibility of EMP attack.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
This is why power delivery networks are going to be toast and can have problems even from major geomagnetic storms.
It's specifically the transformers that are vulnerable to E3; the extra voltage/current buggers up the assumptions that go into their design, so they lose efficiency (efficiency at transmitting the normal power from power stations) and, yes, overheat. Of course, power grids don't work without the transformers, but the long wires themselves are in no danger (we know that one experimentally due to the Carrington event).
But yes, transformers are metal and they are vulnerable if not unplugged.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Military targets are:
- Sydney (naval base in the harbour, which is perhaps not the best place to put it)
- Perth (naval base just offshore, which is perhaps not the best place to put it)
- Darwin (US nuclear bombers in airbase there; not going to object to this one since Darwin's low-population and much of that is for the military base)
- Pine Gap (major control station for ABM radar, which is fairly relevant in a nuclear exchange)
- maybe Cairns
- Canberra (capital)
Obvious civilian targets are, yeah, the five state capitals Brisbane/Sydney/Melbourne/Adelaide/Perth, especially Syd/Melb.
And, obviously, it only takes one high-altitude nuke to EMP much of the continent, so why wouldn't you?
Agreed that they might not have the nukes to hit all of those.
Adelaide is usually upwind of me (as is Perth, though it's far enough away to be less of a problem), and frankly Victoria's weather is weird enough that I'm not entirely confident in being upwind of Melbourne (I'm in Bendigo). And, well, EMP is still a thing. But yes, fallout is much less of a danger than in the 'States.
WRT number of ICBMs, remember that they have MIRVs (i.e. in some cases "one ICBM" can drop nukes on 12 different cities as long as they're close enough to each other). Australia is also closer to China than the USA, so some of their missiles that can't hit the USA can hit us.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Doing a bit of googling, the solar panels would probably be the highest risk since they have the longest dimensions and thus highest field strength difference from end to end.
Note that size only matters here if it's the size of a conductor (i.e. metal) attached to a semiconductor, not the size of the semiconductor itself (because the semiconductor's resistance also depends on size and that cancels out).
But that's kind of irrelevant; yes, photovoltaic solar cells are low-voltage semiconductor devices (specifically, they're giant diodes) and are thus likely toast if exposed to EMP. Solar-thermal can be EMP-proof, as there's no specific need for semiconductors and metals don't really care about EMP, but AIUI solar-thermal generators are more a thing for power stations than something remotely portable.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
I know it’s fashionable in some parts of the internet to fantasize about society collapsing and having to build it back, being revealed as a Nietzschean superman in the process or whatever. I guess the aesthetic vision doesn’t appeal to me. [...] The bombs won’t fall.
It's definitely not locked in, which is why I'm not following extreme advice like "manufacture a ghost gun" which would have substantial downside risk. But come on, basic gambler's logic. A 1% chance of avoiding death is worth spending $500 iff my life is worth more than $50,000 to me, which it obviously is since I can't exactly spend my money if I'm dead and I don't have any children yet; a probability of <1% for nuclear war in the next ten years seems pretty risible to me (from base rates: nukes have been used in anger in one conflict in the 79 years they've existed, so 10 years = 1/8 = 12.5%; from Reliable Sources: the Doomsday Clock is set closer to midnight than it's literally ever been; from my own actual Inside View: the West is reeling from the culture war, the PRC shows little interest in playing by the rules, there are intersecting red lines on Taiwan, and the spooks are spooked which has me spooked).
And, um... you do realise how offensive it is to implicitly accuse me of a) adopting beliefs because of fashion and/or hope rather than logic, and b) hoping for a billion people to die, yes? I am not Hitler and I'm not a sheep.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
When Israel was imagined in the late 19th century, the Arabs were a docile people under the absolute rule of Christian Europeans.
Point of order: while there were some parts of southern and eastern Arabia under British control in the 19th century, Western imperial control of the Levant didn't happen until the 20th (specifically with the conquest of the Ottoman Empire in WWI by the British and French, who carved it up into Syria/Lebanon/Palestine/Transjordan/Iraq).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
No. I mean to live.
Kant's categorical imperative says that we should do those things that we would have all do. If all shirk in such a time, there will be no more humanity, and all we have accomplished will come to naught: the ultimate tragedy. Bentham said we should act to ensure the greatest happiness for the greatest number - which means we need to maintain that number if ever there is to be happiness again.
For all history, mankind has taken the world with all its faults and worked to make it better for the next generation. I will not abandon that proud tradition. If destiny says I'll live in hard times, I want to endure them, so that there may again be good times for me, for the children I hope to have, and for humanity.
I believe in something greater than myself, greater than some momentary pain. I want a better tomorrow, and I can't help build it if I'm dead. Dying for a cause can be worthwhile, if the death achieves enough. But dying for nothing? No, thank you.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
What happens if your own government starts rationing and sends out commissars to take all the food that isn’t nailed down?
Then the stockpile is irrelevant because it would be taken by those commissars.
It's tricky to come up with a situation where both I actually need the food and I get to keep it, particularly since I'm regional, not rural (a cult compound in the middle of nowhere can definitely use the food, but I don't live in one).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
I think you might be underestimating the sheer scale of Australia's food surplus; we could lose a lot of efficiency without Australians starving (as opposed to Asia starving from our exports stopping), because we've got 2.5 times the arable land/people ratio of even the USA. Transporting it is still an issue, but Australia does have some oil.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Hmm, hadn't put two and two together regarding 131I having a long enough half-life that I'd need to eat before it was all gone and also being somewhat inhalable. Guess that goes on the list; thanks.
Guns are a legal headache here in Oz, and going the illegal route doesn't seem like a great cost-benefit at present. I suppose I could get a compound bow; those are the most effective fully-legal weapon of which I'm aware.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
What belongs on a nuclear-prep shopping list?
NB: I live in country Australia, so there will be some things notably missing from mine that others might want. In particular, Australia is not going to have a long-lasting food shortage due to our immense food production and paucity of viable nuclear targets, and I don't need to worry about being directly injured by nuclear blasts (this is not a coincidence; it's why I didn't move back to Melbourne).
Here's what's already on my list:
- Bottled water (as in, the cheap huge bottles), in case water supplies get contaminated by fallout (I have 20L)
- A battery- or hand-powered radio, to pick up emergency broadcasts (don't have this yet)
- Aluminium foil, to wrap up electronics (including aforementioned radio) to protect from EMP (don't have this yet)
- Some means of transportation that will work after EMP (I have a bicycle; an ICE car would arguably be better but I can't drive)
What else belongs on such lists? Does something I mentioned not belong on the list?
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
Furthermore, you act like they aren't even real. Like they don't even count, without any basis. Just "Nope, you don't get to use citations for that." We doing hate facts now here?
You cited Bing searches; those aren't sources of information but notoriously-unreliable aggregators. I'm pretty sure I rated your earlier comment either "Bad" or "Deserves a warning" on the volunteer page, and part of it was because the only motive I could come up with for citing Bing searches (given that a Bing search is not going to convince anybody) was that you were hoping people would take the existence of the link as evidence without actually checking what the link was.
If you'd dug a bit deeper to provide actual sources, I'd have been much more positively disposed toward your post and I imagine Amadan would too.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
If I really truly believe that something is an existential threat to humans, I’m not going to let petty politics on other subjects get in the way of fixing it.
That is the correct response, given that you are all of: rational, consequentialist, and not convinced that success will occur regardless.
However, most people are not consequentialists, and many people are not rational.
Most libertarians oppose bans on loli hentai for exactly this reason.
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