pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
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User ID: 278
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2d ago
That is the easily foreseeable outcome of a security guarantee. Trump is 100% correct not to offer this.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
5d ago
You cannot use commercial reactor fuel for weapons (except some kind of dirty bomb). It would be easier to make weapons material from scratch.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
5d ago
You're just dealing with a catastrophic loss of trust, driven by I think mostly Covid and woke ideological excess. That puts this stuff in the same category as public restrooms and park benches: it sure was nice when we lived in a society where we could have these things without them being abused and ruined for everyone.
pusher_robot
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6d ago
Winding back a bit to option A, to put things into perspective, what we’re presently doing is pretty much what led to WW2. Chamberlain and the rest of the west were in a stance of appeasement. By not actually fighting evil, we let it grow. Just as appeasement emboldened Hitler to push further, letting Russia keep gains now might signal to Putin—and others—that aggression pays.
On the other hand, forming a complicated web of alliances, security guarantees, and geopolitical networks is somewhat the thing that escalated into WWI. It's worth considering that making security guarantees allows the opponent to decide when to trigger a large scale conflict.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
6d ago
Of course, there are some on the American right who would be only too happy to dismantle the post-WW2 alliance system in favour of a more narrowly transactional approach, even at the cost of global influence and leadership.
What "influence and leadership" does the U.S. have that is not transactional already? EU seems to believe U.S. "leadership" consists of them making decisions and us paying for it. Our "influence" in most other countries consists mainly of bribery in the form of foreign aid and trade concessions. This is all transactional already! What soft power we do have comes from cultural output completely independent of and irrelevant to our foreign policy establishment, and that has all gone to absolute shit anyways.
From my perspective it seems like we're the Sugar Daddy who is promised that we're really, truly, loved and fun to be with, so long as the wallet comes out. They'll say nice(ish) things about us exactly as long the checks keep flowing. One second later, we're monsters who are killing the entire world.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
7d ago
Trump is a “make it so” kind of guy.
You mean Jean-Luc Picard? I don't know, I think if Trump was a starship captain he would be Jellico. "Get it done."
pusher_robot
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8d ago
I would distinguish activities that have a tangible, elevated risk of death from ones that have a risk of death high enough that the odds of dying in repeated acts over time approaches 1. Riding a motorcycle or smoking is risky, but someone who does those things, even their whole life, is not likely to die from them even though they might. Consuming recreational doses of street narcotics is something that, if you do it frequenlty enough, is very likely to kill you sooner or later.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
8d ago
Congress can delegate their power to subordinate positions. Why can't the President?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
8d ago
If you choose to repeatedly engage in an activity that you know has a high risk of death, that's just suicide with plausible deniability. I don't consider someone who loses a game of Russian roulette to have suffered a "fatal accident".
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
9d ago
"Safe, lethal legal, and rare." I've been fooled by this before.
That is to say, I believe you and believe your earnestness, but I just cannot conceive of how you would stop cultural slide on this without a solid Chesterton fence.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
9d ago
You can find papers with actuarial analysis, side effect rates and presentations, justification for the schedule and so on.
So do it.
I can't. You know I can't. I don't have the background training, or the time, or possibly even the raw intelligence. And even if I did, I don't have the credentials that are required to make my opinion valid.
This is just ordinary epistemic helplessness. I do know two things: first, that this is beyond my primary knowledge. Second, the people I trusted to inform me betrayed me.
I know of no other option than extreme skepticism until such time as trust can be rebuilt. But it does take time.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
10d ago
To me the most parsimonious explanation is that there are details that are relatively probable but highly embarrassing to the federal government. For example, if Oswald did indeed start shooting, but that it was an accidental discharge from a Secret Service agent (possibly still alive) which blew Kennedy's head off and killed him.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
10d ago
If you are a non-minority non-veteran, those jobs are all but closed to you.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
10d ago
Just finished Trinity's Child, the book which the HBO made-for-tv movie Dawn's Early Light is based on. It was written probably at the peak of 80's SIOP nuclear paranoia and presents a look at the difficulties that stopping even a limited engagement would be due to the number of dead-man's switches in place. The book is a little dour, and the writing has the flavor of a journalist trying their hand at creative writing, which is what it was, and it didn't pull too many punches. It's certainly no Tom Clancy novel in that respect, though it is similar in the way that it proceeds mechanistically on a fixed timeline across several plot threads. The movie was a remarkably faithful adaptation of the book, but obviously without the internal existential crises the characters go through in the book. I couldn't acquire it either physically or electronically new and had to buy a used copy that appears to be an original hardcover printing that circulated in the Richmond public library.
It was an interesting read, and it prompted me to think a while about why global thermonuclear war seems to trigger so little existential dread now as compared to then, despite the weapons still existing in roughly the same form. I suppose it's partly because the number has definitely been reduced but also because the perception at least is that with the breakup of the Soviet Union, the level of alert is noticeably lower. The bombers are not on 24-hour alert and the Post-Attack Command and Control System is not on continuous airborne alert status. However, the pieces are all still maintained and operational, and something like SIOP still exists. I think it's an underrated existential threat these days, compared to climate change and meteor strikes.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
10d ago
I thought there was some evidence that nicotine suppressed it?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
11d ago
Right? It wasn't that long ago that asking others to call you by a nickname was cringe. It wasn't that long ago that if your name kind of sucked, people would just choose a different one for you.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
13d ago
And I daresay that robotics is lagging enough that I'm skeptical that we'll see AI capable of physically navigating the real world independently, without using a human intermediary before we get AGI. They haven't yet hooked up an LLM to sensors that give it a constant stream of data about the real world that I know of, so maybe it can adapt faster than I expect. I wouldn't put anything out beyond 5 years.
This came out just this week: https://microsoft.github.io/Magma/
Magma is the first foundation model that is capable of interpreting and grounding multimodal inputs within its environment. Given a described goal, Magma is able to formulate plans and execute actions to achieve it. By effectively transferring knowledge from freely available visual and language data, Magma bridges verbal, spatial and temporal intelligence to navigate complex tasks and settings.
Things are moving very quickly now.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
15d ago
Doing this with an executive order is a naked grab for power from both the courts and congress, with no recourse for either.
Not so, executive orders are themselves reviewable by the Supreme Court.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
15d ago
Perhaps but at least the line of political accountability will be clear. There will be no question of where the buck stops.
pusher_robot
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20d ago
Doing it before-the-fact rather than after-the-fact enables what is essentially a DDOS attack on the decision-makers. Doing it in this order makes a flood-the-zone-with-appeals strategy work in favor of DOGE instead of against it.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
20d ago
The genius entrepreneur's elite crack team can't come up with a clearly-worded directive that accounts for "don't dump medical volunteers in the street with experimental equipment inside their bodies" without giving gender activists an out? Really?
No, it's literally impossible. Remember, you're dealing with people with sufficient motivated reasoning to pretend to be confused about words like "man" and "woman". People with years of critical theory training that teaches that meaning is subjective, and concepts constructed.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
22d ago
The operational strategy is that of Blitzkrieg: by forgoing careful, methodical advances in favor of moving as quickly as possible, you incur substantial tactical penalties, but this is more than made up for by disrupting the abilities of your opponents to respond effectively. If your advice were followed, it would give the defenders of USAID ample time to challenge every single cut to the maximum ability possible, likely with multiple consecutive injunctions, as well as reorganize and potentially reroute funding to prevent the next most likely targets. Then, when those programs are cut, even if they have not already been rerouted elsewhere already, they will be well-prepared to immediately mount a defense-in-depth. The effort would be halted in a quagmire of legal proceedings and public propaganda for so long with so many challenges that the public would despair of any change and the political support would evaporate. That's why the only effective strategy can possibly be to cut as much as possible as quickly as possible, then give back only where it is tactically prudent to do so.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
23d ago
I’m confused. You said if the President goes against the Constitution, then he should be removed. He has clearly violated the Constitution. Therefore he should be removed.
There is general agreement on this, but the question is who decides when this happens. According to the Constitution, the answer has been "Congress." As such, attempts to force this result by the judiciary are in this tradition inappropriate.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
24d ago
The point of separation of powers is that Congress actually isn't involved in the administrative operations.
What use do they have for citizenship?
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