quiet_NaN
1mo ago
cis [...] men who were raped
In the woke mindset, men are the oppressors, helping them is at best a distraction from the fight of structural oppression. Almost all rapists are men, and any man who rapes other men is a sexual minority. Now, if you are a high status, handsome, gay man of a known-to-be-oppressed ethniciy, and your rapist was some creepy, fat, powerful, bisexual white dude, then that might be enough that fighting for you would be fighting against structural oppression, but anything less does not fit the narrative.
Cynically, if you want people to care about (male) prison rapes, what you should do is claim some 90% of all prison rapes are White Nazis raping some poor Black kid.
Of course, from what I remember most of MeToo was never about violent rape. Instead, it was more about coercion, from 'have sex with me and you will get the role' to 'senior colleague is hitting on a younger colleague, who feels their collaboration might be in danger if she rejects him'.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
if there's a bar fight, as a society we don't want the altercation to progress to shooting.
I think that this is a value judgement of society, and I am not sure I agree. I think that once you rule out escalation, the consequences of punching someone at a bar are rather limited. I mean, if you seriously injure or kill your victim, you will go to prison, and if you lose the fight then you might get beaten up, but I would expect that many non-consensual bar fights do not even make in in the police statistics.
Every bar should be free to declare itself a free-for-all dojo. Sign a waiver, enjoy your drink and punch anyone whose face you don't like, if you kill someone we will sort it out just like we would with MMA. Probably not a great place to pick up women, though.
But absent such a consent, I take a very dim view on violence. If you are a adult person of sound mind who was not drugged against their consent, and you think that violence is an acceptable solutions to whatever the fuck your problem is, I have very little sympathy. If the alternatives are that you get to beat up people until you finally maim someone and end up in prison, or you are either motivated enough by the threat of deadly retaliation to keep your fucking barbaric urges under control, or otherwise your third bar fight ends up with you bleeding to death with a punctured lung, then I will very much prefer the latter world.
What gets me is the pro-Palestinian not also getting charged.
Totally agree. Prosecutional discretion seems bad in this case. Perhaps the old English system where anyone could bring criminal charges would be better here.
But even without the politics, the incentives for the DA are very bad here. They want to win the high profile case, not some minor battery case. And if the defense can point out that the victim was already convicted for battery, that will lower their chances of winning the big case. So they throw that case under the bus, justice be damned.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
This overtime proposal is interesting since it only rewards people who are already working more than 40 hours a week. And it will, of course, hit mostly blue collar workers.
My guess is that the median overtime hour worked may well be by some minimum wage worker struggling to make ends meet, but the median dollar earned through overtime is earned by some doctor or lawyer.
Let's face it, the single mum working three different shit jobs to feed her family is not going to pay a lot of taxes -- nor should she. Tax cuts benefit the people who are in the higher tax brackets, i.e. the well-off.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Doxxing people still seems bad.
The Wikipedia article mentions that some rifling is achieved through electrochemical machining ("reverse electroplating"). Still, I think the barrel is a major bottleneck. Most hardware stores likely don't happen to sell high grade steel piping with an inner diameter of 9mm, I guess.
I also don't quite get some design choices. Is that buffer stock required? Wikipedia implies that there are variants without the buffer, so possibly not? Given that the barrel length is significantly shorter than even the infamous MAC-10, why go for the SMG form factor at all instead of treating it as a slightly oversized hand gun?
Anyone relying on one would rather have a conventionally manufactured firearm or, at least, some professionally machined parts.
Agreed.
It's good enough for self-defense though.
In my opinion, no. Don't get me wrong, I would rather fight an attacker with that thing than with my bare hands. But I don't think it is a good option given the risk landscape in areas with tight gun control, such as Europe.
Generally, people are cheap, don't want to go to prison and don't want to die because their self-defense (or rather home defense -- that thing is a bit large to keep in your coat just in case) option failed, often in increased order of priority.
The FGC-9 is cheap, sure. It also poses little risk of discovery for someone who who has excellent online opsec, certainly less than using a dark net marketplace. (Of course, buying the ammo will expose you to all the same risks as buying a gun and serve as probable cause to search your property if you are discovered.)
However, if one was discovered for any reason (such as using the weapon for home defense), you will not get any rebate for it being a homemade weapon of limited reliability instead of a standard 9mm.
If you estimate it unlikely that you will need a home defense weapon, then getting a 3d-printed weapon is not worth the hassle and risk of prison. Depending on your jurisdiction, there are likely a number of options you can just legally buy, from pitchforks to crossbows.
If you think there is a significant risk that your life will depend on your ability to win home defense fight, then you don't want a homebrew solution which might fail you in that moment. Getting a hunting licence or joining a sport shooting club are often avenues to legal gun ownership, albeit not the ability to carry your guns loaded in public spaces. (Technically, I think you are also not allowed to keep them loaded them for home defense, but 'I only took the gun out of the safe and loaded it when I heard glass breaking' will be plausible, 'I only printed my FGC-9 when I heard glass breaking' not so much.)
Now the main limiting factor for an individual in a restricted jurisdiction (see: most of the world) is ammo.
Agreed. From my understanding, you would need casings, primers, powder and a projectile.
Casings and bullets are mechanical, but I am very doubtful that 3d printing will help very much there (besides casting molds for lead, perhaps).
Primers and powder are chemistry. Both are technically explosives, but with much higher quality requirements than what some bomb-maker would care about. Most people prefer not having to clean their barrels between shots in a gunfight.
In a lot of areas, the option available to private citizens have exploded greatly expanded. The amount of electronic components or machine parts I can order from the internet is higher than ever. For chemicals, the opposite feels true. Substances you would have found in youth chemistry kits in the 1970s will raise eyebrows if you want to buy them as an adult today. Table salt is about the only chemical where you can be reasonably sure not to land on a watchlist if you buy it, and you can't produce gunpowder from it.
(Dear authorities: I have no plans to acquire any firearms, munitions or explosives. I own pepper spray strictly for animal defense and will get rid of it once it becomes verboten.)
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I agree that the sex revolution enabled by effective birth control (and abortion procedures) did have negative side effects.
But then, any important invention had negative side effects. The printing press was near the beginning of a causal chain which lead to a few bigger wars in Europe. The Internet contributed to increased human isolation. The chemical revolution enabled the horrors of chemical warfare.
It was not all sunshine and rainbows before the sexual revolution. For men, raising a family with their wife may be close to the optimal evolutionary strategy, but it can still be improved upon by impregnating a few other women in whose child-rearing you are not invested on the side.
The trope of a man seducing a virgin girl, having sex with her and then moving on, leaving her either 'dishonored' and unfit for marriage in the eyes of their society or actually pregnant, in which case her choices might be suicide, infanticide (which will be punished as murder) or becoming the sex worker society already considers her to be anyhow are pretty omnipresent in German literature, from Goethe's Faust to Mann's Untertan. Or high status men fucking their female servants (who are in no position to object) and then kicking them out of their household in shame as harlots once they are visibly pregnant.
While I agree that the number of unmarried sex-acts per capita has doubtlessly increased since then, I would argue that the negative consequences of such acts -- especially for women -- have drastically decreased since then.
Freedom from consequences is axiomatically harmful to human actualization and that's half our politics.
I guess you don't wear a seat belt in a car, as its only purpose is to protect you from your consequences of your decisions. Granted, sometimes the decision was just 'enter the road when you know that there are unsafe drivers', but that is just the way of life.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
As a part of sex ed, you teach that while contraception can prevent a majority of pregnancies, only abstinence can prevent it 100%.
That is demonstrably untrue. Gay sex and lesbian sex carries no risk of pregnancy, and there are plenty of ways for cishet couples to have sex besides PIV which drastically reduces the risk of pregnancy, such as oral or anal sex.
Based on the past success of a sex education focused on abstinence, I think that a sex education which focuses on anal sex would likely be more effective.
There are cases where reasonably proficiently used birth control methods lead to pregnancy, but I would wager that most unwanted pregnancies result from sexual encounters where birth control was either not used at all or used in obviously deficient ways as a result of a lack of advance planning or intoxication.
If you teach students
It is preferable to learn how to use birth control in a safe and comfortable environment. If you are using a condom correctly, the risk of pregnancy is small. If it fails in obvious ways, you should take Plan B. In the unlikely event that it fails in non-obvious ways, you can get an abortion. Carry condoms with you whenever there is a chance you might end up having sex with someone. that will in my estimate lead to a small number of unwanted pregnancies.
However, if you teach students
Birth control methods are not 100%, so the only safe way to avoid pregnancy is not to have sex. Wear these purity rings and remember that only sluts have sex outside marriage. Don't carry condoms, they will only lure you into thinking it is safe to have sex WHEN IT IS NEVER EVER SAFE.
then my prediction is that the median student will not have any planned sexual contacts. As the sex drive is quite strong in late-teenage humans (selection pressure) and most people don't marry and have kids early, it is very likely that at some point -- typically under the influence of alcohol -- the sex drive wins against Jesus. A drunk makeout session after some party is not a good time to learn how to use a condom even if any of the participants had the foresight to bring some. The mixture of shame and booze will likely not help with acknowledging what happened and seeking a morning-after pill, and might also lead to denial about a pregnancy which will eventually either lead to a late-term abortion or an unwanted kid being born, neither of which I consider good outcomes.
Abstinence education treats the sex drive as a lake whose flooding can be prevented by a huge enough dam made out of fear and shame. I would treat it as a river which can't be blocked, but certainly can be channeled in a way in which it is least likely to cause harmful flooding.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Because these Institutions are feeders into the political, economic, and cultural institutions that rule over us.
I think that this is the real problem.
It is not that Harvard is ten times as efficient at teaching, so if I randomly send one student to Harvard and another to a decent state school, the Harvard alumni will totally destroy the other one on merit.
Or at least, it is not only that. Swimming in money and being able to attract the very best people as tutors will likely help education quality some.
But mainly, I think it is a mixture of two things. First, the pure signaling value. 'That student did something which is very difficult to do and vaguely related with merit, namely getting into an elite school, so we should update towards them being competent'.
The other thing is that you can form connections to other people with high signaling value who have already achieved or will likely achieve positions of power.
I want to contrast this a bit with the system we have in Germany. Here, the choice of university matters a lot less. For example, if you look at the currently serving SCOTUS Justices, you will notice that eight out of nine of them went to either Harvard or Yale. Compare this to the number of universities where the judges of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht studied law. For sixteen judges, I counted some eleven different places of study -- there is remarkably little clustering. Study at Kiel or Konstanz, it will not open or close any doors for you.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Well, I think that it is unfair that happy families were represented and joyless cohabitation projects doomed to end in divorce, trauma and drug abuse were not adequately represented in unicode. I mean, these kids have it hard enough, the least we can do for them is having an emotionally adequate representation of their childhood.
I jest.
What I really think is that rather than trying to enumerate all possible family situations, it might be better to just compose families out of emoticons for individual family members.
Representing 'formerly three adults: an adult of indeterminate gender who left (red X superimposed), a blonde woman and a bearded man who died (bearded ghost icon), as well as a toddler, an female elementary student and dog and formerly a cat (which also left, red X)' in a single character is probably not feasible.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Bayes to the rescue: If you pull a gold coin from a box, that is strong evidence that the box is pure gold (because with a gold box, you will always get that measurement), neutral evidence that it is mixed (because with a mixed box you /can/ get that measurement) and rules out that you have the pure silver box.
If you start with a uniform prior, then you should end up with 2/3 pure gold, 1/3 mixed, which will give the probability you said.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
It also fully covered me for the $100k hospital bill I got when I broke my leg.
What kind of broken leg are we talking about here? A simple fracture of one of the long bones (the central case for 'broken leg', imho), or multiple fractures, including smaller bones, perhaps with a hip joint replacement and some knee surgery thrown in? Because that price for just 'do an x-ray (or even ct), make a cast, perhaps do another x-ray' would be insane.
Or is this just the sticker price, and what your insurance ended up paying was more like $3k?
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Hot take: election prediction should be split into two different jobs: pollsters and oracles.
Pollsters should just ask short, neutral questions and just report the results without any leeway to skew things, like "if today were US presidential elections, who would you vote for?"
If 10% of the respondents are jokesters who reply Lizardman Hitler, they should just report 'Lizardman Hitler at 10%'.
Oracles are the likes of Nate Silver (formerly 538), who have their voting models which takes in polls and any other considerations ('Lizardman Hitler is not on the ballot', 'Shy Tory effect', 'My goldfish Frodo is more depressed than usual') and form a prediction out of them.
If they get it wrong, you can give the oracles shit, but never the pollsters, because they just truthfully reported what people said they were going to vote for. If you trusted people not to lie, that is on you.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I agree that the Wikipedia article is quite illustrative.
I think I have a few objections to STV over simple proportional representation with party lists.
- I don't care for districts. The idea to physically visit my representative's office in town would never cross my mind, the internet exists. The only thing districts exist for are redirecting federal gravy trains to their constituents. I have no problem with voters voting for someone from their own city or state, but that should be their choice, not pre-baked in the election system.
- If you put all the candidates for a parliament onto the ballot so I can rank the candidates who I actually care for, that will be a bloody long ballot. There are 733 representatives in the Bundestag, the number of candidates per seat are likely higher by a factor of five or so.
- While Arrow's theorem affects all voting systems, it does not affect all voting systems equally in practice. With party-list proportional representation, if I have an oracle of how everyone else will vote, there is just so much strategy I can apply. You could check if your vote will influence the possible coalitions (which would be very unlikely but also very powerful), but otherwise, you vote for whatever party best represents your values. (Without an oracle, it is generally a mix of both of these considerations.) However, with STV, strategic votes matter a lot. Suppose my preferred candidate is very popular, and I expect a ton of people to vote for them, so he gets x>q votes, where q is the quota for election. This means that in the next round, my vote will be discounted by factor of (x-q)/x. So if I know beforehand that my preferred candidate will get elected, it would be rational not to vote for them, and instead put all my efforts into backing my next preference. However, this strategy is not stable -- if everyone assumes that their preferred candidate will win anyhow, nobody will vote for them.
- In list-based proportional representation, the one thing keeping representatives in line is that if they don't vote along the party line, they might not find themselves on a favorably spot on the list for the next election. The deal offered by parties is basically: 'be our straw man for voting in parliament, in exchange you get to shape (party) policy in some area and have a relaxed job with good compensation and little heavy lifting'. If there are no lists and getting elected depends on the population searching for your name on the ballot, incentives change dramatically. Your most likely competitors for votes are your colleagues in your party. Your best strategy is to throw them under the bus. If your party is woke, accuse them of being racists. The resulting equilibrium would be that you no longer have parties (yay!), but instead have a parliament filled with 700 independent representatives who were the most successful at selling their own brand like some youtubers. Now imagine having to find a majority coalition among the top 700 youtubers.
While I am a strong proponent of 'one person, one vote' for electing parliament, I don't think it is required that every representative shares the same voting power in parliament. Instead of transferring votes, one could simply say that if a candidate reaches x>q votes, their voting power in parliament will simply be scaled by factor x/q. You would get much smaller fractions where a few key players of each party make up most of the votes, plus perhaps a few hanger-ons whose main appeal is that they represent niche interests, plus some popular independents.
Finally, you are correct that changing voting systems is hard. The powers that be have formed in response to the present voting systems. While it is sometimes in their best interests to change particulars to entrench their party interests (e.g. gerrymandering) it will almost never be in the interest of a supermajority to fundamentally change the voting system, especially not in a way which lets in outsiders.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I think you are massively over-interpreting the data.
-
There is some correlation between income and IQ (which is in turn correlated with genetics). Likely, there are different effects at play here: Rich caretakers will invest more in educating which will lead both to higher IQ and better paying jobs, but of course a lot of high-paying jobs (STEM, law, medicine, etc) also have some implicit IQ requirements.
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There is at least some correlation to number of children between generations, parts of it purely cultural. Kids who grew up in large families are more likely to have many children themselves. On the other hand, a significant part of incomes are from inheritance. Most people living in cities spend a huge fraction of their income on rent, and most landlords did not earn their properties through the work of their hands but through inheritance. It stands to reason that a single child whose mother was 40 when she gave birth will on average inherit more money than one born to a five-kids family whose mother gave births between 20 and 35, even if either ones parents owned exactly the same amount.
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You look at the income to fertility curve of blacks in the US and conclude that they true for blacks in Africa. If the relationship between IQ and fertility in each ethnicity was constant, then 10k years (perhaps 400 generations) ago blacks should have been very smart and whites really dumb given that today their intelligence is roughly similar. This is nonsense.
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The source in the plot is cited as "American Community Survey". I am not sure if they are affiliated with the IRS and telling them their income is a bad idea if you are cheating on taxes. Just dismissing Hispanics because "anecdotally they do lots of tax fraud" feels epistemically bad, if you believe that tax fraud is significantly affecting the data, then your data is useless, unless you have statistics showing that 99% of the Hispanics cheat on taxes and only 1% of the non-Hispanics.
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I disagree with your value-loaded adjectives 'dysgenic' and 'eugenic'. All things being equal, a person with a higher IQ is probably more beneficial to society than one with lower IQ in most scenarios. But what you are actually measuring is parental income, which is somewhat correlated to IQ, which then has a strong genetic component. As you use these adjectives, the implications are that a successful drug dealer reproducing is good while a person working an unglamorous job (such as a truck driver) is bad.
As this is the CW thread, we should also discuss how Dobbs will affect this curve. My prediction is that it will mainly increase the fertility of the lower income population. We are selecting not only for parents who were not able to use birth control successfully, but also for people who lack the resources or executive function to travel to another state to terminate their pregnancy. If the IQ 135 math student gets pregnant by accident (not terribly likely, imho), her professor parents will pay for a trip to another state. If the IQ 90 high school dropout raised by a single mom with a substance problem, who discovered sex and booze when she was 14 finally gets pregnant (a more likely scenario), she might not have the financial and executive resources to go on a trip to a blue state.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Hitler is best understood as a Golem figure, built by both Communists and Capitalists to protect against the Other, only to turn on each in their turn.
I have some problems with that statement.
In the subtext, one of the defining features of the Golem is that it is a Jewish creation. If you want to imply that Hitler's rise was the result of him being backed by Jewish interests, please state so outright. Otherwise, a better metaphor might be 'a demon summoned' than 'a golem built'.
Before his rise to power, Hitler was definitely backed by German industrialists. They could see the specter of communism looming, and were seeing Hitler as the strong man who could defeat communism. Industrialists (at least the ones considered proper Germans by the Nazis) mostly fared much better under the Nazis than they would have under communist rule, especially once the anti-capitalist SA was out of the picture. (I guess they had more influence in the Weimar Republic, where they could not be arrested on a whim, but mostly they got to keep their riches as long as they were willing to build tanks when ordered.)
I am unsure how much international backing there was for Hitler in the Weimar time, outside of German expats. I mean, on the one hand he was likely seen as necessary against the commie threat, on the other hand the Western allies had fought a long and bloody war against an expansionist Germany.
Before Hitler became chancellor, communists were strictly anti-Nazi. While united in their disgust at parliamentary democracy, they both had very different and incompatible revolutions in mind for Germany, and both knew that the other side winning would result in their side getting purged and losing.
By contrast, in 1939, Stalin knew that a commie revolution in Germany was not in the cards. It is true that with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, he gave a ton of resource aid to Germany which enabled the Blitzkrieg. I am unsure how militarily sound that was as a strategy, in hindsight. I have a hard time imagining Western Allies to decide to enter a land war with Russia to rid the world of communism, so Hitlers defeat of France likely bought the USSR no security.
I am not sure if Nazi Germany ever got significant aid from the Western allies between 33 and 39. At the most, I think that the obligations under the Versailles treaty were not imposed, and he was allowed to amass troops about that treaties limitations.
Of course, both Western allies and the USSR were not in a position to fight a war against Germany in 1933, so Appeasement might have been the best strategy. As the old adage goes, diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice dog' while looking for a bigger stick.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Once we dig deep enough, the real reason World War II started was to preserve Anglo hegemony over Europe, the exact same reason that Britain joined World War I.
Sorry, but what Anglo hegemony existed in continental Europe before WW1? To my knowledge, there were few if any British or US troops stationed on the continent at that time. Neither the US nor the Brits were in a position to push France or Spain or Germany or Austria or Italy or Switzerland around by threat of overwhelming violence.
As any player of Paradox games like Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis knows, if you allow your regional rival to absorb smaller countries until they control a large empire, this will be very detrimental to your future security interests. The British generally have a strategic interest against an Europe which is militarily united from Lisbon to St. Petersburg (at least unless they are part of that military union).
The regional power most likely to achieve conquering huge parts of Europe was Germany. So it makes sense that they opposed anything which would see Germany getting stronger, such as allowing them to defeat France and extending their territory.
Especially in WW2, their security interests and international law happened to align, as Hitler was not uniting Europe by charming the Polish into voting for him, but by outright conquest and annexation.
By contrast, the USSR was a lesser threat to British security interests in 1939. Sure, if it conquered all of Europe to Calais, that would be a problem for them, but the USSR was not in a position to just steam roll over Germany, and the ideological differences between Stalin and Hitler (with the Nazis considering the Slavs Untermenschen, and the Soviets considering the Nazis evil capitalists) made a long term joint military effort unlikely.
Of course, once Germany was soundly defeated, the geostrategic landscape changed, and the two blocks emerged. This is the point where I would assert an Anglo hegemony over Western Europe.
It should also be noted that Germany was not especially threatened in 1939. Of the regional powers, neither the Brits nor the French nor the Polish had any plans to jointly attack Germany and annex parts of it -- they had gotten their territorial claims in 1918. The USSR was perhaps a different story. A risk-adverse German leader might have co-founded NATO in 1935 to secure their future security interests against potential USSR expansions.
But Hitler was not content with Germany not being the strongest player, so he opted to conquer Europe instead.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
To be fair, they are less pacifist and more pro-Putin. I am sure that if someone invaded a part of Germany, they would sing a different tune.
I agree with you though that their objection to aid for Ukraine -- which they share with the new BSW -- is not something which is beyond the pale.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I am sorry, but I don't see it.
The German word 'Union' simply means 'merger', no relation to trade unions. I guess that it refers to the fact that both Catholics (which had their own party in Weimar) and Protestants are welcome.
I also think that the CDU is in fact democratic. There were parties which were genuinely anti-democratic, such as the KPD (which wanted the dictatorship of the proletariat), monarchists or the NSDAP. The CDU/CSU wants none of that. If by some miracle, the SPD had won an absolute majority in Bavaria in the 1970s, they would have peacefully transferred power to them without pulling a Trump.
Their Christianity is indeed debatable. But then again, you can't look into the hearts of people. Perhaps Merz has deeply held Christian beliefs, or perhaps his most cherished belief is that he should be chancellor and he recognizes that he won't get there leading the FDP. Perhaps Christianity (as in WWJD) played a role in Merkel's decision to let the refugees in in 2015.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Many borders are accidents of history. If things had gone different, the Texas might still be Mexican, or some other Mexian state might also have joined the US. In feudal societies, it might be down to the order in which some nobles croaked and inheritance was passed along. Sometimes it was just some guy with a straight ruler who could just as well have drawn his line a few arc-minutes further north or south. Sometimes, little details end up being crucial. Hong Kong might have been leased for 50 or 150 years instead of 99. Sure, if the Soviets had organized Ukraine differently, then it might have stayed with Russia when the USSR collapsed. "But I have a reasonable historical claim to these lands" might have flown in 1200 CE, but it does not fly in 2020 any more.
I think Putin wants Russia to become a hegemonic power, as it was during both the Empire and the USSR. Unlike the USSR, he is not motivated by a communist political ideology, but by a blend of nationalism and conservative Christianity, which is why I compared him to the Tsars.
I have not claimed that he precisely wants the territories Russia or the USSR held at any point, but I think the claim that he strives for Russia to be a dominant local power, as it was in the Empire (or during much of the USSR) can be rather well supported. To phrase that as "to restore Russia to the Tsarist glory days" is putting it a bit polemically, perhaps like claiming of an aspiring bodybuilder "he wants to become the next Schwarzenegger".
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
With Tiktok, Chinese intelligence gains a great deal of data about the U.S. military and intelligence, including the location of many or all of our secret bases and personal details about the people who work in them.
This seems like a fig leaf reason.
- US personnel are a tiny minority of the population, banning it for everyone would be disproportionate. Just tell the soldiers that they can't bring their private phones to their bases and have to use phones which vetted software instead.
- Most info you get from phone tracking in non-restricted spaces is actually not that valuable. You could probably get the same by using classical spy work, like just observing people or putting trackers on their cars. I mean, if it was the seventies, you could try to find a serviceman who frequents the local gay night club and try to blackmail him over that, but today he would just laugh at you. You would require something heinous to entice treason (perhaps being a serial killer or child abuser), which is highly non-trivial to figure out from location data.
- Most of all, Tiktok is hardly the only avenue for getting location data. People have a shit-ton of apps installed, facebook, whatsup, tinder, candy crush, pokemon go, etc. Probably even some other apps controlled by the PRC either directly or through letterbox companies. As a general rule, all of these apps will gather all the data they can get their grubby little hands on, and store it somewhere in the cloud. If you think that the PRC can not get access to the location records of half the US smart phones, I would call you very optimistic.
The Tiktok ban is purely about controlling the flow of information between users on the platform, and what the algorithm could push.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I think that the hostages are basically a distraction, geopolitically.
I am willing to cut the IDF some slack for hostage saving operations, if 50 civilian Palestinians and 30 Hamas die in an operation that ends up rescuing a few hostages, I will not cry foul at them for valuing the lives of their own citizens higher than that of the civilians of a territory whose government are murderous bandits. Much more slack than for accepting collateral damage for other goals such as offing yet another Hamas lieutenant. Other than that, the hostages should not make a difference.
In the meta-game, the winning response to hostage-taking is to ignore the kidnappers demands. If you roll over whenever someone takes your citizens hostage, expect to be doing a lot of rolling over.
The problem with Nethanyahu's war is that is is not actually winning. Defeating Hamas would (at least) require occupying Gaza, and the IDF seems unable to do that. Just striking here and there until all of Gaza is living in some refugee camps will not get rid of Hamas (killing half of their bandits will not accomplish anything on a decade scale), and seems like a waste of human lives.
I think Biden (or his minders) does not care too much about lives of the remaining hostages either, and mostly uses this as political leverage on Bibi.
Gaza really deserves the Germany-45 treatment (occupation and the stamping out of their government), but if nobody is willing and able to do that and if we have to suffer Hamas to live either way, then it seems strictly better to cut a deal with them where both sides refrain from bombing each other rather than fighting a war whose objective will never be fulfilled. Bringing the hostages home would make it seem less like the defeat it actually is.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
While I'll be the first to say I find the labeling of the European right as 'far right' more indicative of European peculiarities and attempts to stigmatize political opponents than objective
I don't really agree with that. For the existence of the BRD, the disavowal of the Nazis has been universal in every party. "What Germans did then was uniquely bad, and we should be ashamed about that" was consensus outside of a few fringe parties like the NPD. Granted, in the beginning, the consensus was mostly "let us not talk about it", while after 1968, it shifted to a culture of remembrance. Feeling bad about German atrocities has been a core part of German identity since then, and I think we are better for it.
The AfD, especially in the person of Bjoern Hoecke, breaks this consensus. If I was a smaller country bordering Germany, I would get a bit concerned about a German leader waxing about the 'thousand years of glorious history' of Germany, given historic precedent in that period. I mean, nobody would expect a chancellor Hoecke to try to restore the borders of the Reich in 1914, but then few people suspected that Putin would be willing to start a war of annexation in Europe to restore Russia to the Tsarist glory days.
Hoecke is trying to walk as close to the line drawn by StGB § 86a (which outlaws "Sieg Heil" and the like) without crossing it (and then gets convicted for using the more obscure SA slogan "Alles fuer Deutschland). And where the other parties treat the swastika-tattooed mobs as toxic, the AfD is willing to tolerate them in their voelkisch wing.
Then there is that whole Remigrationskonferenz thing (called Wannsee 2.0 by some). What was said and by whom is contested, but there are credible claims that some called for deporting German citizens if they had the wrong ethnicity, which would be completely beyond the pale. I mean, restricting political asylum is one thing (and unless you have a 2/3 majority, expect the German supreme court to have an opinion on that, because that right is in the constitution), but this is something different. Sending people with US passports back to the birth country of their ancestors is way out the overton window for US politics, and it is similar for Germany.
So no, I don't think that calling the AfD (especially in Thuringia, where Hoecke is the leader) extreme right is wrong.
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Regarding the outcome of the elections, I think this puts the parties in the middle of the spectrum in a bit of a bind. I mean, they can form very large coalitions. Looking at the distribution of seats in Thuringia, if you want a majority without the AfD, you would require some delegates from every other party (except for the SPD) to at least tolerate your government. Given that BSW was formed in a messy breakway from the Linke ('the left'), this seems like a tall order. For Saxony, the situation looks a bit less dire because the conservative CDU did very well. Still, you are stuck with either CDU+Linke+SPD+Greens, or three-partner coalition with CDU+BSW+any, neither of which sound very stable. And four years from now, whoever was formed that coalition is likely going to get punished for it, unless the East Germans are actually satisfied with both state level and federal administrations (fat chance, that).
On the other hand, anyone who had campaigned on not forming a coalition with the AfD (which I gather are basically all of the parties) actually forming a government with them would be a blatant betrayal of the voters trust. In Germany, we have the concept of "Steigbuegelhalter" (literally stirrup holder), which generally refers to the parties which formed a coalition with the NSDAP in 1933 (and were eventually assimilated into it for their troubles). Nobody wants to be that guy.
As an opponent to the AfD, I thus would have liked it better if Hoecke had won 51% in Thuringia, because then he would have to deliver, and show how pushing asylum seekers to other German states would solve the manifold social, demographic and economic problems of East Germany.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
If we are talking economic output, then rock bottom would be 'everyone is dead'. However, this is a really hard state to reach, even horrendous commie countries don't make it that far.
Of course, there is no bouncing back from that state.
In general, I am skeptical of the 'things have to get worse so they can then get better' meme. The real world is not full of either metaphorical or physical springboards.
Of course, I am also skeptical of the decline and fall narrative of the US. I don't think that every job will be that of a DEI officer eventually. Instead, it might eventually go the way of McCarthyism, where we got rich of most of the witch hunts (but obviously still screen job seekers in highly sensitive jobs like defense R&D for political leanings).
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I think the point of having a principal investigator, is that he is aware of what is going on.
If they are not in the loop of the research process, they is no point for them to be on the paper and they are just academic rent-seekers.
Granted, at some level, you have to trust in the non-maliciousness of your grad students. If a smart and highly capable PhD candidate decides to subtly massage their data, that could be difficult to impossible to catch by their supervisor. The way to avoid that is not to incentivize faking data (e.g. no "you need to find my pet signal to graduate"). The PhDs who would fake data because they are lazy are more easily caught, producing convincing fake data is not easy.
Of course, in this case, we are not talking about terabytes of binary data in very inconvenient formats, but about 170 patients. Personally, I find it highly unlikely that the graduate student found that data by happenstance, and his supervisor was willing to let them analyse it without caring for the pedigree of the data at all. I think the story that he provided the data in the first place, years after it was curated by another grad student whose work he did not check is more likely.
The recipients of Nobel prizes have often done none of the physical work that produced the result, or the analysis, or the write-up. Sometimes they didn't even come up with the theory.
In my field, physics, I don't generally feel that is the case. For one thing, people tend to get their Nobels much later than their discoveries. From my reading of wikipedia, when Higgs (along with a few other groups) published his paper on the Higgs mechanism, he was about ~35 and had just had his PhD for a decade, and a job as a Lecturer (no idea if this implies full tenure) for four years. Not exactly the archetype of a highly decorated senior researcher whose gets carried by tons of grad students towards his Nobel.
Also discussed on the ACX open thread here.
Crossposting my take:
Analogy time. Someone posts on twitter about the health benefits of drinking mercury. Millions follow them, the FDA starts to recommend a daily intake of 1g Hg. After a few years, someone happens to notice that a lot of people die of mercury poisoning.
Would it be fair to say that this twitter user has killed millions?
I would say perhaps, but there is clearly more blame to go around. Why would the FDA trust what a random person on twitter says, that is grossly irresponsible. Why did nobody notice all the bodies piling up?
Now, some people might claim there is a difference between trusting a random tweet and trusting a peer reviewed medical study, but in my mind, there is not -- only a complete fool would do either. At least do a meta-analysis of five studies done by different institutions (this leads to https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dml8wLEUUAASwZi.jpg but still seems like the least worst option). I mean, if Scott had written an article "Beta blockers before surgery: much more than you wanted to know", I would not have expected him to say "well, this guy sure publishes a lot of studies in favor of them, so I guess they are fine".
Also, if the new clinical guidelines based on the fraudulent study lead to a fucking 27% of excess mortality, there should be someone whose fucking job it is to notice that fact.
In a way, this feels like if Boeing decided to base their flight controls on a Windows 95 platform, and blame Microsoft for the resulting computer+plane crashes. It is fine to say that Microsoft is to blame because Win95 was obviously not fit for sale, but the bulk of error was to decide to control an airplane with it, so most of the blame would depend on the specifics: did MS actively push Fly-By-Win or did they not?
I think that most of the members of the red tribe will have a positive or neutral reaction to Trump, but that is about all it tells you.
Scott Alexander, as firmly part of the grey tribe as anyone could be, spent thousands of words to persuade republicans not to vote for Trump. Should I suspect that he is crypto-woke?
I consider myself part of the grey tribe and my reaction to Trump is mostly negative.
There are prominent republicans opposing Trump, does that make them blue tribe?
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