quiet_NaN
1d ago
Religious exemptions are a nonsense idea.
Either a rule is genuinely important to have and exceptions shouldn't be given out (because it's important!), or the rule isn't actually important and therefore shouldn't exist.
I agree for the specific case. If a society decides that knives are bad, it seems silly to make exceptions.
Other things are more general rules than hills society is willing to die on. If you get a court date, there is a strong expectation that you will appear on that date, but you can probably get an exemption if your best friend is marrying on that day or you have an important medical appointment scheduled. There is little lost in also making "it is sabbath and it would be really inconvenient for me to get to court" also a valid excuse. Likewise, if Christians want to take a sip of wine with the Eucharist, it would be an asshole move to require their church to get a liqueur license. If kids miss a day of school a year for an important religious holiday, we can probably make an exception from the rule of mandatory school attendance, nor does there seem much point to require someone to take PE classes during Ramadan (or ever, but sadly society disagrees with me on that one).
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Unlike Floyd, Nowak was actually murdered
This is consensus building. [A jury convicted Chauvin of murder 2] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Derek_Chauvin). I am sure that his defense made pretty much the same arguments as you did, and obviously did not convince the jury.
Generally, you want to deter people from doing stuff which contributes to bad outcomes even when it is unclear if their contribution alone would have caused the bad outcome. If three people stab a victim and cause it to die from blood loss, we are not generally going to determine if the any of the assailants caused woulds which would have ensured death on their own, or if perhaps the victim might have survived if he had not taken an Asprin beforehand. Instead, we say that they all maliciously contributed in an attack which predictably resulted in death, so they are all murderers.
For Floyd, it seems plausible that Chauvin contributed to his death. He certainly acted with reckless disregard for his life. I do not give a rats as if his behavior was department policy, he can join the illustrious group of all the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg defense who were convicted despite claiming superior orders.
--
I will grant you that the optics in the new case are almost as terrible as for Floyd. But while the police response was inappropriate in hindsight, it certainly lacks Chauvin's recklessness, the contribution to the death is less likely and there is a convenient guilty party on which to focus the ire.
Personally, I think that an absolute no-brainer would be to cancel the religious exemption to the laws forbidding knives. An openly carried weapon is a promise of violence. Religious exemptions are for stuff like keeping the sabbath or covering your hair on your passport photo, not for rules society really cares about, like bodily integrity of kids or public safety.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I will grant you that just from the facts I have read, it is entirely possible that Wolfgang's company accumulated the debt through straightforward fraud and they are now living in luxury due to their ill-gotten gains.
However, I do not think this is overly likely. I surmise that the local law makes a distinction between fraud and debt, and it would be strange to only charge the latter if the former applied.
The more central possibility seems to be that his company either got unlucky or got played. Suppose you are a local noble, and you desire the company of a foreigner. You know your legal system works in practice, against whom laws get enforced and who is untouchable. So you get him to accept a contract with a local government, and then subcontract a significant amount to a locally owned company. The subcontractor does not deliver. Now he is a debtor to the government, and a creditor to some local noble. The court system is not going to send a local to debtors prison for a debt owed to a foreigner, but it will gladly send the foreigner to prison -- he might have offshore assets he could still cough up to shorten his stay.
I can not rule out the possibility that everyone rotting in debtor's prison in Dubai is guilty as sin, there might be a correlation between willingness to do business in autocraties and crookedness, after all. But I find a conviction in some Dubai court to be only very weak Bayesian evidence of guilt of anything, because I do not trust their justice system very much.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I agree, the median US net worth is not 19 million dollars, after all.
(It also matches intuition -- 0.05% is an amount you can spend every day for almost six years before going bankrupt. Literally the kind of money you can spend on a whim without thinking too much about it. If the average American tells their spouse they dropped 9k$ on a whim (e.g. on a life-sized dinosaur model, or a fancy gaming rig, or a high end vacation), I think it is likely that their spouse would go wtf instead of treating it like Tuesday.)
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I think you are pessimistic about the consequences of nuclear war. I do not think that there are enough nukes in the world to glass the US.
Popular depictions involve the survivors either donning spiky leather straps and becoming raiders or turning into man-eating mutants. I am a bit more optimistic. The United States does not seem like the kind of institution you can destroy simply by turning DC into a parking lot. Nor do I think that starvation is inevitable. If the 50 biggest cities are gone, it seems like the US would have a huge food surplus.
Nor would the industrial capability drop below that of Argentina. Some sectors (finance, insurance, software development, liberal arts) would be devastated, but plenty of factories seem to be located in smaller towns, and there would be no reason to mothball them until some vault-dweller discovers them centuries later.
Absent cobalt bombs, I don't think radiation would wipe out the US population either. Anchoring on Hiroshima, it seems that more people are killed by the blast and heat than radiation poisoning, and cancer deaths are a distant third. If cancer rates in the midwest increase by 10x, that is not nice but also not enough to collapse civilization. And billionaires would be exempt anyhow because they could afford to consume more expensive low contamination food.
That is not to say that nuclear war is fine. The QALY costs are enormous. The US could well lose its exceptional status in the world. The disruption of international supply chains might throw the country back to the tech level of the cold war. The voter base of the Democratic party would be devastated. The political system might not survive intact, and would likely be replaced by something more authoritarian.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
As someone else mentioned, if shit hits the fan, they will not let him live the good life while their fake country collapses.
I think a point could be made that all countries are fake.
Also, the number of countries which let billionaires live the good life while collapsing is just about zero. There might be some principled libertarians who would feel compelled to respect the property rights of the rich even in the middle of a collapse, but the average policeman or soldier is not going to watch his family starve while the rich feast.
In democracies, runaway inflation will reliably cause the election of extremist candidates. And dictatorships are even worse -- dictators as a rule do not believe in respecting human rights, so they have no principled reason to respect the property rights of the rich. Sometimes they even expropriate and imprison rich foreigners when they are not collapsing even though it might seem in their long term interests to not do so.
Your best bet in an authoritarian state is probably having close personal ties to the dictator (e.g. through marriage, Crusader Kings style), but even then there is always the danger of an internal coup. It seems hard for foreigners to have collectively enough political clot that the generalissimo feels that he can't throw one under the bus from time to time.
If I was a billionaire, I would still bet on the US. The 1% class is very good at looking out for their own interests. Ideally, I would recommend staying out the culture war and partisan politics. Let the peasants fight about affirmative action or abortion, the rich can thrive both under GWB and Obama.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think that his phrasing is still okay. We use phrases like "Russian aggression" without bothering to add a fig leaf about some Russians not supporting the war in Ukraine, and perhaps even being in prison for protesting it.
If someone says "The Iranians can not be trusted to stick to the terms of the nuclear deal", it is obviously a shorthand for the Iranian leadership, because the average Iranian citizen will not be in the position to enrich uranium in her basement, so there is no claim about her trustworthiness being made.
Likewise, the average US citizen does not run the internet. And I think it is very true to say "In the current political system, the median US voter can not be trusted to elect a wise government which is (among other things) a good steward of the internet." Note that this leaves a lot of possibilities open, from "the US is run by the deep state, which cancels any anti-snooping candidate" to "most US citizens are genetically inclined towards the military-technological complex, so of course they vote for spying and bombing" and all the more likely explanations in between.
If Cory had written about the US 'stealing' (i.e. annexing) Alberta in the Obama era, the median response would have been to recommend that he finds a more reputable crack dealer. The framing back then was very much activists vs surveillance state. Today, the US is openly neo-colonialist (like Trump bragging about securing Venezuelan oil), and the EFF seems completely sidelined in the culture war, the MAGA idea of privacy is Palantir, and the opposition will want to spy on you in case you do a racism. Realistically, the chances of the US electing a government which cuts down on spying seem as good as that of the Mensheviks overthrowing Stalin in 1950.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
but I admit my general opinion of him has lowered, as this recent article has subtle xenophobia.
I will admit that I did not read all of it, but I failed to detect anything I would call xenophobia in the parts which I did read. If there is a sentence about low-IQ foreign barbarians ruining the UK, I must have missed it.
Presumably, your claim is that Cory Doctorow (born in Canada and naturalized as a UK citizen) is xenophobic towards the US.
If so, this seems a bit disingenuous to me. I mean, he is closely aligned to the EFF, which is a US-based organization critical of surveillance states. The EFF does not seem especially anti-American to me. Sure, they spend more time fighting against US surveillance efforts than Chinese surveillance efforts, but I don't think that this is because they love China or hate the US, but rather because their members are based in the US and the political system allows them trying to influence laws in the US but not in the PRC.
A central example of a xenophobe would be someone who dislikes another culture he knows very little about. "I don't understand their language, their food smells strange, their customs are weird, they are probably up to no good and I want them gone."
By contrast, Cory Doctorow could very much pass as a US citizen without too much effort on his part. I am sure that he has more knowledge of the US political system than the median citizen, and a big chunk of the culture he engages with is likely US-origin.
People are very much allowed to have opinions on countries they are not citizens of. There is no part during the naturalization process where the officials tell you "you may now have an opinion about our government". I am a German, and yet I have opinions about governments and policies of pretty much any country I know anything about, from the US to North Korea.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
As an asset and an investment, yes, and occasionally as a way of paying for mildly shady or super-techy things, but in general the value proposition just never seems to have manifested to me.
Minor point, this seems to be the wrong way round. The asset aspect is the boring (if hyped) part, and the proposal to do financial transactions without a trusted party (which can easily coerced to block some transactions by the feds) was the innovation. Of course, this freedom to do transactions has mostly been used in darknet marketplaces and for ransomware, but that's humans for you.
I will grant you that the anarcho-libertarian utopia promised by the blockchain has not happened, though. 'crypto' is 99% get-rich-quick scams, and the 1% are probably mostly ransomware and the like, with 0.01% being nerds buying acid or donating to wikileaks. Legal crypto exchanges are very much centralized, and banking laws in the US are probably broad enough that the feds can jail you for decades if you put substantial amounts of your money through a mix or otherwise annoy them.
And gen-AI is definitely the bigger deal, sure. It might take six or eight orders of magnitudes more money to train a LLM than it takes to train an individual human, but my feeling is that if we assume that the tech will keep the current intelligence level and and simply improve on the execution, that is already enough to make the mean white collar worker obsolete. Heck, I have a PhD-level education and consider a future where I am reduced to wearing AR goggles and connecting cables to where some AI decides they should go while it takes care of the software tasks far more efficiently than I ever could distinctly possible.
This is not to say that the AI bubble bursting is not also possible. I mean, investors in the late 90s were not wrong about everything -- the internet did have an enormous effect on commerce. It was more the specifics which they were wrong about, like if pets.com would ever become profitable.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
constructivism
The main thing about constructivists is that they do not generally accept proofs where you you assume the negation of what you are want to prove and arrive at a contradiction (Reductio ad absurdum -- though it seems that some cases remain valid in intuitionist/constructivist logic).
As a layman, my gut feeling is that the constructivists would probably accept Euclid's proof of an infinite magnitude of primes, because it gives you a rather concrete algorithm for finding a prime which is not in your list of all primes, but not Hilbert's proof of his Nullstellensatz, because it does not give you a way to determine the algebraic relationship.
These views were forcefully expressed by David Hilbert in 1928, when he wrote in Grundlagen der Mathematik, "Taking the principle of excluded middle from the mathematician would be the same, say, as proscribing the telescope to the astronomer or to the boxer the use of his fists".
Moving on further
The classical-style logic in the preceding paragraph does not apply to constructivist logic used for software formalisation!
I am not sure I follow. Suppose you have a program and a claim about that program ("this Turing machine will halt for any input", "This C code will never invoke undefined behavior", etc). In my mind, a proof which is just half a gigabyte of gibberish without rhyme or reason would still be acceptable for such practical problems. If someone formally verified that a given version of the Linux kernel did not suffer from a given class of exploits, I would not complain about them using proof by negation.
By contrast, open problems in mathematics are not things where our main interest is in knowing the answer. Few people are interested in P==NP because they think there is a practical algorithm for solving SAT to be discovered. If an ASI told us what the answer is ("P is equal to NP, but the polynomial has coefficients and exponents so large that your mathematics can't even express them using all the protons in the universe"), that would be of little value. People are interested in these big open questions because their answer sometimes lead to the development of new and exciting branches of mathematics.
The textbook example of a problem which looked promising in that regard until it was proven would be the four color theorem. "So it can just be proven by brute-forcing 1834 configurations with a computer? Seems it was not a nice problem, after all."
With most of our existing software, the problem is even identifying what formal properties we would want, or constructing it so that has the desired properties (and ideally we can easily proof them).
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I think the bigger problem is that land is simply not a good where markets work very well, because there is no supply elasticity.
The mean time between expropriations (e.g. through war, revolution, commie takeover) in most of the Western world is probably upwards of a century. This means that city land is a good investment even if you don't collect rent for it.
The Georgian fix would be to simply tax the income from unimproved land at 100%, to the point where an investor would be indifferent between owning the same building in a big city or the countryside because he would not see a single cent of the rent difference.
Fixing rent prices is just treating the symptoms, and making everything worse in the process.
Nor do I think a land value tax would fix everything. Suburban home owners would have reason to become even more NIMBY towards higher density housing, as it would also raise the LVT they would have to pay for their single family homes.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Also, nukes are not "I win" buttons. The US could not have won Vietnam simply by nuking the Vietcong, nor could the Soviets (or the US) won Afghanistan that way.
I don't think NATO would start WW3 if he nuked Kiev. I certainly hope we would not. We might decide to sell Ukraine nukes though and trust his unwillingness to not start WW3 if they nuke him in retaliation.
I imagine a single nuke hit might make quite a dent in Ukrainian military capability, but not to the point where they would be forced to surrender.
The strategy of just publishing a list of cities and announcing that you will wipe out one of them every 24h until your enemy surrenders has not been tried before, though conventional morale bombings mostly failed to persuade the populations to surrender.
One of the primary objectives of any nuclear power is not to get their own cities nuked. A big part of that is to persuade their smaller neighbors -- many of whom could likely have nukes if they considered it a matter of national survival, North Korea has nukes and has 138 countries ahead of it in the list of countries by GDP.
So even if one could defeat Ukraine or Iran with a single nuke, this would lead to an equilibrium where a lot of countries would feel the need to maintain their own nuclear weapons program, which is a worse outcome than not winning some neo-colonial war for the nuker.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Considering how many businesses there are now that refuse to take $50 or $100 bills, a $250 would be even more limited.
No problem, Trump is working on that, the inflation rate for April was 3.8%. (Yes, I know that it will still take 19 years for the currency to lose half its value, but I for one have trust in the man to speed this process along even more.)
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I am not really against universal background checks, but the state enforcing a law which is technically blocked by a court order seems bad.
The fix would be to limit immunity for (executive) politicians, the police and even the courts. Basically, if the court finds that a reasonable person would have recognized that your action had no legal basis, then it is treated no different than if the mob had done it.
The analogy would be medical malpractice. Doctors generally are mostly exempt from laws forbidding you to cut people up and so forth. In general, there is (and should be) a broad road of defensible medical opinions, and as long they stick to that spectrum they should be fine and not get sued about 'why did you prescribe this antibiotic and not that' etc. This changes completely when they go beyond that road. A doctor who decides to murder their patient through poisonous medication will not be treated leniently because we generally allow doctors to put substances with harmful side effects into their patients' bodies. Instead, they will be treated more harshly, because in addition to breaking an important general civilizational rule, they also betrayed the trust which societies puts in physicians.
If a cop shoots a cosplayer dressed up as the Joker, we should book him for murder. If his defense is that they thought they were supposed to thwart evil-doers, then we will say "you are sadly mistaken about what the law is, and we do not believe a reasonable person would make this mistake, and we will punish you more harshly because you betrayed the trust we place in cops".
I am simply proposing extending this principle to more cases. If the DA orders the enforcement of laws which are plainly not in force (which is the story here, from what I get from you), then any arrest becomes a kidnapping charge for the whole chain of command (although there are some corner cases where we might apply a higher standard to the DA than to beat cops, just as we might apply a higher standard to physicians than nurses).
The ideal outcome would be that the police unions would go "we checked with our lawyers, and we advise our members to not follow orders to enforce that law because they would actually commit felonies if they did". (No, it does not suffice to go after the top guy, because then you end up in situations where the top guy kills himself in some bunkers and all his goons were blameless people merely following orders.)
This would also fix that FIRE case about a sheriff and judge randomly locking someone up for 1A speech. If we treat it the same as if they had abducted their victim in a van and kept him locked up in some basement for a month, the penalties we have on the book for that should deter re-offense.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I do not like making value judgments of the form "it is normal, therefore it is good". History is full of of things which were considered normal and therefore good, which we nevertheless consider atrocities. If I were to judge behaviors good simply because they are widespread, then all the trans activists would have to do is to make teen mastectomies as common as circumcision and I would be forced to conclude that it is fine.
For the 16-yo getting a kid, it depends on the outcomes for her, the kid and broader society. Perhaps she will thrive in motherhood and raise five kids in a stable family. Perhaps she will be left by the father of the kid before it turns three, and struggle to meet the responsibilities of parenthood without any skills to earn a living, perhaps raising a kid whose trajectory through the criminal justice system is already over-determined. Perhaps if she does not have a kid she would become a brilliant medical researcher, or a serial killer.
Likewise the army. For pretty much everyone except Khorne worshippers, war is negative-sum. If people enlisting on one side of a conflict make the world a better place, then people enlisting on the other side of a conflict will make the world a worse place.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
The law which says "Don't be a wise-ass."
Which law would that be?
There is a reason that the US constitution is about 4500 words instead of just
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All elections shall be free and equal.
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Laws should be construed so as to do justice.
The point of having fine-grained, specific laws is that "the judge already knows what outcome is just, and will just reach for some law to justify it" is a terrible procedure. It gets you decisions like Roe v Wade, where reproductive freedom hangs on a very shaky legal decision until some later SCOTUS takes the common sense approach that the amendments did not mention abortion at all.
Nobody sane would campaign for the biggest employer in some town also getting a single vote, because that would not change anything -- they clearly have a vested interest in the local politics, and can trivially spend money on donations or campaigns on a scale which will give them a lot more influence than a single vote ever could.
"One man, one vote" is a very simple Schelling point. There is always some quibbling over details, and we end up at something like "one adult, non-felon citizen of any gender whose primary residency is registered in the municipality at the reference date", with the voting rights of alien permanent residents being up for debate.
It is also somewhat robust, because people are very expensive. Sure, a company could just pay politically sympathetic people to settle in their town, but they might spend northwards of 100k$ per vote that way, so it is much cheaper to just pay bribes to the voters already there.
By contrast, corporate entities are very cheap to create and maintain -- Delaware LLCs pay 300$ in taxes a year. So @birb_cromble's question is exactly the right one: how does this scale?
Even if there is a limit to one corporate vote per property lot, that would still leave a lot of loopholes. A family living in their own house might decide to form a holding company which leases their home back to them for a dollar a year, then cast that company's vote. Landlords would wield a lot of votes. (Seriously, who looks at the present system and says "the problem with that is that landlords have too little political power"?)
There is a reason that the US is not organized as a stock company, where everyone starts out with one share and the federal government can simply emit more stocks to raise funds, and voting power is simply the amount of shares you own. This would lead to the effective disenfranchisement of the majority. At least in a democracy, the 1% will have to spend money on campaigns to get the 99% to vote for them, and different 1%ers might be competing with different political visions rather than just their budgets.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I'm so, so, so sick of dishonest hacks confusing the brutal competition between life forms with the normal development of healthy organisms. The presence of disease or predation does not make dying before adulthood "natural," and conflating them is dishonest in the extreme.
Your "healthy organism" (that adjective is doing a lot of work, there) is very much the product of billions of years of brutal competition. There is no reason to suppose that the amoral process of evolution would find something which is morally good.
I will grant you that humans evolved for being efficient, so most random alterations (like removing a hand or an eye) you do on a human will make it less efficient, so a lot of times what is good and what is natural will coincide.
As a trivial example of the natural and the good not coinciding, a good fraction of healthy humans will have their periods about once a month, a process which I understand can be very painful simply because evolution did not give a fuck about the lives of the carriers of the genomes being free of pain. It would only care about it if the pain was strong enough that women would have frequently jumped of cliffs to escape it (and probably have given rise to genes which make them more reluctant to suicide). (I mean, you could try to define a woman who has her period as an unhealthy organism who is suffering from not being pregnant (though I would despise such a world-view), but pregnancy in humans is just more body horror, so the point stands.)
As another example, per Google's LLM, about 15-30% of adult male humans are estimated to have died from human-on-human violence in the ancestral environment. A 17-yo guy who gets into fights and perhaps ends up killing another guy is not mentally ill, but simply following a genetic script which worked perfectly well in the ancestral environment. From the perspective of evolution, he is a perfectly healthy organism, and the guy who attends university to get an office job is the real weirdo.
A big part of human civilization is to take these apes evolved for scavenging in the African savanna (or whatever) and turn them into call center workers, lawyers and so on. While this thankfully does not involve physical maiming, it certainly involves denying a lot of inherited instincts -- either through nurture or by executing people for stuff like 'murder' until they become docile, if you are a HBD believer.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
If you steal a gun and it ends in the hands of someone who murders with it, a case could be made that this makes you an accessory.
Or selling dozens of guns could constitute depraved-heart murder in its own right. Arming the local felon population is similar to throwing rocks from a tall building without checking if anyone is in the impact zone. You might not intend to kill someone, but you certainly decided that to take your chances.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I would argue that a lot of stuff is permanent and kids (or people more generally) don't understand it fully.
At least in previous generations, dropping out of school had consequences which were pretty permanent for many. Sure, there are people who dropped out of school and still got a university degree later on, but they are the exception, not the rule. Yet few if any countries try to make 16-yo's go to school against their will.
Teenage motherhood is another example. If you get pregnant at age 14 and decide to become a mother, then that decision will very likely shape your further life trajectory. Yet few states will force a 14-yo to have an abortion against her and her parents' wishes. (OTOH, plenty of red states will try to force a 14-yo to give birth.)
More mundanely, we let 14-yo's ride bicycles in traffic or engage in sports which have some risk of permanent harm, and if there is a state which bans 14-yo's from working with circular saws I have not heard about it.
And in society more generally, it is more of the same. The physical consequences of voting are very often permanent: the dead of WW2 did not come back to life when the Germans who had voted for NSDAP in 1933 voted for CDU in '49 instead. A 30-yo who picks up smoking likely has no good concept of what it is like to die of lung cancer at age 60.
Some things are almost-all downsides, almost-no upsides, and sometimes society tries to ban these for minors (cigarettes) or generally (heroin). Gender-affirming healthcare is more ambivalent, like dropping out of school is (or was, back before AI). Some will look back and say that it was the decision which saved their lives. More of the ones who are contemplating it would see it as a grave mistake in hindsight.
Even in a perfectly accommodating society (which we very much do not have), being transgender sucks (from what I can tell, I am cis-by-default). We simply do not have the tech to fully give people a body of their chosen gender with little hassle or downsides. If someone is indifferent between gender identities, I would strongly recommend them trying to be cis-by-default. Treat trans kids in school like you would treat wheelchair-bound kids -- they got dealt a bad hand, and one should certainly respect their struggle and try to accommodate them, but for God's sake do not make speeches about how brave they are. You want an environment where kids with MS will know that they can still attend school when they require a wheelchair, not an environment where kids will want to have a neurodegenerative disorder so everyone will talk about how brave they are.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
I find both sides of this CW rather tiresome. The pro-trans "well, if half of the class in fifth grade wants puberty blockers, just let them have puberty blockers" is obviously wrong, but the anti-trans side is just as bad.
With parental consent (PC), a 16-yo can marry a 30-yo and bear his children in a lot of states. Or a 17-yo (with PC) can enlist in the army and get blown to pieces in some war on another continent. Or he could murder someone domestically (without PC) and be executed for that, until the liberals in the SCOTUS put a stop to that in 2005. And of course every 10-yo has the ability to kill themselves (without PC), not granted by the SCOTUS but by physics (i.e., God). Sadly, suicide is the second or third most common cause of death for teens (though homicides are ahead of suicides in the 15-19 group, second only to accidental injury, which I find even more fucked up).
I think that the bodily integrity of people whom we don't consider to have the ability to fully consent is an important good, and one should not make it too easy for them to get irreversible changes done to their bodies.
That being said, I do not consider mastectomies to be that irreversibly life-altering. If you change your mind, you can still get implants, and we have the tech to prevent any kids you might have from starving to death (and arguably had the tech for 10k years or so).
Bottom surgery is a different category, but the fact that you focus on mastectomies likely means that it is exceedingly rare in minors. And while we are discussing genital surgery without medical indication in minors, we should probably acknowledge that the median case is not the 15-yo getting her breasts removed, but the baby getting circumcised for religious reasons of his parents.
With regard to puberty and interventions, I will notice that 'natural' is not the same as 'good'. 'Natural' is when half of the kids die before puberty, and nobody remotely sane would suggest we go back to that. We have seen how God has planned out human life, and collectively decided "fuck that guy". The natural fate of a 12-yo with no health anomaly is not puberty. It is death through asphyxiation within minutes -- basically everywhere in the observable universe.
That being said, I doubt that most people's lives would be improved by accepting/deciding that they are trans. A lot of kids have issues with their identity around puberty, for most of them accepting their birth gender is likely the best outcome as far as quality of life is concerned. But there is certainly a subset who have a different gender identity hardwired and would be harmed not helped by letting puberty happen.
This means that medical interventions must be made based on trade-offs. Anticipate how the patient would view the intervention with 20 years of hindsight. Try to minimize the excepted reduction in QALYs -- no matter if it is due to suicide, sterility, surgical interventions etc. This involves guesswork, but every moral decision in the real world involves guesswork. Sometimes you will still decide wrongly and mess up a patient's life, either way. It also involves not being in the trenches of the CW. If you think that every trans-related intervention in minors is either good, you have not grasped the complexity of the situation. If you think every intervention is bad, likewise.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Yes, or a bright teenager with nothing better to do, for that matter.
(Though there are certainly orders of magnitude more people with an LLM subscription than people with the skills and diligence to find exploits the old-fashioned way.)
quiet_NaN
12d ago
The US pcb supplier cost more than 10 times as much as the equivalent shenzhen house. They took the order (nothing special, an OTS bit you can get by the 40 foot container from china)
Just out of idle curiosity: are we talking bare PCBs or complete assemblies? There is a big difference between "I can not find a company to produce a bare six layer board" and "I can't find a company to produce electronics assemblies full of phone-density chips on a 20 layer board with buried and plated vias".
FWIW, here in Europe we certainly have companies which have both the capabilities to manufacture PCBs (like MultiCB, which will produce a bare ten-layer board in six work days in the UK, with initial costs of about 600 Euros). I had a colleague organize the component placement of some six-layer board with a large-pitch BGA with some company in Germany, and that basically worked fine.
Of course, my field is basic research, where we might need a couple of hundreds of boards and won't care too much if they end up costing 100 Euros apiece. I guess that if one needed a million boards to sell to consumers on paper-thin margins, then one would not want to use European manufacturing. And of course the supply chains for the components will mostly still lead the Shenzhen -- I don't think anyone is producing SMD resistors in Europe.
The free market is great for communicating certain information, and historically has been the only way of sending the signals that it does send. Unfortunately, it as a dogshit way to coordinate a complicated series of production and logistics processes, and will always lose out to central planning.
I think that there is a point to be made that most companies internally do not work as a free market, and the ones which try to do that (some HP CEO tried, IIRC) fail badly. However, I think it would be wrong to blame capitalism for ruining America.
There is certainly some amount of central planning required for designing and building complex products. No amount of mom&pops shops can collectively manufacture a smartphone. But I don't think that China's manufacturing power is showcasing the superiority of planned economies. If I order some PCBs from China, it seems unlikely that I dealing with a factory which is fulfilling some five year plan of the politburo, or even centrally controlled from Peking in real time. Instead, the company is likely competing against other companies locally and globally, making the business decisions which it thinks will earn it the most money, just like it would in a Western economy.
The difference between the US and China seems more that in the US, there is a certain belief that the voice of the market is the voice of God, and any interference with the market will it make less efficient and is therefore bad. By contrast, most countries recognize that the market has failure modes and may not generally lead to good strategic outcomes, and there are some decisions where it is worth it if the state puts the hand on the scale to reach some desired outcome.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
a secure piece of software
I think this is an unlikely claim. curl helpfully lists past vulnerabilities. (Fun fact: they stopped awarding bounties for vulnerabilities when people began posting AI slop bug reports, wasting their time.)
I do not think that "curl does not have any more medium-or-high level exploits beyond CVE-2026-7009 and CVE-2026-7168, so even an ASI could not have found any" is true.
Don't get me wrong, I think curl is certainly in the rightmost percentiles of software security (alongside openbsd), and an interfacing library (i.e., tons of attack surface) with a whopping 176kLOC and only 188 CVEs so far (despite heavy auditing) is pretty amazing, even more as it is written in C. It is entirely possible that Mythos will turn less-audited codebases (e.g. closed source or more niche open source) into a blood bath.
But I still think Stenberg's (not entirely dismissive) take is a good one to update on. Much of the software industry is very much on the AI hype train, and for the AI companies hype seems to be the main product. I would not expect Microsoft to come forward and call Mythos not a big deal (unless they are hyping up ChatGPT, of course), for example.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
Personally, I think those insurances are clearly immoral, just like offering insurance to companies for fines due to health and safety violations.
I think this is something which could also be solved by moar dakka. Simply award damages (or impose fines, in the case of companies) which are twice the maximum coverage limit of their insurance.
If the county has unlimited insurance, then the first order of business would be to punish their insurance company. This is not particularly hard, the judges will not require Knuth's arrow notation or anything, simple high school math skills will suffice. Big reinsurance companies like Munich Re or Swiss Re have assets worth a few hundreds of billion dollars, a judge could write down a number in 30 seconds which would reliably bankrupt them.
From the guardian article:
Could obviously all be a fabrication on his part, I was not present for the proceedings. But like the guardian, I would tend to believe him on that part, and see it as a scathing indictment of the court process. I do not know how Western courts handle language barriers, I presume that they use interpreters (but probably can't afford simultaneous interpreter?), but I am sure that they will not simply tell the accused to STFU with his heathen tongue or be held in contempt.
And a court which is fishy in that way is probably also fishy in other ways.
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