roystgnr
29d ago
put yourself in the shoes of a Trump who was absolutely positive that there was significant fraud in PA, GA and NV, but can't prove exactly how much. What is your best move?
Publish all the evidence that made you absolutely positive. This must not be done in "throw everything you have at the wall" Gish-Gallop style, though, because if the 5th item on your list of evidence is pretty convincing but the first 4 items turn out to be nonsense then you risk nobody bothering to read past the 2nd or 3rd.
Even if everybody agrees the evidence should have made you absolutely positive, this doesn't get you inaugurated in 2020, but it does guarantee you 2024, a stronger showing in the House and Senate from 2022 on, and mass support for election reform in your favor that could last for generations.
roystgnr
30d ago
Even the IRS doesn't keep more than a decade or so of records on hand ... but apparently the Social Security Administration does? With Form SSA-7050-F4, a $144 request for "Detailed Earnings Information" should provide a record which "Includes periods of employment or self-employment and the names or addresses of employers."
I don't see how the timing would have worked out, though. Harris mentioned working at McDonalds while campaigning in 2019, but I can't find mention of Trump calling this a lie until she brought it up at the end of this August, by which time it would have already been too late for the SSA to provide evidence. ("Please allow SSA 120 days to process", after which point you may call to "leave an inquiry" about why it still hasn't been processed, after which point I guess you just get to enjoy the sloth scene from Zootopia more.)
roystgnr
30d ago
Even if you have within-state income inequality, that can be solved at the state level. You need whole states who can't pay for their kids before you need a solution from a federal ...
Oh my. I was going to write "Dep. Ed." because "DoE" is ambiguous with Energy, but I decided to look it up and apparently the official abbreviation, at www.ed.gov, is in fact ED? "Son, I'm afraid you've got ED. I'm prescribing the Tenth Amendment, but be sure to call us immediately if you get a school board election lasting more than four hours!"
If federal funding covers that cliff, I think removing it would be pretty serious.
In theory, you could just make up for it with the extra state taxes that everyone can afford once the taxes which paid for the federal funding are reduced. In the short term, it could be a hell of a transition in the meantime. In the long term, I suspect the question of budget changes stemming from federal debt problems will dwarf budget changes stemming from how much interstate redistribution we do for schools.
roystgnr
30d ago
Poor states don’t have a better plan waiting
Do we still have any of those? Mississippi looks like it's still way down at the bottom of the list of US states, but the bottom of the US list is now at like $53K GDP per capita, which even if we use PPP for the nation as a whole still puts them ahead of such hellholes as Belgium, Canada, France, the UK, South Korea, Japan...
Edit: perhaps GDP per child is the right metric to use here? Mississippi is probably behind a few of the countries I just listed on that score, though I can't quickly find numbers and I still doubt the distinction would be large enough to matter.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Natural selection was still in the process of optimizing our genes when they hit the point where their phenotypes could invent and spread much faster-optimizing memes and then (in an instant, geologically) start wondering whether faster optimization was possible for genes too. Even brain size growth, perhaps the cruelest obvious tradeoff, doesn't show any obvious signs of having leveled off.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Personally I demand that the little postage-stamp-sized picture of my face on Teams be downsized from Blu-Ray-quality video. If you're only throwing away DVD-quality data when downsampling what's even the point?
I'd assume they worry about the difficulty of either transferring the rocket from one platform to another as a whole and/or robustly (re)assembling the rocket on the static launch platform.
Fun fact: each of the two 5-segment SRBs on an SLS stack weighs twice as much as the entire dry mass of the Starship stack put together. A liquid rocket stage can be stacked while empty to make it light enough to lift easily, but with a solid rocket stage the only way you can empty it is with the on switch (and you can't refuel it so much as you can remanufacture it, and there is no off switch...).
roystgnr
1mo ago
AFAIK their data is fine; the proposal was for 100/20 Mbps down/up, and Starlink currently only promises 25-100 down and 5-10 up on their standard plan; even the priority plan is still 40/8 at minimum.
The timing of the data is what had everybody stunned. In the FCC's START DATE FOR PERFORMANCE MEASURES TESTING last year they say, "For the carriers participating in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), pre-testing will begin on January 1, 2025, and testing will begin on January 1, 2026." You'd think this was a first draft, but I can't find the final version with "unless we don't like you in which case we started testing in 2021 and what are you going to do about it" added for accuracy. Must have been a version control snafu.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Whoa, whoa. That $2.7B isn't what's being poured into the launch system, it's what's being poured into the launch tower. The money that's gone into SLS is more than ten times that (or a touch less if you don't adjust for inflation; development started in 2011).
To be fair, the Mobile Launcher 2 tower is indeed mobile, and its Ground Support Equipment includes plumbing for liquid hydrogen, a cryogenic that makes even other cryogenics look easy.
To be snarky, ML2 doesn't even have any giant robot arms.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Alcohol, sometimes. But really not a good road to go down.
No kidding, even aside from health issues. Some people get much more angry when drunk. The chance of curing a minor anger problem that's at the "asking for advice on the internet" stage isn't worth the chance of turning it into a major anger problem that might reach the "asking for advice from the defense attorney" stage.
I like that you put "working out until exhausted" at the top. Even just "working out until calm" is good. Either way you still only have a chance of curing the problem long-term, but now the worst case scenario is that whenever you get a needlessly elevated heart rate you make it needful and improve your health.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Then you ignored past evidence. As such, no reason to link it again when you can easily see for yourself if you search.
If it's easy, you should do it and paste the links here.
If it's not easy, but you expect persuadable people (at least persuadable third parties) to be reading, you should definitely do it and paste the links. (this is the case I suspect is true, as a persuadable third party who didn't see anything on the first results page for "gaza doctors access", although I vaguely recall seeing stories along these lines before)
If you don't expect anyone persuadable to be reading, why bother writing at all?
roystgnr
1mo ago
You're welcome. It is an argument, though, to be fair, not a proof. I have to admit I felt better about seeing them attempt the tower catch after they finished stacking the second Texas launch tower, and I would have felt better still if they had the second tower operational already.
roystgnr
1mo ago
A typical (so typical they did another two this morning and nobody paid attention) Starlink launch has the booster fire its engines, then shut them down, then fire them again for a reentry burn, then shut them down, then fire them again for the landing burn. For a return-to-launch-site mission like their two last month there's also a fourth startup and shutdown for the boostback burn.
There may be someone at the FAA who thinks four ignitions in a row (where the second ignition aims the rocket back at the coast of Florida!) without inspection is fine, but six ignitions in a row with only a brief inspection after the third is crazy, but I doubt it. The feds are pretty good about making distinctions between airline safety (where we're down to something like 1 fatal incident per million commercial flights and rightly proud of it) or astronaut safety (where NASA wants 1-in-250 or better) vs unmanned flight safety. In the most extremely opposite case, unmanned test flight safety, FAA rules have been as lenient as "yup, both halves of that Starship sure screwed up and exploded right where you warned us they might screw up and explode; carry on" after the 3rd test.
The FAA has rightfully cracked down on a bunch of Falcon 9 issues recently, and Starship shouldn't be any better, but it shouldn't be any worse. Not doing a return-to-landing-site or return-to-tower didn't save SpaceX from those crackdowns. Booster fails its 24th landing, on an unmanned ship, in the middle of nowhere, in a NOTMAR zone behind a "Beware of the Leopard" sign? Falcon 9 grounded for days. Second stage deorbit burn is 0.5 seconds too long and it burns up slightly short of where it was expected to burn up? Falcon 9 grounded for weeks. It doesn't matter whether there's a ship or a tower that might get damaged on a failed landing; they'd get grounded for an investigation of what led to any landing they didn't expect to fail, to find any root cause that might affect other phases of flight too.
The FAA hasn't been obviously right about how they license SpaceX flight plan changes lately (though it was nice that they finished the IFT-5 license as quickly as they did in the end), but that's a separate issue from incident investigations. And I did notice that they've been obviously wrong about not requiring an investigation for that last ULA Vulcan flight, where the rocket lost the nozzle of a solid rocket booster (an antiquated design in part because it can have no "off" switch, only a "kaboom" switch) mid-ascent. Considering that case makes me worry a little more about political adversaries than military ones. The contrast between "I want to build cities in space" Bezos speeches versus "you can't launch that often!" Bezos protests is particularly sad.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Yeah, but how much a monopoly lowers those prices depends on how the elasticity of demand varies with price, and I'm not sure what they can count on there. Over the past few years they've managed to double their number of commercial+government launches in part by being the cheapest option around, but still the majority of their launches are now Starlink. Bezos wants to put most of the Kuiper satellites up on New Glenn, and China's putting the Thousand Sails constellation up on Long March, and all the other satellite constellation plans out there are for tens or maybe hundreds of satellites, not thousands, so there's not a big external market in the wings that they can sweep up.
They can probably keep Starship busy with more internal payloads, which will be great for them, since they've got a more powerful Starlink design waiting on Starship because it's too big for Falcon, but this doesn't affect their prices to others. To have incentive to cut prices they need the cuts to essentially create new markets. New markets would be awesome if they happened, I admit. The first "12 universities design a nanosat and we launch the winner" programs started up shortly after I left undergrad, which was awe inspiring, and at Starship costs we could afford "1000 high schools design a nanosat and we launch the winning 100" instead. But that only scales so far, and most markets with lots of room for growth are very speculative. The one obvious growth market right now is high-bandwidth low-latency communication, but Musk+Bezos+China seem to have that sewn up already.
On the other hand, prices here aren't determined by a spherical monopolist, but by Musk. He actually seems to be serious about the cities-on-Mars thing, and Starlink seems to be lucrative enough to pay for it even if he doesn't maximize profit from other customers, so it wouldn't be completely out of character for him to just lower short-term profit margins speculatively, on the theory that even if the short-run demand elasticity isn't there it's more important to create new markets in the long run.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Hard to find good data while they're still revising and testing. 550mT is probably high since a previous version was under 400mT for both stages put together, but they've beefed up both heat shield and booster a bit since and I dunno how much. Payload is probably around 40mT reusable right now but no telling for sure until they start doing real orbits. Landing legs on both stages would probably be 8% or so of dry mass, 32mT, but only mass on the upper stage trades off 1:1 with payload, so I'd guess they'd lose 40% of payload with v1 Starship, and maybe bring that down to 10 or 15% by v3.
Huh. That's actually not as bad as I'd have guessed. Either they're so good at guidance now that they consider the catch to be "easy", or they were afraid of losing even more mass budget during development (that 40mT is down from a 100mT goal), or they're really not kidding about their real goal for the catches being cadence.
Musk claims he wants to just set a booster back on the launch mount after a catch (as they just practiced late yesterday) and stack the next ship on to launch again an hour later (as they probably won't practice for years). Sounds crazy to me, but I though catching the giant rocket in more-giant robot arms was crazier, so what the hell do I know?
roystgnr
1mo ago
The cost of kg to orbit should now go down about an order of magnitude within the next decade or two.
The cost should, but the price might not. The first orbital boosters to ever undergo a powered landing or be reused were the ones for Falcon 9, and the second orbital boosters ever to undergo a powered landing were ... the SpaceX successor to Falcon 9?! They're literally more than a decade ahead of nearly all their competition. The only thing I've seen at the same scale as Starship is a Chinese concept that's at the "powerpoint presentation" stage, and even in vaporware form they're only talking about starting testing in the early 2030s and regular use in 2040.
And just like SpaceX are still selling $70M Falcon 9 flights even while their internal marginal costs are likely to be down to ~$20M, I bet they'll feel free to sell Starship flights for something like $150M (for a full, 10x the F9 payload, granted), even if they ever actually manage to get its cost under $10M, until they get some real competition.
The biggest question among their competitors is New Glenn, I think. Blue Origin got started earlier than SpaceX without yet reaching orbit, seemingly progressing at half the pace ... but they now have a rocket nearly ready to launch, something like 4x more powerful than F9, for the same price. If everything works as planned and they can manage to ramp up the cadence then I could definitely see SpaceX prices being pushed down to that level too.
roystgnr
1mo ago
we mostly grew up with the idea that we might live in a two-party system with drastically opposing ideas
Where by "we" you mean the first world, anyway. I saved this pamphlet excerpt explaining the idea as soon as I read it for the first time:
"One of the most difficult concepts for some to accept, especially in nations where the transition of power has historically taken place at the point of a gun, is that of the "loyal opposition." This idea is a vital one, however. It means, in essence, that all sides in a democracy share a common commitment to its basic values. Political competitors don't necessarily have to like each other, but they must tolerate one another and acknowledge that each has a legitimate and important role to play. Moreover, the ground rules of the society must encourage tolerance and civility in public debate.
When the election is over, the losers accept the judgment of the voters. If the incumbent party loses, it turns over power peacefully. No matter who wins, both sides agree to cooperate in solving the common problems of the society. The opposition continues to participate in public life with the knowledge that its role is essential in any democracy. It is loyal not to the specific policies of the government, but to the fundamental legitimacy of the state and to the democratic process itself." - "What is Democracy?", U.S. Department of State
Great lesson to teach the democratizing developing world, but we might want to start printing up extra copies to hand out to other Americans too.
roystgnr
1mo ago
it's just immediately taken for granted
It's funny when you see the SpaceX progress in this direction taken for granted even by critics of SpaceX. When they lost that booster on landing recently instead of being able to refly it for the 25th time, people started talking about how wasteful that was. Does nobody know what happens to every single rocket booster actively being flown by everyone other than SpaceX? Rocket Lab reflew one engine once, and they're hoping to refly a whole booster in the near future, but other than that? Vulcan? Splash. Long March? A cloud of toxic smoke next to a Chinese village. Artemis I? A multibillion dollar fish habitat.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Saying they "sample" goals makes it sound like you're saying they're plucked at random from a distribution.
Of course they are. My computer didn't need a CUPSD upgrade last month because a printer subsystem was deterministically designed with a remote rootkit installation feature, it needed it because software is really hard and humans can't write it deterministically.
We can't even write the most important parts of it deterministically. It was super exciting when we got a formally verified C compiler, in 2008, for (a subset of) the C language created in 1972. That compiler will still happily turn your bad code into a rootkit installation feature, of course, but now it's guaranteed not to also add flaws you didn't write, or at least it is so long as you write everything in the same subset of the same generations-old language.
And that's just talking about epistemic uncertainty. Stochastic gradient descent randomly (or pseudorandomly, but from a random seed) picks its initial weights and shuffles the way it iterates through its input data, so there's an aleatory uncertainty distribution too. It's literally getting output plucked at random from a distribution.
But I wouldn't expect generality seeking systems to become Skynet.
We're going to make that distribution as tight and non-general as we can, which will hopefully be non-general enough and non-general in the right direction. In the "probability of killing everyone" ratio, generality is in the denominator, and we want to see as little as possible in the numerator too. It would take a specific malformed goal to lead to murder for the sake of murder, so that probably won't happen, but even a general intelligence will notice that you are made of atoms which could be rearranged in lots of ways, and that some of those ways are more efficient in the service of just about any goal with no caveats as specific and narrow as "don't rearrange everybody's atoms".
roystgnr
1mo ago
We do have something like that, it's just not randomized, so there's no calibrated score, so the results are based less on how far out to lunch the contestant is and more on how hard they're pressed on mistakes or on how hard they're not pressed on mistakes afterwards.
I also want Presidential Jeopardy to be part of every campaign season. It's hard to decide how to write a fair set of questions, even if they're randomly selected in the end, but that's not much worse than how the debates are run. Maybe limit the selection to predefined categories of questions where there are too many options to just cram the whole test? "World Leaders", "Headline News", "Microeconomics", etc?
roystgnr
1mo ago
It would be of great benefit to any American voters who can't recognize a dodged question unless they have their noses rubbed in it. So, maybe most of them, but surely not all of them, unless you're counting the indirect benefits that accrue to non-voters too.
roystgnr
1mo ago
I'd imagine only a small amount of the country even has the computer and networking capabilities to begin working remotely for overseas firms.
Looks like internet access is only available to 33% of Liberia, though it's growing fast, and roughly 0% of the country has high-speed internet. This seems like an extremely easy thing to fix in the Starlink era, though.
I'd be more worried about the lack of education. If every Liberian 20 year old was also magically granted the average education of a "typical" 180-IQ 20 year old, then the ensuing economic growth might be trivial, but if they have to acquire the education from scratch (at roughly 1.8x speed, if the ancient "IQ = Intelligence Quotient" and the modern "IQ = 100+16σ" definitions still match so far from the norm?) then that's going to cut a bit deeper into a 16 year timeline; they're starting from a literacy rate around 50%.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Maybe not as a Schelling point, but at least via mechanism design? I fear there may be no level of intelligence at which everyone independently adopts pro-social individual values because the is-ought problem turned out to not be a thing, but there probably is a level of intelligence at which the creation and support of large-scale anti-corruption institutions is easy enough that corruption simply no longer pays off.
roystgnr
1mo ago
I would love to see a work of fiction where each side conspires among themselves in hushed tones about how, even though their candidate is garbage, they have to pretend to be strong enthusiastic unqualified supporters, lest they express any honest reservations and thereby let the even-worse candidate win instead. In the climax of the story, everybody discovers that this is what everybody is doing, and for once they break the hysteresis of plurality voting and elect a decent third-party candidate instead.
But back to non-fiction, obviously that's not what's consciously happening, because people just aren't that good at deliberately lying to each other and keeping it a secret; we have to do it unconsciously. That's probably why we evolved half of our cognitive biases: to help us accomplish useful deception of others via the intermediate step of lying to ourselves first. "Gosh, it's a good thing my candidate is so great, because otherwise we'd be mostly screwed either way", is the sort of thing people actually come to believe. In the climax of reality, we all just keep lobotomizing ourselves in such fashion to a greater and greater extent, because to reverse course would require reducing our present persuasiveness and admitting the magnitude of our past mistakes, and none of that is something we can easily do when we've evolved to try to impress others.
Nah. It was so non-weird you could see it coming months in advance. It's reasonable to wonder whether the protections on mail-in ballots were sufficient, or whether other election rules like "Wisconsin law requires that the results of those absentee votes be reported all at once" were a bad idea, but when absentee ballots are reported all at once, in large heavily blue cities in a year when a majority of blue voters went absentee and a supermajority of red voters didn't, it would only be weird if the large vote dump wasn't massively blue.
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