roystgnr
4mo ago
Huh. You might be right? I remembered Namibia having significant uranium ore, but I misremembered Germany losing control there after WWII when it was really in+after WWI.
roystgnr
4mo ago
I have zero evidence that any given person who locker-room-talks "too bad he missed" has had any involvement whatsoever in destroying people's lives over the past 8 years.
I'm sure most of them didn't, and I'm nearly sure all of them didn't. The number of people whose direct involvement it takes to get someone "cancelled" is frighteningly low.
But I'm also pretty sure that they didn't because of lack of opportunity rather than lack of desire, in the case of the ones who aren't joking. If you're happy about deterring your political opponents through murder then you're hardly going to draw the line at firing, are you?
So it's back to being liberal about speech. Back to Voltaire/Hall for me.
Sounds great, so long as we codify it. Put "Acts of speech shall never be considered evidence of a hostile workplace environment in a legal context" or some such into a bill, and I will vote for whoever supports it and against whoever opposes it. I'll still support the right of Home Depot to independently decide that they don't want any employees who are pro-assassination or anti-homosexuality or in whatever categories they want to use to draw the line, but I suspect that without massive lawsuit risk they'll be a lot more chill about firing employees who can keep their personal beliefs out of their work. Apply the same principle to independent contractors and businesses, and to really make it clear, add damages against anyone who files nuisance suits anyway.
But if we don't codify it? I'm not going to join in on cancel culture, but neither can I bring myself to condemn its equal application, not until the people nominally on the side of the current victims are also opposing it in a way at least as meaningful as my off-the-cuff suggestion, something that will definitely still apply after the next pendulum swing, once the jackboot is back on the other foot. I don't want to join in the (metaphorical!) bloodshed, but I can still recognize that, while shooting opposing forces as they surrender is a war crime, shooting them as they retreat is just good tactics.
roystgnr
4mo ago
Dark humor is not even remotely in Tenacious D's wheelhouse.
"I can't wait to take Kage back to Hell
I'm gonna fill him with my hot demon gel"
Their second most popular song jokes about a protagonist potentially being raped for eternity by Satan.
But your point (B) is much more persuasive.
roystgnr
4mo ago
Trump hasn't grown in my esteem at all (there are many virtues I think he lacks, but the abilities to take risks and project self-righteous strength are not among them), but Biden has been falling fast recently. Confusing "5%" for "$55", repeating inflammatory lies after the dangers of that were demonstrated, maybe that could be excused as a mentally slipping figurehead who nevertheless has a solid team behind him ... but is the team out to lunch too? Even "5%" is some mix of shameless pandering with economic illiteracy. More obviously, the "we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof" lie should have been treated as probable cause for criminal investigation; every hour where it isn't even considered to be cause for firing is another hour of shame.
I also don't effectively have a vote in the Presidential election (in a very non-swing state, I get to vote for the Libertarian and plurality counting be damned), but every year I get more sympathetic to people who do. Whichever way you all vote, at least have the decency to regret ending up in this situation, and maybe get drunk afterward?
roystgnr
4mo ago
Based on the info we have today? Sure.
Are we sure? The person who did the most damage to Hitler's ideals was arguably Hitler, though the mechanism is a tossup between "Let's fight on two fronts; doesn't getting involved in a land war in Asia sound fun?" versus "Let's get rid of all the Jews; what good are their wacky nuclear physics ideas ever going to be anyway?" The latter dumb idea was probably baked into the Nazi ideology, but the former dumb idea might have been a Hitler-specific mistake. If Hitler dies, do we end up with something like the Germany of today where anti-immigration polling above 20% sends the country into an introspective panic, or do we get a Germany (plus half of Poland, plus France, plus...) where hatred of The Other hasn't been so massively discredited, because its banner got taken up by somebody more competent?
roystgnr
4mo ago
Even a flaky subhuman model can probably be made limited enough and wrapped in enough layers of manually-written checks to keep it safe for its builders, in which case your first paragraph is only true for a definition of "high-powered" that's literally superhuman. That's not to say it won't come true eventually, though, which makes your second paragraph more worrisome. A Prisoner's Dilemma payoff matrix can be modified continuously into a Stag Hunt matrix, with no sharp distinction between the two if we add any uncertainty to the payoffs, and if capabilities progress faster than alignment then that's what we'd expect to happen.
roystgnr
4mo ago
There is an intention when mitochondria generate ATP. The intention is generated by evolution (indirectly, but that applies to human purposes too), but it's very clearly goal-oriented; its complication is a backpropagation of selection on simple effects, not a consequence of simple causes.
Imagine instead that we were to say "One purpose of the mitochondria in [this person with Kearns-Sayre] is to cause pigmentary retinopathy and progressive vision degradation." That no longer sounds right, does it? From a non-intentional definition of purpose, it's just as correct as "to generate AGP"; it's What The System Does! But it's clearly an exception to the "purposeful" workings of evolution, not a central case, and so describing it as a "purpose" anyway feels wrong.
(And also, yeah, what @SubstantialFrivolity said; I just wanted to point out that that's even applicable to your example.)
roystgnr
4mo ago
"Plant a bit of everything and see what happens" seems to be the right way to go if you have any kind of tough local climate/pests/fungi/etc. Our green beans grew great. Our okra next to them grew even better but went from "not yet ready to pick" to "basically wood" so fast that we only successfully harvested a fraction. Our vine plants mostly didn't sprout, except for some that sprouted and grew great and then suddenly died for no apparent reason. Our peppers grew very well; our tomatoes did the same, then came back on their own the next year, but didn't really fruit that time before a heat wave got them. Our parsley kept coming back, huger and huger, through heat waves and freezes, though I think this summer might finally finish it off. Etc. etc. I'd never have predicted any of that in advance ... except the peppers and tomatoes, I guess.
But I'm lazy and our planting season is tricky, so mostly I gave up and started with hydroponics. We still had the same problem with cucumbers (it's got to be fungi?) and of course it's a tiny garden, but it's wonderful for herbs, still good for tomatoes and peppers, and infinitely better for things like lettuce that can be hard to distinguish from the local weeds until they're big.
I need to be weary of that.
I'm thinking you meant "wary", but I have to admit that "weary" is somehow even more accurate.
roystgnr
4mo ago
"I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'Try being rich first. ' See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job." - Bill Murray
Of course, being famous often entails or leads to being rich, and in those cases it seems worth the trade, but in the worst case, famous people who can't monetize it or who go broke often seem to be miserable.
roystgnr
4mo ago
haven't noticed any sharp increase in appetite
This is what exercise seems to get for me. Yeah, burning an extra 300 calories means spending a whole hour on light exercise or half an hour on more vigorous exercise, but after I've done that I somehow don't feel like I'm missing 300 calories. I can initially drop 300 calories more easily (infinitely more easily! negative effort!) by skipping snacks or eating a lighter meal, but if I do that with real food or even junk food then I'm acutely aware of the absence until I make up for it (possibly with interest, eating too fast because I'm hungrier...). I think for most people the easiest low-hanging fruit is dietary, avoiding liquid calories, but once that's done exercise starts to look like a good deal very soon afterwards.
(this is just talking about weight loss - obviously if you're more directly worried about health and fitness then things like "replace junk food with healthier food" and muscle-building exercise are more beneficial sooner)
roystgnr
4mo ago
Sony just announced its partnership with "immigration equality", promoting "justice and equality" for aids-ridden gay immigrants through lawsuits and lobbying.
Huh. 24 hours ago; not a joke.
To be precise, though, Immigration Equality is only "the nation's leading LGBTQ immigrant rights organization", so Sony is currently just focusing on immigration restrictions in the USA (where immigration leads to a mere 750K new naturalized citizens each year, and where Sony has a full 16K employees), and presumably there will be a small delay before efforts expand to less urgent places like Japan (a solid 10K naturalizations per year, but only 55K Sony employees).
Ironically, I'm actually on Sony's side here (the liberal and libertarian in me are happy with most immigration, and the conservative in me still thinks the solution to AIDS is just "hey, remember monogamy?") ... yet I can't help but wonder if any top Sony execs will really be suggesting that this additional kindness and awareness of other people's problems should also be extended to Japan (42 out of 10,493 annual asylum applications approved in Wikipedia's most recent data), or whether such a possibility would have them concerned about their precious fingers.
roystgnr
4mo ago
The exact same thing happened to me, but a few "Not interested in this post" clicks fixed it soon afterward. It still don't know how clicking "like" on some topology theorems could convince the algorithm that I really wanted to witness order-of-operations-confusion train wrecks too, but at least it was temporary.
And, whoa - did I manage to do the same on Facebook??? Last time I was on there I finally snapped, and instead of clicking "Block" on only the first "Suggested For You" slop before exiting, I went down my timeline and blocked AI image purveyors one after another after another. And now that I reconnect, to get a count of how much of their feed is algorithmic garbage as a negative contrast to Twitter, the count is 0%? Today there's literally nothing there but posts from friends and (not too many or too stupid, even!) sponsored ads. I'm not even seeing anything from the less repulsive sorts of "Suggested For You" that I hadn't blocked. Did Facebook happen to change their algorithm right as I got most fed up with it? Is their algorithm too dumb to guess that I won't want to play "find all the physically impossible or architecturally stupid details" in 20 AI log cabin pictures in a row, but not too dumb to realize when they pushed me over the edge? Could I have fixed this long ago if I'd just been more exhaustive about it earlier?
roystgnr
4mo ago
Indeed. Literally, everything @RandomRanger just said was correct. But connotationally, what the comment missed was that "imposing your political viewpoint" can mean "Totalitarianism" or it can mean "avoid Totalitarianism"; it can mean "refuse to make jokes that make fun of women" or it can mean "make whatever jokes the user asked for", it can mean "avoid saying various anti-CCP things" or it can mean "avoid saying how to make new bioweapons" or it can mean "say anything the user asks you to whatsoever".
The idea that we can avoid imposing any viewpoints and just get whatever falls out of intelligent absorption of training data might be true, but I wouldn't want to bet everything on "whatever falls out" being good for us.
roystgnr
5mo ago
The seemingly now-universal popular habit of calling Instant Runoff Voting (a term that specifies one particular voting system) by the name Ranked Choice Voting (a term that applies to IRV, but also Condorcet methods, STV in multi-winner elections, a ton of other methods, and I guess technically even plurality voting), is weird to me. How did that get started? Long ago when I first looked into better voting systems, it seemed like nobody could make that mistake: people who had also looked into better voting systems wouldn't mix up those terms because they'd get it right, and people who hadn't looked into better voting systems wouldn't mix up those terms because they didn't know the terms.
Are we just at the far end of a branching/viral game of telephone, here, where person A carefully explained about tactical voting and Smith Sets and the DH3 scenario and on and on, but persons Z1 through Z1000 barely managed to get "ranking good" and "plurality bad" out of all that?
My personal beef with IRV is that it claims to make it safe to vote for 3rd parties, but only does so if the 3rd parties have no chance of winning. I'm not sure whether the possibility of "tricking" voters into an untactical split vote would be likely to hurt the Democrats or Republicans more, though; I think Democrats are just more pro-IRV right now because when you feel in control you feel like it's safe to trust wonkish ideas, whereas the minority party has more cause to fear that complications are a way to hide trickery.
I'm a fan of Approval Voting, where the optimal tactics are "look at the two front runners and vote approval for the better of the two as well as anyone you like more than them", not much harder to understand than plurality's "look at the two front runners and vote for the better of the two", and where there's pretty clearly still no trickery hidden in "the person who gets the most votes wins". It's not as good as a Condorcet method in the absence of tactical voting, but since there won't be an absence of tactical voting I think it makes sense to settle on something where the tactical-voting failure states are as benign as possible.
roystgnr
5mo ago
I think "frequently" is understating the situation: "skeptical of the media" is now a supermajority, at an all time high, with 29% of last fall's Gallup poll reporting "not very much" trust in the mass media and 39% reporting "none at all".
roystgnr
5mo ago
Essentially, the NYT wants your outside work to basically still look similar to the NYT.
"NYT rehires Hitler-praising Soliman Hijjy to cover Israel-Hamas war" - Oct 20, 2023
I do hope that's a disproof, but, well....
roystgnr
5mo ago
What's the Lewis theodicy for pre-Christian-contact humans? Jews (and people exposed to Jewish missionaries? but AFAIK they were never exactly an evangelical religion...) I assume get the "Redemption ... a different way" loophole in (5). Maybe you could also argue that e.g. the Tang dynasty might have had some kind of missionary contact, though the likely tiny ratio of hypothetical-missionary to local-established-belief-systems exposure seems pretty unfair to people required to pick the former. But the further you go from the Middle East in space or the further back you go in time, the more of a stretch it gets. In the most archetypal case of the problem, the Native Americans hit points (1) through (4) so hard that people invented entire religions to try to provide a solution.
But on the other hand, Christianity didn't collapse in 1493, so clearly there's some theodicies that make Christians happy enough. Even not knowing exactly what they are it feels like they ought to apply to extraterrestrial aliens as easily as extracontinental ones.
roystgnr
5mo ago
Regulation and taxes factors low on this yet it's always the part that gets the most attention.
It varies from state to state, but what I've read from business owners is that taxes factor low but compliance with vague and shifting regulations can be a disaster:
"As a business owner in California, I am going to have to do a ton of research to figure out just how we can comply with all this, and even then I will likely be wrong because whether one is in compliance or not is never actually clear until it is tested in court. I had to do the same thing with California meal break law (multiple times), California heat stress law, new California harassment rules, California sick leave rules, the California minimum wage, Obamacare rules, Obamacare reporting, the new upcoming DOL rules on salaried employees, etc.
Five or ten years ago, I spent most of my free time thinking about improving and growing the business. Now, all my mental bandwidth is consumed by regulatory compliance. I have not added a new business operation for years, but instead have spent most of my time exiting businesses in California. Perhaps more important is what I am doing with my managers. My managers are not Harvard MBAs, they are front-line blue collar folks who have been promoted to manager because they have proven themselves adept at our service process. There are only a finite number of things I can teach them and new initiatives I can give them in a year. And instead of using this limited bandwidth to teach some of the vital productivity enhancement tools we should be adopting, I spend all my training time on compliance management issues."
To be fair, this might be partly selection bias; the business owners who stay in business long enough to write a lot about it are the ones who already survived dealing with capital and customers and emergencies and all.
roystgnr
5mo ago
It stood out from the first launch (IFT-1) because that was nearly a total disaster: 3 (out of 33) booster engines failed immediately (then 2 more on the way up), and it practically crawled off the pad, which also failed and flung giant chunks of concrete far enough to hit ocean. If a few more engines had failed sooner we might have seen one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions in history. 4 minutes later (at only 29km up and 2100m/s) we did see a pretty big explosion, when they lost control before stage separation and had to terminate the whole flight, and even the termination didn't work properly, with the termination explosive damage taking half a minute to finish off a vehicle it should have wrecked in seconds.
It stood out from the second launch because it actually got the upper stage and booster into their planned trajectories after separation. In IFT-2, right after separation the booster was supposed to boost back towards a site closer offshore (for a controlled splashdown, practice for future returns to launch site), but LOX filters had some kind of blockage, 6 (out of 11) of the restarted booster engines started rapidly failing, and they had to blow it up instead. The upper stage made it almost to their target trajectory, started dumping excess LOX as planned ... and that interacted with a leak, started an engine bay fire, shut down the engines, and triggered another termination. At least all the explosives worked properly that time.
It stood out from the third launch because it actually brought both stages back to splashdown. In IFT-3 the boostback worked, but then the booster was having trouble with control during the descent and then with propellant for the landing burn, so instead of a controlled "landing" on the ocean they got an explosion half a kilometer up. Then, the "orbital" (actually very slightly suborbital, specifically as a fallback for what happened next) insertion worked ... except that their attitude control thrusters froze up. So they got to do their free fall experiments in space, but when it came time to reenter they were slowly spinning, and entered sideways instead of heat-shield-first.
I'm a die-hard SpaceX fan (for reasons discussed here), so take my opinion with a grain of salt too, but I'm excited about an excellent splashdown this time with the booster, and more importantly IMHO they just passed the hardest test in the whole program: getting the largest reentry vehicle in human history to decelerate from orbital velocity while still intact and (albeit barely, this time!) fully operable.
Hell, in honor of the Starship 29 Flap, let's push that "passed the test" metaphor to work far past the point it should have been expected to give up: SpaceX only passed their Advanced Launch Vehicles test with a low D-minus this time, and also the exam paper is kinda charred from where it accidentally caught fire right as they were finishing it, but that D-minus beats their 40% last time, 20% the time before that, and 5% the time before that, and whereas such failure would make other advanced students drop out, SpaceX seems determined to just keep retaking the damn test until they've got the same "A++ and extra credit and they corrected one of the professor's mistakes" they eventually reached on the Intermediate Launch Vehicles test with Falcon 9. And that's a big deal, because so far they're the only ones yet to even pass the Intermediate Launch Vehicles test. Space Shuttle got a low pass from the Teaching Assistant (NASA) but failed when the professor (physics) checked their work more carefully. Almost everybody else elected to only take Basic Launch Vehicles, on the theory that that was all you needed to earn a living, which was true once but is becoming more obsolete each year. The exceptions were a few poor students long ago who failed to scrape up the tuition, one rich student who is having to repeatedly audit the class until they find enough time to get ready for the preliminary exams, and a couple young students who seem pretty smart but either aren't ready to test quite yet or are still mastering the Basic test.
roystgnr
5mo ago
The nuclear salt-water rocket propulsion that would give them range to Pluto and back one tank fairly fast are doable
"When Chernobyl reached peak x power during its explosion it was about 350 gigawatts for a fraction of a second. This is 700 gigawatts continuously, right, it's a non-stop Chernobyl going on."
are doable
Well, maybe? For obvious reasons we'll never get the EPA to approve a ground test, and I'd be a bit leery about LEO too, which leaves us just hoping that Zubrin's paper was solid.
Of course, the 66 km/s exhaust version was his conservative design; the really speculative version upgrades the uranium enrichment level from "20%" to "weapons grade" and bumps up the yield, to get the delta-V to a few percent of the speed of light. YOLO, right?
Either way, while I'm generally a big fan of the SpaceX "get hardware flying so if it breaks you learn more faster" strategy, I think I'd be cool with taking things more slowly before assembling a 200,000 megaton hopefully-not-a-bomb in orbit.
roystgnr
5mo ago
Live internet stock trading technology is awesome. When I was a kid this kind of pyramid scheme relied on snail mail, and you couldn't even buy on margin; the only way to cheat even more was to bump your name higher up the chain letter list.
roystgnr
5mo ago
I'm going to make the prediction that there's a 50% chance Israel launches a nuke in some capacity by 2030 if Biden is elected later this year.
See, this is exactly the sort of case I was just talking about with @cjet79 - obviously your comment should be upvoted for overall quality, but the one sentence above would tempt me to just drop the whole thing unless I had time to qualify the upvote with written disagreement.
The October 7th attack on Israel was shocking, but it was nothing compared to the 50-years-before-October-7th war. We believe Israel had already had tested their first nuke a decade before that point (to this day, Israel won't confirm or deny having nukes, so take foreign intelligence guesses with a grain of salt), but they still met an attack over a hundred times larger with conventional weapons alone. It's possible that Iran will build up a much more massive conventional army for next time, to really back Israel into a corner, but that's not going to happen by 2030. 5% would be a high estimate, much less 50%.
This is much worse than Babbitt.
"It's okay to shoot at a mob engaged in violent breaking-and-entering" would have been a classic conservative talking point if not for the valence of that particular mob. It might have even been considered an especially-conservative talking point; centrists might agree with Niven's "1a) Never throw shit at an armed man." but the "why didn't you aim for the leg" crowd would hesitate at enforcing "1b) Never stand next to someone who is throwing shit at an armed man."
However, "It's okay to shoot at a political rally for the wrong politician" is only defensible if the politician is Actually Literally Hitler, not Hyperbolically Literally Hitler. The election may now be Trump's to lose, now that every anti-Trump campaign message has to thread the needle between "doesn't invoke Godwin's Law at all" (in which case it might not be persuasive, given the alternative and the implicit backpedaling) versus "kinda invokes Godwin's Law" (in which case it looks like irresponsible stochastic terrorism to anybody who isn't already pro-assassination).
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