wraelk
28d ago
I love these news roundups: a lot of these things weren't on my radar, and I appreciate you bringing them to my attention.
A dispute in Nigeria seems small scale now but in the worst case scenario could snowball into a civil war. Details are unclear but the dispute seems between the central government of Nigeria, controlled by one party, and the governorate of an oil rich region, controlled by another.
I wonder if there are common triggers for civil wars vs just political disputes? My impression is that these things are happening all the time in Africa, but also that civil wars are happening all the time in Africa, so I guess that makes sense.
wraelk
1mo ago
the correct metric to measure criminality would be average conviction length per person, not 'number of suspects'. If most of the French suspects are accused of crossing as pedestrians on red, that paints a very different picture from them being accused of aggravated assault.
Doesn't this start having issues if judges have different levels of leniency for different demographics of offenders, or other confounders that vary between demographics (like age or wealth)?
I think you'd want to instead do it by the average sentence length for the crime they were convicted of, regardless of what they were actually sentenced to. That should eliminate the confounders while maintaining a relative scoring that roughly maps to society's view of the crimes' severity.
If you're worried that those numbers don't match up, that there are crimes that carry a sentence of 5 years but no one's ever given more than 6 months, you could instead use the average actually-given sentence length for all people convicted of that crime.
wraelk
2mo ago
Saudi Arabia apparently did something similar with their foreign-investment oil company, although they bought it out rather than force a contractual handover.
Instead, the Sauds executed a patient, and most importantly, amicable assertion of power over Aramco, which did not become fully owned by Saudis until 1974. At the very start of Aramco, the company was entirely owned and operated by Americans aside from menial labor. However, the Saudi government inserted a clause into their contract with the corporation requiring the American oil men to train Saudi citizens for management and engineering jobs. The Americans held up their end of the bargain, and over time, more and more Saudis took over management and technical positions. This steadily increased the bargaining power of the Saudi government, which periodically renegotiated its contract with the Americans over decades to get a greater share of the profits in exchange for more oil exploration or diplomatic concessions.
In 1973 and 1974, the Saudi government authorized two big final buy-outs of Aramco. The prices were not disclosed publicly, but the consensus is that the American oil companies were well-compensated, and that’s after they had made enormous profits for 30 years. This left the oil companies on good terms with the Saudis who were happy to employ them as consultants and specialists. Today, 80% of Aramco’s employees are Saudi, as well as all executives, though surprisingly not all board members.
(From https://mattlakeman.org/2022/11/22/notes-on-saudi-arabia/)
Well, that's depressing.
So @PmMeClassicMemes, it looks like the text you linked to didn't actually go anywhere: the House passed it unanimously, then the Senate overwrote the bill with something completely different. I checked a couple of the legislators and it looks like Democrats voted to overwrite it and Republicans voted against it: it would not surprise me if the House Democrats who voted for the bill initially were aware this was going to happen.
We're left with the law essentially the same as what we were originally discussing, and the next amendment to that section, rather than clearing up the confusion, makes sure we're aware that someone can be attracted to genderqueer or androgynous people.
I'll continue to stand behind my original points.
wraelk
3mo ago
I don't think you have the right law, you want https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/363A.03.
But it also doesn't have the pedophilia clause, and has additional wording that isn't in either revision:
A person may be attracted to men, women, both, neither, or to people who are genderqueer, androgynous, or have other gender identities.
If you look in the revisions you can see that there's only been one revision to that section in 2023, but it doesn't use the new language.
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/bill.php?b=house&f=hf447&ssn=0&y=2023 is the bill, and if you look at the current bill text, that text is not in it: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/text.php?number=HF447&type=bill&version=3&session=ls93&session_year=2023&session_number=0 . In fact, very little of the text is in it.
it looks like it was removed after the second version: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/text.php?number=HF447&version=2&session=ls93&session_year=2023&session_number=0
As best I can tell, once it got to the Senate they just completely rewrote the bill? https://www.senate.mn/journals/2023-2024/20230522077.pdf#page=824, if I'm understanding this correctly they just amended the bill to delete everything past "this will take effect" and wrote their own bill, which seems unbelievable, but... the bill passed, the text isn't changed, and the latest revision of the bill has the text they changed it to.
wraelk
3mo ago
But what's the alternative? The guy whose entire thing is talking about how safe the V22 is faked his own death in a v22 crash to... undermine his own points?
I guess he could be trying to blunt the effect of the v22 crash by making it personal to the point that people can't bring it up, but... a single crash was going to destroy his argument so fully that he's committing to forever pretending to be his own wife (and having to repeatedly bring up the crash again and again in context) as a result of this? He can't just point out that "safe" is not "infinitely safe"?
The Internet's just weird.
wraelk
3mo ago
I'm just a little skeptical that out of all the potential redundancies in the legal code, they went after this one, particularly when "is pedophilia a sexuality" is the kind of thing that is actually up for debate. The legal code is not trying to minimize word count, and while I could see a case for not putting the exemption in in the first place, I don't see a reason to remove it once it's in there, unless you actually care about the effect
And the person who introduced the bill is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Finke, a poorly-passing MTF who seems a lot more motivated by trans ideology than systematic optimization of the legal code.
wraelk
3mo ago
That seems like what the original wording that was removed in the redefinition Walz signed, "Sexual orientation does not include a physical or sexual attachment to children by an adult" would imply?
If someone was a bisexual pedophile, I would expect discrimination against them based on their bisexuality to be prohibited, but discrimination against them based on their pedophilia to not be prohibited. So I'd want to clarify in law that pedophilia is not a sexual orientation for the purpose of discrimination law. That seems like exactly what the pre-revision wording does.
wraelk
3mo ago
Tacticool catalogues have spears that can screw together (example: https://www.budk.com/Amazon-Jungle-Survivor-Break-Down-Spear-Cast-2Cr13-51329)
I don't have this one, but I do have one similar to this, and it's remarkably solid-feeling, I'm pretty happy with it aside from the whole "why would you ever need a spear" question. And it seems easy enough to put together with 5-10 minutes warning on a fight, which might match reasonably well to gang violence: you know when the other gang shows up and as long as you know you're going to fight rather than run, you just screw it together and put it down somewhere that's easy to reach for when things kick off. If they don't, take it back apart, stick it in your backpack, and head out.
wraelk
3mo ago
I think the issue there is doing it after the primaries.
"The candidate people voted for wasn't going to win, so we picked a different one for them" is kind of an awkward line to have to focus on.
wraelk
3mo ago
Not really relevant to the broader topic, but there's an incredibly on-point example of this: a reddit account (https://old.reddit.com/user/UR_WRONG_ABOUT_V22) whose sole purpose was correcting people who thought the V-22 Osprey was unsafe.
About 7 months ago, he died in a V-22 crash off the coast of Japan.
(The only thing I changed about the wording of the original riddle is to clarify that you must take two entities across the river every time, not simply that you can, because even though can is how /u/Gillitrut originally phrased it, must is how he seems to be interpreting it with "Note that the very first step violates the rules!" in response to the LLM he asked taking only one entity across in its first step.)
The problem with the solution Gillitrut's AI testing gives isn't how many entities are taken across, it's that the AI immediately leaves the fox alone with the feed. That would be fine under the standard formulation of the problem, but under the wording actually given, it leads to the fox eating the feed.
wraelk
9mo ago
Would this suggest that someone having multiple different fetishes would need all of them present to get off?
wraelk
11mo ago
In that example, in wartime that's not "shooting an unarmed man", that's "enemy soldier engaging in act of war" and legitimate target.
Well that's the thing, that man is both. He is an enemy soldier engaging in an act of war and a legitimate target, but he is also an unarmed man.
So there are two rules in conflict, both completely applicable and giving opposite results. What actually happens has a lot to do with which rule is emphasized and brought to the forefront.
wraelk
11mo ago
For some reason, this 24-hour window from Friday morning to Saturday morning seems to always pack a lot of news
This doesn't work for all of your examples, but I think part of it is that companies will often wait until late Friday to make moves that could get a lot of pushback. The extremely-online types will always pick it up anyway, but the normal people will often be less interested because it's the weekend and they've got things to do, so it reduces how much it gets picked up. By the time Monday rolls around the momentum of the pushback is often lost.
Actually, hadn't thought about it like this before, but that's also probably to reduce big stock shifts, give the news time to settle a bit before people get to trade on it.
wraelk
1yr ago
because Christian thought just views punishment differently. “Eye for an eye” is Old Testament, after all.
It kind of seems like when you say "eye for an eye" you mean "makes the whole world blind", i.e. forgiveness instead of retribution. Just to be clear, the Old Testament is in favor of eye for an eye.
If anyone injures his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him.
Leviticus 24, 19-20.
wraelk
1yr ago
At some point after Iran has established they're going to shoot, I think Israel loses their plausible deniability. "oh no Iran shot them AGAIN? What are the odds?" probably wouldn't come off very well.
Assuming they don't run out of boats and/or Palestinians who would prefer to be shot by Iran than by Israel first, of course.
wraelk
1yr ago
I wonder if modern communication and widespread prevalence of Islam will lead this to be less effective than your examples.
Like with Nazi Germany, the main source of Nazi ideology was Germany itself: if you wanted to learn about Naziism you had to go up against the occupation authorities that were against that. And even if there were Nazi groups that weren't repressed in Italy or something, you'd have a hard time finding and learning from them.
But that's clearly not going to happen here: Islam exists in many countries across the world and will explicitly talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict, so there's always going to be a supply of Islam for anyone in Palestine who wants to learn it.
Keeping it repressed doesn't just mean tearing down the mosques, it means keeping Palestinians from accessing the mosques in other countries, which would mean an unrealistic crackdown on all communication technology in the country, and probably needing to maintain that crackdown perfectly for decades against people from other countries actively seeking to break it.
wraelk
1yr ago
On reddit, the mantra was that the downvote was not an "I disagree" button. If that's not the case at the motte I sure would like to know that.
Despite the mantra, the downvote button is pretty universally used as a disagree button on Reddit: I think the main reason the mantra exists is as a push against the clear regular use.
It's a good question to ask what the intended use here is. I vaguely recall a discussion where it was useful to have a button to push as a way to let off steam in response to a post that you dislike: instead of writing an angry retort that drives down the quality of the discussion, you just push your dislike button and move on to a conversation you can productively engage with. I don't know if mods were involved in that discussion or what their thoughts on that philosophy were.
Certainly with our aggressive modding of tone and the community moderation effort, there's a question of whether downvotes meaningfully imply "this shouldn't be on here": that's what the report button and janitor duty are for, and downvotes seem rather redundant with that.
wraelk
1yr ago
It might say something interesting about the distribution of interest in the movie: some people were sufficiently interested to buy multiple tickets and contribute more towards the movie's success than they had to, and some people may not been sufficiently motivated to see it without a free ticket (although i don't know a lot about how you get a free ticket and it's possible ticket recipients would have seen the movie anyway)
I'm not sure that's negative towards the movie, though: having some people be super excited about your movie isn't uncommon, and it's kind of interesting that we don't see more of this.
Imagine a campaign where feminists and allies subsidize a movie that they think portays women well, to try and get more moviegoers to explore along those lines. Kind of terrifying in what it'll do to movie creator incentives in a Toxoplasma of Rage way, but i don't think people are making a strategic decision not to do it on those grounds.
wraelk
1yr ago
The nice part about Nature is that she follows the letter of the law rather than the spirit, and doesn't care if you outwit her. Find a way to exploit Nature's laws and you just win: find a way to exploit a human's laws, and those laws will change quite quickly.
My point is that it is entirely possible to have consistent principles that result in treating trans people as their preferred gender in most cases, but not when it comes to women's sports. An example of such principles would be the basic liberal/libertarian maxim "let people do what they want as long as they're not harming anyone".
I think this falls under "arguments as soldiers".
Arguing that trans women should not be allowed to compete in women's sports is admitting complexity beyond "trans women are women". It will be torn down by fellow believers as not being fully committed to the cause of trans equality, and will thus be eroded away or at the very least not said out loud.
And only that one seems consistent: arguing that trans women are not women but should be allowed to compete in women's sports anyway would be a weird position to hold. Although people that want women's sports to be removed entirely might fall in that category. I also feel like I've seen a view that was something like "make two different categories that anyone can enter, label one with a cool sounding name and one with a lame 'I'm a weakling' sounding name, and let things work themselves out".
Well, he won't pass on his genes with that woman. Even assuming that he never finds a woman who offers little enough resistance to leave alive, he could still have children in a consensual relationship separate from the rape.
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