Is there interest in a group summary project of Project 2025, similar to the Inflation Reduction Act project from the Old Place?
It seems likely that the boring non-headlining aspects will quietly inform the agendas of a Trump administration, or that independent-ish administrators will align with it without explicit direction from above, as we've already seen in leadership styles that rely on prospiracy to deniably communicate leadership priorities, eg Putin and Trump, so a good amount of benefit could come from a small investment of labor.
Edit: Project 2025 full text is available here.
xablor
1mo ago
Struggling with "Electric Machinery Fundamentals" and "Introduction to AC Machine Design", making good time on "How to Keep House When You're Drowning". ACMD has a hilariously math-heavy approach that I imagine I'd appreciate if I were still a student with vector calculus competence, but I honestly doubt I ever was, and I don't think my degree program ever required an EM Fields course, so it's an intimidating slog that seems to only serve to back up the engineering equations given in EMF.
HtKHWYD, contrariwise, is gloriously pragmatic, and I like both the content and the presentation quite a bit for how pedestrian it is. Lady has a skillset to communicate, communicates it, communicates fine points and failure points, and does nothing else. I appreciate that.
xablor
2mo ago
Florida, which in latest polling is a weak Trump advantage; I don't know if the senators Matter. My interpretation is that a flip is more than possible by November, so it's higher-impact this year.
xablor
2mo ago
But Election Day totally should be a federal holiday.
Concur, as an insufficient start.
Two factors that I find repel me from voting are
- the effort needed to develop a ranking over the candidates
- sub-problem: develop and keep current opinions on the decisions I expect them to make
- ex: What are my opinions on The Wall, what will Trump likely do?
- ex: Do I even need to have an opinion on whether tips should be taxed, or is it fluff?
- sub-problem: identify issues in the world to have a preference on that aren't in the discourse
- ex: What are the odds of John Bolton's opinions on Iran getting into Trump's cabinet? Do I like them or not?
- ex: Jake Sullivan's conservatism about escalation in the Russia-Ukraine war? Do I like them or not?
- (I don't know actually know Harris' cabinet rumors well enough to have thoughts about them.)
- sub-problem: for each issue, develop a score for each candidate for/against on that issue.
- sub-problem: develop and keep current opinions on the decisions I expect them to make
- the ugh field around the actual physical implementation of the act of voting, executive dysfunction, and the difficulty of bootstrapping into knowing how to accomplish it.
- App idea: a checklist manager for taking part in the polls you want to. You need to register to vote? Here's the form and the types of evidence to gather, press a button to have a copy and a stamped envelope mailed to you, paid half-and-half by each party. Daily reminders and follow-ups on the tasks and sub-tasks. It's two weeks before voting day, did you arrange the morning off? Probably this is already a thing; I hope it is. Maybe I should make it if not.
Between perfectionism, procrastination with a fun and infinite problem, and a multi-month process requiring advance planning and grit on the day of to wait in an hour-long line to poke a cranky ATM, it's very easy to round 1/3E8 of the cost/benefit from a given federal outcome to 0 and not bother. This is effectively charity to a process that's worked more-or-less well enough so far, all outcomes are within bounds, going with the flow is entirely tolerable.
You've run elections as part of the implementation of the electoral process, or as a consumer of the data and metadata resulting from the electoral process? I have to imagine campaign staffs would want to know the breakdown of motives of non-voters between Vegas, dead, protesting, and lazy, that would turn out for them but for some factor, so they can correct that factor - or, offensively, make them worse for the opposition.
No, see, this is exactly what I was hoping to elicit, and thank you: a composite version of my dad with similar ideology that can make the non-vapid arguments that he can't. I don't think he's even heard of game theory, or knows why defecting is bad, or finds results using it as an argument compelling. I'm sure that stronger arguments for his position exist, and I've got a couple sketched in my back pocket that I'm withholding to avoid bias, I'm just trying to get them from a wider audience than my own head.
xablor
2mo ago
In my weak defense, I do actually try to correct myths and encourage more comfortable bellyfeel about nuclear power policy, when the opportunity presents naturally. Actually mobilizing someone to vote, or trying to convert someone to my candidate, no, though.
xablor
2mo ago
I'm currently having a debate with my dad.He asserts that voting is a civic duty, and that if you don't vote you can't complain about outcomes.
I disagree with both halves:
-
voting is commendable, but supererogatory, and in practice futile compared to lobbying and coalition-building
- If it's a duty, why don't they arrest you for not following through? Failure to comply with taxes and selective service both get people very angry.
- If it's a duty, why is it made practically harder than the intrinsic difficulty of developing an informed opinion? There is no Voting Day or Weekend, there is no guarantee of no reprisal for taking time off to do it.
- Tangential rant: why the fuck is the most powerful country on the planet apparently incapable of deploying world-class secured online voting? Why is the single fundamental operation of ensuring political legitimacy treated so unseriously? You have to show up in person? And you're authenticated by showing a $15 license-like thing at best? Scribbling on a register? Scribbling on a mailed-in slip?
- If I'm honest with myself there's an element of go-to-hell rebellion. Duty is meaningless if you didn't sign up for it with full comprehension, and you can take your cultural-indoctrination-by-bullying and shove it. I'd happily trade my federal suffrage for my federal tax burden.
- An individual vote isn't much power at all. In an age where a junior senator can be bought for $10K, you properly 'vote' by organizing a Fun Run and starting a war chest, or finding a way to enhance or steer an existing one. Voting by voting is a loser's game.
-
it's obviously viable to hold an opinion on how a leader you didn't vote for is acting. Flippantly, it's like atheism: you didn't vote for every other pol, why is the one in power different somehow? Practically, we don't say you can't hold an opinion about your driver falling asleep if you're a passenger.
- Less flippantly, if no leaders on offer will implement policies or styles/frameworks that you'd prefer, then participation at all indicates a mandate, and refusing participation expresses protest. Especially in the US federal system, where there is no "none of the above" option.
- He assures me that spoiling your vote in protest implements this, so long as you Do the Voting Ritual. I don't trust the opaque interpretation of unknown officials, and these days don't trust that it won't be used in some vote hack.
- You don't vote for high leadership's direct actions, you can't predict what decisions they'll take for reference situations, there is no standard expression of personal style. You're already an ignorant passive passenger once the vote is cast, why is intelligently and deliberately refusing to vote somehow special?
- Less flippantly, if no leaders on offer will implement policies or styles/frameworks that you'd prefer, then participation at all indicates a mandate, and refusing participation expresses protest. Especially in the US federal system, where there is no "none of the above" option.
There's mutual incomprehension, here, and frankly he doesn't seem sophisticated in his thinking; it's just repeating a slogan with the vehemence of a moral axiom, pure meme replication, pure social force on force. Can someone steelman his side for me? Mind read if you need to. Can someone steelman my side for me?
xablor
2mo ago
I'd argue for proper storage shielded against EMP - a couple metal ammo cans with a grounding wire would be very good, a microwave would be mediocre, don't forget dessicator packets and maybe oxygen absorbers or displacers - and a couple smartphones, loaded with info and entertainment. A local backup of digital docs you care about, could be a thumb drive, probably cloud storage services with maximum replication will survive but be spotty to access. Basic cellular service will be a priority to restore, fast data won't. If you want to splurge on EMP shielding a closet-scale volume, an ebike and the delicate bits of a solar power system. I dunno if solar panels will be impacted by EMP. Consumables for your tech, tires and lubricants for your vehicles. Food. Water filters, rule of thumb is 2L a day, more if you're working hard. Gas for cooking, a compatible stove. Maybe a compatible generator? Multivitamins.
...you know what, just read everything on https://www.ready.gov/ .
xablor
2mo ago
I'm currently refreshing on Factorio in preparation for the expansion, let's coop?
xablor
2mo ago
My passive cooling vest project has metastasized, since I've lost access to my primary shop facility with all its wonderful free-to-me toys. Accordingly, I'm building a vacuformer, demonstrated at https://youtube.com/watch?v=RWxCvMzvxlQ . I've got parts and tools in stock, I just need to execute.
Also, Factorio is eating me again.
xablor
2mo ago
My cooling vest project is moving again, at long last!
I live in Florida, in August, and my work schedule relative to my work site's means that I'm walking across a half-mile of parking lot in full morning sun. NightHawkInLight, a popular science youtuber, recently ran across (https://youtube.com/watch?v=Nqxjfp4Gi0k) a Phase Change Material that's amenable to DIY-level resources, so I've taken it upon myself to package it in a wearable form. Academic writeup at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316893824_Preparation_and_thermal_properties_of_Glauber's_salt-based_phase-change_materials_for_Qinghai-Tibet_Plateau_solar_greenhouses .
Phase Change Material: a material that melts and freezes at a tuneable temperature. This is the stuff that keeps your pillow foam cold at night. This is not chemical cold packs, it's only melting and freezing - the entire connected volume of the material will fight a temperature change to the other side of the phase change point as long as any part of it hasn't absorbed enough joules to implement the phase change. If the temperature you care about is 32F, you can use water just fine. If you want a little less than that, add rock salt, like the North does every winter to clear roads and driveways. If your temperature is about 95F, you can make a saturated water solution of sodium sulfate, aka Glauber's salt. Then, if you want it to be relevant to human-compatible temperatures, dope it with sodium chloride, and you get the melting temp to about 65F. Then, if you put it into flexible pouches held more or less against the skin, it rescues engineers from showing up dripping to their cube farm.
I've been treating the PCM as more or less turnkey and solved, so the only obstacle is making pouches to a) hold a useful amount of PCM, b) against a curved surface (me), c) in a structure that doesn't impair other forms of cooling. I've chosen heavy PVC sheet for this, and had some trouble getting it to fuse to itself - I'd made a temperature-controlled heat spreader out of a brass bar and a cartridge heater, controlled by an off-the-shelf PID controller and solid-state relay, but it didn't heat the far sheet effectively enough to fuse at the heated zone. A colleague pointed out that pipe cement is really PVC cement, so I figured out over the weekend how to mask that zone to pretty tightly control where the joint between sheets occurs - masking tape works fine - and last night how to heat and form the PVC sheet using a vacuformer. So now I just need to make the forms for the pouches, make the front sheet with the vacuformer, and glue on the backing sheet.
xablor
2mo ago
"Electric Machinery Fundamentals 3e" by Stephen J Chapman, because a) I'm tired of thinking starter-generators are magic, b) I want to design and build a microturbine APU so I can get a BEV power armor without having to handle my dad's range anxiety.
Also David Chapman's Vividness website-book-blog-thing at https://vividness.live/ , he's been on my radar for a long time and I've never followed through.
xablor
3mo ago
I've wondered similar at https://www.themotte.org/post/440/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/85958?context=8#context , albeit overengineered a little.
containers for digital media (video, audio, hell why not text documents or tweets) that's trusted for public decisions must be cryptographically signed and checksummed by the originating device before it hits userland, and further signed by a trusted location service that claims the capturing device was actually present. Media without the container is considered not possibly trustable. Unpacking the container and doing ANYTHING to the contents, without the private key of the originating device, becomes detectable. The entire problem reduces to a) key management, which is merely moderately hard at scale, but made easier by centralized management for many (almost all?) mobile device, b) the trusted location service, c) protection against extracting the signing key of the originating device. Obviously this trades off significant amounts of privacy, but if you're submitting your film to the MSM to influence public opinion, that's maybe acceptable.
An undercurrent of anxiety about Iran being nuclear-latent has come to my attention lately - I think I noticed it via Warographics on Youtube? In brief, they have fissile material, but thus far haven't demonstrated a complete device which requires a casing, fission initiation, etc, and the amount of max-effort work to cross that line seems small. Gun-type fission weapons are of course super-simple and reliable, the biggest problem to solve has always been the industrial capacity to refine the necessary amounts of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. I don't know how hard the R&D and engineering problems of implosion-type weapons are, or multi-stage fission-boosted weapons, and I don't know how hard the miniaturization and operationalization problems are to create, say, a 10-KT device that is small enough to be man-portable, or rugged enough to be delivered via artillery or a ballistic reentry vehicle.
Except - isn't this old news?
Iran's been running gas centrifuge farms for a long time now, that was what Stuxnet was about, turning up the cost of operating them by abusing the bearings, ergo turning down the rate of weapons-grade uranium purification. Probably they've had multiple devices' worth of weapons-grade material for a long time. While that stockpile accumulates, it's not like the math for old designs of fusion weapons is hard to back out of modern physics, that gives you the prerequisites for your fuse engineering effort to run in parallel, up to testing with inert cores.
In summary, Iran has been "on the brink of getting access to nuclear weapons" in the same way they're claimed to be today for years. They've actively chosen not to cross that line in a way observable to Western intelligence. This is an open secret to everyone professionally in the game, and commentators of low-medium sophistication on up. So why are mutterings only surfacing now about the risk? I can only speculate it's a quiet angle of pressure against further increasing the scale of Israeli combat operations, but I don't understand to what end, or why it isn't simply being said in diplomatic meetings.
Why turn up public fear about the Iranian nuclear program? Why do it now? Why do it so subtly?
xablor
5mo ago
It's been a visible technique in psych inventories I've taken to invert ~half the Likert questions-scale questions, which seems like correcting for precisely this type of bias. I haven't seen it in political polls I've taken. I infer that it's a Best Practice for those who really care about such things, or at worst net-zero cargo-culting, and that invoking this bias is a useful technique for those who want to engineer a biased survey.
xablor
6mo ago
Hm. Proposal: bare links thread exists, but it's only one bare link per day, first come first served? Small-N bare links per day, first come first served? I don't know how easy bot integration would be so it doesn't weigh down the server.
xablor
6mo ago
Small-scale shower thought, since I don't want to wait until Sunday: a belief is an entry in our knowledge base that we know we have, and that we act on. A so-called alief is knowledge that we act on but don't know we have (Wiki gives the example of being scared when standing on a tall balcony with a glass bottom that you trust intellectually - you're safe, you know you're safe, the body is scared anyway). What, then, is something we don't believe but take action as though we do believe? A policy? A trusted hypothetical? A religious law? This is a mode of thinking that I lean on a lot, that seems to be a lot more frequent than for most people.
I got to this thought by completing the 2-variable square, with "known to the process doing introspection" as one variable, and "used in actions in the world" as the other. Given the vague and brief description above, what other frameworks can we fit alief and belief into that reveal other kinds of -lief?
xablor
7mo ago
This surprised me, are you sure it's true? I seem to be able to buy quote-unquote CARB-compliant generators online, or at least generators that have a sticker claiming it, and the price premium for extra emissions controls appears to be small. There are also provisions to run a non-compliant generator in declared emergencies.
This is hard. The best move I've got is to brute-force my sleep schedule to be awake at 5 or so, addy up (back when I had access), and use those crack-energy disinhibited hours while there are no distractions from the world to get some work done.
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