xablor
8mo ago
Thanks for the correction. My understanding was that IRGC more or less supported anything destabilizing Israeli presence, continuation, and competence, lots of casual internet sources seem to back it up. Is that an emphasized element of the total truth, not mutually exclusive with your claim? Is your claimed support from the US leakage from aid efforts, or how's it work? I can't see it being a first-class element of US foreign policy.
xablor
8mo ago
Thanks for weighing in. I think I acknowledged this, that's the bit about "Yes I know it's evil, but it's less evil and seems back-of-envelope more practical than what they're doing now". The current Israeli actions also implement war crime criteria pretty well, so clearly they're up for that class of action either covertly or accepting it via negligence. The point of the question is that my proposal seems to be strictly superior in both humanitarian and logistical terms but isn't being taken, so I'm looking for reasons the that seeming isn't correct.
xablor
8mo ago
Why Not Simply: Gaza, some more.
As I understand it,
- Hamas is the mostly illegitimate government of the Gaza Strip.
- Hamas is Iran-backed and hostile to Israel and Jews in general, with the dissolution of Israel and the expulsion of Jews from the region as explicit long-term goals, and general mayhem and violence as immediate goals.
- Israel is treating the further existence of Hamas as an existential threat, and, catalyzed by the 10/7 attack, has launched an embargo and military campaign in Gaza in order to eliminate Hamas as a continuing threat, analogous to the US's military efforts in reducing ISIS in MENA.
- Israel is more powerful in total than Hamas, and only sometimes more powerful locally; Hamas is more powerful in total and also at all times and places in Gaza than the Gazan civilian populace
- Consequently, a common Hamas strategy has been to strike at Israeli targets and ensure that attempts at reprisal maximally injure Gazan civilians. It is in Hamas' interest to maximize the suffering of Gazan civilians in order to maximize Israel's loss of face internationally.
- In order to reduce Hamas' effectiveness as a military force, Israel has enacted a siege, which is disproportionately impacting Gazan civilians since Hamas is using large stockpiles located in underground tunnel networks. Food and medicine intended for civilians is easily taken by Hamas agents, by force if needed.
- The conditions for lifting this siege are Hamas' elimination as a viable opposing force, meaning starving them into submission, meaning probably starving civilians to death first.
It seems that one way to defuse Hamas' tactic of using a civilian populace as an all-purpose shield and moral justification is to separate Hamas-ans from Gazans, prevent the Gazan class from providing aid to Hamas, prevent the Gazan class from attacking Israel, and then avoid mistreating the Gazan class. In other words, stop-the-world filtration:
- accept all who surrender, Hamas and civilian, starve/shoot/bomb/propagandize those who don't.
- house those who surrender in a temporary facility, observed and audited as needed. Control movement inside, monitor information in/out/within.
- provide food, infrastructure, and medical aid to whatever standard is demanded for the duration of the surrender. 3a) lots of time here to process and investigate covert Hamas members
- After combat operations end, repatriate.
(Yes I know it's evil, but it's less evil and seems back-of-envelope more practical than what they're doing now)
I don't understand why Israel isn't doing this, and prefers to do horrific things to civilians and take the international consequences on the chin. Is it just because it's reinventing concentration/filtration camps, and not even Israel can handle the international blowback of that tactic at that scale? Is the scale impractical? Is the expense impractical? Is the needed bandwidth of processing humans not doable within Israeli manpower constraints? Do they simply not care that much? Do Gazans prefer to live freely in the current war zone that much more than food, board, and light prison regimentation? Is "after combat operations end" too fuzzy of a line to trust? Is there no trust in being released after internment, or good conditions during?
xablor
9mo ago
FVEYS might be the one group in the world that actually doesn't spy on each other.
I thought this was known to be false, as another layer of end-run around restrictions on SIGINT against citizens? If eg MI6 spies on an American citizen on American soil and relays it to NSA with the expectation of reciprocation, it's not NSA doing the spying, and therefore totally in the clear.
xablor
10mo ago
Personal bugbear: Superior Labrum, Anterior to Posterior. The labrum is a bowl of cartilage that provides passive stabilization of the shoulder joint, which in humans is significantly less structurally sound in exchange for a greater movement envelope. The labrum can be torn by heavy exertion at the edges of the envelope or by the proximal head being driven through the labrum, as in holding your arms rigid during a car crash.
xablor
10mo ago
What prevents the client state from building sufficient capacity to not rely on the foreign plant? It's economically unfavorable while they can't get their shit together, sure, but that just means hard, not impossible or actively prevented. Or is your thought that the nuclear plant would be operated at a loss and price out other sources to cause dependency?
I'd imagined that the site would be diplomatically (edit: and militarily) privileged somehow, so that the US could operate and secure the site, and quietly have a standing plan to irreparably scram the plant and make the equipment useless in case of being overrun. My ignorance shows in lack of details, I'm afraid.
Iran, for the use case of providing nuclear power without exposing nuclear tech to a hostile power. The various countries in and including South Africa, for sponsoring stability and prosperity, since Warographics tells me they've been notably incompetent and corrupt in administering their domestic infrastructure in the last decade and might welcome some foreign investment slash paternalism.
xablor
10mo ago
Happy new year, all. More geopolitics that I don't understand:
Why doesn't the US or some other nuclear power Simply (tm) operate nuclear power plants at a profit on foreign soil on behalf of the local government? This would defuse narratives of the tech tree being made inaccessible to developing nations due to climate change campaigns. It would also promote nuclear non-proliferation and defuse narratives of preventing access to effective power technologies due to the risk of dual-use tech development. Finally, it would stabilize local power grids in regressing states and promote both stability, enabling eventual growth, and loyalty/dependency on the operator in the region. For the cost of single-digit billions of investment, the US (frex) infuses money into American industry, develops the region, and effectively infuses an extra quantum of stability and pseudo prosperity into regions that desperately need it, while extending and securing American hegemony and economic entertwinement/influence.
xablor
11mo ago
Haven't read the replies yet, but I'd like to point out that your incompetence theory holds water again if there are factions within CIA with differing capabilities. My glance over Legacy of Ashes suggests that the analysis/research and operations groups are culturally quite distinct centrally, meaning de-facto siloed. Only the analysis/research groups are at risk if the WMD claim is revealed to be bogus, and only the ops groups are able to convincingly plant evidence in the field. Shit rolls downhill onto the specialist team evaluating WMD risk in MENA/AFRICOM, skipping the chain of command above them, so there's no incentive for a figure to arise who can make a market to resolve in bridging them.
xablor
11mo ago
Why's Georgism gone sour for you? I've only been tracking it loosely and casually, not to the point of going hunting for counter-arguments to it, and I'm certainly not qualified to generate them on my own.
xablor
1yr ago
I read Freddie deBoer on Everyone Can't Do Everything , and I'm trying to have some thoughts on the topic. It's not going well and I'd appreciate contributions and reactions.
In summary, school Halloween celebrations have been canceled at some locations due to equity concerns, due to some students not being of a culture that has Halloween: students without the tradition aren't able to enjoy it, and so no one at the school should enjoy it. Another, different, example of the same impulse is to let a fully blind child onto the field to play peewee football with the aid of radio instructions from the coach. These examples are then bent to serve his argument that schools at all levels should not be designed with the goal of educating every student presented to them, since some students lack the native talent to succeed at them: some check out at 12 and can't read even after high school, some are fit for vo-tech trades but not theory-laden engineering, some few are capable of world-class physics research (or fintech), and all are poorly served by promoting the view that success at any level is merely a matter of effort and perseverance. It's arguably cruel to hold out the possibility of high success to unfortunates who are incapable of it under any circumstance. This leads to lots of poor outcomes: wasted time in schools, devaluation of all markers of achievement as standards are lowered to pass all who show up, credential inflation. That said, he acknowledges the possibility of achievement beyond one's talent with dedication, and offers no real prescriptions beyond protest at the state of affairs.
Raw thoughts, no real ordering: kids who drop out explicitly, not just implicitly, have no place to go other than back home as a drag on the family unit (impractical) or into the workforce as menial labor (viscerally revolting, childhood is for more than that).
attainment, the ability after training to accomplish a task, seems intuitively to have many more factors than just talent and time of exposure. Off the top of my head:
- developmental enablers - whether the student is or has been stunted by malnutrition, disease, heavy metals, etc
- social cohort - is there competition between friends to develop skills? Is there mutual support between them? Does the home culture value schooling, or is school just a holding pen to let the parents work?
- match between presentation and student - not that learning style silliness, but literally the match between the student's model of the things being used to describe the subject of instruction and the vocabulary used to present it
- amount of potential energy the student has for the task - are adolescents up at 6 for the bus and in class at 8 when they're wired to wake at 10 and 11? Have they already been worn down by 3 hours of lecture before the current topic? Was lunch garbage that will spike blood sugar and crash it a half-hour later, or cause a food reaction?
- yes, natural talent is a thing, I'm not denying it
- time of exposure to the topic, in lecture, in homework, in independent work
- have the precursors of the current topic been laid down effectively?
- I don't have a clean phrasing for this - are they pushed? Kids aren't typically self-motivated to study boring difficult topics
- when are the skills presented in the kid's life? Learning rates fluctuate over your life, generally downward; conversely, some kids are late bloomers and hit all their milestones on the same learning curve, just delayed a year.
So, very different skill-acquisition timelines are possible. Here are some prototypes I can imagine:
- Standard-issue kid is deliberately unschooled and left to follow their interests until 16 with exposure to increasingly complex practical tasks, learning only what is needed, ends up mediocre but comfortable.
- Standard-issue kid doesn't value anything, spends the entirety of elementary and high school disrupting classes and not learning anything.
- Functionally damaged kid is advanced with his cohort, doesn't learn anything beyond some of his times tables because the dependency tree doesn't get filled in, bags groceries and never learns anything for the rest of his life.
- Functionally damaged kid is held back until skills are mastered, discovers that he just needs to be exposed to a topic for twice as long as a standard kid but it takes as well otherwise, is allowed time, graduates high school at 20 and struggles some but ends up running a small lawn care company.
- Functionally damaged kid is held back until skills are mastered, discovers that he just needs to be exposed to a topic for twice as long as a standard kid but it takes as well otherwise, ages out at 18, is not prepared to advance in life, scrapes along as a grocery bagger forever.
- Talented kid is given a median course of study, takes engineering courses in college, has 80th percentile life.
- Talented kid is given a hothouse aggressively tracked course of study with a dedicated tutor, becomes a global expert.
All of these are just-so stories, I'm not very happy with them as argumentation or intuition pumps, and they don't advance a point, but I don't want to waste the time spent typing them out. I guess they demonstrate a few points in the broader space of possibilities and show that life outcomes aren't just f(talent, instruction hours).
I can only resist solutions-oriented thinking for so long. What does a student know, when? What ideas are they prepared to build on? How well do they recall a given fact, when? How well do they manipulate interacting facts? What fact, in other words, do we present to a student, by what channel, with what phrasing, at what time? How do we determine this? Economically, how do we structure delivery of these functions for good scaling? I guess I'm redefining "private tutor" here, with functional breakouts to slot automation in as useful. What about providing education after schooling age?
Teaching staff aren't just presenters and test designers, of course. They're required reporters of signs of abuse, first-line mental health responders, mentors, coaches, disciplinarians, college advisors. Similarly schools have had extra functionality piled onto them over time - childhood food distribution, extracurriculars, a refuge for children from a poor home life, a facility for permissive parent figures, I'm sure there are others.
xablor
1yr ago
Spongebob-grade thinking: since we're already being practical but evil in talking up mass civilian displacements, why not Simply(tm) move the population of Gaza to the West Bank, annex Gaza, and freeze Area C settlement in place or abandon Area C? This removes all need for Area C settler shenanigans, enables mass filtration and registration, re-establishes Israel as both massively powerful in the region and comparatively generous about it in tangible terms that an honor culture understands, moves Hamas militants and sympathizers into an area both more amenable to policing and a population with a chance of assimilating them into prosperous coexistence, simplifies the security situation by removing an unfriendly border...
This is, of course, an evil act in many ways, and I don't endorse it as a plan of action, but it's been bouncing around my head and I wanted it out. Why's it impractical and more expensive than necessary?
xablor
1yr ago
claims to want contrast; immediately rules out backlit full-color LCD displays
claims to want speed; indicates preference for a display tech with second-long rewrites
What gives? What are you reacting to to call these your needs? This smells like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem .
That said I used a commodity offering from Sony back when they offered them; they're closing their eReader line down, so it's moot-ish.
xablor
1yr ago
You can't control a process if you can't measure its parameters and outcomes. Record yourself during interactions and review later, if you have warning. Maybe jot down notes about encounters that you feel went especially well or poorly?
xablor
1yr ago
I'm actually a little surprised that someone hasn't tried to displace him to cash in on his silliness with an aggressive article like "Sit Down Mr Macgregor, It's Time to Stop Talking". Maybe there's enough grifting niches out there that there's no need to usurp an incumbent, just set up your own pitch next door? Maybe it's unexpectedly high risk and an attacker needs to build a network of allies before making an attempt? Maybe it's just too much work to thoroughly compile a list of failures and mistakes - there was that one guy who became "the global expert on Moldbug", with more than enough material to discredit his theories, and he didn't make a move. Maybe it's easy to take someone down, but uncertain that you'll be the one to pick up the freed niche.
Presumably there's people willing to say a message - they may even believe it! - and people who want that message said, and a finite budget allocated to getting those things said. Or maybe there's a finite amount of attention in the world to hear the mess. In either case it seems like, assuming there's an equilibrium to disrupt by discrediting someone already in the ecosystem, there's money to be made. So why hasn't someone made a move? What are the dynamics of this grift economy?
This is the same Macgregor that's been predicting Russian forces having free run of all Ukraine east of the Dniepr Real Soon Now for the entire duration of the war? The one whose consulting firm got casualty and death estimates wrong by a factor of (E: at least) four? The one who likes to plug gold?
Yeah I don't think his thoughts are worth much. Maybe as some kind of entropy source for a prototype AI tasked with writing movie plots?
xablor
1yr ago
Not so, source. Seems like it's a pressure tactic from the unions:
Earlier this month, a bargaining group representing hotel owners filed unfair labor practice charges against Unite Here Local 11 with the National Labor Relations Board. According to the complaint, the hotel workers’ union is demanding that the hotels support the Responsible Hotel Ordinance.
And there’s more.
The hotel owners say the union is also demanding a 7% tax on guests of unionized hotels, which a union official said could fund affordable housing for hotel workers.
Technically, unions can’t bargain with hotels for a tax increase. What they’re probably doing is trying to strongarm the hotels into backing, or not opposing, a new initiative for a tax increase. That would probably cross the line into an unfair labor practice.
xablor
1yr ago
I'm seeing speculation that it's leverage in a labor dispute. Since the union brought the proposal, they can withdraw it at will. Therefore the hotels should accede to their demands or the hotels will risk the proposal getting put to a popular vote.
Apparently union construction labor is known to bring lawsuits against projects that don't use them, in the same vein.
xablor
1yr ago
Another round of naive techno-optimism :
I ran across this interesting tidbit from Los Angeles news : the March 2024 ballot includes a proposed Responsible Hotel Ordnance to provide vouchers to homeless people and to require hotels to report vacancies daily and accept vouchers if they have room. The pro and anti reactions you'd expect are in full swing, with the unexpect-to-me wrinkle that the hotel worker's union organized the petition campaign. Bill text here, courtesy of LA city clerk. There's some historical context here in that Project Roomkey was (is?) a COVID-era initiative to rent idle rooms from hotels and motels during the pandemic downturn and use them to house homeless people, under the reasoning that this would reduce the risk of transmission among the homeless population by controlling their living conditions and reducing contact rates.
I mention this only to set context for my actual topic: for purposes of high-density commie-block-style housing of the feral, incompetent, and non-economically viable, how difficult is it to build rooms that can't be damaged beyond repair by an adversarial occupant? Online discussion points out the inevitability of a lawsuit after someone trashes their residence in a fit of, uh, exuberance, and the comparisons to open-air prisons write themselves, but I'm interested in the actual engineering challenges of building an individual space so well that a tenant can't render it unfit for use, modulo bleach, power-cleaning, and replacing some Ikea furniture. I figure the key is to keep the interior of the room entirely sacrificial, and to have the room's border act as a firebreak for damages, so that even if the occupants render everything inside into unusable scrap, it doesn't propagate to your service trunks in the hallway. What's this cost? What are the regulatory hurdles? Who's solved this before, and how well?
xablor
1yr ago
"The Manga Guide to Linear Algebra", and I hate myself a little more with every page I turn. I'm going to complete it, because I want the knowledge and the skills, but the process constantly rubs my nose in my lack of bandwidth in onboarding even basic definitions, much less keeping abstract structures in my head well enough to even see their implications, much less their interactions.
Related, and secondarily, a video course in convex optimization (is that out of scope? If you lot can brag about classic literature I figure it's on to brag about forcing myself through technical content.) I won't detail it except to say it's humbling; playlist at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8WsPW41L6l7rviIGvIkY0-jn-tM3YSNi if you're curious.
I've rediscovered the US's official congressional record, at https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/crec . For whatever reason it's compiled as being distinct from the hearing transcripts, at https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/chrg . It's a weird mix of infuriating and humbling, seeing the egoistic grandstanding around things as subtle and varied as the BUILDER act, substantially modifying the National Environmental Policy Act, and as tiny and high-context as tribal treaties from the 1800s interacting with permitting to add a convenience store to a reservation casino. Something about the scale of impact vs the scale of the people involved? These aren't great souls, whether in Congress or the experts they bring to testify, and they're largely not able to make sweeping impacts due to the combined momentum of history, lobbies, budgets, and a few hundred Congressional cats to be herded.
I just wanted to see Jamie Tucker say "shitter" on the record, man.
xablor
1yr ago
There really aren't ANY apps that just pass the API costs on to users? It's been months, surely that's enough time to figure out an instrumentation layer and a payments provider integration.
xablor
1yr ago
You might be encouraged by recent work in current-gen small modular reactors. Oak Ridge National Labs is standing up 6 of them, a few efforts got approved to start construction, and the US military is obviously interested given their focus on expeditionary logistics.
This has bugged me too, to the point of asking in the past why Blue and Red teams didn't coordinate to both get what they want: money and a makework program for Blue, better voter ID for Red, more faith in voting infrastructure for both the Uniparty and the plebs.
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