xablor
14d ago
It seems like it'd be as 'simple' as making it a requirement for electing a Senator or Representative, per https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-i/clauses/750 . (Article 1, Section 4, "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators. The Congress shall assemble at least once in every Year, and such Meeting shall be on the first Monday in December, unless they shall by Law appoint a different Day.") That lets implementers get experience and debug the spec, establishes a reputation, and makes extending it to the Presidential election more a question of 'why not' rather than 'why'.
xablor
14d ago
Wait, I'm confused. Multiply that out for me? If you demonstrate a fair die and I bet evens every time, why isn't that +EV? Transaction costs? Or are you leaving unstated that it's one round, few rounds, or rare rounds (enough time between rounds to invalidate assumptions)?
xablor
21d ago
I'm not privy to Israeli policy discussions and I haven't even studied the topic intensely, so this is necessarily facile and off-the-cuff, sorry. My impression of the terminal goals of the Israeli government are, in no order:
- TG1 Prevent a reduction of the current extents of Israel.
- TG2-1 Minimize population and property loss due to present enemy action
- TG2-2 Minimize the likelihood-damage product of future enemy action
- TG3 Extend the borders of Israel to include current-day Gaza and the West Bank
- TG4 Promote the prosperity of the Jewish people
- TG5 Promote the personal power and prosperity of Israeli leadership
- TG6-1 Maintain good relations with their current backers and alliance network
- TG6-2 Promote prosperity of their current backers and alliance network
- TG6-3 Increase the alliance network
- TG7 Human benevolence
This is only a quickly brainstormed list of generic goals of good governance with some extra ethnocentric emphasis, plus TG3. I used a pairwise comparison chart to figure out my guess at their relative priorities:
- TG2-1
- TG1
- TG2-2 TG4
- TG6-1 TG5
- TG6-2
- TG3 TG6-3 TG7
Which passes some sanity checks: defense above prosperity, land growth in conflict with not annoying allies and human benevolence and at the bottom since they can afford to play a long game, personal graft about middle priority, minimizing present loss prevention over minimizing future loss prevention.
These goals and goal priorities give us a number of possible compatible goal scenarios for the current conflict, which roughly map to the same old list of options from the policy wonks:
- GS1: Mowing the lawn: reduce the current iteration of Hamas, keep a tight upper bound on the ability of whoever replaces them. This has failed dramatically, and so rejected in favor of other goals, but I included it for completeness.
- GS2: Regime change, resulting in two states: the publicly claimed current approach, installing the Palestinian Authority with no border changes.
- GS3: Palestinian population displacement: not really viable, since no one else will take them
- GS4-1: Palestinian population elimination: Conventional genocide: physically viable, not at all politically viable
- GS4-2: Palestinian population elimination, eventually: Genocide construed liberally, including suppression of Palestinian civic bodies and suppression of reproduction. Compatible with a lot of other scenarios, and maybe covertly viable, but the potential scandal and time scales needed make it probably politically non-viable.
- GS5: Palestinian mass internment, Gaza annexation: something like what happened with indigenous NA tribes and the reservation system. Palestinians are restricted to even smaller areas.
- GS6-1: Gaza annexation, permanent Palestinian subjugation: Irael extends to include current Gaza, Palestinians become second-class citizens on a permanent basis.
- GS6-2: Gaza annexation, Palestinian incorporation: Israel extends to include current Gaza, Palestinians become citizens of the resulting joined state.
I've probably missed a few. The current 'gated community' proposal seems consistent with GS2, GS5, GS4-2, GS6-1, and GS6-2. Establishing a safe zone and expanding it gradually doesn't seem avoidable in GS2, GS6-1, and GS6-2. I don't see a way to distinguish which end goal is being pursued at this time, but the obvious experiment seems to be to wait and see what the conditions are in the safe zones, to rule GS4-2, GS5, GS6-1, GS6-2 in or out. If the safe zones are expanded over time, and their populations increase over time, and abuses are minimized with good mechanisms to detect them, that seems like decent evidence that we're in the GS2 timeline. Personally, I expect GS2 in the near term, and GS6-1 evolving to GS6-2 within 50 years.
What do you think of this framework? Do you agree with my proposal to distinguish which timeline we're in? Does extending the framework somehow give us more options for analysis or prediction?
Followup to my post here earlier where I wondered why Israel didn't forcibly establish filtration camps to stop the world, acquire every person in Gaza, determine which collaborate with Hamas, and release the remainder: The Telegraph: Former British special forces poised to deliver aid to new Gaza ‘gated communities’. They're proposing doing just that, controlling who gets into their safe zones, just in-place rather than stopping the world to do it. Props to I think @2rafa for calling it in advance.
I'm not sure how to expect the proposal to evolve from here as it makes contact with reality, though we can expect some likely elements from first principles:
- creates an authentication system from scratch
- enables physical segregation of approved and non-approved Gazans
- enables inspection of goods passing through the physical border
- enables inspection of any point in the safe zone on demand with no warning
- enables detection of people and goods that are somehow present without passing through an inspection and vetting process
- enables incremental expansion of the safe zone to cover a greater portion of the city
- enables collaboration and hand-off of the reins from Israeli power structures to friendly Palestinian power structures.
How do you all see it working out? What will work, what won't? What failure modes are most likely?
xablor
27d ago
I got a notification that I'd gotten a reply to this post from @Belisarius , but when I went back to find it in another tab it didn't appear in Comments or the thread. Are they blocked from posting? Did that post have to be approved?
xablor
27d ago
If you operationalize "personal loyalty to Trump" as "conformist authoritarian tendencies", then we've had a profiling instrument for that for awhile courtesy of Bob Altemeyer at U Manitoba: https://theauthoritarians.org/ . You can take a version of his research questionnaire at http://openpsychometrics.org/tests/RWAS/ to get the flavor of personality type that it's trying to detect. (No it doesn't capture every way there is to be authoritarian, yes woke is left authoritarian, it still seems relevant to answer the question at hand.) Couple that with "amount of pushback against direction from superiors" as an item of quarterly personnel review to set up evaporative cooling dynamics, have semiannual shit tests and purity spirals, and I bet by year 3 of a Trump admin you could get at least some of them to rerun Jonestown. Maybe have a not-legally-binding oath to Trump personally, just to engage the monkey brain a bit harder.
This would probably do terrible things to your talent pool, mind! It's basically building a cult around the Presidency, with direct interpersonal dynamics rather than parasocial ones like we've already seen with the Trump cult of personality. Selecting for that trait seems like it starts trading off against general competence, independence, ability to be delegated to, pretty quickly.
xablor
28d ago
The worst fears of every pundit from 2015-2017 of Trump came nowhere close to manifesting, so this makes me disinclined to take them seriously at anything.
Klein tries to counter this argument from history by pointing out that 4 years of learning and prep by the Trump reelection team makes one of their high-priority goals be vetting top-level staff for compliance with Trump's desires and personal loyalty. Separately, his attempt at moving federal workers to Schedule F to remove protections against firing them and rehiring for loyalty and obedience late in his prior presidency tried and failed to do the same thing in medium- and low-level roles. Klein claims that this would remove the moderating factors that prevented pundits' fears from manifesting.
I don't know how the tension will resolve over time, between the need to maintain continuity in low-level staffing to enable daily operations versus the need to overwrite existing loyalty and power structures, but separately I worry about the damage the attempt will do to tacit institutional knowledge rather than procedural knowledge; cf the various worries about the shallower bench of talent on the right.
xablor
28d ago
Taking other replies into consideration, I would suggest instead getting kids very good at developing intrinsic motivation, something along the lines of operationalizing and scaling the writeup here, instead of applying top-down selection without access to the contents of the student's head. I think this means refactoring your instrumental goal into "detect native talent applicable to a specialty, if any, and supply every resource towards maximizing development towards it if it's desired." This reflects my bias towards individualism and market-based solutions rather than top-down assignments, especially given the massive uncertainties we have around intellectual development timelines.
Very belated followup to a maybe-too-dismissive response and promise for followup here. I feel bad about leaving that branch rudely untaken and not following through.
Bluntly, criticism as from SlowBoy and KMC was correct, 'corruption' in the sense of using power to drive personal gain was the wrong word, and I should have spent more time finding a better way to express the tangle of traits in Trump that I dislike and that drive me away from favoring him for 2024 President.
I would endorse maybe half of the class/aesthetic criticisms laid against him by the total commentariat (crude, boorish, unrefined), the cultural-conservative portion of moral criticisms (venal, dishonest, weather-vane, pandering), all of the epistemic ones, few to none about intelligence and raw perception (stupid, senile, psychotic). I like Ezra Klein's podcast ep "What's Wrong With Donald Trump" as laying out the raw impressions that drive me away, and support his induction of the base disorders being basically narcissism and total disinhibition. These two factors couple to a lack of intellectual humility ("my gut tells me more sometimes than most experts ever have" or something similar in the podcast was a line that struck me) that verges on disconnection from consensus inference and prediction, but not perception, that I think also drives a disgust reaction for me. Practically, his anxiety to be liked drives people-pleasing in historical US competition and opposition that is excessive to the goals of diplomacy, and his refusal or inability to engage with the existing machinery of state and its tribal knowledgebase is a crippling defect, even accounting for parachuting in friendly top leadership like Project 2025 wants to.
I look forward to reading Bob Woodward's trilogy on the topic and believing a third to half of it, and whatever Milley has produced about his experiences and believing two-thirds of it.
xablor
1mo ago
Placeholder reply: I have thoughts on this, but I don't want to divert the evolution of the discussion yet.
xablor
1mo ago
Shower thought: conditional on a Harris win in 2024, what are the odds that Trump runs again in 2028? I want a return to the dynamics of pre-Trump elections, where at least the candidates had the decency to act embarrassed at being shown to be corrupt, so the fewer times he gets at bat the better.
He'll have the existing huge demand for populist wrecker policies and style that most politicians can't supply, so the crowd will want him back. The crowd wants him back, so it seems like his narcissism would pull him back in, but his age might preclude it, and a loss might drive him away from Presidential elections via sour grapes.
I don't know much of his psychology, and of course there's four years of unknown unknown developments until then. What other factors can you all identify? How do we beat them all against each other to get a spread of probabilities?
xablor
1mo ago
I'm abandoning "Introduction to AC Machine Design", "Electric Machine Fundamentals" answers the same questions for me and isn't making me want to refresh on the entire dependency tree of vector calculus first. I did get "Principles and Applications of Electromagnetic Fields" for the Aspirational pile, though. "How to Keep House When You're Drowning" remains inspiring and comfortable. Factorio continues to eat me.
xablor
1mo ago
"Among key issues that remain unresolved is automation that workers say will lead to job losses." from [Reuters] (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ship-queue-grows-us-ports-dockworker-strike-enters-third-day-2024-10-03/). Which I suppose was predictable, no way operators were going to lock away that growth option, human perf can only scale so well by adding workers. It seems be only a candidate agreement, though?
xablor
1mo ago
A work perk, actually. It's pretty badass and has toys I could never dream of affording, like a Tormach CNC mill with all the trimmings and a 3d printer farm, as well as the vacuformer I was making progress with. I was too casual with leaving some non-compliant tools around, so copped a month ban and a requirement to retake the safety training.
xablor
1mo ago
No movement on the passive cooling vest. I'll get access to my beloved workshop again next week, maybe that'll restore some enthusiasm? It would at least remove a step, by removing analysis paralysis about DIYing a vacuformer.
xablor
1mo ago
How precisely can the strike package planners control/predict when and where missiles are going to be during the strike? Functionally this isn't much damage dealt, but maybe it could be trying for an intelligence objective instead, probing locations and stores depths of anti-missile batteries?
Oof. Good on you for following your ethics, but that is harder. I can only speak for my own situation, I hope it helps as a sketch:
I'm designing food supplies for 3 days, which lines up neatly with integer bulk quantities of food I can buy. I'm targeting 1800-2000 calories a day, 150-200 grams protein, about 300 grams carbs, the balance is fats. My level of talent and energy to invest is minimal. My 3-day buy is:
- 5 pounds of boneless skinless chicken breast, usually packaged as 6 breasts. This can flex between 4.5 and 6 pounds, which lets me easily buy from what's in the cooler.
- 5-pound bag of russet potatoes.
- 2-pound (? Maybe just 1) bag of rainbow carrots.
- Enough broccoli heads to end up with about 1.5lb of florets. Allegedly you can coin the stems, I've not tried it.
- 1 or 2 heads of cauliflower.
This assumes stocks of olive oil or EVOO and spice blend on hand. I use 2 large baking pans, because I don't have a lot of counter space.
Batch 1 is chicken:
- Preheat the oven to 425. While that's running, prep the batch:
- Pat the breasts dry of juice, array them on the pan
- Lightly coat with OO, you want a thinnish layer, say just short of dripping off, but enough to adhere the spice blend and help cook
- I have a mister that should help with this, but instead wants to squirt a stream of oil all over, not fog it. I don't have a solution for this beyond keep the stream moving and vary spacing until the result looks right.
- Dust with spice blend
- Set timer for 25-35 minutes, depending on weight and preference. 165F in the center is what USDA will tell you to achieve; I think this is high because that's what's needed for instant sterilization, not an accumulation of sterilization over longer times at lower temps.
- After starting batch 1, immediately prep pan 2:
Batch 2 is broccoli and cauliflower:
- Use a paring knife to prep the veg as you like. For me this is just cutting florets of both up, medium size.
- In a second pan, arrange artfully. Some piling is acceptable; if you need this, oil the veg that would get covered up.
- Apply OO, fairly heavily. I'm not going to say soak, but you want enough for all exposed veg to be wet.
- Apply spice dust
Wait out the rest of pan 1's cooking time with a beer and entertainment. When your timer dings, cycle pan 2 in immediately, turn the heat to 450 and let it climb, set timer for 25 minutes, and give pan 1 the rest of your beer to cool. Move the chicken out into a storage platter, move the platter to the fridge to start chilling, and pour out chicken juices wherever you find acceptable, perhaps a beer can or the trash. Roughly swab out pan 1 and prep batch 3 in it:
- Sink wash potatoes, sink wash carrots. Remove blemishes, top and trim.
- Coarse-chop the carrots to ~1.5" long. Or maybe don't even bother if they'll fit your tupperware and you're feral enough, it doesn't seem to change much.
- Arrange on pan 1 as you go.
- Apply OO, you can be pretty light here if you want.
- Apply spice dust
Wait out batch 2, cycle in batch 3, bake for 40 minutes. While it's cooking, pull the chicken out and start portioning out. For these portions, one day is enough volume to fill one 8-cup Rubbermaid container and one 4-cup Rubbermaid container, as here.
This is, you'll gather, not haut cuisine, and that's somewhat intentional, in order to encourage the food-as-fuel mindset.
xablor
1mo ago
Batch cooking is an honest revelation, especially with automation like ovens, crock pots, rice cookers, or sous vide rigs. When I'm doing well I can meal prep for 3 days with about 3 hours end to end, of which maybe 30 minutes is actual touch time and the rest is watching a movie waiting for food to cook. That gets me very whole foods that are honestly pretty boring, but there's a whole universe of price points for effort vs outcome. You could do a week's worth of giant 1000-calorie burritos in 90 minutes end to end, I bet.
xablor
1mo ago
Import Indian modafinil? It's only skirting law, I believe, and the package might get stopped, but it is legal. Or find a source for the hepatic prodrug armodafinil, I think that's unregulated if you don't mind the QA issues.
xablor
1mo ago
Passive cooling vest is stalled, yet again, some more. I can't muster any interest in the DIY vacuformer as an instrumental goal, fitting up the vacuformer components as an immediate goal, or the cooling vest as an end goal. This sucks. My brain sucks. How can I possibly expect to achieve anything ever if I can't keep a want in my head for more than two weeks?
xablor
1mo ago
I'm embarrassed, since I claim to care about transparent election integrity but haven't heard of ERIC beyond this. Can you whip up a precis? I've only found https://www.npr.org/2023/10/20/1207142433 and https://www.npr.org/2023/06/04/1171159008 casually.
Derp, thanks.
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