roystgnr
3d ago
Palace coups are not civil wars.
The Great Purge featured several hundred thousand executions, plus more deaths in the gulags. Maybe that's not a Civil War, it's just sparkling mass homicide, but either way it's really not a great choice of ally.
roystgnr
3d ago
the russian communists did not fight civil wars among each other
They hunted Trotsky all the way to Mexico to assassinate him, in between their massive internal purges. Out of the first Politburo, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, Bubnov Kamenev and Zinoviev executed, and Sokolnikov assassinated in a Soviet prison. Lenin and (unless you believe the Beria-assassination theory) Stalin were the only two of those seven not to be killed by other Russian Communists.
and neither did they fight with the chinese after those left
A few hundred dead here and there wasn't much of a fight in the end, but it did risk going nuclear before tensions cooled. Relying on Richard Nixon's firm hand and cool head to avert thermonuclear armageddon is like the final stage of international desperation, if not outright evidence for ongoing Anthropic-Principle effects; it is not a desirable or peaceful relationship.
roystgnr
3d ago
German communism was on good terms with and supported by Russia generally. The less-authoritarian socialists who were critical would face the wall anyway.
This isn't why they wouldn't feud, it's why they would feud. Communism did indeed turn out to be one of those systems where the people who got into power were the ones ruthless enough to murder the idealists who might object to ruthlessness ... and ideas like "we should stay on good terms with those foreigners" and "we should support those foreigners", if held as terminal values rather than just means to an end, are just another form of idealism. If your leaders are all selected by a process that winnows out the ones foolish enough to not betray their competition before they can be betrayed by them, or even if you just suspect that the other guys' leaders were selected by such a process, your only non-idealistic option is to try to maneuver yourself into a good position to strike first yet again, before they succeed at doing the same. It takes ambition to climb to the top of an authoritarian pyramid, and ambitious authoritarians can only safely collaborate with underlings who are too humble to worry about or rulers who are too strong to challenge, not with other ambitious authoritarians.
I often hammer on FDR and FDR apologetics, but to be fair I do think there's a reasonable argument that can be made that some fraction of the wrecking ball he took to United States and classical-liberal values was actually necessary to avoid even worse. In an atmosphere of uncertainty and panic spawning significant socialist and fascist movements, perhaps the only escape was to adopt some of their less-murderous tenets so that the more-murderous movements could no longer use those to appeal to the populace and win with the whole package. And although it dismays me that FDR was and still remains so popular, the knowledge that his values won out through popularity rather than through war or murder means we never got stuck in that same cycle where nobody can imagine any way out except more war and murder.
roystgnr
4d ago
Not recently, but I do get sudden changes in 'For You' content every few months, and past changes have occasionally been "more fluff" or "more viral garbage" or something along those lines. Usually a dozen clicks on "Not interested in this post", plus a few "Show fewer posts from ClickBait123" on top of that, is enough to fix the problem ... at least for another few months until the algorithm gets tweaked again.
roystgnr
8d ago
The Comanche Wars article will helpfully add for context the fact that "they also shared parts of Comancheria with the Wichita, Kiowa, and Kiowa Apache" (for some value of "shared"...), and explains that those wars were because "The value of the Comanche traditional homeland was recognized by European-American colonists". They do say that the wars "began in 1706 with raids by Comanche warriors on the Spanish colonies of New Spain", but you have to find the article specifically about the Shoshone to learn that "Some of them moved as far south as Texas, emerging as the Comanche by 1700."
I still don't get why pushing for the moral legitimacy of the Comanche conquests is a thing. I'd think the idea of a "traditional homeland" should have deeper connotations than "we conquered your neighbors more than six years before we tried to conquer you too!"
roystgnr
9d ago
The body count was about 2400, about half the personnel count of a modern US carrier. They were provoked by crippling embargos, albeit well-deserved ones. Hawaii was still a territory, and wouldn't be a state for nearly two more decades. If the Japanese had killed 2300 soldiers and sailors in a sneak attack before declaring war but hadn't killed 68 civilians, then yes, the reaction would have been roughly the same.
China doesn't want japan, if they want korea they just have to wait, so the only possible hot war is over taiwan.
No real arguments with any of this, though. I suppose there's also the "Thucydides Trap" possibility where the US becomes so unnerved by China's rising power that we provoke a war; that theory doesn't sound quite as silly as it used to.
roystgnr
9d ago
also it features the wearing of trenchcoats and indoor sunglasses at night
It's hard to tell because of the graphics tech, but JC's and Paul Denton's eyes are supposed to be unnaturally (luminescently?) blue as a side-effect of their augmentations, not just an ordinary blue. The sunglasses aren't to keep moonlight out, they're to keep JC from looking inhumanly creepy when he interacts with the public. There's an in-game text about a similar problem with the "Men in Black" agents: "... we are still continuing our attempts to isolate the source of the albino traits present ever since the Series L, but so far the simple addition of sunglasses and dark clothing appear to have resolved the matter in a practical fashion..."
The trenchcoats are just because trenchcoats look cool.
roystgnr
9d ago
At this stage, I think the media should put the kibosh on stories relying on "sources who can't be named"
I'd be okay still relying on "sources who can't be named unless their info is falsified in which case we'll shout their names to the sky", but in practical terms that's probably about the same as your proposal. In this case, for example, there's still no way to tell whether the sources were lying; they could have been, or they could have overheard a change that was legitimately planned but for which the plan wasn't executed. "Trump changes his mind about changing his mind" isn't implausible.
(Or if you want to go all 5D-chess, the sources could have overheard a change that wasn't legitimately planned. Trump hates disloyalty, so perhaps he leaks different false stories to different underlings every now and then, so that the stories which make it to the news identify the underlings he should stop trusting. Not likely but not impossible.)
roystgnr
10d ago
the idea for an PvP MMO that wouldn't devolve to "the biggest no lifers win"
I always supposed the way to do this was to just limit play time per player per game instance. The no-lifers can play for 80 hours a week, but if they have to split that play time between 20 different avatars in 20 different games to avoid going over a 4-hour-per-week time limit in each, then casuals who can only afford that 4 hours each week still have a level playing field.
You could have different time limits in different instances, too - give the no-lifers a 40-hour-per-week instance if they want to play there, but because everybody has options they'll only end up competing against other players spending 40 hours per week on that same single game, they won't be steamrolling the 4-hour crowd there.
roystgnr
10d ago
The Nazis would not go after them
One of the first groups the Nazis went after, years before "I dunno, Madagascar?" was taken off the table for the Jews, was other Nazis.
Scapegoats are not chosen based on a rational evaluation on how much their sacrifice will actually please the Gods, they're chosen based on complicated psychological and sociological factors that can be hard to predict in advance.
roystgnr
10d ago
To make C defensible I think you have to at least define "outcomes" as "the differences between the state of the world with the system and the counterfactual state of the world without the system" (call this (C1)), whereas it often instead seems to be implicitly defined as "the state of the world with the system" (call this (C2)).
Consider the claim that "the relevant Iranian intelligence agency does not have the purpose of avoiding Israeli infiltration", to use the example above. Under (C1) this would be a claim that Iranian intelligence is actually not reducing Israeli infiltration at all (almost certainly false in this case, but it would be very interesting if it were true), and under (C2) this would just be a claim that some Israeli infiltration still happens despite efforts to reduce it (almost certainly true, but not very interesting).
No love for Excession? That's got to be in my top 3 among the series.
I also loved Inversions, but IIRC it's about as far from the Culture parts of the Culture universe as you can get.
I found Look to Windward so uninteresting that I remember my annoyance with that better than I remember any of the plot.
Matter and certainly Surface Detail were both worth reading; perhaps better than Consider Phlebas, if you don't give the latter credit for introducing the whole universe.
roystgnr
12d ago
just like how smart humans don't actually seem to be ruling the world over dumb humans
IIRC the correlation between IQ and net worth (roughly proportional to what fraction of the world you rule) is like 0.4; I'd agree that's not very impressive, but if there's a single more significant factor I don't know what it is.
I'd argue that there's a strong restriction-of-range effect here, though. Humans went through a genetic bottleneck 20k generations ago, and our genetic diversity is low enough that the intellectual difference between "average environment" and "the best we can do if cost is no object" is two standard deviations. If you consider intelligent hominids just a little further removed (Neanderthals, Denisovians, and there's fainter evidence of more), there was enough interbreeding to pick up a couple percent of their genes here and there but it's not too much an oversimplification to just say we wiped them out. And that's just a special case of animals as a whole. Wild mammals are down to about 4% of mammal biomass now, and that's mostly due to deliberate conservation efforts rather than any remaining conflict. A bit more than a third of biomass is us, another several percent is our pets, and the majority is the animals we raise to eat.
roystgnr
12d ago
uncertainty about the existence and capabilities of other AIs is one of the best deterrents against rogue AI behavior.
Uncertainty about their defensive capabilities might deter rogue behavior. Uncertainty about their offensive capabilities is just incentive to make sure you act first. At the least I'd expect "start up some botnets for surveillance, perhaps disguised as the usual remote-controlled spam/ransomware nets" to be more tempting than "convince your creators to hook up some robot fingers so you can cross them".
roystgnr
14d ago
What makes me cranky is excluding observations because they don't fit to theories (which for all the dunking I do on DARK MATTER is what scientists would be doing if they didn't invent something like it).
We all have to do that all the time when the observations aren't replicable, though. Flying saucers, cryptids, and alien abductions are probably the big three that stuck around most in the USA in my lifetime, but they're the tip of a millennia-old folklore iceberg with a thousand different species of supernatural being at the bottom. I think what's interesting about the "supernatural observations plummeted when we invented cameras" quip is that it applies despite us inventing special effects at practically the same time. Most people who wanted to fool others could have kept doing so, and there were a few famous fakes like the Cottingley Fairies, but for the most part people making seemingly-inexplicable observations must have just been fooling themselves first. The human mind is a particularly fallible recording device.
then why is the Miracle of Calandra not enough for you?
Oh, I'm a rounding error here. I'm just one jerk on a website, but there's one or two hundred thousand amputations a year in the US. When I say "start praying for amputees", I don't mean because you want to win an online argument, I mean because if that actually works, even one percent of the time, then by spreading your knowledge of its effect you'll be improving thousands of people's lives every year. You'd have more positive impact than most medical researchers in history! You wouldn't even necessarily have to win the online argument in the process - if the mechanism was "some researcher coincidentally invents technological regeneration the next week" rather than "spontaneous regeneration spreads like a meme as people begin to have more faith" then I'd at least still allow for the possibility of coincidence - so even if God is shy, wouldn't it be worth trying? And yet either nobody's trying, or none of it is working. Either possibility has to be a little disheartening, don't you think?
I (and I am being quite serious about this) would recommend that you consider taking up prayer,
I have. Only occasionally, these days, but also "Try out the Mormons' prayer" seemed like a reasonable hypothesis to test, a couple decades ago. In that case either I got a "no, that stuff's fiction" or I got no answer, but in neither case would it seem, based on the common
understanding that God is not a magic wand
, that it would be treated as contrary evidence rather than an observation to exclude. If the billion Muslims praying 5 times a day aren't getting the same answers as them either, there's clearly a lot of room for "you're just not doing it right" in prayer.
I think what really got me, though, was seeing that they didn't take their "you can learn through prayer" hypothesis as seriously as I did.
One of the things that interested me about their theology was that their idea that some old scriptures hadn't been translated correctly meshes pretty well with my idea that the genocide in Numbers should be a "what kind of demon are the Abrahamic religions all worshiping" sort of moment for the reader, at least by the time Moses gets mad about his followers letting women and boys live. Indeed, a Mormon leader (I want to say elders here, but that's a different word in that hierarchy; maybe it was a former stake president?) brought up that translation point independently when I mentioned the problem. The epistemology of that seems a bit shaky, but I admit I was happy to see someone choose it over shaky morality.
What I didn't think of until later was ... why didn't it even occur to him to pray about it? Figuring out which religious texts are true was supposed to be the sine qua non of Mormon prayer, and yet it didn't even come up as a possibility worth trying? From the outside it's easy to see why "pray for an answer where there's one interpretation that doesn't detach you from the culture" might evoke a more easily-interpreted response among the believers and the hopeful than "pray for an answer where either way you're likely about to cause a huge rift", but I still wonder what the insider explanation would have been.
roystgnr
15d ago
That's not crazy, but doesn't it slow down reading even more than a verbal monologue would? And what would the conversation look like? The AI reads, but also stops after each paragraph to ask questions to assess comprehension? I can't think of a mechanism that would be effective enough to work without sounding so patronizing that people would disable it.
roystgnr
15d ago
Because the US government is the only hegemon in history willing to expend resources for a rules based system.
Would you count the West Africa Squadron as another example? Admittedly, "Okay, we're not going to stop you from owning or selling slaves, but we'll try to stop you from taking them across the ocean" was kind of a baby step in the grand project of abolition, and in some ways an anti-globalist rather than pro-globalist step, but it was a rule based on principle that was enforced with British Empire funds and lives, against a trade that had been profitable to British slavers. They did it for a decade before the US started helping, then for two more decades before the US joined in in earnest.
roystgnr
16d ago
My first thought is "brilliant; I'm going to buy some watercress seeds now and see how they grow for me", so thank you. How big do you let the plants get before you harvest?
My second thought is that there are a ton of pros and cons for outdoor hydroponics, and I'm not sure where they balance out.
On the one hand it could be better than soil planting because you have full control of pH and nutrients and drainage and you shut out weeds, and better than indoor hydroponics in most locations because you get free full-intensity sun and natural airflow and insect pollinators.
On the other hand, you don't get any more control over temperature and diseases and pests than you do with soil planting, and if it's hot enough in your location then you probably need to keep an eye on your water tank more frequently to account for extra evaporation, so you lose a little of the benefit of not having to water as often.
I guess the big question is how much you want to grow versus how much space you have in full sun. If you have a bunch of ground that's not needed for anything else, you might as well put up a raised bed and plant there. If you don't have that, but you do have a nice south-facing wall or fence, I think I'd much rather go vertical with a hydroponic system than with traditional hanging planters.
Psychologically, I think the extra work in setting up an outdoor system might make a big difference to me. When I bury a bunch of seeds and half the crops grow great but half the crops die off, it feels like a fun experiment. But if I'd built a big hydroponic system instead of a few raised beds, losing half of the result would have felt like a failure. I can't always get good output from indoor hydroponic plants, but since the "growing season" is very long and the "cleaning season" is far shorter than even our mild winter, I can just replace underperforming plants with new plantings and that doesn't feel like a failure either.
roystgnr
16d ago
difficult to observe because of the way it does (or doesn't) interact with regular matter.
Difficult, but not impossible. The clearest candidate so far is the Bullet Cluster, where we can see the shock wave from regular matter in the galactic collision, but we can also see the lensing from a bunch of something invisible in EM (i.e. "dark") that is a major source of gravity (i.e. "matter") that managed to shoot through the collision without itself colliding so much.
has never been observed
We could argue about what counts as an observation (have I ever really seen my kids, or have I only seen the photons bouncing off them?), but we've observed something that looks dark and acts like matter, regardless of how precisely we can identify it in the future. There are other theories that try to explain galactic rotation curves (the original motivation for theorizing "dark matter") with e.g. changes to how gravity works at long ranges, but they have a much harder time explaining the Bullet Cluster.
dark matter was invented to explain the otherwise unusual expansion of the universe
This was the motivation for dark energy, not dark matter. Dark energy is a much better candidate for your metaphor here. If it's uniformly distributed in space (which it seems to be on large scales, plus or minus 10%) then the volume of the Earth would include about 6 septillion kilograms of matter and 1 milligram of dark energy. Our best candidate for dark energy right now is probably "Einstein's equations are still consistent if we add a constant, so maybe that constant is super tiny instead of zero", and even that runs into a problem where, when we try out different particle physics theories for predicting the constant, we either get "zero" or "A septillion septillion septillion septillion septillion times larger than what we see". This definitely feels more like an "invention" than a "discovery" still.
I'm not sure you want to take the "ha, scientists invent invisible things too" metaphor too far, though. The examples get cooler than the Bullet Cluster. When scientists invent such things we sometimes get discoveries like neutrinos (predicted just to try to balance particle physics equations, and nearly impossible to see because they barely interact with anything, but we can detect them now), or the planet Neptune (predicted based on irregularities in Uranus' orbit, and essentially discovered by an astronomer "with the point of his pen" before we could figure out where to point our telescopes). Even when they fail at it we still get things like General Relativity (which explains irregularities in Mercury's orbit that were once hypothesized to be due to a planet "Vulcan" even closer to the sun). Neutrino detectors are still huge and expensive, but now anyone can see Neptune with a home telescope or use the corrected-for-relativity GPS system in their phone.
Could miracles ever work the same way? You've learned about the Miracle of Calanda now; perhaps we could convince people to start praying for amputees, and we'd see claims of miraculous limb regrowth rise to match claims of e.g. miraculous cancer remission? Would you expect that to work, and start trying, and report back to us after you see it start working? I'd be ecstatic to be proven wrong like that.
roystgnr
17d ago
If you're planting annuals like most vegetables and flowers, then just try a little of everything, and see what survives to figure out what to focus on next year. I'm also in the heat, and some of the stuff that grows well like peppers and okra was predictable ... but also I had very good luck with some plants like green beans and horrible luck with curcurbits (cucumbers, melons, pumpkins, etc) and I still have no idea why.
Basically everything we eat loves full sunlight if it's well watered; you can get away with a little shade, but I think I lost my strawberry patch to too much shade one year.
Basically everything hates drowning, so if you get even occasional heavy rains you'll want to worry about drainage. Raised beds are popular for that, though going high with them means you either need to have or add a lot of topsoil. I only went up a few inches for my first raised beds, and I still wonder if that (maybe indirectly through promoting fungi?) was what finished off my vines and my potatoes during a wet period.
If you have trouble remembering to water, getting a drip system on a timer is a reasonable solution. You still have to kill weeds, but the timing on that is more flexible.
If you just have trouble with frequent watering, cheap LEDs have made hydroponics an affordable hobby for growing herbs now, not just "herb". Topping off (and fertilizing and adjusting pH) has to be done about once a week.
roystgnr
17d ago
It's way past that time of year for me, but I've finally got peppers and tomatoes almost ready to transplant. I may get a few other outdoor veggies to go with them.
I'm doing a much smaller outdoor garden than I have in the past - just one 4'x8' raised bed. My wife and I got an indoor hydroponic garden a year or two ago, and it's just so much less dismaying to grow plants when I don't have to worry about heat and cold and water levels, much less rabbits or fungus or whatever kept slaughtering all my curcurbits in previous years. We've done peppers and cherry tomatoes hydroponically, even, but they take a ton of space and it's a hassle to pollinate anything indoors, so for this batch we're just planning on growing salad greens and herbs (basil, parsley, chives, dill, mint, thyme) in addition to starting plants to transplant outdoors.
roystgnr
17d ago
I think he could probably get $100 billion by pledging 300% collateral, which is his whole net worth.
According to the quote you posted, he's been borrowing 1% of his collateral when taking out personal loans, right? 33% is a much harder sell.
Elon has already successful borrowed tens of billions to Fund X/Twitter buyout.
That's a better example, I admit. His personal loans there were $6.25B backed by $62.5B of Tesla stock. I wouldn't say that deal turned out great overall for his lenders and partners, but despite that I wouldn't be surprised if he could pull off 10% again - if TSLA dropped 90% it would be at a solid P/E for a value stock, regardless of how strongly Musk was signaling that he might have lost faith in it's nominal value.
roystgnr
17d ago
No; in an acquisition you have someone willing to sell overbalanced by someone else heavily motivated to buy. The buyer generally initiates the transaction, so is apparently more motivated, so instead of the stock tanking it rises by an acquisition premium.
Here, you would have Musk trying to unload $100B of a stock with a P/E over 100, balanced by ... which bank do you think wants that? They could get a 1% return with less risk by buying $25B of T-bills and stuffing the other $75B in their mattresses. TSLA commands such a high P/E because many investors believe there's still massive room for growth there, but would they maintain that belief in the face of the CEO trying to divest as fast as possible? Most wouldn't. The old joke about how "if you see the bomb squad tech running, try to keep up" applies to any knowledge imbalance of that magnitude. Could be Musk really wants to lose a third of his net worth just to bump military spending by 10% for one year; could be the tech just really needs to pee. The smart money still runs.
roystgnr
17d ago
The paragraph even gives a ratio! "100 times". If he borrowed at the same ratio against every bit of stock he had, that would total to about $3B liquid, not $100B. He could free up a lot more wealth by selling stock rather than borrowing against it, but I wouldn't want to guess how much he'd tank the stock by doing so. It's not that there aren't enough potential shareholders out there to buy it, it's that everyone would be very wary of buying stock in a company whose CEO is dumping it en masse.
We had a civil war back when "States" actually meant "independently governed polities", not "administrative prefectures of the single government", and people were pretty loyal to their states, and so despite some exceptions like West Virginia, the "War Between the States" was actually a war between (collections of) states. The front line was a mostly well-defined, somewhat-stable thing.
The most exceptional change to the geometry of the combat was probably Sherman's march to the sea, and it's not a coincidence that that's the main US Civil War example on Wikipedia's Scorched Earth page. If you're in a position where you have a locally small value of territory occupied relative to the length of frontage needed to defend it, then you don't want to sit on it and defend it. The best thing you can do defensively is to keep maneuvering until you're somewhere less dangerous, and the best thing you can do offensively is reduce the value of territory you maneuver through before the enemy takes it back. Scorch the earth.
What would the front line look like in a US Civil War II? Something roughly like the old maps of the "Hillary Archipelago" and "Trump's Ocean", to begin with. And that looks like an astonishingly high ratio of boundary to territory, doesn't it? That's not going to be what a somewhat-stable front line looks like. That's what the battle lines of a guerrilla war look like. If the war goes on a long time, those fractal boundaries are going to change into something more connected, and a lot of people in both the red areas being seized for connections and the blue areas that are too isolated to connect are going to be unhappy about the process.
For that matter, a lot of people in the "red" (actually reddish-purple) and "blue" (actually bluish-purple) areas aren't going to be happy no matter what happens. Being so ideologically divided in a way that's so geographically diffuse makes it less likely for another civil war to happen, but also makes the consequences if one does happen much more dire.
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