roystgnr
3d ago
expecting them to never figure it out no matter how many times you lie to them
What's really weird is the ones who have that expectation, not just in a positive sense, but in a normative sense. At least on eX-twitter it seems like there's a significant number of people who believe that, when a candidate has taken a position previously and has since repudiated it weakly or hasn't even repudiated it at all, it's somehow ethically unacceptable for a voter to hold that position against the candidate unless the candidate is currently running on that position. @MaiqTheTrue is correct that it's "Machiavellian" to believe that you should manipulate voters who have the memories of goldfish, but is there a word for the belief that voters are thus morally required to have the memories of goldfish? Maybe this is just a bit of random chaff from the "wishful thinking"/"ought-is" fallacy, where if "X would have made it more likely for my team to win" then that's supposed to be evidence that X is true, at least in a weird sense of "true" that doesn't mean you can use it to infer any other propositions.
roystgnr
3d ago
Abraham Linchpin
I can't tell whether this is a silly autocorrect fail or an incredibly clever pun+metaphor.
roystgnr
3d ago
There's at least people getting the "less bad" end of it compared to each other, even if true "better" might be far in the past or future, and "white men in the like 25-45 range" does seem to be the least bad male demographic to be in. I long ago noticed in OKCupid blog data that men do have better odds as they get older, and looking now at the "Reply Rate by Race - Male Sender" graphic from the old OKCupid blog, it does look like white men had it less bad than other men - with nearly 30% of women they messaged willing to acknowledge they exist!
Disclaimer: all data above is at least 15 years old, OKCupid was since bought out for being too functional a competitor to commercial dating apps, and there is no reason to believe the descent away from "better" has abated. Even limiting our complains to the situation of men seems myopic; women hardly seem much happier with modern dating, with very different but similarly serious complaints.
roystgnr
3d ago
These aren't the cases you really need euthanasia for, though. Morphine and all its more modern alternatives are some strong shit; we know how to handle physical pain right before the end. The metastasized tumors in my mother's lungs made her more and more tired for months, until she never woke up again, but with the pain counteracted there was no reason for her not to want to get as many awakenings as possible.
What we can't do anything about is mental suffering. My father's tumor went metastatic before treatment killed it, and its progeny recurred inside his skull, where the fight with them became an existential horror, crushing various chunks of his memories and personality one by one, leaving an increasingly confused and terrified remnant behind. I try to reassure myself that, a week or two before the end when his frequent screaming sessions changed from "Help! Help!" to "Hell! Hell!", it was surely only because he'd lost more fine motor control, not because he was making a deliberate evaluation of his situation.
I want legal euthanasia, with the explicit ability to create a medical directive that instructs and allows my family to be the ones to order euthanasia at some defined point after I'm too far gone to do so myself. There's a bit of a paradox in the fact that the only circumstances under which I'd want to kill myself are those where I would be non compos mentis and so both personally and legally unable to do it.
roystgnr
4d ago
No one thought of using airliners as weapons until Al-Qaeda did it.
Tom Clancy, "Debt of Honor", wasn't too far off. Disgruntled pilot rather than hijackers, one plane into the Capitol building rather than 4 planes into assorted targets, but it obviously conveyed "a jumbo jet full of fuel is a dangerous missile", and it was the 7th book in a best-selling series that had already been adapted into 3 blockbuster movies.
Using a truck rental as a weapon wasn't a thing until that Nice attack.
It was the weapon delivery system in the OKC bombing, but yeah, not the weapon.
as a result pretty much every major public square in Europe now has bollards to prevent people from getting vehicles into them during busy times.
I've always half-wondered why truck attacks didn't become a more serious threat. It seemed so trivially easy and moderately effective that in the wake of Nice I expected it to become just another Thing that happens regularly. Wikipedia doesn't even list more than a handful of copycats.
it certainly seems like people who commit terrorist attacks want it to be recognizeable as such; or alternatively are just generally uncreative.
IIRC this still holds even if you have a very loose definition of "terrorist"; the "contagious" timing of school shootings suggests that the kinds of assholes who try to become infamous for shooting up a school are much more likely to do so if there's been another famous school shooting recently, as if even though the idea is hardly a secret at this point they don't really take it seriously until they see a de-facto commercial for another one on the news.
I do also think there might be something to the theory
Is killing a lot of people with a gun just that much more satisfying than running them over with a car?
The black trench coats and guns at Columbine were like an evil echo of The Matrix protagonists superhumanly fighting The Man, whereas simply running people over feels like something that could be accomplished by an elderly person confusing the gas and brake pedals. They say that "nobody thinks they're the villain of their own story", but also nobody even wants to think they're just a half-competent mook in their own story, so perhaps when they do slip into villainy they try to make it dramatic. The sort of utilitarian who deduces that you can massacre more people with a car than a gun might also generally be the sort who deduces that massacring a bunch of people doesn't actually accomplish any of your real goals anyway.
roystgnr
5d ago
It's not a discrete "rapid shutdown mode", it's just the smooth Gompertz-Makeham curve. Your odds of a natural-causes death double every 8 years, starting at age 30 at the latest (though possibly much earlier; non-natural causes obscure things for 20-somethings and teens).
Come up with a medical revolution that cures 50% of death? You'd think that would double lifespans but no, it just buys everyone 8 more years. Exponentials are wild.
roystgnr
6d ago
Thanks for pinging me on this, and for the spoiler tags.
The focus on Subliming (definitely the most hand-waved, mystical part of the series) was arguably a great topic to wrap up on.
This is selling me on the book. Decades ago I was very skeptical of the then-common sci-fi trope of "Elder Races who were once Immensely Powerful until they Mysteriously Disappeared Up Their Own Asses", but I kind of want to see it again with fresh eyes now that my first reaction isn't "but that makes no sense" rather than "oh, sure, like Europe".
roystgnr
8d ago
Stop believing the propaganda.
This is a good message. I've called out more-liberal friends on this one, at least when the propaganda is really obviously objectively false, to good effect. I don't think I've completely convinced anyone that "the fact that someone as smart as you falls for this stuff so easily once you identify it as being on Our Side is also why you should cut Trump voters a little more slack about the stuff they fall for", but at least there's motion in the right direction. I think this comes easier from me (Libertarian voter, can steelman Trump but would still pick Harris for "lesser of two evils" if I was in a swing state) than it would from an actual Trump supporter, but if you actually cast your vote for Harris then you're in an even better position to insist that you're offering constructive rather than malicious criticism. When the Boy Who Cried Wolf finally gets eaten, IMHO it's perfectly fine to point out that his prior lies were part of the problem and that you don't have to be Pro-Wolves-Eating-People to notice.
We're not descending to Christian fascism!
Also probably true, and personally I'd note the "we have to take away Musk's companies" and "we have to ban The Misinformation" style left-wing fascism while I was pointing it out. But I've never gotten the chance, since I'm not friends with anyone this panicked, and if you do then being very careful about how you try to calm them down might indeed be the way to go here for the sake of the friendships.
We're not going to have a national abortion ban!
Maybe not? Probably not anything sweeping. But I wouldn't be surprised to see something relatively weak, third trimester with rape/incest exceptions or something. With a decent Republican lead in the Senate and probably a small lead in the house, there's at least a chance.
This will almost certainly not affect your life in any way!
And this is almost certainly wrong. It won't be the most important thing in most people's lives, but the federal government writes laws by the thousand and writes regulations by the million and spends dollars by the trillion. Even the second and third order effects on people not directly impacted can be huge.
roystgnr
8d ago
Nah; the popular vote is a relative rating rather than absolute. E.g. if I'd been in a swing state I'd have voted for Harris, not because she is a non-awful candidate I approved of, but because she seemed like the less awful of the two. I suspect a lot of Trump voters feel the same way in reverse.
On the other hand, one reason for disapproving of a candidate you'd vote for is that you think their weaknesses will cost your team an election, and if that's the case it's possible that Trump's approval rating is shooting up right now as his more pessimistic voters realize he wasn't too much of a liability this time after all. I'm only seeing one poll post-election so far, and it's still got him at Unfavorable +1 among registered voters, but that's within the margin of error of 0 and it's a big jump from the same pollster's Unfavorable +8 a week or so earlier, so maybe he's actually up in the positive numbers now.
roystgnr
9d ago
I could take or leave the music, but I do have to admit that PowerPoint-97-looking music video is amusing.
She seems to have some impressive vocal control, though. Flipping through other videos, it sounds like this one is way above her usual register, and yet she's still doing smooth glissandos up to the highest notes?
roystgnr
9d ago
Kamala Harris was a good candidate who ran a good campaign.
This interview was not of a good candidate who ran a good campaign. She was handed a damn multiple choice question with pre-written softball answers, and instead of just picking A over B, she wrote in Potato. If she'd been facing an opponent whose net approval rating doesn't hover around -10 then she would have lost in a landslide.
Though I wouldn't let the Republicans off the hook here either. Do they even have any nationally well-known politicians with a positive net approval rating?
roystgnr
11d ago
If the fine structure constant was 137 it would have been so incredibly exciting. It would be obvious that there was some incredibly deep connection between number theory and the basic structure of the universe, just sitting right in front of us waiting for us to discover it!
But no, the fine structure constant is 137.036 minus a smidge. What the hell, God?
roystgnr
11d ago
The NYT only called it for Trump at 5:38am (tell me that was a coincidence...) so it could be she's sleeping first. Their predictor needle was hovering around 99%-Trump since around 1:30am, but after Gore's embarrassing concession-retraction in 2000 there might be some understandable reluctance for politicians to make a concession phone call until the outcome is completely certain.
roystgnr
11d ago
Thanks for the feedback! "Be a jerk more"; check!
"surely, they're not going to try to land this thing on a coin toss?"
The only alternative I can see piles conspiracy theory on top of conspiracy theory: start with "The White House pushes to get FAA approval before the election so Elon can publicly embarrass himself" but then checkmate it with "Elon knows they would pull something like that if they saw the chance and so expresses grave doubts even though he knows they'll succeed".
Better a false-positive-driven crash into the ocean, than a false-negative-driven crash into the spaceport.
Definitely. This is what they do with Return To Landing Site booster landings for Falcon 9 too, and those are just aimed at slabs of concrete, not expensive ground support equipment. They had one splash down back in 2018, when a grid fin actuator failed and it didn't/couldn't turn toward the landing pad. SuperHeavy is designed to be much easier to land than F9, but it'll also be a much bigger kaboom when a catch fails.
The big risk they're taking is with upper stage catches. With a booster return, it's flying over ocean all the way, and if it can't fly any more than it just goes in the water like any other rocket company's booster would. Landing the upper stage on an east-coast launch tower, on the other hand, requires it to reenter from the west over land. When that works it should work fine. IFT-5 managed to drop right on top of camera buoys pre-positioned to film the action. But IFT-4 just had one mostly-lost flap and ended up about 5 miles off target, and back in its day the shuttle Columbia scattered debris over a 250-mile-long swath of Texas. Starship is a hardier design than the Shuttle was, and any debris would probably include some scarily huge chunks. Just this year SpaceX started exclusively bringing Dragon capsules back to the Pacific rather than also to the Atlantic, because the discarded "trunk" rings that were supposed to be flimsy enough to burn up on reentry turned out to have too-big chunks of debris reaching the ground too frequently. SpaceX really can't afford to fail an upper stage RTLS Starship reentry, not until they've got a west-coast or island-based or ocean-going catch tower to practice with afterwards, and they have no near-term plans to build any of those.
roystgnr
11d ago
internally I was expecting a giant fireball at Boca Chica, not a successful booster catch.
Man, I'm usually the jerk that yells at your anti-SpaceX nonsense, and even I was expecting a giant fireball. I think Elon's estimate was still 50/50. A third of of the SpaceX formula is the "hardware-rich" design process where they start testing prototypes as soon as they expect useful data rather than as soon as they're sure everything will work.
And according to that leaked meeting audio the booster catch just barely worked this time. IIRC their software has a couple hundred metrics to pass to decide on "everything's working ok, so turn toward the tower to land now" vs "something's badly broken, so just continue to the shoreline and crash in a safe spot", one of those metrics was misconfigured, and it was literally 1 second away from deciding to crash instead. They'll fix that, and fix the design on the chine cover that ripped off, but this is still very much a test vehicle, even if they finally had a test hit every objective.
roystgnr
11d ago
or not poke all the way through
Oh, no, the insanity of the "hanging chads" was much worse than that.
First, you could poke all the way through and not have the machine count it, because the chad happened to still be attached by one or two corners and could thus fold out of the way of your punch but then fold back into place to prevent the scanner from seeing a hole. In the Palm Beach County recounts they had to decide on rules about how a "Tri Chad" with only one separated corner would still count as a vote but a "Pregnant Chad" pushed out but still attached at four corners would not count.
Second, in theory you could not poke through a chad but still have it get counted, because the whole process of the recounts was that you got a bunch of partisans on all sides to manhandle a bunch of paper designed to be easily torn. You think it's bad when a printed paper ballot isn't immediately read perfectly by the scanner/tallier? Imagine if each time someone tried to scan it it got more smudged than the last...
roystgnr
11d ago
2022 was a drop from 2020, but we still had 30% of votes cast by mail. Even before the pandemic there were mail-ins by the tens of millions, in numbers rapidly increasing. "There's still some to count but not enough to change the Presidential result" was a thing I recall hearing in 2000, back when they were called "absentee ballots" and they were just a thing for invalids and active-duty soldiers and out-of-state students and such, but that time is past.
roystgnr
11d ago
Focused on Gaza, and specifically blaming Harris for enabling Gaza. "If we push hard enough against her we'll get her to cut off support for Israel" was a gambit, and it failed, and now it'll be hard to admit it was just a gambit if she loses, even if her opponent was literally the guy who had the US recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
roystgnr
11d ago
I've always had only positive experiences with other people in voting lines. But I do cynically wonder whether that's only the case because the norms are "no campaigning within 100 feet of the polling place" rather than "everybody talk about what you really think about the candidates".
roystgnr
11d ago
I'd also bet Harris wins if you gave me 50/50 odds, but if there's storefronts being boarded up in DC then I wouldn't say the expectations there are completely calm. Right-wing rioters would be less likely to go after local businesses than left-wing rioters would, and the guys shelling out for plywood know that.
roystgnr
11d ago
I solve this problem by typing up my selections as I research them, then I bring the notes to the polling place. This usually works out fine for me, but unfortunately during the first election I owned a smartphone, I had my notes on it and I had a little trouble because the poll workers didn't want anyone to get out any device with a camera. I hurriedly memorized things outside for that election and then I switched back to paper printouts afterward. These days the printouts don't seem to be necessary, because "a camera could enable someone to coerce your vote" is a joke in an election where a third of ballots are mailed in.
When I looked into it, a supermajority of voters solve this problem by selecting "party line R" or "party line D". This seemed like a reasonable button for voting machines to use to filter out people who shouldn't be voting, but it turns out that poll tests are illegal and the machines actually record those votes, so basically in non-off years we're just picking all our winners based what each local district thinks about the Presidential candidate from the same party.
roystgnr
12d ago
They didn't poll Russia, but among the 34 countries Pew did poll, only the Tunisians and Hungarians prefer Trump to Biden, at least when the only question is whether they "have confidence in ____ to do the right thing regarding world affairs".
Globally (at least in these countries, which are a somewhat diverse sampling), Biden had 43% confidence and Trump had 28%.
I feel like the interpretation of that could be a hell of a scissor statement. Democrats: "Everybody else everywhere in the world knows the right choices to make; why don't you?!?" Republicans: "Hundreds of countries are run the way you want, and for some reason you can't understand why everybody wants to live here instead!"
roystgnr
12d ago
is the "calling" of states entirely based on partially counted results?
Partially counted results, but they are at least smart enough to weight the partial count by source precinct, so when Trump's solidly winning the rural Wisconsin in-person votes but the Milwaukee mail-in vote count hasn't been finished they're still not going to call the state for Trump.
Well, they're probably not? There's always tension between "if we call a state first we get a lot of attention" vs "if we call a state too early we might horribly embarrass ourselves". Fox called Arizona for Biden in 2020 with 73% of the votes counted and a 8.5 point Biden lead, despite the expectations for uncounted votes heavily favoring Trump, and Biden only ended up winning by 0.3 points. I'm not sure whether the takeaway from that by 2024 media is going to be "we might also piss off a lot of people and risk having to backpedal embarrassingly if we call it that close" or if it's going to be "they got away with it last time so we might want to play the odds too".
By far the most serious embarrassment I can remember was Florida in 2000. Networks called Florida for Gore before voting in the panhandle region of the state (which is in a different time zone) even closed, then had to retract the call, then called it for Bush, then had to retract that call - after which point Gore, who had already called Bush to concede, retracted his concession.
roystgnr
12d ago
not sure when the election results will be announced
You and everybody here. I presume that explains the "(Day?)" quip in the title.
Most amusingly: Nevada's a swing state, and it's going to be counting mail-in ballots with postmarks up through election day (or with smudged postmarks) if they're received up to 3 or 4 days later. Even if everybody counts competently and instantly with no errors and no recounts there's a small chance we might not know the final outcome before the end of the week.
If AOC had been running this year, she could have threaded the needle between "we don't need to enforce our borders" and "Trump's border enforcement was nothing to cry about" by asserting that Trump just did it badly. Harp on things like kids unable to be reunified with families because they didn't collect enough data when separating them.
How well that plays in four years will depend on how badly Trump's border policy is carried out over his second term, but since the worst case for her is "Trump's Executive Orders don't make any big photogenic mistakes and the civil service who has to carry out his orders also don't make any big photogenic mistakes", I'm betting she still ends up with some swing-voter-friendly territory to stake out.
On the other hand, the "I'll do what you want but I won't screw it up" card works in any player's hand. Even if Trump does end up taking the blame for any big problems, he won't be the one running in 2028, and it'll be easy enough for any Republican (except Vance) to simply say "well, he had good goals, and I'll be the one to achieve them, without any mistakes this time."
It was a pretty good argument against. "My values have not changed" probably sounded like a tough focus-group-approved thing to memorize out of context, but without some explanation for Harris' changing positions it was just an obvious attempt to weasel out of an incredibly important question when she was asked about the changes. When someone is obviously trying to mislead you, the only safe thing to believe is that an honest answer would be the one you didn't want to hear, so it wasn't too crazy that many moderates and progressives concluded that Harris wasn't to be trusted.
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