roystgnr
11hr ago
I know that Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People, of course, but it's always nice when one of the 99%-sane people spends part of their remaining 1% to pop in and confirm.
"Yeah, of course I'm not writing much on discussion forums. I decided to prioritize employment and family and friends and such instead."
It's generally very politely worded, but always wonder if the "I'm just explaining myself" attitude is merely a guise, and the real driving emotion is "I feel sad for you all and wish some of you would take the hint." If so, then thank you very much, but no, I'm sorry, we probably won't.
roystgnr
11hr ago
Presumably by "developments" he means how muskets would develop in their future, not the contemporaneous state of their development.
Though IMHO this argument doesn't apply extremely well to the Second Amendment. Some of the Founding Fathers thought it was just Common Sense that private merchants should be allowed and encouraged to own their own warships. I don't think "maybe they can have a ship with fifty cannons on it, but surely they can't have a semiautomatic rifle!" would be the devastating argument that some people imagine.
roystgnr
11hr ago
I think it’s a lot like the spree shooting phenomenon in the USA, which doesn’t seem to have any sort of ideological Origen that I’ve been able to find.
"Every being which is endowed with reason, and transgresses its statutes and limitations, is undoubtedly involved in sin by swerving from rectitude and justice."
roystgnr
2d ago
their state flagships, which are as good on a resume as any non-Harvard school.
At first glance, Harvard appears to have about a 4% salary premium over the top California state schools or Georgia Tech, 15% over U. Virginia, 20-25% over U. Michigan or UT-Austin, and about 55% over my childhood state's "flagship".
Plus, even the flagship schools aren't exactly guarantees. UT-Austin just tightened its auto-acceptance rate (the way 85% of its in-state students get in) to the top 5%. If you were only in the top 6% of your high school, I'd say you're a good student, but you didn't make the cut this year; if you were in the top 10% of your high school, I'd still say you're a good student, but you never really stood a chance.
roystgnr
2d ago
I wonder if there would be any way to get statistics on this.
When I went to college I moved out of a city where Burger King was staffed by teenagers managed by late-twenties workers, all of whom seemed to see this as a stepping stone to bigger things, and I moved to a much bigger city where Burger King workers were all twice my age and clearly not proud of or happy with where they were. I hoped the under-seared patties and limp lettuce were just due to heedlessness and heat lamps rather than spite and spit, but either way I found different places to eat.
roystgnr
2d ago
Yeah, but if the admissions officers are in the filter bubble then the filter bubble effect becomes a real effect. The belief doesn't need to be "a teenager working a low wage job is a problem", it just has to be "a teenager who did these fancy things would make a better admit than a teenager who just didn't seem to have as many man-hours of accomplishments for some reason we don't understand".
roystgnr
3d ago
Very fair point.
I suspect the answer intended by the US Constitution was also the one you'd get from game theory: treaties are supreme over other laws, and require a 2/3 Senate vote to ratify, and naturally you're not going to swing wildly from "2/3 in favor of ratification" to "2/3 in favor of nullification", so once a treaty is ratified it should be relatively trustworthy.
Unfortunately the Constitution doesn't actually spell out the "2/3 in favor of nullification" part of that, and so the status quo for terminating a treaty ended up somewhere in between "big legalese mess" and "the President can do whatever he wants", leaning towards the latter. I would still trust the US with an alliance more than Russia, but not as much more as I'd like to.
roystgnr
3d ago
the US should look to ally with Russia
Can one ally with Russia, in any sense that requires future commitments rather than presently verifiable terms? What has changed in between the Berlin Blockade and now that makes them less likely to use such an alliance when it might benefit them but then ignore it as soon as it might cost them? (Fun aside: though it sounds like one of Aesop's, The Scorpion and the Frog is a Russian fable)
in order to build an economic and diplomatic relationship with China:
China is already our third-largest trading partner (right after the two that each share thousands of miles of border with us), and though our diplomatic relationship is somewhat strained by philosophical tensions similar to our tensions with Russia, e.g. between "conquest is bad" versus "if the other guys are basically the same ethnicity then it shouldn't even really count as an invasion when we send in the military", I don't think the proper resolution here is to just switch teams. There are a lot of potential Sudetenland "special military operation" opportunities in the world, and it's a better place when they're unrealized opportunities.
and we allied w/Japan
Despite my suspicions above, I would agree that if Russia agrees to an unconditional surrender, demilitarization and disarmament, an American rewrite of their constitution, and acceptance of military occupation to enforce it all, that would be ample evidence of sufficient change for us to ally with them afterwards.
roystgnr
5d ago
The hostage doesn't have a gun, but by not resisting, the hostage is enabling a criminal with a gun to get away.
By not resisting, the scientists are (checks notes) noticing that scientific studies done in a Hispanic country might help more Hispanics want to become scientists.
The hostage still isn't coming off as the better of the two here.
roystgnr
6d ago
Keanu Reeves character, "Speed", trying to be edgy: "Shoot the hostage. ... Go for the good wound and he can't get to the plane with her."
The_Nybbler, actually understanding edgy: "Shoot the hostage. Once they've obeyed the terrorist they can't legitimately complain of being treated as an enemy."
roystgnr
6d ago
Zelensky is asking for American boys to die on the steppe in Ukraine on the other side of the world.
I thought he was still just asking for materiel. When did he request troops?
roystgnr
7d ago
A bit of a stretch, but also interesting to read about in its own right. Three of the FDR justices in the majority vote in that case also voted with the majority to overturn it just 3 years later, with a separate concurrence to specifically discuss why they deliberately did so. Their concurrence isn't entirely the paean to freedom I'd have hoped for, but it's still impressive to see people change their minds so significantly, publicly, and (relative to the judicial workings) quickly.
roystgnr
7d ago
Was FDR against American ideology?
Maybe it was using threats of court packing to nullify the 10th Amendment, perhaps it was the racial concentration camps, or maybe it was handing half of Europe to a genocidal communist, but yeah, at some point one must become a tiny bit suspicious!
America contains multitudes, for better or worse.
Those aren't two binary options, remember, they're a sliding scale. There's always "even worse" as a possibility.
I don't see what there is to be done about it, though. Without mind reading, "selecting for people whose beliefs are American" isn't going to filter out all aspiring immigrants with un-American beliefs, it's only going to filter out the honest ones. And if we did have a magical filter, why would I expect it to be used to test for my definition of "American" or the Constitution's, rather than for the definition that would earn "the raucous applause of the American public"?
roystgnr
7d ago
INTX here. I like that coding.
It's been a good 20 years for me, but back then I encountered both types of tests, and the catch was that while the one administered in an educational system was a proper continuum-results test, the ones that were rapidly spreading around the internet like astrology-for-nerds were all binary-result versions. People debating MBTI validity often seemed to be talking past each other as a result, arguing about two significantly different categories of test as if they were the same because they were named the same.
roystgnr
8d ago
I don’t buy into MBTI, but I think the axes are at least somewhat consistent
The problem with MBTI isn't that the axes aren't consistent. They're obsoleted by OCEAN, because "factor analysis" performs better than "Jung plus guessin'", but they're reasonably consistent and informative.
The trouble is that half the time (or 90% of the time?) you see MBTI used, the axes aren't treated as axes, they're treated as binary categories. If your MBTI test doesn't rank you from "100T, 0F" to "0T, 100F", it just calls you "T" or "F", then it's approximately as useful as a nearly-blank tape measure with a single mark to delineate the boundary between "Tall" and "Short". Yes, those are real concepts, not imaginary ones, but they're not describing bimodal distributions, so at least there should be a third category that the modal person can fit into, stably and without having to flip a coin.
roystgnr
8d ago
He's basically taken over Trump's shitposting duties.
Oh, there's more than enough shitposting to go around.
roystgnr
9d ago
I don't pronounce the slash, but yeah.
I also don't refer to IEC standards that often, but that reminds me that IEEE is another odd one: I've never heard it pronounced "I-E-E-E", or in fact any way but "eye triple e".
roystgnr
9d ago
Wait, you say "I-S-O", not "iso"? How can you not pronounce the international standards ("ways we should all be the same") organization acronym like the Greek prefix meaning "the same"?
It's wild that it works, right?
I can't wrap my head around it when the mother and child were sharing every bodily fluid possible for 9 months.
Not quite - the whole point of the placenta is to share oxygen and nutrients without directly sharing blood, and apparently the Hep B virus generally doesn't make it through an undamaged placenta, or through an undamaged amniotic sac (which makes amniocentesis a risk for infected mothers), whereas some Hep B antibodies do make it through the placenta, and some accumulate in the placenta and may form a bit of a "barrier" there.
I'm not an expert in any of that, though, and it looks like part of the answer is "luck". Some viruses slip through the placenta much more easily than others, despite the obvious natural selection issues to the contrary.
roystgnr
9d ago
Yeah, we're down to 1000 mother-to-child transmissions a year in the US. The tradeoff here is between "a lot of babies get a vaccine they could have gotten later" vs "a few babies get a disease they can't get cured later".
roystgnr
9d ago
Hep B which they want to give children in the first hour post-birth despite no plausible method of transmission
Hep B can be transmitted from mother to child at birth, if not medically prevented.
roystgnr
9d ago
Reading that link was interesting and disturbing but wasn't totally worth it until I made it to this comment.
roystgnr
9d ago
This took me a second to think about, but I guess that is a distinct possibility. I was considering the "might have been version 0.0.1" case, where Covid-19 was an intermediate for a future coronavirus bioweapon, but it's not completely out of the question that someone could e.g. work on a single protein in one virus strain and splice it into a very different base virus.
roystgnr
10d ago
I assume the argument for infant Hep B vaccination is that infection during childbirth is a major transmission method; I think around 5-10% of the population in many Asian countries are carriers, most infected this way by their mothers. IIRC the liver damage cuts life expectancy by a couple years in women and by a decade or so in men, and it's incurable.
But it's also a sexually-transmitted disease (though not much of one in places where we're all vaccinated) for whatever stigma that holds, and it's a disease that can be asymptomatic, so I guess the thinking is that it's better to have 100% of babies vaccinated immediately (the vaccine response can "outrun" the disease!) than to rely on 100% of mothers to know and admit if they're carriers.
In this metaphor, the first boyfriend being cheated on is the Taliban? That's not really a "his girlfriend got seduced by another guy" situation so much as a "when he tried to help his murderer friend hide from the cops, his abuse victim made a break for it and told them" situation. Maybe it's a risky idea to date this girl, but if the guy gets off on a technicality it still seems cruel to send her back.
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