johnfabian
1d ago
johnfabian
1d ago
Someone like MLK would fit much better as a Civ leader - he's much more obviously a political leader, and he fits a similar tradition in Civ games of giving prominent leaders of social movements a spot as Civ leaders (most notably Gandhi).
johnfabian
2d ago
- For busses, you could require everyone enter through the front door and pass such a barrier there. While we have seen a lot of AI systems fail spectacularly, I feel "detecting people entering through the rear doors of the bus and telling the bus driver to wait until they have validated their tickets" should be well within the realm of the doable.
Having everyone enter through the front of the bus is bad because it slows the travel time of the bus considerably and also makes it more of an interference to other traffic. Minimizing stopped time is very important for effective transit.
The better strategy is just very visible and frequent fare enforcement. Teams of inspectors rove the bus lines and bust people for not paying, in a very visible and obvious and shaming way. Yeah maybe you still have serial cheats or whatever but you get average people to think there are consequences and more importantly not feel like they're a sucker for paying a fare.
johnfabian
4d ago
I would be hesitant to overexplain this as some grand global struggle; I think this is 90% personality politics and the rest is just the cherry on the top. Trudeau seems to be a very bad man-manager: he's had Freeland, as his #2, eat shit for him on a number of different files. For the past two weeks his office has been leaking stories to various newspapers undermining her. He told her on Friday via zoom that she was going to be replaced as Finance Minister, but oh, before you go, on Monday can you deliver our fall economic statement (that we've delayed for two months)? Oh yes, it shows we have a $60+ billion deficit and we've totally blown past the "fiscal guardrails" we had promised. But once that's done and you've humiliated yourself for me one more time we'll shuffle you to a less-visible cabinet position and maybe you won't lose your seat in the next election in what is supposed to be a safe Liberal seat.
Freeland predictably told him to go fuck yourself. Her public letter announcing her resignation (while also admitting she was getting fired) was pretty scathing as far as these things go. To do it on the day you were supposed to give the long-delayed economic update for the country was as pretty direct a knife to the guts as you can do as Finance Minister. I don't think Trudeau will make it to February.
johnfabian
12d ago
Unless Penny set out that particular day to detain someone on the subway, he was not a vigilante. Defending yourself or others is not vigilantism, it is defence.
johnfabian
12d ago
I think it's not exactly useful to gauge a company's level of "greed" by its profit margin, particularly these huge companies. They are not tight ships running as lean as possible: they inevitably swell with thousands of useless, well-paid employees. Not to mention well-paid executives. These firms love to tighten the screws on their clients in order to avoid cutting the fat.
And of course using this as your proxy will make out better-run companies as being "greedy", and poorly-run ones saints.
johnfabian
16d ago
I guess it depends on how invested you are in American hegemony. Which if you are a westerner, or especially a non-American westerner, might seem like a silly thing to be rooting for. But you might not realize how good you have it.
If the US lets China take Taiwan, then much of south-east Asia probably reorients politically. The Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc. fall out of American orbit and into the Chinese sphere; on the other hand, India might seek a formal American military alliance. International waters are no longer guaranteed by the US Navy, and the costs of cross-oceanic bulk cargo increase massively. Major economic disturbances ripple out as markets realign; international computing and mineral markets take years to recover. South Korea and Japan become nuclear states in a matter of weeks or months; Japan rips up its constitution immediately. Australia prepares to be the bulwark of southeast Asia.
johnfabian
17d ago
If China can get across the strait and onto Taiwan, that's not a stalemate for them, it's an absolute victory.
China doesn't want the US to collapse. They just want Taiwan (and maybe less American influence in the Pacific).
johnfabian
1mo ago
I think it kind of smacks of desperation to take a politician changing her twitter profile as some kind of great paradigm shift. This reaction alone makes me think we have not yet reached "peak woke."
Aren't lots of high-profile people leaving twitter anyways? It might be more of a prelude to her jumping ship off the platform than anything else.
johnfabian
1mo ago
There were a spate of these kind of terror attacks in Europe in the mid-2010s. ISIS-inspired, invariably; some 2nd generation disaffected Arab rents a U-Haul and drives it into a crowd on some holiday. The first one was the Nice truck attack in 2016; there were a bunch of copycats and 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.
There are a couple of other similar cases elsewhere; here in Toronto in 2018 an incel hired a van and killed a bunch of people with it.
Terror attacks very much seem to follow specific trends, and it seems to take certain people to think of novel ways to go about it. No one thought of using airliners as weapons until Al-Qaeda did it. Using a truck rental as a weapon wasn't a thing until that Nice attack. I'm not sure why this is, but it certainly seems like people who commit terrorist attacks want it to be recognizeable as such; or alternatively are just generally uncreative.
johnfabian
1mo ago
Are you talking about analysis of historical accounts? Because this is the bread and butter of history as a social science. This is a very big subject but I can give you a simple outline. This is the kind of stuff that would be covered in a classic "History of the Roman Republic" first-year university class. You get assigned a reading and in the tutorial sections you would ask questions like:
- What is the author's purpose?
- What "side" is the author on?
- What is the social background of the author?
- When did the author write this?
- What might cause him to portray events this way?
- Was he present at these events, or is he hearing this second-hand? If so, who were his sources?
- Is there any information he might be leaving out?
- Are there things which seem exaggerated, or maybe false?
- How would the author have known about this specific detail?
- Does this text match what we know from archaeological evidence?
- Does this text agree with other things written about this event? If not, why might that be?
- Do you think this text would be flattering to the author's patron?
- Does the author seem to care strictly about accuracy, or are there other elements he prioritizes?
etc. etc. Basic textual analysis. Use what you know about the period and the situation and the author to expand upon what is written and try to think about all the different influences that might have transformed the narrative from what happened in reality to how it reads on the page.
If you want to read history books that go into this kind of stuff, the ideal subjects are periods where there are limited historical sources: I used classical Rome as an example and it's a great one. Historians in these books will often tell you very directly how they are analyzing accounts and what inferences they are making from them and the other historical evidence available to them.
johnfabian
1mo ago
The amount of votes you need to form a representative sample is smaller than a lot of people think. So once you have the first few thousand votes counted in any given county, you have a very very good sense of how the rest of that vote in the county will be distributed with a relatively small margin of error. Based on that, after a certain number of counties start reporting results, you can often quickly reach a point in some of the more lopsided states where regardless of the distribution of votes in future counties the vote is already effectively decided. And on closer states like the swing states once all the areas are reporting and have a large enough sample of results, even what seem like relatively small margins (like 51% to 48%) can give you the confidence to call a final result on the more-or-less ironclad assumption that the rest of the votes to be counted will have very similar distribution.
It's really only on the very very close races that it might take more than a day, or multiple days, to arrive at a result.
johnfabian
1mo ago
this was still a nail-biter of an election.
It wasn't as close as 2020 in terms of the number of votes, but it was still a margin of ~300k in the key swing states between a Trump win and a Harris victory.
johnfabian
1mo ago
Depends on where you live; varying with the source tap water can be awful or quite tasty. The tap water in Toronto is delicious, in my opinion.
johnfabian
1mo ago
It looks like turnout was the major factor. Trump more or less repeated his 2020 performance whereas Harris is down 15 million from Biden's numbers. There's been some coalition shuffling but I can't imagine it changed things all that much for Trump; I would presume he alienated and attracted in roughly even numbers. But it's hard not to look at Harris's results and see anything besides a deeply uninspiring campaign and candidate. Democratic voters simply did not turn out; not just in swing states but across the board.
johnfabian
1mo ago
johnfabian
1mo ago
My gut impression, with very little in terms of analysis to back this up:
- Comfortable victory in the popular vote for Harris, maybe 6-8% margin
- Superficially large spread in EC votes in favour of Harris; like maybe in the 310s or 20s
- Actual margins will still be very close with fewer than 200,000 votes being the difference across the swing states between a Harris victory and a Trump victory
johnfabian
1mo ago
So a pollster colluded with Democrats and released an absurd “momentum shifting” poll 3 days before the election, but your default response is to take it at face value? I have a bridge to sell you, man.
Well, we've got three days to see. I'm willing to eat crow if I'm wrong.
I can't remember, was there this much hubbub among election nerds over one particular poll in Iowa as a bellwether as there has been/is now? When I saw this first start someone had spelled it as "Seltzer poll" and I thought that it was like the bakery "cookie polls" expect with different varieties of Alka-Seltzer or something.
I heard about this poll pre-election back in 2020. But I think its prominence has increased in the years since because of the amount and degree of polling errors the other big boys have had, which has increased since. Selzer made big outlier pro-Trump calls in 2016 and 2020 and was dead on both times. So given the track record of success combined with the increased inaccuracies of other polls the attention on this specific one has mounted considerably since 2020.
johnfabian
1mo ago
It’s hard not to view this as just the latest in a long string of people lighting their credibility on fire for a tiny chance of stopping bad orange man. It seems to run contrary to every other piece of evidence: polls, registration, early voting, “vibes.”
A Trump blowout still seems like the most likely scenario to me. There is just too much going in Trump’s favor relative to the very close 2020 election.
We've only got a few days to wait so we'll see. But how willing are you to consider that rather than your ideological opponents willfully blinding themselves, it is perhaps you?
I've got no horse in this race; I suppose I would prefer Harris wins but it would certainly be funnier if Trump does. Seems like this pollster has a sterling track record. I'm not sure why your initial response would be blanket denial.
johnfabian
2mo ago
It definitely still is in Canada. I've mentioned this before here but a major part of the reason the affluent Toronto parents I talk to frequently are swinging against the federal Liberals is because none of their kids can get the typical high school jobs (fast food, grocery store, cashier, waiting tables, etc) that they expect them to get anymore.
johnfabian
2mo ago
I'm reading The Count of Monte Cristo and enjoying it a lot. It feels very much like a sort of shlocky Hollywood action movie dressed up as literature, but like in a good way. A man is wronged by his friends, imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, escapes, becomes rich and plots his elaborate revenge on his enemies? I can just imagine Dumas whispering "hell yeah" to himself constantly while writing this.
johnfabian
2mo ago
I don't think the PLA Navy is ready yet. I don't think they'll be ready for a few years. But with the ongoing rearmament of Japan and Australia as well as a growing awareness in Taiwan and the USA, there may be a threshold where China decides that future gains in readiness are not worth waiting for given the potential of increased western capabilities to resist.
But in any case I highly doubt that this war would ever go nuclear. China simply does not have the nuclear stockpile to destroy the US; we're not in a MAD situation here so neither side has the incentive to strike first, or strike at all.
johnfabian
2mo ago
Mountains also have another possible source of flash fooding: spring melt.
It's not often you see a movie that has an entirely novel concept, especially as a courtroom drama which is one of the most done-to-death formats.
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