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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   30193 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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So any opinions on the drone sightings in New Jersey? Is it just mass hysteria and people mistake airplanes for drones? Are they aliens? Supernatural phenomenon? Just a distributed prank by drone owners?

So far the confusion and appeal to the government is bipartisan:

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/15/politics/mysterious-drone-sightings-lawmakers-criticize-response/index.html

Lawmakers from across the political spectrum on Sunday criticized the federal government’s response to mysterious drone sightings in the Northeast, as officials emphasize there is no evidence of a security threat.

Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, a ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, also expressed frustration with the administration’s response to the public. “The government has a real responsibility to put more information out there so people better understand what the real dangers are,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Trump said Friday that the government needs to convey more information and shoot down the drones.

Asked Sunday about the president-elect’s post calling on the government to shoot down the drones, Mayorkas said, “We are limited in our authorities.”

What drives me crazy is that only phone videos seem to exist and phone cameras suck for faraway objects in the night. Is there not one good camera with a zoom in New York/New Jersey?

Edit:
This orb ABC News was puzzled over is really an out of focus Venus:
https://x.com/MatthewCappucci/status/1868052013164134899

Should maybe repost to the new thread

What drives me crazy is that only phone videos seem to exist and phone cameras suck for faraway objects in the night. Is there not one good camera with a zoom in New York/New Jersey?

As obviously some good cameras exist - I would expect that reason is the same as lacking high quality pictures of Yeti, Bigfoot, Ukrainian biolabs from Russian propaganda fantasies, Loch Ness monster and so on.

These things are not actually existing or have a boring explanations.

There's probably a significant element of mass hysteria adding noise to the body of reports, but I found this theory from Reddit (tl;dr: US government sockpuppet theatre to create momentum/public or internal support to marshal significant funds for a drone defense moonshot) plausible. Considering the way the Ukraine war is being conducted and the Chinese drone swarm videos that are being circulated, it would be shocking if US military planners were not currently running around desperate for a way to get the funding bodies to acknowledge the scale of the problem without projecting weakness to the outside.

As in my own favoured theory for the "tictac video" UFO case before, there could also be an element of flexing the US military's own capabilities to likely adversaries. "See, our ship-launched drones confuse and overwhelm even the rest of our military and civilian law enforcement. Do you think you would have a chance?"

There's an absolutely absurd amount of money being thrown at drone warfare in general in the US - eleven figures and growing by my estimate. But the thing is, that's almost entirely about building up attack capabilities - because drone warfare is the culmination of like five different disciplines worth of buzzword bingo! AI, machine learning, machine vision, autonomous weapons, 3d-printing, batteries, advanced semiconductors, supply chain challenges, mesh networks, swarms and coordinated behaviors, cost-to-hazard ratios...

Drone defense is surprisingly straightforward, provided you're a real first world country. There's a lot of fancy electronic warfare toys that can trivially defeat anything off-the-shelf, and anything more robust to EW (whether a cheap firmware reflash or a custom high-autonomy platform) is still vulnerable to a half-decent shotgun. In fact, basically all drones are weak to shotgun, and mounting a radar on a rapid-fire spreader turret is pretty cheap by military standards. Protecting high-value locations is basically a solved problem - I'm sure there's still some ongoing grifts to solve it even more expensively better, but for any location worth protecting, the means exist today.

Of course, cheap by military standards is still ludicrously expensive by infrastructure standards, and there's a few orders of magnitude more critical infrastructure targets than military targets, so there's not really a scalable solution to this problem that involves grounding or destroying drones just before they strike infrastructure targets. The actual scalable solution is to license and regulate drone ownership, and use early warning systems built on top of existing surveillance capitalism to track and crack down on anyone whose purchasing habits start to look like the incredibly obvious signs of building a drone fleet, not to mention the equally obvious signs of building a ton of explosives to attach to those drones. Anyone with the capability to overcome regulation and surveillance and still pose a credible threat (cartels, China, Russia, maybe Iran) faces the risk of starting a war with their actions - and if this risk isn't enough deterrence, we've got bigger problems.

It is in principle possible for some jihadi group to smuggle enough drones, explosives, and operators into the US to do 9/11 Part 2: Electric Boogaloo, but it would take an uncharacteristically spectacular degree of coordination, training, and resources. I don't think anyone is sockpuppeting drone terror in response to a perceived threat of jihadi drone terror.

Drone defense is surprisingly straightforward, provided you're a real first world country.

This sounds like copium to be able to say that it doesn't mean much that Russia and Ukraine are not managing to pull it off reliably.

Russia has widely been considered superior to the US in EW, and yet both Russia and Ukraine are now in a place where all their EW measures are at best a minor annoyance to each other's drone activity and the only things they can jam reliably are stodgy known-frequency systems like GPS and Starlink. Shotguns on turrets sounds appealing, but I haven't seen evidence that it works reliably in a realistic settings - physics get in the way of any sufficiently heavy cannon rotating to track a fast-moving close target, an additional drone coming in from a different angle costs much less (and eats much less manufacturing line capacity, before you start talking about GDP gaps) than an additional turret, and with anything more advanced than Shaheds the drones can come in low/sneak around terrain in such a way that just firing a shotgun at them is bound to cause collateral damage. Then, of course, a modern country's functioning depends on the safety of more than a few "high-value" locations - a Factorio gamer faction like China could easily afford paralyzing a city by sending one quadcopter equipped with a grenade and a frequency-hopping transponder to each gas station and perhaps even each of those small plastic roadside electric/telecom switchboxes. In terms of larger infrastructure, a container port occupies tens of square kilometres, while a putative scifi shotgun turret against low-flying drones in such an environment could perhaps cover a 0.01km² area.

Of course, cheap by military standards is still ludicrously expensive by infrastructure standards, and there's a few orders of magnitude more critical infrastructure targets than military targets, so there's not really a scalable solution to this problem that involves grounding or destroying drones just before they strike infrastructure targets. The actual scalable solution is to license and regulate drone ownership, and use early warning systems built on top of existing surveillance capitalism to track and crack down on anyone whose purchasing habits start to look like the incredibly obvious signs of building a drone fleet, not to mention the equally obvious signs of building a ton of explosives to attach to those drones.

There may be a reason why the NJ drones are reported to come in from the sea, too. Ukraine has demonstrated the unreasonable effectiveness of jetski-sized drone boats. Cartels have already DIYed similar craft. It wouldn't take much inventiveness to replace the explosive payload of one of those designs with 4 quadcopters to be launched at inland targets when the boat gets close enough to shore.

Anyone with the capability to overcome regulation and surveillance and still pose a credible threat (cartels, China, Russia, maybe Iran) faces the risk of starting a war with their actions - and if this risk isn't enough deterrence, we've got bigger problems.

Well, the thing is - speculation about the game theory of an actual direct US-versus-adversary conflict and how the ability to wreak more non-nuclear chaos on the US mainland may impact the game tree aside, the goals and ambitions of the US still go well beyond defending its own territory, even if this is a hard sell to funders and the voting public sometimes. The problem the US currently faces with drones is not just that it may not be able to defend its own territory; it's also that there is no technology platform it could even hypothetically provide to Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, Australia or any other ally that is not quite under the US nuclear umbrella or even the US dead fresh-faced college kids umbrella to save them from the threat of drones, and this is a glaring limitation to its ability to project power. If the US just wills it, you could be made safe from traditional air attack, obtain arbitrary amounts of firepower, or sub-1h delay high-resolution satellite imagery and RF emissions data for any point on earth; but apparently (and so whether you get those blessings is merely a matter of being willing to pay up/sufficient alignment with its objectives); but it turns out that if you are suffering a death by a thousand drone cuts all across your territory, this is beyond the Fairy Godmother's powers to prevent.

a putative scifi shotgun turret against low-flying drones in such an environment could perhaps cover a 0.01km² area.

Your estimate of engagement area is off by three orders of magnitude. Existing systems are designed to bring down drones from several kilometers away. This is actually really easy to do, and gets easier the closer you get.

Collateral damage is a problem, so we usually deploy these kind of systems in remote military installations with established secure perimeters. It's difficult to imagine a scenario where drones could be deployed close enough to these installations that they couldn't be intercepted in time. But again, it's not really feasible to place a secure perimeter around every substation, dock, or bridge in the country, and there are actual collateral damage risks for doing so even in limited capacity. Hence the fun EW toys.

Russia has widely been considered superior to the US in EW

Then they got into a war where EW matters, and the truth became more complex. There are effective EW systems on both sides of the conflict, which can and do suppress drone activity, this is not some hypothetical annoyance when effectively deployed. The challenges are not the capabilities of the technology, but the logistics of supplying advanced technologies to the combatants, particularly across several hundred km of active conflict zone. Ukraine has effectively no domestic EW manufacturing capability, and its benefactors provide extremely limited quantities of systems, in many cases for prototyping assessments before high-volume manufacturing can take place. Russia is so systemically corrupt that they can assemble heaps of money for EW manufacturing, pocket 90% of it, and distribute chinesium equivalents that basically don't work instead.

Compare with growing domestic stockpiles of anti-drone EW equipment near military bases, and active deployments around high-value political targets. These have a different logistics problem - how to deploy them effectively and immediately against a threat - but if it ever came down to street-level warfare with a threat of prolonged drone attacks, a response does exist.

China could easily afford paralyzing a city

I suspect they could not afford the war it would start... Even if they could, they nevertheless choose not to.

reported to come in from the sea, too

Ukraine's drone boat campaign took Russia quite by surprise, and the cost-to-hazard ratios has been quite impressive. But there's a lot more going on here:

  • Ukrainian benefactors are providing satellite capabilities to track Russian ships and communicate with drone boats
  • Prototypes enjoyed significant software assistance from western companies
  • Russian navy vessels make the state of US navy vessels seem palatable by comparison - maintenance and armaments are very likely heavily degraded across the entire fleet to begin with
  • Drone boats are only one part of a multi-prong effort against the Black Sea fleet, which also includes missile strikes, much larger aerial drones, and sabotage

In principle, an autonomous submarine drone carrier unloading a swarm on Manhattan sounds like it could work, evading existing oceanic tracking systems and putting a swarm near critical infrastructure with minimal risk of interception. I don't think "autonomous stealth submarine drone carrier" is something straightforward to develop and deploy - this takes a lot of research and resources to get right. Some smaller-scale swarms using very small surface vessels also seem possible, but low-yield.

this is a glaring limitation to its ability to project power

The reality is: if any significant number of drones are in the air and angling to explode on your infrastructure, and your country is not a postage stamp investing heavily in modern missile defense systems to repel an endless stream of homemade rockets from the doghouse next door, you and whoever is attacking you are already in deep shit. The time to prevent drone attacks is before the first drone ever takes flight. If your argument is that preemptive deterrence doesn't sell expensive drone defense systems, I agree.

But on account of all the collateral damage concerns outlined above, deploying sockpuppet drone warfare against your own civilian population is a terrible idea that invites chaos. It's not impossible that encouraging spending on expensive drone defense systems could invite such reckless behavior, so I'm not going to dismiss the possibility outright... But it's not in my top three explanations, which currently look like:

  1. It's actually just planes or stars or satellites or... Etc
  2. It's actually civilian drones, and someone did something they shouldn't have for boring reasons
  3. 1 or 2 but at least one was some kind of surveillance op on behalf of a foreign military/intelligence apparatus

Your estimate of engagement area is off by three orders of magnitude. Existing systems are designed to bring down drones from several kilometers away. This is actually really easy to do, and gets easier the closer you get.

I think we still may be thinking of different types of drones - there are the long-range plane-type ones like Russia's Shaheds/Lancets/Orlans and Ukraine's jury-rigged single-engine aircraft and some dedicated designs the names of which I don't remember, and then there are the low-flying helicopter types ranging from Ukraine's Baba Yaga to modded off-the-shelf FPV ones. The latter can easily fly between trees, buildings or stacks of containers; I don't see how you can engage them in a much larger area from a single point because in a busy industrial area there is simply no point near ground level that has line of sight of that much space. (You could of course place it in an elevated area and aim down, but then you are aiming towards the ground and I'm not sure what you would have to pay people to work in an industrial area covered by such a contraption.)

Then they got into a war where EW matters, and the truth became more complex. There are effective EW systems on both sides of the conflict, which can and do suppress drone activity, this is not some hypothetical annoyance when effectively deployed

I see an abundance of FPV drone video streams from both sides where the drone actually flies into a vehicle with EW equipment. This usually plays out as some noise in the video stream that gets worse as the drone gets closer, but the target is hit all the same. I'm sure there are cases where the interference results in failure, but cases where it does not are not one-offs.

I suspect they could not afford the war it would start... Even if they could, they nevertheless choose not to.

Since the whole "Russian economy collapse in a month" fiasco, I'd take Western predictions about the financial capabilities of its adversaries with a lot of salt...

Ukrainian benefactors are providing satellite capabilities to track Russian ships and communicate with drone boats

That's a fair point, but what do we know about Chinese satellite capabilities? Russia's legacy kit is one thing, but I'd imagine China to actually be quite good at something of type "get a lot of good cameras and radios into orbit fast".

Prototypes enjoyed significant software assistance from western companies

Interesting if true (but again, is that really the bottleneck for an adversary like China or even Iran?).

Russian navy vessels make the state of US navy vessels seem palatable by comparison - maintenance and armaments are very likely heavily degraded across the entire fleet to begin with

That's only really relevant for the scenario where naval drones attack ships, no? In the autonomous drone carrier scenario, they would not even get close to capital US surface ships.

an autonomous submarine drone carrier unloading a swarm on Manhattan

Would the "submarine" element really be necessary? Do you think the naval tech gap between Russia and the US is so big that Russia can't track surface craft of the size of Ukraine's drone boats in the open sea but the US reliably can?

your country is not a postage stamp investing heavily in modern missile defense systems to repel an endless stream of homemade rockets from the doghouse next door

You lost me with the metaphors in this passage.

The time to prevent drone attacks is before the first drone ever takes flight.

They've evidently failed with that in the case of Iran + proxies (and yet they are still not in an official state of war against either). What do you think would happen if, say, China did a drone-swarm warning shot against the US, say in the context of US saber-rattling against a blockade of Taiwan intended to break its resistance? It's hard to predict, but I could see a drone attack that manages to largely avoid human casualties failing to elicit the Pearl Harbor response and instead making public opinion lean towards "yeah, we don't need this war".

In fact, basically all drones are weak to shotgun, and mounting a radar on a rapid-fire spreader turret is pretty cheap by military standards.

I never saw an automatic or anti drone turret in combat footage, despite a very high incentive for Russia/Ukraineto to have that.

There is tons of footage of shotgun use and this Russian soldier is doing it very non-chalantly:

https://old.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1eq2jmh/soldier_shoots_down_a_drone_from_moving_truck/

Fighting against a drone searching for you must be nerve wrecking, you hear the high pitched sound and play hide and seek against the drone operator:

https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1d1611e/russian_soldier_shoots_a_drone_with_his_shotgun/

Of course this is the lucky case where the human survived. There is tons of footage of drones hitting their target.

Rheinmettal, Thales, BAE all have such systems in production today; other players are in development. Ukraine doesn't have them because they're not 50 years old and rotting in a warehouse; Russia doesn't have them because they went all in on EW and, in typical Russian fashion, produced something claimed to be effective and dangerous on paper, maybe even showed off some fancy prototypes, but then collapsed into graft and half-measures under actual wartime pressures.

As noted, any real first world country can solve this problem today.

As someone who flies model aircraft in NJ... it's 99.9% fake, and getting more fake by the sighting. There's a LOT of air traffic in this area, and no shortage of private planes, and nearly everything I've seen online has clearly been a full-sized plane. The exceptions are mostly either unidentifable lights which are also probably full sized planes (further away) or stationary lights (yeah, that's not a hovering drone in your neighbor's yard, it's a light on a lightpost, genius). Some do appear to be quadcopter drones... the catch is some police departments have been putting their own drones up to try to spot the original drones, and the police drones then get spotted.

It's possible it was kicked off by a real sighting of a formation of drones; there have been such sighted elsewhere (near military bases, including US bases in the UK) fairly reliably. Those drones, if they exist (which they probably do) are almost certainly military, though "ours" or "theirs" is an open question. If they are "theirs", whoever "they" are is pretty brazen, but China did do that balloon thing, so it's not out of the question.

some police departments have been putting their own drones up to try to spot the original drones, and the police drones then get spotted.

...like Winnie-ther-Pooh hunting Woozles. (He was following his own footprints around a grove of larch-trees.)

This is what happened during the Great Gatwick Drone Scare. The entire airport was grounded for more than 24 hours.

At least we got this banger of a tweet out of the incident (movie title: New Yorkshire)

90% chance this is some classified US government project. The feds didn’t officially acknowledge Area 51 for decades after it was obvious they had a test base there. This is just how they roll.

Really? 90%? Only 10% for typical mass hysteria and people confusing stars, planes, street lamps Christmas decorations etc for UFOs?

They established Area 51 out in the middle of nowhere on government land and forbid people from flying over it. This might be a classified government project but it's very different M.O. from Area 51.

Is there not one good camera with a zoom in New York/New Jersey? At night, even with a good camera, you're just going to see the little lights. Not sure how much you'd see even with an IR sensor with little drones unless you were close.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is pen-testing and/or sending a message, perhaps by a foreign actor. I really think it's hard to counter small UAS and even if you can counter them, hard to finger anyone specific for doing it. This would track with the relatively recent appearance of drones over a number of US bases, including outside the United States.

I guess it could be a classic UFO flap, but the objects seem to be described as being drones, so I'm not really inclined to leap for anything paranormal unless there's a legitimate demonstration of unusual capability.

It’s only hard if the drones are autonomous. With piloted drones, the operator is broadcasting his position out in the open.

Well, I'm not sure exactly how easy DFing a drone transmitter is just as a general rule, especially in a populated area, but if you're trying to evade detection - which these drones reportedly are - you could probably do it successfully. The actual drones spotted in New Jersey are assessed as being about six feet in diameter, which would be large enough to house a satellite communications suite, I think, which would make the operator pretty much impossible to find. (You can also run drones off of fiber-optics but that seems much riskier.) This might be why at least one NJ officials is reporting that their drone "detection equipment" is not working but that they are detecting the drones on radar.

The actual drones spotted in New Jersey are assessed as being about six feet in diameter

Yeah, and you can take that with a mine of salt. It's really hard to tell how big something in the air is, or how far away.

The formations that have been seen in various places have been a bunch of quadcopter drones along with a fixed-wing drone. In the case of those, I would guess the fixed-wing drone has the comm suite and the quads are controlled through it. But most of the stuff people have been seeing in NJ isn't that.

People don't look at the night sky enough. Here's the former governor of Maryland complaining about the constellation Orion. There are a lot of things up there that look strange when you zoom in really hard with a shaky camera!

Oh god! The comments!

With immense respect, Mr. governor, this is the constellation "Orion." It's made up of stars between 244 and 1,344 light years away. The stars will be in a similar place tomorrow.

The Time Wars Have Begun.

President-Elect Trump has put his weight behind ending Daylight Saving Time. Pretty much everyone likes the idea, but immediately the perma-DST vs. Noon-Is-Noon factions drew up battle lines.

I’m not here to litigate that battle, it’s tiresome; all the points have been made elsewhere and basically come down to if 9-5 or 8-4 (solar time) is what our civilization should stick with, and what we should call them, for the sake of the children and for having some evening daylight after work.

Instead I propose that schools and businesses start using “sundial time”.

They’d open at, for example, one hour after dawn and be open 8 or 9 hours. Retail stores, bars, and other businesses that rely on evening business could base their workday around sunset, closing at (let’s say) three or five hours after sundown.

Their door signs could be IOT smart displays, automatically coordinating with a virtual sundial based on their GPS coordinates, with translation into noon-based time. Smartphones could show these times pretty easily, via a settings switch.

We even have the Latin abbreviations AL (ante lucem), PL (post lucem), AV (ante vesperum), and PV (post vesperum) ready to go.

The major plus would be health, as instead of one hour jumps in spring and fall causing heart attacks, times would adjust only minutes each day, steadily.

Would you be opposed to this in your city/town, and would you be more or less opposed if your political rivals suggested this? Do you have any priors re which political tribes would hold which opinions?

Are you PDST or NIN and a night owl or early bird, and do you think that influenced your other answers and arguments? (For transparency, I’m a Noon-Is-Nooner night owl.)

Speaking of this, what does the motte think of the proposal to take the continental US down to two timezones- east+central and pacific+mountain?

The most significant benefit of eliminating DST would be that I no longer feel like an idiot for a) forgetting it exists and the switch happened yesterday, b) forgetting which way around it works and c) needing more than 5 seconds to figure out what that means for setting my clocks.

Also, yeah, having noon at noon would be neat.

For B and C: Spring Ahead and Fall Back

If Im looking up the hours of a shop in another town, what do I see? If I drive east, do I time travel? What happens with all the non-internet-and-gps clocks?

Instead of arguing if we should change clocks maybe we should redo the time zone boundaries. Something like this.

Having time zones follow state borders is very aesthetic, but you will have to make an exception for Kansas City. The time zone boundary should be diverted to pass through Kansas between Topeka and Lawrence.

This comes up every year around clock change time and perma-DST people and noon is noon people are equally moronic. The mere existence of this debate is proof that time changes are needed. Seriously, if you can't handle two time changes a year maximally coordinated to minimize inconvenience, then you should never be allowed to get on an airplane again in your life. Or stay up past your bedtime. Or sleep in. Or do anything else that results in any mild disruption to your precious sleep schedule.

Losing an hour of sleep on a weekend is something I can deal with once a year. But as a white-collar worker who gets up at normal o'clock, waking up in the dark is something I do not want to deal with on a regular basis, as it is noticeable harder to get going in the morning when it's still dark. I currently have to deal with this maybe a few weeks out of the year. Permanent DST would have me deal with it from the end of October until mid-March, and I really don't want to fucking deal with that. Conversely, if we eliminated DST altogether it would mean I'd forfeit the glorious hour between 8 and 9 in the summertime when it's warm and still light enough to do things outside in exchange for... it getting light a 4 am. To those early birds who think that it getting light a 4 is just as good as it staying light until 9, you either do not have a job, a family, or other real-world obligations. The average person isn't getting up at 3:30 am to sneak a round of golf in before heading to the office. For those of us who don't get out of work until 5 pm or later, that extra hour in the evening is a godsend.

So can we stop this perpetual bitching? Time changes were implemented for a reason, and people who think we'd be better off without them have never actually lived in a world without them. The benefits are all theoretical. When permanent DST was implemented during the 1970s, the program was cancelled within a year because people couldn't abide the first winter. And very few people want to end summer evenings early. This has to be the stupidest debate in American political discourse; just leave things where they are.

I suppose the opening line was a bit antagonistic? But the Steelers lost, so I think that can be forgiven.

On substance I completely agree with this. Losing (and later gaining) one hour of sleep, once a year is such a trivial "cost" that it barely warrants noticing. I am more likely to mess up my sleep schedule, and with more significance by degree, from any of the dozens of meetups, holidays, events, etc. that I will go through in the year than I am from changing the clock forward an hour. The benefits of extra sunlight (for those with a "standard" wakeup schedule of 5:30 or later, apologies to @FiveHourMarathon ) vastly outweighs the negative of losing one hour of sleep, on one of the two days with the least time constraints for the general population (other than church (which commands less and less relevance), what would the modal American have as a firm time constraint on a typical Sunday?). I could see the argument for moving the clock forward and just leaving it there, the point others have made about kids blundering in the dark getting to school being the only significant pragmatic drawback I can think of. The only other argument I have against is a pure "Noon should mean Noon", which connects with me on an emotional level but doesn't really do much for the pragmatist argument.

If forced to choose I think perma-DST is pragmatically the clear choice over Noon-Is-Noon even if viscerally I prefer Noon-Is-Noon more than "My life would be better if time worked differently, so DST should be permanent." A transition to an 8-4 workday would solve the problem better than a perma-DST move, but I don't know how easily one could convince the entire workforce of that.

I do not understand this whole discussion about daylight, mostly because how huge the timezones are. As an example the easternmost Central European Time (UTC+1) timezone is around two hours - so as I write this the sunrise in Northern Macedonia is around 6:50 AM while in Northeast Spain it is 9:00 AM. Even difference between Berlin and Paris is 25 minutes. You will never have ideal amount of sunlight in the morning for the whole timezone, unless you are specifically hunting for a location that suits you specifically. In my experience many countries softly adapted to this, for instance in Spain many people do live till later times, in summer they can have sports matches late in the evening. In the east it is on the other hand normal to have 8-4 or even earlier shifts.

But I agree with you that changing time is actually good for more stability, especially to have more light for whatever time is usual to go to the office in that country. So I am absolutely for keeping time changes twice a year.

Why dont schools just change the time they open? Businesses ditto? It seems the retarded thing is 9-5 being so rigid.

Because it's just a clunky way of achieving the same end.

Clunkier than resetting all the clocks and telling everyone to shift their routine back and forth by an hour and pretending that noon is when the sun is one hour off from the highest point of its transit?

There are many institutions that have different sets of opening hours for different seasons. It's perfectly feasible to change those, if change they must, rather than to pretend to be time travellers.

To those early birds who think that it getting light a 4 is just as good as it staying light until 9, you either do not have a job, a family, or other real-world obligations.

Can I ask how you put a 7 year old to bed when the sun is still up? As a hobo the only thing that matters to me is getting up super early so I can get all of my nothing done for the day. Here's my usual schedule.

3:00 to 4:00 - get up, tie up my bindle and dodge the bulls.

4:00 to 5:00 - tell a sympathetic McDonald's worker an amusingly circuitous anecdote in exchange for the dead nuggets in the frier

5:00 to 6:00 arrange my collection of bark and strings by aesthetic preference.

6:00 to 8:30 gather all of my cans and garbage bags into a discarded shopping trolley and take it down to the nearest major road so I can laugh at the wage apes stuck in their daily commute and waggle my genitals at anyone in a lexus

8:30 to 2:30 chase sunbeams in the park and if I manage to catch any torture them for their secrets

2:30 to 4:30 dupe widows out of their savings

4:30 to 6:00 on to public transport to take up far too much space and recruit agents in my war against the sun by angrily staring at strangers

6:00 to 8:00 where is the sun? Has it retreated yet? What about the moon? Remember, it also can't be trusted! The moon beams are just secret sun beams, find out what they know!

8:00 to 10:00 find tonight's boxcar

10:00 to 3:00 methylated spirits/sleep

The only reason anyone I know is an early riser is real world obligations. Maybe you need to hang out with classier people.

Can I ask how you put a 7 year old to bed when the sun is still up?

You tell him to go to bed, just as my dad told me to go to bed when I was seven and had to go to bed at 8:30 in the spring. I don't know when or why putting school age kids to bed became an hour-long ordeal for the parents.

I wasn't thinking of parents, I was thinking of when I was 7 and made to go to bed while the sun was up. I would lie in bed, wide awake, until after the sun went down. So I wouldn't actually get to sleep until hours after my 'bedtime' (7 at 7) and then be utterly wrecked when I woke up the next morning. And then everyone would wonder why I was so tired. It was perverse.

Once again, the whole of society must reorient so that parents aren't mildly annoyed with their toddler.

Seriously, if you can't handle two time changes a year maximally coordinated to minimize inconvenience

That is two unnecessary dumb government-mandated inconveniences too much.

then you should never be allowed to get on an airplane again in your life

you seem to fail at distinguishing "I dislike it" and "I cannot survive it". You also fail at being aware that planes moving N-S exist and planes travelling on short distances in the same time zone.

Or stay up past your bedtime. Or sleep in.

Yes, I try to avoid it.

But as a white-collar worker who gets up at normal o'clock, waking up in the dark is something I do not want to deal with on a regular basis, as it is noticeable harder to get going in the morning when it's still dark.

Then tell your employer that if they want to keep you, you must be allowed to come in later during the winter. Why is this the government's job to solve?

One of the primary use cases for government / rule by Czar is to break people out of mutually reinforcing bad habits. See China closing down the cram schools.

To those early birds who think that it getting light a 4 is just as good as it staying light until 9, you either do not have a job, a family, or other real-world obligations.

On the contrary. I wake up at 430 so that I can do things before those real world obligations kick in.

The benefits are all theoretical.

I don't really care about DST but it is worth noting that there's supposedly an association between time zone changes and medical and psychiatric health issues. Healthy people can change their sleep easily but medically ill people get more heart attacks, people with bipolar are more likely to have an episode etc.

I say supposedly because doing a lit review right now the evidence base isn't aggressive, but it is often passed around as medical fact.

100%. I audibly scoffed when OP said ‘pretty much everyone likes the idea’

I will also add that Trump likes this because he basically lives in Florida. This is extreme latitudinal prejudice. Ending DSL is less of a big deal the further toward the equator you go.

Dude nobody gives a shit about how early or late it gets light. It's not a big deal. Changing clocks, on the other hand, is an inconvenience for everyone and it messes with time calculation as the Count rightly pointed out. If you're going to call people "moronic" you best bring an argument better than this weaksauce "oh no it'll be dark when I get up for work" shit.

Nobody is saying that changing clocks is the biggest inconvenience in the world. The point is that there's no corresponding benefit, so why keep it?

Full agreement. I didn't know that keeping daylight saving time had a constituency -- every time I've heard DST discussed, both in person and online, in the past several years it's always been mildly-to-highly negative. And I don't live in some kind of crazy bubble, actually I'm from a conservative area.

My guess is that this is just the motte's reflexive contrarianism, combined with a high percentage of temperamental conservatives for whom it's an uphill battle to argue for any change. It's safe to say that most opinions you see on the motte are going to be unpopular ones (even mine!): if people had a popular idea to argue for they could do it somewhere else.

I strongly disagree that you were mod-warned over this comment, and I find it bizarre that the very pragmatic reasons for removing DST would ever be described as "ideological". "Let's keep time consistent over the year and not have to change clocks and sleep schedules" is a very down-to-earth and pragmatic change, and I don't see what 'ideology' it could be said to forward.

Dude nobody gives a shit about how early or late it gets light. It's not a big deal. Changing clocks, on the other hand, is an inconvenience for everyone and it messes with time calculation as the Count rightly pointed out.

I have no idea how to bridge the fact that this is the exact opposite of my intuition and experience. I couldn't possibly give a shit less about the clock changing. I travel pretty often and my clocks change by more than an hour without it being a big deal. Working hours starting while it's still dark out, on the other hand, actually sucks and this seems completely obvious to me. I'm baffled by people that feel differently. Getting up when it's dark sucks.

I'm baffled that the answer to a problem that your employer is introducing into your life (and may be willing to negotiate!) is a nationwide mandate.

In my experience, employers HATE negotiating like that. They’re terrified that if they offer any flexibility, everyone will be lobbying the company to get their preferred working conditions and chaos will erupt. So they refuse to permit any official leniency on anything where they aren’t forced to by law.

Yeah I dunno man. It probably goes without saying, but I'm equally baffled that there are people who genuinely care whether the sun is up when they get up. I believe you, I just can't understand it on a visceral level. Maybe it's the difference between morning people and night owls? I find waking up to be kind of unpleasant no matter what the light is like, so I guess maybe if I didn't feel that way I would notice more of a difference. Not sure though.

It’s not just that it’s dark but also how long it stays dark. Where I live sunrise between dec and Jan is somewhere 7:10-7:30.

My children get up for school at 6:45 and we drop off around 7:40 and school starts at 8. It starts getting light somewhere around 1/2 hr before actual sunrise so this basically means that dawn is just cracking or will be soon when they get up in the winter. If we went dst all year, it would mean school started in the dark. ‘Just start school an hour later’ doesn’t really work since it’s timed to start before the workday, also getting out an hour later means getting home in the dark.

If the argument is to push work hours as well, at this point you are making the argument against dst all year long, since you’re effectively countering it with a shifted schedule.

It’s not really about whether the sun cracks through your window and touches your face as you wake up. It’s about coordinating even the slightest amount of social complexity to maximize both winter and summer differences

You seem, probably unconsciously, to be using arguments as soldiers here.

If we went dst all year, it would mean school started in the dark. ‘Just start school an hour later’ doesn’t really work since it’s timed to start before the workday, also getting out an hour later means getting home in the dark.

As things stand, your kids are already getting home in the dark, so that’s not a good argument to oppose any changes to the DST status quo.

In many parts of the country, it’s just not possible to have sunlight both before and after the work/school day. DST and choice of time zone have nothing to do with it.

As things stand, your kids are already getting home in the dark, so that’s not a good argument to oppose any changes to the DST status quo

It's not an argument as a soldier, it's a stupid mistake of math on my part. Shifting both the time and the school day an hour wouldn't change the fact that my kids don't get home in the dark, you are right.

But the broader point stands: pushing both the school day and the time and my work an hour, undermine the argument for DST all year long. as it effectively negates it. My arguments are:

  1. DST in the winter means a great deal of the morning happens in the dark (school being the most relevant).
  2. This is unsatisfactory imo
  3. A solution which advances the start time of these things, effectively undermines DST all year argument.
  4. Therefore you are left with no DST year long or a variable schedule at different parts of the year which is just DST in effect.
  5. Thus the argument needs to either be for standard year round (for which the objections are the 4:30 sunrise) or for everyone negotiating their own schedule shift preferences in the winter, which has it's own drawbacks against centralized coordination.

Personally, I find the idea of standard time year round much more palletable

Right but I don't see why "start school in the dark" is something you put out there like it's an obvious nonstarter. That seems perfectly fine. Ditto for getting home in the dark. The state of the sun when I'm going about my day doesn't matter to me in the slightest, and I fail to understand why it matters to some people here.

Just registering for the sake of completeness that I find sunlight in the morning hugely important. Sunlight is one of the most cheerful and vitalising stimuli we have, tied directly into a bunch of our natural circuits.

I think there may be a genetic or cultural component - it’s much more common in Asia to treat the Sun as an enemy. In my last office there was a running war between the European employees who wanted the blinds open and the Asians who wanted them all shut.

If you're going to call people "moronic" you best bring an argument better than this weaksauce "oh no it'll be dark when I get up for work" shit.

Seriously, this dude is going way too hard for someone whose objections boil down to a bunch of foppish idiosyncrasies.

All you do is sneer, sneer, sneer.

Unlike the other poster I warned, you do nothing but post things you hope will increase the heat, for no other purpose than to reduce light.

Banned for two weeks this time.

you're a moron

No mod action

This guy is going way too hard

Banned for two weeks.

Thanks, there wouldn't be nearly as many funny jokes around here without your "moderation."
Looking forward to seeing how far back in my post history you'll go to find something "unrelated" to ban me for in revenge.

We factor in posters' history as well as the individual post. This is not new, and you know this. One bad post probably gets a warning. The latest in a long string of bad posts probably gets a ban.

Looking forward to seeing how far back in my post history you'll go to find something "unrelated" to ban me for in revenge.

I have never done anything like this. To anyone. You know this, and yet you never adjust your priors when the things you keep saying will happen never happen. Almost as if you don't really believe the things you say.

You're also being dishonest about "You're a moron," which is further proof that your complaints are entirely based on a desire to see people you like be allowed to say anything, no matter how inflammatory or insulting,and people you don't like get banned.

That's nonsense, I've watched you have arguments with people, then ban them for a two week old post a day later. Maybe it was just "in the queue" lol

This doesn't happen. Bans are almost always approved by more than one moderator. We always let each other know when we have carried out a ban and for what reasons.

Amadan in particular is diligent about recusing himself when he thinks there might even be a hint of bias.

He is still the most active mod on the team. I'd consider him a pillar of the community and essential to keeping this place running.

You on the other hand are on the opposite end of the spectrum. You've been on thin ice for about the entire 8 months that you have had this account active. 7 warnings, 3 tempbans, and no quality posts.

Your pattern of behavior follows many such permabans in the past. You are a dick to everyone to start. Then as your warnings and bans increase you mostly just direct the trolling towards the mods in particular, so it starts looking like any punishment of you is just retalliation for your "speaking truth to power".

I'd rather not go through the whole rigamarole where we pretend you are going to in some way reform. But we have the process in place so these accusations can be seen as false every time they inevitably get trotted out by every bad faith actor we have on this forum.

If I see you making more unfounded accusations against a moderator like this, then I'll be in favor of a permaban, regardless of how it "looks" because at some point its just not worth dealing with this crap again and again.

More comments

That's nonsense, I've watched you have arguments with people, then ban them for a two week old post a day later.

Post a link.

More comments

Calm down and be less antagonistic.

I'm not being antagonistic, or at least not moreso than he was. I didn't personally attack him (deliberately so), yet he is directly calling people morons. I don't think I'm breaking the rules to say his argument is weak.

Well, contrary to @Templexious's hastily deleted comment that "It's only ideological," I couldn't care less about DST and I have no reasons to feel anything about you or @Rov_Scam. What I care about is the tone of discourse. "Your argument is weak" is fine, flipping out and trying to start a fight is not. (@Rov_Scam also seems to be calling both arguments moronic, so who exactly are you defending?)

Rov was being way more of a dick than his replies were.

Well, first of all, interestingly enough, no one reported @Rov_Scam, while multiple people (not Rov himself) reported the responses.

If someone had reported him... I wouldn't have modded it. But if you feel super strongly about it, report him and I will let some other mod determine how to handle it.

The most objectionable thing he said was "perma-DST people and noon is noon people are equally moronic," which, yeah, taken literally, is calling certain people who believe certain things morons, and if you are a "perma-DST person" with a thin skin, you could complain that he called you a moron. Could he have phrased it better? Maybe. But I don't think his intent was to say "You (individual person) are a moron" and we see people arguing, essentially, "A is stupid/People who believe A are stupid" all the time, and generally (unless it's really egregious or obvious consensus-building) we will let it go. Do you really want us to apply the standard you are suggesting every time?

It's very weird to me that an argument over DST is causing this much gnashing of teeth (reminds me of the Calendar Riots) and it's hard not to view this entire brouhaha as "ideologically motivated" as one deleted post said (apologies to the poster who apparently was not trying to start a fight).

My subjective opinion is that @Rov_Scam made a somewhat dismissive comment about the controversy, and people with surprisingly big feelings about it (and grudges) took offense and then went on the offense, with namecalling and belligerence. I disagree with you that Rov was being way more of a dick. But that is my opinion.

  • -10

I wouldn't really have reported any of them. I try not to report stuff just because it insults me for waking up early. After all, how much sense can you expect out of people from Pittsburgh?

Just struck me as odd is all.

The point is that Rov_Scam called the people moronic, not the arguments. Upon reflection I probably just should've let it pass, but I do object to the characterization that I was starting a fight. He came in starting a fight by calling names, not me. But yes, I shouldn't have continued the fight and you're correct about that.

It was a fragment of a comment that I genuinely didn't intend to post.

DST is idiotic because it absolutely fucks up any historical time series analysis. E.g. if you're looking at market data for a stock listen in London it opens at 08:00 UK time and closes at 16:30 UK time. Now imagine you wish to do some correlations with a similar stock but listed at the NYSE, which opens 9:30 NY time and closes 16:00 NY time. What people might not realize is the US DST and UK (and European) DST are offset by a week each year so if you're using UTC as your "base" timezone then for each year we have 4 different step functions for the hours where our stocks are open/closed for trading.

If you are dealing with 10 years of historical data this suddenly becomes an absolute pain to deal with (because e.g. for the UK clocks change on the last Sunday of March/October, so now you need your script to have access to a calendar module to work out exactly what dates these were for each of the years). Without DST (shakes fist) we wouldn't need these 40 different separate time regimes for the 10 years of data but could simply hardcode in the opening hours for both our stocks in terms of UTC because they wouldn't change. Much much easier!

I don't think you'll find "Won't someone think of the quants" as a very compelling argument either way.

DST is idiotic because it absolutely fucks up any historical time series analysis.

What sort of half-baked script-kiddey nonsense are you using to do your analysis?

I don't think I've ever seen a professionally developed program (or competent open source project) that didn't store time data in UTC, Zulu, or some other standardized epoch, unless it was an embedded application running off a hardware tickcount.

Our data is stored in UTC. Still fucks up time series analysis (in fact it fucks up time series analysis more than if it were stored in London time, but using UTC is the correct choice) because exchanges open and close based on local time which means that 08:00:15 UTC means 15 seconds after the opening bell for half the year and for the other half an hour and fifteen seconds after the bell. So if you want to do some sort of study based on stock behaviour shortly after the open and you just use the UTC timestamp column from the database half your data will be straight up wrong. Hence necessitating extra work to handle DST properly.

Our data is stored in UTC. Still fucks up time series analysis

I dont see how this happens in a competently run organization. Normalizing your inputs is like basic sanitation, if you can't manage that, how do you manage anything else?

Had it ever occured to you that you can just do all the math/analysis in UTC and then adjust the display output to local time?

Yes, that's what I do. The problem is with converting London time to UTC which is what gets fucked up by the existence of DST unless you use some sort of timezone localisation. If the exchanges opened at 08:00 UTC and closed at 16:30 UTC each business day regardless of DST there would be no problem. Instead because of DST they are opening at 07:00 UTC for half the year. The issue is with them, not us.

Just about every serious programming language includes zoneinfo related functions in the standard library.

The serious programmers that use zoneinfo are lacking. Not the library funcitons.

Agreed.

Yes I agree, e.g. in Python I use pd.DatetimeIndex.tz_localize to help me with this (after spending my first two years as a quant doing things manually before throwing my hands up and realizing that this is a common problem everyone must be having, so someone somewhere has probably created a good solution).

However needing to import it and write like an extra 10 lines of code for every single project I wouldn't need to do if DST (shakes fist) didn't exist adds up over time to become a serious pain in the ass. Plus now my script has an extra dependency and is more susceptible to code bitrot over time as it'll stop working if pd.DatetimeIndex gets its behaviour changed or deprecated.

Also SQL doesn't play nicely with timezones at all, so the problem still very much exists for SQL scripts unless you only want to use SQL to pull the data and will do all your analysis with the pulled data in a different language.

Yes I agree, e.g. in Python I use pd.DatetimeIndex.tz_localize

Well, that's your mistake - I'm talking about the standard library, not pandas. No dependency, no bitrot. No need to localize any datetimes until you're displaying them, so as long as you aren't working with naive datetimes it's pretty low overhead.

Also SQL doesn't play nicely with timezones at all, so the problem still very much exists for SQL scripts unless you only want to use SQL to pull the data and will do all your analysis with the pulled data in a different language.

As SQL is fundamentally not a serious language, it indeed does not support zoneinfo.

Perma DST is preferable in northern climes because

  1. Almost nobody (save for a few joggers) is out enjoying the additional hour of sunshine. In many places, like Northern Europe and much of Canada, people are already at work when it gets light even with DST. Meanwhile, many more people (those who work early shift, kids getting off school, people who have half an hour to go out for a coffee at 4pm, students, NEETs and those retirees who wake up late anyway) are available later in the afternoon to enjoy the extra daylight.

    The real reason permanent DST won’t be rolled out is because of the risk of kids getting run over or moms crashing on the way to school in the dark. That is the sole reason and it’s why politicians are scared of it.

  2. Perma non-DST is extremely dumb for the reason you mention.

My only issue with perma DST is aesthetic - it feels stupid for the answer to modern society suffering from pretending to live by the schedules of a century ago to be decoupling our clocks further from the solar day instead of shifting working hours to be closer to where most people want them.

Which doesn't mean it isn't the easiest answer.

The benefits of Perma DST easily outweigh the yearly cost of some extra kids getting run over.

Sorry I don't know much about this debate, what are the benefits? Are they mainly convenience wrt not needing to switch the clock twice per year?

I love the no-DST time zone I live in (where noon is 12:30, noon is noon only for tiny slivers of time zones). I love the natural progression of brighter and brighter mornings each spring.

I've thought about natural mornings as well, and there's just one thing that stops me from endorsing this approach. Dawn in Moscow is at 03:44 in June and at 08:59 in January. Starting work at 05:00 is just too damn early. Yes, it means you'll be off work at 14:00, but it also means you'll want to go to bed at 20:00.

If this passes, I hope other anglo nations follow. I despise the switch to BST, I always feel the lost hour of sleep but never feel the hour I supposedly gain back. I don't care whether Noon-Is-Noon or not, it is my heartfelt wish that the time chicanery ends.

Their door signs could be IOT smart displays

no, just no, no, apage, no

This is a dealbreaker to me.

One of effects of being a programmer for me is developing allergy to electronics and "smart" things were they are not critically needed. If your idea requires them - you will have an uphill battle to convince me (though I will gladly repair you IOT system at market rates, and these are definitely higher than printing/carpenter costs).

Also, I want to be able to remember when shop is open without consulting external memory.

I just can’t see any of this being nearly as big of a decision as it’s made out to be. Most retail shops and restaurants do a significant portion of their business online — so the business is selling 24 hours a day. Factories have been 24 hour affairs since the beginning of factory jobs. Restaurants will open for breakfast well before the morning shift arrives at work. So why would it matter what time it is? The idea seems like it would only make sense in a situation where business operates only in brick and mortar and only sells locally. Neither of these are true. DST needs to end as it’s a relic of a time when the majority of Americans worked on farms and needed daylight to do work.

In terms of raw, personal, I'm-not-going-to-get-this-because-it's-just-my-own-idiosyncrasy preference, I want standard time with an 8-4 work schedule. Like let's let noon be noon, but let the workday be from 8 to 4, let the schoolday be similarly DST equivalent, etc.

Never liked that we pretend to have the power to mess with Time Itself rather than admit what's actually happening is we're changing our schedules.

Second best option, let's switch to perma-DST but call 1:00 noon and midnight, and rotate any newly made analog clocks.

Third best option, ugh I guess we can just do perma DST and explain to our grandkids the history of why the twelves have a special name while the sun is at its highest/lowest point at 1.

(I like the DST schedule but I don't like the time nonsense.)

Noon-Is-Noon faction

Ironically, these are the same people who tend to be fans of SI (popularly "the metric system").

When I see those people do this I just laugh. Oh, so now you want to preserve a human-centric unit (like every system of measurement did before SI, metric or not) now that it affects you, rather than those backwards blue-collar people who do human-scale works with their hands? Humans don't divide evenly into fractions of the [wrong] size of the Earth; convenient for a state who wants to alienate its population, inconvenient for anyone who works for a living.

For me, the sun rises at 7 AM and sets at 4 PM. Which makes any job a salt-mine one, where you go down into work in the dark, and you go home from work in the dark. I'm more than happy to push sunset beyond the bounds of the workplace for at least some people because not seeing daylight for 4 months is unnatural, it sucks, and it kills because the evening commute is simply more dangerous when it's dark.

now that it affects you, rather than those backwards blue-collar people who do human-scale works with their hands?

In practice, there is no difference between using metric and standard measurements for mechanical work. 8 millimeters is not actually more or less arbitrary than 5/16 inch. This is simply memorizing different benchmarks and taking measurements in a different format.

I don't particularly want to switch to universal metric system. But I don't hate it either. It's just... different names and sizes.

I've heard arguments that, because the metric system and the imperial system round in different ways, they encourage the use of different ratios. Supposedly this has a lot of knock-on effects re: architecture and other manmade systems.

Noon-Is-Noon faction

Ironically, these are the same people who tend to be fans of SI (popularly "the metric system").

[...]Oh, so now you want to preserve a human-centric unit (like every system of measurement did before SI, metric or not) now that it affects you, rather than those backwards blue-collar people who do human-scale works with their hands?

Don't you have this backwards? The Noon-Is-Noon argument is that 0 hours should be at the time when the point on Earth comes to a phase in the rotation of the planet where the movement component towards the Sun becomes 0 and starts to increase again. That is, the Noon-Is-Noon argument is about the rotation of the planet, not about anything human-centric, whereas the perma-DST argument is about whatever schedule the person proposing it happens to have in their current job, etc.

Oh, so now you want to preserve a human-centric unit (like every system of measurement did before SI, metric or not) now that it affects you, rather than those backwards blue-collar people who do human-scale works with their hands?

I dislike non-SI systems for distance/weight/volume in general precisely because it affects me, especially when doing human-scale works with own hands.

(though I am from area which is dominated by SI with minor encroachment of weird units)

Ironically, these are the same people who tend to be fans of SI (popularly "the metric system").

I think opinions on DST vary a lot among fans of SI given that includes almost everyone on earth except citizens of the united states, the united kingdom and aviators.

Oh, so now you want to preserve a human-centric unit (like every system of measurement did before SI, metric or not) now that it affects you

There's nothing less human-centric about the SI the meter is just a standardization of the toise (also known as fathom, klafter and many other names), a measurement approximating the distance covered by a human's outstretched arms. If you wanted a unit of measure that wasn't human based you would invent something like the nautical mile, not the meter.

The other argument people make along these lines is about units of temperature but firstly nobody actually uses the Kelvin outside of scientific papers and is brine really a more human substance than distilled water?

Besides length and temperature nobody ever talks about anything else. Nobody ever argues that the pound is more human because the roman libra just exists in nature but the french bushel, precursor of the liter is an inhuman monstrosity. Or that the inch of mecruy just gives them a better intuitive understanding of pressure than the hectopascal.

What makes US customary units human-centric is mostly the fact that they are base-2 instead of base-10. Base-2 gives you an assortment of related units that are close to human scale.

For example, there are two tablespoons in a fluid ounce. Eight fluid ounces in a cup. Two cups in a pint. two pints in a quart. Two quarts in a half-gallon. Two half-gallons in a gallon.

Inches are also used in what amounts to a base-2 system, since they are broken down into halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds and sixty-fourths. Foreigners may find it a bit ridiculous that Americans have sockets and wrenches with sizes like 5/8" and 1-7/16". I would say it is worse than metric overall, but the use of fractions does have certain advantages.

And yet, 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon, 6 picas into an inch, 12 inches into a foot, 3 feet into a yard, 1760 yards into a mile and 3 miles into a league. But you will be pleased to know that you can, in fact, ask for half of a liter or a quarter of a liter if you like fractions (and many fraction lovers do just that).

Fahrenheit has more reasonable degrees within human comfort zones to accurately describe the temperature so I think it is superior to Celsius.

Celsius is rather useful in a country that spends a considerable fraction of the year in temps that are on the Celsius minus scale. Important clothing decisions might depend simply on whether the temp on the weather app shows up in red or blue.

How is that different Fahrenheit? We too show blue for freezing temperatures.

Fahrenheit has more reasonable degrees within human comfort zones to accurately describe the temperature so I think it is superior to Celsius.

The human mind can in fact adapt to 40 as "very hot" and "0" as cold instead of 100 = very hot and 32 = cold.

Important clothing decisions might depend simply on whether the temp on the weather app shows up in red or blue.

The point where numbers become blue is in fact completely arbitrary.

The point is that there are about 1.8 times degrees in Fahrenheit between freezing and boiling as there are in Celsius meaning there can be a bit more specificity.

When you need this level of specificity? Celsius has already too much of it. (except rare cases like measuring fever or scientific research)

That's almost always false precision.

Weather reports (never mind weather forecasts) simply aren't good enough to report single degrees, regardless of whether it's Celsius or Fahrenheit.

The human mind can in fact adapt to 40 as "very hot" and "0" as cold instead of 100 = very hot and 32 = cold.

In the United States, 100 is hot and 0 is cold, and anything below 0 or above 100 is very hot or cold. Which I find very intuitive!

I've never understood the argument the US customary units are "human-centric".

Is 0.00731x the weight of an average man really that much more intuitive than 0.0161x? How about 0.588x the historical average height vs. 0.0149x (or was it 0.179x)? Is 2.63 just-noticeable-temperature-difference-intervals worse than 1.46 of them? (I'm not going to bother questioning the zero point of Fahrenheit. Freezing is much better.)

I can tell the difference between 1/4", 5/16", and 3/8" head hex screws from across the room, but that's just because I've seen tens of thousands of each of them. There's nothing intrinsically human about any of my intuitions, it's just what I've learned (and no, I haven't learned metric to the same degree).

Imperial is great because it has so many quick levels of accuracy. When you take a diagonal are you working to the nearest inch? Half inch? Quarter inch? 16th? 1/32000th?
With metric what are you gonna do? "Aha, I see ve have measured 1.285 meters to 1.315 meters, a 97.7% degree of accuracy!"

Are you reporting a length as 11 16/32" if that's what you measure? If not, then it's plain worse communication than 11.50" because it's ambiguous with 11.5". Reduced fractions (e.g. 1/2") is a horrible system, and expanded fractions (e.g. 16/32") is almost as bad.

Also, the multiple levels of measurement was the first thing I dropped when I did construction: everything was in 1" or 1/8" increments, and we didn't use feet (so something might be 135" or 135 1/4", but never 11' 3 1/4", 135 5/16" or 135 1/2" from that measurement). Same with the manufacturing I'm doing now: it's 1/16" (reported as 1/16ths, so 8/16 is the proper format) or 0.001", and never feet when it is imperial.

I've never understood the argument the US customary units are "human-centric".

I mean, I find it really easy to work with some units because I know their origins. It's much easier to know that a "league" is about as far a person can walk in an hour, and it is 3 miles, and then to work from that fact to how far my D&D party could walk with 8 hours of travel on flat terrain, than to do anything involving distance with metric units.

In practice, 24 mi in eight hours would make me assume the party was made up entirely of marathon runners.

Obligatory mention that GURPS, unlike Dungeons & Dragons, has multiple sets of rules for long-distance travel, depending on how much detail you want. Assuming default humans with no encumbrance at all:

  • Basic Set p. 351: Hiking achieves a speed of 50 miles per day, at no cost.
  • Low-Tech Companion 2: Weapons and Warriors p. 32: Hiking achieves a speed of 2.5 miles per hour, at a cost of 1 FP (Fatigue Point) per hour. Once you've lost 7 FP, you move at half speed. Resting regenerates 6 FP per hour. Some quick algebra indicates that the optimal strategy for a 16-hour day is 14 hours and 40 minutes of hiking mixed with 1 hour and 20 minutes of resting, for an overall speed of 37 miles per day. But you may want to keep your FP higher than 3, just in case you are ambushed while hiking.
    • The Last Gasp (Pyramid vol. 3 iss. 44 (Alternate GURPS II) p. 4): It's unrealistic that your speed isn't reduced until you've lost an entire 7 FP. Instead, your speed is reduced by one-fifth after you've lost 5 FP, and by two-fifths after you've lost 9 FP. Also, it's unrealistic that your FP regenerate at 6 per hour. Instead, your reservoir of FP is divided into 5 points of mild fatigue, which regenerate at 1 FP per 2 hours, and 5 points of severe fatigue, which regenerate at 1 FP per 8 hours. Some quick algebra indicates that the optimal strategy for a 16-hour day is 8 hours and 40 minutes of hiking mixed with 7 hours and 20 minutes of resting, for an overall speed of 22 miles per day.
  • Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures p. 21: Hiking achieves a speed of 2.5 miles per hour. Instead of doing a bunch of finicky FP math, just assume that you spend 30 minutes striking camp in the morning, 3 hours resting throughout the day, 30 minutes pitching camp in the evening, and 12 hours actually walking, for an overall speed of 30 miles per day. If you are ambushed while hiking, you are missing 1 FP when the encounter starts.

Seems like the best rule would be something like "pick an exertion level from "Gentle Amble" to "Forced March". Multiply by the difficulty of terrain and individual encumbrance. That's how much fatigue you gain per hour of marching.
The straight-line distance you travel is your march speed x hours x terrain difficulty modifier (from "marked highway" to "the cursed swamp-forest maze of fuck-you."
Tune the table so the DM can have players traveling from 0-40 miles a day.

So you're only moving at the speed of your slowest party member, and the wizard is going to arrive more tired than the monk-ranger. Maybe have him ride the barbarian or use a few spell slots on Harkonnen's Floating Fatass

GURPS also incorporates rules for forced marching, terrain difficulty, and encumbrance, but I omitted them from this simplified overview.

Ahem

It's easier to remember historical trivia and perform the unit conversion than just "5 km/h is walking speed"?

We need two systems, one for you sun lovers and one for us creatures of the night. We could call you guys the enthusiastic lovers of illumination and my guys the mostly only really lovers of climate kontrol systems and my guys will solve our problem by moving underground. What could go wrong?

I will confess myself as a completely confused person when this comes up. The switch never affects me and the different times dont seem too different. My mother strongly prefers permanent DST and so do animals of the farm type, so why not do that? I guess?

Do you have small kids?

Yes. He doesn't care.

I have small kids and the switch has never been a problem. The smallest babies have taken maybe 3 nights to work it out, kids over 2 has never been a problem.

The only real difference is being slightly hungrier after morning church one Sunday a year

Our infants really struggled with it. I guess ymmv

The switch never affects me

switch is annoying as it throws sleep schedule a bit over data change (if you have externally defined work hours)

and this adds some extra confusion for no benefit

few times I wasted few extra hours on fixing DST-related software bugs

Animals of the farm type don't know what time humans' watches are showing.

The argument that "farmers start work at 6am and it will be too dark to do farm work that early in the morning if we have permanent DST" is widely made in the UK, and believed by significant numbers of farmers, but it is the stupidest argument on either side of the debate. Farmers have to start work at dawn (or slightly before, depending on what they are farming) regardless of what time the clocks are showing. All moving to permanent DST would do is take away part of the early-riser machismo that attaches to getting up early (relative to dawn) when we have set the clocks so that urbanites do that.

I thought the idea with farmers is that, yes, they start their day at dawn, and DST helps them stay in sync with the rest of the country. Probably obsolete now that a very small fraction of the UK and US populations are family farmers, but I think it's a coherent idea.

I'm a noon is noon early bird. Although I don't think I'm really opposed to dst so much as I am opposed to summer in general, living in Queensland I just want to see as little sun as I can. The air is thick, everything is sticky, it feels like I live in god damned soup for four months a year.

Would you be opposed to this in your city/town

Yes, because I live in Anchorage, Alaska; the length variation in the solar day across the year is just too big. It's also why DST is kind of pointless for us in the summer. For example, the official sunrise and sunset times (AKST) for Dec. 15 this year are 10:00 AM and 3:40 PM — If you work a 9-5 job, you don't see the sun. Go half a year to June 15, and with DST you've got dawn at 4:21 AM and sunset at 11:40 PM — without DST, these would be 3:21 AM and 10:40 PM.

Arctic circle is the obvious edge case where it would be worse than useless.

Here in New Mexico, one of the southernmost states, sunrise ranges from 7:13am in winter to 4:53am in summer (without DST), only a 2:20 swing. Sunsets range from 4:55pm to 7:23pm (again without DST). 9am here is about 2 hours post lucem in winter to 3pl in summer with DST. That means three hours of blazing hot summer sunlight before I even get to work, and the A/C is on all day.

DST helps me (other than the sudden transition), but sundial time as hyper-DST with my workplace opening two hours after sunrise would be better for my sanity.

I’m from Arizona, and mildly prefer no DST. The swamp cooler is/was on all day either way, and Abq can’t even upgrade form swamp cooling to AC in their schools due to old roofing and such.

They’d open at, for example, one hour after dawn and be open 8 or 9 hours.

So businesses in Seattle would open at 6AM in the summer? That doesn't sound very useful, and I'd hate to be an employee.

For places with hot summers, it makes sense to get up before sunrise to enjoy the coolest part of the day. Daylight Savings Time is as much about optimizing for temperature as it is about optimizing for daylight.

Sure, but Seattle doesn't have hot summers, and places with hot summers are usually closer to the equator and don't have such early sunrises.

The point is that there isn't a one-size-fits-all opening time solution, which is why it makes sense to let Sol Invictus dictate noon for consistency and let businesses set their hours to be whatever is most useful.

let businesses set their hours to be whatever is most useful.

Left to decide on their own, no businesses will adjust their hours to start earlier in summer and later in winter. I support the status quo, because I prefer to begin my day at sunrise year-round.

Left to decide on their own, no businesses will adjust their hours to start earlier in summer and later in winter.

Then there is probably not much demand for this.

Seattle doesn't have hot summers. Midday typically has ideal temperatures.

I'm noon-is-noon night owl, aspiring early bird (don't think it'll ever happen for me), and I honestly cannot understand the popularity of making DST permanent, as it seems is going to happen eventually in the US (especially if Orange Man supports doing the opposite). It's nothing but an irrational commitment to have the clock say "5:00 PM" when you get done working, when in fact what's being expressed is a culture-wide unwillingness to work until five every day year-round.

The only BASED solution is to represent all time as the number of seconds from the beginning of the UNIX epoch.

What time is your party?

Answer: 1734224199.

Seriously, though, I love Donald Trump doing stuff like this. For years (decades?) NPR types have written lazy think pieces calling for the abolition of DST. It's just pure candy for the midwits. And now Trump is going to give it to them, good and hard.

Normally I would expect some loser journalist to write a story with the title "here's why DST is good, actually". But I don't think we will get one. I don't think they even believe their own bullshit anymore.

This would make "there are roughly pi gigaseconds in a century" an actual useful fact.

Vernor Vinge and his metric time, using orders of magnitude. How long is 10^4 seconds? Fifteen minutes less three hours.

Fifteen minutes less three hours

*Three hours less fifteen minutes (imagine "less by")

Also, obligatory reminder that binary is better than decimal

The fact that Unix time is based on UTC, which observes leap seconds, and not TAI, which is monotonic, is IMO a pretty poor decision. It's not "the number of seconds since the epoch", it has weird jumps and skips.

This matters little since leap seconds will be abolished in the medium term and the difference between UTC and TAI will simply be a constant.

And noon will never be noon as UTC drifts away from solar time.

Do views on leap seconds in UTC (among people geeky enough to care) line up with views on DST in ways which reflect the underlying logic of "noon is noon"?

In my experience, the few folks that care about "noon is noon" (say, those aligning telescopes) already aren't using UTC because the second granularity of leap seconds isn't good enough, and the statement is only true for a single meridian within your time zone anyway.

For example, almost all satellite navigation (also used for time synchronization of local clocks) uses monotonic time on the backend.

It won't necessarily drift very much away from solar time.

On 18 November 2022, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) resolved to eliminate leap seconds by or before 2035. The difference between atomic and astronomical time will be allowed to grow to a larger value yet to be determined. A suggested possible future measure would be to let the discrepancy increase to a full minute, which would take 50 to 100 years, and then have the last minute of the day taking two minutes in a "kind of smear" with no discontinuity.

Hey, programmers have to stay employed somehow.

ENDORSED. We have finally gotten enough technology to RETVRN.

(I think there will always be organizations - the military, groups working across state lines - that will have to used a fixed time. But sundial time would be awesome. If you need something less weird, use GMT.)

The users of Bluesky, a platform that promotes itself as X/Twitter but without hate speech, have been having a meltdown for the last few days over the presence of Jesse Singal on the site. He is literally the most blocked user on the whole site. The current state of affairs is that they no longer post violent fantasies of killing him, after the moderation team indicated that they don't see a violation of terms and services in his account activity, they graduated into violent fantasies of killing him coupled with his home address attached. There's also a change.org petition for banning him, and I believe there are videos of prominent activists filming themselves signing it.

Jesse, for those of you who don't know, is a cohost of the Blocked And Reported podcast dedicated to internet drama, probably most relevant to users here as the place where Tracing Woodgrains had a brief stint. Jesse is not unlike JK Rowling in the eyes of the activists, in that he's 99% onboard with the left agenda, but has some doubts about some details of transgenderism. Even less doubts than her, in that his opinions is that some children are definitely trans, but some others will come to regret medical interventions, so caution should be exercised. And that's enough to label him as a heretical transphobe for the Bluesky users.

What was the trifecta for an effortful enough comment, event, context, personal opinion? Well, for the personal opinion, I always thought that the idea of heretics as more reviled than heathens was somewhat self-indulgent, but I'm starting to believe that idea.

I think a key difference with the trans issue and normal culture war issues, is that people have undergone difficult medical procedures in the expectation that the "civilized" parts of society will respect their choice of gender. That expectation would have been reasonable if Harris had won and the government continued to pressure employers and schools to punish anyone who didn't go along. Now, I have to imagine many fear being betrayed, not just by Trump voters, but by the realization that ambitious Democrats might abandon the progressive trans position to help win future elections.

Uh, are these people themselves trans?

Some are, certainly. More than zero of the people furiously angry at Singal are trans.

Jesse also published articles by former moderator @ymeskhout.

Speaking of that guy, I saw he deleted his Twitter recently. Although he's still posting substack articles defending Letitia James's political prosecutions.

Although he's still posting substack articles defending Letitia James's political prosecutions.

I find that hard to believe.

Link?

this query of google: site:substack.com ymeskhout letitia

only found him arguing with some other substacker, but no article.

https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/intellectual-insecurities

And the follow-up: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/npc-dialogue-trees

It's really weird autism. I the guy not aware of the whole misinformation censorship complex where Dems had USG fund 'independent' NGOs to pressure platforms to censor?

He's a lawyer making lawyer arguments, that's just how they work:
If something's not good for your case, never bring it up. If the prosecution mentions it, try to get it struck by the judge. If you can't get it struck, smear doubt all over it. If the evidence is impeccable, try to claim it doesn't matter anyway and should just be ignored.
If important evidence gets ignored to your benefit, that's just how the game is played, and the other side should have just gotten gud, scrub.

Do all that and you can turn the entire censorship issue into "why are you so hopped up about a discovery dispute?!"

Lawyers just can't stop using their courtroom/debatebro skills. They're too effective to put down.

You may have to fill me in.

Interestingly it doesn't seem to have been covered much or maybe I'm using wrong keywords in search.

Stanford Internet Observatory was one of these NGOs.

https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-censorship-deceit-at-the-stanford-internet-observatory/

Mike Benz covered it in depth and maybe even broke the story. He's got a lot of info on it on his account.

https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1737489386244030932

Those are the ones, thanks. The links were on my desktop, and actually going to substack crashes this old phone.
I've gotta ask if I can get a password reset to login on some other device.

I mean, twitter also had ridiculous drama blowups of this sort. I'm not sure why it's newsworthy that resistlibs and SJWs do this; we already knew they did.

There is currently a bit of a question of whether bluesky will be able to pull the center away from twitter/x so this fight does kind of matter. We're going to learn whether people find the right wing stuff let run wild on X more obnoxious than the left wing stuff let run wild on bluesky. How this shakes out is actually probably of substantial importance.

I wonder, actually, if Twitter/Bluesky is an inversion of the old battle between neutral and conservative? Twitter is currently an officially-neutral-but-soft-right-leaning mainstream site, and the left defected from it to go and make their own space, which predictably went badly, and now is evolving much stricter and harsher purity norms than even pre-Elon Twitter had. They attract only the refugees from a right-slanted system, and so they get not only progressives, but the worst and most extreme progressives.

There's almost a schadenfreude in it - "Ha! Now you know how it feels!"

Unless, of course, Twitter craters even more. Other possible dynamics are right-echo-chamber-Twitter and left-echo-chamber-Bluesky, both of similar reach and power, which I would take to be the worst of all worlds; or Twitter collapses entirely and Bluesky takes its place as the default short-messaging platform.

I wonder, actually, if Twitter/Bluesky is an inversion of the old battle between neutral and conservative? Twitter is currently an officially-neutral-but-soft-right-leaning mainstream site, and the left defected from it to go and make their own space

If Twitter went from soft-left-leaning to soft-right-leaning this may have been a valid comparison, but it went from ruthless oppression of the right to "it's not fair that Elon retweets far-right disinformation". If you think this is in any way comparable to the landscape from "neutral vs conservative" you'd be shell-shocked if you found yourself in a world that's an actual inversion of it.

I think that, regardless of objective statistics or anything, it is felt to be right-leaning by the kind of people who migrate to Bluesky.

Is it possible that they're just so used to unchallenged left-wing dominance that any presence of non-censored, non-battered-and-fearful conservative voices at all seems 'right-leaning' to them? Entirely plausible, to me.

But even if it's just illusionary or a product of absurd expectations of cultural dominance, that would still get you the Neutral vs Conservative effect, where the most extreme witches flee, create their own space, and that space ends up terrible.

Does Twitter even really lean right? Every left-leaning tweet I see gets an order of magnitude more likes than any right-leaning counterpart. People have claimed these are botted likes but that can't be the case for all of them.

People have claimed these are botted likes but that can't be the case for all of them.

Yes, it could.

Anecdotally, I feel that there's subjective plausibility to the idea that heretics are more hated than heathens, or that traitors are more hated than enemies. If I ask myself how I feel about Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses, and then how I feel about Muslims or Hindus, I realise that on a visceral, intuitive level, I dislike the former much more than I dislike the latter. Mormons and Muslims may both be wrong, and in fact the Muslims may be objectively more incorrect than the Mormons - but the Mormons try to pass themselves off as Christians, and the Muslims don't. The Mormons form a kind of threat to Christian identity or Christian unity in a way that the Muslims don't.

This may just be the barberpole model of fashion again. I'm a Christian, nobody is ever going to confuse me with a Muslim, but people might confuse me with a Mormon, and so I need to more militantly ostracise Mormons in order to make the distinction clear.

Or it might just be that I experience Mormons (or Jehovah's Witnesses or Baptists or whoever) as in a sense making a 'direct' attack on who I am, whereas outsiders are not doing that.

If we jump from explicit religion to pseudo-religion (I don't really consider liberalism or LGBT or progressivism to be religions, but many here do), it would not surprise me if the same dynamic is at work. A Bluesky progressive doesn't need to worry about actual conservatives because everybody on Bluesky already has very strong anti-conservative antibodies. Jesse Singal, however, like J. K. Rowling, is already a liberal and present in liberal spaces - and unless you make sure to ostracise him clearly to send a message, less aware liberals might listen to him.

Of course, this argument can only do so much, because if you look at the handful of conservatives on Bluesky, they don't do much better. Here's David French on Bluesky defending the Tennessee trans case. Look at the comments - nobody is sparing him, or going, "Oh, well, he's a conservative, he's outside the tribe, whatever." He is being predictably and brutally attacked. (Particularly amusing considering how more right-wing people on Twitter brigade him now, but I guess you can't win.)

less aware liberals might listen to him

I think this is the essence of it, Jesse Singal offers a plausible alternative vision for Democrats' future. Especially given the UK recently banning puberty blockers for minors, AOC removing pronouns from her twitter bio, Trump's tremendously successful 'they/them' ad and the general handwringing about the direction and electoral viability of the Democratic party, I think there is a real sense that hardline ideological transgenderism is very much "on the table" for debate and may no longer have the aura of untouchability it once did.

Unlike Matt Walsh, Jesse Singal speaks to moderate Democrats in their language with their etiquette and with solid Blue Tribe Elite bonafides. He went to Princeton, he's jewish, he lives in Brooklyn, he's written for The Atlantic, he cites scientific studies, he uses the preferred pronouns of transgender individuals and is unfailingly polite. He is threatening because he (or rather his position) could theoretically win over the Democratic party. Even if Republicans win an election and pass some hypothetical anti-trans law, in the minds of trannies at least they would still have one of the two major teams fighting for them, and it would only be so long before the Democrats eventually win one. However if the Democrats abandon them then all hope is truly lost, no major player will be on their side and childhood transgenderism risks being consigned to the dustbin of memoryholed progressive ideas like eugenics or lobotomies.

I feel that there's subjective plausibility to the idea that heretics are more hated than heathens, or that traitors are more hated than enemies. If I ask myself how I feel about Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses, and then how I feel about Muslims or Hindus, I realise that on a visceral, intuitive level, I dislike the former much more than I dislike the latter

sounds like https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/

Well, yes, and I take the whole "heretics are more hated than infidels" observation to be the same distinction.

I wouldn't say so.

Infidels in this case are the far group but when the infidels actually are right beside you they don't become more palitable than the heretic, in fact it's the opposite. When a group of infidels become available as an outgroup rather than a fargroup it frequently forces the nearby outgroups to band together against the new outgroup. This happens on the national levels in the case of regular wars as well.

That's not quite what I'm talking about in the specific example of myself - I meet a lot more Muslims in person than I do Mormons. It's the identity claim that gets under my skin.

The users of Bluesky, a platform that promotes itself as X/Twitter but without hate speech

Without hate speech, or with the right kind of hate speech?

Elon is a True Believer, and that's why he Backs Trump

https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-reentry-by-eric-berger

So there's been discussion of why Elon Musk put threw in so hard with Trump. What he gets out of owning twitter. I've long had a pretty simple and parsimonious explanation- he wants humanity to spread throughout the universe, and if democrats get in his way he will have to back republicans regardless of his other political opinions. Democrats got in the way.

This review of Reentry is, functionally, a better sourced argument for my intuition. I suppose as a religious fanatic myself I can recognize a fanatic of a different creed by instinct; I guess indifferent PMC types need to be reasoned into the conclusion. As an aside, this is why I'm less worried about woke than some of our other social conservative posters- I don't think I can point to it, but everything about them just screams 'these people sort of believe, in the sense that they don't really disagree, but not in the sense that they'll take licks for their ideology. Like, they're willing to ruin other people's lives over it, sure, but not their own'. Regardless, the actions of SpaceX point to being run by true believers:

when SpaceX is preparing to move their Falcon 9 rocket from its test stand to the launch site for the very first time, they hire “the second largest crane in Texas” to first stack the pieces of the rocket on top of each other, and then lower them onto a waiting trailer. Halfway through the operation, they realize it won’t work because of the wind and that they’ll have to assemble them on the ground. But the piece currently dangling from the crane and blowing like a sail in the wind isn’t designed to bear its own weight, so they literally can’t put it down.

The guy in charge of the operation joined the company a few weeks ago as a rocket engineer in California, and he is now watching the future of the company dangling in front of him from the second largest crane in Texas. Darkness is falling. What does he do? He does what he has to do: calls a few dozen welders to come the next morning, then stays up all night designing a custom “cradle” that the rocket can be lowered into while anxiously watching to make sure the crane doesn’t start leaking hydraulic fluid. He notes: “At Northrop [Grumann], building a custom cradle would have become its own mini-program with design reviews, taking months to build rather than hours.”

Once the rocket is down, they need to move it. To Florida. NASA and other rocket makers generally move their rockets by sea, but that’s slow and expensive. SpaceX doesn’t like to do things that are slow and expensive, so they decide to drive it there. Unfortunately, when lying down on its cradle, the rocket can’t fit under a standard freeway overpass. This is the point at which, if you did not follow the Haywood Algorithm, you would rent a barge and allow the rocket to arrive a few months late. But SpaceX always acts as if any delay at all will kill the company, so they instead set off on “the road trip from hell,” finding an absurd and tortuous route down backroads from Texas to Florida.

Their route has no overpasses, but it does have power lines and traffic lights. So some of the world’s best rocket scientists drive in front of the trailer with a flexible, 17-foot pole taped to the bumper of their car. Whenever it hits something, they jump out, use large sticks to lift the power line enough that the rocket can pass under, then jump back in their car and drive off the road and around the rocket (it’s too wide to pass) so they can intercept the next obstacle. The average speed of the trip is 10mph, and they drive continuously through the night, sleeping in shifts when they’re able to. They have a hard deadline of 5pm on November 24th, because Florida closes its roads to oversized loads for a week around Thanksgiving, and they roll into Cape Canaveral on November 24th, at 3:21pm, after ten days of continuous driving.

That's one example. It's also not just about SpaceX being lean and nimble. It's about being true believers. Elon Musk literally actually believes that humanity spreading through the entire universe is the most important thing... ever, with no exceptions. And he's managed to convince the company that that is correct. Obstacles to this will need to be overcome or removed, such as by sending a guy with a flexible pole to lift up overhead power lines when your rocket engine passes through backroads in the rural south because a barge would take too long. NASA would have accepted the cost. Why? At the end of the day, they believe in going to space, sure, but they're not, like, fanatics about it. SpaceX are fanatics.

And SpaceX just consistently decides not to cash out and take easy money for the rest of their lives. Instead they plow the profits from that easy money into moonshots that push the possibilities of space exploration forwards by developing new technology. Why? I'll quote the review again:

No! It’s actually very simple: remember all that stuff about how SpaceX is less of a company and more of a religious movement, with a goal of making life multi-planetary? Elon and SpaceX behave the way that they do because they believe that stuff very sincerely. A version of SpaceX that merely became worth trillions of dollars, but never enabled the colonization of Mars, would be a disastrous failure in Elon’s eyes.

It's actually pretty simple. He's not a perfectly rational money-maxxer because a perfectly rational money-maxxer would not be betting the entire company on moonshot technological progress no matter what the math says. People are risk averse when all they care about is purchasing power.

So how does this tie in with politics? Well, he bought twitter to back republicans because democrats were doing things like making him kidnap seals and record their emotional reactions to recordings of rocket launches, and other such stupid delays. It's extremely rational for Elon to conclude 1) a cooperative government will enable him to get to mars faster and 2) republicans will give him a cooperative government in exchange for support, democrats will never give him a cooperative government. Yes, he condemns woke, but a) woke doesn't have, like, an actual definition, so it can easily refer to the socialism-by-bureaucracy wing even if that's not totally standard b) I get the sense that a lot of the turn of opinion against him relies on woke-ish methods, with things like cancel culture allowing a corralling of left public opinion, and it's pretty reasonable to think he does too c) there's lots of wokeness or woke ideology involved in holding him back(especially with environmental stuff), and plenty of potential attacks on him from a woke perspective(I'm kind of surprised nobody's already tried to metoo him). Yes, he's conspicuously worried about birthrates, but space colonization essentially requires high human capital high tfr populations.

I wrote a post a few months ago about Gen Z not having enough grit, aggression and agency and willingness to go all in. In retrospect, I don't think it was my best work. Elon's plenty gritty. There's lots of lack of grit in modern society; the every-other-month-AAQC about how all marriages are gay marriages now is basically decrying that, because in modern marriages there's no going all in, doing whatever it takes, they're in concept similar to 'partnerships' among sexual minorities. I'm willing to make that argument but not making it here. Instead I wonder- is fanaticism a necessary component of grit? That certainly seems to be the difference between SpaceX and NASA. Is today's malaise just downstream of being unwilling to commit to things? The birthrate crisis, the military recruitment crisis- moderners just not wanting to burn their bridges and have no recourse but to see their commitment through?

I've rambled a lot here, but it seems convincing to me at least.

In Poker, they'll teach you that it's usually a fool's errand to try to guess exactly which cards another player has or what he's thinking. Instead, you try to put them on a plausable range. So like, anything from "medicore hand played aggressively" to "strong hand played weakly," but ruling out the extremes.

I think we can do the same thing with Elon Musk and SpaceX. Who knows what he's "really" thinking, we can't read his mind, and he probably changes his mind himself from time to time. But he seems consistent enough to rule out the extremes- he's not a conman who's just lying about going to Mars, because he's put so much money and effort into developing Starship. But I also think he's smart enough to realize that it's very unlikely a Martian colony will ever be established during his lifetime, or that it would ever actually be profitable.

I think his play is:

  • 10% true believer, he really wants to go down in history as being the guy who established the first off-world colony. He already has an insane amount of money, but he still wants to feed his ego and feel like he's doing something more important than selling cars or cryptocurrency.
  • 40% hypeman- he doesn't really care about that, but he's got a lot of super nerdy engineers working for him who care about it a lot. They're willing to work way harder for his companies than they would at a normal job, because they think they're on some sort of grand quest for the human species. I've heard that working for NASA is often like that- everyone is super passionate about what they do, even the most mundane experiments, so they'll work long hours for low pay.
  • 50% conman/salesman- he doesn't care about Mars at all, the real play is LEO here on Earth. Data from Starlink, intelligence data from Starshield, or just straight up selling missiles to the military- all of that has the potential to be insanely profitable. If a major war breaks out and he's got a near-monopoly on that technology, he can pretty much name whatever price he wants to the US government.

If a major war breaks out and he's got a near-monopoly on that technology, he can pretty much name whatever price he wants to the US government.

in minor war, yes

in major war if he overplays then he gets nationalised under some emergency war powers

True, they're not going to literally hand him a check for a trillion dollars. But he can still ask for an awful lot. Lots of military contractors made bank during WW2.

Oh, with that I fully agree (and depending on dates/inflation/what would delivered trillion may be actually on table...)

I agree with your thesis but i think there is a secondary reason that has been largley ignored.

Another reason that i think Musk backed Trump is that senior DNC officials were on the record saying that there would "be a reckoning" for his anti-censorship (read pro 1st Ammendment) and anti-dei (read pro-meritocractic) policies after the election, and that the incoming Harris Administration would be doing everything in thier power "to make his life as difficult as possible" and wrest control of SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, Et Al. away from Musk.

When someone tells you that they are your enemy, believe them.

Musk had already, in practice, thrown in with the republicans long ago by this point. This is a concerning attitude which points to democrats as actually not the party of democracy, to say the least, but it emerged in reaction to Elon buying twitter more than it precipitated it.

8 minutes in for anyone watching. Although it's funny to watch from about 6 because they flip from "it's outrageous for Republicans to spread doubts about our elections" to

and and also all of the lies uhh Russia and there's more information coming through about Russian disinformation in this election and you've got to- you know I'm not a conspiracy theorist at all and I'm not- by saying Trump was on the phone with Putin and by saying that Elon Musk met with Putin uh you know

Yeah yeah and and Elon I know you're watching us and I want you to know that even if you know trump wins I mean it's not going to happen but even if he wins and if you get a position in the administration I guarantee you I'm going to make life so difficult for you, really so difficult for you so just be very careful of yourself

Just pure fucking evil, they all deserve a very short prison sentence. At the very least every single single party apparatchik deserves to have its wealth seized as proceeds of criminal activity.

8 minutes in for anyone watching.

Sorry i thought i had put the timestamp in the link but yes.

Should be fixed now.

That did it. YouTube copy paste seems to strip the timestamp sometimes.

Hey at least it wasn't a nice hat

I still want to know what causes that

Is today's malaise just downstream of being unwilling to commit to things? The birthrate crisis, the military recruitment crisis- moderners just not wanting to burn their bridges and have no recourse but to see their commitment through?

Yes. Yes it is. I 100% believe this and have vaguely gestured at it before. It's what I observe IRL all the time, every day, in almost every interaction with young-ish urban-ish people. A complete inability to commit to a task, a schedule, a version of the truth, an agreement, a responsibility, a shared model of the world, or even eye contact.

No idea why though. What went wrong?

  1. More options means more ways to unwittingly screw up by committing to something bad or by denying new opportunities.
  2. A liberalised world means you don't get anything for committing. If you commit to a person, there is no legal recourse for forcing them to honour their own commitment in return. If you commit to a job, they are no longer required to take care of you from cradle to grave. Likewise babies. Likewise responsibilities: what responsibility (rhetorically) do you want me to take, and what are you going to give me for it?

It's what I observe IRL all the time, every day, in almost every interaction with young-ish urban-ish people. A complete inability to commit to a task, a schedule, a version of the truth, an agreement, a responsibility, a shared model of the world, or even eye contact.

From a young-ish urban-ish perspective, and adding a little more cynicism than usual, can you see why a lot of this sounds like a trap? Especially when you hear it from an older person? The specific examples given - solving the birthrate crisis and the military recruitment crisis - require young people to take on significant costs for very dubious long-term benefit. Likewise I bet Musk is underpaying his engineers. I agree with you in many ways but also young people are responding rationally to shifted risk & reward incentives.

No idea why though. What went wrong?

Because life is meaningless now. In the past, kin and religion- real religion, the sort of thing people actually believed- dominated life. You had a role and a part to play dictated mostly by those two things; even if you weren't a subsistence farmer because you were the son of a subsistence farmer, there were pretty good odds that your parents picked your future for you- you were an apprentice blacksmith or whatever because that's who they knew. There was a heft to things, and it's easy to commit to heft. Most parents don't abandon their children to foster care and they'll fight like mad to avoid it, even if they technically have the right. People today don't believe in anything real and they've stopped believing in anything real. Every generation, the blood memory of why you have to pick something to carry through at whatever the cost gets weaker and weaker, and this is the cause of great chaos. Nowadays it takes genuine belief to make that kind of heft exist without already having your bridges burned.

'Men have forgotten God. That is why all this has happened.'

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I think it's just because people have much more to lose now. Your normal standard of living is big enough so you don't have to diverge from a safe railroded life path to live well. Why would you commit if by doing so you limiting your own options and open up yourself to failure?

Theory: daycare from infancy.

I think a lot of the problems stem from how we’ve outsourced raising kids almost entirely to caregivers. This has tge obvious effect of essentially destroying the attachment process between family members, and it’s devastating for kids. Kids who grow up in daycares are one of 8-10 kids in a room in which adults ignore them unless they’re getting in trouble or need care. Parents, assuming an 8pm bedtime might get an hour or two on weekdays and whatever time they can squeeze around household chores on weekends to spend time with the kids. Achieving something in a daycare doesn’t mean much, the care giver is simply too busy with other kids to notice them getting good at something. Parents are too busy to celebrate them doing something. And this is for everything they do. The kids don’t matter, and their attempts to do things don’t matter. Eventually they don’t bother..

It's very rare no? Don't most people stay with their kids at home until maybe age 4-5? IRL I know of one person who was in early daycare, and my entire family sometimes (but rarely) talks that she's a little odd bc of that. She herself has said that. Her parents were careerist high flyers and very much in love. 1930s kids, so they considered their parental duties done when kids were fed, clothed and attending school.

Except parents spend much more time with kids now than they did in the sixties.

Can you double check your link?

Not the stupid hat thing again. Replaced.

Thanks I was really confused why it was linking to a deleted reddit comment or whatever.

Except that I’d guess 100 years ago parents spent way less personal ‘emotional’ time with kids, kids were much more independent, were raised by neighborhood older figures in informal crèches until they were old enough to play by themselves, whereupon they did so until they went to school, which they did until they had to work and/or get married. The sentimental, schmaltzy suburban model of parenting where mom actually spends hours every day with her kids above the age of 3 or 4 is the new thing. I think there are a lot of big failure modes when parents spend too much time with their children; they should love them, but not be too close.

What went wrong is that Western society lost its commitment to its founding religion and deepest set of moral principles.

Not only that, but we decided Christianity was uncool and needed to be remade in our image. No wonder we can’t commit to anything.

I'm sorry, but Western society was founded on Greek paganism. Christianity almost destroyed it once, and we only squeezed through after a thousand-year rut by deciding that Christianity as it was is uncool and remaking it in a different image. In fact, we to then continued to tweak away at it further to great effect for some 500 years more. No wonder that, having been left with such a strong cultural memory of this serving us well, we would eventually slip up and remake it again in a way that is bad without even realising how we screwed up.

What do you actually mean by 'Western society'?

Because yes, Greek influence is the substrate for west Eurasian civilization post-Alexander. But that includes Islamic societies and Indian Societies as well. That is, to say the least, a non-standard use of the term 'western society'.

What is typically meant by western society is societies founded on old Rome and Christianity. I assume you're referring to Rome's fall as the fault of Christianity(a very debatable and not supported by the evidence take; I presume you don't believe Roman mythology was literally true and ancient Rome fell because they didn't stay in the good graces of Iupiter, so I'm curious as to the mechanism for Christianity causing the fall of the Roman empire and the evidence for that mechanism because to all appearances Christianity actually briefly strengthened the Roman empire before it resumed its previous rate of decline), which BTW left a dark age of 300 years at most, not a thousand. But Christian institutions are the reason Roman knowledge was preserved. Christian institutions spread technological advances that lead into the industrial revolution quite directly. Christian institutions were the only thing that kept literacy alive in big parts of Europe.

Roman paganism(and you do know that Roman and Greek paganism were different religions despite the similarities, right?) was a dead man walking at the edict of Milan. An impartial observer in 300 AD probably would have expected Manichaeism or some kind of mystery cult to supplant it as well as Christianity. The fusion between Christianity and Roman culture built the greatest civilization the world has ever, or will ever have, known. Constantine's conversion came at a time when the crisis of the third century had essentially discredited Roman paganism and dealt a mortal blow to the empire. It was Christianity that brought the Germanic tribes into Roman culture; the early scientific texts weren't written in Latin as a tribute to Iupiter, but because of the influence of the Christian church. There's Christian stampings all over this stuff; even timekeeping is due to the Christian church needing to hold religious services at a particular time.

Without Christianity the Germanic tribes would have settled into their conquered Roman territory and acted like Arabs today(and indeed the Arabic golden age had outsize contribution from Christians and a decline in the Christian percentage is at least a reasonable contributing factor).

There was no thousand-year rut. Christian Europe in the High Middle Ages had already overtaken Rome in terms of technological sophistication, with notable inventions in the period including spectacles, the windmill, mechanical clocks cheap enough to be installed in every village church, sandglasses which keep accurate enough time to be useful, and the architectural techniques needed to build the Gothic cathedrals. (Neither the Romans nor the Chinese could build anything like that). The translation of the key Greek and Arabic works into Latin had been completed by 1200, and at that point Western science and maths started to move ahead (most obviously in astronomy with Oresme). The fall of the Baghdad caliphate and Song China to Genghis Khan allow the West to move into first place, but we never look back and continue to forge ahead through the Renaissance, Commercial Revolution, Age of Exploration, Industrial Revolution, and American Hegemony. If we are not the same civilisation that built Notre-Dame, it is because of some loss of faith in the last hundred years, not because the Renaissance was a RETVRN to an older continuity. (And in any case, the implausibly effective rebuilding of Notre-Dame is strong evidence that we are the same civilisation that built it.)

I am less confident, but on balance believe based on Tom Holland's work, that the key ingredients of the thing that grows into Western Civilisation come together during the Ottonian Renaissance (950-1030), the Cluniac Reforms of Christian monasticism and worship (910-c.1130), the Gregorian Reform of the Church which grew out of Cluny (1050-1080), and the Peace of God movement (989 onwards). Those ingredients are Christianity, the example of Rome, and some kind of customary law or oligarchic cultural trait of the ascendant Germani that counteracts the worst aspects of Romanism. Greek paganism is only essential to the extent that Roman paganism is an offshoot of it (a point of great controversy among classicists).

@hydroacetylene curious for your response?

See above.

Well yeah I saw but you’re not responding to the pagan accusations. :(

I really don't think this is true. To the extent that Greek paganism contributed to Western society (that is, the actual society of people living in Europe and America) it is primarily by allowing us to regain lost scientific and engineering knowledge. The only reason that the Iliad is relevant to us is in the West that upper-class elites thought it was a pretty neat story. Democracy is nice but I don't think you can really call it foundational when most people in the West have only had the franchise for a hundred years at best.

To be provocative in my turn, Western society was founded on God, landowning aristocracy, and weirdoes (landlors or clergy) tinkering in their backyard.

What I don’t understand about Elon is his push for Mars colonization, given his views on AI. AI is either going to kill us or greatly accelerate technological progress. If it kills us, it will find us on Mars. If it accelerates technology, it will make getting to Mars much easier than it is today. Given the likely progress of AI over the next 15 years, why is Elon bothering with trying to colonize Mars in the near future?

There are some "mutual kill" scenarios where we kill Skynet but Skynet unleashes something that kills all Earthbound humans (e.g. Operation Dark Storm, or an alga that isn't digestible, doesn't need phosphate and has a better carbon-fixer than RuBisCO). Not high-probability, though.

There's also the AI-pessimist view: "neural-net alignment is impossible, so if neural-net AGI happens we're all doomed". No point planning for worlds where you're dead anyway; you want to play to 1) stop near-term AGI, 2) succeed in an AGI-less world. This a) negates your point, but also b) means you probably want to have "building things" projects that aren't AI, in order to pull the smart, driven people out of the AI field (where their talents are an outright detriment to humanity).

Plus Elon poured blood, sweat and tears into his rocketry well before near-term AI looked likely. How could he think about it rationally, SpaceX is his baby! It's got X in its name.

Even if the purest rational move is to go all in on AI and drop the Mars mission, he's already invested so much into the latter it's too hard to give up.

Yeah but based on the past two hundred years of human history, you will always have an easier time doing anything if you wait fifteen years. In fifteen years time the ai will be good at getting us to Mars, but if we wait another fifteen years on top of that the ai will be even better at getting to Mars! You can always find a reason to wait, the 'any delay is death' philosophy allows Musk to do things we didn't think possible.

Elon might be able to get humans to Mars before someone creates a computer superintelligence, but it seems very unlikely he could create a self-sustaining Martian colony before superintelligence is created.

Interesting that strong AI is now taken as consensus? I believe superintelligence is not possible. LLMs hitting a ceiling recently is one sign for that, but I don’t believe LLM can be intelligent anyway.

I believe superintelligence is not possible.

I see no reason to expect that humans are the most intelligent being possible.

I hope that AIs are nowhere close to that. LLM managing to succeed here would be just sad, being outcompeted by glorified Markov chains would be too much.

Strong AI (and strong AI hurtling towards humanity) has enjoyed a lot of general agreement on the Motte for years. So much so that the odd user here and there will express a sudden disinterest in the culture war, the result of a belief that AI will come soon and obliviate every modern-day political concern by turning Earth into a paradise or a hellscape mountain range of paperclips.

One user maybe a year ago posted a big departure comment saying that everyone here was stressing him out talking about AI so much, and how mind-blowingly fantastically utterly unrecognizable the world with AI will be. He couldn't handle it and took the grill pill. A good choice, I think.

To your point about LLMs and intelligence, it doesn't matter what theory of intelligence you use. If it can be programmed to talk, it can be programmed to laugh, or cry, or scream in pain; and then people are going to try to give it voting rights.

It does, but it's about the attitude. Necessity is the mother of invention you know? Behave as if you have no choice but to find a solution and you will likely find solutions that never occurred to anyone before. Ai might kill us in 15 years, or solve everything or hit a cap we didn't previously understand or anticipate. Elon wants to go to Mars now though, so that means throwing everything he can now at it.

Probably better to have our eggs in more than one basket and no one else was making that one happen.

Yes, but building multiple underground bunkers run on geothermal power that have mass food stockpiles would probably do more to increase humanity's survival chances than trying to colonize Mars would.

A sufficient speed differential between Earth and a kilometer wide object would literally destroy the Earth, flipping it inside out and melting it.

Maybe if the goal is solely survival. But there is something romantic about trying to expand the aim of humanity and to raise it to heights it dreamt but never could achieve. Colonizing Mars may not per se by smart but it is human and I hope to see it in my life time.

Right, I just said so elsewhere in this thread. Btw food stockpiles are good but the ability to grow more is a much bigger deal. No telling how long that winter will last.

It is definitely helpful to see Elon’s ambition as religious: he replaces a supercelestial permanent abode in the heavens for an extracelestial permanent abode in the cosmos, for all of humanity. The exaggerated importance of his dogma orders all of his steps in the world. Will Elon, like the Biblical Enoch, ascend through the heavens alive? My issue with Elonic aspirations is that it’s zero-sum. There can only be one Elon, and only one SpaceX, and if they’re deciding the future of humanity then you’re not. This unconsciously reduces the enthusiasm of everyone else on the planet, whose labor fails to have eschatological importance. This is a considerable downgrade from a positive-sum spiritual system that can motivate all of humanity equally, and not just the 0.001% involved in a particular company.

I don’t think there’s any reason to see Elon’s ambition as zero sum. More than one person can reach mars.

Sorry what I mean by zero-sum is that it’s a “telic” zero-sum status game. The motivating force behind Elon Musk isn’t just “humans will inevitably reach Mars”, but that Elon is the one championing this species-significant event. He is involved in it, others are not; the fate of consciousness rests on his company’s shoulders. This is motivating for everyone at SpaceX: they at the company are the ones forever altering the trajectory of humanity, in their daily course of action. But this isn’t grounds for motivation for everyone else. In fact, this narrative kind of reduces everyone else’s motivation for perfecting their life. If they agree with Elon’s narrative, then their own boring “Uber for pet antibiotics” company life is meaningless in the grand scheme of things. They are just some person not at SpaceX.

I suppose you can try to enlarge Elonic ambitions so that it includes all of humanity. The janitor who stays late at Starbucks is doing his part for humanity, because he served the road repair crew of someone who might one day drive to SpaceX to repair a heating system. I don’t think this will be as compelling. I’m not criticizing Elon’s own mindset here, but noting that promoting this mindset is probably not beneficial and enlarging it is probably impossible.

Not everything has to be about status. I think Elon is actually literally a fanatical true believer in the cause of humanity spreading through the universe. I don't think he cares about his status except insofar as it influences his actual goal.

All humans and primates are motivated by status. It’s not something we can opt out of. Whether we decide to care about our status consciously or not, our actions revolve around our status in groups due to millions of years of evolution. If he is a true believer, somehow willing himself into true belief, it’s still a belief that comes with the highest possible increase in status per his worldview. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing for Elon, only that it can’t be generalizable to humanity at large, and in fact may be pernicious if attempted.

I respect the ambition of conquering space, but I think there’s also a clear and unspoken disconnect between what’s promised - which is a kind of romantic, sci-fi version of the age of exploration - and the reality.

There are no planets we’ve ever found that can likely support human habitation without terraforming. Certainly nowhere else in the solar system would support human habitation without terraforming, which mostly involves hypothetical technology and would take thousands of years, just to end up with a worse version of what we already have. What’s more, a multiplanetary species would likely still be at risk of pandemics / MAD / extinction-risk events. Sure, an asteroid can’t destroy us, but most other extinction scenarios would still be viable.

There is no major viable route to other habitable planets; we’d need to send probes to find them first, and we can’t do that at speeds fast enough to make that kind of search viable. Even if one was miraculously found, it would require thousands of years on a generation ship (involving mountains of uninvented and possibly impossible technology) or cryostasis (see above) to make work.

I’m all for exploring space, but I’m also 99% certain that human civilization, whatever becomes of it, will be tied to earth as the center of its story from beginning to end.

Sam Kriss is a notorious blowhard, but on just one thing, he was prescient:

Humanity will never colonize Mars, never build moon bases, never rearrange the asteroids, never build a sphere around the sun.

There will never be faster-than-light travel. We will not roam across the galaxy. We will not escape our star.

Life is probably an entirely unexceptional phenomenon; the universe probably teems with it. We will never make contact. We will never fuck green-skinned alien babes.

The human race will live and die on this rock, and after we are gone something else will take our place. Maybe it already has, without our even noticing.

If your response to this is to post the NYT quote from the early 1900s about man not flying for a thousand years, then I care not to argue.

Space is a black void with a few resources we can mostly find on earth. It can never replace the Wild West, the frontier. It is empty, and it can never be home to us. This is where we have evolved to live, and to die.

Yoda voice: and this is why you fail.

Or if you want to get spicey see that infamous Avatar-40k crossover copy/pasta that seems to make the rounds every few years

Spare us your pity, alien. You gush about your connection with nature, your primal wisdom, but what has it brought you? Where are your marvels of engineering? Your voyages of discovery? Your great insight into the nature of the universe? Even at our basest, when we dressed as you do, dwelt as you do, hunted as you do, lived as you do, we did more than merely survive. We built wonders. We made great journeys. We forged epics. You have not. You speak so proudly of the plugs dangling from your skulls, little realizing that they are but strings and you puppets. What little you have accomplished you attribute to the wisdom of your goddess, who is nothing but the voices of your dead echoing for all eternity. She moors you to the past, serving as a leash that keeps you as little better than apes, sad parodies of civilization that lack that special spark to become something more. We have come to your world in search of resources. Whether your actions drive us back or we take what we want and move on, the outcome is the same. We will depart from your wretched planet, leaving you behind. And in a thousand years, you will not have changed from this contact with another world. You will remain in your trees, hunting your prey, communing with your goddess, until your sun burns out and your world dies. And above your tomb, the stars will belong to us.

In the spirit of playful contrarianism:

‘But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin,’ said the sky-person.

In fact,' said the Na’vi, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy. Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent, the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow.' There was a long silence.

I claim them all,' said the human at last.

The Na’vi shrugged his blue shoulders. 'You're welcome,' he said.

I liked Semper Victoria if you’re into fic. It’s an Avatar sequel about humanity’s return that’s unabashedly pro-human without overly strawmanning either side. Very well written and very suspenseful.

I’m surprised at your lack of vision here, 2rafa. To me it’s more than obvious we can conquer space. We’ve already got people living in the ISS. If we don’t blow ourselves up it’s only a matter of time imo.

We went from having our home be sub Saharan Africa to living in the entire world. Space is just the next step.

I’m surprised at your lack of vision here, 2rafa.

That seems totally in character. The best rafa posts are a window into the Id of the beancounter, and many heuristics that really really almost always work are found there.

Welcome back.

Also, don’t be a jerk.

This is unnecessarily mean.

But why, though? The US was and is better in a lot of ways than Europe (more arable land, great scenery, natural resources). What does space have over earth? The view?

Habitation on Mars would be in radiation shielded bunkers underground, how is that even comparable to living on earth?

You have to think longer than a few generations. Or course it’s going to be terrible for the first century or two. Everyone on board with the mission knows that.

They are inspired by something far grander than their own small existence. I hope you are able to understand someday.

I think that you will be able to find first generation colonists. I also think that the rage of the second generation will be hideous to behold, and the relative immigration rates will make third-world immigration look like a trickle. I don't want to agree with @2rafa, I fantasised about colonising space when I was younger, but absent huge technological improvements living anywhere except a terraformed planet is going to be basically crap forever.

I also think that the rage of the second generation will be hideous to behold,

I suppose it depends on how much you believe in blank slatism. If the children of those who took the long view and volunteered for hardship, take the the long view and volunteer for hardship, what would they have to "rage" about?

I guess. They wouldn’t really be volunteering so much as being volunteered, and that might make a difference too.

What’s the endgame? I don’t think I’m blinded by my small existence, I think they’re blinded by science fiction; they fantasize about playing golf on an alien world with candy cotton trees, about going on space liners around the rings of Saturn, about going where no man has gone before. They imagine a universe of earth-like worlds with breathable atmospheres, each full of its own mysteries, cultures, fertile soil for new civilizational growth. Is it they who are lying to themselves. Space is a black void. It is strictly worse than earth in every way. Better to be done with the delusion now (which, again, is not to say I’m against exploring it, only doing so honestly).

All of what you’re talking about is possible, relatively easily in my opinion. Do you think scientific advances will stop?

We have barely scratched the surface of what is possible. You aren’t thinking big enough, still. In 10,000 years, assuming we don’t collapse our society and technology continues to progress, we will be powerful beyond belief. Space will be a cakewalk to master.

If you want some serious reading on this I recommend Beginning of Infinity.

Do you think scientific advances will stop?

Eventually, yes.

We have barely scratched the surface of what is possible.

How do you know that? How do you know we haven't already accomplished ~90% of what's possible?

In 10,000 years, assuming we don’t collapse our society and technology continues to progress

I, for one, think these are both big, unsupported conjectures.

“Hence, if it requires, say, a thousand years to fit for easy flight a bird which started with rudimentary wings, or ten thousand for one with started with no wings at all and had to sprout them ab initio, it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years — provided, of course, we can meanwhile eliminate such little drawbacks and embarrassments as the existing relation between weight and strength in inorganic materials.”

Heh, nothin personal kid.

There are no planets we’ve ever found that can likely support human habitation without terraforming. Certainly nowhere else in the solar system would support human habitation without terraforming, which mostly involves hypothetical technology and would take thousands of years, just to end up with a worse version of what we already have.

This is true, but the implication isn't that we can't conquer space, just that we should assume we'll have to mostly build our own habitable volumes. There's enough matter and energy in the solar system to support at least hundreds of billions of humans this way, in the long run.

So Musk might be a little off-target with his focus on Mars. Still, at this point we don't really need to make that decision; SpaceX is working on general capabilities that apply to either approach. And maybe it's not a bad idea to start with Mars and work our way around to habitats as AI advances make highly automated in-space resource extraction and construction more viable.

What’s more, a multiplanetary species would likely still be at risk of pandemics / MAD / extinction-risk events. Sure, an asteroid can’t destroy us, but most other extinction scenarios would still be viable.

Many forms of x-risk would be substantially mitigated if civilization were spread over millions of space habitats. These could be isolated to limit the spread of a pandemic. Nuclear exchanges wouldn't affect third-parties by default, and nukes are in several ways less powerful and easier to defend against in space. Dispersal across the solar system might even help against an unfriendly ASI, by providing enough time for those furthest from its point of emergence to try their luck at rushing a friendly ASI to defend them (assuming they know how to build ASI but were previously refraining for safety).

There are no planets we’ve ever found that can likely support human habitation without terraforming. Certainly nowhere else in the solar system would support human habitation without terraforming

I don't think this is true at all. It's possible we never colonize Mars, or wherever, or that if we do it's just basically a scientific research outpost.

But Mars has water. So humans would be able to breathe and grow food. From what I can tell - although I am happy to be corrected - colonizing Mars is much more of a logistical challenge than anything else. The technical challenges seem solved or solvable with current technology.

colonizing Mars is much more of a logistical challenge than anything else. The technical challenges seem solved or solvable with current technology.

Pretty much, in fact NASA concluded that it was largely solvable with 1970s technology, the issue was that it was estimated that (assuming a reliable source of water could be found) a self sustaining lunar colony of 50 - 100 people would require something on the order of 10,000 tons of seed mass. Not all that much in the grand scheme of human endevour, but there was no way congress was going to give budgetary approval for 650 Saturn V launches over the course of 10 years.

That later bit is what makes "Starship" so exciting. If SpaceX actually manages to deliver even half of thier advertised payload capacity and flight rate, an ISS-scale space station will be something a decent sized university or tech company can afford, and a permanent Lunar colony will be within the means of most nation states, not unlike arctic and antarctic stations today.

IMO Mars doesn't necessarily seem like it will be the most interesting destination: It seems likely that once we have the technology for extended in-space habitation to get there, the bottom of a large gravity well seems a relatively boring place to hang out. What does the planet get you? Gravity? Spinning habitations seem easy enough. Meteorite protection? We'll need to have figured that out anyway. Land? Is it really easier for farming than in-space?

The asteroid belt looks a lot more tempting to me because even if resources are scarcer (unclear), they are easier to move elsewhere.

Radiation resistance is a big deal.

Of course, the irony is that radiation resistance works against Mars, because what you want is either a) a thick atmosphere (Earth, Venus, Titan*) or b) low-enough gravity that you can go deep underground easily (for which asteroids and even Luna beat Mars handily).

*Not discounting Venus because its CO2 atmosphere permits cloud cities. Discounting the giant planets because their H2 atmospheres don't.

Do they not? Isn't the hydrogen atmosphere of Jupiter rather dense due to how cold it is? I'm not sure what the math would look like on a Hot Hydrogen Balloon. (Edit: like 2-1 density ratio between 100C hydrogen and -100C hydrogen, you'd only have 1/6th the buoyant force of a hydrogen balloon on earth. But double check my napkin math before trusting it for your Jupiter colony please)

Edit: like 2-1 density ratio between 100C hydrogen and -100C hydrogen, you'd only have 1/6th the buoyant force of a hydrogen balloon on earth. But double check my napkin math

As a less-relevant point, I did double-check your maths and I think you did make a mistake somewhere.

Hydrogen at (old) STP (0 C, 1 atm) has a density of 0.08988 g/L. Assuming ideal gas, that's a density of 0.0658 g/L at 100C and 0.1418 g/L at -100C, for a buoyancy of 0.0760 g/L for your hot hydrogen balloon in cold hydrogen at 1 atm.

Air at (old) STP has a density of 1.2922 g/L (representing an average molar mass of slightly under 29, due to contributions from N2 at 28, O2 at 32, Ar at 40 and H2O at 18, whereas H2 is 2). As such, a non-heated hydrogen balloon in 0-degree 1-atm air has a buoyancy of 1.2023 g/L, which is 15.8x the buoyancy of your hot hydrogen balloon (or 14.5x if your "hydrogen balloon on Earth" comparison is at 25 degrees and 1 atm).

I think you might have divided the density ratios of air/hydrogen vs. hot/cold hydrogen, but the relevant criterion for determining how big a balloon you need is the absolute difference of the densities. You need 15.8x as big a balloon to support a given weight with your setup as you would at STP with a hydrogen balloon in air (actually somewhat more, because the lifting gas has to lift the balloon as well as the payload and the skin of a balloon with 15.8x the volume weighs 6.3x as much for a given material/thickness).

(Jupiter's atmosphere does have about 14% He, which makes the numbers a little better than with pure H2, but not much. And yes, that does bring up the possibility of using a pure-hydrogen balloon without heating, but between the buoyancy per litre being even worse than in your example at ~0.0192 g/L and the thick balloon walls needed to keep He and H2 apart in the long-term (they're both notoriously-difficult gases to contain), I think you again wind up in "theoretically possible and could totally let an atmospheric probe float for a few hours, but not practical for long-term holding up a city" land.)

Thanks. I got as far as 0.076, but not sure where I made the math error after that.

It's theoretically possible, but a) it's still weak (particularly since it's not breathable, whereas a cloud city on Venus counts all the air toward lifting gas), b) it's an active system which kills everyone inside a day if it's turned off, which generally falls under the heading of Bad Ideas.

(On Earth, the slow buoyancy failure of a hot-air balloon usually produces a survivable if bumpy landing. But, of course, that's no help on a giant planet.)

I actually think there's a good chance the moon does very well for exactly these reasons - there's water ice there, there's enough gravity for useful things but barely enough to stop you from traveling, and we could make a space elevator from conventional materials. Basically has most of the benefits of a space habitat but doesn't require space infrastructure assembly.

One thing that I think planets have that space habitats don't is more room for error. If you are building on Mars it's pretty easy to build e.g. a "panic room" for a colony - food stockpiles, an extra reactor, etc. (And if something does go badly wrong you at least have resources on hand that don't have to be flown to you.) You can build redundancy on a space colony as well, but I imagine it as the difference between designing a ship with that versus a land-based colony. Both are doable, but it's probably going to have a marginal impact on the ship's cost moreso than that of the colony.

This isn't to say that space habitats won't be a thing, though - they seem plausible to me.

Space is a black void with a few resources we can mostly find on earth. It can never replace the Wild West, the frontier. It is empty, and it can never be home to us. This is where we have evolved to live, and to die.

The Earth vs. Moon and African Plains vs. far Arctic are differences of degree, not kind. Both the moon and the arctic are inhospitable environments that will quickly kill unprotected humans, and lack easy access to essential resources. And yet, with sufficient adaptation and technology, we've managed to create self-sufficient populations in the far north.

We've gone beyond "where we have evolved to live, and to die" once already. I wouldn't count us out yet.

Some may ask why we aren't building cities in Antarctica now before going to Mars. Building life support systems and growing food is easier there than it will be on Mars. Mars will be colonized first, though, and Antarctica may never be colonized. The reason is because international treaties prevent Antarctica from having sovereignty. But sovereignty can be attainable on Mars. The pursuit of sovereignty is what makes space exploration worthwhile. Sovereignty is unobtainium—the resource more abundant in space than on Earth. Men will endure bitter poverty, cold isolation, drink piss and eat lichen just for a chance to be free from the tyranny of the United Nations.

This looks like one of the cases where being more realistic is not more useful. Even if Sam Kriss is 99% right, what is the use of following his earthly wisdom instead of gambling for the 1%?

If there’s energy, (whether from solar panels, a greenhouse or a nuclear reactor) people can live there. I’m positive star entrepreneurs could find lots of people willing to live in a cage, eating reprocessed gruel facing fearful odds for a hundred generations, because I’m not far from considering it. A lot of polynesians drowned, but in the end they got to most of the pacific.

No need for terraforming, just dig the equivalent of an antarctic base. Who needs fresh air anyway. Modern youth’s predilection for browsing dank memes over going outside will pay off on mars.

Yeah. Elon has explicitly stated that “if it’s not against the laws of physics it’s not impossible”.

This attitude has proven to be enormously valuable.

Mars colonization is not impossible just because we don’t know how to do it yet.

That may be true, but what actually matters is that Elon himself does not believe this.

It's true that designing some kind of vault system to survive a meteor strike would be vastly easier and cheaper than trying to do something similar on another world. At least here we have air and water, and transportation costs are comparatively nil.

A vault system is okay for a meteor strike, but if planet Earth gets taken over by robots, a human colony on Mars has a better chance of escaping extermination.

I think I'm in camp "If the robots can take over earth they can and will probably get to Mars too." Guess one never does know.

IIRC a novel called 'Moving Mars' deals with such a scenario.


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