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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1724 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 15, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Breaking news, there was a school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin.

It seems the shooter is a fifteen-year-old female (as in female female) who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

I first heard about this because of a meme I saw referring to unconfirmed reports claiming that the shooter had written up a manifesto concerning her motivations on Google Docs, but neglected to make the document public before going on her rampage.

Anyone here know who radfem Hitler is or was? I keep seeing it referenced.

My understanding is that RFH used to actually be on the dissident right but - as I've seen a large number of women on far-right movements do - eventually grew tired of the rank misogyny and general inceldom on that side and flipped towards some sort of a terf/right-wing split position, in practice taking the same woman-hating/incel attitude and just flipping the valence so as to start advocating man-hating and femceldom. In so doing she, apart from naturally attracting a large amount of hatred from former far-right comrades, she has also approached the position of some posters who are coming towards the same split from the terf side, chiefly Ana Slatz of Reduxx.

Slatz has posted what seems to be the Wisconsin poster's actual manifesto, which just seems like typical school shooter misanthrope blather and doesn't indicate a connection to RFH or any politics beyond admiration for some Nazi shooters, seemingly more for being shooters than being Nazis. Obviously this is not going to convince anyone who was only too happy to see RFH take one on the chin, whether this is due to hating her for bashing men or for bashing trans people or whatever.

A Twitter schizoposter with a radical feminist bent. Like most actually-radical feminists, she was really and truly radical. There was some crossover with the Twitter DR due to the shared schizophrenia, but she was a radical feminist misandrist and not a DR member even if she believed in esoteric crap about hyperborea.

Esoteric Hitlerism is just a new manifestation of Satanism I guess.

Some Twitter/X femcel who resents men because she had bad experiences, so she offers an openly misandrist world view. Kind of like a personification of https://old.reddit.com/r/FemaleDatingStrategy/.

She’s a self-proclaimed “New York 6” and you wouldn’t really remark on her looks, rather mid, but not ugly enough to warrant her rhetoric.

I’ve had her blocked for ages since I reflexively block all women on social media, but she would get into rows and the shooter, who followed her, said RFH has been “vindicated” - I’m not sure how.

She had an alien Nordic avatar, IIRC she was involved with some kind of hard right thing back in Tumblr(?). But here is her substack since she went private on X after the shooter praised her (though the authenticity of that excerpt has been questioned):

https://substack.com/home/post/p-152931025

Here is some spicy info from some anon who follows her:

https://x.com/roninmeta/status/1868968032913309748?s=46

I reflexively block all women on social media

I feel this could do with some elaboration.

It prevents drama, simping, weird cliques and e-girl social games from showing on my feed. I’ve never been tempted to not block, even if a woman makes a regrettably good point, and the women I’ve accidentally ended up following (such as I/O @eyeslasho on X, who posts HBD stats, is almost certainly an Asian woman, I’ve since blocked) end up focusing on content and it isn’t obvious they’re women until they get into spats outside their focus which betray them.

That being said a lot of the men get into hen house dramas of their own, especially homosexuals like Fuentes and others. I block them too.

I've misplaced the link to an American policeman's blog post where he explained that while American cops are allowed to deceive during interrogation, European cops have many more powers that might make American readers worry about civil rights. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

I'm 98% sure it's this Graham Factor piece:Earl Warren's greatest mistake?

Ta! I see that the substack is private now, this explains why I couldn't find it again.

China has over a billion people and an average IQ of 104. While this is a complex topic, when simply considering these two variables it seems almost inevitable that China will by some distance become the dominant global economy within this century.

What are the reasons it's not so simple?

I mean, to start with East Asian countries underperform their IQ numbers. Japan is poorer than Italy, after all. China also has multiple bubbles propping up their economy.

But secondly, China has a population pyramid that makes Europe’s look good and a rigidly inflexible totalitarian government that has not managed to find solutions to historical Chinese weaknesses. Sheer number of people will make China a top global economic power for the foreseeable future, but ‘dominant by a wide margin’ seems unlikely just due to those.

Japan is poorer than Italy, after all.

According to what metric? GDP per capita? I'd consider that stronger evidence for the proposition that GDP does not measure anything useful than that Japan actually underperforms according to any sensible measure of performance. It is more surprising that people still have this blind faith in economic metrics considering how official inflation figures have gone viral for being comically disconnected from easily observable real price changes in recent years.

It's a blatant exploit, which seems designed to inflate the score of systems implementing a particular economic culture, that GDP includes the "market value" of illiquid and socially constructed line items which can be created out of thin air at no material cost. If the US were reduced to an irradiated reservation occupying half of Wyoming after a future war against China, its economists would probably still find a way to award themselves the superior GDP medal by having the two surviving lawyers on the territory mutually bill each other a few hundred trillions for consultations.

Japan is poorer than Italy,

On a per capita basis, sure, but in absolute terms the Japanese economy is substantially larger (approx $4tn vs $2.3tn). China could in theory be a lot poorer than the US per capita and still dominate it as an overall economic unit.

I accept the rest of your points.

There is more to the human mind than just IQ, despite the fact that your G is one of the best predictors. Many also postulate that Indo-European populations tend to have fatter tails. Culture comes from people. The East Asian worldview is more risk-averse, with a much larger emphasis on standardised tests over everything else. Most stats about IQ from China are not very trustworthy either.

My amrchair theory is that having a population that has always self-selected for people defined by tests is not good in the long run. China will dominate within this century, it already is and it has good biocapital which could have been better without these insane pressures.

Because the IQ stats are fake. They're obvious nonsense if you've ever left a tier 1 city and spoken to actual Chinese people in Mandarin, which I have. The vast majority of China is either Soviet dystopia or 3rd world hellhole. There's plenty of low IQ behavior on display. Going off vibes and Lived Experience™ I would wager their average IQ is around 95 or so.

If China becomes a dominant power, it will be by virtue of having a ton of warm bodies, a large overall number of >120 IQ people simply due to population size, and a very powerful government apparatus unhindered by Western moral concerns and that rules over a populace that has long been content to submit to authority as long as at least a little of the sweet corruption money trickles down. You don't need to have an average IQ of 104 to win if you have those advantages.

I've seen some IQ numbers for China that suggest it might have an IQ around 90 or so (no sources rn, sorry), which seems to make more sense than them actually currently having a 104 IQ. But judging by Taiwan, Singapore, and other East Asian nations, isn't it probably true that the mainland Chinese have the genes for a ~104 average IQ but are held back by the poor environment? If this is the case, I would think that the OP's argument still applies.

China is large and diverse. The northern coastals likely have similar IQ to the rest of north east Asia while other regions have other (lower) averages. What all this averages out to is anyone's guess but 104 is likely the upper bound given how testing has been done. Maybe it's above 100 maybe it's below, regardless there are a shitton of high IQ individuals in China.

Why didn't the scientific and industrial revolutions start in China?

Rigid and inflexible governance practices, worsened by a lack of competition. Consider the Seaban where the Ming relocated whole villages away from the sea to combat piracy. That's a bizarre thing to do, rulers usually like having trade. But the Ming were so strong they didn't care, they had no peer competitors and so little need to search for revenue. The consequences for this stupid crap didn't hit them immediately. The Qing didn't raise taxes for about a century or two because they wanted to be benevolent, so the footprint of the state was very light compared to Europe. The population ballooned and they had the same number of officials, it was a mess. Proto-industrialization was accelerated by the military-industrial complex, China wasn't usually under threat... They could afford to do all this suboptimal governance that would get them annexed if they were in Europe. In Europe, states had to search for qualitative military advantages in metallurgy and shipbuilding, they had to squeeze out as much tax revenue as they could from people. Europeans weren't interested in ritualized trade missions where they gave out more than they received to 'tributary states', they wanted profits. The Chinese state didn't care so much about profit, they assumed they were the richest and the best from the start.

China built a huge fleet and explored all around the Indian Ocean, terrifying all the natives. But they felt like there was no use for it, they had plenty of money already. And the steppe nomads were acting up again, so they scrapped it and refocused. They thought they were on top of the world, so resisted catch-up industrialization for some time in the 19th century on the basis that they already had everything they needed.

Many megadeaths later, the lesson sank in. Today they push out official party doctrine books about how important scientific and industrial development is, overcorrecting if anything: https://www.strategictranslation.org/articles/general-laws-of-the-rise-of-great-powers

What charities or causes do you donate to? I used to donate to GiveWell, but I'm not sure what I want to do this year.

Givewell, a local homelessness charity, a local rape crisis centre, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, Medical Aid for Palestine. For many years I donated to the Brain & Behaviour Research Foundation, but they've been a bit funny with accepting my donations recently for some reason. Used to donate to Nick Bostrom's Future of Humanity institute before it got shut down.

I buy beer from Trappist monasteries.

What is up with the proposed Trump tariffs? I work in ecommerce and everything comes from China. If it wasn't made in China it was made with parts that came from China. Get on temu or aliexpress. Things are so cheap on those sites that you would have to impose tariffs of like 300% before it would be profitable to produce them in the US instead. And reshoring manufacturing is just going to open the flood gates of immigrants (see: Italian villages filled with Chinese workers shipped in from China who pump out goods that say "Made in Italy.")

I work in ecommerce and everything comes from China

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today.

Ok but the Chinese are also better workers than Americans, you just ask factories in China to make you stuff and they make you what you want, redoing entire production runs of faulty product is so cheap in China that they can do this without blinking, they work like slaves and don't even mind, the inefficiencies of the US labor force aren't present in East Asia...

Yes. Unfortunately we haven't figured out a way to profit from this cheap labor without also giving them our IP, technology, and dominant world position.

Ergo, tariffs.

Ok, I understand this reasoning behind the tariffs, but I don't understand how that justifies the massive price increases that will inevitably result from them, which won't be just on the price of knockoff legos and polyester dresses but also everything else because everyone will need more money to buy fewer and fewer goods as the supply will shrink, people won't be switching to domestic goods (especially not right away) they will just switch to no goods at all, leading to a decline in the quality of life with inflation at the same time, and I don't think there's enough American patriotism or anti-Chinese sentiment to go around to keep the economy afloat without seeing blood in the streets

I don't think there's enough American patriotism or anti-Chinese sentiment to go around to keep the economy afloat without seeing blood in the streets

This is also my prediction. The only thing MAGA Americans love more than America is consooming large amounts of low quality goods. Conservatives aren't patriotic or nationalistic enough yet to stomach a reduction in their consumption of cheap plastic crap and electronic gizmos in order to benefit their fellow Americans.

The only thing MAGA Americans love more than America is consooming large amounts of low quality goods.

My precise take. Drive through any poor southeastern county and every front lawn outside a trailer is strewn with Chinesium. That's all that's available at Dollar General and Walmart, and it's all they care to afford.

Well the problem is that it isn't just cheap plastic crap that's going to get more expensive... All the food you eat in the US relies on Chinese produced knives and forks and cutting boards, the farmers in america harvesting the food rely on Chinese produced shirts and jeans. And so on. When the Chinese inevitably impose counter tariffs the food they used to import from the US will stop being bought disrupting the agriculture industry, the knock on effects will be on everyone not just people you're characterizing as brainless consoomers

I’ll ask again next Sunday if I can remember.

What’s something awesome I can plan for my wife that would take 4 years to execute? I’m thinking about a big anniversary that’s about that far off, and I want to take advantage of thinking about it beforehand.

I suck at romantic gestures (I am not creative), so being willing to plan still doesn’t get my very far.

  • Do something monthly and then combine it all after 4 years and give it to her (maybe add 2 months for an even 50 months). It could be writing a little postcard, or a note, or whatever would have sentimental meaning
  • Plan and save for a luxurious trip that has symbolic importance for the two of you, like where you proposed or first met
  • Make a scrapbook or photo album for each season and write a sentence under each photo that you stick in it

I enjoy romantic gestures and I've had success with them in my decade plus of marriage, FWIW. IMHO the key is not originality, but sincerity.

My wife did something really nice for me on my 30th birthday. She reached out to many friends, family, old acquaintances and had them write a little blurb about a special memory they had of me, then she bound it into a book with lots of old pictures.

She asked a few of my friends and siblings if they could make a list of people who I knew that would be good candidates, then reached out via Facebook, etc, and hounded until she got a ton. More of maybe a 1 year plan ahead than 4 years, but it was really meaningful to me and honestly it's kind of like, a personal relic.

Have you considered asking an LLM? I bet they would give great ideas, plus you can personalize it by providing extra info.

What's going on with Chrystia Freeland? Rats v sinking ship?

Why are the activists and politicians preoccupied with climate change when fighting pollution is more doable, easier to gather support for, actually fosters innovation and chances of reducing it - will meaningfully help with CO2 emissions anyway?

Have you read The Toxoplasma Of Rage? Things everyone agree on don't get much attention, it's just the way our societies are wired.

when fighting pollution is more doable, easier to gather support for, actually fosters innovation and chances of reducing it

Real pollution-fighting activists exist. But they are usually much less visible than the climate gasbags. And, gives as fighting pollution is pretty much normalized now, it doesn't gain more attention than any other case of malfeasance like fraud or theft. I mean, you need to do a real lot of it to be noticed, and usually it will be dealt with before it becomes big.

There also could be a possibility that having a big problem which is somebody else's fault but you can protest it and whine about it as much as you want, and blame literally everything on it - is actually much more attractive than solving small-scale, practical and solve-able problems? I mean, if you can just fix the emission of a local factory by upgrading its air filters and that's it - where's the moral superiority in that? Where's the damnation of soul-less capitalism? Where's the potential for annual lavish festivals where you can shmooze with Hollywood celebrities and vane billionaires? Most people want to be Warriors of Light, not utility inspectors.

Pollution gets plenty of attention. See the op-eds about how Trump is going to personally shit in your drinking water.

On the position page you linked the word "climate" appeared 9 times in 334 words, and the only reference to any other form of pollution was "quality of our air, water, and land." It begins and ends talking about climate change and trump not believing in climate change, and in the middle there's some stuff about climate change. That's the entire environment policy statement summary.

The interesting part is the backing down from the "Climate Crisis!" phasing that was so popular until recently. But they don't even mention any specific non-climate environmental issues. Nothing about fracking of course, but also nothing about sulphur, acid rain, lead, freon and the ozone layer, racist highway noise, deforestation, or endangered species (seriously, not a single spotted owl or polar bear in sight!). If you're young you have no idea how different this looks to the early 00s.

They've completely dropped the messaging on all of those things, and it seems like they only persist in the niches they do through bureaucratic inertia, and because they're still making money for some client group.

I agree that climate change gets the lion’s share of messaging, especially in outward-facing, soundbite-oriented places like that website. It has won the coveted position of shorthand for its whole cluster of related policy.

I don’t actually think that indicates loss of support for the old policies. More that their low-hanging fruit has been picked. Or, I guess, that the bureaucracy to do so has already been put in place.

when fighting pollution is more doable, easier to gather support for, actually fosters innovation and chances of reducing it - will meaningfully help with CO2

I don't think this is true. Can you elaborate on that?

The big CO2 producers in a modern economy (and even in a modern economy with significant heavy industry) are producing CO2 without adding much pollution otherwise. Gas turbines dump clean CO2 exhaust by design, and much of cement and chemical production also runs on natural gas. Coal plants have marched down the learning curve for 100 years, exhaust gas treatment is extensive and effective. The remaining steel mills still running blast furnaces instead of electric arc furnaces also already need to treat their exhaust.

The only semi-low hanging fruit I could think of is further cleaning up the diesels used in transport, construction and agriculture. But again, you can reduce pollution here a bit, but until batteries improve further, those processes will emit exactly as much CO2 as before you've reduced pollution.

And sure, we probably should flat-out ban two-strokes. But I doubt you'd even save 1% of global CO2, even if pollution in certain cities would improve noticeably. And objectively - both from a pollution an greenhouse gas perspective - we probably also should ban any and all large-scale livestock operations. But the effect on meat prices would be absurdly unpopular almost everywhere.

It will help. The more expensive you make bunker fuel/diesel/coal (and you make the companies producing them pay for storage of the mountains of sulfur for example) the more operators will look to other technologies or try to squeeze more productivity from the more expensive fuel. It will also put upward price pressure on lpg and natural gas where they can replace them. Look how li ion moved from exotic and expensive to disposable vapes in decade and a half. Free market is extremely capable of delivering solutions when someone puts the right problems.

Yeah, but those are all classic decarbonization measures, right? Yes, those work. But the premise was to use a pollution argument instead.

Unless you want to simply rename "decarbonization" into "reducing pollution" (and people will resist that, a gas turbine just doesn't produce enough black smoke or yellow water), this won't work. It's too easy to reduce visible pollution while keeping carbon emissions exactly the same.

I'm normally supportive of the stance that capitalism+innovation converges to most efficient outcomes, but that is true only for local contexts. Bunker fuel is just burnt in international waters and the world collectively shrugs and says 'fuck the fish'. Economics is one thing but absolution of responsibility does exist. The only reason there isnt a floating migrant fleet of slave-labour factories is that efficient capital planning beats out deregulation.

In the West, pollution has been getting better not worse. So it can't be an apocalyptic threat.

Climate change also can't be an apocalyptic threat on any reasonable timescale either (as seen in the IPCC reports) but it's easier to pretend that it is because it's a 'bad, getting worse' situation.

I don't think most people look at climate change narratives from first principles either, we've had 30 years of increasingly intense media indoctrination and prestige-class opinion-forming. It's all but locked in. Many people see Bjorn Lomberg and immediately think 'debunked/denier/paid-off/Newscorp shill'... They don't want to change their minds and so they can find some reason not to. I don't like changing my mind either. The Aztecs didn't doubt that you had to sacrifice humans on the altars, that's just what you do.

The Aztecs didn't doubt that you had to sacrifice humans on the altars, that's just what you do.

I keep coming back to this [folk theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_theorem_(game_theory), which points to a fucked up equilibrium where many/most Aztecs don't believe in human sacrifice, but believe they will be punished by others if they don't do it or punish others.

Have you ever heard the expression 'watermelon'? Green(environmentalist) on the outside, red(communist) on the inside. No doubt a few of these people are true believers(Greta seems to be), but most of them like environmentalism because they've already decided environmental prescriptions are good for other reasons.

Greta seems to be

Until she started talking about how fighting global warming is really about Palestine. The omnicause.

I believe because what many actually oppose is wealth (and differences in wealth) CO2 is just the best pretext that's far more popular.

Related to the SpaceX discussion in the CWT, can someone explain Starship's place in a mars program to a guy who never played KSP (but watched some videos)?

I see the 1st stage vehicle design as optimized for heavy surface to low orbit launches. The second stage is confusing, mixing atmospheric engines and heat shields with vac engines for fairly inefficient interplanetary burns. The whole thing looks more like Tintin's Lunar Adventure than any real mission I've seen designs for.

What am I missing here? Why is this better than launching a lightweight interplanetary-dedicated ship plus a smaller lander? Is the whole mars thing just hype for what's really a STO heavy lifter?

I see the 1st stage vehicle design as optimized for heavy surface to low orbit launches.

Nah. The 1st stage vehicle design is optimized for reusability. The staging velocity is much lower than you'd want to minimize fuel use, because that way it can fly back to the launch site easily enough, and fuel is cheap but time and operations complexity is expensive.

The second stage is confusing, mixing atmospheric engines and heat shields with vac engines for fairly inefficient interplanetary burns.

The heat shields are what it needs for reentry, and the atmospheric engines are what it needs for controlled landing, and those are what it needs for reusability. You're using the same pointless definition that most rocket design programs have: that "efficient" means "payload divided by fuel mass". But fuel is cheap, and the most meaningful definition of "efficient" is actually "payload divided by cost". If each SLS costs $4B to launch, it could have the highest fuel-efficiency quotient of any rocket ever in history before or since and yet its true efficiency would still be too low to ever be sustainable.

Why is this better than launching a lightweight interplanetary-dedicated ship plus a smaller lander?

A smaller lander means you need more landers. Approximately one hundred times more landers, if you compare the heaviest thing landed on Mars so far (Perserverence) with Starship payload capacity. Starship is gross overkill for putting a flag and a few footprints on Mars and then never going back, but it's about what you'd want as the minimal scale product for a large base or a small city.

STO heavy lifter

Did you mean TSTO? Part of the genius of the Starship design is the realization that, if you have a reusable two-stage-to-orbit design, you've basically also got a three-stage-to-Mars design, just by refueling the second stage and then using it as the third stage too. So instead of launching your big Mars transfer vehicle via a bigger second stage and a bigger-squared first stage, you can get rid of the "squared" level of scaling and just do more launches.

NASA designs avoided going anywhere near this in part because talking about orbital refueling used to be forbidden there. I'd love to place all the blame on a few folks like the former Senator of Alabama, but really once Congress started treating space as a jobs program, the idea of cutting costs was doomed already, and infighting over which costs were the most uncuttable was just icing on the cake.

Is the whole mars thing just hype for what's really a STO heavy lifter?

This, on the other hand, I can't entirely rule out. It would be incredibly shitty hype for investors, because "we're just going to plow our profits into a program that won't pay off in your lifetime" is an awful spiel for getting your hands on someone's retirement fund, but for employees it's been pretty effective hype, a big part of how they've been getting very talented idealistic young people to work very long hours with otherwise barely-competitive salaries.

I don't see how the math works out for a bait-and-switch at this point, though. Starship development wouldn't make sense as a purely greedy investment unless they really expect it to undercut Falcon 9 internal costs, which means a flight rate on the order of what they're pulling off today with Falcon 9, which means so much tonnage to orbit that they'll be able to continue the Mars side of the program as a loss leader. Even if Musk is secretly planning to pull an "aw, shucks, we're going to want to cash out most of those Starlink profits in our lifetimes after all", or he somehow gets pushed out by someone else who wants to change plans, they'd still want to earmark a dozen launches for Mars every so often just to keep attracting talent.

Compared to the moon, Mars is farther away and has a deeper gravity well.

This means that the craft has to be more substantial since the astronauts will be in there for quite a while. Also the lander needs to be more substantial since it has to escape more gravity.

The lightweight ship and small lander might not cut it.

SpaceX hasn't really explained the mars plan. They might be planning to assemble something in orbit and use a Starship as the lander.

SpaceX hasn't really explained the mars plan. They might be planning to assemble something in orbit and use a Starship as the lander.

The high-level details have been there for years. No orbital assembly, just orbital refueling. Multiple Starships as the lander(s), with cargo sent in the launch window ahead of crew so they can make sure consumables are there and refueling systems are working.

I hesitate to call this a "plan" since I don't expect it to survive contact with reality unchanged, but the changes are likely to be more along the lines of "wait to send many more cargo ships first, after some break and some get departure liftoff testing on Mars etc etc" or "redesign when Raptor turns out to be too powerful to land on unprepared Martian soil", not "orbital assembly". It would be kind of cool to see them tether two Starships together for artificial gravity in-flight, but that would be hard to combine with their "put the landing fuel tanks in between the crew quarters and the sun" plans to minimize radiation shielding weight.

My understanding was that the Mars rocket would be assembled in LEO from parts launched in Starships, and that a tanker configuration of Starship would be used to fuel it.

Nobody has this plan. The SpaceX manned-Mars plan is that the crew/cargo configurations of Starship are the Mars rockets, that will each send ~100T to Mars after refueling in LEO from a tanker filled by several reusable tanker-configuration Starship launches. The non-SpaceX Mars probe plans are the same as they've always been, to launch <4T to Mars directly via an expendable upper stage and a separate aerobraking shell. NASA's pre-SpaceX manned-Mars proposal was generally to assemble a Mars Transfer Vehicle in LEO, from parts launched on whatever heavy-lift was politically favored at the time (I see 5 Ares V launches in the 2009 study, for example), to put 80-90T on Mars ... but the cost was always in the $100B+ range and I wouldn't call any of the studies a "plan". Looks like the latest idea was to do (relatively minimal, thanks to SLS Block 2 plus some handwaving about nuclear-electric propulsion) assembly in lunar orbit instead?

So, what are you reading?

I’m still on Future Shock, 12 Commandments and Closing of the American Mind. Picking up Al-Ghazali’s The Book of Knowledge, which so far is a lot of quotes, and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, which is more interesting and lucid than I expected.

The Great Divorce by CS Lewis. I want to upload a review of it but dunno if I should post it on the Wednesday thread or start a substack where I post reviews of the books I am reading.

The Outlaws by Ernst von Salomon.

At the part I'm at he's death squading socialists in post WW1 Germany. But confusingly some of his squad mates are secretly socialists and also he hung out with socialists a lot hoping they had the fervor needed to reshape Germany. At least they weren't listless quitters like lots of other people at the time. Some strange confusion where they are killing socialists (and women and children who get in the way) but also are very socialist-curious.

There's a good bit about desperately fighting in urban combat and then wandering into a part of town not currently fighting and seeing people are enjoying themselves in restraunts and prostitutes teasing him and his squad. As though they can't hear the rifle and machine gun fire a few blocks away.

I picked up a few books at the bookstore yesterday. Wind And Truth by Sanderson, On Living And Dying Well by Cicero, Blood Of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski, and an illustrated selection of Hagakure passages. The last one is really nice in particular, it is bound in traditional Chinese fashion and has lots of Japanese illustrations to go with. The only thing I'm not stoked about is that it's only a selection of passages, not the whole thing - but it's such a nice edition that I still enjoy it. Have only started Hagakure so far, but I'll start the others soon enough.

Blood Of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski

Be prepared that the series change fundamentally in style and tone past this point.

I've been kind of afraid of that. I enjoyed the short story collections quite a bit, but with the shift to full novels I know I might not enjoy it as much. But we'll see.

I just finished The NHL: 100 Years of On-Ice Action and Boardroom Battles, by D'Arcy Jenish. Last year I found a copy of David Harris's The League: The Rise and Decline of the NFL, and was captivated by it. It's a history of the power struggle among NFL ownership that culminated with Al Davis moving the Raiders to Los Angeles and Pete Rozelle's authority as league commissioner severely challenged. But it's also a history of ownership and the business side of the league from roughly 1974 to 1982, with the first section covering the "status quo ante" as it had developed since 1960 and a final postscript covering the three years between the immediate aftermath of the move and the time the book went to press. It's a remarkable story, covering the entire history in great detail over its 640 or so pages.

I was looking for something in the same vein and The NHL seemed like it had promise. As a much shorter book (fewer than 400 pages) covering a much longer time period (1917 to 2011), I wasn't expecting the same level of detail. And boy, I did not get the same level of detail. I wasn't really expecting it for the early years of the league, as the author admits that the source material is thin, all the major figures are dead, and the NHL wouldn't give him access to what they had. So when the book seemed to be breezing through the Calder era and including a lot of padding, I sort of nodded along, figuring that by the time we got to, say, the 1960s and the expansion era things would start to pick up a bit. They did, but things were still moving at a pretty good clip, and without records or living witnesses, the task probably wasn't made much easier.

It's once we get to the John Ziegler era that the disappointment started to set in, since he interviewed Ziegler for the book. It seems as though once Ziegler put out all the fires Clarence Campbell left in his wake, very little happened for another decade. Once we get to the Bettman era, though, it takes even more of a nosedive; these are the years I remember paying attention to the league, and while he does a decent job of pointing out all the high points (expansion, lockouts, franchise relocation, etc.), there's not much here that someone buying a book on the subject doesn't already know.

Take the 1994 lockout, for instance. It was the first major work stoppage in league history, it lasted 104 days, and 468 games were lost. This merits fewer than four pages. It is immediately followed by discussion of the Nordiques' relocation to Colorado, which doesn't even get one full page. Major stories of the 1990s, such as John Spano buying the Islanders despite having no money and the Penguins' 1998 bankruptcy (which resulted in Lemieux taking ownership of the team) are not discussed at all. I understand that you can't include everything due to space considerations, but when he spends three pages talking about the on-ice exploits of the 1980s Oilers, and elsewhere discusses the dynamics of various playoff series, it seems disconcerting in a book ostensibly about the business side of the game.

And it gets even worse from there. Once we get past the 04–05 lockout, the final chapter is dedicated to what are evidently magazine articles copied and pasted into the book. There's a section where he discusses the state of the league circa 2012 that centers around an interview with Gary Bettman. This is followed by a detailed description of the War Room in Toronto and a discussion of what's available on the NHL website. Even in the early parts of the book, he leaves threads hanging. For instance, he talks about how competitive balance problems in the early 1950s led the league to institute a draft, but since the good teams wanted to protect their farm systems it was compromised so the losers didn't have access to the really good prospects. As Chekov said, though, if you introduce a gun in the first act, you'd better fire it in the third — the draft is never mentioned again. Obviously, at some point the draft evolved into what it is today where every team has its pick of junior players, but I have no idea how this actually came to be since Jenish forgets about it. This is especially maddening when he's talking about the 70s expansion teams trading draft picks or building through draft picks and I'm left wondering what the system even is at this point. There's stuff like this throughout the book. He also makes one critical omission; when we get to Clarence Campbell's retirement, he chalks it up to his advanced age and inability to keep up with the crises the league was facing. What he doesn't mention is that Campbell announced he was stepping down shortly after he discovered he was under investigation for bribing a senator.

All in all, it's not a bad book by any means, especially if you're just looking for a breezy capsule history of the business end of the NHL, but I'm not sure who it is for. Anyone reading this book already knows 75% of everything that's covered after 1992. Anyone who doesn't probably isn't interested in a book about the business end of pro hockey. Once I read a book on a subject I'm usually ready to move on to something else unrelated, but I just started The Instigator: How Gary Bettman Remade the NHL and Changed the Game Forever because The NHL left me so unsatisfied. It seems promising, but at only 276 pages, I'm not expecting miracles.

I have 0 philosophy background and have really struggled with Beyond Good and Evil. I think i must be missing some key context. Claude has helped a bit but i also have a difficult time trusting that it's giving me the right summaries.

Mind and Cosmos was another one that I just could not grok. I'll have to keep pressing on. But sometimes it feels like I'm reading a book on algebra when i never learned what addition and subtraction were or something

I can't speak for the current quality of Claude, but if you are struggling with the context of a philosophical work and would like a lucid, analytic-inflected explanation of how academic philosophers see it, your best bet is generally the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - hope that is helpful.

(PS - SEP does reflect the mainstream academic interpretation of philosophers, which comes with its own biases, such as the ludicrous claim that Nietzsche did not have a political philosophy. Think of it as a good teacher's opinion rather than gospel truth)

Yeah that is super helpful

Just started A Memory of Empire. it’s amazing so far.

You meant "A Memory called Empire" by Arkady Martine?

Yes

Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen. Kind of neat so far, feels like Niven but updated for a 2020 view of the future instead of a 1970 view.

Dresden files

What translation are you reading for Nietzsche?

Zimmern, although it looks like the standard one is Kaufmann.

What are some unconventional growth industries, motteizeans? I’ve picked the funeral industry due to population aging, any others?

The term, I believe, is mottizen, from denizen.

I like motteizean though, very Italian.

The funeral industry is low growth. In real terms it will grow what, 1 or 2 percent per year? High growth industries, like crypto or AI can 100x in size over a decade.

Sure, low growth. But predictable growth.

Okay, I can do better.

World airplane travel has increased by about 5% per year for several decades. The number of people flying is increasing much faster than the number of people dying.

Not sure how to make money on this though.

Not sure how to make money on this though.

Neither is the airline industry.

Not sure how to make money on this though.

Airport transfers

So, governments?

Despite the current new administration, energy transition is a good bet. Decarbonization, electrification, GenAI. Energy companies will continue with low carbon and distributed generation buildout for the next 30 years. Nuclear maybe get little bit of investment, but I expect it will not be material to overall new generation. Gas turbines will be the backbone but expect more renewables regardless of fed policy.

The problem with green investment seems to me to be that is it is so polluted with political money that you can't use market as a signal for anything. I.e. everybody invests in, I don't know, solar panels (just random example) and then it turns out the model is not viable, and all the political money is burned, which nobody (among politicians) cares about, and your money is burned with them. Sure, if US were a dictatorship like China, you could follow the political money just relying on inertia, but in the US the agenda could change every 4 years, and some investments may be so stupid that they don't survive even if the government wants them to. There will be viable projects too, the question is how you separate viable from unviable ones in a distorted market?

There's a fundamental issue with industrial policy where it's justified by government mandates and subsidies allowing nascent industries to develop locally. But once the justification for the power is made, they forget all about it and just throw money at things. Like how the economic concept of a non-exclusive, non-rivalrous "public good" gets repurposed to mean "goods I want the public to pay for"

Giving people money to buy solar panels from China didn't produce a local industry, it just gave certain people a ton of money at the expense of other people. Solar might be a great investment, but nothing about the government's policy did anything to influence that except add more slack for malinvestment and the nightmare of scams residential solar loans turned into.

Ironically the Biden tariffs and manufacturer subsidies are an actual piece of industrial policy, but decades too late and at odds with literally every other government policy pushing manufacturing off shore. Ironically harming the natural process of solar adoption more than.ending all solar subsidies would have.

Tempering this, most of the money in renewables is in shady grants, kickback schemes, and running scams. It's like investing in the Chinese stock market as a foreigner: all the value is harvested by 5 layers of insiders, and the iShares China ETF you can buy has only gained 20% since 2012.
(I seriously didn't realize it was that bad before looking it up for this post)

The profitable way to "invest in renewables" is by getting your non-profit a $50 million "inflation reduction act" grant to identify minoritized stakeholders and leverage indigenous community engagement for the equitable siting of utility solar (run an extortion and money laundering racket with ARM lawyers and a casino company, funneling kickbacks to certain political parties)

And you've got to be in the inner circle to keep the money flowing. Owning a residential solar installer has been a gold mine for years, but suddenly next year you're paying 50-100% tariffs so that some other guy's overpriced US solar panel factory can profit by getting a special tariff waiver on imported components

I didn’t realize this was an investment question. You are correct that there are not many good public companies out there for this industry. You’ve got scams on the low end and private capital at the high end.

I thought this was for career advice.

I mean, I am up for taking my HVAC contractor exam. If you know of a way to make money with that in the 'energy transition' I'm at least willing to hear it.

Heat pump installations?

Just to piggyback on this a bit. In Sweden, the median net profit margin for wind power operators has been less than -60 -38% the last 15 years, and its getting worse as time goes on, for what should be obvious reasons. The largest wind power farm in Europe is having a net profit margin of less than -400%.

This is in a market environment with substantial subsidies, favourable regulatory conditions, lots of hydro to combine wind with, manufacturing of wind power components being heavily subsidized by the Chinese state, not having to have a demolition fund and wind power not paying for any of the massive system effects it has due to intermittence and other related issues.

All new wind power projects in Sweden have been stopped by developers and they now want both the state to pay up towards ~30% of the cost of the parks and getting price guarantees like what is proposed for new nuclear plants, despite the well known and unsolved issues with intermittency and the like.

This is with record high power prices in northern Europe.

There are of course people making money here and that's the companies designing and constructing the wind power farms. Its always funny when there is some article saying something like "These people want to build a massive wind power farm!" and its just some project planning company looking for investors and journalists being taken for a ride (possibly willingly, possibly getting paid for running a covert ad).

Do you have more about this?

AFAIK, onshore wind in particular is by far the cheapest form of electricity available, most decent locations should be well below $20/MWh today.

Are Sweden's wind parks doing so poorly because those are all first-generation off-shore parks, using experimental turbine foundations and giant turbine prototypes (where scaling effects from mass production have not kicked in yet)? Has Sweden massively overbuilt wind capacity without investing in storage, and now the wind-parks collectively ruin the spot market for each other on windy days?

In theory, onshore wind parks are cheap to built and cheap to run. Wind in Sweden should have a capacity factor >40%, with barely any hours per year where it goes below 10%. In an ideal location like this, wind should even beat solar (in an ideal location) for the next couple of years - and solar is now cheap as dirt.

The energy in the wind scales as the cube of the wind speed. It looks like it ought to be the square of the wind speed, because kinetic energy is one half m v squared. But what is the mass here? It is the mass of air passing the wind turbine, so that is proportional to the wind speed.

This makes intermittency a huge problem. When the when is blowing at half speed, you only get one eighth of the energy. Imagine planning for low winds by over provisioning by a factor of two. You have built twice as many wind turbines as you need for a day with the designed for wind strength, expecting that you will make it through low wind days without black outs. But when the wind strength dips to 79% of design nominal, you are already down to half power, taking up the entire margin provided by over provisioning. The wind drops to 78% and you have to start shedding load :-( Or at least drawing on storage.

I keep seeing critics of wind power asking "what do you do on calm days?". That is a bad question. It leads to boosters and critics both worrying about the occasional calm day when the air is still. But we need to worry about the half strength days. And those are common place days when the wind is still blowing and we expect the turbines to turn and the electricity to stay on.

A credible wind power system would have eight fold over provision, and weeks of storage. The occasional day when the wind is above design strength all day would be a cause for celebration: we have captured a weeks worth of energy in a day! And we could start feeling that we had a secure energy supply. We are nowhere near facing the challenge of intermittency nor the expense of intermittency.

The energy in the wind scales as the cube of the wind speed.

This is true in theory, and a decent model for small wind turbines in relatively slow winds.

It's not useful for large modern turbines (let's say 3 MW and up), since it assumes that higher wind speed automatically results in faster rotor RPM. But since rotor RPM is critically limited by blade tip velocity, a large turbine reaches max RPM in ultra light wind. After that point, power scales linear with wind speed. See this power curve, first example I found

Add to that, that a large turbine reaches nameplate capacity at around 10 m/s wind speed (and goes linear at around 3 m/s, shuts down at around 30 m/s), and it's really not that much of a problem in a modern park.

In short, oversupply (but there are other problems as well) and its not limited to Sweden, it afflicts all surrounding countries. Its both a local, national and regional problem. Although there are some smaller areas and projects are profitable where market penetration is low and there are areas where wind could be profitable but the local popu

Newer projects aren't meaningfully less negatively profitable than older farms due in part to lessened subsidizes but mostly due to the underlying problem of oversupply.

Now, what constitutes oversupply? In Sweden about 20% of the electricity currently comes from wind and this in an energy system where 35-45% comes from hydro and effectively constitutes storage for at least parts of the year.

This is as far as I'm willing to engage on this topic at this time, I might make a top level post in the main thread after Christmas if I get time with more information and sources. Everything is public access through company annual reports and the like.

Has Sweden massively overbuilt wind capacity without investing in storage,

As far as I'm aware no scalable storage is even remotely financially viable, even when it's a byproduct of some other related industry and all non-neglible projects in Europe have been cancelled as far as I'm aware (not that anything got out of the planning stages anyway).

Grid storage may not be economical without subsidies, but a ton of it is nevertheless being built in California and Texas.

You’re right that grid scale storage is not very economical, but I was thinking a bit about this: doesn’t Norway have good geography for large scale hydro storage? Basically, dam up the fjords, and pump them high with water.

This is as far as I'm willing to engage on this topic at this time, I might make a top level post in the main thread after Christmas if I get time with more information and sources.

Please do, I look forward to it!

Currently, I'm still bullish on wind. I think there's a reason why the Chinese are installing massive new capacity. Also, I've seen forecasts that global Li-Ion production capacity will be 8 TWh next year, several hundred percent percent above demand. If this is true, the bottom will drop out of the market and grid scale battery storage will suddenly become very feasible.

Can you post this in the CWR tomorrow?

Cruises are amazing. How many people here have been on one?

I've been on a cruise with my wife (back before we were married). It was really nice, although I did get horrible motion sickness. We were on a 3-day cruise from Miami to Nassau and back, and I would like to do a longer cruise - but I also worry about the motion sickness aspect. I've heard great things about the patches, but would kinda like to try it on a shorter cruise before I commit to a longer one.

I've done several, most fun was an Atlantic Crossing Miami to Amsterdam.

I've been twice, with extended family (as a teen). I think they get too much of a bad rap. It's an ok hotel with good-ish amenities that takes you to a couple of cities. It's not the best value you can get for a comfortable vacation, and definitely not for tourism, but if you want something that straddles the line, you can do worse.

I hear bad things about "cruise people", but I think that's an "Americans have infinity money" thing.

Exactly!!! It’s basically a luxury resort that has to entertain you all the time because nobody can leave.

Also the cost is extremely solid if you get deals, we ended up getting a free cabin which is insane.

I do admit a lot of the people on the ship annoy me though. Luckily I don’t have to interact with them, but I feel for the staff.

I assume "cruise people" means the crowd that retires to the ships and moves on to the next sailing when they finish?

I did a 2-week to Alaska, and distinctly remember being on deck watching this stunning scenery go by and being utterly perplexed by the sight of multiple tables full of people instead fully engrossed in their bridge/cribbage card games and pina coladas, not even looking up out the window. Like, why did you come here if you don't want to see this?

I wanted to ask them, but it's not my place to ask nagging parent-questions of people twice my age, so I let it be.

They've probably been on the route a few times already.

I did the Viking Rhine Getaway, and I've been on a cruise to Alaska

Ooh yeah Alaska seems fun. And awesome. How did you like them?

I was around thirteen-years-old when I went to Alaska. Being with a group of strangers my own age on a boat for a week was a unique experience. Whale-watching was the highlight of the vacation. Whales breach the water quite frequently.

The Viking cruise was more recent. River boats are much smaller than ocean cruise liners, so the emphasis is on excursions rather than onboard entertainment. There is much to see on the banks of the Rhine. It's very nice to stand on the top deck and watch the scenery go by.

What's the deal with the drones?

Are there even any drones?

I have done zero seconds of research on this but my money is on mass hysteria / hallucination event

Given how unconcerned the US government is, I think it's clear that that belong to some branch of the US government.

What drones? Can you be more specific in top-level post? At least link some useful summary?

What's the deal with the drones?

Is about war in Ukraine or what?

Are there even any drones?

Probably no then. Unless it is some really big-brain take.

https://www.fox29.com/news/drone-mothership-claim-new-info-about-irans-drone-activity

Based on this we can say that New Jersey Congressman lied (or repeated lies/confused babbling) about supposed Iranian droneship of the coast of USA.

Silly, but still below old classics like risk of island tipping over.

Also, he may have seen some drones. Or planes. Or stars. Or street lamps. Or something else.

Why this would be of interest to anyone?

UFO people claims at least have some (usually lame, but still) backstory with all this alien stuff.

I’ve heard a few theories:

-Ayylmao invasion fleet. This one doesn’t have too much traction since most of the drones seem to be pretty conventional and don’t exhibit any of the physics breaking movements or properties of other UAP encounters like the 2014 navy sighting.

-Government Nuke sniffers. This theory came from an engineer on tiktok. He thinks the drones could be looking for the radiation signature of a nuclear device that was smuggled into the United States. This might explain why the federal government seems so tight lipped about it, so as not to create panic.

-Foreign adversary. The drones belong to Russia/Iran/China and are being launched from a submarine carrier off the coast of New Jersey for reconnaissance or to intentionally spread fear

-Military Test: The drones are US military and need to be tested for urban operations, which is why they’re in New Jersey and not somewhere in the Nevada desert.

It seems like most of them are just regular planes, in a region with multiple large commercial airports and right on the route to several others?

Completely false. Some of them are stars.

Key word being “most of them”. There are a non insignificant number of very strange things that people are observing.

They're pretty clearly just regular drone exercises by the American intelligence corps. Not entirely sure what the purpose of the operations are.

It is a useful distraction from other things that would likely be in the overton window, though.

I know this is a rat forum, but I’m still surprised people are so incredulous about non-conventional explanations. I’m not necessarily suggesting that these are extraterrestrials, but it seems like there are a mix of three categories of things being seen:

  1. Misidentified fixed wing aircraft/helicopters and lens flares.
  2. These large drones with novel characteristics
  3. Other orbs, lights, or unexplained things.

You seem quite certain about what these things are. I’m going to guess you haven’t looked at it too closely are are either repeating others analysis or just playing the adds and speculating a likely explainstion.

It seems to me that the government/media/expert class have no problem either outright lying or are happy to just be flat out wrong.

It would be more interesting to talk about what’s new about this latest episode - because there are some novel aspects to it.

I’m still surprised people are so incredulous about non-conventional explanations

Because when I was younger and had more time I looked into several such cases and it turned out that people advancing non-conventional explanations were some combination of lying, stupid, confused, on hallucinogens, shitposting, unable to distinguish UFO from Milky Way or Sirius and so on.

Give me some serious proof or even hint of proof.

because there are some novel aspects to it

Then clearly list them if you want people to bother.

After spending few times on investigating UFO claims and discovering that it was waste of time induced by liars/incompetent/trolls I am not inclined to waste even more time, I prefer it to waste on something novel. It makes as much sense to investigate this as follow up on "You have received a donation of Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars ($500,000) from" emails.

In fact, following on scam emails likely has greater payoff. Some people managed to scam scammers or at least waste their time.

Please, do do a full write-up on why they are not, in fact, intelligence ops, and try and change my mind.

I'd much rather be reading about the netanyahu trials and discussing israeli due process, however.

You are welcome to do a big write up. I'm interested but too feverish right now to do original research.

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