TowardsPanna
4hr ago
Wondering where I should try to move to... Will there actually be any safe spots on earth in a few decades?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
4hr ago
Because the conclusions of any given paper are the same "Climate change is worse than we thought in some new way, it's caused more by human activity than we thought, we're all going to die even sooner than we thought, and if there's any chance to avert catastrophe it's in turning over control of all energy usage to boards of people like me who will be stewards for the common good." If this is true, we've already heard and we don't need any more. If it's false, it's even more useless.
TIRM
4hr ago
Yes and they understand identifying as African American or native when you aren't really is consequence-free. Conservatives can mock Elizabeth Warren all they want, her progressive supporters don't care that she is a fake Indian.
quiet_NaN
4hr ago
So your claim is "Iran has the bomb but it is useless to them".
So why did they build it? Is it just a stepping stone to the hydrogen bomb?
Also, it is not widely claimed that Iran has bombs, which would require some explanation. Does Mossad know? If yes, then why do they not make that claim? How can it be both in Israel's and Iran's interests to keep the world in the dark? If not, then how were they able to hide it?
Does the US know? Am I supposed to believe that Trump could avoid blabbering about it? Was Trump's bombing targeting finished bombs, or was it just a charade and if so for whose benefits?
that the half-ton of 60% HEU could have be easily boosted to weapons grade by removing the third of lighter uranium atoms from it (it'd only take days)
This seems plausible. 400kg of 60% U-235 corresponds to roughly 240kg pure U-235. If you start from natural uranium, you would have needed to process 34 tons to get that much U-235. If your bottleneck are centrifuges rather than raw uranium and fluorine (which seems likely), you will likely have processed twice that much because squeezing out the last 0.1% of U-235 is just not worth it.
Naively, I would expect that separation efficiency is proportional to the product of the fraction of both species, so the easiest percentage gain is going from 49.5% to 50.5%. However, you do not have to go back to 99.3%, because 85% is enough for a weapon. Plus you are dealing with much less material.
(Actually, the WP article on SWU contains the relevant formula. Producing 400kg 60% enriched U takes at least 34t SW. Splitting that into 140kg 85% and 260kg 46% takes about 140kg SW, or just 0.4% of the total separation work. Even separating it to the point where your tails are just 0.7% again will just take 1.3t SW.)
There is still some overhead, probably. Perhaps the Uranium is not stored as UF6 but in a more reduced form, and it certainly will take processing after it is sufficiently enriched. The mechanics of a bomb can be prototyped with depleted uranium, but at the end of the day you either need to test your device or trust your computer models. With regard to the latter "someone falsified a fission cross-section in literature" seems like an unlikely story, but so does "someone hacked the air-gapped Iranian centrifuge network".
TowardsPanna
5hr ago
Like leaving a beaten opponent with one or two crappy cities in Civilization V. They'll denounce you at every turn for the rest of the game.
NunoSempere
5hr ago
Yeah, SMOC reversal seems like a proof of concept for AMOC reversal.
vorpa-glavo
5hr ago
While I fall somewhere in the "state capacity libertarianism" and "liberaltarian" spectrum, I would say my main objection to naive libertarianism is the problem of petty tyrants.
I think there's a sense in which libertarians mostly ignore the ways that a local bully with a lot of property and social influence can make a person's life a living hell. If we live in a Dickensian libertarian utopia, what exactly stops bosses from treating their employees like crap? If the bankers refuse to give you credit because of some immutable trait of yours, how are you supposed to build wealth? If everyone in town refuses to hire someone who looks or talks like you, how are you supposed to make a living?
At best, I think the libertarian just hopes that society ends up supporting a diverse enough set of viewpoints that somewhere there will be a boss that isn't crappy, somewhere there will be a bank willing to take on more perceived risk, and somewhere there will be a person willing to follow the financial incentives and hire you.
But I think similar to the old financial dictum that "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", there's a societal corollary that "Petty tyrants can make your life hell longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, the bigotry or social censure of a petty tyrant and their supporters ends up "irrational" from an economic perspective, but that can still create situations like those that necessitated black motorists creating the Green Book to help them find gas stations, restaurants and stores that were willing to serve their kind.
If the libertarian response to a black motorist who wants to use the government to make more spaces open for them is just, "Don't worry, it is in their financial interest to serve you, in the long run they'll be out-competed by the gas stations, restaurants and hotels that do serve black people", then a part of me feels like the response is incomplete.
A similar situation emerges with the treatment of untouchables in India. Even without law, people of higher casts often don't want to be in the same room or even have the shadow of an untouchable touch them. How were the untouchables supposed to end that situation in a libertarian utopia? In the real world, a lot of the way it happened is the Indian government using men with guns to integrate untouchables in schools, the same way it happened in the United States.
I'm curious if a more traditional libertarian can point to success stories of an oppressed underclass becoming a normal, accepted part of society without government intervention to force the petty tyrants to comply. I'm a little unclear on how a libertarian watchman state where all of the government enforcers are racist/sectarian/whatever, ever stops being bigoted. If you belong to a class of people whose de facto status is that you can be lynched or murdered and the local government will look the other way, is it not sometimes worth it to have a larger government that sends in men with guns to stop the local government from letting people get away with murder?
WandererintheWilderness
5hr ago
Many kinds of scientists are irrationally prone to thinking their particular specialty is the most important thing evah, but AI risk is still a real thing, space exploration is still a real thing, deadly viruses are still a real thing, etc. I think the same is obviously true of the climate. Global warming isn't going to literally set us all on fire by 2035 but climate change is still an ongoing phenomenon with massive global implications and it needs to be studied. So long as you don't follow them on X, I think most scientists still produce more light than heat, if you'll forgive the expression.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
5hr ago
But there's literally no reason for it to be doing that, either, when there is definitive information, easily available for reference. Its information it should never get wrong, in practice.
Yeah this is something that gets me about the frequent code-based hallucinations too. The things will make up non-existent APIs when the reference docs are right there. It does seem like it wouldn't be hard to hook up a function that checks "does this actually exist". I assume it must not actually be that simple, or they would've done it by now. But we'll see what they can do in the future.
Paging the actual Australians here, since I have no idea.
But if I were an aboriginal rights activist trying to win as much as possible, I think I would push the argument that deciding exactly how ownership is distributed amongst aborigines is a detail that only becomes relevant once it is correctly admitted that ownership does in fact belong to the aborigines, and that quibbling over downstream details is a ploy to avoid ceding the base point.
If there were no clear institutions to inherit the rights of aborigines (I would argue) then a trust or a parliament or an advisory body could easily be set up. Something like the Scottish parliament, say, or the Norwegian oil depository.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
5hr ago
Iran could threaten the use of a salted bomb on the grounds of the Temple Mount, maximizing radioactive contamination. The ultra-religious have enormous political influence in Isael. This would act as deterrence in a way that targeting a major city would not, while minimizing loss of life. Al-Aqsa isn’t super important for Shia Muslims, but the Temple Mount actually needs to be the place of construction for the Third Temple.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
That or they’re employed in one of a variety of non-w2 scenarios.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Because it’s ’the End is nigh! Pay attention to me!’ Doomsday ascetic attention whoring.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
I speak Spanish, French, and Latin. It’s just barely plausible that he can understand Spanish spoken deliberately slowly that way but French? Come on.
OliveTapenade
5hr ago
I might suggest that one of the reasons why native activism in Australia is so maximalist and the demands so bombastic is that there are apparently no documents or conventions that spell out their obligations and the limits of their sovereignty. So native activists can insist that their due is the moon, and there's no way for this to be effectively rebutted without denying any concept of native political power altogether.
Yes, I think this part is probably correct. There is no actual framework to negotiate from, and in effect Aboriginal demands rest entirely on what they're able to guilt the greater Australian society into giving them. If I were feeling suspicious I'd suspect that recent attempts to formalise the relationship with mainstream Australia are motivated in part by the realisation that larger and larger parts of that society are now made of migrants from Asia, and migrants from Asia do not feel guilt about Aboriginals at all.
To the rest of your post, I appreciate all the detail about Native American history, but I do think that on the broader level it's true that much of Australia's most toxic progressive activism is imported from the US. It's just not directly imported from Native American activism, which we are largely ignorant of and do not care about. (Though "the Americans have treaties with Natives" was absolutely a card that gets played over here when Treaty comes up.) However, we did have, for instance, a copycat BLM movement inspired by the American one, which focus on indigenous deaths in custody.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Counterpoint- while Israël has plenty of crazy people in it, they don’t yet have the critical mass to trade Tel Aviv for the destruction of Iran. And if they ever do get that critical mass, the ‘extermination of Israël’ will not stop them because they believe building high rises in specific patches of desert will change the metaphysical structure of reality so Israël can’t lose.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Ok, Cherokee and Navajo independence are absolutely uncontroversial in the US. The reservations are just uncontroversially sucky places but everyone tolerates them having casinos as a loophole and understands Indians with the means to live elsewhere do so. It’s not very cucked.
Ok, I have a perhaps stupid question. But my impression is that unlike Amerinds, who often have actual tribes and in some cases a continuation of the old tribal government, aboriginal Australians absolutely do not, only the names remain in most cases. So who would be the actual people that own the land and can overrule the Australian federal government? @RandomRanger @OliveTapenade
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
6hr ago
I guess I just don’t see a way in which property rights aren’t a social project.
Do you? If so, do you have the time to explain your point of view?
crushedoranges
6hr ago
I said no such thing, you set up a false dichotomy. Vegans can call slaughterhouses concentration camps and although there are superficial similarities it is ultimately not a true comparison. The same is true for libertarianism, because collective action in the form of violence (either directly through force or indirectly through coercion) is a normal and trivial thing.
And in a postmodern, Foucaultian sense, I suppose this is tyranny and murder and kidnapping. In this case, I will take personal responsibility, as a individual, to assert my social project of throwing people who assert naive libertarianism into the wood chipper: as a collection of pederasts, drug addicts, and tax evaders who do nothing but redefine perfectly normal things and call it injustice.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
6hr ago
However, the proper comparisons here are between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. On those terms I feel like Australia is arguably the least grovelling. All three other Anglo colonies already have treaties with indigenous peoples that make those peoples semi-autonomous. Australia is the only one that doesn't, and the Voice was roundly rejected by the Australian people, which tells me that actual grassroots support for this is pretty low.
I don't know that this really demonstrates an understanding of what the Indian treaty system does in the United States or its historical context.
It's not about being smug, but the situation in the US is remarkably different from the other Anglo colonies. In US history, the concept of treaties with various tribes developed essentially as a way to take tribes out of their land -- the point was "here's a treaty that gives us your land and requires you to leave it and go towards land we consider less valuable." The point of the treaties was they gave a legal veneer for the goal of conquest: we didn't take the land, they gave it to us fair and square. Sometimes this was better, and sometimes worse; every American kid learns about the Trail of Tears.
It's for that reason that any concept of Indian sovereignty above and beyond simply the tribal governments and their reservation land is dead in the water, though some activists still try. The concept in US law is "dependent nations"; the US government has historically seen Indian tribes as completely subsistent upon US sovereignty, but with special carve-outs that make them similar in some ways to states. The fact that tribes have self-governing is kind of a point in federal power above state power, not so much that tribal governments are massively powerful. Only the national government constitutionally has the right to control Indian affairs and make treaties with tribes.
It's true that in the US there are Indian reparation programs and lots of federal funding. But a lot of this is very token, and doesn't help anyone all that much. And there's little or no calls for expanded reparations programs and land acknowledgements are rather rare; black political activism sucks all the oxygen out of the air for anything like that, and for a lot of people the situation for American Indians is basically "out of sight, out of mind."
Land acknowledgments are becoming slightly more common, but only among progressive activist groups, and essentially never with actual native involvement: there's no American equivalent to "welcome to country." Because in the American context, such a thing is incoherent. You say that this stuff is the result of importing American culture war into Australia, but as far as I can tell the land acknowledgement stuff in the US, such as it exists, is the exact opposite.
The two big culture war flashpoints for native affairs have basically been "should they be called American Indians or Native Americans?" which among actual Indians is a generational thing; older tribal members prefer "Indian", younger ones prefer "Native American." The other one is more of a culture war flashpoint in Oklahoma, specifically, but a Supreme Court case said that the five tribes of Oklahoma were never disestablished, and angered a lot of non-Indians in Oklahoma. But the point is that Indian sovereignty is limited to the reservations, and this is spelled out and a matter of consensus.
I think the idea that a proper-noun Treaty or some level of self-government for natives is the high-water-mark of native activism is an importation of Australian political categories upon other countries where they're not relevant. Actually, it surprises me that Australia doesn't have any sort of treaty system with aboriginals and the Torres Strait groups, that clarifies sovereignty and makes it clear what the limits of native power are and are not! I might suggest that one of the reasons why native activism in Australia is so maximalist and the demands so bombastic is that there are apparently no documents or conventions that spell out their obligations and the limits of their sovereignty. So native activists can insist that their due is the moon, and there's no way for this to be effectively rebutted without denying any concept of native political power altogether.
I understand that "aboriginals are just like you and me" is the conservative view of Australian politics, and it follows that any political representation for them is controversial. But the US view is that tribal governments exist, and so there's no need for actual political representation for them. The need for Treaty is forestalled by the existence of treaties.
In the US, tribal governments petition the federal government to do things, and maybe they do them, maybe they don't. But there is no widespread call for, say, a congressional seat. Or a "Voice." Their voice is their own tribal government, which is dependent upon the whims of the federal government and sometimes the courts.
So, I think if we're comparing "who is most concerned about native activism in their country," and we look at one where natives have limited autonomy, clearly spelled out territorial limits (in places like the helldirt of New Mexico and the plains of Oklahoma -- "out of sight, out of mind"), and formal dependence upon federal whims, and then one where the government proposed for a public vote the idea of a formal advisory panel for indigenous political activism which even in its most unclear form won 40% of the vote, and natives are sometimes treated as the quasi-spiritual owners of the whole Country with spiritual welcomes that open meetings like a national anthem... yeah, I'm going to go with the first one as the one that cares less.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Is it possible the body writing this is full of true believers who actually think they’ll get all this crap?
WandererintheWilderness
6hr ago
Why don't you think that climate science is useful science?
TowardsPanna
6hr ago
So the SMOC reversal will probably lead to an AMOC reversal and us eurotrash are all going to starve and freeze to death? Cool...
A common thread I saw on the gazanow telegram channel (now deleted) was that Hamas was uploading their livestream of civilian massacres not for goreporn likes, but to prove the IDF was a hollow shell without the USA and that the entire rotten edifice was kicked open so the rest of the arab world, especially West Bank but Hezbollah and Syria too, could roll in to clean out the yahudi with no effort. I still don't know if this was a particularly inspired attempt to justify the gleeful livestreamed executions and rape aftermaths as serving some strategic reason, or if it was a sincerely held belief that Israel was nothing without the USA and Hamas had struck the singular crippling blow, or y'know, both.
The one thing that really baffles me is whether Hezbollah also failed to reign in its own militants itching for action given their lack of full greenlight from Tehran or likely Nasrallah himself. For all its failures and cosplaying at being a fighting force (uniforms for nasheed tiktoks, journalist vest for publishing in reuters, the senior Hezbollah leadership must have known that keeping its cards in reserve for any Israeli incursion was the right play no matter what Hamas did.
Maybe trading bodies for international sympathy could work as a viable end state wild card, but previous trends don't really bear it out. The intifadas didn't result in a materially improved ground condition for the Palestinians and for all the hatred Israel gets it still has a growing population and economy. If that is losing for Israel, I'm sure Israel will collapse immediately like most of the world wishes it would.
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