> This article assesses whether Hellenistic war-elephants were given alcohol before battle…Unfortunately, despite the recent rise in scholarly interest on war-elephants, this issue remains overlooked.
> "The number density of primordial black holes with a mass above this cutoff [MP BH > 1.4×1017g] is far too small to produce any observable effects on the human population."
Ideally, trying to reform the government & its activities shouldn't require a team to burrow all the way down to the literal payments system & call individual balls and strikes.
But I assume that is indicative of how unresponsive the bureaucracy has become to political direction from the president & secretaries.
Look I get where you're coming from, but those "checks and balances" can't be the thing you defend because they've largely done neither and in fact allowed this insanity in the first place.
Bureaucracy is there to protect us from people like Trump and Elon. Congress can pass laws and the president can issue orders. This action threatens the US financial system, which threatens the economic stability of most of the world. In terms of human suffering this could have massive impact. We now have a psychopath (well, at least one) with his fingers around our throats. We're all waiting to see what comes next, but it won't be good.
No there hasn't. When someone named the 6 DOGE guys kicking in doors at OPM and TReasury Musk spluttered on his social media platform that the person was committing a crime by naming them and then deleted the person's account.
What have you actually learned? And consider that there's no way for anyone to argue that information was already available to the public, because the main activity of DOGE so far ahs been taking government web pages or entire domains offline. With no organized archival process, how do you equate significantly less availability of information with 'transparency'?
I mean, I've been watching my feed scroll by with the various monetary alotments they've discovered. Finally, someone's taking a critical glance at the $$ dedicated to increasing atheism in Tibet (no, I'm not kidding).
Wow, your feed tells you you're better informed now? Compared to what? As I pointed out, you have no way to check how much of this information was previously published, a point you chose to ignore.
I'm curious about whether you ever attempted to find details of USAID spending, pulled budget docs from their site or filed a FOIA request or anything like that. If you had done so and run into a brick wall, I would understand your saying that there had been a lack of prior transparency. But your posts reads as if someone just drew your attention to something you weren't aware of before, and you've mistaken that for transparency when in fact it's just a talking point designed to grab your attention.
I thought the article was pretty level headed. Here’s the status, here’s the future, here’s what AUKUS is doing, here’s what China is doing and is capable of doing. What smugness or jingoism were you referring to?
I actually found it refreshing to not have a “journalists’” opinions and world-view slathered all over the article. I’m smart enough to form my own opinions about things, thanks.
Joint checking, savings, investments, home ownership, cars, everything. I do most of the account management and planning because she hates doing it.
We have no concept of fairness in spending. If she wants something truly expensive we talk about it and how it fits in our budget. I do likewise, but in general we both kinda know what the boundaries are, and there’s zero score keeping. She probably spends 3x on herself compared to me, and I’m fine with it. I know she has the best interests of the family at heart.
Large purchases like cars are the result of weeks of research, discussion, planning, budgeting, etc.
> She probably spends 3x on herself compared to me, and I’m fine with it.
Plenty of people are "fine with it" until the court awards spousal support on the basis of lifestyle acclimation rather than needs.
50% divorce rate, 75% of which is initiated by the wife, and don't require you to have done anything wrong. Effectively, you're playing roulette and you've staked your entire financial future on Red. I really hope it works out for you.
If you mean the subsequent detonation of an ICBM in the atmosphere, I think we are in uncharted waters there. The expert discussions of what effect the atmosphere-EMP would be is fascinating/horrifying to read.
> I think we need better regulation of these companies to prevent them from doing actual damage rather than trusting them to self-regulate against hypothetical ones.
What is the actual damage you are concerned about and determined to regulate? Simply saying "environment, workers, and the economy" is so broad I can't imagine what an effective regulation would look like. How would you even word the regulation?
However the evidence that these companies are doing real damage now is all around us.
I already gave the example of Microsoft using billions of litres of fresh water to cool data centres during a drought.
In the case of labour the SAG-AFTRA strike, a contributing factor was the use of AI in the industry.
There are some estimates that the carbon emissions of these training efforts dwarf the airline industry and will grow to consume, like crypto, more energy than small countries soon [0].
Not sure that we need to be protected against hypothetical, super-intelligent, self-aware AGI systems that are, if even possible, decades away when people are using what we have today to lay off labourers by training models on their work and replacing them.
In your water example, perhaps that liter of water used to cool the datacenter is offering software to a hospital that offers life saving treatments. How will you measure the trade-off of a liter of water used one way vs. another?
Likewise, how can we distinguish between a ton of carbon emitted in the datacenter vs. a ton of carbon emitted by an airplane? Again, you might train an AI and emit one ton of carbon and that AI a save a million lives. Contrast that ton of carbon emitted with any number of frivolous airline flights by rich talking heads.
It may sound like I'm being deliberately difficult/obtuse, but this is exactly why regulation is so difficult to do well, especially in such a rapidly innovating space.
We don't really need to argue hypotheticals to make progress. We know that airlines move people around and someone taking a trip on that airplane might be a doctor who could end up being at the right place at the right time to save the world!
That doesn't mean we give up and don't regulate the airline industry.
We can put caps on how much water data centres are allowed to consume in a given period in order to protect vital ecosystems and ensure enough fresh water for other uses.
We can write labour laws that protect workers from employers training models on their employees' work and then laying them off.
There's a lot we can do that isn't being done, "because innovation."
Population is a single, low-resolution parameter into a theoretical ship-building-capacity equation, which really needs a basket of parameters. Raw resource availability, fuel capabilities, naval training, coastline details, etc.
Great Britain historically had a fraction of the population of France and other European powers, but consistently out-produced the rest in ships and projecting naval power.
During a peacetime economy. Don't forget during war time, your factories are being bombed. You're pre-war numbers don't indicate what your war time numbers will be. China's manufacturing tends to be focused around the easter coast and it's rivers. The USAs is spread throughout the country. The USA is pretty good at setting up factories. My understanding is China is more into single large factories. The USA is a net exporter of oil (that greases the entire machine). China is an oil importer (not good when you country is being sieged during war).
You seem to be having a kind of a blind bias. You argue that during war time China will be less productive; and the opposite will be for the US: more productive. As if China can't target/hit back at the US. Both have massive geography and given that the US is likely the attacker, China only has to play defense.
> The USA is a net exporter of oil (that greases the entire machine). China is an oil importer (not good when you country is being sieged during war).
This seems to be their largest risk (if you are playing defense). They seem to be going crazy on solar though.
I think the unspoken assumption here is that China is already producing at near-maximum capacity, while the United States is barely trying and has lots of headroom.
Is the assumption correct?
I haven't been able to find a study on America's plan for local naval production capacity given such a conflict, which is kind of stunning to me. Perhaps there are classified studies.
This conflict (assuming it lasts multiple years) would play out across the Pacific, possibly offering replays of old Pacific battles from WW2. Large numbers of naval assets and expeditionary forces squaring off across millions of square miles of blue-water ocean. Lots of naval tonnage attrition.
America is either guarding it's planned production capabilities close to the chest, or they anticipate winning such a conflict quickly without the tonnage attrition I just referenced.
Again, China's production is centered in a specific area, along the coasts in the east and associated coastal waterways. American production is spread throughout the country. The USA has a distributed highway system for transportation. China has a strong focus on shipping lanes. The USA has a long record of projecting military power. China does not. The USA has a strong 'get shit started' track record. China has a mass produce track record. The American dynamic is better situated to recover production during war time than China.
Solar is not going to fuel missiles, ships, and attack aircraft. It's not going to grease the machines in the factories.
This is the best abstract ever.
reply