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@finest-quality
Meeting today with a guy from MDA (Canadian space company best known for making the Canadarm line of robotic arms):
Yah, I've been with MDA for 20 years, I've worked on everything from Canadarm to Canadarm 2, even worked a bit on Canadarm 3. All across the board.
MDA-MDA merger (grab the missile)
Presidents
Name all the presidents.
Now name all the first ladies.
Exactly.
“First Lady” is not an elected position, it’s just what we call the person who happens to be married to the President.
General Motors, IBM, PepsiCo, Lockheed Martin, to give four examples, all have female CEOs. Explain why anyone with any stake in these companies should know or care what their husband’s names are.
Stop trying to make everything into misogyny. “President’s spouse is less memorable than President” has absolutely nothing to do with sex.
Name all the presidents.
Now name all of their children.
Exactly.
I honestly can’t name all the presidents anyways.
Most people can’t even name nearly as many VPs as they can Presidents, much less their families. Also, both First Ladies and VPs are much less important that the guys in the Big Seat.
I can name all the presidents because I’m autistic as shit and read every book in my school’s library about ‘em. I’m not exactly a benchmark for statistics here.
This reminds me that I was in a social context earlier where I was idly wondering what Angela Merkel’s husband was generally up to.
I actually know this one because he's also a quantum chemist. Also he's not a Merkel (she kept the last name after getting divorced from her first husband)
There's this extremely weird thing happening in american politics where fusion energy research has real, actual, genuine bipartisan support, though for very different reasons on each side. This is fantastic for research, but I'm always a little worried that some demagogue is going to miss the memo and flip it into a culture war issue and the whole thing will fall apart.
i'm worried as soon as we have the first spill of anything anywhere no matter how small, someone will jump on making it an environmental issue
THEM: Hello, this is CVS, pharmacist speaking. May I ask who's calling?
ME: This is Scott Alexander. Scott Alexander is located at the desk in his bedroom. Scott Alexander's waking hours are between 5 AM and 9 PM on weekdays, and between…
THEM: Excuse me, I don't understand.
ME: I'm playing a defect-defect equilibrium. For every minute you force me to sit through useless pseudo-information before I can talk to a human, I'm making you sit through one minute of useless pseudo-information before I explain my issue. Did you know Scott Alexander received the COVID vaccine? If you are having a medical emergency, please hang up and dial -
THEM: Sir, we're very busy today, if you could -
ME: Busy people don't like being forced to listen to useless pseudo-information before being able to have a phone conversation? Are you sure? You're telling me this for the first time.
| #This is the tax proposal I want to see the Democrats embrace in order to pivot to the center
Sometime years I mail in paper returns out of spite. If my state wants to spend less on tax clerks they will simply have to expand free online filing
bedframes should come with cupholders
Persian nationalists like to make a big deal about never getting colonized by the European powers, but reading more about Kazemzadeh's "Russia and Britain in Persia" reveals that getting colonized twice actually cancels out as both powers prefer the status quo to letting the other expand their claim
10000 diplomatic cables decrying that the other guy's railroad concession will erode Iran's territorial integrity followed by immediately proposing your own railroad concession along the exact same line
Persian nationalists like to make a big deal about never getting colonized by the European powers, but reading more in Kazemzadeh's "Russia and Britain in Persia" reveals that getting colonized twice actually cancels out as both powers prefer the status quo to letting the other expand their claim
I think there should be a type of racist miscegenation discourse where race-mixing is mandatory but you have to consult a huge table of compatibility ratings, like with astrology
pintupi subsection marriage requirements:
trying to think of a clever pedagogical explanation for plasma instabilities in terms of "in high dimensional space local minima are rare" but it doesn't really work; magnetohydrodynamic systems are high-dimensional but so are lots of other stable things like normal fluids
Not that I’m especially well informed in this space, but isn’t the whole deal with MHD that it’s fluid dynamics, except you also have to think about Maxwell’s equations?
Caveman intuition says more (non-trivial) forces means more chaos—not that this really qualifies as pedagogically clever
well in a counter-example the inviscous fluid is more annoying than the viscous fluid. of course the EM forces aren’t dissipative in the same way
I read acoup's piece on the american civil-military relationship a couple weeks back and I haven't been able to get it out of my head since. He doesn't really seem emphasize them, but there are some really tough pills to swallow in there that nonetheless seem very hard to avoid. It might unfortunately just be the case that the military draft is a violent and brutal tool of imperialism, a mass-scale violation of human rights and freedom, and also a central component of how democratic societies retain control over their militaries, without which they tend to collapse into autocracies.
what role would the even draft play in a society that wasn't involved in a war that required it? Korea and Israel have compulsory military service and I think it would be tough to say they're further from [bad stuff] than the US.
The way it often works you cycle through everyone when they become eligible for a short training that may or may not actually teach them anything useful. More broadly though if you not just conscript but take it seriously you base your military structure around it, have preparations to turn under strength forces into full-strength forces if the need arises.
the longest period of conscription in the US was from 1940 to 1973, right? besides 1917-18 there wasn't much use of the draft after 1865, was there?
I think the issue is that there almost wasn't a US military, at least compared to what we have today.
it just seems difficult to talk about "the draft" in the general sense when the battlefield environment and manpower requirements of the 1800s, the 1900s, and today are so different!
The point here is not about the draft as a tool for military effectiveness and what the military needs to function for national defense. The point is that the draft keeps the demographics of the military pinned approximately to that of the nation as a whole, which acts as a constraint on what actions the military can take against the citizens or governing institutions. The idea is that just as mandatory voting is a valuable law that guarantees political input is approximately evenly spread amongst the populace (thereby constraining the actions of politicians), and just as jury duty guarantees that criminal judgement is approximately evenly spread amongst the populace (thereby constraining the actions of the courts), mandatory military service was providing an important check by guaranteeing that the control of the state monopoly on violence was approximately evenly spread among the populace. By contrast, voluntary military service is subject to selection effects, and (right-wing, authoritarian) ideology is among the traits that are selected for.
Now, I think it's clear that this is probably the least important of these three checks in the short term, but in the long-term it could be very important as military service tends to concentrate more and more in a small portion of the population and selection effects get stronger. There are certainly historical precedents for it.
In any case, I'm not totally convinced that this will happen, and I'm certainly not sure that this effect is worth the enormous costs conscription imposes. But I do find this worrying
but mandatory military service is typically only imposed in times of war, which is a minority of the time, or is a perfunctory exercise that has little to do with how the military is actually employed; like is it necessary to call up millions of people for a couple of world wars per year for civic cohesion? and is flooding the country with disgruntled veterans even a good way to achieve that?
(also mandatory voting eliminates voter suppression as a political tactic and juries maintains the perceived legitimacy of the justice system, they have other uses).
Yeah, surely if we're worried about spreading control of the state monopoly on violence among the population, we should be drafting for the police force, not just the military?
(Now imagining a world where everyone in the US spends one year as police, and the majority of police are people serving that one year. Would have some interesting consequences! Not clearly good ones, but interesting ones!)
That last idea makes me think of Yglesias's suggestion that it would be really valuable to have more left-leaning people go into policing. Right now police forces are heavily selected into certain types of people, who are among other things relatively right-leaning and authoritarian-leaning.
His concrete suggestion (other than "if you're left-leaning consider going into policing and don't condemn people who do"), was to try to launch an analogue of Teach For America that would send [left-leaning] college graduates into local police forces. But a police force draft would also solve that problem.
(I still have massive fucking ethical issues with any sort of draft, obviously. It's evil! But this is an interesting idea to rotate.)
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Incidentally, Devereaux answered some of the upthread questions on BlueSky.
Claim is that historically, we had a small conscript peacetime army, with plans to scale it up to a large conscript army in time of war.
I would add that it's not like Russia, Eritrea, Egypt, and Vietnam are bastions of republican virtue (I think those countries all have mandatory military service). Iran even has that classic failure of civil-military relations, the parallel regime military force that acts as a state within a state, and it has mandatory military service, too. South Korea had conscription under its military dictatorship (and still does). It doesn't seem like conscription, at least on its own, is sufficient, or at least the details matter a lot. And there are plenty of countries that have non-politicized militaries who do not have conscription. Britain's army hasn't been active in its politics since the English Civil War; I don't think it had a modern conscription system at all before World War I. A bunch of European countries don't have it now, though they did in the past. These countries all spend a lot less on their military than the US, and have smaller militaries, so that might be part of it. But I am skeptical of some of the social benefits claimed for conscription. It seems at best to be a very contextual thing?
@tanadrin the Iranian case is actually quite interesting. the regular army that everyone gets drafted into is not politically reliable and so is kept incapable because of that. The regime-aligned paramilitary forces accept a few draftees but are mostly professionals
Yes Mr Trump, stick it to the evil tyrannical PMC overlords by taxing patents 1-5% of their value, they''l be so owned and cry so hard.
Gift Link
Patent holders typically pay the government a few thousand dollars, up to roughly $10,000, in flat-fee payments made periodically over many years. The new fee would be a much more exorbitant cost for some patent holders that would function like a property tax. “It’s a total paradigm shift in how you think about protecting intellectual property rights,” said Brad Watts, senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center, which advocates for strong IP standards. Many businesses would likely have major concerns with what they perceive as a tax on innovation, he said.
"I’m not seeing how charging a percentage of what the U.S. government thinks the valuation of your IP is encourages innovation,” said Marylee Jenkins, a partner at law firm ArentFox Schiff who led a Patent Office advisory committee from 2016 to 2019. Lutnick fired the members of the committee earlier this year. The office’s chief financial officer left in April. The change would also make the U.S. an anomaly globally and could fuel international backlash, because the country is part of global patent treaties. Foreign companies operating in the U.S. like Samsung and LG are among the largest patent holders here. Trump has nominated intellectual property lawyer John Squires, who spent many years at Goldman Sachs, to take over the Patent Office. If confirmed by the Senate, he is expected to help push the new fee and other changes forward, the people said.
OK not much on how it works internationally or how they will value the patents which tbh I was suspecting. Doesn't seem likely to happen but you would think this would get shot down immediately.
I hope they go for the Harberger! Low transfer costs for patents means it will work as advertised, plus it's much harder to be a patent troll.
As is traditional here, I am taking advantage of the Fourth of July this week to write something about the United States, this time a brief
Notably, the problem here really has come primarily from the executive. Reading all this way, it may be somewhat striking that there is so much Congress and so few Presidents so far. However, since 1933 (when Franklin D. Roosevelt became president) the powers of the presidency, as exercised in practice, have grown substantially; the usual term for this is the ‘Imperial presidency,’ and it seems apt to the increasing dominance of the executive over the legislative branch. Meanwhile, the United States military has never been truly demobilized at any point since 1941. Instead, it has remained almost always on an operational, if not war, footing somewhere more or less continuously. At the same time, Congress has seemed to effectively shrink as a political institution. So while for most of American history, the civil-military bargain existed primarily between a military and congress that were often opposed, increasingly it operates between the military and a president who views the military as an agent of their own authority.
interesting read from Devereaux
This is, clearly, quite a dangerous trend. The American civil-military bargain has been extraordinarily successful, but it relies on restraint and forbearance by both military and civilian authorities.
And, quite simply part of the reason this trend continues to get worse is that we do not generally talk about it or think about it in these terms. Journalists do not write about the civil-military relationship the way they write about congressional norms (which are also fraying) or perennial political issues like the budget. Where the civil-military relationship isn’t simply ignored, it is taken for granted, assumed that because the system has always worked this way that it always will. But the strong norms of the civil-military bargain are not typical or normal, they are unusual, the product of more than two centuries of careful construction and maintenance dating back to that day in Newburgh. It is one of the great American achievements, and we should not let it slip away out of indifference.
I disagree that the US having a civilian Department of Defense instead of a general staff has anything to do with American beliefs about civil-military relations. No part of the federal government is allowed to have a civil service choosing its own leaders! This is mostly because presidents want to do patronage.
Way back in I think 2011-2012, I made a remark on my long-since-deleted Twitter account that there was a reliable phenomenon where every six months or so you'd get a "we should bring back the draft" take from some pundit at The Atlantic or The Washington Post or whatever. On the surface, these takes were never about military capability, they were always about the author's personal social engineering project to fix the issue du jour— it'll bring rich and poor into contact and promote cross-class understanding, it'll reduce alienation from the military, and so on.
I find it interesting what a hardy weed this is. Today the posts are still there, except now they're on Substack, and now they're about fixing today's social ills— it'll make low-quality men more marriageable and cure inceldom, it'll provide purpose and address existential ennui, it'll bring progressives and conservatives into contact reduce political polarization, etc.
Whatever the problem, mandatory military service is apparently the cure. I actually disagree with the takes that America is a highly-militarist society, but this seems like a surviving example of a phenomenon that has probably stretched all the way back to Rome or beyond.
Ultimately the military is one of the few American institutions that responds to policy. You can just write stuff in the NDAA and a semi-competent civil service will do it for you. Of course this kind of thing is irresistible to big-idea pundits.
imagining evil universe where screws operate in reverse. "lefty locky, righty releasey"
That's our universe though?
I hate "left loosy righty tighty" so fucking much. It doesn't mean anything! Both ways of rotating a circle can equally be described as both left and right!
Clockwise to tighten it, counterclockwise to loosen it. I don't care if it doesn't rhyme, at least it actually tells you which way to turn the fucking wrench.
i prefer the right hand rule: point your thumb the direction the screw goes and right hand fingers curl in the direction of rotation
the printing press is not all that technically complicated, right? that's one of those things which could have been invented a lot earlier. or is the required metallurgy fancy in some way
You can do it with wood blocks; it's just that metal is more durable
right, so my (unsubstantiated) gut take is that this could have been economically viable somewhere from the middle roman republic through the principate. by the time it gets invented I can imagine there might not have been the combination of economic concentration and literacy to support it
making it cheaply requires movable type, which requires fancy metallurgy
@finest-quality ok I am a metallurgy pleb so I am curious, what are the technical requirements for making moving type? they were doing some reasonably fine casting much earlier than the advent of the printing press, I think? does it take something else?
The issue is that most of the time, casting wrecks your mold, so you only get to do it once. This is fine for statuary and sucks for "make thousands of letters".
The metallurgy wasn't all that fancy, but required the know-how to make something soft enough that you could stamp it with something made of iron such that it would deform under relatively low heat and not deform the iron main mold.
This required a eutectic mixture of lead and antimony (no, they didn't understand eutectic points, just that it melted easiest at a certain ratio). And antimony wasn't really starting to be isolated until like 1000 AD.
Also I'm not sure how much play the printing press gets without the invention of paper. Parchment is just way more expensive.
During the Roman empire they would have had relatively easy access to papyrus, which was fairly cheap, so I think the "book material" problem would have been solvable. Ditto for the Caliphate, though I think Arabic could have been harder to print due to the letters being less independent of one another than Latin.
I don't think that Arabic typecasting is actually that bad. While good-looking Arabic requires ligature forms, cheaper printing leaves gaps. It's not terrible looking
(American missionary printing, 1800's. I'm not sure how the diacritics are typed.)
This leaves at most four forms for each letter (word-initial, word-final, medial [combined with previous], medial [previous letter does not combine]).
Of course the printing looks better with ligatures, but this is cheaper than you might expect. Making a mold usually starts with making a punches and counterpunches: Punches are ~molds for molds (same shape as type) and counter-punches are ~molds for punches. Even in English printing the same punches are re-used. If you're making a serif font, you can use the same punch for all the serifs of the same orientation. In Arabic typesetting you can use the same punch for each letter in every ligature. To make ligatures the only new carving required by the mold-maker is closing the gap.
Of course you can't make ligatures for every possible combination of joined-up letters but using even two-letter ligatures greatly reduces the number of gaps, as the presence of non-joining letters means runs of even four joined characters in a row are rare.
the printing press is not all that technically complicated, right? that's one of those things which could have been invented a lot earlier. or is the required metallurgy fancy in some way
You can do it with wood blocks; it's just that metal is more durable
right, so my (unsubstantiated) gut take is that this could have been economically viable somewhere from the middle roman republic through the principate. by the time it gets invented I can imagine there might not have been the combination of economic concentration and literacy to support it
making it cheaply requires movable type, which requires fancy metallurgy
@finest-quality ok I am a metallurgy pleb so I am curious, what are the technical requirements for making moving type? they were doing some reasonably fine casting much earlier than the advent of the printing press, I think? does it take something else?
The issue is that most of the time, casting wrecks your mold, so you only get to do it once. This is fine for statuary and sucks for "make thousands of letters".
The metallurgy wasn't all that fancy, but required the know-how to make something soft enough that you could stamp it with something made of iron such that it would deform under relatively low heat and not deform the iron main mold.
This required a eutectic mixture of lead and antimony (no, they didn't understand eutectic points, just that it melted easiest at a certain ratio). And antimony wasn't really starting to be isolated until like 1000 AD.
yeah this is basically my understanding: “hard enough not to deform under heavy use” and “soft enough not to mess up the mold” is a pretty narrow window and hitting it consistently means you have to be able to distinguish and isolate metals
What’s not clear to me is how wide a trade network you need. I’ve no clue how rare any of these minerals are or where early European printers got them from
Toronto multicultural English voice: I saw the Prince of Darkness, with his staff / standing bare headed at the Cenotaph
