Open Road

[memorycycle]

ever since i was a young hydrogen particle 14 billion years ago i knew i wanted to be wasting all the hot water in the shower

[open-road-air]

Calvino's COSMICOMICS is just this.

[max1461]

Is there a reason the US gives very much of a shit about Iran? I mean I know it’s a fairly large country with a government aligned against the US, but it’s not like, that big. Obviously Iran’s not literally a threat to the US in any military or even economic sense. So what’s got all the DC types so frothing? I don’t fully get it.

[open-road-air]

I think the answer here is actually "regret." Iran, like Cuba, are states where the current government was formed via a revolution against a prior government that was, like, a little US-puppety. So the new/current government has a lot of incentive to position itself as anti-American; to make common cause with whoever's in America's bad books these days; etc. Meanwhile the US DC types see a country that they were used to having a lot of influence with/control over and thinking positively about, suddenly become strongly opposed. Furthermore, in both cases the US took abortive but deeply discrediting hostile steps toward the government in its early days, which helped lock in the confrontational relationship; and as @centrally-unplanned says, both parties to the hostilities have taken escalatory or at least lock-in approaches toward each other over time. And of course both cases are characterized by a real refugee population, affiliated with the ancien regime in one way or another, who settled in the US and exercise outsize and highly motivated influence on US foreign policy (since the refugees care a LOT about their country of origin and its current (despised) government, while the average US resident doesn't know much about it). Iran may be more of a hate object than Cuba by a bit, largely because it is bigger, richer, and more conveniently situated to intervene in a lot of other neighboring countries and conflicts, while Cuba is an island operating in the shadow of US power and is more effectively contained, but I think this is nibbling around the edges. The Israel thing is basically downstream of and parallel to the dynamics outlined above; after all, Iran's revolution postdated the active phase of Israeli-Arab conflict; the deep-historical and regional-rivalry incentives set the Arabs and the Persians against each other and there's no reason why even a theocratic Iran couldn't side with Israel against Syria, Iraq, Egypt, etc. If you want to go to a like, pretty early and foundational moment for this whole thing, an interesting subject to read up on would be the Allied invasion of Iran in WWII; this was apparently like the invasion of Iceland, a hasty and pragmatic decision to overthrow a neutral government to maintain control of high-priority trade routes (in Iceland, the North Atlantic; in Iran, land routes into the USSR). You can kind of see how an Anglo-American attitude of "we demand that Iran produce a government favorable to our interests, and we will invade otherwise" could create a national-independence regime with a lot of anti-US beef most of a century down the line.

[tanadrin]

"countries shouldn't invade each other, and you should support the country being invaded to resist the invader" is in fact a remarkably useful razor!

[eightyonekilograms]

Ok but hang on, I think this needs a lot more nuance. For example, what if the country doing the invading had a different government decades ago which was based on a political philosophy I kinda like? Checkmate.

[king-of-men]

More to the point, would you be prepared to bite this bullet to the extent of active support for Iraq and Afghanistan? Like, not merely disapproving of the wars, which many people did, but funding or arming their respective armies and resistance movements.

[eightyonekilograms]

I mean, yes? I actively supported the country-being-invaded vis-a-vis Iraq and Afghanistan by voting for politicians favoring withdrawal, which was the most effective thing I could do since I was a citizen of the invading country. Your implication here that this was insincere support compared to "shipping weapons to the invaded people" makes no utilitarian sense, since I don't know how to get arms to Iraqi/Afghan freedom fighters and probably would've been arrested if I did (thus ending further effectiveness). By contrast, the highest EV thing I can do for Ukraine is vote to send them more arms.

I'm not sure what bullet you think I'm biting here.

[tanadrin]

the comparison is imperfect because the ukraine-russia war is a peer conflict, while there was no chance in any universe of the iraqi or afghan states as they existed prior to the US invasion meaningfully resisting the invasion on the battlefield. you could have shipped iraqis all the arms you wanted; i still don't think the invasion would have lasted longer than about a month, because iraq was just fundamentally outclassed by the US military. the most effective form of attempting to avert those wars before they started would have been trying to put pressure on the US government--either diplomatically, in the case of allied governments, or by voting, in the case of citizens (or by putting pressure on one's own government to diplomatically pressure the US, in the case of citizens of foreign countries).

and this is one reason why bush was such a fucking awful president, at least in the realm of foreign policy: by invading afghanistan and iraq he punched a massive loophole in the post cold war status quo by declaring invading other countries was fine actually if you had a good enough reason and you were big enough to get away with it. notably, russia used bushian logic to (try to) legitimize its invasion of ukraine--regime change!--and certainly thought at the outset they were going to pretty strongly outmatch any ukrainian attempt at resistance.

but they didn't--and if iraq had been able to hold off US forces after a disastrously bungled invasion, and if middle eastern countries who didn't want to see the US invade the region every time they decided it was sufficiently justified had started supplying iraq with weapons to assist in that resistance, well, that would have been a pretty strong strong disincentive for other countries to try to pull that shit in the future!

(that some people might be squeamish about sending missiles to the Taliban in a counterfactual where the Taliban somehow magically resists the US invasion of Afghanistan doesn't mean the general principle isn't sound. The Taliban are unusually awful by any measure. But there's not a magical threshold of awfulness where one sovereign state invading another becomes OK.)

[jadagul]

Acknowledging that you called this a razor, not a hard and fast rule:

If I wanted to probe the boundary cases, I'd ask about Rwanda and Kosovo. (Which were, of course, examples Bush et al. were thinking about.)

If I wanted to be a dick, I'd ask about America's invasion of the nation of Vichy France.

[open-road-air]

point of historical order: the Allies did not invade (metropolitan) Vichy France. They invaded North Africa; Darlan flipped sides; the Nazis activated Case Anton and invaded and occupied Vichy France (and Italy), disbanding its army and (leading to) the sinking of its fleet. On DDay the only meaningfully extant French state was the Free French. (Of course, it was not particularly extant.)

[korrasamibottles]

who blows a bunch of money on nfts before realizing they're a scam

Aang

Katara

Sokka

Toph

Suki

Zuko

Azula

Mai

Ty Lee

Voting ended onSep 30, 2023

[tanadrin]

The Federation imperialism problem I wonder about is one that to the best of my knowledge has never been discussed in Trek: the legal status of non-member enclaves. It’s clear from all of the macropolitics/war arcs that the Federation has “territory”; i.e. regions of space it intends to deny to hostile fleets; it’s clear from the micro arcs that (as you say) Federation membership is optional/aspirational. So what of planets in the territory but not members? Does the UFP deny them foreign policy?

To be clear this problem is nowhere suggested by the text and is clearly just a weird spandrel of importing the idea of “big map with various colored swaths” to a star state without really considering the like Mare Liberum/archipelagan implications of deep space “territory” but still, it compels me.

yeah given that basically on the maps we see on-screen are effectively 2d maps the watsonian interpretation that suggests itself most readily to me is that these are schematic overviews used to get a quick general idea of the situation, not detailed maps for tactical planning. but of course it's television, trying to communicate concepts quickly to viewers who can't and mostly aren't inclined to linger over the practical details of how exclusive territorial control should work in interstellar polities, and given that the sci fi is quite soft it doesn't really matter for narrative purposes

but i have always tended to think that the model for territorial control that makes the most sense in most sci-fi settings is control around planets and maybe systems only. with warp drive providing fast travel on arbitrary routes through space (i.e., you don't have to pass close to star empire A's planets or systems if you're trying to reach star empire B) exclusive control of deep space makes no conceptual sense. the federation (and other interstellar powers) also don't seem to exercise much close surveillance of their border, except near space installations and on major travel routes

which is all just to say i think non-member systems, even if effectively surrounded by member systems, probably wouldn't be hampered much by having to avoid federation space, if for some reason they had to.

the other thing that makes the idea of exclusive territorial control of vast amounts of space kind of a non starter is just how many star systems should exist even within relatively small volumes of space. there are around 90 star systems just within 20 light years of Earth. if the federation is only about 100 light years across (which would be tiny), and roughly spherical, it would have over 11,000 star systems in its "territory," far too many to maintain even a nominal presence in. it might not want, like, the romulan star empire trying to establishing a military base in those systems, and might claim them for the purposes of signaling to other major powers to stay out, but it probably doesn't care about some minor civilization that has just achieved warp for the first time and is sending out colony ships to its local stellar neighborhood

[open-road-air]

right, but that’s the tension. If some minor planet very near Earth has just achieved warp (or is pre-warp! Not clear if the Prime Directive is held by peer societies) and the Romulans (or Klingons, Cardassians, etc.) show up and say “in exchange for the right to build an enormous fleet yard orbiting your gas giant, we will use our advanced technology to solve all of your social problems and/or bribe your high officials”, it’s not clear what the Federation, as a strictly free association, can do about it. The principled response is I suppose just to make the affirmative case for Federation candidate membership instead, and let the chips fall where they may. That might often work; but it would seem to impose a serious asymmetric weakness on the Federation as a state—surely the other empires are not going to tolerate large starbases very near their planetary capitals.

[open-road-air]

Goncharov (1973) cuts

So in the recent Gonchsplosion there’s been a lot of discussion and even dispute about the core facts of the film—who lives, who dies, which homoerotic cigarette lighting sequences appear, who shops for apples, etc. And I think most people don’t know that this is because of the truly bananas number of cuts of Goncharov that have been released at various times and places, often under unclear or conflicting names, with intersecting but nonidentical footage. Back in like, the mid-00s I saw a Geocities site about this—you know the type, it had everything all charted out in ASCII—that estimated that there were over fourteen hours of Goncharov that had been released in total, across I wanna say seven different cuts? That’s a lot of movie.  Of course I have no idea how to find that site, it’s probably gone forever now, and there’s no way my iPhone-rotted brain can compare with the pure archival relentlessness of a mid-aughties film studies grad student with a beige desktop computer, so this is just off the top of my head listing of cuts I’m familiar with and what things they do and don’t include. Hope it helps. The Cinematic Release You know it, you love it, somehow the most famous one of all despite the fact it never showed in theaters because the mafia (*cough*CIA/KGB*cough*) destroyed almost all of the prints? Idk man, everyone is obsessed with the idea that this one is the “real” Goncharov which is like a nice change of pace from the common canard that the director’s cut is the “real” cut, but also, bizarre. They’re all real cuts! Get with the postmodern times!  Runtime: 3:02. The studio insisted that Scorsese bring it down under three hours and he said he had but he lied. It’s probably apocryphal that Scorsese actually set the clock back 7 minutes during the second screener with the studio to fool them about the runtime—probably he just trimmed some of the opening sequences for this print—but you can see why the story spread, given how aligned it is with the themes/events of the film. Everybody loves a metatextual folktale.  Scenes In/Out: Yes bridge scene, no boat scene. Yes Goncharov/Andrey at the fruit market, no Katya/Sofia at the market. No cigarette lighting at all. (I’m sorry but it’s true!) Goncharov dies, Katya dies, Ice Pick Joe lives (or dies offscreen, this is kinda unclear). Heavy clock imagery.  Verdict: honestly this is a mid-tier Goncharov at best.  The Director’s Cut (Pseudo-Scorsese) This one started to circulate in the 80s and 90s in the US film buff circuit. Some fly by night outfit put out a bootleg VHS which is considered the authoritative version even though you can get a way better digital rip straight from the film. The VHS box set says that this was the version Scorsese first screened for the studio but that’s probably not true. Not clear who actually cut this or why or how. Most of the Netflix footage is from this one but not all of it.  Runtime: 4:12. If you’re thinking “damn, that’s a long movie,” then, uh, buddy, hold on to your fuckin hat. Scenes In/Out: Yes bridge scene, yes boat scene. Goncharov dies. Katya lives (doesn’t even fake her death, that’s just gone all together). Icepick Joe dies laughing. Both G/A and K/S at the fruit market but the scenes are played intercut to suggest that they’re there at the same time? Insane choice. Yes G/A cigarette scene. No K/S cigarettes but Sofia does go into the bedroom when Goncharov leaves. Camera doesn’t follow her, though, it just spends a minute and a half staring at the grandfather clock in the hall? Yes exterior Moscow scenes! This is the only cut I’m aware of that has them. Of course they weren’t actually shot on location, it’s all Red Square B-roll plus exterior shots still in Naples. Verdict: gayest Goncharov available in America before the turn of the millennium, probably the one the gay club reenactors had seen. Greater variety of thematic references.  The Director’s Cut (Actual Scorsese)

This one came out straight to DVD in like 2003. It was, actually, authorized by Scorsese—although he’s subsequently denied it. But it was definitely stapled together over like a weekend from whatever bits of Goncharov he could get his hands on. This does mean it has an unusually high percentage of non-overlapping Goncharov content; it also means it’s a bit of a mess.  Runtime: 3:34. Scenes In/Out: No bridge scene(!), no boat scene. Goncharov dies. (This is shot from like eight angles??) Katya fakes death, lives, gets extended in-credits epilogue in Argentina(!!) No cigarette, no fruit market. Way, way more footage of money, drugs, and guns being shipped into and out of Naples. Clock symbolism almost entirely absent. Icepick Joe gets a three minute death soliloquy for some reason. Palace ball gets like three different scenes? Andrey’s call from the phone booth goes to Valery instead of Goncharov for some reason?? A lot of frankly indulgent long shots and urban b-roll. Verdict: the worst Goncharov you might have actually watched. Only worth it for completionists, and because the DVD had a surprisingly thorough and high-quality soundtrack extra. (Don’t @ me, sapphics who are convinced it’s Sofia coming out of the cabin in Patagonia at the end of the credits and looking down the hillside at Katya—you’re right and it’s perfect but just watch the credits on DailyMotion like a human being, there’s no need to subject yourself to an hour and a half of basically arms trafficking surveillance footage.) The Director’s Cut (JWHJ0715) The version of the film that Matteo JWHJ0715 sent in for consideration at Cannes. (Scorsese did not want to send it in, didn’t feel like it was ready.) Never screened at the festival and it’s not clear how the print leaked.  Runtime: 2:38. Yes, the shortest film cut (not counting abridged TV versions) is a “directors cut”. It just. It’s Goncharov, buddy. Scenes In/Out: Yes bridge, yes boat. Goncharov dies, Andrey dies, Katya lives. Icepick Joe dies in a shootout. K/S cigarette but it’s trimmed like crazy. G/A in the fruit market but it rolls straight into the car chase (the cutting is crazy but they mostly make it work.)  Verdict: the most action-packed and claustrophobic Goncharov. The shots are mostly interior and the plot has no time to breathe. Kinda weird that that’s what JWHJ0715 thought would play in Cannes but it was a different time.  The Director’s Cut (Pseudo-JWHJ0715) Okay, we’re through the looking glass here. This is real film-buff shit. This cut was primarily available in Yugoslavia, of all places. (This is why there are non-optional subtitles in Serbo-Croatian. It claims to be from Matteo JWHJ0715 but it’s almost certainly actually finally put out by his son, Luca. Whether “his son” means “his nephew whom he raised from toddlerhood”, “his long-lost natural child”, or “his younger lover, legally adopted to create some mutual rights for their unrecognized relationship” is as you’d might expect pretty controversial in the Gonchhead community and is unlikely to be resolved soon. Runtime: 6:48 (not a typo) Scenes In/Out: Yes bridge, yes boat. Goncharov, Katya, and Andrey all die. Icepick Joe plunges silently into the Adriatic. Both cigarette scenes, both fruit market scenes (separated by over two hours of film to create a parallel rather than a frantic mishmash (good call imo). Yes palace ball, very early in the film, but only using footage that doesn’t appear in any other Goncharov cut. (The partner-swapping dance sequence.) When Andrey calls Goncharov from the phone booth, it’s Sofia who answers. There’s a flashback scene with B-roll of St. Petersburg but the subtitles insist that it’s happening in Belgrade? Very bizarre, may have contributed to the suppression of the film by the Yugoslav government. Great clock footage, mirror footage, fruit footage, the works.  Verdict: the motherlode. the best Goncharov. Everyone who’s seen it says so. Block 9 hours to watch it and another 3 hours afterwards to have a psychological breakdown.  More editions: There are maybe half a dozen other prints, but we mostly know them through backward extrapolations from the viciously abridged TV-versions, so who knows. It also seems likely that the whole world of Japanese/Hong Kong/Thai remakes was inspired by another cut totally unknown in the West (given the recurrent flower imagery, among other subtler points), but it’s impossible to say if we’re talking about another cut of the Goncharov footage or some sort of ur-remake.  The point is you can keep going, but honestly, the Luca Cut is the one. If you’ve watched that, any other Goncharov just starts to seem like a blooper reel. 

[glassesfreekjr]

Shit, which one did they use for the Criterion Collection? I’m getting it for my uncle on Christmas; is that a mistake?

[open-road-air]

So due to some personal issues I refuse to ever watch anything from Criterion or even go to their website, so I can’t say for sure. Probably they have Pseudo-Scorsese, that’s exactly the sort of middlebrow “look at us, we found the ‘underground’ cut (that everybody has known about for 30 years)” move they’d pull.  Unfortunately it can be hard to tell just from the jacket copy which cut you have. Most of the cuts are “director’s cuts” of one flavor or another, so that’s meaningless. Nobody calls it “the Luca cut” officially. If it’s over 6 hours that’s a good sign, but it might be some bizarre bloated thing that cross-pollinates Scorsese and Pseudoscorsese. Sometimes “the complete Goncharov” or “the Belgrade Cut” are used, that’s probably the best sign. I’d poke around on the page and see if they have anything that gives it away; worst case scenario you can always watch it before you give it to your uncle maybe? And like, don’t feel too bad, you know? it’s all Goncharov. 

[open-road-air]

Goncharov (1973) cuts

So in the recent Gonchsplosion there’s been a lot of discussion and even dispute about the core facts of the film—who lives, who dies, which homoerotic cigarette lighting sequences appear, who shops for apples, etc. And I think most people don’t know that this is because of the truly bananas number of cuts of Goncharov that have been released at various times and places, often under unclear or conflicting names, with intersecting but nonidentical footage. Back in like, the mid-00s I saw a Geocities site about this—you know the type, it had everything all charted out in ASCII—that estimated that there were over fourteen hours of Goncharov that had been released in total, across I wanna say seven different cuts? That’s a lot of movie.  Of course I have no idea how to find that site, it’s probably gone forever now, and there’s no way my iPhone-rotted brain can compare with the pure archival relentlessness of a mid-aughties film studies grad student with a beige desktop computer, so this is just off the top of my head listing of cuts I’m familiar with and what things they do and don’t include. Hope it helps. The Cinematic Release You know it, you love it, somehow the most famous one of all despite the fact it never showed in theaters because the mafia (*cough*CIA/KGB*cough*) destroyed almost all of the prints? Idk man, everyone is obsessed with the idea that this one is the “real” Goncharov which is like a nice change of pace from the common canard that the director’s cut is the “real” cut, but also, bizarre. They’re all real cuts! Get with the postmodern times!  Runtime: 3:02. The studio insisted that Scorsese bring it down under three hours and he said he had but he lied. It’s probably apocryphal that Scorsese actually set the clock back 7 minutes during the second screener with the studio to fool them about the runtime—probably he just trimmed some of the opening sequences for this print—but you can see why the story spread, given how aligned it is with the themes/events of the film. Everybody loves a metatextual folktale.  Scenes In/Out: Yes bridge scene, no boat scene. Yes Goncharov/Andrey at the fruit market, no Katya/Sofia at the market. No cigarette lighting at all. (I’m sorry but it’s true!) Goncharov dies, Katya dies, Ice Pick Joe lives (or dies offscreen, this is kinda unclear). Heavy clock imagery.  Verdict: honestly this is a mid-tier Goncharov at best.  The Director’s Cut (Pseudo-Scorsese) This one started to circulate in the 80s and 90s in the US film buff circuit. Some fly by night outfit put out a bootleg VHS which is considered the authoritative version even though you can get a way better digital rip straight from the film. The VHS box set says that this was the version Scorsese first screened for the studio but that’s probably not true. Not clear who actually cut this or why or how. Most of the Netflix footage is from this one but not all of it.  Runtime: 4:12. If you’re thinking “damn, that’s a long movie,” then, uh, buddy, hold on to your fuckin hat. Scenes In/Out: Yes bridge scene, yes boat scene. Goncharov dies. Katya lives (doesn’t even fake her death, that’s just gone all together). Icepick Joe dies laughing. Both G/A and K/S at the fruit market but the scenes are played intercut to suggest that they’re there at the same time? Insane choice. Yes G/A cigarette scene. No K/S cigarettes but Sofia does go into the bedroom when Goncharov leaves. Camera doesn’t follow her, though, it just spends a minute and a half staring at the grandfather clock in the hall? Yes exterior Moscow scenes! This is the only cut I’m aware of that has them. Of course they weren’t actually shot on location, it’s all Red Square B-roll plus exterior shots still in Naples. Verdict: gayest Goncharov available in America before the turn of the millennium, probably the one the gay club reenactors had seen. Greater variety of thematic references.  The Director’s Cut (Actual Scorsese)

This one came out straight to DVD in like 2003. It was, actually, authorized by Scorsese—although he’s subsequently denied it. But it was definitely stapled together over like a weekend from whatever bits of Goncharov he could get his hands on. This does mean it has an unusually high percentage of non-overlapping Goncharov content; it also means it’s a bit of a mess.  Runtime: 3:34. Scenes In/Out: No bridge scene(!), no boat scene. Goncharov dies. (This is shot from like eight angles??) Katya fakes death, lives, gets extended in-credits epilogue in Argentina(!!) No cigarette, no fruit market. Way, way more footage of money, drugs, and guns being shipped into and out of Naples. Clock symbolism almost entirely absent. Icepick Joe gets a three minute death soliloquy for some reason. Palace ball gets like three different scenes? Andrey’s call from the phone booth goes to Valery instead of Goncharov for some reason?? A lot of frankly indulgent long shots and urban b-roll. Verdict: the worst Goncharov you might have actually watched. Only worth it for completionists, and because the DVD had a surprisingly thorough and high-quality soundtrack extra. (Don’t @ me, sapphics who are convinced it’s Sofia coming out of the cabin in Patagonia at the end of the credits and looking down the hillside at Katya—you’re right and it’s perfect but just watch the credits on DailyMotion like a human being, there’s no need to subject yourself to an hour and a half of basically arms trafficking surveillance footage.) The Director’s Cut (JWHJ0715) The version of the film that Matteo JWHJ0715 sent in for consideration at Cannes. (Scorsese did not want to send it in, didn’t feel like it was ready.) Never screened at the festival and it’s not clear how the print leaked.  Runtime: 2:38. Yes, the shortest film cut (not counting abridged TV versions) is a “directors cut”. It just. It’s Goncharov, buddy. Scenes In/Out: Yes bridge, yes boat. Goncharov dies, Andrey dies, Katya lives. Icepick Joe dies in a shootout. K/S cigarette but it’s trimmed like crazy. G/A in the fruit market but it rolls straight into the car chase (the cutting is crazy but they mostly make it work.)  Verdict: the most action-packed and claustrophobic Goncharov. The shots are mostly interior and the plot has no time to breathe. Kinda weird that that’s what JWHJ0715 thought would play in Cannes but it was a different time.  The Director’s Cut (Pseudo-JWHJ0715) Okay, we’re through the looking glass here. This is real film-buff shit. This cut was primarily available in Yugoslavia, of all places. (This is why there are non-optional subtitles in Serbo-Croatian. It claims to be from Matteo JWHJ0715 but it’s almost certainly actually finally put out by his son, Luca. Whether "his son” means “his nephew whom he raised from toddlerhood”, “his long-lost natural child”, or “his younger lover, legally adopted to create some mutual rights for their unrecognized relationship” is as you’d might expect pretty controversial in the Gonchhead community and is unlikely to be resolved soon. Runtime: 6:48 (not a typo) Scenes In/Out: Yes bridge, yes boat. Goncharov, Katya, and Andrey all die. Icepick Joe plunges silently into the Tyrrhenian. Both cigarette scenes, both fruit market scenes (separated by over two hours of film to create a parallel rather than a frantic mishmash (good call imo). Yes palace ball, very early in the film, but only using footage that doesn’t appear in any other Goncharov cut. (The partner-swapping dance sequence.) When Andrey calls Goncharov from the phone booth, it’s Sofia who answers. There’s a flashback scene with B-roll of St. Petersburg but the subtitles insist that it’s happening in Belgrade? Very bizarre, may have contributed to the suppression of the film by the Yugoslav government. Great clock footage, mirror footage, fruit footage, the works.  Verdict: the motherlode. the best Goncharov. Everyone who’s seen it says so. Block 9 hours to watch it and another 3 hours afterwards to have a psychological breakdown.  More editions: There are maybe half a dozen other prints, but we mostly know them through backward extrapolations from the viciously abridged TV-versions, so who knows. It also seems likely that the whole world of Japanese/Hong Kong/Thai remakes was inspired by another cut totally unknown in the West (given the recurrent flower imagery, among other subtler points), but it’s impossible to say if we’re talking about another cut of the Goncharov footage or some sort of ur-remake.  The point is you can keep going, but honestly, the Luca Cut is the one. If you’ve watched that, any other Goncharov just starts to seem like a blooper reel. 

[poipoipoi-2016]

The unit of engineering is the team.

The team is >=4 engineers for minimum viable oncall coverage, ideally 6 because you know someone's being onboarded at all times. and < about 12

88% attrition in 2 weeks. How many teams no longer exist? What were they responsible for? How many of those are actually important?

iPhone notification counts already don't work. Is that... important? Supposedly, the tweet storage service was down to 2 engineers BEFORE 80% of the company quit. Because if they're down to 0, that is definitely important and if that service sails in a straight line until it hits the metaphorical reef, that's the end of Twitter.

And you know, I might ask why your architecture was so micro-serviced up that only iPhone notification counts broke 2 weeks ago and Musk probably has a point there that you were bloated and overstaffed... and fixing that will take a bit. And people. And knowledge that just walked out the door.

[tanadrin]

as someone who emphatically does not know how big websites work--why is their software so rickety that it could run for (max) a couple of weeks before it breaks so completely? is this normal for big websites?

[open-road-air]

Not an engineer but have worked in enterprise software for a while. I think the fundamental point is that Twitter is not a website, it is a service. The promise of computers is that they automates service execution. The Post Office needs to send a mailman to every door; Twitter doesn't need to send a guy to every phone. But a service is not the set of automated executions; it's the set of social expectations that the entity will fulfill. A service is the promise that the system as a whole will keep doing the same stuff even as every fact about the world continues to change. (In a big-business context these expectations are formalized through SLAs, Service Level Agreements; for Twitter the ultimate SLA may be more social.) This is always hard and fundamentally cannot be automated. If the people behind a service go away, the computers may keep doing the same thing they did yesterday; but this will inevitably drift out of alignment with the service expectations. The bigger and more complex the service, the faster the drift, until the service isn’t doing anything like what we expected it to do.  This is just how every tech company works; fundamentally it is what every tech company is. Software is a cool way of allowing fewer people to solve more problems at the same time, but the ratio can’t go to infinity.

[youzicha]

From time to time you see people on the left describe constitutional originalism/textualism as “not making sense” or “a hack job” or whatever, but I have never been able to sympathize with that. 

Maybe this is similar to what Yudkowsky wrote about 5-year-olds sometimes arriving at atheism for essentially the right reasons. Ever since I was a kid, I basically thought that interpreting the text of the law is what courts should do, and I still feel all the very sophisticated arguments to the contrary seem pretty suspicious. Like sure, it would be good if there was a constitutional right to abortion, but trying to squint hard at a document written in 1787 to read such a right into it feels inherently phony.

[open-road-air]

No, sorry. Originalism and textualism are in fact incomprehensible hack jobs. This isn’t motivated reasoning; they fall down on their face. The first thing to note is that “originalism” and “textualism” are not the same thing. In fact they are deeply opposed. “Textualism” is the theory that the law means what it literally says; “originalism” is the theory that the law means what it was originally understood to mean. “Textualism” doesn’t work. In American constitutionalism the easiest example is the First Amendment. A textual reading of the First Amendment would create inviolable legal protection for 1) ritual human sacrifice, 2) publishing a book entitled “I Stole the Secret of How to Make a Nuclear Bomb from the US Government and This Is How to Do It”, 3) copyright infringement, slander, and so on; et. vastly alia. This is a nonstarter in terms of governing a society—and, clearly, everyone involved in writing, signing, and wrangling the Bill of Rights agreed! These mofos wrote “Congress shall make no law . . . restricting the freedom of the press” and then they passed a copyright statute, in basically the same year. So. Textualism is dead. But if we care about what “those mofos” thought, maybe we can formalize that? Hence “originalism”.  The problem with originalism is like . . . who. And why. And what. It turns out that 1) people don’t agree what a law means, even when it’s written and 2) they certainly don’t magically agree on what it implies for circumstances which they never considered! “Originalism” relies on the idea that there’s some shared meaning of legal texts common to the framers of that text which can be clearly applied to a current legal question, but, this is false. Like, there’s some law, and we want to know if it allows X. So we go and look at the Congressional record, and one guy says “I’m voting against this law, because it would permit X, which is despicable” and one guy says “I’m voting for this law because it would protect the inalienable human right to X” and one guy says “I’m voting for this law because no sane person believes it would permit X” and one guy says I”m voting against this law because it doesn’t protect X and it totally should.” Then the law passes. Newspapers report “LAW LEGALIZES X”, other newspapers report “OTHER NEWSPAPER SLANDERS CONGRESS”. What is the original take?  It’s possible to like. Investigate that question. You might even derive interesting results. Some questions are more settled than others. But it is just not the case that “originalism” generates unique and dispositive results. In situations that are judicially interesting, it typically doesn’t. So, what happens? I mean, “originalist”/“textualist” judges kind of do the same thing they accuse everyone else of doing. They have a range of hermeneutic tricks and tactics and they have a sense of what is just and a sense of what is the law and a sense of what outcome they want in a particular case and a sense of what is politically feasible, and they grope their way there, and then they announce that THEIR decisions, unlike all the other decisions, come from a close reading of the text and of the facts. It is, in fact, a proper scam. This is separate, of course, from the question of whether Roe is well-argued and well-decided. (And what about Casey?) But I think if you want to get into the jurisprudence, the real question is what jurisprudential theories will give you Brown or Gideon, both of which were revolutions in customary judicial practice, and both of which (in my opinion) are the morally AND textually correct readings of the relevant amendments (14th and 6th), and both of which are under constant attack by the so-called “textualists” and “originalists”.

[triviallytrue]

get ublock origin. i am no longer asking.

[open-road-air]

okay for some reason this direct instruction worked, I now have ublock origin. thank you. 

[tanadrin]

On the nationalism of the oppressed...I feel like the Vietnam Marxists weren't really a "local elite"?

The Communist Party of Vietnam is a fundamentally antidemocratic organization (yes, I'm aware that tankies have their long-winded spiel about how democratic centralism is actually more democratic than blah blah blah, and I'm not impressed or convinced). So using nationalism to muscle out one group of tyrannical elites (the French, in this case) and create your own group of tyrannical elites (the CPV) does not strike me as a full-throated refutation of the proposition that nationalism is a cynical ploy to empower a narrow group of elites that would otherwise have a precarious power base. It just means that it's a tool authoritarians of various political persuasions have mastered.

Now, I will cop to knowing almost nothing about Vietnam except the broadest outlines of its history. But I am aware of the phenomenon of left-flavored nationalism, I'm not impressed by it, and I don't think redwashing nationalism meaningfully improves it in any way.

[open-road-air]

This feels like it kind of goes back to Orwell’s claim in 1984 etc. that revolution is a tool wielded by a middle class against an upper class in the name of the lower classes. So you get post-revolutionary power structures where the new elite are all drawn from some obvious pre-revolutionary sub-elite (“vanguard intellectuals”/“local landowners but of a national ethnicity”/whatever) This observation/accusation is meant to defuse the popular bona fides of revolutionary movements—to undermine their claim to be acting on behalf of “the people” broadly construed.  But I kind of feel about it the way Vonnegut reports feeling about the story of the crucifixion—the narrative points at the wrong element of the dynamic for moral instruction.  Because like, who knows? It may be easier to form or lead a revolutionary party if you’re a disaffected local elite rather than an actual literal peasant, but I can’t guarantee that the literal peasants will never accomplish this. And I’m as worried about the literal peasants’ post-revolutionary regime. The problem, from my perspective, is that after the revolution we’ll have a few weeks of street party and/or a few years of Terror, and then a distinct and dawning sensation of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. I’m not particularly impressed if the new bosses are in fact all of genuinely humble backgrounds.  The real challenge is of course the problem of bringing about a state of affairs of liberty, equality, all that good stuff. And while local elites waving the flag of nationalism may be especially insincere about their desire to produce general cromulence vs. embiggen their own privileges, any revolutionary movement can follow the same trajectory. 

[tanadrin]

Are there any known numbers whose digits are 1) infinite, 2) non-repeating, 3) uncomputable? Like pi, if there were no convergent series we could use to get better and better approximations. Feels like we got lucky with that one.

[arjan-de-lumens]

The two first criteria are easy: infinite but non-repeating decimals arise from basically anything that’s a real number but not a rational number, e.g. things like sqrt(2) and sin(1). The third criterion - numbers that are well defined but not actually computable - is a bit trickier, though. The usual approach I see when people try to come up with definable but uncomputable numbers is to do various forms of enumeration-over-all-turing-machines trick, leading to things like Chaitin’s constant and the Specker sequences.

[tanadrin]

to all the smart alecks in the notes who are like “isn’t that most numbers,” yes, the point is one you can specify. i’m not asking whether there exists such a number

[open-road-air]

the real smart aleck answer is to say “no, there aren’t any such numbers, because if one of them were an important natural constant, the Turing machine simulating the universe would catch fire”

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Post your favourite pick-up lines.

In order of how much I've said them:

"Hey, what's up?"

"Would you like to see a cool painting in an art gallery?"

"Can you give me five minutes?"

"Have you ever wanted to have sex?"

"How far are we from the next red light?"

"Would you like to hear about the time I got lost in an underground casino?"

"Is anyone else going to the bathroom?"

"Can I get a sip of that water?"

"If I have any one wish, it is that wish-granting genies would work for me!"

"Is there anyone you really, really hate?"

"Do you ever get that weird feeling of someone who might be watching you, even when you aren't looking?"

[open-road-air]

Robots confirmed better at sex, romance

[unpretty]

i astral projected to porn land for a minute backreading your tumblr today, genuinely thought to myself "what kind of irresponsible asshole doesn't get their catgirl fixed"

asdjklhasdjkhasjd

[open-road-air]

“original i tried to find a reaction image of a catgirl wearing a cone but had the sense to give up quickly i'm sure i could find something but at what cost“ when we got our second cat fixed he did NOT care for the cone and so my spouse (an indulgent cat thad if there ever were one) created a sort of fetching one-piece swimsuit number for him that tied all the way up the back.  Anyway, it would probably look good on a catgirl. 

[transgenderer]

one of the weird things about old sci fi is like. the looming nuclear apocalypse. and like, i dont even think they were wrong to be worried about the nuclear apocalypse! we came pretty close a couple times! but like, it seems like it was just an assumption in like, the 60s and 70s (maybe the 80s?) that we were all gonna get nuked

[tanadrin]

I’m curious about the contrarian argument that even full-scale nuclear war between the USSR and the US, while a disaster, would not have been anything approaching an apocalyptic scenario--that it might have killed many tens of millions of NATO and Warsaw Pact soldiers and civilians, but that fears of nuclear winter, total economic collapse and much less human extinction were all totally overblown.

YMMV whether even in that scenario a nuclear war would be winnable in the traditional sense (which is one thing that I think helped avert such a war--neither the US nor the USSR were interested in it)--and there’s no telling how it would alter global politics, but I’d be sort of interested in reading an alt history scenario set in a world where that war does occur, but it’s not treated as automatically meaning the end of the world.

[open-road-air]

If you’re interested in that, I cannot recommend Walton’s My Real Children enough. 

[slatestarscratchpad]

Another episode of “please help Scott understand investment”.

The traditional advice is that as you get closer to retirement, you should start investing more and more in bonds. But how close, and how much?

As far as I can tell, it seems like you might not want to invest in bonds at all until ~10 years before retirement? I did a simulation (okay, an Excel spreadsheet) for two investors. Both started at the worst possible time for stocks (moments before the 2008 crash). Investor A put all his money in stocks. Investor B put all his money in bonds that paid 5%/year. Just after the crash, Investor A was obviously much worse off than Investor B. But by nine years after the crash (2017), the two of them had equal amounts of money, and by today, Investor A would have about 40% more money than Investor B - and as far as I can tell, also more than any split portfolio of some fraction stocks + some fraction bonds.

So it seems like by ten years after a crash, stock-based portfolios are outperforming bond-based ones. Add some fudge factor in case the next crash is worse than 2008, and maybe someone who wants to retire at 65 who is very paranoid can start adding bonds at 50, but probably not before.

Am I missing something? Is there any reason a stocks-and-bonds mix would be preferable to stocks alone even before age 50?

[open-road-air]

Some other replies have said this, but the Great Recession crash is not the right limit case. After the Black Tuesday collapse in 1929, the Dow didn’t recover until the mid-1950s; the Nikkei is STILL down quite a bit from its peak in December of 1989. Each of these crashes looked initially like the Great Recession crash—a rapid plummet to ~50% of peak value—but had a much, much longer tail of low and flat prices.  So this guidance may be about mitigating the risk of a decades-long depression that cuts in a few years before you meant to retire. How much you should worry about that (vs. a briefer stock crash a little closer in the tails or vs. a more civilizational collapse that renders the “stock market” irrelevant) is up to you, of course. 

[prokopetz]

Concept: Dungeons & Dragons setting where elves, dwarves, gnomes, etc. are all the size they are in English fairy tales, and humanity’s special game-mechanical shtick is that compared to all the other playable species we’re fucking huge.

[open-road-air]

Concept: the little folk are fairy sized, also geology-sized giants exist; humanity’s special attribute is that we represent the only physically plausible ambassadors from the vast hordes of little folk to the unthinkable titans of the giants.