cpleppert

>> The people of Ukraine have overturned a fraudulent election, overthrown a president who betrayed his commitment to his people, and are now fighting tooth and nail to defend their country. But it's all 'just' power politics?

I'm not a fan of Mearsheimer here (he was wrong on whether Russia would go to war for one thing; for another, he extrapolates way too far in ascribing motives to Putin/Russia that he doesn't have evidence for) and I think states are generally security maximizing and not power maximizing.

But Mearsheimer's book title of "The Tragedy of Great Power politics" is apt. Because the tragedy is that states have different interests than the well being of the people that live in them. I don't think pointing that out is immoral, quite the opposite; hard truths are still truths.

>>You want to talk about power? China has certainly gained plenty of real-world power since the days of Mao Zedong.

From the perspective of power maximizing their willingness to go to war is puzzling. But most research suggests states are not power maximizing but rather security maximizing. States don't consider their military potential in a vacuum but rather relative to other states that could disrupt their security. ( see: Collateral Damage Sino-Soviet Rivalry and the Termination of the Sino-Vietnamese Alliance)

In this regard, Russia's decision for war is very easy to understand even if it comes across as blindingly machiavellian and immoral. Even if the Russian economy is wrecked and the people of Russia are materially worse off Russia the state will be more secure with Ukraine destroyed.

Defensive realism? “My theory, which I label “offensive realism,” is essentially realist in nature; it falls thus in the tradition of realist thinkers such as E. H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, and Kenneth Waltz.”: John J. Mearsheimer. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

>>That being said, I think on the topic of Russia and Ukraine, Mearsheimer is not consistent with his own theory (defensive realism). I completely understand why Putin is doing what he's doing, his actions are very well explained by Mearsheimer's framework; he's not a madman (necessarily).

Except Mearsheimer explicity didn't predict a major war between Ukraine and russia. He has commented on this situation repeatedly and failed to accurately predict the outbreak of major war. Mearsheimer has a problem here: Russia is weakening its military potential against other major states by going to war against ukraine. His formulation of offensive realism does not really produce a testable prediction in this case.

I used an intel macbook pro with an older version of Mac Os that had lots of background processes and features disabled just to get the performance I wanted.

My M1 Air was noticeably faster even with spotlight indexing and a massive build inside a virtual machine out of the box.

Given that the last major technological generation of thermonuclear weapons in the US was the W88 (1988) nuclear warhead with a non-spherical primary I have a heard time imagining that spending tens of billions of dollars starting a decade later was the primary motivation of the NIF. The primary, of course, would have had nothing to do with fusion research. It is unclear what the direct application of research on a small target using massive lasers would be to current generation thermonuclear weapons.

Yes, they have stated that the nuclear research labs were contacted by the military; but this occurred after the reported test. Its a stretch to claim that the project is thus military.

>>But mostly, the war ended when the governments and economies of the nations fighting could no longer withstand the strain and started collapsing. (Russia is the most obvious example; Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were sketchy going in; Germany and France were the military superpowers but Germany finally fell apart with France about this far > < from large scale mutinies. Oh, and Britain finally paid off its WWI loans in like 2015.)

Huh? Germany lost. It couldn't have defended its territory by the time it surrendered. Britain and France could have easily fielded armies of the same size into 1920 if needed. There was no financial risk for them once America entered the war. The mutinies for germany began once it was clear that the war was hopeless. In comparison, the mutinies the french arm had suffered in the aftermath of the nivelle offensive were long gone by this time.

>> What they did not foresee was 1) how rapidly ad-hoc fortifications (i.e. trench lines) could be extended

From the planning of the former chief of staff of the german army 1905:

[Along the entire line, the corps] will move on the enemy from position to position as in a siege, advancing by day or night, digging in, advancing again, digging in, etc. They will use all the instruments of modern technology to shake the enemy’s confidence behind his lines. The attack must never be permitted to come to a standstill, as in the East Asian war.

come to a standstill = trench warfare; The reason he emphasizes that the attack must come not to a standstill is the dramatically larger armies employed in a future european war make massive fronts of trench lines inevitable. There are multiple commentaries that make exactly this point.

Once the germans failed at the seine the military reported to the political leadership that the war was lost precisely for this reason.

>> The governments want a win. At any cost.

Well, germany believed it had excellent winning odds. But if a compromise treaty was offered to germany by the entente it almost certainly would have been accepted; that was actually the expectation of many german officers. The problem for the entente was that the reason the germans were in favor of a compromise peace was they believed a war would break out again a few years later that they would be in a dramatically stronger position to fight. Russia, for one, was ruined by the summer of 1915. Germany would have benefited a lot more from any temporary peace economically because they would have access to world trade again. Germany's allies would have come out a lot better as well.

Basically, any peace offer by france or britain would have been equivalent to a german victory.

Not trying to defend Microsoft’s behavior here by any means but the justice department clearly lost the case. The original favorable ruling splitting up Microsoft was conclusively rejected by the court of appeals on almost all points. The general consensus of the academic commentary on the case I have seen( not universal by any means) is that asserting that Windows is itself a monopoly is problematic; mainly due to the lack of evidence that demand for windows is not influenced by pricing.

The Itanium wasn't just designed as a workstation CPU it was designed to be superior to existing high-end systems and then over time with volume be the eventual x86 replacement. The business case for itanium didn't work as a workstation cpu.

>>Intel and HP show up promising a clean sheet design in a decade doesn't seem like a time to roll up your market leading offering and go home.

They didn't roll up so much as have their existing market disappear. SGI, DEC and Compaq were dead. Sparc and Power gradually transitioned away from any workstation offering to servers.

The competing unix manufacturers didn't need Itanium as an excuse to fold; they were completely non-competitive by the time the itanium came around. Customers didn't purchase a unix system because of the performance of the proprietary architecture but the entire ecosystem provided by manufacturers. DEC and its Alpha was on life support even though it was marginally more competitive against x86 precisely for this reason.

The manufacturers that intended to switch to Itanium were either part of HP (compaq & dec) and would have thrown in the towel otherwise or were desperate to remain relevant (SGI). They could never had tried to compete itanium or no itanium. Itanium actually made no impact on the strongest competitors, SPARC and POWER.

Not only did Intel lose billions on Itanium but it tied up development resources that couldn't be used against AMD and influenced the decision not to compete in the mobile space.

The research papers linked in wikipedia don't really support what wikipedia claims even though they are very favorable to TSX. In one paper [1] the only way they could demonstrate a performance improvement in a real world benchmark was changing the underlying lock strategy entirely. The rest are just synthetic benchmarks that transactional memory can look good on due to the lack of actual contention but which required lots of changes to take advantage of. In [2] they used what appears to be a very naive b-tree implementation and an index tree combined with a dictionary. Even though this should probably be a great use case for transaction memory they once again have to make major changes to the implementation.

In a real database, you will run into transaction aborts much more frequently to say nothing of the correctness concerns raised by others in this thread.

[1]:https://web.archive.org/web/20161110144922/http://pcl.intel-... [2]:Improving In-Memory Database Index Performance

It isn't irrelevant in the context; by saying that they are only in range under 'perfect conditions' he makes it sound like the operation was barely doable.

This is misleading. Air operations in WWII where continuously dependent on weather conditions and the wind conditions make a large difference to the payload a piston powered aircraft of that era can carry. The B-29 was specifically designed to accomplish the strategic bombing mission in a pacific war; it would not have been accepted into production if it could not reach Japan from the Marianas Islands. In fact, it could comfortably reach the vast majority of Japan and its industrial centers, only the north of japan was outside of its normal range.

The removal of most self-defense weaponry (except the tail cannon) made the entirety of Japan reachable; they simply weren't needed for night operations and Japan's fighter force was negligible by the end of the war. In fact, future b-29's were built with only a tail cannon in the first place.

The entire book is written like that. It should be pretty clear by even his tone that he just speculating and creating his own opinions to form a story. On top of that it is casually written like a series of blog posts; I found it incredibly hard to take seriously.

Michael Crichton's Gell-Mann Amnesia strikes again.

>>You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well... You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

I guess the simplest answer is they didn't launch an attack because they couldn't. Specialized torpedo boats cannot generally penetrate a destroyer or cruiser screen without assistance. There is no viable way to even get into position to threaten a carrier as such a movement will be detected on radar long before a threat materializes. Even when American ships engaged in offensive operations close to the north Vietnamese coast they came out on top in clashes involving patrol boats making a large offensive operation unappealing.

The red force in the millenium challenge had access to significant capabilities that Iraq and Vietnam did not have access to such as incredibly accurate anti-ship cruise missiles.

The conflicts you mentioned were against non-peer adversaries. The belligerents had no naval or offensive air power to speak of.

>>Also why would you pin the fundamental blame on FDR cutting off the oil? Japan was running a pretty brutal occupation of China at the time.

See chapter 8 of The Challenge of Grand Strategy: The Great Powers and the Broken Balance between the World Wars. War between Japan and the United States was a certainty to FDR's advisors if an oil embargo was imposed.

There has been a lot of studies into the economic performance of south korea and the other asian tigers compared to latin american countries that had similar levels of economic development after WWII and one commonality is the inability of government subsidies to influence export success. A product exported on the global market by a country desperate for foreign investment probably doesn't have the means to gain a competitive advantage through direct capital investment or subsidies.

Of course, a country can always be competitive by keeping wages low (probably artificially low in south korea) but I think south korea and the other asian tigers got a lot of things right that aren't comparable to how mainland china approached economic reform.

Besides being of a duration of five years there isn't a lot in common the economic planning of the soviet union and south korea in the aftermath of the Korean war. The soviet union's plans controlled the allocation of almost every resource and good in the economy and its ultimate price. South Korea's planning was mostly limited to guiding government investment and lacked the policy levers available to Gosplan.

Iran sold oil at basically the same price and with the same legal structure as Saudi Aramaco did. That shouldn't be surprising, both countries reliance on western expertise and capital investment lessened dramatically in the decade following the initial concessions; and with it, Iran and Saudi arabia were able to overturn the initial legal framework that favored UK and US investors. Iran and Saudi Arabia certainly did not give oil away.

As for Afghanistan, the taliban has only recently expanded its territorial base before 9/11. The afghan government of today controls more territory than the soviet backed state ever did; whose control only extended to the major population centers and connecting arteries.

South Korea started growing rapidly by the beginning of the 1960's and its economic growth has been consistent regardless of the political regime [^1]. What has been consistent was a significantly different economic system than the North, which would certainly not have survived unification after a North Korean victory. Military spending can't explain the disparity between the North and South as China had similar economic performance and consistently lower aggregate per capita spending than the North.

Vietnam, on the other hand, only really began to reform its economy after the collapse of the soviet union. If anything, North Vietnam's victory emboldened communist leaders in the aftermath of the war.

1:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_on_the_Han_River

>> There's no easy way to cut a file/folder (Cmd-x doesn't work

Cmd-opt-V will move the previously copied folder/file. I find this behavior superior to having to decide whether to cut/copy a file to select it. Instead, you choose the operation when it is time to actually move or copy. You can also copy a file to multiple locations in combination with a move.

Cmd-up moves to the parent folder.

You have lots of sort and aligning options that are accessible in keyboard shortcuts. Column browser doesn’t have a good windows equivalent for example. Alt or double clicking the bottom bar adjusts the width of all panes or auto adjusts the selected one. So I’m never in a situation where some file name is cut off even in very deep hierarchies.

>> Do you think credible witness testimony is admissible, or do you not? Millenia of justice systems are built on this concept. Even "hard evidence" all comes down to trusting the people in the chain of custody, since things can be doctored so easily nowadays.

Except that eyewitness testimony is never uncritically accepted in any justice system. Ask a group of people who observed an event and invariably there will be a substantial portion who remembered basic facts about the event wrong. This phenomenon is well understood. Furthermore, there is a difference in asking about the phenomena a person observed and a causal event a person was a part of. An eyewitness can be confused about any number of specific details but it is much harder to be confused about an event that had a direct impact on them. In the latter case, we are not blindly trusting their recollection but rejecting alternative explanations as lacking causal power.

Accepting hard evidence doesn't involve trust at all. You don't trust a medical lab not to fabricate evidence; you rationally judge the probability that they went to the effort for no gain whatsoever and risked their reputation and career on something that would be subjected to intense scrutiny in a courtroom on the hope no one would notice something was amiss. Of course, the defense has rights to directly question and propose an alternative explanation. A court doesn't accept evidence blindly.

>> Want to claim crazy or spontaneous mass hallucination? Prove it. Show the mechanism in the brain. Reproduce in a lab. Put a name to the disease. The burden of proof is on you to describe why our justice systems are built on a complete farce.

Nonsense. It is up to the person claiming a radically new phenomena to show evidence and proactively demonstrate that there is no possible alternative explanation. This isn't unfair, if you can't examine the explanatory power of other theories your own theory should probably not be accepted. Do you declare at the end of a magic show that you have just witnessed a supernatural event unless a person can explain to your satisfaction exactly how the tricks were done? Furthermore, you are going further and asking for counter evidence that does not rationally match the standard of evidence you have actually presented. As I just pointed out above, the justice system does not uncritically accept eyewitness testimony.

That’s true but you might as well thank Standard Oil for being able to have a car. Being innovative and anti-competitive aren’t mutually exclusive.

But iPhones and Android devices do have functionality that users can’t obtain anywhere else. What alternative smartphone ecosystem could the average user choose as a substitute? To say nothing of the fact a smartphone is essentially required in and of itself.

Once a user has chosen a smartphone ecosystem large switching costs come into play.

If a significant amount of your customers choose your phone because it is stylish that could just as well demonstrate there is no price competition to speak of.

Sure it is. A gaming console has a plethora of alternatives available to the consumer. PCs, other consoles, game streaming, mobile games and other entertainment options.

If you need a smartphone ( and that is everyone for all practical purposes) your only choice is iPhone or Android. There are no substitutes whatsoever and little evidence of the price competition that would show market forces. In the same vein, software developers have no choice if they want to develop for smartphones and it’s hard to think of a substitute.

I guess I’m skeptical as to what is being claimed here. There have been various attempts to use the Greek phonetic values and logograms of Linear B to reconstruct Linear A equivalents. The only known sentences partially deciphered are votive formulations. Knowing the sound values doesn’t really help you anyway as we have virtually no information on Linear A at all. It’s pretty hard to understand sign equivalencies if you can’t even understand how a sign is being used.

The article is pretty vague; I’m not sure what these sign equivalences are supposed to be.

Huh? The only thing I can think of is that the engine analysis can swing immediately once the move is played because it hasn’t thought about the new position for very long. Obviously if you just watch a stream the evaluation changes immediately.

It would be very rare for the computer in the first place not to have a strong move as one of its candidate entries. Obviously the evaluation can shift but the difference shouldn’t be apparent to a human player and it would be even more unlikely that a computer would reject a top move but a human would find it.

Glad I wasn't the only one to notice that. No one idea what he could possibly mean but given that Java hasn't used x87 in forever and there is no reason to ever want to use them I guess he is just completely wrong here?

The article is a little unclear on why Germany referred to the conflict as a 'Weltkrieg' or World War. The term was used exclusively to refer to a situation where the British Empire entered a conflict between the Central Powers(Germany & Austria-Hungary) and the Dual Alliance(France & Russia). It was used even before any side mobilized or declared war in diplomatic communications with Austria-Hungary.

The declaration of war by the UK brought in all its colonies and India into the conflict and made possible the capture of Germany's colonies in Africa. This radical transformation of a european continental war is what justified calling the conflict a world war. The industrialized nature of the war was not why the coming conflict was described as a world war. By that criteria it is hard to see how any prior conflict would even come close.

The fact that german leaders at the time felt the need to coin a new term is a very powerful argument for WWI being a significantly different kind of conflict.

>> If you have access to limitless, relatively cheap debt, then yeah, there’s absolutely no reason to build fossil fuel plants anymore.

Thats kind of the point. The cost of capital is rightly higher in developing nations. Capital intensive carbon neutral projects just don't make sense for much of the world.