lunar-whitey

The U.S. is currently in a similar position to the U.K. in the Suez in 1956 and is sprinting into the position the U.S.S.R. was in Afghanistan in 1979. Americans watching network TV news or reading the New York Times, however, would be hard pressed to distinguish it from Iraq in 2003.

Likewise for school districts in wealthier areas of the United States.

What’s especially frightening about this comparison is that post-Glasnost figures clearly show the U.S. was never even close to being surpassed by the U.S.S.R. economically or militarily. We don’t need to speculate about production gaps between the U.S. and China today - they have been out in the open for years, and all the political class here does about it is counter, “But the stock market is up!”

The existence of yet worse systems does not make the American system fair. It is not difficult to picture societies where it is not required to build wealth for 4 generations to achieve moderate economic security. Further, specific measures to reduce systemic poverty in America are feasible without any kind of radical societal collapse.

Many wealthy people remain so despite (rarely, even because of) problems with impulse control or irrational perseverance. Exacerbation of these behaviors by stress is well understood. Why are they considered fatal moral defects only in people of low socioeconomic status?

This is why I question the article’s premise. There is no risk of liberal democracies implementing a UBI that supports anything beyond subsistence. Most people in developed countries will want more than that.

The biggest issue I see with UBI is that the rates could be set below the cost of living and used as justification to eliminate all other support programs, as was feared the Nixon administration would do when it proposed a negative income tax in the late 1960s. Different solutions are still needed for the small subset of the population that cannot limit spending to necessities when required.

I think the 10 U.S. metro number itself is somewhat arbitrary here. It’s impossible to say precisely without looking at all parties’ deployed warhead counts and operational plans, but I have seen estimates that put the number of direct casualties over 100 million. (Russia and the United States each have well over 1000 warheads deployed.)

I do accept that towns far from both major metropolitan areas and high value military targets could survive. However, the short term social impact of supply shortages and the longer term agricultural effects of atmospheric changes are difficult to predict.

> Urban centers are not set up for large-scale rainwater collection.

This is correct. Even in suburban areas, rainfall may be irregular and supplies to collect it (and render potable, depending on the manner of collection) also unavailable to most people.

> What would actually happen is the military and national guard would be mobilized. They would use pumps and water trucks to visit acquifers and wells, and distribute water by truck neighborhood by neighborhood. A continuous stream of trucks constantly resupplying cities.

At this point, I will be explicit concerning my opinion of your 28 million direct casualty estimate upthread. I think this only makes sense if you think in terms of individual city centers being destroyed, which is a massive underestimation. Modern weapon systems with independent reentry vehicles and warheads yielding around 100 kilotons do not destroy cities; they erase whole metroplexes.

In such a scenario there are no major population centers left to supply or contingents of military to supply them at a meaningful scale. I don’t have much interest in arguing how survivors in outlying areas might migrate in response to the supply chain collapse that follows.

You cannot sustain a population center of any size on rainfall. For that, you need electricity to operate municipal pumps (which will likely be absent, as above - if not immediately after generation and distribution is destroyed, then a few weeks later when fuel for the generators is exhausted). Without that the bulk of the population is dead in under a week.

Repurposing feed grain reserves is interesting, but you need fuel for that as well (plus significant coordination, which seems unlikely in a scenario where many people with the required knowledge and authority may be dead and telecommunications infrastructure is destroyed).

A full scale exchange would be much, much worse than Europe in 1918. Against a peer adversary, ABM systems can protect 1 city at the very most.

There will be people on both sides who know how many warheads are required, and in which locations, to destroy the capability to generate electricity and refine petroleum at a national scale. This kind of industrial capacity, once destroyed, takes years to replace. Reserves of fuel, food, and clean water will not last nearly that long. You are looking at hundreds of millions of deaths in weeks or months.

The only people who can seriously entertain this live close enough to a high value target to be assured of their immediate demise.

It’s easier for the top 10% to blame the top 0.1% and absolve themselves, in spite of the knowledge that this changes nothing. Americans especially are averse to the idea that the middle class owes anything to anyone.

The civil rights movement broke the New Deal coalition and ended popular support for many of the policies that had maintained the socioeconomic status of working and lower middle class whites. Today, neither party seriously entertains extending social programs for anyone.

I honestly hope you are lying about your profession, rather than venting your personal frustrations with clients by arguing with people that you believe resemble them online.

> And there is another diagnosis that is blindingly obvious but i wont name it out here.

I wonder why a self identified mental health professional would go to such lengths to deny the viewpoint many of autistic people, who frequently report that the truth of what they say matters far less to organizations than the manner in which they say it.

“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”

The current administration has established a pattern of making unsubstantiated fraud allegations against its political enemies. That is new.

The funnel for design is a little wider. Nevertheless, if you aren’t early in your career, I suspect you’ll find that most firms are not interested in people who do not have specific experience building something fairly close to their current product. If none of the handful of players in your segment are interested, see above.

I suppose there could be some shift in market dynamics now that the political leadership here has decided to shut down what’s left of the talent pipeline. I think most firms will just accelerate their shift to more stable geographies, though.

If you are in the US, you probably already know who the players in your area are and can approach directly. Frankly though, the small number of firms and positions is a sign it’s time to change careers.

> There's no benefit to a brain that struggles in modern society.

Would you say there’s no benefit to the genes associated with sickle cell anemia? How about homosexuality? Schizophrenia?

The reality is that we cannot reliably predict how genes interact with the environment in the long term. Modern society is more malleable than ever.

The fact that this topic is relevant on a site disproportionately frequented by computing professionals suggests a strictly negative characterization is incomplete even in today’s society.

Equity remains a valid criticism of LCFF in California specifically.

For one unremarkable observation in this area, see the following think tank report:

> States often commission cost studies to establish the level of funding required to help students meet state standards. LPI analyzed five of the more recent of these studies [...] All of these studies recommended additional weighted funding to support English learners and students considered "at-risk," which was most often defined by a measure of family income and also included other factors [...] The recommended weights for English learners in these studies ranged from 15% to 40% of the base grant level in each state. The recommended weights for at-risk students ranged from 30% to 81%. Compared to the recommended funding in these states, the LCFF’s supplemental grant weight of 20% is at the lower end of the recommended range of weights for English learners and below the range of weights for at-risk students.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED670929.pdf

The school system is downstream broader social issues here. It can be shockingly expensive to deal with the various behavioral problems that disproportionately impact students from lower income communities. Students from stable homes with available and invested parents practically teach themselves.

Fear not - the American school system was built on and holds fast to the supposition that the affluent should be able to avoid any unwanted exposure to the problems of those less fortunate than themselves.

Illiterate incoming freshman are the product of the public middle and high school systems, not the university system.

For reference:

> Beginning in Fall 2022, the number of students placed into Math 2 began to grow rapidly. Math 2 was first created in 2016, and it was originally designed to be a remedial math course serving a very small number of first-year students (less than 100 students a year or around 1% of the incoming class) who were not prepared to start in our standard precalculus courses [...] In Fall 2024, the numbers of students placing into Math 2 and 3B surged further, with over 900 students in the combined Math 2 and 3B population, representing an alarming 12.5% of the incoming first-year class (compared to under 1% of the first-year students testing into these courses prior to 2021).

https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...

These are students that even middling American public schools would have failed to pass from high school in decades past, or would have later failed to meet standardized test requirements prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keller's early experience of the world differed from typical in dimensions beyond language recognition.

If BlueZ was compelling enough, Android would tolerate it for the same reasons it tolerates the kernel. Nobody really wants to be in the business of writing a BT stack, and yet Android has replaced theirs at least twice. I ask, why?

The United States from 1945 to about 1970 made a fair amount of noise about broadening the scope of the franchise. This certainly was not the norm historically, but contemporary ambivalence about that project is what leads us to this article today.

It would help if BlueZ had any hope of being commercially relevant. The Linux Wi-Fi stack, in contrast, is quite usable.

The United States outsourced the bulk of its consumer production to China and the latter's emissions are still falling. You don't find that impressive?

Seems presence of U-232 is more manageable than I thought.

China has many capital controls but generally supports industrial activity in the state interest; the US does the opposite.

Theoretically, perhaps, but I don’t think anyone with a serious interest in weapons would pursue it. From a nonproliferation perspective, I’d guess the infrastructure necessary to remove contaminants from uranium bred through the thorium cycle would be costly and difficult to conceal.