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This is a somewhat longer explanation why the Doomsday argument, mentioned earlier here, is incorrect.
Suppose you’re walking on the street and see a street preacher. The main content of his sermon is “God hates gays! All gays will go to Hell!”. After elaborating on this topic for a while, he adds “Oh and by the way, the world ends next Tuesday! The earth will be destroyed and everybody dies!”
Then a truck hits you and you wake up in Hell. Assuming you’re gay, what does your personal experience of being a gay person who ended up in Hell show about the likelihood of the preacher being correct – specifically the claims “all gays go to Hell” and “the world ends next Tuesday”?
It seems natural to consider ending up in Hell as evidence in favor of the first claim – the preacher’s claim predicted you’d end up in Hell, and the prediction being correct is positive evidence.
The doomsday argument is basically equivalent to the claim that your experiences are also evidence for the second claim – if you consider yourself a random human somewhere in humanity’s timeline, the preacher’s claim predicts that your life happened before next Tuesday, and this is a true prediction. The correctness of such an argument is less intuitive, but it turns out you don’t really need to treat this differently from the above case.
To answer the question correctly, it’s first important to make it explicit what the alternatives are. To create concrete cases, we’ll create models with the same total number of people, but different distributions of gay/straight people going to heaven/hell, and then ask whether the evidence favors one model over another. Start from a world with 20M straight people and 2M gays, and half of both go to Hell for reasons unrelated to sexual orientation. If we assume an indifferent god who places no particular moral value on sexual orientation, we get these numbers:
indifferent god: straight heaven/hell 10/10, gay 1/1
Now if we interpret “all gays go to Hell” as a wrathful god who alters the above by sending all gay people to Hell, we get:
wrathful straight god: straight 10/10, gay 0/2
Between these two alternatives, your personal experience is indeed a 2x factor in favor of the preacher being correct.
However, this is not the only way “all gays go to Hell” could be true. Instead of a wrathful god, we could have a benevolent one that instead pre-emptively cures gayness in all people who are not otherwise going to lead wicked enough lives to deserve Hell. This gives:
benevolent straight god: straight 11/10, gay 0/1
When comparing this to the indifferent alternative, your case is actually not evidence either way. That you ended up in Hell as a gay is evidence in favor, but being gay in the first place is evidence against: there are only half as many gays total, so half the chance that a random person would be gay.
So if we assume agreement on the pre-death world, with the same number of gays, then being a gay in Hell is evidence for all gay people going to Hell after death. But if we don’t assume agreement on the total number of gay people, then such reasoning on the ratio (gays in hell)/(total gays) is not valid.
The correct rule is in fact quite simple: being a gay person in Hell is evidence in favor of models that have a larger total number of gays in Hell. The ratio of that number to the total number of all gay people in the model is totally irrelevant. One way to think about this is to consider a “multiverse of possibilities”. If we have a 50% prior for model A with 1M gays in Hell, and 50% for model B with 2M gays in hell, then there are a total of 0.5*1M+0.5*2M=1.5M matching people in the multiverse. 1M of those are in model B, so you have a 2/3 chance of being in model B.
Like the total number of gay people doesn’t matter, we can similarly generalize this to ignoring the total number of all people, gay or straight. Now the answer to the doomsday question is obvious: being a person who lived before next Tuesday is evidence in favor of models that have more people living before next Tuesday. Since that number does not change whether world ends then or not, your personal position is not evidence either in favor or against doomsday, and the doomsday argument is wrong.
So your existence is evidence in favor of models that have a larger number of people like you. When “like you” becomes specific enough that you wouldn’t expect more than one such person, “number of such people” is about equal to “probability such a person exists”. In that most most specific sense, you’re evidence in favor of models that give the highest probability for there existing a person with all the same exact memories as you have.
Note that a consequence of this is a preference for models with higher population. Suppose you’ve lived your life inside a sealed cube and have no evidence about the population outside the cube. Your prior is that a civilization might create either one such cube or 1000 such cubes. You should consider your own existence here evidence in favor of more likely being in the kind of civilization that creates 1000 such cubes.
Doomsday-argument-like results can be valid in some situations. Suppose there’s a 50% chance that sapient life on a planet ends when a widely used timekeeping standard reaches the value “2020-05-12 18:00” somewhere on the planet. Now, if you start from just the position that you’re a sapient being, then it’s more likely you’re on a planet where this doesn’t happen – a larger number of beings will live on those planets where life continues longer. But if you then learn that this moment will only occur next Tuesday, then this is valid evidence in favor of doomsday occurring on your planet, which will raise the probability back to 50%. So the doomsday argument is kind of valid in the context of starting from the position “I’m probably on a world where civilization doesn’t end early, since such worlds will have more people”; in that context it’s valid to say “nope, since you only live in the early part of your civilization, that’s evidence which exactly negates your evidence for civilization being particularly likely to continue beyond that point”.
Another example: suppose you’re an astronaut currently on the other side of the Moon. Is this billion-to-one evidence in favor of the Earth having suffered a catastrophe that killed everyone not protected by the mass of the Moon? By doomsday-argument-like logic, you could say it is (a random surviving human is behind the Moon? very unlikely otherwise). But the correct answer is it isn’t such evidence – it is only evidence in favor of models where people are sending more astronauts behind the Moon.
Part of being in Hell is that you don’t have enough undistracted mental capacity to think about such questions. You can feel that you used to be clearer-headed, and that’s another of the things that hurt.
The great thing about have a PhD in Philosophy (& Medicine) is that it frees up so much time not dealing with these thought games. Turns out while Heaven May exist hell certainly does not, not per se. Read “Heaven and Hell” by Burt Ehrman. Extremely well written.
The great thing about having a PhD in philosophy is that you can pick a side about an interminably disputed question that will never have any hard evidence, and convince yourself you’ve found the “correct” answer. At least until someone from the other camp shows up claiming to have a PhD too.
Haha as if you need a PhD in Philosophy to do that…
Just googled that book… what it seems to actually say is that “early Christians believed in Heaven but likely didn’t believe in Hell”. Which of course says little about whether Hell actually exists. Anyway, that’s a distraction from the OP’s discussion of the Doomsday argument. Your comment is both a non sequitor in the discussion, and wrong about what it does talk about – not what I would have expected from a Philosophy PhD…
The great thing about having a conventional Catholic education at school is that you’re already familiar with these controversies. See Universalism and Annihilationism.
Also, I personally do not find Bart (not Burt) Ehrman particularly convincing as an appeal to authority, mostly because people on side A of a question like to appeal to him as “And he’s a proper Christian theologian!” while people on side B, the more traditional side, consider him a pseudo-Gnostic at least. It’s not an untrammeled reputation, let’s put it like that 🙂 (I appreciate Colbert’s comedy here and that’s he playing a part. I prefer this clip and especially the end, because yeah, he did teach Christian doctrine classes).
The more
mealy-mouthedsneakynuanced Catholic view is that you are required to believe that Hell exists, but you are not required to believe any particular person is in it, and indeed you can never say with 100% certainty of anyone at all that they are indeed in Hell right this minute 😀Isn’t that filthy human chauvinism that doesn’t apply to the fallen angels?
We were talking about humans not the devils, so too bad for them, they made their bed and will have to lie in it. They got Milton to write fine speeches for them, why do they need me to do them an apologia? 🙂
The great thing about have a PhD in Philosophy (& Medicine) is that it frees up so much time not dealing with these thought games.
Dude, did you just I am euphoric?
If you are trolling us all, well played, sir! 🙂
The great thing about having a phd in physics is you can just mumble words like ‘measure problem’ and ‘boltzmann brains’ followed by some technical jargon about degrees of freedom, so that when the conversation gets derailed, at it leaves everyone more confused than angry.
Isn’t there something missing here?
If you end up in Hell as a gay man (and otherwise a decent person) this seems like some pretty decent evidence to me.
The truck hitting a person being evidence for the world ending seems wrong.
The man behind the moon would be evidence for Earth’s destruction – if he had been put into a coma, to be sent off planet in case of an extinction event.
Maybe in the context of doomsday logic this makes sense, but then that logic never made intuitive sense to me
Missing what? The rest of your post seems like mostly isolated comments – is there something specific which you consider to be “missing”?
The Doomsday argument doesn’t claim that the specific event of being hit by a truck would be evidence. Rather that if we pick up any possible Doomsday date in the future, us happening to exist before that date, instead of after it, is evidence for there being no people beyond the Doomsday.
Evidence like “otherwise decent person or not” was intentionally left out, analyzing the question “what can you tell just from being gay and ending up in Hell?”.
And explaining exactly when that intuition is correct was the main point of my post. It is not always such evidence. It depends on which specific models you compare. Compared to a model where straight and gay people go to Heaven equally, most people will most naturally think of the “go the Hell” alternative as “the same, but change the gay people going to Heaven into gay people going to Hell”. When comparing these two models, it is indeed evidence in favor of the latter. But “all gays go to Hell” also holds in the model “the same, but change the gay people going to Heaven into straight people going to Heaven”. Now there is no evidence in favor of the latter.
So there is evidence for the most natural way people usually interpret “gay people go to Hell”. But it’s important to realize there isn’t generally evidence favoring any model where gays go to Hell over any model where they don’t. It only does that when the two models agree on the total number of gay people, so that a larger portion of them going to Hell is the same thing as there being a larger total number of gays in Hell. And the Doomsday argument is the kind of case where this does not work – it’s the equivalent of changing the number of gay people, while the number of them going to Hell stays exactly the same.
Well you could say that it’s valid evidence for people at least having believed that such a destruction event is coming in the future, if such a belief makes them try to ship more astronauts behind the Moon. How strong evidence, that depends on how many astronauts you think they’d succeed in sending.
I don’t follow at all. I don’t see how the future’s mere existence can count as evidence for any specific event occurring on any specific date in said future. Its existence is a necessary precondition, sure, but hardly evidence.
Well it is an incorrect argument… But it’s not exactly “future’s mere existence” that is considered evidence; rather, it’s our position in history that is considered evidence.
To perhaps better understand why someone would think so, consider this example where a similar argument does work:
Authorities divide the population of a country into groups in a particular way. Each group has a size of either 1 person or 100 people. The authorities first flip a coin to decide which size the next group has. Then they select random people one at a time from the remaining population and give them numbers starting from 0 (last person selected for a 100-person group gets 99) until the group is full.
Now, you select a group at random from all groups. Obviously there’s a 50% chance that it’ll be a 1-person group. But suppose that someone now selects a random person from this group, and tells you that their number is 0. Now this is strong evidence that it’s very likely a 1-person group! You could easily simulate this and verify that it is correct.
So if you know your number is 0, but don’t know your group size, it would be a fairly non-obvious mistake to incorrectly reason as “so if I consider myself randomly placed in my group – which I am – then if my group was selected like that and I was picked as the random person, the correct deduction would be that it’s likely a 1-person group; thus I’m likely in a 1-person group”. This is pretty similar to the Doomsday argument. (The true result – which should again be pretty easy to verify if you want to – is that if a person gets number 0, their chance of being in a 1-person group is actually 50%).
Being person number 0 above is analogous to being in an early part of history in the Doomsday argument. And whether the group size is 1 or 100 is analogous to whether history continues beyond the early part.
But as you go on to show, it doesn’t actually affect the odds at all. A person with #0 still has a 50% chance to be in a group of size 100, after all.
And the reason I phrased it as I did is that, until the end of the universe, there will always be a day D+1 that has not yet occurred that could be the real doomsday, and so our position in history can always be described as “before doomsday.” Or at least, for any doomsday prophecy whose foretold time has not already passed and moved into the realm of certainly false. And then realize that the logic applies equally well (i.e., poorly) to a doomsday a second, minute, hour, week, month, season, year, decade, etc. from now. So which should our poor arguer consider it as evidence for? I’d say that the original formulation is also guilty of privileging the hypothesis.
Basically, I’m not seeing how anyone could make the logical conclusion that “because I live at time_0, I should believe there will be a doomsday at time_1.” And indeed, I’m not aware of any doomsday prophets who have used such logic. Their signs tend to be more along the lines of “wars and rumors of wars,” or the rise of atheism, or sexual degeneracy, or something (my selections may be heavily biased by Christian samples).
As originally stated, the argument doesn’t try to claim a single specific Doomsday moment; rather, as you say, it’s generally evidence (well, actually not, but) favoring models where humans survive a shorter time over models where they survive for a long time. And that is stated as an overall result like “unlikely that there would ever live 10x more humans than have lived so far”. You can see such arguments on the Wikipedia page (overall that page seems like a mess, but at least it shows how some people take it seriously…).
@uau:
> So if you know your number is 0, but don’t know your group size…
I think I agree with your logic, but could you walk me through a couple variations on this?
Assume instead that you don’t know your number, but can easily find it out — perhaps your number is covered by an opaque piece of tape and you’ve never peeked underneath. You go through the same reasoning process as an outsider, and conclude that if you remove the tape and discover a 0, you are probably in a size-1 group. I think this reasoning is correct. Conditional upon knowing you are a 0, it’s 50:50, but if you discover experimentally that you are a 0, it’s a high probability.
Now let’s assume that you actually go through this process every day, but you have a really lousy memory. Every day you go through the same reasoning, remove the tape to “discover” you are a 0, but this is a genuinely a discovery and not a precondition because you’ve completely forgotten the what you saw the previous day. I think you are still correct that you are most likely in a size-1 group?
Now assume your memory isn’t quite that bad. You fuzzily recollect that you might be 0, but not having looked recently you aren’t confident. You go through the reasoning process, remove the tape and discover a 0. It’s a true discovery — your memory might have been wrong. What’s the chance of you are part of a size-1 group? Is it some function of your degree of confidence in whether you were a 0?
Nope. Half the zeros are in size-1 groups, half in size-100 groups. Doesn’t matter how you discover it.
You can’t “go through the same reasoning process as an outsider” because your group wasn’t selected equally among groups. If the outsider picks your group, his prior for group size 1 is 50%. Your prior for group size 1 is 1/101. The number being 0 is equally strong evidence for group size 1 for both, but due to different priors the resulting probability differs.
Suppose the outsider goes through the process and randomly picks you. Now what is the probability? Now you should agree with the outsider that you’re probably in a size-1 group, because a random pick from the group ending up being you is additional evidence for you that it’s a size-1 group.
What if the guy handling the random number generator announces in advance “if you pick the group that nkurz guy is in, I’ll use him as the random person – after all, his position will be as random as any other”? Now the outsider should agree that it’s 50% – because you being in the group is evidence for it being big (100 times as many chances for you to be in a group if it’s 100 people).
What if the person handling the random number generator decides to use you as the random person if your group is selected, and tells you but not the outsider? Now you keep your different probabilities; yours is more accurate because you have more information.
@uau:
> Nope.
Thank you for the correction. I was worried I was wrong when I wrote it, but couldn’t quite see the light.
Maybe a useful view is to conceive of first throwing out everyone who is not a 0, and then asking what the remaining 0’s can learn about their environment from their knowledge of their number. Because there are the same numbers of 0’s in each class, the answer would seem to be nothing.
Welcome to Hollywood. Your producer needs your project proposal by tomorrow. Your prompt is, “I enjoy beer.”
Make a movie of Tim Powers’ _The Drawing of the Dark_. It doesn’t just have tasty beer, it has magic beer.
The International Powerful Assistance league (IPA for short). They have different costumes according to their flavors. The oddball of the group is the only girl, Mandarin Heffelweisser.
The leader of IPA is High Gravity (HG for short). His superpower is making people twice as drunk and twice as heavy at the same time.
My proposal is “The Adventures of Gilgamesh & Enkidu“.
Beer: the first marvel of civilization.
Driving marvel of civilisation.
You’re a Sumerian king who wants to keep track of how much beer everybody gets?
Invent maths and writing.
German brewer who’s having trouble moving beer around the steep terrain of the Black Forest? Better buy one of those newfangled Motorlastwagens.
A romcom based on the OK Cupid blog post that found that “do you like the taste of beer?” is the question most highly correlated with being willing to fuck on the first date.
That idea is a winner! It writes itself.
Boy is told by friend about this stat, so out of sheer curiosity finds a girl online who says she likes the taste of beer. They go out and get along famously. It’s as if they’ve each found their soulmate!
After they’ve slept together, girl asks boy what it was about her that initially interested him.
Boy: “Well, you’re going to laugh. It’s actually very funny… You see, well you see my friend Conrad , he told me about this dumb statistic. Anyway, it was really just a joke. I didn’t take it seriously. I just thought I’d give it a try…”
Girl (not amused): You thought you would give it a try!? What!? You thought I was a slut!
She leaves his apartment, slamming the door behind her.
They date other people. Are generally unhappy. Eventually run into each other at a party. She flashes him angry looks when he tries to make eye contact. Somehow they end up in a conversation. She’s a bit drunk (on beer).
Girl: You know a funny thing about that statistic? I’m pretty sure it’s right. Because, you know what? I really, really do put out a lot. I pretty much sleep with every guy I go out with, and that’s a lot of guys if you add it all up. And I like the taste of beer. So I guess those are the two things I like. The taste of beer, and a good fuck from someone I just met!
Now he’s hurt and angry. He leaves without replying. The look on her face turns to a look of hurt.
Girl: No, no, wait! I didn’t mean that! Wait!
She chases him but can’t find him. Something, something, they eventually wind up together and are happily in love. Last shot is of them together in bed, she picks up a bottle of beer off the nightstand, examines it a moment before taking a swig and says:
“This is good.” Takes another swig.
Fade to Black.
Edit: I obviously misread the OK Cupid stat to mean someone answering in the affirmative to that question.
Quasi-documentary about the evolution of American post-Prohibition beer from millcoorsweiser to something decent. Start back in, say, the 70s when Coors Light was considered a delicacy east of the Rockies, focus on the rise of one company who managed to put something better on the shelves of your average town (specific company to be determined by who offers the most for product placement, yes, this would probably wind up being one of the brands bought out by AB-Inbev).
Something like Bottleshock, but with Beer? That shouldn’t be too expensive to make.
Remember that Rickie Gervais movie that takes place in an alternate reality that’s the same as our contemporary one, except no one ever has heard of or told a lie until the protagonist invents it? Do that but for booze
Is this the Brett Kavanaugh biopic?
A documentary on the impact of Corona. It takes until the second half to clarify they’re talking about the beer.
“In a world, where a disease has destroyed the name of a good beer…
It’s time to kick the virus out.”
*This Is The Rhythm Of The Night plays*
The Hidden Links Between Mental Disorders
“He was taken aback by what he found. Every single mental disorder predisposed the patient to every other mental disorder — no matter how distinct the symptoms1. “We knew that comorbidity was important, but we didn’t expect to find associations for all pairs,” says Plana-Ripoll, who is based at Aarhus University in Denmark.”
Is there one factor leading to all mental disorders? Or just a few? Or what?
Didn’t Scott once review a paper where they ran a cluster analysis of all the correlations between mental ilnesses?
Found that the main clusters were roughly mood disorder, conduct disorder and psychosis.
I’d be curious to see that paper if you remember how to find it. (A web search gave me nothing of interest.)
this?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/14/ssc-journal-club-mental-disorders-as-networks/
Makes an offhand reference to DOI: 10.1177/2167702613497473
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/obsonline/general-psychopathology-factor-may-describe-structure-of-psychiatric-disorders.html#.WFGVr1IzWJA
It’s natural to expect at least some degree of positive correlation between lots of possible bad traits humans could have. I’d expect general developmental problems, or genetic issues causing cells to generally not function well, to increase rather than decrease the chance of most specific problems. Thus those problems will be correlated – each specific visible problem has some correlation with “fetal development didn’t go quite right”, “all cells function badly” or other such issues, and through that to each other.
So there are factors that I’d expect to lead to lots of possible disorders, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t also specific factors that cause one disorder only.
There are probably lots of people going around with a mild disorder or three that never seek or receive treatment and therefore are not counted in such statistics.
On the other hand, if you have 1 severe disorder and 1d3 mild disorders, you certainly receive treatment for the severe disorder, which leads to diagnosing all of your disorders, which leads to being included in the statistics for all of them.
One thing l would naively predict about population-wide studies of traits that are selected for/against in assortative sexual selection, is that such a study will not be able to distinguish “links” between traits that have a shared physiological cause from “links” between traits that have no such shared pathway, but are simply selected for/against during assortative sexual selection, where “healthy/fit” selects for “healthy/fit” and “healthy” or “unhealthy” starts to run in families.
In other words, my very limited and conceptual-only understanding of Hardy-Weinberg plus assortative sexual selection against negative traits will tend to mean that instead of an equilibrium with all traits ‘evenly’ distributed, having a gene for any one clear negative trait will (generally) predict having any one of the others.
Haven’t read the paper, but how does it get out of the confounder of variable medical treatment? In other words, to the best of my knowledge, I have no mental disorders. It would not be shocking if that was incorrect, but they were rather sufficiently minor I never bothered to be evaluated. If I did have another, more significant disorder, I would go in for some form of evaluation which would probably detect other more minor things. And that’s without getting into, ‘well your last doctor said it was X, but I’ve re-evaluated, it’s really Y and Z interacting in an odd way.’
There’s probably a good term for this, but I call it ‘whole-body scan’ problem from an old episode of Scrubs.
I’m definitely in favor of naming more things after episodes of Scrubs.
Something along these lines seems likely to me. If your brain has a notably atypical way of evaluating information and reacting to it, this could have cumulative effects that present as what we tend to classify as mental illness. Unusual moods and perceptions, compulsive or odd behavior, etc. The same “mechanism” could be underlying most of these conditions, but the ways in which it is affected could differ significantly. I’m sure I’m oversimplifying this, but a rough analogy could be how cancer is generally caused by disruptions in the cell replication mechanism, but the mutations involve vary widely and so do the resulting cancers. (Just realized “uau” made a somewhat similar point above).
I think mental illness is best thought of not as something extra or wrong in someone’s brain, but rather an “improperly” regulated application of normal functions. Scott’s discussion of schizophrenia and autism gets at this idea.
I definitely think how we classify mental illness is hugely influenced by social norms and structure, as is the way such anomalies in regulation express themselves. This changes the patterns we identify, and the behavior we consider most troubling or abnormal. In reading about the Victorian era, I noticed two “types” of prominent people that we didn’t seem to describe coherently now.
One type is usually speculated to be bipolar by modern writers, and manic-depressive illness was definitely recognized very early on. But the people I’m talking about seemed to have very little depression, and more like chronic mania that verged into psychosis at times. There’s some overlap with what Scott calls “classic schizotypal traits,” and also with his discussion of “Puritans” (“Eccentric overeducated hypercompetent contrarian early American who takes morality very seriously”). Scott discussed I know there are different types of bipolar disorder that fit better with this, but these definitions basically acknowledge the line between “mood disorder” and psychosis and some other things is hard to draw. There just seems to be an over-application of the term bipolar to very different presentations and degrees of atypical behavior, and I think this inhibits a full understanding. I’m intensely curious about the answer to the question Scott asked about the Puritans: “what happened to these people? When was the last time you saw somebody called Hiram invent five different crazy machines, found a new religion, and have twelve children who he named after Greek nymphs?” They had this unbelievable but highly functional combination of eccentricity and energy. And in addition to this, they often had the type of fixations people stereotypically associate with being on the spectrum.
Which brings me to the other seeming outlier personality type, often speculated by modern writers to have had Asperger’s syndrome or be on the autism spectrum. And they do display hallmarks of this, but many of these people were described as extraordinarily charismatic or tactful in unusual ways, which is often ignored because they’ve been firmly placed into the “brilliant but lacking social skills” box. (I understand these things aren’t actual dichotomies, such that people on the spectrum can be charismatic, but that’s kind of my point. No category will be perfect, but they seem fundamentally off in some ways that seem to artificially limit our understanding.) They were highly intellectual and had a certain rigidity and fastidiousness, and were inclined to disregard social niceties, but were known for certain kinds of social brilliance and successful in areas like politics. Charles Sumner is the best example I can think of. Some others that pop into mind are Robespierre, Thoreau, and Stonewall Jackson. Isaac Newton is regularly put forward as psychotic, bipolar, and on the spectrum. And maybe that was so. But it seems likely to me that instead of having several conditions and being a genius, all of these things were manifestations of an atypically-calibrated perception mechanism.
There is a saying that poor people are “crazy” while rich people are “eccentric”.
Presumably, if you are predisposed to one mental illness, being otherwise healthy and well-off helps you to control or compensate for it effectively. Whereas if you are busy dealing with other issues, that mental illness will become more severe both diagnostically and in its effects on your life.
Seconding Dack above, I expect one common factor to be a tendency to engage with the medical mental health system, particularly engaging in ways that encourage a positive diagnosis for anything that’s being tested.
“Lookism” is “discriminatory treatment toward people who are considered physically unattractive”. I didn’t know there was a word for it until I found it from the quite fascinating r/femcel.
From wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lookism :
“Studies on newborns have found that human infants as young as 14 hours from birth prefer to look at attractive faces rather than unattractive faces.”
“Research shows that on average, physically attractive individuals have more friends, better social skills, and more active sex lives.” (pretty obvious but one of those touchy things where it’s good to have quantitative evidence)
“The idea of beauty is also linked directly to social class because people who have more free time and money have the ability to work on their appearance”
“there exists a 7–to–9 percent ‘penalty’ for being in the lowest 9 percent of looks among all workers, and a 5 percent ‘premium’ for being in the top 33 percent […] the authors conclude that there can be no clear model of injustice in such discrimination, nor would legislation to address it be practicable”
Yes, I always found it strange that more isn’t made of the de facto penalty that’s imposed on conventionally unattractive people. At face value (pun intended) it seems to me that being ugly attracts much worse disadvantages than ethnicity or gender. I can think of a few reasons why it isn’t politically inflected more than it is.
1. The advantages fall off steeply with time. Sure, pretty people get a boost at the start of every encounter, but this tails off as other factors assert themselves. You might, for instance, attract a nicer partner, but once you’re shacked up and have a couple of kids, your life isn’t really dissimilar from the less attractive person and their (less attractive) partner.
2. Acknowledging a prettiness bias makes it harder for pretty women, in particular, to make political capital out of gender discrimination. This would be particularly so if those at the forefront of gender politics are also pretty, which they may well be, if lookism is a thing.
3. The existence of a prettiness bias challenges the idea that desire is socially manufactured. Sure, there are variations in what’s considered attractive, but there’s robust evidence that a set of common traits keep recurring. If so, then acknowledging a prettiness bias means acknowledging that prettiness is a biological fact.
4. We all enjoy having pretty people around, so there’s a positive externality. Relatedly, no one wants to be down on pretty people because they’re attracted to them and don’t want to antagonise them.
Also, trying to get equality for ugly people is going to mostly be coming from ugly people, so there’s already prejudice in play. This kind of thing can be beaten at least to some extent, but there’s a self-maintaining problem.
Yes, agreed, but isn’t that true of most efforts to get equality for discriminated-against groups, when at least part (likely most) of the effort comes from members of the group itself?
Why are SSCers incapable of considering anything between the levels of “random individual variation” and “biologically innate”? There’s a consistent set of traits considered good-looking within a given society because, you know, that’s what “socially manufactured” means.
But there are also consistent patterns that are considered good looking across societies, which is what biologically innate implies.
N = 1, but I’ve been watching a lot of Indian movies/shows recently and while it’s hard to think of a more different society, it’s trivial to tell which characters are supposed to be seen as attractive* because they look pretty to me too.
*In Padmaavat, for example, the titular queen’s beauty launches a war, like Helen of Troy.
Ya. I think people like to talk about the rounding errors and ignore the majority.
If you watch a Chinese show then the girl who’d be a page-3 girl in the UK is considered way less attractive than the hyper-thin waif.
There is definitely some difference between societies and the “ideal” weight seems to vary quite a lot between societies from fairly overweight to fairly underweight.
But then people tend to extend that principle to try to argue that it applies to everything when it seems apparent it really does not.
I would think that being attracted to your partner has a material impact on your well being, whether or not you yourself are attractive.
A lot of conventionally attractive traits (height, clear skin, body/facial symmetry, physical prowess) seem to be markers of good health/fitness, in which case the increased success of the “attractive” could very well be because they’re healthier. If that’s the case, the “ugliness” penalty may be nothing more than a particularly cruel variant of the general travails of someone who is relatively worse than their peers at some activity.
We should also probably expect correlation between attractiveness and intelligence. Clever people make more money and consequently have children with more attractive partners, would be the short version.
Why doesn’t this slowly make biological castes over time? (Actually does this make higher and lower human castes in most societies?)
As I understand it, the upper classes used to be more fertile than the lower classes (or at least have more children who survive), so upper class genes were always working their way down into the general population. Also, every now and then, someone would manage to rise.
I don’t know how true this is today. Maybe we’ll start to see biological castes in the coming centuries (though I think the main cause will be genetic engineering).
Maybe we’ll start to see biological castes in the coming centuries
One mechanism could be the spread of cesarean sections. They allow bigger brains at birth, giving the caste able to pay for them a (groan) head start.
This is why it’s so important for upper-class men to have a few pieces on the side in the slums. They’re doing their part to combat equality and keep the Gene Gini coefficient down.
I think to actually get something like a caste structure arising, you need almost no flow of genes between castes. You actually have this with jati in India, but probably not in many groups within (say) the modern US.
In particular, our ruling class types tend to be extremely heterogenous–people from all over the world come to the US, join the top tier of our business, political, media, academic, etc., elite, and very often intermarry with other elites.
I think height and attractiveness both have a small positive correlation with IQ. Which makes sense to the extent that those are all results of healthy environment, low developmental noise, and not too many slightly-deleterious genes dragging you down.
This seems like a *really* easy feature to control for. I would be surprised if no study of this has controlled for actual health outcomes.
I installed tick tok a few weeks ago (consumer only). I definitely recommend the experience, makes instagram looks like a flintstone’s car.
A couple of things stand out. It’s the best tool ever if you want a time skip. After a pretty gentle learning curve (say starting with the third time you open it) it’s literally a time skip. You open, look at a couple of videos, 40 minutes pass. Look at another couple of videos, another 40 minutes pass. A video is about 30 seconds, btw. I have no explanation. But properly harnessed it’s pure gold – do it on a fitness bike and you feel neither fatigue nor sore butt.
The second thing is that at least – AT LEAST – 40% of enjoyment comes from looking at attractive people. Throw in catchy tunes and you could argue for 80%. I try and filter for this a bit, and to follow only people that are attractive and have a modicum of skill. But the hindbrain mostly sees “pretty!” and wants to click like. It’s pretty loud about it too.
See also magazines, television, films, romance novels.
I recall reading that Tic-Tok, at least in China, was actively seeking to cull the ugly and poor off their platform.
That’s a negative, right? I’m short of time as it is.
Yeah, I used to think I hate aerobic exercise. Turns out I just get bored easily.
The direction of causation given the influence of genetic load and environmental stressors on both attractiveness and productivity-over all functionality in a way that impacts success is unclear.
The premium is probably linked to a principle agent problem. People who are involved in hiring decisions tend to be much closer to the person hired than the owners of a company. Hence one might higher someone who is pleasant to be around over the more productive person who is unpleasant to be around. This will be true on any number of factors including looks but also kindness, smell, and countless other factors. Still given that as far as I can tell no company has successfully tried to make it semi official company policy to hire underpaid ugly people for positions that do not interact with customers makes me dubious that this is purely principal agent problems.
Still is this a bad thing(societally and not from the perspective of shareholders)? It does not seem unjust that people whose presence makes people’s lives better off are rewarded and people whose presence makes people’s lives worse off are moderately penalized even if people are not responsible in any way for their impacts on the lives of others.
To put an alternative spin on this:
If one thinks of it in terms of control, rather than of responsibility, and in terms of incentives [and the cost of implementing the incentives]: Applying (imposing?) incentives to people only does anything if the people being incentivized have control over the attribute or behavior or event. Now, that control might be partial, or might be difficult, or might be indirect, or might be unconscious – but if the person being incentivized has no control, the incentive is pointless.
Ohhhh, zero sum vs positive sum! Surely someone’s thought about this? There is at least some control – that’s what gyms, plastic surgeons, and makeup are for.
At least on the highly explosive topic of makeup, it seems zero-sum to me. Like if makeup vanished off the face of the earth everyone would just adjust their standards such that it’d make no difference – apart from potentially leaving a load of extra time and money and brainpower that could be spent on other things. I did consider “maybe the purpose of makeup is to signal that you spent time on your appearance, which is somehow attractive”, but I don’t think that’s true. Foundation, for example, is a form of makeup that is meant to give the impression that it isn’t being used.
The signaling arms race aspect is clearly real to an extent. Our standards would move downwards if people started getting uglier.
Indeed. See any painting of a famous beauty before Emma Hamilton, who herself was merely quite pretty by modern standards but was hot enough for the time to go from impecunious orphan to openly cheating on her ambassador husband with her country’s biggest celebrity (and arguably occupying second place in that particular power ranking in her own right).
Spending effort to cultivate our exterior experience could have value. Sort of like making your bed: putting things in order in your environment is both inherently valuable and makes you a better person.
I don’t think one should assume that amatory success depends only on appearance, although it’s obviously one factor. Consider Emma Hamilton’s contemporary John Wilkes, said to be the ugliest man in England.
> It does not seem unjust that people whose presence makes people’s lives better off are rewarded and people whose presence makes people’s lives worse off are moderately penalized even if people are not responsible in any way for their impacts on the lives of others.
This seems to depend on a very specific theory of justice. In particular it seems to mean that it is just for people who own productive land to be rewarded more than people who own unproductive land, which strikes many people as paradigmatic injustice.
Agreed. It might be useful to hinder uncontrolled unwanted traits ala eugenics, but it isn’t justice unless the trait was chosen or at least could have been. It’s not even an incentive at that point.
It’s probably a good to have a norm of socially punishing people with poor grooming or hygiene; shunning short people, for example, would accomplish little and be harmful, even if a hypothetical appreciation of height was ubiquitous.
Ted Chiang wrote a wonderful science fiction short story positing a brain modification called “calliagnosia” that would make people stop being lookist, and the ethical issues ensuing from its availability.
I was going to mention this. The short story is called “Liking What You See: A Documentary” and is in the collection “Stories of your Life and others” (which I recommend).
His other collection, Exhalation”, is also good.
+1
Arrival should have been about the calculus of variations.
Do asymptomatic, but infectious, surfboarders ride carrier waves?
Dutch fixed expressions to American ones is like boerenkool to a kale salad.
‘Bijdraaien’ = turn the right way
To come around (to accept what someone else wants from a person).
‘Boekje over iemand opendoen’ = Open a book about someone
Telling things about the person, that they want to remain a secret. For example, when discussing Carole Baskin’s business adventures with her first husband.
‘Bok schieten’ = Shooting a member of the Caprinae species
Making a major mistake. Refers to shooting a goat or sheep while hunting, which is typically a mistake, as those are kept animals.
‘Miauwen’ = Meowing
Complaining. You can tell a Dutch person who complains about something insignificant to ‘stop meowing.’
‘Bonnefooi’ = ?
Without preparation. Usually used for traveling without plans for what to do at the destination. Comes from the French ‘de bonne foi’ = in good faith.
‘Op goed geluk’ = on good luck
Without preparation. Used more generically than the above.
‘van likmevestje’ = of lick-my-little-vest
Of low quality or incompetent. This is probably an adopted French expression, where people started writing it with a similarly sounding Dutch word. ‘Vestje’ was originally probably ‘fesse,’ French for buttocks. So ‘lik me fesse’ was lick my ass.
Boerenkool sounds like a slightly fancier colcannon 🙂
Cue song!
That is very similar. Although we are clearly more serious about it, since we call our dish the same as the Dutch word for kale.
Well many thanks for the link to “The Dutch Table”! When quarantine ends, it’s not like I’ll have to fit through the door any more, right?
Boerenkool is similar to what we call “Kohl mit Pinkel”, it seems? Which is green cabbage with some sort of sausage, and I believe “Pinkel” is not related to pinkeln (peeing).
Once again, I recognize some of the expressions: “einen Bock schießen” and “auf gut Glück”. Oh, and er, the licking part of course. Goethe used it in a robber’s drama, and Mozart wrote a canon (KV 231) about licking in the you-know-what.
It seems that you simmer the kale, while we cook it. Also, you keep the potatoes separate, instead of mashing them. You seem to forget the gravy. 🙂 The smoked sausage is probably also different. I found a story about some German branches of HEMA, where the smoked sausage seems popular. In The Netherlands, the HEMA is a store known for selling them (to warm up at home or to eat on the go).
There are surely many local variants of how to prepare green cabbage and potatoes. I know the mashed-together variant, too. But gravy (jus, Bratensoße)? That would have to be accompanied by a piece of meat, I thought.
Oh, and HEMA, look at that! Is it a bit like Zeeman? Those are quite present in our pedestrian zones, similar to Woolworth, Kodi and Tedi, of cheap and low-quality fame. Other Dutch supermarkets are coming, too: Picnic with their delivery concept should now rejoice, although I’ve never heard of them. Albert Heijn has failed.
The German supermarket field is difficult to penetrate. Food / groceries are pretty cheap, in comparison to France, Switzerland, UK and Benelux. Aldi and Lidl are a tough competition, and Walmart with their corporate culture (e.g. their daily cheer or what that is, or prohibiting romance between colleagues) failed their attempt.
The proper way to serve boerenkool is to make a pit in the center and pour the gravy in there, like so. Then you mix the gravy with the boerenkool at the table, spreading the salty, slightly fatty gravy through the food, which improves the taste and consistency.
The gravy is now commonly just made from a package. Not that fancy. This is a winter meal that can be made very quickly and yet taste nice. Of course, it can be elevated with more effort.
—
HEMA stands for ‘Hollandsche Eenheidsprijzen Maatschappij Amsterdam’ which translates to: Hollandic Standard Prices Company Amsterdam. They started off copying the business model of Woolworth, which had 5 and 10 cent stores, where all products cost 5 or 10 cents. Woolworth stopped using that model in 1935 and HEMA in 1945.
Then HEMA’s business model was changed into a department store for common, relatively cheap items, in contrast to the luxury department stores. Their products are mostly their own brand. In the olden days, department stores offered an amazing experience to people who mostly bought from local stores with a limited assortment and who very rarely went to a department store, as much for entertainment as for buying things. Eating food in/near the store was part of that concept. So HEMA has been selling smoked sausage for 90 years or so, as a working class variant of the high-end department stores (like ). They’ve been expanding abroad and apparently doing fairly well at it, although are not selling the sausage in most of their non-Dutch branches.
Zeeman also focuses on cheap prices and selling own-brand products, although they focus on clothing and have much more temporary offers.
If Disney were to offer J. J. Abrams a chance to edit a “non-director’s cut” of The Last Jedi, how could he best turn the Star Wars sequels into an actual trilogy? Let’s say he’s limited to the kinds of changes that were made to the Special Editions of the original trilogy: he can add CGI scenes and characters with cheap voice actors, but he doesn’t have the budget to shoot new scenes with the main talent. Plus let’s let him cut a scene or two, but it still needs to be recognizably the same movie when he’s done.
He can’t.
If Ep9 hadn’t been made yet, then maybe he could salvage it that way, but as is the whole sequel trilogy is a hot mess.
Better off to toss it in the “we shall never speak of this again” bin along with the holiday special and hire the team that made The Mandalorian to try again on a sequel trilogy from scratch.
Really, the most he could do under those limitations would be to introduce voice clips and maybe a scene of palpatine at the end,so at least that doesn’t get pulled out of no where, but you’d still be left with a terrible story.
Abrams wouldn’t do it because he doesn’t care about that kind of thing. He loves making movies, doesn’t give a shit about telling stories. Better to ask what Rian would have done with control over 7 and 9.
Amen to that.
I enjoyed Fringe for a while, when I saw that he was willing to completely upend his universe and his characters rather than always do the trite reset at the end of each episode or series so that we get things back to normal. But then I realized it was all because he did not have a freaking clue where he wanted to go — it was all just a Drunkard’s Walk through the possible plot points.
For what it’s worth, the Special Editions do have at least one scene that wasn’t in the theatrical version; the part where Han talks to CGI Jabba in A New Hope. As originally filmed Jabba was human and at one point Han walks behind his back, so in the Special Edition Han rudely steps on Jabba’s tail for no particular reason.
I suppose the sequels probably also have some scenes that were filmed that we haven’t seen; is it public knowledge what they were?
It was such a stupid scene to add back in, too. 90% of the dialog is the same as with Greedo.
Replace Admiral Holdo with Akbar. This raises the stakes of Poe’s attempted mutiny by having it be against a character the audience knows and respects. Then at the end, we’d get more of an emotional punch from his departure (and some understated fan service from Akbar springing a trap).
Or have holdo in wear a uniform, not an evening gown.
Mon Mothma worked well without a uniform, exactly because she sticks out from all the other uniformed rebels in the base with her white dress. Why would Holdo be different?
Because one is a military officer and the other is a civilian political leader?
Tarpitz got it exactly.
Replacing Holdo with Ackbar might have helped the mutiny scenes, but for the Holdo Maneuver, “It’s a trap” fan-service aside, I think Leia would have been the most natural fit. Especially given the tragic passing of Carrie Fisher during production.
It’d have carried so much more of an emotional punch, it’d be very fitting with Leia’s character, and you could even hand-wave the “why don’t they always weaponize hyperspeed?” questions with saying it requires the force to pull off. (Which would be much better than than the “It’S oNe In A MiLlIoN” handwave/retcon from IX)
this is a much better idea.
That would be good, but it would also require a lot more editing of Ep. 9 for consistency.
If Disney were to offer J. J. Abrams a chance to edit a “non-director’s cut” of The Last Jedi, how could he best turn the Star Wars sequels into an actual trilogy?
I don’t know whether to burst into laughter or tears.
An interesting paper on the gender gap in math competitions: http://economics.mit.edu/files/4298
You hear a lot about that theory where women have lower variance in whatever-it-is, and so the extreme ranges of something-or-other will be dominated by men.
This paper doesn’t exactly disprove it, but gives one pretty convincing argument that it’s not the reason why, for example, most IMO contestants are male. The paper argues: if you look at the backgrounds of top boys and top girls, they are drastically different. The girls almost universally come from elite schools where many students do well in math competitions. There’s boys from those schools too, but the backgrounds of boys on the IMO team vary much more.
It’s hard to find an explanation of this that’s not “the non-elite schools have plenty of girls that have the ability to do well in math competitions, too – but for whatever reason, they’re not doing it.”
This was section 5 in the paper and sections 2-4 are also quite interesting, but this was the observation I found the most striking.
Regarding the lower-variance theory, the paper admits that this data is not evidence for or against, but points out:
Why can’t the answer just be that girls with really good mathematical ability are more likely to get in to elite schools?
Why wouldn’t the same be true for boys? If so, you’d expect math competitions to be dominated entirely by contestants from elite schools.
Not necessarily; there could be some affirmative action for girls. I know there was at my high school.
That might get more girls into elite schools, but it wouldn’t explain why boys from non-elite schools would be able to compete evenly with boys from elite schools in terms of getting into math competitions.
This indicates that there is an oversupply of elite boys such that the elite schools cannot take them all, whereas every elite girl gets into an elite school.
Not necessarily — I think there was / is a much heavier push for “girls in STEM” than more generally for “people in STEM” (especially after the Larry Summers scandal in 2005, which could be relevant to the 2007/2008 olympiad cohort).
Speculation: I could easily imagine that elite schools have a special effort to recruit (and offer scholarships to) “high-scoring girls on the AMC / AIME” rather than “all high scorers on the AMC / AIME”.
Anecdata: I graduated from high school (private all-girls, but not conventionally “elite”) in 2004 and was an IPhO (physics) gold medalist. Phillips Exeter, I think, had tried recruiting me in 8th grade after I did well on the AIME, but the money wasn’t there and my parents weren’t comfortable with the boarding school idea even if a scholarship materialized. I know I got into every college I applied to, while my younger brother (also IPhO gold medalist, and a similar bucketload of medals otherwise) got into several but not all, but a confounder is that he was going through it ten years after me and it could’ve just gotten harder across the board.
These are high schools. I’m pretty sure there’s just not enough shopping around for high schools for that to be the answer.
At regular high schools, no. But I’ve heard it’s very different at elite high schools.
Yeah, there are people whose whole job is to place students into elite high schools. I know a woman who gets Chinese students into elite US high schools.
This result is exactly what the higher male variance theory predicts. Consider the following highly simplified module.
Let us assume that there are two school type normal and elite. Elite schools are .1% of schools
The average normal school student has 400 mathions (arbitrary unit of being good at math for all reasons that is normally distributed) and the elite school student has 500.
You need to have at least 600 mathions to be a mathlete and everyone who can does.
Let us make the math nice and examine an extreme (obviously falsely extreme) form of variability differences. Male have a standard deviation of 50 and females of 33.3.
Males at normal schools need to be 4 standard deviations above average and two at elite schools. Females need to be 6 standard deviations above average at normal schools and 3 standard deviations at elite schools.
.999*0.000063343=0.0000632 .001*0.0455= 0.0000455. So males will above 600 will be primarily from normal schools but not dominantly.
.999*1.97e-9= 1.97e-9 .001* 0.0027=2.7e-6 so basically all females over 600 mathions will be from elite schools.
So under the pure variability in ability hypothesis one gets almost all female IMO contestants being from elite schools, which is exactly what we find.
Now the actual differences in variability would be more muted than this, but the general direction of the way higher variability works out will not change.
But how do the elite high schools override the variance thing to bring both males and females up to 500 mathions?
This makes sense if there are two separate populations: “students at elite schools” and “students at normal schools”. Each with their own mean from which the genders deviate in their various ways.
But I’m pretty sure the model where students are drawn from the same population, and some happen to end up in these schools, is more accurate…
One thing I would suspect is that girls in non-elite schools are more likely to be called upon to spend their afternoons and evenings doing domestic chores, and therefore not have time to study math. In lower class households, a smart boy may be excused from such duties if he is seen as having potential, but a smart girl is much more likely to be forced to babysit younger siblings or cook dinner if nobody else is available.
I think the best explanation for why there are fewer women in math is that boys have a comparative advantage in math.
And because girls are much better at writing that at math, smart girls don’t bother with the math, even if they’d do good with it, because their English lit skills are better. And expensive high schools groom smart girls towards math.
> when almost all girls who would be capable of achieving extremely high scores do not do so.
What does this mean? Is this a genuflection to political correctness or does it actually follow from their result?
The authors of the paper mean that it follows from the result because, in particular, the non-elite high schools must contain lots of equally talented girls which nevertheless don’t do well in math competitions.
I was persuaded by this, but the other comments suggest that the elite high schools just disproportionately recruit girls who are good at math, which did not occur to me. I have no idea the magnitude of this effect, but it could potentially be another explanation.
I have a simpler theory. Parenting influence. Parents are more likely to decide a boy child is a little genius and lavish them with support.
Sometimes they are right, but girl children are less likely to get this push. At elite schools, the school catches on and supplies the support itself so parental backing matters less.
Where do all-girls schools fall in this distribution?
My comment in the last Classified Thread got spamfiltered and Scott had to fish it out for me (thank you!) but it meant that it wasn’t visible for most of the time that people were commenting there which I was sad about. So, just thought I’d point to it again here in case you missed it there: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/07/classified-thread-8/#comment-893543
List of some but not all of the experts in the official SAGE.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/scientific-advisory-group-for-emergencies-sage-coronavirus-covid-19-response-membership/list-of-participants-of-sage-and-related-sub-groups
An argument against solar and wind power is that PV panels and wind turbines wear out and fail after 20-25 years and have to be replaced, and those costs are disingenuously hidden by clean energy advocates. However, isn’t is also true that the costs of replacing worn-out panels and turbines will be lower than the initial costs of installing the first ones at the site?
For example, if I want to build a solar farm, it’s initially a large investment because I have to pay many one-time startup costs like buying the land, getting permits, maybe grading the soil, and extending power lines to the site. Twenty years later, when all my PV panels have broken, all I have to do is buy new ones and install them (the metal mounts might still be fine as well)–I don’t have to spend money again on the aforementioned startup costs. Additionally, since the cost-performance of PV panels will have improved over 20 years, the replacement panels will be cheaper but no less efficient than the first panels.
Have any energy economists examined these issues I’ve raised?
No. That is entirely standard amortization, and noone overlooks it.
The costs intermittent energy advocates always handwave away super hard is grid services and storage, because whenever someone actually does the math on this, they conclude that intermittent sources are only ever going to be economically viable in places with extremely uniform weather.
You can build a solar concentrating plant in Morocco and the attendant molten salt heat storage to make it a full-service grid power source without breaking the bank. You cannot do this in a place which does not enjoy 300 annual days of sunshine and seasonal variation which follows seasonal demand for power, the costs become completely unreasonable.
Take Finland. People keep bringing up Olkiluoto 3 as a slam dunk argument against nuclear. But the interesting thing about that project is that the fins took a good long look at that clusterfuck and went “..lets give this another wack”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Plant
– The fins did that because they have taken a look at the historical weather conditions in Finland, and calculated what kind of overbuild and storage would be required to actually supply the grid with power via intermittent power, and they did not care for the numbers they got back even a little bit.
Almost all renewable projects are stalking horses for natural gas, because natural gas is the only way to make a grid with a high penetration of intermittent sources work outside the tropics of capricorn and cancer.
What about places that have been given the gift of hydro resources? I know Norway doesn’t need to, but it could cover it’s mountains with wind turbines and combine that with it’s stored hydro power.
Norway effectively already did this. Or rather, harvested the profit from doing so. Denmark has built far, far more wind turbines than its grid can absorb the swing production from. This is handled by selling power very cheaply to Norway when it is windy, and buying an equivalent amount of power when it is quiet. In megawatt hours, the trade is very balanced. In euros, its a pipeline gushing money into Norway.
Nicely put.
It’s not as if the Norwegians are short of cash, but good luck to them..
Cables are built and being extended, but I don’t think much pumping capacity is installed for storage, and cheap wind and solar just substitute for hydro which can be saved for later. Both hydro and consumption (in particular electrical heating of buildings) are seasonal, and in winter magazines tend to get emptied out, until snow melting in spring fills them up again. This reduces their advantage, since I belive the really low prices occur when both solar and wind are at full production, which would happen in summer.
Note that while receiving free energy and later selling it back at a profit is nice, the advantage to Denmark and GB is a more stable supply and thus price. So the benefit is mutual.
The topic was costs not accounted for by intermittency advocates, and the expense of this trade – which is still much cheaper than actually having to build storage !- is very much one such cost.
It is so high that Denmark has quietly stopped building more windmills domestically, and instead is upping the “renewable” percentage by buying utterly bonkers quantities of wood-pellets. Which is very expensive, not very sustainable, and on the sub- century scale is not even low carbon.
Energy policy in general vexes me.
Coal and gas are insane, preferable only to not having electricity at all.
Renewable is a category that produces nothing but muddled thinking because it lumps together too many things, and considered individually, the intermittent sources are advocated without regard to local conditions, which is just insane, because when harvesting weather related energy flows you goddamn have to consider what your typical weather is like.
Nuclear, The one power source which has sensible tradeoffs if you are not blessed by physical geography has been rendered near unthinkable by a an 1970s astroturf campaign that grew roots and turned into memetic kudzu.
And on top of everything else, most politicians and polities seem dead set on trying to create “market solutions” for electricity despite more than half a century of that going wrong in new and horrifying ways over and over again, due to the electric grid being literally the text book example of a natural monopoly. Set up a damn quango and have done with these experiments already. None of the “markets” ever work half as well as EDF or TVA anyway.
Olkiluonto nuclear power plant has a charming feature: agriculture.
You can do that with fossil fuels too.
The difficult bit for residential stuff is building the district heating infrastructure to pipe hot water to everyone’s house.
What I want to see is plants with fungal melanin radiotrophism pathways modified into them so they can get energy from gamma rays.
OK, I think that last sentence wins the SSC Mad Science 2020 award.
Can we get a clip of someone in a labcoat reciting it in German-accented English? Dat vould be perfekt.
@johan_larson: I can’t give you that, but I can give you a link to an explanation of the turbo encabulator.
+1
Hey, our distant descenants on those generation ships are gonna need to eat *something*, and they’ll already be running some kind of reactor for power….
Has the radiation-eating stuff been nailed down? I remember hearing about a couple experiments and some observations that some fungi were able to get energy from radiation (gamma radiation? alpha particles?), but I’ve never heard anymore about it. It will be super cool if it holds up.
I’ve not looked deeply into it, but it doesn’t look too well-understood yet.
At least no proteins I could copy/paste from Uniprot.
I think you’ll be lucky to get more than 20 years of productive life out of the average solar panel or wind turbine.
The majority of solar PV is on domestic roofing, and 20 years down the line anything remaining from your original solar adventure is just going to be an impediment to the new ones. This is less true for solar farms, where indeed you might be able to make some savings over a completely new investment.
With wind turbines I think you’re probably worse off than in the (domestic) solar panel example, apart from having access to the land etc. The main reason for this is that as turbines get ever larger they are unable to be set in the foundations used for previous generations. So instead of just plonking 3000 tons of reinforced concrete (for each turbine..) into a freshly dug hole, you first have to excavate and dispose of the 2000 tons of reinforced concrete left over from the last lot. Of course, it’s not the end of the world, but you’re right that solar and wind enthusiasts are unlikely to point out these things. And they’d be very odd advocates if they did.
What if you just replaced the old turbines with new ones that were the same size?
I’m not sure that would work….. but even if it did it would be pointless – the benefits and efficiencies of bigger turbines vastly outweigh the inconvenience of disposing of old foundations.
Current turbines seem to be profitable – I imagine a turbine of the same size in the future would also be profitable. If it’s not as profitable as the most-profitable-option in the future, so what? That doesn’t change the question of whether current turbines are unprofitable due to the expensive future removal.
Why not leave the old turbine’s concrete base, and build a bigger turbine right next to it? The old base wouldn’t do any harm except obstruct a bit of farmland.
Hi Proyas,
If someone is making that argument, they are either being purposefully disingenuous themselves or are a bit out of their depth. When energy economists talk about renewables being competitive with fossil fuel, they are generally talking about the levelized cost of energy, which is effectively a lifetime average cost to produce one kWh from a given system. It explicitly accounts for the useful life of the generating plant, as well as ongoing maintenance. It also explicitly accounts for the gradual reduction in conversion efficiency as a solar PV plant ages (and similar reductions in efficiency for other technologies).
It’s also important to note that in practical terms, the difference between the 25-year life of a solar PV plant and the 40-year rated life of a combined-cycle gas turbine is fairly minimal, given the time value of money. Unless the developer has access to incredibly cheap capital, the value of extra electricity that is generated in Years 26-40 by the CCGT is discounted so much that it adds very little to the “present value” of the plant, which is what the LCOE is based on.
To give you a sense of the various numbers involved, here is how a solar PV plant might compare to a natural gas plant:
Solar PV – useful life 25 years, initial capital cost $1m per MW, fuel cost $0/MWh, ongoing OpEx $50k / MW / year, capacity factor 20%
Basic CCGT – useful life 40 years, initial capital cost $800k per MW, fuel cost $50 / MWh, ongoing OpEx $60k per MW per year PLUS $3 per MWh, capacity factor 85%
As you can see from the numbers above, the big difference between solar PV vs CCGT is not the overall life, but what we call the “capacity factor”, which is the amount of electricity you can get from a plant of a given size, as a fraction of what you would get if you ran the plant at 100% output for 24 hours / day. Since the sun doesn’t shine 24h/ day, you can’t get a very high capacity factor for solar PV – so even if the solar PV plant cost the same and had the same useful life, the cost of the plant itself, per MWh of electricity, would be more than 4x. This is a bigger deal than the difference in useful life – but of course, the flip side of that is that the solar PV has no fuel costs and lower maintenance during its useful life.
Happy to discuss more or do a longer post at some point exploring how financing costs affect these comparisons!
Finally, while the difference in useful life is not relevant, one claim about solar PV and wind that is often relevant is that if you put a lot of solar PV and wind on the grid, you then need to spend a lot of money preparing the grid for the intermittent nature of this type of generation. This means paying for a lot of standby capacity in the form of gas turbines or even building large battery arrays. The utility has to pay the plant owner to keep this standby capacity ready but unused, which does add to the ultimate cost to the consumer. How this all adds up in terms of competitiveness is a topic a bit too complex for this post!
Are you discounting at the nominal interest rate or the real interest rate? Historically the real interest rate, which is what is relevant, runs about 2%. Discounting at that, year 26 has about 60% the weighting of year 1.
Thanks for these numbers, it helps to understand the financial reasoning.
However, I think there are two factors beyond the raw costs to keep in mind. The first is the existing mix of energy the utility can call upon (has contracts to buy, because as I understand it, most generating facilities are now owned by separate companies, not the utilities). If they already have a baseload generator, a combined cycle gas plant, and a gas turbine peaker, and maybe some renewables, they don’t necessarily need more absolute capacity, just a cheaper mix and maybe a bit of capacity to handle anticipated growth. Maybe they can reduce their use of the combined cycle plant from 50% to 20% with cheap wind 90% of the time (the other 10% of the time, usage goes to 50%). That’s a totally unrealistic example, but I’m trying to say that new power sources aren’t decided in a vacuum, and renewables can fit into a portfolio profitably.
The other case is when the intermittency of renewables matches that of the load, as is the case with solar. When it’s hot and more people run air conditioning, solar PV should almost perfectly generate at the same time. Of course, people also use A/C on hot summer nights, but they probably used it more during the sunny daytime. In this case, the power factor is not dominant anymore, and solar is more like a valuable peaker plant. In fact, solar PV is almost like a hedge against hotter summers and more A/C usage—and the cheapest one in that case.
Here is a fun article estimating the future cost of solar power:
https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020/
Tl;dr: It will be insanely cheap. Yay, we are saved!
Yes, as @Thomas Jorgensen noted, amortization of these kinds of operations & maintenance costs is standard.
However, one thing that people don’t think about when it comes to pricing in renewables impact is that renewables make natural gas more expensive by being connected to the same grid. O&M costs for natural gas go up as their usage becomes more variable, because spinning gas turbines up or down shortens their operating lifespan significantly. As a result, the more renewables you have on your grid, the more expensive natural gas turbines become to maintain. This is one of the major economic factors behind the adoption of grid-scale energy storage.
This issue was mentioned in Planet of the Humans, but I was skeptical about it because no data were provided quantifying those gas power plant efficiency losses. Do you have figures?
This isn’t an actual paper, but it’s a good summary of the effect of renewables penetration in California. Generally speaking, the term “duck curve” will find you some papers on this topic.
The duck curve gets a bad rap. Yes, the steep increase in demand when the sun goes down creates the need to increase generation quickly and have that capacity “in reserve.” But always remember the duck curve is lower than the daytime peak that would/did exist without renewables. And the capacity for handling the evening peak already existed before, just now it’s idle for longer during the sunshine hours (and the owners/investors of said capacity are thus selling less of it).
I’m so happy someone finally brought up energy economics in an SSC thread. It would be great if Scott delved into this, it’s one of the greatest issues of our time.
I feel too many people just assume that we’ll come up with ‘something’ to replace the hyper-concentrated solar energy in the form of dino-juice.
It gets very scary when you realize GDP and energy-consumption have historically had an almost perfectly stable correlation, and profit seeking means that any efficiency gains just get turned to producing other things, or more of the same. Decoupling is therefore an impossibility without some central actor decreeing a maximum amount of energy used/GDP ceiling.
Would people be interested in running through a few different scenario’s with me? I really hope there are some people here who know more than me.
There’s the politically impossible scenario where we build a load more nuclear capacity and then there’s the bad scenarios.
It’s kind of scary how many problems seem politically impossible to solve.
@Lambert
I think that sums up the situation pretty well.
Except here in France, where nearly 75% of our electricity is created fission-fashion.
Given the political pressure of the green and the general anti science dogmatism of the majority of the French, I wouldn’t bet on this exception continuing much longer. There is no longer any new reactor build in france, and the last 2 government had an objective of reducing the nuclear parc to 50%.
Absolutely and sadly true.
My only positive take on the matter is that France got to 75% nuclear as a result of a ‘no choice’ situation. As that situation still pertains, I think the plans to reduce the nuclear proportion may well get quietly dropped.
And what might fill the gap anyway? Gas from Putin’s Russia? Chinese coal? More intermittents? All fairly unlikely methinks.
There’s also the politically-impossible scenario where we build a load more pumped-storage capacity. And the (politically-impossible)^2 scenario where we build both more nuclear power plants and pumped storage facilities.
I thought building more hydro was topographically, rather than politically impossible. Like, what do you expect the Dutch to do?
Does nuclear require pumped storage?
I can see a poorly-designed, “do it all with nuclear, then we need to move energy around” plan would require it. But using nuclear as part of the mix doesn’t require pumped storage, does it?
Nuclear can handle baseline loads well, and solar typically does a good job of handling noon-time peak requirements for AC.
It depends on which, specific, implementation of nuclear you use, and how much overbuilding costs versus building some storage, but in general you cant kill the gas component of the grid without at least some storage. Far more reasonable amounts than an intermittent based grid, however. Also..
One selling point of all molten salt cooled designs is that it is very simple to bolt large tanks onto the power production loop, and now you have a reactor which can operate as a peaker plant trivially, and without wasting fission events.
Nuclear doesn’t require pumped storage, but pumped storage is a useful add-on for nuclear. Nuclear lacks the flexibility of, say, gas turbines, and if you had something like 80-85% of your electricity coming from the fission-factories, having a lot of pumped hydro would avoid a lot of grid scale headaches.
Solar is great for places where the peak demand is in the middle of the day. In places like the UK, not so good….. peak demand is about 6pm in December which is when it is very dark. So your non-solar has to be capable of providing 100% of demand, which makes any solar at all (especially at the UK’s latitude) essentially pointless.
RE: the topographical impossibility of pumped hydro, there are actually some exciting developments in this area – specifically using pumped water to lift a granite piston that’s cut out of native bedrock. There are a lot of benefits to this approach, including being able to site it anywhere with suitable granite, which is much more common than the high altitude reservoirs necessary for traditional pumped hydro. You end up with costs per kWh that are a bit higher than traditional pumped hydro, but still much better than large battery installations.
We don’t have granite in The Netherlands either, though. Just sand and mud.
But it may help some other countries.
The Netherlands actually has some of the largest reservoirs of water above their land level, but it’s low head. That and flooding the polder is what they want to avoid.
We also use those water supplies for agriculture, to prevent salinization* and to keep water recreation safe from blue-green algae & botulism. Climate change seems to be creating longer periods that are very dry or very wet. We currently are on course for a record rain shortage.
This is worst for (slightly) higher regions that we can’t divert our water supplies to.
* Due to water shortages we are now installing air bubble barriers, which reduces the mixing of salt and sweet water.
I’ve got a moral/ethical question here for people who advance the argument that “it made things better in the long run”. I started out thinking about capitalism, prompted by a late breaking thread in the prior OT, and then moved on to think about the way evolution works in practice, the way various religions were spread, etc. etc.
I’m going to start with a hypothetical. For purposes of the moral question, please think in terms of “if this were true”. And I’m going to phrase it in terms of capitalism, because that’s where I started.
Early capitalism was, in net, a process where people’s descendants were _relatively_ less well off than their parents were, even while often being _absolutely_ better off. Those at the bottom tended to die young, without issue, to the point where they don’t replace themselves en net, just like we know was true of early cities. The bottom was continually restocked by people falling from above, who were then subject to the same pressures. A few determined, talented, or lucky individuals manage to move against the flow, but except at times of unsual resource expansion this was not the normal story – and those times of resource expansion often resulted from dispossessing the prior owners/users of the resources, who can then be seen as part of the very bottom group who doesn’t replace itself. (E.g. every territory ever conquered and looted.)
If this were true – what’s your ethical response? If this were in fact still true of modern capitalism, does that change your moral/ethical response? Is your theoretical response (“according to xxxism this is fine because…”) contradicted by your emotional/actual response to observing this in practice.
Feel free to substitute something else for capitalism, if the cognitive dissonance gets to you. Just try to pick something that’s done by humans collectively, or by human leaders and their minions/troops, rather than something that happens regardless of human choices.
I’m not quite sure how that would work are you saying something like
The bottom quintile mostly dies off childless
The second from the bottom quintile becomes the bottom quintile, and are poorer than their parents but richer than the previous bottom quintile
etc, etc?
I probably didn’t phrase it well, when trying to not to trigger people’s knee jerks. Or maybe I’m just commiting fuzzy thinking ;-(
From the POV of someone who dies young as a result of being on the bottom of the heap, the system that produced their death really sucks, and one with less inequality would obviously be better. Much the same is true from the POV of someone who watches their children die.
Those looking at the situation in hindsight are descendants of those who didn’t die young, or at least didn’t die before leaving decendants. Maybe they have a somewhat biased viewpoint.
Except that the game is iterated repeatedly – each generation, the most unfortunate – descendants, by definition, of people less unfortunate than them – dies off yet again.
It’s not at all specific to capitalism – evolution by natural selection explicitly works this way, after all. Most subsistence societies also experience a lot of deaths. And modern first world capitalism doesn’t usually result in deaths caused directly by scarcity, at least not in the home country.
But the (moral) argument shows up in its pure form when advocating accumulation of capital by some, at the (implied) expense of subsistence for others, as the only way productivity can be improved to the eventual benefit of all.
That’s not obvious at all. It’s obvious that a system that would have prevented their death is better. That has no logical connection to inequality. If everybody died in the same way as the person in question they would not be better off while inequality would be at 0.
Who argues for that? I consider myself an enthusiastic supporter of capitalism, and see no implication that money is earned at the expense of other’s subsistence. Who would freely trade their subsistence for something that wasn’t of greater value to them? And if it’s not a free trade, then it’s hardly capitalism.
I’m a little bit confused because I don’t follow how the different elements you are talking about are connected.
I don’t see the connection between capitalism and dying early. Dying early (compared to the current first world) is the natural state of man.
You mention that cities were (still are maybe but for different reasons) demographic meatgrinders. But I’m not sure it’s accurate that this was because of capitalism (although cities exist because of primitive capitalism). It seems more likely that cities were demographic meatgrinders because of disease.
I’m not sure I see the connection between capitalism and war either. The roving bronze age Yamnaya don’t strike me as particularly capitalist, but they were pretty successful in war.
As for your abstract question at the top. Can you justify something with “it makes things better in the long run”? I generally wouldn’t accept this as a justification for taking an action if the payoff wasn’t either very clear or the “long-run” was well within one human lifetime. I have trouble thinking of any planned actions humans took that intentionally made things worse for something like 50 years in order to get a payoff in 60 years. I don’t think that sort of thing occasionally happening by accident is a good argument for that sort of plan.
I don’t think it’s possible to have a system where “people’s descendants were relatively less well off than their parents were”. The amount of relative-well-off-ness in the system must always average to 50%.
I suppose one might argue that inequality in cities increased over time, so that a small number of people got much more relatively-well-off, but a very large number of people got increasingly less relatively-well-off. But it’s occurring to me that the whole “cities” thing supplanted the previous system, which I think was feudalism, which also featured a great deal of inequality. I think cities decreased inequality, rather than increasing it.
You’ve written: “please think in terms of “if this were true””, so: I think that, if something tends to make people better off in absolute terms (but worse off in relative terms), that is totally fine and we should do that thing as much as possible, and people should quit worrying about whether their neighbors are doing better than them.
The average child of the average parent can be less well off even if the average child isn’t worse off than the average parent. The latter is equivalent to the average child of the weighted average parent (weighted by how many children they have).
Richer parents could afford to support more children, so the weighting results in the latter number (which is fixed, relatively) being larger than the former.
Relative to their parents. If my generation has a 25% chance of dying in infancy and my parents’ had a 30% chance, we’re doing relatively better, although not great.
What’s the moral question? What choice by a person are you thinking of that could be either moral or immoral?
I lack the information to make an ethical judgement, because you posit an outcome without either talking about means through which this was achieved, or alternative outcomes that were achievable given the initial constraints.
Examples:
– A society where the absolute welfare distribution improves by 1% each year, and overall population grows by 2% annually. A policy is instituted to execute the bottom 1% of people each year. This is trivially immoral, all you’re doing is killing people.
– A society where 1% of people die, no matter what (How? IDK). Some people with the means to do so take measures to improve their odds of survival, let’s say by spending some of their leisure time/money on growing and eating more food. This (somehow) results in more deaths among everyone else. I’m not sure how to judge this one: on the one hand it seems reasonable behavior, on the other, if the death rate is fixed, this is zero-sum, and everyone spends all their time trying to decrease their relative odds, which could have been avoided by coordination.
– A society with a flat standard of living. Some small percentage of the population chooses not to have children, and instead spends those resources towards improving the shared environment. Obviously moral.
The set of possible alternatives matters (and the means employed as well). Tying this right back to early-capitalism:
– A lot of capital accumulation was massively unproductive. Versailles has negative ROI (still costs $100M euros a year in maintenance), you could have used those resources to improve the lot of the poor or make productive investments, either would have been an improvement over what actually happened.
– Many systems were in place to limit competition, which both hindered growth and made it much harder for poor people to make a living. The origin of the word “cottage industry” was a means of bypassing the guilds that existed in most cities. Every country in Europe was subscribed to Mercantilism, which in practice was used to enrich the politically connected at the expense of everyone else. England banned the export of raw wool (making its own manufacturers the only buyers), and later on banned export/sale of processed wool from Irerland/America (who were starting to compete with domestic manufacturers).
There’s a lot of awful, pushing-people-below-subsistence decisions in medieval Europe that don’t even have the benefit of improving things for future generations.
You’re doing way better than did at putting what I was trying to say into words. What I was thinking of was closer to the middle example.
Let’s say there are enough resources to feed everyone adequately in good years, to keep most people alive in ordinary years, and to have significant deaths from starvation and diseases made worse by inadequate food in bad years. Now some enterprising powerful people skim off resources, with the intent of improving their own long term position by investing in better food (etc.) production. Unfortunately that means less powerful people are pushed towards “enough to survive for a time” even in good years, and the bottom of the heap now have significant starvation in ordinary years. Eventually, there’s more food with less work needed to produce it. But meanwhile a lot of people die because they don’t get to consume the resources being invested.
Obviously this is less bad then the same powerful people skimming off the same resources and simply destroying them, or “investing” them in a status competition with their peers in some way that doesn’t result in e.g. them all accumulating (and feeding) ever more hangers-on.
But is it justified by the results? Would it be justified if the goal were improved food production? Would it be justified if the goal was not acheived? If it were predictably not acheived, but the people running the show refused to listen to predictions/punished the predictors.
Let’s stipulate that the folks starving are not consenting; in fact, they repeatedly make attempts to re-allocate the accumulated resources.
Let’s farther stipulate that according to the local legal system, the powerful people in question have the legal right to do this. (E.g. they own the land.)
I think the morality of the actions taken would basically depend on the legitimacy of this arrangement:
If the people who got all the land were just the biggest thugs around (or descendants thereof), their getting a bigger share of the resource (and/or controlling who gets which share in the first place) is already immoral, before considering to how they decide to use it. Even the one who entirely spends his extra income on helping the less well off is still passing the land onto his probably-not-as-generous children.
If 100 subsistence farmers decide to pool all their land together, and hand it over to the winner of a draw among all of them, then the winner (and his descendants) deciding to pursue additional ROI instead of charity seems fine to me.
That second option is obviously a bit whimsical, but I bring it up as a way to resolve the “immorality is necessary for eventual betterment” concern you bring up. If bad outcomes now are actually outweighed by better outcomes later by whatever utility function you use to judge the outcome, then in theory each farmer prefers E(1% chance wealthy-ish landlord and ancestor of all future humans + 99% chance slightly worse off subsistence farmer whose descendants will eventually all disappear) to E(100% current subsistence farmer whose descendants will be exactly like them), so such an arrangement is possible (discounting transactions costs, differing preferences, and risk-aversion).
I think at least some version of your story is actually true. And this leads to what is, IMO, the most important conservative[1] insight: Getting to our current level of wealth and safety and well-being, and getting to a society where defect/defect isn’t the rational strategy all the time, was hard and expensive. There’s no law of nature that guarantees we won’t break that stuff and end up back in the world of the iron-law-of-wages and defect/defect. Knowing that this stuff is breakable should make you much more careful about trying to radically re-engineer society or human nature, because you recognize the downside risk.
[1] Real conservativism, not the pasturized processed ideological product sold under that label most of the time in the US.
Or as Roger Scruton said:
But for well off people this is true at any point of history. It took a lot of luck and effort and suffering to get the well off people where they were, so why risk changing it? Obviously slave owners in the south recognized that their position and well being had been obtained after a lot of suffering, and that there was no guarantee for them to be better off if they freed their slaves. If you ask the aztecs, they would have tell you that destroying their empire would have made a lot of people worse off, and that all the human sacrificing was better than the alternative.
The truth of the matter is that nobody knows whether the current position is a possibility optimum (we can’t look into parallel worlds to check whether other possibilites make for worse off outcomes) or if it will remain an optimum in the future (because we don’t know the future), but what we _DO_KNOW_ from human history is that most increases in well being include big, sometimes dramatic changes across the board.
So conservatism, the real one, is at best myopic.
I mean, we ALSO know from history that most big, dramatic changes lead to tragedy, scarcity and mass death. See: 90% of revolutions for instance.
While it’s certainly true that a strict conservative heuristic will be wrong in some important cases, it’s also true that they will be right most of the time.
Chesterton’s Fence is a classic for a reason; it doesn’t say ‘never tear down fences.’ It says to make damn sure you understand what that fence is doing before you mess with it.
Re-re-posting my invitation to the Unofficial Slate Star Codex Extremely Heavily Modded Minecraft Server. I’ll be posting this again in the next three integer and half-integer OTs unless someone tells me to cut it out.
We currently have three players, counting myself, and we’re having a ton of fun. When I started the server I envisioned something a little more like 2b2t where we’d all be hiding in caves and making uneasy peace treaties and trade deals, but that’s pretty much the opposite of what’s happened – considering where I’m drawing my player-base from, I probably should have seen this anarcho-socialist utopia coming. We’re still thinking of starting a space program, mostly just focusing on getting our industrial base going.
I was holding off the “how allowed is PVP” decision, but someone logged in and started placing TNT down and forced my hand. So PVP is disallowed outside of mutually agreed on duels. If you just show up and start breaking shit without even introducing yourself, you’re just gonna get permabanned with no recourse.
To play on the server:
Short version: We’re running the Technic 1.12.2 pack; the address is unofficialsscmc.404.mn
You will need to have purchased Minecraft, and have a Mojang account to log in with.
1. Go to technicpack.net and hit “Get the Launcher.” Download and run the launcher.
2. Type “The 1.12.2 Pack” in to the search bar. Hit “install” in the bottom right corner of the window.
3. Wait.
4. Hit “play,” it’ll be where the download button was.
5. Wait.
6. Go to “multiplayer,” then “Add Server.”
7. Paste unofficialsscmc.404.mn in to the Server Address box. Put whatever you want in Server Name. Hit done.
8. Double click the new entry at the bottom of the server list.
9. It should just work from that point on. If you have a problem, tell me about it in this thread, or EMail me – my address is my username at gmail.
We still need a fourth player to justify paying for a dedicated server instead of just running it on my machine.
I’ll probably hop on next weekend after I’m done with my finals!
I don’t own computer minecraft, and don’t intend to buy it unless there was a big sale, but I’m very interested in this project, and would be interested in hearing any stories or systems that might emerge or care to share
I love this idea! Honestly, I’m a huge fan of just vanilla Minecraft so i’ll keep checking back on this to see if this grows and has people looking for the unmodded version as well, but I’d definitely love to hear more about this and come check out the world too. Keep it up!
Does anyone have recommendations for education/teaching/pedagogy blogs, rationalist or otherwise ? I’m specifically interested in (French) language teaching and second language acquisition, as well as educational reform, but I’m trying to get as many perspectives as I can.
In the next month or so my kids (one girl and one boy) will start sharing a bedroom. What should I know ahead of time that I probably won’t see coming? What should I avoid doing? What should I be sure to do? (Mainly in terms of either rules I set for them, or things I should do/not do as a parent.)
Other info that might be relevant:
– Up until now, both kids have had their own rooms
– The boy is about to enter preschool and he is about 75% potty trained, and the girl is in early elementary school; she’s the better sleeper
– They find each other’s nakedness hilarious; my wife and I try to take it in stride (we were kids once after all) but enforce a prohibition on nude or partially-nude horseplay whenever we can
– Their bedtimes are usually 1/2 to 1 hour apart — this might change.
– They’ll be in a bunk bed
– They’ll be in this arrangement for the next 3-5 years, until we can move to a house with more bedrooms.
I’m especially interested in hearing from parents of opposite-sex children who share(d) a room. I’d also be willing to hear from people who had to share a room with an opposite-sex sibling when they were very young and who can recall specific things that made the situation better or worse.
We have a 7 year old (boy) 5 year old (girl) and 18 month old (girl) sharing one room, a bunk bead for the older two and a small bed for the 18 month old.
Shared bedtime is the easiest way for us, but we have the luxury of letting the kids get up whenever they want. It didn’t take long for the 18 month old to sleep through the other two getting out of bed 1-2 hours earlier than she wanted to wake up.
All of them sleep better when sharing a room.
Naked play time is frequent for them, not a big deal for us since they still take a bath together on bath nights.
The only adjustment I can think of is that the 7 year old wants more alone time than the other two, so we have to enforce it sometimes when he asks.
My family have always been pretty casual about being naked in front of one another, but my parents were careful to make clear to us that society has all sorts of silly-but-deeply-ingrained taboos around nudity and that it was very important not to scandalise people by violating them.
We had that set-up for about a year with opposite-sex kids around that age. I don’t have any strong memories of it, so I’m going to take that to mean it was fine. They had two separate twin beds, though the younger one’s was just a mattress and boxspring resting on the floor. The naked thing was a non-issue.
I do remember we staggered bedtimes. We put the younger (also goofier) one to bed first. The older one had bedtime stories in the living room then snuck in after the younger one was asleep. Sometimes the littler one re-woke and talked a bit, but everyone was already drowsy, so it was brief. We’d occasionally have specific “sleepover” nights where they were allowed to stay up late and talk and play as a treat. We actually still do that occasionally now that they’re older and don’t share a room.
The two things I sorta remember having to manage were early-risers and naps. The older one is our early-riser, and that often cost the littler one 30-45 minutes of sleep, which adds up when it’s several times a week. We were just conscientious about naptime and bedtime to make sure it wasn’t a big problem.
They definitely could not nap at the same time; that was too much to ask. So we put the older one in our room for naps.
I will say that in general we’re really strict with naps and bedtimes and staying-in-bed-once-we-tell-you-goodnight. It’s a set of hills I will basically die on. So they’re pretty well-behaved on that front.
I was sort of sad when we moved and they had their own rooms. It was good overall, but they did miss being together at first.
Boy is about 2.5 years older than Girl. They shared a bedroom starting when Boy was 5 and Girl was 2.5. I think we moved bedrooms again when Girl was 5.5ish and Boy was going to be turning 8, so about 3 years. (They started sharing a room when Younger Boy was born, so he got his own room as a baby. Now the two boys share the room and Girl has her own room.)
We absolutely had to have shared bedtime, it would not have worked otherwise. That said, they almost never actually went to sleep then and would keep playing for awhile. Sometimes Boy wanted to go to sleep and would complain that Girl wasn’t letting him. Really that’s about the only thing we had any kind of problem with. I remember a friend talking about their two opposite-sex kids who normally had separate bedrooms but who had to share temporarily due to construction or something, and the friend was saying that the two kids were not going to sleep and just playing around all night. I said something about “you might think that’s just the novelty of them sharing a room for the first time, but for us after two years that hasn’t worn off”.
Never had any nudity issues with them. They shared baths when younger, but it’s never something we made a big deal about, and there was nothing extra about sharing the room that made a difference.
I guess the one other thing is that the Girl since she started sharing the room at 2.5 and barely remembered her own room as a baby, got used to it and was a little upset when she stopped sharing the room, and would often say she was lonely when going to sleep by herself. It’s been about a year and it still comes up sometimes.
@Aotho
In much-belated reply to your comment here:
Honestly the 3Blue1Brown series you found is about as good a resource as I can find with a few minutes of googling. If you’re interested in learning more, then I’d recommend looking into probability theory in general. Wikipedia looks pretty accessible on this topic.
So, I think there are some cases where it makes sense to talk about the probability distribution (and thus confidence interval, etc.) of a probability, and some cases where it doesn’t. I think it comes down to which of the interpretations of probability each of your “probability” figures are referring to.
Mathematically, probability is defined in terms of axioms about functions and sets. That these mathematical objects correspond to something useful in the real world is commonly accepted; people were talking about probability thousands of years before it was mathematically formalized in any case. When, how, and why probability theory describes the world is a matter of much more debate, and it isn’t a question I’d expect to come to a single, unambiguous answer. Two common interpretations or definitions of probability are the frequentist (or “physical”) and Bayesian (or “subjective”) interpretations. Frequentists define the probability of an event as it’s relative frequency out of all alternative events over a large number of trials. In other words, a frequentist says the probability of rolling a 4 on a standard die is 1/6, because when you roll the die a large number of times, the fraction of 4’s rolled approaches one out of every six rolls on average. The problem with this definition is that there are many events which cannot be repeated a large number of times, that we’d still like to discuss the probability of–for instance, the probability that Joe Biden will be elected president this November.
Bayesian probabilities, on the other hand, are thought of as personal degrees of belief in propositions. Though this is in many ways more subjective–in fact, one name for this interpretation is “subjectivist”–there are simple, strict mathematical rules that Bayesians use to update their probabilities. If you’ve been hanging around the rat-sphere I’m sure you’ve heard of Bayes’ theorem; here’s an interactive guide if you haven’t. A Bayesian would agree that the probability of rolling a 4 on a die is 1/6; but would ask the frequentist whether he’d actually ever rolled a die thousands of times and kept track of the running totals. She’d bet that even if he did roll a die 6,000 times, the number of fours would not be exactly 1000. And what does “the limit as you repeat the event again and again” even mean when in real life no one can roll a die infinitely many times?
I think both perspectives are valuable, though I do find the Bayesian one more general and more in accordance with how we actually think about odds in most circumstances that don’t involve dice rolls or coin flips. While the philosophical underpinnings of frequentism are IMO about as shaky and subjective as those under Bayesianism, I’ll admit it can be a simpler way to think about the probabilities of events that are repeated many times, like dice rolls or asteroid strikes. It’s in those circumstances that I think it’s reasonable to talk about the “true probability” of an event, meaning the probability we should expect bases on the consistent long-run frequency, and furthermore to have confidence intervals for that “true” probability. Though you should be able to boil that uncertainty down to a single Bayesian estimate, elaborating on the confidence interval of your model gives more information.
However, for one-off events like AGI apocalypse or catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, I don’t think the frequentist interpretation makes much sense at all. There’s no mathematical model for how frequently unaligned intelligences kill humanity. The only kind of probability that makes sense to me is the Bayesian degree of belief in the proposition, and so confidence intervals would be quite odd. “I’m 95% confident that extinction-level supervolcano eruptions occur between once every 5,000 centuries and once every 100,000 centuries” makes sense. “I’m 95% confident that I’m between 1% and 20% confident that we’ll all be killed by AI” makes much less sense–just say you’re 10% confident! An interval implies you have some kind of model whose parameters you’re unsure of, which isn’t true in these predictions of unprecedented events.
One more point: When you are trying to come up with an answer to “what’s the chance we’ll be hit by an asteroid in the next century?” and your estimates range across orders of magnitude, your overall Bayesian probability will be almost entirely dominated by your highest estimate when your level of precision is “order of magnitude”. The average of ~1 in 1,000,000 and ~1 in 100 rounds to ~1 in 100.
That’s a really interesting example, and I’d love to reply to it after I get in a solid three hours of actually studying for my finals. One of them’s a stats class so I could almost count this as studying….but not really. 😛
See also about “probability of a probability”: Chapter 18 “The Ap distribution and rule of succession” in Probability Theory by E.T. Jaynes
I’m glad to hear from you again! 🙂
However, I don’t quite want to pile on extra work for you with a long reply just now, especially since my 2nd point seems to have reached you in a way that I intended — I’ll let you ponder and eagerly await when you have a response as to how you’d distinguish between those two sets of 100 predictions with just a single number. Maybe that line of inquiry will allow us to have a breakthrough moment!
That assumes that the arithmetic mean is the appropriate one to use here, which is not immediately obvious.
Ah, I should be more precise:
If you have fewer than ten probability estimates that span orders of magnitude, and you’re approximately equally confident in each estimate, then the order of magnitude of your overall probability should be within an order of magnitude of the highest estimate.
Mathematically: Let P(E) be your estimate of the probability of the event in question; P(M1) be the probability that your first model is correct; P(E|M3) be the probability that your third model assigns to E, or the probability of E given M3; and so on for n models.
Assuming exactly one model is correct, we can write:
P(E) = P(M1) * P(E|M1) + P(M2) * P(E|M2) + … + P(Mn) * P(E|Mn)
If you’re equally confident in each of your models, then:
P(M1) = P(M2) = … = P(Mn) = 1 / n
and the overall expression simplifies to
P(E) = 1/n * P(E|M1) + 1/n * P(E|M2) + … + 1/n * P(E|Mn)
or
P(E) = 1/n * [P(E|M1) + P(E|M2) + P(E|M3) + … + P(E|Mn)]
which is indeed the arithmetic mean of the estimates from each model.
If you’re significantly more confident in the models that assign lower probability, this wouldn’t be the case; but high probabilities will dominate whenever you’re about evenly confident in each.
I think this is still hiding a lot of information in “equally confident”. There is equal confidence in the sense of the Bayes prior (confidence spread equally across probabilities), but there is also equal confidence in the sense of the Haldane prior (confidence spread equally across log-odds). In a situation where estimates vary across orders of magnitude, the Haldane prior tends to be more appropriate than the Bayes prior, and its corresponding mean is the geometric mean.
“No one regretted the fall of the Aztec empire” (I know there’s an exact quote to this effect somewhere, I can’t find it on Google.)
I’ve always (perhaps naively) assumed it was a net good that the Aztec empire was toppled—colonial subjugation by the Spanish being objectively better than thousands of people having their hearts ripped out every year. But I wonder, partly inspired by some of the religious discussions here on SSC, if the wrong-side-of-the-knife participants in Aztec ceremonial drama were actually happy with, and looking forward to, their fates. In that case, who are we (or the Spaniards) to say we know better?
Aztec civilization seemed insular enough that I imagine few people (if any) had the thought, “hey, I’m not comfortable with this idea of having my heart cut out, can’t I just pay a fine instead?” If everyone bought into the ritual, and was comfortable with it, and knew the consequences involved, and had absolutely no exposure to any countervailing cultural or intellectual framework, there was no actual “evil” involved, just tradition and belief.
Note that I don’t mean this argument to be analogous with other *true* evils in history. Lots of white people in the South might have said, “hey, black people are happy being slaves,” but we have documentary evidence that slaves *weren’t* happy being slaves and knew slavery wasn’t their only possible fate. So please don’t go there.
Epistemic status: my knowledge of the Aztecs is pretty much confined to the book History of the Conquest of Mexico and the movie Apocalypto.
TL; DR: Is cultural relativism a valid concept? Are “evil” practices truly evil if they’re not perceived as such by the victims?
Colonial subjugation by the Spanish meant that an overwhelming majority of the indigenous population of the conquered states died either of plagues or getting worked to death in the Spanish mines, I fail to see how that could be considered worse than Aztec rule.
Plagues were mostly just the result of contact with Europeans (or Asians if they’d gotten here first), independent of style of government. Working to death in the mines was specific to the Spanish government.
This isn’t an answer to your question but, disease aside, I’d have to see some math before concluding that Aztec rule was worse. Plausibly was, but it’s also plausible that the greater power differential between rulers and ruled allowed the Spanish to e.g. work tens of thousands to death in mining operations at a scale that the Aztecs couldn’t have pulled off.
(Throw in disease and post-contact is clearly worse, but let’s assume a world in which disease has its impact with or without conquest.)
Disease having its impact with or without conquest is a perfectly valid assumption. Pizarro had an easy time conquering Peru because smallpox reached the Andes before the Spaniards did, killing many and triggering a war civil war of succession.
I would agree that for the generation there at contact, post contact is worse because of disease. But for the following ones the columbian exchange brought a lot of gains as well as a lot of diseases. Further being in contact with the rest of the world has a lot of benefits.
And while slower contact might have slowed disease passage, short of really strong quarantines any real contact with the rest of the world would have spread the diseases.
Weirdly, the Aztec areas are the one part of the new world where the massive disease-related deaths may have had nothing to do with the diseases brought from Europe–cocoliztli hasn’t been conclusively identified, but is thought to be a local zoonotic disease.
Not an expert on the Aztecs, but it’s my understanding that a lot of the late (at least the last 100 years) Aztec Empire’s sacrifices were sourced from nearby states, who shared a pantheon but lacked the Aztec’s particularly bloodthirsty doctrines. These were acquired as prisoners of war. Several of these states later allied with Cortés against the Aztecs, so it isn’t out of the question to think they weren’t thrilled with the sacrifices.
I seem to recall that all Mesoamerican civilizations (Aztecs, Incans, Maya) used blood sacrifice to some extent, but the Aztecs were at the far end of the curve.
Yeah, my impression was that it was similar to the Mediterranean world, in that cultures had varying degrees of enthusiasm for sacrificial rituals, but nobody doubted their efficacy in principle (see: how the Romans would denigrate other societies for practicing human sacrifice, but if the going really got rough…)
I think you can’t include disease as a factor at all.
Look at North America, even the natives who never encountered a white man in the flesh succumbed to mass pandemics of Old World diseases.
As an economics nerd, I believe you have to look at revealed preference. Cortes had a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding without essentially every single non-Aztec city allying with him .
Almost every non-Aztec chose the devil they did not know over the devil they knew. Did they regret it? Maybe?
And maybe not.
I agree with Skeptic. The number of native allies Cortes was able to gather suggests the Aztecs were about as terrible as you would expect them to be from all the sacrificial heart-ripping and towers of skulls built afterwards.
I don’t remember the movie very well, but I am pretty sure that Apocalypto portrayed Mayans, not Aztecs.
Not knowing much about the Aztecs specifically, I’ll answer your TL; DR instead.
I’m not a cultural relativist, but I do think in evaluating cultures you need to have a considerable degree of epistemic humility. Cultural practices have to be evaluated both individually and as part of the whole; even a genuinely cruel and inhumane practice might serve a function that’s neither obvious nor easily replaced. A kind of Chesterton’s barbed-wire fence, if you will.
On top of that, I think it’s good to have a Schelling fence that forcing people to change their culture is bad, even when the culture in question is inhumane in many ways. This is both to protect ourselves from other cultures’ do-gooders, and to prevent the sort of abuses that frequently happen during such reforms.
So, yes, a practice can be immoral even if it’s not recognized as such, but we have to always keep in mind: is this our problem?
But… that’s the hard form of cultural relativism. Examples come to mind – should we support condomless sex in Africa? Corruption in Romania? FGC? I might even add apartheid here – it was a pretty solid cultural institution, and they were pretty settled in their own ways.
I could be naive, but I’m pretty sure if you come to Romania with tanks and change nothing except shoot public officials you catch taking a bribe – everybody here would be so fucking happy. They’d keep trying to bribe them, of course, doctors would still receive envelopes and so on. It is our culture right now. But … and that’s something I consider somewhat a sociological axiom – people can get used to the good pretty damn fast.
people can get used to the good pretty damn fast.
On a societal scope you need a strong and pervasive enforcement, but also a thorough discrediting of the old ways. E.g., the change in Germany after WWII would not have taken root without either.
But… that’s the hard form of cultural relativism.
I’m a little confused. If that’s the hard form of cultural relativism, what’s the soft form? My understanding was that cultural relativism in the strong form holds that it’s invalid, in principle, to judge a culture’s practices from the outside.
My position is that, in practice, forcibly interfering involves (a) risks of making things even worse for them because you meddled in something you didn’t understand — not to mention the outright abuses that typically accompany forcible reforms — and (b) invites other cultures to do the same to us.
I could be naive, but I’m pretty sure if you come to Romania with tanks and change nothing except shoot public officials you catch taking a bribe – everybody here would be so fucking happy.
I don’t deny that forcing cultural change can be good in some ways. Realistically, though, that wouldn’t be the only change made by the invading force, nor would there be no abuse by soldiers; as I understand it, sexual abuse of civilians by UN Peacekeepers is a perennial issue.
@Iago the Yerfdog
Oh, we are civilized enough that rapes would be properly reported and prosecuted. Right now we literally have armed soldiers at major intersections, and worst that ever happens is various misunderstandings of when it’s ok to fine. Remarkably functional democracy here – which is probably very worrying, considering how suboptimal the situation is.
But it’s an interesting case study. We both agree that forced change (in the sense of armed force) comes with plenty of side-effects. I’m far from prepared to admit that it’s never worth it, but let’s put that aside for now. However, assuming one had the requisite soft force to make changes – what would be the MVC (Minimum Viable Change)?
In Romania’s case there would probably be two directions.
1. First would be direct prosecution of corruption cases. We, very officially and procedurally, kicked out out very successful head prosecutor. Which turned out to be a promotion, because less than a year later she’s the head prosecutor of EU (no, it’s not a telenovela, she’s just that good). So one can imagine with sufficient support from EU she can come back and put in prison enough people to decimate the classic, older parties. Except “decimate” in this case means 1 in 10 is not in prison. Yeah, it’s that bad. Problem solved, new people necessarily come instead.
2. Why did we democratically elect a bunch of corrupt people? Demographics, disappointment, disaffection and so on. But also barriers to entry – we have a decent vote counting and seat distribution legislation, but also a bunch of stupid and out of place limits. Like required signature of 1% of population just to enter the race. Yeah. One can imagine either international (EU) pressure or international courts declaring this illegal – we’re assuming we do have the soft force necessary. No more barriers to entry, many more parties, a bit of chaos but a more healthy Parliament.
Would you have objections to that as well? Is is pretty clear interference in internal matters, done with the express purpose of changing the culture. They’re just the result of 5 minutes of thought, instead of a knee jerk “shoot all the corrupt people”.
@Radu Floricica
Well, I’m hardly one to be deciding what’s best for Romania!
I would ask a question back, though. If the EU put pressure on you, at least that’s an organization your country is a member of. Suppose instead that Brazil decided that your internal culture wasn’t acceptable and rolled the tanks in. Would that change your assessment?
@Iago the Yerfdog
Well, you just suggested Peacekeeping forces raping Romanian women is bad, so I guess you’re ok with having an opinion. Are you sure you’re not running from this? Last time your argument was about the use of force…
As for Brazil, sure I’d object. 1. Tanks and 2. I don’t particularly admire Brazil. Now if Sweden came here with tanks, that that might be different. Except they’d probably force unisex toilets or something.
I like how the petition signature requirements that Radu Floricica thinks are “stupid and out of place”, requiring signatures from 1% of the population to get on the ballot in Romania, are substantially less than the signatures from 3% of the voting population in Oklahoma that the Libertarian party had to collect to get Gary Johnson on the ballot in 2016. Oklahoma’s democracy: three times more hostile to non-mainstream parties than an ex-Soviet-Bloc country. Way to go, guys.
(At that, remember, this is the reformed Oklahoma ballot access law. The requirement used to be 5%.)
Imagine if the Aztec religion had survived to the present day. Your very religious Hispanic coworker will sometimes come into work wearing a hoodie made of the rotting skin of some slave he sacrificed. Some of his tastiest meals use human meat.
Illegal immigrants to the US are known, accurately, for performing human sacrifice, including of their own children, who they torture before killing. And you can imagine the rumors and progroms that happen when a child of US-citizens goes missing in an area with a heavy migrant population.
Illegal immigrants to the US are known, accurately, for performing human sacrifice, including of their own children, who they torture before killing.
This seems, um, perhaps a wee bit inflammatory. Are you referencing a handful of cases among millions of illegal immigrants?
I would add that there are plenty of instances of native-born (white) US citizens torturing and killing their children, though perhaps not for strictly religious/ritualistic reasons.
Edited to add: strange that you use the word “pogrom”. In the Middle Ages, plenty of Jews were slaughtered when little Christian kids wandered off into the woods and died of exposure. Because, of course, the preferable explanation was that Jews performed ritual sacrifice on little Christian kids.
I am referencing an alternate world where Aztec religion still exists, not the real world.
Sorry about that. So you meant, “in this hypothetical world, illegal immigrants to the US are known, etc. etc.”
As Emily Litella used to say, never mind!
Sorry, J, I made the same mistake on first reading. I think it’s the tense switch in the second paragraph.
Now for a more substantive question, how likely were the most objectionable practices of the Aztec religion to fade away through reformation or evolution?
In Pastwatch, OSC makes the argument–supposition might be more correct–that slavery evolved as a replacement for human sacrifice in the ancient world. One has to assume there is a lot more efficient and marginally more humane uses for war captives and the like. But who could say how long it would take the toll in painful deaths before the society reformed itself.
My understanding from reading Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization was that agriculture precipitated slavery. Before that, when you captured members of the other tribe, you ate them. Once you had fields to work, there was a use for captives besides tonight’s dinner.
@Randy M
There are apparent examples of substitution of non-human objects or of animals for human sacrifices. The use of a lamb in Roman-era versions of the Carthaginian tophet-sacrifice seems to be one of the better-attested examples (and yes, there is a reasonably good probability, despite ongoing controversy, that the original sacrifices had involved intentional killing of healthy infants, not just some kind of post mortem incineration, which would not fit the ordinary pattern of ancient sacrificial acts. So I hear, at least; I’m no Punicist.) One suspects it would require significant cultural pressure, however, and thus a major rearrangement of our alternate-historical Aztec society.
The occasional occurrence, even nowadays, of sati in India and the apparent persistence of child-sacrifice, in secret, to Tertullian’s day (i.e., end of the second century) suggest that human sacrifice would, absent the extreme opprobrium from a conquering Christian (or similar) overlord, still happen from time to time in that scenario. Jaskologist’s grim vision might not be realized, but I suspect that the rumors–and the retaliatory killings–might well, and there might be something to them. Best that didn’t happen, whatever the sins of the Spanish (and let’s not get into the question of the so-called Black Legend).
Fair point. But consider that with the change of one word, your first paragraph might be written by a vegan today: “Your very religious Hispanic coworker will sometimes come into work wearing a hoodie made of the rotting skin of some slave he sacrificed. Some of his tastiest meals use animal meat.”
A similar change could be made to the second paragraph for a world where militant veganism was dominant; take a look at the bands of vigilantes in India who punish people for killing cows, for a real world example.
My point is not that these perspectives have equal weight; they don’t. Killing humans to eat and wear is an atrocious evil, certainly far worse to my mind than doing the same to animals.
But try to come up with a compromise that (a) allows you to force the human-sacrificers to change while (b) not allowing the vegans to force meat-eaters to change while also (c) not changing the minds of the vegans about the object-level issue — they’re that stubborn.
It seems to me you either have to commit to tolerating the human-sacrificers, or you have to commit to allowing the vegans to be intolerant of meat-eating if they deem it fit. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.
EDIT: For what it’s worth, I think the vegans are lesser evil in this situation. But you can generalize the point to other situations. Overall, I think the better option is to create a Schelling fence that says, “As long as it’s them, over there, doing it to themselves, and not making it our problem, it’s better not to interfere.”
Also, for those playing along at home, I’ve finally accidentally reported one of my own comments. Sorry to Scott or whoever has to take time to deal with that.
@Iago
Conversely, you can argue that both the militant vegans and the human sacrificers are wrong. The objective good against which both are sinning is the maintenance of human life (and, by extrapolation, human freedom). I think that’s something like the default compromise followed by modern, liberal countries (and arguably also, with a rather different take on “human freedom,” by pre-liberal European countries).
That doesn’t really satisfy your condition c). The question, of course, is whether it would be legitimate to go to war and force them to change their minds. I think most people–again, in reasonably liberal countries–would endorse that move in case of large-scale human sacrifice. They do, at least in historical retrospect, for wars against ideologically slave-holding or genocidal powers. Vegans? Probably not so much, by itself.
Yes. Subjective morality doesn’t make any sense.
Contextual morality does, though. And the presence or lack of consent is an important contextual feature.
EDIT: It also makes a difference to my mind what the practitioners think they’re doing. Sacrificing people for fun is reprehensible; sacrificing people because you believe it’s necessary to keep the sun from crashing into the Earth is pitiable.
One can believe in objective morality, and also believe that consent legitimizes behavior that would be evil without consent.
I kind of doubt the six-year-olds were happy with it. Especially when the priests ripped their nails off to make sure they cried the requisite amount before they were killed.
The Aztecs themselves, like most other humans, knew that murder was wrong. That’s why – as with most other human civilizations – homicide was not only illegal in Aztec society but considered to be among the most serious of crimes, outside of a few specific contexts where it was allowed. If someone randomly killed their neighbor over an argument, or cut down a stranger on the road to steal his belongings, they’d be considered the worst sort of criminal and harshly punished for their grievous misdeeds.
The Aztecs were not aliens. They weren’t looking at this through some otherworldly perspective that would be unfathomable to the rest of humanity. For the most part, they had the same disdain for the intentional killing of other humans that everyone else did. They just also happened to believe that if they didn’t slaughter tens of thousands of people on their sacrificial altars, the sun god wouldn’t have the strength to fight off the great evil threatening to annihilate all life on Earth. Of course, they were wrong, as proven by the fact that the world continues to exist, so it seems rather undeniable that ending the practice of ritual sacrifice was an enormous good under nearly any set of ethical standards imaginable. (Whether that good was outweighed by the atrocities of the Spaniards over the centuries to come is a more difficult question to answer; I’d be inclined to say that the Spaniards were the lesser evil by far, but I’m not an expert and I may be underestimating the depths of their cruelty.)
Did they actually believe that massive human sacrifices were necessary to save the world, or did they just say this as an excuse to intimidate and terrorize their enemies, and perhaps entertain themselves with blood sport?
Absent other evidence one should always assume that people believe in their own religion.
How many people would violate the laws of their religion if they really believed in their hearts they were going to hell as a result?
Considering that back in the times we had punishments like quartering, dragging, and people still commited those crimes, I’d say quite a few people would. Because everybody would think they’re the special snowflake who won’t get caught.
And back then, you could see and witness the punishments, and people would still commit the crimes.
@ana53294- surely if you actually believe in Catholicism (or similar) that means that you believe in an omniscient God, so there is no way to “not get caught” as there is with laws enforced by humans?
In general, AFAIK studies find that in general it is certainty, not severity, of punishment that drives deterrence. Of course there are edge cases where the punishment is so minor that people simply don’t care…
Well… generally following the rules of a religion means you’re supposed to go to heaven or at least the regional equivalent.
Note that Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular has mechanisms for asking God’s forgiveness for your sins.
I’ve seen that claim, but the evidence I saw for it showed, in effect, that increasing the probability of conviction by a given percentage increased deterrence by more than increasing the length of sentence by the same percentage.
An alternative interpretation is that amount of punishment isn’t proportional to the length of sentence, because there are additional costs to conviction — reputation loss, cost of bond, legal costs, etc. If cost of punishment is a fixed cost plus length of term, then increasing length of term by a fixed proportion doesn’t increase cost of punishment by that proportion, which would explain the experimental evidence.
This is from reading stuff on that a very long time ago, so there may be better evidence now.
In fact, a careful reading of the Bible suggests that repeatedly sinning and repenting might be the optimal strategy for maximizing the amount of rejoicing in heaven.
“What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? May it never be! ”
-Paul the Apostle, Romans 6:1-2
That’s such a weird argument that he was responding to.
“Clean houses are great, let’s dump garbage in our living room so we get to clean it again!”
To be fair, the loss of utility from the great evil annihilating all life would be enormous. So even if there’s only a small chance that ritual sacrifice is necessary to stop it (and since our ancestors believed it would, by Chesterton’s Fence we should surely assign non-zero probability to that) it seems clear that the practice of ritual sacrifice should be considered a top cause for effective altruists.
Clever troll 🙂 It comes down to Pascal’s wager and the responses to that wager, I guess.
I agree the Aztecs weren’t aliens, but some cultures certainly seem more “alien” than others. What was it really like, subjectively, to be a participant in Aztec society? That is an impossible exercise for someone looking back over the distance of 500 years.
if the wrong-side-of-the-knife participants in Aztec ceremonial drama were actually happy with, and looking forward to, their fates
Given that the Aztec seem to have gone out actively looking for sacrificial victims, that would appear to indicate that there weren’t enough volunteers/they would have crashed their entire population taking it only from their own people, so I think we can conclude that Aztec sacrifice was not, in fact, a popular fate.
I understand why, given the constraints of Aztec theology, they did what they did; they believed they were literally saving the world. Whatever about the knock-on effects of Spanish colonisation, I think it can be seen why the peoples of the region might have preferred a faith that said yes, the gods need sacrifice, but our God did a one-time-for-all sacrifice which redeems us, no humans need die for it to one which said get up on that altar, friend!
Other commenters have argued that the sacrifices weren’t voluntary and the Aztecs really were awful, but as an exercise, let’s assume that all those people really did volunteer to get their hearts ripped out, based on a sincere desire to feed the sun god. The end of the Aztec empire was still a net good.
Doesn’t it matter that the Aztecs were wrong? Empirically, the sun god did not need to be fed blood in order for the sun to keep coming up. All those sacrifices were at best, throwing their lives away while thinking they were helping. I’m not going to get into the theological discussion of whether outsiders were justified in ending the sacrifices that were supposedly the only thing preventing the world from falling into permanent darkness, but with the benefit of hindsight we can say that it definitely worked out and the new status quo of no heart-ripping is way better. If some guy who had been looking forward to being sacrificed managed to survive the fall of the empire and live long enough to notice that the sun was still coming up, he would’ve thought “Wait, we didn’t need to do that? Jeez, I’m really glad I didn’t die for nothing.”
It does matter that they were wrong (IMO), but for the end of the Aztec empire to be a net good you also need to consider how the Aztec empire was ended (it wasn’t great).
Then also consider whether there might have been a less bad way for the practice to end than European conquerors. Could they have been pulled away from ritual sacrifice after introduction to outside cultures without the bloodshed and disease?
It seems entirely plausible that the way the Aztec Empire ended was a net harm.
There is a religion in the world that places certain people on the bottom of a pyramid, forcing them to do the most menial jobs and not allowing them to do jobs that require interactions with people upper on the pyramid.
It seems that people who are in the bottom do whatever they can to convert to other religions that don’t place them in the bottom of any hierarchies, and the bureaucrats who manage the hierarchy do whatever they can to prevent it. But, whenever they are allowed, people engage in mass conversions, changing their religious identity from bottom of one religion to equal brothers in another.
It seems pretty obvious to me, that even if there was no conquest, once Spanish settlers start living in the Americas, and the people most likely to be sacrificed start converting to Christianity to get the protection of these new nice god who has already done all the sacrificing himself, and the Aztecs try to sacrifice these newly converted Christians, the Spanish Crown will have a casus belli and will destroy the Aztec empire in defense of the Catholic Americans. With all the newly converted Catholics fighting on their side.
So war on Aztecs was inevitable once you have Catholic missionaries in the Americas, even if the whole conquest thing doesn’t happen.
When it comes to the Aztec religion, I’d rather be placed at the bottom of the pyramid than the top…
Good idea, bad idea? I expect SSC or (DF specifically) to tear this apart for something obvious I’ve missed.
Congress passes a Respirator Funding Bill. It subsidizes respirator production in the US, $1 per respirator until we reach 330M respirators produced per day. First come first serve contract wise. Guaranteed $1/mask until 2025.
Total cost: ~ $120B annually. I expect we wouldn’t actually hit 330M until ~2022 or 2023. I’m assuming this has positive externalities that outweigh the deadweight loss from taxation, and feel free to tear that assumption apart as well.
Would this be meaningfully different in effect from an Advance Market Commitment? This op-ed talks about an AMC for vaccine dosage but the same idea could apply to PPE too:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/opinion/coronavirus-vaccine.html
330 million per day? That seems insane.
It depends on whether Covid-19 is endemic and we still don’t have an effective vaccine.
The “proper” use of N-95 masks is to use a new one few each patient contact. In-practice, this could mean a nurse working a Covid-19 floor would go through ~50 per shift. Similar for every other person involved in patient care.
And ideally, we end up with *everyone* wearing them when indoors anywhere close to others. That works well if you can change masks often, but not if you have to keep reusing the same disposable N95 mask every day for a month, and maybe occasionally try sterilizing it by putting it in a 160 degree F oven for 30 minutes. Among other things, your breath makes it damp and warm, which leads to things growing in/on it and makes it smell bad.
@albatross11 says:
At my job we’re required to wear the masks anytime we get passed the shop near the boiler room, but we’re rationed to no more than one N95 mask a week (sometimes we have to wait even longer). Mine usually start to stink within four hours and if I don’t hide in a closet and do any actual work they usually become visibly dirty before the end of the day, much less a week.
I keep all my old ones and rotate based on how stinky and dirty looking they are.
I’m no logistics wonk, but a fixed number like that seems overly simplistic. In my mind, there is a number of masks needed in the country per time unit based on best practice procedures in medicine (hospitals, doctors’ offices) and adjacent fields (nursing homes), as well as general public (public facing jobs that will require them and individual use). Once that reaches a steady state, make sure there is enough domestic production for that, then determine how much of a strategic reserve is needed (3-12 months of pandemic-level usage above that baseline), and how fast to build it up (number of months of additional production). You might also need to account for people stockpiling their own (all survival bags will now include a dozen masks). Now you have your production targets and you just have to figure out how much you need to subsidize the cost above the price of a Chinese mask (multiply by your final steady-state number to get the total annual subsidy). Then you also need a protocol for rotating newly produced masks through the national reserve and making sure they don’t expire too soon. Voila: a domestic mask industry.
In Neal Stephonson’s sci-fi novel Snow Crash, there is an image kind of like a QR code that if you look at it causes your brain to crash because of the pattern neuronal of activity it elicits. Turns out we can do that to ML algorithms – give them just the right weird, unexpected data that it makes all their training fall apart and they do weird things like identify a horse as a frog because one pixel is out of place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5wtoH0_KuA
So human brains are actually resilient against this kind of thing, right? Exposure to lots of weird noisy data over evolution means that (outside of the case of flashing lights in some people with epilepsy) we are able to ignore random noisy data and be successful at whatever task we were undertaking anyway. Or am I wrong about this? Are there good examples of human brains behaving really strangely because of what looks like it should be noise?
Epilepsy?
Many epileptics can, in fact, have seizures induced by strobe lights. This sounds like a pretty close match.
All optical illusions?
I think the only correct answer right now is “we have no idea.” We don’t understand the brain, nor do we understand how to harden artificial neural networks against adversarial inputs well enough. We just now learned enough to know to ask the question in the first place.
On the other hand – we could consider propaganda and advertising to just be humanity’s best attempts at human adversarial inputs. They sorta work, but not that well.
And don’t forget – artificial “neural” networks have almost nothing to do with real brains. They’re inspired by brains in the same way fish inspired submarines.
Optical illusions are kind of the opposite of adversarial image attacks.
Adversarial images basically work because the image classification systems don’t have any layer of understanding of the world. They see a few pixels that are highly representative of, say, a panda, and they have no ability to say, “wait, but most of this animal is green, not black and white, maybe it’s actually a frog.” There’s no understanding layer that error corrects basic sensory interpretation.
Optical illusions (ones that aren’t just actually ambiguous images) often work exactly by trickling your understanding layer. For example, a lot of color or pattern-orient’s optical illusions are trickling you because your brain tries to compensate for different lighting conditions by modifying your perceived colors or lightness/dark or motion based on its understanding of how that sensory input usually fits into realistic environments.
There are lots of things that can crash your visual perception. Just look at one of those pictures of people with an extra pair of eyes painted on. But I don’t think something like an image could crash your whole brain.
You can crash the brain with big annoying stimuli, or with drugs. But not with subtle inputs.
A wholesale crash is unlikely, for the reasons you specify. But there is the McCollough effect, in which staring at certain images can cause a change in visual perception that can last for hours to months.
Pareidoila, and superstimulus which capitalizes on it (eg cartoons / anime). I could see an argument that people who are Too Into Anime have had their brain “crashed” by a stimulus that it should have been able to safely categorize as “a simple series of lines and shapes” and instead was categorized as “The Best and Most Important Thing”.
I don’t think anime fans are seduced by the images themselves. All the analysis I’ve seen has argued that the superstimulus is the simplistic and satisfying storylines and scenes of anime, and the individual characters and their design become attractive as a consequence of that.
Of course, many people find anime drawings visually appealing on their own, but interpreting the drawing as e.g. “sexier than real women” is learned behavior from the context in which the image is presented.
At some point we’ll probably stumble on such things. If not “brain crash”, than at least a headache or some other annoying side-effect. But the main reason we’re not seeing this right now (other that most likely needing 3d and thus hard to draw on paper) is that people are different. It’s quite a bit more difficult to find a pattern that will reliably influence everybody.
I can reliably induce a headache with a smartbulb and the code
while true:
bulb.set_color((rand.randint(0,0xffff),0xffff,0xffff,6500))
# (hue, saturation, brightness, temperature)
Almost certainly. If brains are vulnerable to external attacks like this then there really should be some evidence of it being used in nature. That we don’t have some kind of hypnotic frog or QR penguin that shuts down its attackers before running away, suggests that sensory equipment does not function enough like an algorithm to be vulnerable to a purely information based spoiling attack. That said, if misidentification is your only aim then that’s pretty common with thousands of forms of camouflage out there. Spoofing your predator’s/prey’s identification algorithm into returning the wrong result is highly effective as a survival strategy.
That said, the fact that psychosis is a thing is evidence that processing information in the brain can be disrupted to the point where it no longer conforms to reality. I know there are genetic and environmental factors that lead into psychotic episodes, and that certain drugs can trigger them. Interestingly, humans are the only species observed to experience psychotic breaks, although, that might just because because identifying animals that think they’re Napoleon is quite a lot harder than people. This might undermine my original argument, if it takes a certain neural complexity to be vulnerable to these kind of attacks then there may have not been enough evolutionary time to develop them as humans have only been around in a form close to our current state for a few million years. That’s adding another layer of if to the rebuttal, though, so for now I’d just say that there’s no evidence for or against such hacks.
That we don’t have some kind of hypnotic frog or QR penguin that shuts down its attackers before running away, suggests that sensory equipment does not function enough like an algorithm to be vulnerable to a purely information based spoiling attack.
There is a counter-example, the zebra.
source
ETA
That is not exactly ‘shutting down’ the attacker, but shows there are possibilities to exploit the attacker’s sensorium.
Ooo, that’s very interesting. I wonder what part of the fly’s brain dislikes landing on stripy things? Perhaps stripes are more often associated with terrain rather than meals.
I know zebras’ coats are also quite effective in preventing lion attacks, the cats struggle with depth perception so can’t easily distinguish individuals in the heard due to the conflicting stripes. Much in the same way dazzle patterning on ships prevents U-boat attacks because it adds an extra uncertainty to any attempts to ascertain range and heading.
I’d say that would fall under camouflage rather than a true info-attack, though.
Polarization of light seems also involved:
BTW, stripes work also with cows.
I don’t think that’s a good counterargument. Finding those adversarial patterns requires in-depth knowledge of the network architecture so that you can induce a highly specific set of inputs. That can’t happen in nature because it’s not feasible to intelligently/exhaustively search over the space of inputs in the same way.
If you assume a deterministic simulation of the brain, I believe it’s quite likely you could find all sorts of really weird stuff. Obviously animal brains are robust in ways that our piddly ML models aren’t, but to the original point about tailored adversarial attacks, it is unclear.
That’s fair, I had a counter thought after writing this that, by the same logic nuclear fission doesn’t exist because no species uses that as a power source. There are inventions that humans have developed which have no parallel in nature and you can’t argue against them just because the evolutionary random walk hasn’t reached that section yet. That said, it does suggest that the bar for an effective spoiling attack on a brain is set quite high.
That’s true, and there’s been some research in the space along those lines.
First, the discovery that small amounts of strategically altered pixel values could change the network’s answer: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.6199.pdf (unlike the cited paper in the video, this one modifies multiple pixels, but tries to minimize total distance, so the image looks identical to the human eye).
Then, use of genetic algorithms to produce simple, abstract patterns that deliberately trip the recognizer: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.1897.pdf (This one is interesting, because the patterns tell you something about how the neural net identifies the topics in question).
Finally, someone thought to make the generator be a neural net itself (that given a label, produces an image), and pit the recognizer against the generator in adversarial training. The recognizer’s goal is to tell apart real images from ones made by the generator, the generator’s goal is to make images that fool the recognizer. This technique produces extremely good generators, that often are good enough to fool humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network
Judging by the linked Wikipedia article, when you say that the generators are good enough to fool humans, it seems to me that you are using the word “fool” in a completely different sense from what we mean when we talk about fooling other neural networks.
Seeing an image of a person and not being able to tell that this image has no causal history linking it to a real person is to be fooled, but it is to be fooled in a completely different way from seeing something that has lots of visual features of a horse but classifying it as a frog because of a few pixels.
Right, but the point is that the reason the generator is fooling humans is that the detector no longer relies on minimal cues to tell apart “face” from “not face”. Look at the second paper’s example images for examples of images that have nearly nothing to do with the concept that the neural net assigns high probabilities to.
The concept has been used in SF:
“BLIT” (acronym of Berryman Logical Image Technique) is a science fiction short story by British writer David Langford. It features a setting where highly dangerous types of images called “basilisks” have been discovered; these images contain patterns within them that exploit flaws in the structure of the human mind to produce a lethal reaction, effectively “crashing” the mind the way a computer program crashes when given data that it fails to process.
This also appears extensively in the SCP Foundation collaborative fiction project. Such images (as well as sounds and other sensory inputs) are called “infohazards” or “memetic kill agents”.
Some cool replies, thanks everyone! So we all agree that you can cause localised malfunctions with optical illusions, and also that sometimes other weird things happen in people’s brains like psychosis,
Pareidoila and Being Too Into Anime. Also that flies (with their simple little neural systems?) can be snow-crashed into not landing on zebras because the zebra’s barcode-coat messes with them somehow.
It seems to me that maybe optical illusions might just be the easiest to identify example of a weird stimulus causing weird neural activity – we can find lots of them because they don’t mess with the “consciousness” part of neural activity and have subjectively obvious effects. The fact that they exist does kind of imply that there might be other subtle ones we don’t pick up – random visual stimulus affecting emotion (modern art, anyone?) or sound behaviour, or stories cognitive state (Anime as above) etc. I suppose though when you move out of the _relatively_ stereotyped simple neurology of primary senses like vision and into cross-function effects it might get less reliable or just not work in the same sense. A QR code (penguin) which makes you feel angry would be interesting though (and the emotion-code-penguins may be a creature turning up in my next D&D one-shot now 😛 ).
There was a discussion here (iirc) about predictive processing and optical illusions.
That could be the base for a SciFi of targeted attacks on higher neural systems; even its own sub-genre (together with Watts Echopraxia, and the way the vampires of Firefall manipulate humans).
I just thought of the most obvious example of a visual stimulus affecting the brain. The written word! It’s a series of visual stimuli that causes you to hallucinate vividly and it is so specific that the original creator can even shape the hallucination to a greater or lesser degree.
I’d like to register some confusion: why do we have control groups for well understood phenomenon?
For example, pretend I’m trying to make a special grease that makes coin flips always come up heads. I go get a thousand random coins, split them into a test group where I apply the special grease and a control group, and then flip each coin 5 times. I examine the test results and determine the special grease didn’t work, so I go back to the lab and invent special grease 2.0. When I go out to test special grease 2.0, why can’t I just get 500 coins, apply the special grease 2.0 to those, and test those results against the original control group results to see if it works? Why would I go gather 500 more coins and flip all of them 5 times for another control group?
More concretely, there are lots of areas where we have a pretty concrete knowledge of the actual prevalence rate. Imagine we were testing the effectiveness of a heart medication drug and we want to test whether it decreases the incidence of heart attacks in patients aged 55-64. If we took drug to clinical trials, why would we need a control group instead of just testing it against the trivially identifiable actual incidence rate, which is 37/10,000? That’s a very clear standard of evidence and if our control group is at all representative, they should have that incidence rate, so what’s the point of the control? Clinical trials, and using controlled trials in general, are expensive, so what are we getting for this extra cost? Sure, our sample could be unrepresentative, but if it was that would screw up the test whether we used a control group or not.
This is not like a challenge, this is honest confusion. I’m fairly confident there’s a good reason we use control groups, I’m just not sure what it is?
Haven’t thought about this much, but I’ll take a stab from my vague memories.
Primary problem is there is no way to know if the people you select for the treatment group are otherwise the same as the overall population (EDIT: a lot of the time, they’re intentionally different from the overall population so it’s actually some fuzzily-defined subpopulation you’d need to be comparing them to). The treatment group may do better not because it was treated, but because it is different from the overall population (EDIT: or subpopulation of interest) in some way you don’t observe.
If you select people to be treated, and then correctly randomize who gets the treatment and who gets a placebo, you control group and treatment group may not be the same as the overall population. But given large enough groups, they are likely to be similar to each other even along axes that you don’t measure.
It’s possible that population in the study is composed of people who respond better to the drug than to a placebo while the overall population is not like that. But that’s probably less of a risk than that your study population is accidentally somehow different from the general population and thus if you had no control group you might erroneously infer that the drug did/didn’t work.
Not a scientist, but my guess would be (a) drawing a bright line to prevent people thinking they don’t need control groups when they do, and (b) giving more chance for statistical noise to cancel out.
Because the guy who works for the heart medication manufacturer puts up flyers for the study at the local sports centre and recruits anomalously healthy people.
If you use an unrepresentative sample (all samples of humans are unrepresentative), it affects both the active and the placebo group equally.
Yeah, this is one of the things that confuses me. If I get an unrepresentative sample, isn’t the test a failure either way?
So let’s say our drug manufacturer recruits from the local sports center:
If I don’t have a control group, the test group is unrepresentative and we get a false positive unless someone looks at the sample data.
If we have control group, the result doesn’t matter, because we can’t extrapolate the results to the general population. We can “prove” the medicine is effective or ineffective for sporty people but there’s no way we can apply that to the average American.
It seems like if you have an unrepresentative sample, you fail either way.
If you have a control group, you can at least say that the medicine has an effect for some group regardless of whether the sample is representative. That’s much better than getting phantom effects for any substance whatsoever.
Being unrepresentative is not necessarily a problem in and of itself. All samples are unrepresentative along some axis. And not all types or levels of unrepresentativeness are equally bad.
It’s not always going to be true that a medicine which works in the sample will work in the whole population, but it’s a safer bet than if you compare a sample with no controls to the population. The second case is different in two ways from the whole population instead of just one.
A sample of Americans will include more obese people than one of Italians, and thus be unrepresentative.
Should we have to test every drug in every single country?
Cynical take:
My interpretation of the last several years of science news is that peer review is mostly a joke, and that a non-trivial amount of researchers are perfectly willing to hack/lie/manipulate their way to results that are apparently but not actually significant.
If that’s at all true, the last thing you want is to make this easier for them, and removing a control group would make it much easier to hide cheating that’s built into the study design in non-obvious ways.
One example that comes to mind is animal studies – you can make animals have a lot of really dire conditions through bad husbandry. So if you feed your sprague dawley rats just wrong enough to make sure they have above-average tumor stats, your control group becomes really important because it shows your methods caused cancer in both groups in a way that’s somewhat independent of whatever medication/toxin you were testing. This matters even if people aren’t cheating(because not everyone is great at animal husbandry).
There was a study a few years ago when it was very easy to get media coverage for “vaping will kill you” stuff so everybody and their mother was pumping out those studies as fast as they could. The study design was to put mice in tank connected to a smoking machine pumping out e-cigarette vapor and basically make them vape the mouse equivalent of a human taking a puff every waking second of the day. The mice were then exposed to various viruses and observed for outcomes. The problem besides the dosage were the control mice were just simply mice they had on hand who were left in their cages; they weren’t taken out of their cages and moved, and didn’t spend hours of every day in a relatively loud smoking machine. The results were bad for the non-control mice, but their design allowed a lot of ambiguity as to why, since the non-control mice had a lot of stress the control mice didn’t.
In that study, you had a situation where A. There was a need not only for a control group but for a better designed control and B. A badly designed control group that still, by virtue of existing, pointed out a potentially serious problem with the study design. This is despite us having a pretty good idea of the baseline uptake of various pathogens in mice.
The super short version of this is that there are too many variables in how studies might be done not to have controls even if people aren’t cheating, and people are cheating for a variety of reasons. If everyone got honest and better at study design/execution at once, I’d be all for the time-and-cost savings of eliminating the control, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
1) There’s _always_ exclusion criteria and contraindications and whatnot, i.e. effectively a population for whom you don’t know the population incidence rate.
2) The sites participating in the trial may have a slightly different composition of cases (e.g. more/less comorbidities) and will often be better than average at treating the condition (because it’s the expert on condition X who is approached about testing treatment XB or launches the study themselves). That’s not ‘unrepresentative’ in any meaningful sense of the term, but it can be a small bias.
3) Bad incentives for selection: Lambert already mentioned this, but consider the more subtle case: A patient is doing very well, despite their condition: Without a control group you’d definitely want to include them. With a control group, chances are they won’t have an event anyway, regardless of treatment/placebo arm, so their inclusion is a waste of ressources. Conversely, patient is doing poorly: Without control group, it’s easy to be less persuasive when asking them to participate, so they won’t bring down your beautiful treatment effect. With control group, this patient becomes valuable, because you can show your treatment lowers the risk of adverse events for these patients (or not) because you actually get to see the event in the limited time your trial runs.
4) The study itself, the extra attention, extra human contact, extra availability of medical staff may have a beneficial (or placebo) effect. E.g. having a 2nd person go over the co-medication may have beneficial effects as bad interactions are more easily caught.
4a) Bad incentives for design: If the study doesn’t have a control group, you design it so participants will have to have contact with medical staff every 2 weeks or less. Make it a shot instead of a pill if you have to. The frequent monitoring alone will have substantial effects.
5) Outcomes offers lots of chances for bias: How you classify stuff matters, the amount of detective work matters (e.g. patient moves to another state, doesn’t want to do phone follow-up, but does not retract participation: Do you track down the records at his local hospital or not? Do you pester the attending physician long enough to get them to take a second look at the patient’s file which you think contains an error?)
5a) Outcomes may be a measured performance like FEV1, which you need to test on cases and controls.
6) Statistical analysis: It’s easy to manipulate (aka ‘make a totally reasonable ruling for this study’) your data if you can do it to the treatment arm only.
To summarize: At all stages of the study there are a host of factors influencing the outcome of the study so that even the most scrupulous and dilligent independent researcher would have a hard time producing a result for the treatment arm that can be compared to some population statistics without problems. Add in the actual incentives, and the only way to approach realistic results is to blind everything and fix as many factors as possible.
A control group verifies that your sampling method and study design are not unduly affecting the results, by exposing the control group to every part of the process except the intervention being tested. (And to the extent you are affecting the results with e.g. the placebo effect, your control group helps calibrate this)
Basically, there’s a weakness with your metaphor; coins as I think you’re envisioning them are heavily standardized, and any variation is randomly distributed. Neither of those is true among human beings.
We can extend that metaphor to more closely match the reality of human testing:
* Allow all types of coins of any denomination from any country.
* Collect our test sample by advertising online and in various hospitals that we’re willing to pay people if they send us coins (of whatever denomination and origin and condition is most convenient for them.)
You can imagine that our test group will be a motley collection of coins biased toward whatever countries had people most likely to show up where we were advertising. Coin condition would be biased based on how much we were willing to pay and where we advertised (wealthier people are more likely to have coins fresh from a bank which are more likely to be freshly minted, and would probably be less likely to send coins in for money.) If we suspect that the performance of our grease will depend to some extent on coin design and condition (since these coins aren’t even all going to be fair normally), then we have a real problem trying to extrapolate any results from this sample of coins to the general population.
How do we solve this? One good answer is that we randomly shuffle our test sample (biased as it is) into a control and test arm. Then we can flip all the control coins 5 times, and find out that our sample comes up head 55% of the time normally. And we can grease and flip all our test coins 5 times and know that if we get 55% heads, our grease is doing nothing. If we get 50% (the presumed population average) then our grease is actively making flips WORSE.
The reason why we need a new control group for the new study follows easily from this; the new call-for-coins will inevitably be advertised in different places, at different times, and reach different demographics. Even if you TRY to advertise the same way, the population passing through a given hospital or on a given website will vary by time of day, day of week, and even what month or year we’re doing the study. That means that your grease 2.0 sample won’t be identically biased to your grease 1.0 sample, and using the grease 1.0 control arm’s 55% heads rate is no better than just using the population average 50%; maybe this collection of coins has a 45% heads rate, and a grease 2.0 heads rate of 55% would be a massive improvement.
This is also why it’s very very dangerous to combine results from multiple studies. Hidden in the background of every study is a pile of unspecifiable selection bias, which is different between every study, and the control group bias correction in each study is only valid for the sample in that particular study.
It’s true that the control arm doesn’t completely eliminate the potential for errors due to selection bias. Perhaps your grease only works on US currency, and this sample happened to have US currency over/under represented. Correcting for the direct effect of the selection bias won’t correct for this error at all. If you have a high enough N, you can spotcheck for this sort of thing by doing subgroup analyses; checking how well the grease worked on the US currency in the sample, the UK currency in the sample, etc. But that requires significantly more N to be statistically significant because you’re running a lot more checks (and some will simply come up positive randomly.)
In the end, no study is perfectly extrapolatable to the population. But well-designed studies are more extrapolatable than poorly-designed ones, and having a control arm from the same sample as your test arm is an important tool for accomplishing that.
tl;dr: Real life samples are NEVER representative, and always suffer from selection bias. A control arm lets us cancel out the direct effect of the selection bias on our endpoints. Indirect effects of the non-representative sample (like grease only working on a subset of currency) need to be corrected for by other techniques like subgroup analyses. In the end, all studies are flawed. Some studies are useful.
To use the coin-flip example, let’s say that your intern leaves while you’re developing special grease 2.0, and you get a new one. (What, did you expect us to think you flipped the coins yourself?) The new intern has a weird way of flipping coins, which means they land with the same side up about 60% of the time. He doesn’t realize this, and out of habit, he always puts the head up before he flips a coin. If you say “well, we don’t need a control this time”, then you come back with Special Grease 2.0 working to a very significant level even though it does nothing. If you run a control, you instead learn that it’s no different from doing nothing, and that you need someone else to do the flipping next time.
The problem is that “new intern with a weird way of flipping a coin” could be anything, and it’s far easier to just run a control group than to try to compensate for all possible confounders. For the heart attack example, as many others have pointed out, maybe the sample population has a different rate than the general population. You can’t know without a control group.
I live in Korea, which is apparently the best place in the world to be during this pandemic. Sometimes, it feels like I’m living in a totally different world than the commentators here, particularly the American ones (which is disorienting, as an American myself).
Out of curiosity, would anyone be interested in an effort post on what the experience of COVID19 has been like on the ground in the ROK? I haven’t seen much, and my city is the most lightly hit in the entire peninsula (apart from north of the DMZ, which of course has zero cases whatsoever), but we are doing the usual precautions that the rest of the country is doing.
Absolutely! Or even a non-effort post. Tell us what’s going on. I’ve heard that recently Korea is going back to closing the nightclubs because of some outbreaks. What most surprises me is that they let nightclubs open in the first place.
We seem to have enough SSC commenters in Europe that we get good descriptions of what is happening in most countries there, and even fascinating arguments between people from the same countries. But we have almost no commentary from Asia. I request as much as we can get. Similarly, from South America and Africa.
That’s correct. I’ll try to do a full write up later of Korea’s experience the last 3 months or so, but in a nutshell:
Korea* never went full lockdown. We didn’t need to. Our big outbreak in late February was caused by a single woman attending a crowded church service (Korea has one of the fastest growing Christian communities in the world, and there’s lots of weird culty Protestant sects. This was one such), which spread to over 500 people from that service and from there to nearly 5,000 in the country as a whole. This was confined mostly to Daegu, with another 5,000 coming from Seoul. The government advised voluntary social distancing and universal mask wearing, which were mostly complied with, while they carried out a massive program of testing and tracing for those affected. Most Koreans stayed home and ordered out, but that was business as usual for many restaurants (“takeout” is so common that the English word has become a Korean loanword, and delivery drivers on their mopeds are everywhere. I can get McDonalds’ or Krispy Kreme delivered to my front door if I like). Mask wearing was already common – air pollution is bad here, so ~1/4 of the population wore masks every day outside as it was. Hand-wash stations appeared everywhere, including on board city busses, lots of places would refuse you service if you didn’t show up in a mask (but you’d stick out like a sore thumb if you didn’t wear a mask outside anyway), and some places would take your temperature before allowing you inside, but on the whole, life continued as normal.
The government, as the world knows by now, did massive testing and tracing. I walked by at least 3 drive-through testing centers on the half-mile walk to work in my city, and I think in big cities like Seoul they were even more commonplace. Whenever a new case was identified, an emergency alert would go to every phone in Korea, letting you know the sex, age, and rough itinerary of the person (really invasive, too – the whole nation would know that you went to a love motel, for example). The emergency alert system went off probably 4 or 5 times a day on my phone through February and March. You’d be urged to go and get tested if you thought you may have been in contact with the reported case, or if you’d just been in the general area. Between the masks, the social distancing, and the aggressive tracking and quarantining by the government, after the initial Daegu spike our numbers flattened out and eventually declined to 0 new domestic cases for nearly a week at the start of May.
The last few days, though, things have blown up again (by Korean standards. Still a paradise compared to the US). A fellow in Busan had been out at clubs, and he tested positive. I’ve no idea where he got it from, but he was in contact with hundreds of people – Busan has a thriving nightlife, it’s Korea’s party, touristy city. Then there was an outbreak associated with the Itaewon area in Seoul, another touristy, night-life heavy place. Nightclubs had been open, because the government never mandated their closure, and with so few domestic cases we relaxed our social distancing standards a bit. I went to a couple bars in the last few months and I’d had my temperature taken before they let me in, and they were much less crowded than normal as most people stayed home, but otherwise life was getting back to normal. Now, though, who knows? I don’t know if the Itaewon cluster is related to the Busan outbreak or not, but the expat networks are all riled up over this.
Xenophobia is always present in Korean culture, but it’s been sharpened by the crisis. Lots of places are flat out refusing service to foreigners, and many of us are being pressured by our schools (90% of all foreigners are teachers, like myself) to swear we went nowhere near Itaewon recently. Some even report that they’ve been told to have no contact with Koreans for 3 months! (which is of course impossible and absurd, but that’s kind of par for the course for waygooks dealing with the Korean bureaucracy). I also heard that a foreign middle school teacher tested positive (possibly even in my city? Hard to get reliable information at the moment), which is why the government is now panicking about its population of resident foreigners. Schools were SUPPOSED to reopen next week, but now, who knows?
Life, which never got too out of sorts – no massive, nationwide lockdown necessary here – now seems to be headed back into turmoil. We had restarted KBO (with no fans – my dream is still to go to a Kia Tigers game before I leave the country D:), were talking about lifting social distancing measures and reopening schools, but now? Hard to say. I don’t think this new outbreak will be too bad – the government is launching back into the same program that stamped out the first cluster, and this one didn’t expose as many people. Within 2-3 weeks it should be again under control. I just worry it will continue to upset the general re-opening of the country – I’ve been teaching online the last few weeks, which is a pain in the butt when you have never taught online before, but especially so when your class is English conversation and you need students to interact with each other as live human beings!
But yeah, I’ll try to put together a detailed post about Korean life since early February.
*It’s never called South Korea here. The stance of the government and the people is that there is only one Korea, the rulership of which is presently in dispute. The North, when it’s referred to at all, is simply referred to as the North. It shows up in the news surprisingly little – I’d say less often than it does in the United States. Anyway, I’ve been here long enough that “South Korea” feels a little unnatural and stilted to me, but kindly assume I mean that whenever I say “Korea” or refer to the ROK. The endonym is 한국, “Hanguk,” or “Country of the Han.” But no one would know what I meant if I kept typing 한국.
EDIT: Not 20 minutes after posting this my school came by for me to sign an official document verifying I hadn’t set foot in Itaewon since April 24th. They’re taking this latest outbreak very seriously.
Thanks for that – really informative and interesting.
Thanks.
This reminds me of the time the Hellenes changed their endonym to “Romans.”
Isn’t this about the Han river rather than the Han ethnicity?
@keaswaran
Actually, no. The Han River uses the same hanja as “hanin” for Chinese person or, well, “hanja” for Chinese character. Hanguk/Hankook uses a different character.
From what I can determine, 한국 refers to the 삼한 (Samhan) or the Three Kingdoms of Korea. So it might even be more literally rendered “[Three] Kingdom Country.”
Huh, TIL. So what’s the etymology of the term Romanized “guk” or “kook” in 한국? I inferred that “waygooks” was “foreign people” with English pluralization, so it comes out “[Three] Kingdom Country People”?
@Le Maistre Chat
Guk or Kook is the Sino-Korean for “country, nation.” Wayguk (properly more like weiguk) is literally “foreign nation” (the first character meaning “outside, foreign”). “Foreigner” would actually be weigugin, with the last syllable meaning “person.” You could use hangugin to mean “Korean person,” but from what I’m recalling at the moment hanguk saram seems more common, with saram being the pure Korean word for person.
국, “guk” or “gook” is Korean for “nation, country.” Usually it means National – National parks are 국립, Korean food is 국밥 (lit. “national rice”), Korean language is 국어, etc. It’s very closely related with the Chinese guo – China’s endonym is zhongguo, in Korean it’s 중국, “jungguk” (z = j in Korean). America is meiguo in Chinese, 미국, “miguk” in Korean, etc.
Waygook is foreigner slang for what Koreans call us, 외국인, “weigukin,” meaning literally “foreign-country-person.” A Korean person is hangukin (or just gukin, following the discussion of 국 above). 사람, “saram,” is a more proper and polite term. Waygook has a slightly derogatory edge, almost like gringo in Hispanic countries (although the severity of gringo varies from country to country). It’s used in the expat community with a slight tongue-in-cheek sense.
Wouldn’t it be better to just close the nightclubs and eliminate the virus entirely?
They weren’t closed before now because there seemed no need. Remember, Korea was down to single-digit new cases a day, and all of those were travellers from abroad being picked up at the airport. Domestically, there was about a week straight of no new cases. And really, there’s no real way to justify closing down clubs alone without closing down the rest of the economy US-style, and that’s a cure likely worse than the disease in Korea’s particular case.
It is easy to close down clubs and not other workplaces, because clubs have a much greater risk of viral spreading per person than nearly all workplaces. Similarly, at the same time baseball games were being played without an audience.
“all of those were travellers from abroad being picked up at the airport” – That I didn’t know. Zero cases a day nationwide does justify opening up almost everything.
Considering that Busan and Itaewon are also places US military members go to drink (because they think there’s nothing else to do when stationed in Korea), it would not surprise me at all if US service members were involved in these outbreaks.
Thanks for that. By the way, if you don’t mind, what city are you in? I lived for a year in Andong, and another year in the Banpo part of Seoul.
I live in Gwangju, in the southwest.
Thank you for doing this. That was very interesting.
Thank you Chevalier. Very interesting, but a bit confusing in places.
So it sounds like they closed the schools but not the bars?! That sounds a little crazy to me. You say Korea hasn’t gone on lockdown but they did close schools and sport arenas? Is that the extent? How about theaters and churches? I have heard that Korean baseball is going. IS that the deal where the athletes play but no fans are allowed in, so just on TV? I know they are talking about this for US baseball; I think that makes sense.
So it sounds like Korea had had very few cases other than the one highly publicized one in that one church. Sounds much like Japan. Also rather confusing why there have been so few cases, especially right next to China, and it sounds like plenty of opportunity to spread it, such as bars (and restaurants I assume? although you did say mostly take-out). Do you have an idea why this is so, or is there general beliefs there as to why? On SSC it has been suggested fewer Asian cases because of ubiquitous masks or natural social distancing or even genetic immunity. Any of this make sense?
Interesting your comment on the word “Korea.” I said just Korea because it is shorter and I think it is almost always the case we are talking about the South unless specifically about North Korea.
Oh one more thing. You say you are American. Does that mean you are Caucasian, so easily recognizable as foreigner?
Most large social gatherings were shut down, and people were encouraged (but not mandated) to socially distance. So the school year, which in Korea runs from February through December, was delayed several times, before switching to online classes at the start of April. Gathering that many students in a small place was unconscionable. Similarly, KBO was shut down, as were schools, theaters, etc. Restaurants, bars, and other individual entertainments were left open, but attendance was way down, and various precautions were instituted – notably no non-masked entry, mandatory hand wash stations, and temperature checkups before entry.
KBO finally started just last week after the country had had so few domestic cases, but no fans are allowed – for now, they play in front of empty stadiums (good thing, too, since my hometown Kia Tigers were absolutely blasted by the Samsung Lions.*)
There were about 11,000 cases all told, most of them from that one superspreader in Daegu. I think Korea’s swift implementation of social distancing, with widespread compliance, plus ubiquitous mask wearing and nearly universal testing and tracing, is why the outbreak was mostly contained. Korea follows the same curve as everyone else until about 2 weeks after their lockdown was initiated, after which new cases quickly slowed to a trickle and even vanished entirely for a week or two. So I don’t feel genetic immunity is really an explanation. Just most cases were related either to the Daegu cluster, or to a Seoul cluster, and never spread beyond that.
One possible explanation – this is pure speculation on my part – is that nationwide the lockdown prevented the virus from spreading very far. Gwangju, my own city, locked down (remember this doesn’t meant the total shutdown of the US, just no large public gatherings, masks and handwashing, etc.) long before we had our first case, and we only ever had about 30. Plus, in Korea, inter-city travel isn’t as common, and is mostly done via public bus and the KTX train, both of which drop passengers off in a nice, centralized terminal where all incoming passengers are tested and those showing symptoms were isolated. My belief is that the combination of all these things dropped R below 0, hence the quickly tapering curve.
Most Koreans instantly fell in line with the government’s measures, and there is severe social disapproval for anyone who violates them. The idea of people protesting to re-open schools or not wear masks or whatever is almost unthinkable here. You’d be looked at like you were insane (and it’s not that Koreans are meekly compliant to the government, either – the week before the virus arrived in the country, I was in Seoul, where there was a massive rally opposed to President Moon Jae-In and in favor of “Donal Trump”. There’s a lively political opposition…but the administration has won almost universal approval for its handling of the coronavirus).
Yep. In fact, I’m just about the only waygook in my neighborhood – I see a few Russians around, and I was good friends with some Mormon missionaries who ran a temple a few blocks away, but they were recalled to the USA in early February, so now I’m mostly the only white person I see day to day. There’s between 200-300 foreigners in the city generally, though, I’d estimate. We all either know each other or have at least 1 friend in common.
*KBO teams mostly have corporate sponsorships – Lotte Giants, SK Wyverns, KT Wiz, Kia Tigers, etc. Geographic-based teams are difficult in a country where half the population (and 5/10 teams) are concentrated in Seoul.
When you look at all the details (closures, masks, distancing) it doesn’t sound much different from the stay-at-home implemented in the US. There are slight differences in what could stay open, but when you started off by saying Korea never went full lockdown, I was expecting it to sound more like Sweden (and even there they did take some measures).
Two things seem radically different between the US and Korea: the phone tracking and notification, and the lack of dissent and demonstrations (though you haven’t mentioned that side of the response in Korea, I’m going by my impression from the news). The border protocol is also much stricter (and logical) in Korea, but that isn’t something that affects day-to-day experience.
It might be that all these things piled together make a big difference. Now, I don’t actually know much about the lived experience in the US these days – just what gets posted on social media, but lots of things don’t get posted at all because “everyone knows.”
The main reason I say Korea didn’t “totally lockdown” is that restaurants and small public areas remained open and active throughout March and April. I rarely cook at home here (Korean apartments have very limited kitchens compared with Western style), and ate out pretty much every meal during the “lockdown” without any trouble. My belief is that that would not be possible in the US. Similarly, lots of people stayed home from work or were even furloughed – that never happened here. Everyone still left their apartment, still went to work, they just didn’t eat out quite so much and we didn’t go to church or school for a few weeks. Wore a mask and used hand sanitizer on the bus, etc.
What did Sweden do? I follow little of the news outside Korea and the US (and little enough of the US, at that – just what leaks through friends and family on social media).
I think all the little differences combined piled up. Compliance feels like it was higher in Korea. There were no protests, no dissension, everyone just uncomplainingly did what was necessary. Korean society IS definitely more community-oriented than the more individualist West – basically this just manifested as no one even questioning that all would do what was necessary to protect the society as a whole.
So you had fewer people going out. Then everyone who did go out wore masks, washed their hands, and kept their distance. If they thought they might have been exposed, everyone got tested, quickly and easily. Thus, incidental spread was much lower than in the US, and cases that did crop up were quickly found and isolated before they could spread far.
The testing and tracing feels like the biggest difference to me. Everyone who set foot in Itaewon for a three-week period has been urged to go and get tested, free of charge. There was never a testing shortage here (or a mask shortage, or a toilet paper shortage for that matter). Korea has always had a pretty good idea of who’s infected and who’s not, but i seems like the US STILL has no idea and isn’t really making much of an effort to find out.
Like, the social isolation was meant to buy time for testing and tracing to run down all the cases and isolate them properly. In Korea, that happened. In the US, the isolation was left to do all the work on its own, and when that didn’t happen…everyone just shrugged and gave up? I don’t know. I’m baffled by the US situation.
Thank you for all the information. I think the point about food is an especially good one (and the not losing your job thing plays into the willingness to spend money on takeout). The popular U.S. approach of minimizing grocery store trips but also not eating out much seems in some way riskier. People end up spending a lot of time in a closed space with many others during such trips. Certain types of takeout or even restaurants might be safer. While I’ve always been ashamed of my aversion to cooking, even this hasn’t sparked me to change. I’ve kept up my daily takeout and coffee runs, although definitely less than before and really am not eating enough. But I haven’t set foot in a grocery store since this started, even though I need some things. It just seems ominous to me. And, of course, many Americans don’t have easy access to a variety of takeout places.
What did Sweden do? I follow little of the news outside Korea and the US (and little enough of the US, at that – just what leaks through friends and family on social media).
Yeah, I think it was a combination of things, including ones that probably seem minor. People seem to be really downplaying the role of how much initial spread there was in each area. Particularly, the prevalence of international flights from certain regions may have played a big role, especially if you didn’t quarantine them like Korea did.
Curious as to the test and trace: while this seems reassuring and like helpful information for the authorities to have, it seems difficult for it to have a big impact. Would it make sense to urge every new arrival to go congregate at a testing center if they weren’t sure the cases were very rare? I’d read that the Korean approach was more about strict quarantine after tracking down anyone who could have been exposed, rather than discovering cases via widespread testing. (And widespread testing was also done to understand and monitor the prevalence, but it wouldn’t have been the major way of identifying the exposed and bringing the epidemic under control). But from your experience, it was used successfully? How many negative tests were required?
Yes!
I’m interested in learning more.
I’ve heard a few things from family/friend connections in Korea, but I’m a little surprised at the method of broadcast about new cases.
It gives me the impression that Korea is serious about public health in a way that would frighten the typical American.
Korea as a whole is sort of invasive in ways that take a lot of getting used to for the average American. Forget the mask protests (which I admit I didn’t see coming – mask wearing is so normal here it’d probably never occur to anyone to protest about it. It’d be like protesting “No shirt, no shoes, no service”), but imagine Americans reaction if every COVID patients’ demographics and recent travel history were blasted, Amber-Alert style, to the entire state.
At the airport, even if you have a Korean passport, you’re given a specialized phone to track you (and I heard ankle monitors? Not sure if that’s true). If you have a home, you need to stay there for two weeks (and they do check up), if you don’t, then you have to go a specialized quarantine dorm for 2 weeks. The phone requires you to check in at random times during the day, and its location is tracked at all times. Plus, sometimes officials themselves will randomly swing by for a mark I eyeball inspection, too.
They give you a care package with lots of food, toiletries, etc. (the Korean bureaucracy doesn’t seem actively hostile to those caught up in its pitiless net, which is a weird experience for someone whose only experience was with American civil servants) and are solicitous about your well-being, but breaking quarantine is a quick path to a hefty fine and deportation if you’re a foreigner.
I’ve been wondering why Korea is doing these very onerous 14-day quarantines for foreigners instead of just testing them. It seems like the baseline level of infection is low enough that there ought to be plenty of spare testing capacity. Any thoughts on that?
You can be infected but undetectable for a few days.
But surely not for 14 days?
Even a three-day quarantine followed by a test would be hugely less burdensome.
Might the answer be something like “Because they are a highly nationalistic ethnostate that doesn’t consider inconveniencing foreigners to be much of a problem at all?”
The quarantine is applied to returning citizens too.
And actually this site says that if you’re coming from the US/EU, you’re tested on arrival AND you have to quarantine. So I guess the answer is that they’re being really, really cautious.
This is true, but they also take the pandemic deadly seriously and are quarantining their own citizens, too (just at home, instead of at special isolation facilities. As a long-term resident, I can also undergo isolation at home if I were to leave the country and return).
Just as evidence backing up Matt’s characterization, yesterday one of the local expat restaurants posted this announcement:
I’ve seen similar announcements from other places that cater to expats, although none have complained about the differential treatment as explicitly as this one. And lots of NETs and other waygooks are facing heavy scrutiny from their bosses and neighbors following Itaewon, as well.
I’ve been thinking of starting my own business for a while. Do you think there would be any interest in a reusable coffin company?
Only if you named it Six Feet Redundant.
I appreciate that the anecdotal reaction of someone who is presumably not part of the target market may not be that useful to you, but that is definitely too spooky for me.
It’s been tried, initial demand was high but it never caught on.
Does anyone here have any experiences with “failing” meditation? I’ve been meditating consistently for the past five months, but I haven’t seen any changes in my capacity for attention or my mental state, or even gotten better at focusing on my breath during the sits themselves. I find that it doesn’t feel like I’m meditating at all since there’s no change in my patterns of thought, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep myself motivated at something that so strongly seems like a waste of time. It feels comparable to spending an hour every day trying to cast Fireball; maybe if I could make some flickering sparks I’d feel like I could get somewhere with sustained practice, but as it is I don’t even seem to have a baseline to be improving on. Is this common? How are you supposed to overcome this initial hurdle? I’m also not sure how long I can expect this sort of stage to last if it is common, since meditation teachers are particularly loathe to ever give a timescale on anything.
Disclaimer: I have less than two hours total in on meditation efforts and I don’t believe it offers substantial benefits placebos(other placebos, from my viewpoint) don’t. I tried to steelman the advice below, but take it with a huge grain of salt.
If the purported benefits/effects of meditation are real, I would say that you are either doing something wrong(and should find guidance) or uniquely unable to get the benefits in some way. I would imagine five months should have been long enough to see an effect of some kind if it were available to you with the methods being used were correct and the effect real. I’m not sure that I’d expect the positive effects of meditation to have even been discovered(in a scenario where they are real) if it took longer than five months to get even an inkling that something was maybe changing somehow. If you still find the claims of benefit probable and want to continue pursuing it, you should try to find alternate guidance/methods – whatever you are trying either doesn’t work or doesn’t work for you, and you need to try new stuff.
If the effects aren’t real, then you are in a situation where you either can’t be convinced they are without evidence or aren’t time-committed enough yet to convince yourself they are. In this scenario if you still found the claims of benefit credible your only option to get them would be to convince yourself the non-extant benefits were both real and occurring to you, basically just trying to take advantage of the placebo effect.
You might try different types of meditation. I’m assuming you’re doing mindfulness meditation, since it’s the best advertised, but it’s far from the only kind. There’s mantra meditation, japa meditation, and the one I’ll expect you might be most interested in: discursive meditation.
I’m not currently a practitioner of any form of meditation, but from what I’ve read, in discursive meditation you focus on a single idea or sentence. You let some lines of thoughts or associations arise naturally, and follow one of them as far as it will go. If you find yourself off-track, try to trace your steps backwards until you’re back on track; if you can’t do that, just start from wherever you last remember being.
You might benefit from guided meditation – I can recommend “Waking Up” and “10% Happier”.
If you’re the type of person who benefits from hearing people describe things verbally in specific ways, Sam Harris and Joseph Goldstein will be excellent meditation guides for you.
I’d recommend you try a different type of meditation. If you’ve been practicing on your own, you may want to join a group or use an audio guide. If you’re already using a guide, you could try a different one.
I wouldn’t expect meditation to have obvious effects in daily life, but it’s unusual that the meditation itself hasn’t changed at all. I guess there’s always the possibility that meditation is just Not For You at this point in time, but I’d be surprised if there isn’t any type of meditation you can benefit from at all.
No experience as such but coming at it from a Catholic/Christian viewpoint, in general when engaging in spiritual exercises/contemplation, there are two things:
(1) What do you expect from this? What do you think should be happening now you are regularly meditating/ What did you want, going in, to be the noticeable results? Are you so busy concentrating on “by now I should be experiencing X, Y, Z” that in fact you are not meditating correctly because you are distracted looking for results during the practice (taming the monkey mind is hard)?
(2) Are you doing this on your own? All beginners need a guide, spiritual director, mentor or other helper. Maybe a group, maybe one-on-one. Doing it by yourself is trying to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps, and you won’t realise what you’re doing wrong or when you’re doing. Even if it’s only the equivalent of whapping you on the back with a big stick when you start slouching, right practice will lead eventually to right results.
The third thing is that it takes as long as it takes. You can’t put it on a timescale, though I understand why Western/secular society, with its promise of “easy self-renewal in ten guaranteed steps!” pushes that way. Again, this ties in with question number 1 – what do you expect? what are you looking for? Serious change of heart is a work of years. If you’re looking for “by month three I expect to be able to levitate or my money back”, you are not going to get it.
Ignatian spirituality, for instance, is based on St Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, which are divided into four weeks. But the weeks are not “seven-day week”, they’re stages on the road. They take as long as they take. Similar with Salesian spirituality: live in the now and the process takes a lifetime.
That’s not even getting into the Carmelites and the Carthusians 🙂
This is a severaly underspecified thing to say. What exercise have you been doing and for how long per day, and how long is each sitting?
In general, some people have reported significant progress starting from scratch at home following The Mind Illuminated. I’m not sure how many of those who fail to get anywhere do so because they fail to build the habit (like myself) or because one or two hours of meditation per day is really not very much. I suspect both.
If you’re serious about finding out what meditation is really about and what it does, there’s really no way around a one-week or ten-day retreat. Afterwards it will be much easier to practice at home because you will know that it works (that is to say: has effects; no judgement intended as to whether those effects are useful or desirable).
One or two hours is definitely very much! I expect there are some monks who average around that! The more plausible failure mode is more like 10 minutes a day.
Most likely, yes. But they’re just people who like the chill life at the monastery, not people who are serious about meditation. There is a whole lot of not-meditating going on at Buddhist monasteries.
Five days of 8 hours each will yield something significant and possibly mind-blowing. I strongly suspect that for most people, 40 days of one hour each yield next to nothing.
I think almost all secular meditators do at most an hour per day, are you saying that hardly any of them get anything out of it?
I have a huge problem with racing thoughts, in particular of the meta-cognitive variety. I start to get some weird recursive feeling thought-loops that can induce panic attacks.
So I’ve have had many people suggest meditation. Not only have I not succeeded but, I’ve found that it actually makes my problem worse, because the whole thing is basically an exercise in focused meta-cognition and I feel like it’s just reinforcing negative patterns. I wish I could find a way around that, half the time my Cartesian theater is a neurotic hellscape.
(I’ve done 30 minutes- 1 hour a day for a couple months in a row, didn’t seem to see benefit and it was exhausting)
If you’ve only tried discursive meditation, mindfulness meditation or calmness meditation, maybe that’s not suitable for your current state, and you could do some guided meditations focusing on positive emotions and pleasant mental states.
I think people probably shouldn’t just try meditation from a book or even an audio guide. It can definitely make mental problems worse and lead to fear and weird issues with mental awareness. So I’d recommend always learning it from a teacher in person, maybe with a group.
Are you actually meditating for an hour each day, like in the fireball analogy? Perhaps, somewhat counter-intuitively, it’s too much too soon and you’d see more encouraging results if you started small with 10 or 15 minute sessions?
That is, as a matter of empirical fact, not how it works. There is no such thing as “too much too soon” with mediation. I suspect there may be diminishing returns somewhere in the region above 4 hours a day, but even then I have a hard time that the returns turn negative.
I wonder if there is any purely mental learning where “too much too soon” is a thing. It applies to exercise where too much can cause damage, but that doesn’t really generalise. It certainly doesn’t apply to meditation, language learning, or the playing of musical instruments.
I think you’re overconfident. Meditation isn’t a well understood thing where you can categorically assert what is and what isn’t an empirical fact and declare a one-size-fits-all approach.
For what it’s worth, my suggestion is based on the belief that trying too hard is a failure mode. Books about meditation will usually talk about the need to balance diligence with relaxation and openness. Warnings against “overefforting” are a pretty common theme in discussions on The Mind Illuminated subreddit. Seems like pushing for long meditation sessions right from the start could be a symptom of that.
I just found out today that the Cares act changes how donations to charitable organizations are handled through a financial planing forum I read. I then followed up and it appears this is legitimate, but I am not seeing any news organizations discuss this at the moment.
The caps for deductions for donations to charity for individuals and corporations has gone up. That’s kind of interesting and related to a recent post by Scott. Even more interesting (to me) is now there is a $300 above-the-line donation deduction for individuals who do not itemize. $300 isn’t a lot and it isn’t tied as percentage of income, but since most people do not itemize (usually because they don’t make enough money to give enough money away to reach the standard deduction) this seems to be a step towards democratizing charity.
I know with the flurry of COVID-19, stimulus payment, PPP, and mortgage forbearance news going around $300/person doesn’t seem that significant, but why isn’t this a sudden large rallying cry for everyone who can afford to taking a moment to give a little bit back to nonprofit research, healthcare, food banks, soup kitchens, free school resources, churches, and especially people like GiveDirectly?
And although many lower-income people who would be happy to chip in are not taxed very heavily already, above-the-line deductions adjust their AGI, which improves eligibility for programs like Medicaid, the ACA Premium Tax Credit, and other programs.
Why is no-one talking about this?
What would be the best way to get this information to >50% of people who could donate $300, but have never donated before, and this would be enough to tip them over the edge to just do it?
Are you saying that I, someone who doesn’t itemize deductions, will be able to add $300 to the standard deduction via donations? And could I have done that for tax year 2019? If so, consider that you have informed at least one person for whom this is relevant (though I guess it wouldn’t change my charitable donations).
Edit: guess I can partially answer my own questions by finding the relevant part of the act. It would not apply to 2019 taxes.
You can do it starting tax year 2020. This is brand new starting this year and they didn’t make it retroactive to 2019.
They also increased maximum itemized deduction for individuals to 100% AGI from 50% and companies from 10% taxable income to 25%. Food inventory donations also went from 15% to 25%.
And no, the $300 is not added to your standard deduction. It is removed from your AGI (which is better).
Thanks for the clarifications.
Charitable donations are overrated as a driver of tax deductions. The number one tax deduction for most people is mortgage interest. Number two is probably state tax. If you own a house that you haven’t paid off, you’re probably itemizing. If you own a house that you haven’t paid off in a high-tax state, you’re definitely itemizing.
(Before Trump, one or the other could do it if you were middle-income or above, but now it’s only a sure thing with both.)
What’s the chance that five years from now, the state of relations between the US and China will be routinely and non-metaphorically described as a cold war?
What does non-metaphorically mean here? Isn’t the phrase inherently a metaphor?
I think it is extremely likely that “cold war” will be a reasonable way to characterize US-China relations in the coming decades (85%) and quite likely that they will be characterized that way in five years even if reality is otherwise (and not very likely that the opposite error in characterization will be made). So 90%?
What I’m getting at with the “non-metaphorical” term is that the situation should be something more than mere rivalry. There should be real hostility, and at least the possibility of actual fighting.
I’ll take around 15%, as there’s just too much entanglement for both sides to reach the level of hostility that a real Cold War would entail.
Wasn’t everyone in 1912 Europe saying that?
But I see that leading to a hot war more than a cold one. One great power fighting the other’s proxies, at minimum.
And that’s something that seems like a bit of a gray area to me, especially in regards to Iran- loads of economic ties to China, but I can’t really see the US bombing them as a proxy fight.
Actually Chinese relationship with Saudi Arabia, Iran’s main rival in islamic world, is stronger than with Iran.
Iran is a Russian client not a Chinese one, but note that in the previous Cold War the two most notable proxy wars took place in/against the Chinese clients in Korea and Vietnam. If we think of China and Russia as having merely switched roles as regards who is the senior partner and who the junior, the analogy holds.
It also seems entirely plausible to me that we will see proxy wars over/in one or more resource-rich African countries in the coming decades. The DRC and CAR seem like particularly prime candidates.
Vietnam wasn’t a Chinese client. Their support all came from Russia, and they wound up fighting a war with China not long after they were finished with the United States.
Korea yes. I don’t think Vietnam was ever a Chinese client — and after the U.S. left, Vietnam fought a small war with China.
Even Korea didn’t have much Chinese involvement at first. As far as I’m aware, China didn’t become majorly involved until the US rolled up on their border and MacArthur started spouting off about nukes.
Norman Angell didn’t have nukes.
And in 1936 it was ludicrous to think of Japan fighting any sort of war with the United States because they were utterly dependent on the US for steel and oil. A: Things change and B: economic ties are an overrated prophylactic against even hot wars, never mind cold ones.
Japan is certainly an interesting counterexample. A lot of the belligerence was in search of more resources, and it doesn’t seem like that would hold for exports in the post-colonial era.
I think Japan was just a weird case full stop. It had this more than usually insane principal agent problem where the people at the top were pushed towards belligerence by the threat of assassination by fanatical militarist junior officers. As future history would demonstrate, they could quite easily have obtained the resources they needed through trade if they were willing to behave in a vaguely normal fashion regarding foreign policy. They weren’t.
There’s a good chance that a significant escalation happens that leads to it being considered a cold war, but I don’t think the current state of affairs would be considered such because there are partisan factors that require a cold war to have a high bar. It’s somewhat likely that China becomes further emboldened and makes large geopolitical moves that significantly threaten the Pax Americana within that time period. One feature that would make it a true cold war like the previous one is if China moves to militarily intervene in certain hotspots, and both countries end up fighting each other’s proxies. Arguably, this is already true for Russia Vs the USA in Syria and other spots in the Middle East.
I think a hotspot for China Vs USA proxy fights may actually be Africa given the softly softly neo-colonial strategy China is going for there.
How common is it to have doors that are difficult to break in the US?
One of the things I notice in movies, is how easy it seems to break into a door in the US, even into the houses of the mob or whatever. Is it a movie thing? Because if you’re going to be a criminal living in a country where it’s common to get swatted with a no-knock warrant, why not make it harder for law enforcement to do it without you hearing it?
In Russia, because of racketeering and other fun things, many houses have a security door. They are unbreachable, without destroying the door frame, also. It’s a solid steel door, that only opens outside (so you can’t push it inside). I’d say in most cases, it would be easier to destroy the wall or door frame than the solid steel door many Russian homes have.
Law enforcement can cut through steel; but you’d probably hear it, and they wouldn’t be able to do it as quickly, I think.
I’ve seen security doors like the ones you describe on commercial buildings and on the outside of apartment buildings that did not have onsite security. I don’t think I have ever seen such a thing on a privately owned house or apartment.
I’ve seen one once in the UK, while working as a maintenance technician for communal TV and door entry systems in blocks of flats (so one out of many thousands that I visited over a number of years, mostly in London, but also across Southern England and the Midlands). The owner of the flat, I was told by my colleague who had worked that area for more than twenty years, was a career criminal, with convictions for bank robbery among other things. Police raids were a relatively common reason for our callouts in that area: perhaps once a week we’d be called to a flat where a new tennant had moved in to discover that the intercom handset had been smashed when the police knocked down the door to arrest their predecessor.
I don’t know much about the US, but from what I do know, a lot of US houses are built from wood and gypsum boards, so installing a heavy door would be really pointless. Law enforcement can probably open your door with specialised tools either way, and other people can just go through a window.
I think it also depends a lot on the culture. In China, it’s common to have heavy doors with multiple locks and bars, and a cage-like structure over ground floor windows. In central Europe, front doors are generally not very sturdy and window cages almost unheard of (I only know one family that has them, and they’re Chinese immigrants). If movies are to be believed, many US homes only have very flimsy doors and windows.
I guess it’s either a “social trust” issue or US citizens who feel unsafe prefer to get a firearm and alarm system over heavy doors.
Bars on windows in the US are a sign you’re in a bad neighborhood, a place with a real crime problem. Most US single-family homes are trivial to break into if you’re willing to break a pane of glass.
I think in the US people who are worried about being robbed are more likely to have alarms and contracts with security companies. I remember walking through a neighborhood in the LA suburbs, and an entire street of houses were all sporting “armed response” signs on their lawns.
Only the interior wall surfaces are gypsum boards. The exterior wall surfaces are commonly 1/2 inch plywood or OSB (oriented strand board, a type of engineered wood that’s a close substitute for plywood for most uses), covered first with water-resistant sheeting and then with a facade layer. The facade material varies wildly: stucco, solid wood panels, bricks, aluminum siding, and vinyl siding are all in widespread usage.
The plywood alone, combined with the wooden frame of the house, is very sturdy. You’d need an axe to break through it without heavy machinery, and it wouldn’t be a fast process. Vinyl siding wouldn’t add much to the process, but bricks or stucco would need to be demolished with a sledgehammer, and aluminum siding or wood panels would need to be pried off one-by-one. Pretty much nobody breaks through walls unless the goal is to demolish the building, since the wall is much sturdier than doors or windows.
Windows are much sturdier than depicted in TV shows and movies. TV and movies use sugar glass (basically a thin, clear sheet of rock candy) for glass that’s meant to be broken, specifically because it breaks easily into shards that look like glass but aren’t dangerous. Actual window glass is a lot tougher, generally designed to be fairly resistant to accidental breakage. You wouldn’t want to try to punch or kick through it, since you’re likely to cut yourself rather badly in the process. Still, it’s fairly easy to break a window on purpose: the best way is probably to throw a brick through it or hit it with a crowbar, then use a hammer or crowbar to enlarge the hole. The main deterrent to breaking windows to get into a house is that it’s noisy and tends to attract unwanted attention.
> it would be easier to destroy the wall or door frame
I’d not be surprised if the average American wall/doorframe were weaker than a Russian one.
Outward facing doors expose the hinges, so you’ll have to install jamb pins.
Locks can be bumped or electrically picked so you need bolts that can only be accessed from the inside.
You need to prevent access from either the top or bottom of the door.
And all of the above needs to be able to survive being shot by multiple breaching rounds.
Once you’ve done all of this, the police will come in through your window.
I think it’s a matter of threat model. A racketeer will decide your house isn’t worth the effort and move on to the next one. The police have a signed warrant that specifies your house and they’ll be damned if they can’t get in. They’re an advanced persistent threat.
They could also knock on the f–king door and tell the residents “we have a warrant, let us in now or you’ll be in more trouble.” No-knock warrants make sense for a really tiny fraction of cases where there’s, say, a hostage situation or something. They apparently get used in small-time drug prosecutions all the time, which is nuts.
They could, but we’re talking about America here.
Also the question kind of presupposed that it’s about the sort of person who wouldn’t answer anyway.
In the drug cases they use no-knock warrants, nobody will open due to the police knocking because this statement is completely opposite of true. While they’re knocking on your door and making pathetic little threats that the law won’t back up, you should be flushing all the drugs they’re there to find. Once you’ve gotten rid of all the evidence, you’re going to be in way less trouble than you would have if you’d let them in on the first tap.
This isn’t a sufficient justification for no-knock warrants, because–assuming arguendo that drug dealing should be illegal–if somebody is so small-time that knocking and waiting for response for a minute before kicking in the door is enough time for them to get rid of all (or most) of the evidence, they’re probably too small-time to be an actual dealer. But at least understand that the time due to knocking absolutely gives the people in the house a lot of opportunity to make things way better for themselves.
Yes, but that at least serves to equalize the power of the state and the individual. If the state has the ability of going into your house without your permission, why is getting a couple of minutes to microwave your computer too much to ask?
It just seems like the state has way too much power to arbitrary go against somebody. Anything that lets you defend yourself against that is good.
I’m pretty sure you can flush hundreds of grams of heroin in one go. Maybe even up to a kilo?
Yeah, I’m pricing in the terrifying threat that a low-level drug dealer might manage to flush his drug supply before opening up, thereby causing us to, I dunno, I guess lose the war on drugs and have every high school in America have someone selling drugs in it? (Oh, wait….)
There are some circumstances where no-knock warrants and SWAT teams tossing flash-bangs and coming in loaded for bear makes sense, but situations where the main risk is that the drug dealer will manage to flush all his drugs in the couple minutes before he opens the door aren’t any of them.
You’d’ve thought the dealers would live in a house with multiple toilets and store all the drugs above one of the bowls, with some kind of trapdoor mechanism in case the rozzers came.
@Lambert: Toilets are silly cheap and don’t take too much plumber labor to install. Pipes are relatively expensive but seems like it’d be relatively cheap to have 6 normal-looking residential bathrooms/half baths in a two-storey house by making them all horizontally/vertically adjacent.
Generally, secure doors and windows on a residential property in the US are a sign of a high-crime area–so not rare overall, but rare enough to be very attention-getting in a “normal” neighborhood.
I have never lived in a house where I couldn’t have gotten in without any specialized tools in under 5 minutes.
Easier still to, you know, break any of the glass windows most American homes have. There are circumstances where the sorts of security measures you describe are appropriate, but you need a combination of steel doors, barred windows, brick or concrete walls, and probably a shotgun. Otherwise, in a high-trust society the commotion involved in breaking down a door will have the neighbors calling the police before criminals can finish their work, and in a low-trust society criminals will be able to go straight through the walls with a Sawzall or an axe while the neighbors keep their heads down.
It’s common enough in older urban areas. I have such a door on my house, and wrought iron bars on the ground floor windows too. They were there when we bought the house, and all the older houses have them, even though my neighborhood is not particularly high crime. None of the new houses popping up everywhere have them, so they’re not considered necessary anymore.
As an American who has spent time in Russia, I remember being shocked by the massive chunky metal doors (as well as the loud beeping button you have to press to open them). Even the pretty tough-looking doors you sometime see on apartment buildings in the US are much smaller, and often there’s some glass around them that I assume someone could break with a big enough rock and some dedication. The gigantic soviet block style buildings every Russian I know lives in seem to lack windows you can easily get to from the ground, too, though at the cost of being really depressing to look at.
Others have already pointed out that having high-security doors or windows is usually a sign of a high crime area. I just wanted to add that while it wouldn’t surprise me if doors were easier to break down in America than other parts of the world, it is not as easy as movies would lead you to believe. The average door isn’t just going to cave to one good kick or a rammed shoulder like in the movies.
In the US outside of dense city enters, residential front doors are relatively weak and unsophisticated. Doors are almost always wood, people think that a dead bolt is adequately strong, and as noted, windows are generally un-reinforced. Generally people close and lock their windows and doors when they leave for the day, and consider it adequate. As mentioned, bad neighborhoods will have metal screen doors (outer door, almost never a metal main door) and window bars, and medium-and-good neighborhoods with break-in problems will have weak doors and windows but add security systems, cameras, and signs for security-response companies (and some number of them have the corresponding service).
In my experience, none of these measures are to counter any law enforcement actions, and almost no one thinks of them that way. Maybe it’s because I don’t associate with criminals, but I think it’s just that in general, most people have more problems with criminals breaking in than with law enforcement breaking in. I suppose criminals think about these thing (though I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually didn’t given the lack of planning by most petty criminals), but I can’t speculate how or what.
Compared with Europe, the average US home is not as secure but about as safe. What I saw in France was that almost all front doors were reinforced (not necessarily metal) with fancy locks that were presumably hard to pick. This was also the case inside of apartment buildings that had controlled entry (locked door with code or intercom access), though the common entry door usually isn’t that secure (glass door, code never changed, etc). In any free-standing house, any outside window that was reachable from the ground would have a solid locking shutter that is closed whenever the residents aren’t home. Some of these windows also had metal rolling shutters, for example on a patio window and door.
In both systems, residents have about the same amount of expected safety and security. When I think about the reasons that the French need stronger doors, locks, and windows, I can come up with a few theories, but I’m not sure which is right or more influential. First, I think Europeans just have more valuables to protect. Perhaps with the wars and cost of banking, there is tendency to keep cash equivalents under the mattress, so to speak. Also, there are more antiques, jewelry, and baubles from great-grandma that can be worth serious money and are kept in homes. In the US, these are kept in safety deposit boxes, or most people don’t have that much of real value (other than electronics, and those you can easily replace). People in the US with real valuables will have an in-house safe, stronger doors and windows (but not metal), and probably a security system.
Second, I think there is more property crime in Europe. There are more organized gangs who rob banks and break into homes looking for those valuables. It’s not petty crimes of opportunity, but more organized. But it’s not “organized crime” like in the US which means the mob which shake down businesses and other rackets—as far as I know, they don’t target residences like it sounds they do in Russia. Gangs in the US are associated with inner city drug dealing, and their territories are the “bad neighborhoods” with the metal bars on windows. In the US suburbs, home break-ins are often drug addicts looking for cheap stuff to resell, which is why the suburban towns don’t like to see the homeless around (because they are often thought to be drug addicts). France also has roaming groups of Gypsies (or Rom, not sure what the appropriate demonym would be) with 100+ members camping out in the local sports fields of medium and large towns (they all have modern RV trailers now). I don’t know whether or not they are actually involved in burglary, but I’m sure they are suspected of it by stereotype.
I honestly don’t know how much guns have to do with it. It makes sense that when any house (but not every house) may be defended by the homeowner with a gun, there will be less burglary and thus less need to spend on reinforcing doors. But then some places where guns are not prevalent are also low crime and still don’t need heavy doors. In some places, people even leave houses open and unlocked when they are away, so it’s not a safety or gun issue.
There may be other factors I’m not aware of, for example insurance coverage. Depending on the prevalence, cost, or exclusions of coverage, people may need to install the doors and shutters either to be insured—or perhaps because they can’t get or afford insurance. Or maybe hey do a cost analysis and just buy the fancy doors and windows. Also, once it becomes a norm, you don’t want to be the only house in the area without a metal door.
PS: random topics like this are one reason I like these comments, for the small nuggets of cultural or experiential insight, moreso when I can even contribute.
The kind of property crime that occurred in Russia in the 90s (and apparently still occurs, but on a much smaller scale), was not the break in type.
So called “black realtors” (none of whom were of African race), together with organized crime, would get rid of an owner, and somehow privatize people’s homes for themselves. This was especially common with old pensioners who weren’t living or in contact with their families/heirs. So this kind of protection was put not only to protect property, but lives also. Not sure how well they worked, but that was what those people could do.
Movies/TV may be a little hazy about the details… Generally, if the door and frame are made of wood, then the weak point is where the door-latch inserts into the door-frame.
In the houses I’m familiar with, doorways have hinge-mounts on one side, and a catch-plate on the other side. The weak point is that the catch-plate is usually fastened to what the builder calls ‘trim wood’: parts of the door-frame that can be removed without altering the framing material that supports the wall. I know that this is true in the U.S., and I imagine that it is true for wooden door-frames in many parts of the world.
Apparently, both American and British police use battering rams. It’s a cylinder with a special mechanism that amplifies force when an officer swings the cylinder against the door.
On a wood door, a typical use is to strike the weak point near the latch and catch-plate. I gather that the catch-plate is easy to tear out of the wood using such a tool.
I read this blog so much I had a dream about Deiseach.
I don’t know what she looks like in real life, so she looked like her avatar. We were playing foosball (which she might know as table football). She refused to use all of her men because she was familiar with an Irish version with fewer men, which she insisted was obviously superior. She won handily.
I apologise deeply and sincerly for giving you nightmares! 🙂
That must have been my Evil Twin, since although I am familiar with table football, I cannot play it well because of lack of manual dexterity or any aptitude for games.
This is hilarious and a tiny bit concerning!
Just wait til you hear what the post-Jungian dream interpreters make of it..
http://web.archive.org/web/20200405061401/https://medium.com/@agaiziunas/covid-19-had-us-all-fooled-but-now-we-might-have-finally-found-its-secret-91182386efcb
Above is a webarchived post from a crackpot from a month ago which was removed from Medium (despite Medium alleging not to remove posts for factual inaccuracies), and this is NatGeo today:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/science/2020/05/they-do-not-struggle-to-breathe-but-coronavirus-starves-them-of-oxygen-cvd
Given all the new information, does it look more or less likely that the crackpot was right? Someone had posted his article here shortly after it came out, just looking to see if anyone who knew better than me would still discredit his post.
Substantially less likely, given that the Medium post uses the supposed efficacy of hydroxychloroquine as evidence for its position and that we can now be fairly confident that hydroxychloroquine is ineffective.
No, that medium article is still crazy.
NatGeo is suggesting that COVID19 damages lung tissue in an unusual way.
Nothing dumb about binding to haem groups.
The other replies already hit what I was going to say: the touting of hydroxychloroquine in the Medium article is a difference from the article published by NatGeo.
With that in mind, I’ve seen comments about silent hypoxia elsewhere. (Not in the Medium article, and before the publication of the National Geographic article.)
It’s one indicator of COVID-19 that might be much easier to test for than the actual virus, or the antibodies.
The silent hypoxia was actually mentioned here and there quite early – I remember doctors talking about patients who seemed in good condition despite remarkably low blood oxygen saturation and I think some of those pieces were from a couple of months ago though I can’t find them now. A month ago this was starting to inform treatment:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/intensive-care-doctors-question-overly-aggressive-use-ventilators/
How you know that it was removed by Medium?
It’s definitely removed. Do you think someone besides Medium removed it?
Amongst other things, a virus that infects mature red blood cells would be incredibly weird, as in no known virus does it. RBCs in humans don’t have nuclei (or any other internal structure), or the ability to synthesize DNA/RNA or proteins (though apparently we’re less sure about the proteins). Viruses infect cells in order to hijack cell’s ability to copy genetic material and synthesize proteins. Any interaction between coronavirus and red blood cells would have to be either accidental, or part of some multi-stage life cycle that eventually leads to the infection of a real cell.
Background: Wife’s family asks me as the finance guy to do a sort of feasibility study for this, I have no subject matter expertise but people I know who do advise this is no small time job, wondering what the best way to politely kill the idea would be by attaching some dollar signs and costs to it.
Question: What are the economics of setting up your own small crude oil storage operation in Cushing OK?
Details: Suppose you buy a quarter acre of farmland and plop a 10,000 barrel (420k gallon) bolt-on storage tank there. How long before the EPA and other regulatory bodies give you approval to open up shop, how much would upfront and running fees cost, and would one person showing up there every day count as security/sales/property management? How much would third-parties cost for such measures?
Obviously oil prices are spiking back up again lately and contango is disappearing, but economics of the storage aside, what are the pitfalls for operating it yourself?
Thanks all!
Here’s just some things off the top of my head – definitely not speaking professionally here.
Looking at just the federal regulations, a quick Google points me to aboveground tank construction requirements and inspection guidelines. You’ve got to follow all of those, and they’re generally written vaguely enough that you need an engineering contractor to turn it into something concrete.
You’ll have to work with both the EPA and the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality. All the regulations I found were EPA regulations, typically state regulations are tighter in some way. I haven’t looked into Oklahoma at all, can’t comment.
The inspection requirements typically say something about training, even for the daily walk-through. Either your relative will need to take some form of training, probably yearly and documented, or you’ll have to hire an engineering firm to perform your inspections. The dike likely counts as a confined space, which probably means multiple people required for inspection safety. The inspectors will need to have H2S and explosive atmosphere detectors – not expensive to buy but expensive to keep calibrated. Plus you’ll need a less frequent inspection that is definitely hired out.
I would be surprised if you could build this and get approved to run in less than a year, for less than a million upfront. A refinery or chemicals project is typically in the vicinity of 4 years – this is simpler but still big enough you probably have to go through all the hoops.
Some additional difficulties you may not have considered:
First of all, keep in mind you’re not going to be able to ‘plop it on farmland’. You’re going to have to build a foundation to support the weight. It will have to include a dike capable of containing 10000 barrels, so that tank rupture does not lead to 10000 barrels of oil leaving your property. That dike will have to have a drain system for rainwater – which needs to be sent to a facility capable of treating wastewater with oil in it, not a standard sewer connection and definitely not ‘the ground’, because you have to assume your tank leaks or there’s been a spill. I would guess you can pay one of the big guys to accept your water for treatment rather than build your own, but that’s a negotiation not a standard product.
On the foundation, you’re going to have to have the tank assembled, probably welded. 42 ft x 40 ft is not something you can drop off with a truck. A 40′ tank is heavy enough that you really ought to start with a site inspection, not all soils can support this kind of pressure, and then have your foundation designed by a civil engineer – maybe including pilings rather than just concrete on soil.
You might need to build a road, at least something gravel, for filling/emptying your tank. A large semi can handle 200-300 barrels, so plan on 30-40 deliveries each time you want to buy or sell your contents. You’re probably not big enough for a pipeline company to give you the time of day. I’m not sure what a hazmat trucker charges, but it’s probably significant.
You’ll need electricity, at least enough to run your safety equipment and probably enough to run a pump or two.
You’ll want to budget some form of security. $Hundreds of thousands of a commodity is a real temptation when it’s sitting someplace out in the country available to anyone who stops by. Also, this is a flammable/toxic hazard, you don’t want to be liable for your neighbor getting gassed when he tracks down his cow to your property. Crude seems like it ought to be pretty easy to launder in oil producing country. Mostly people with the knowledge how to turn crude into cash also have a lot to lose if they’re caught, but you still want some form of deterrence – probably a chain link fence with a lock and a camera would suffice.
I’m sure I’m overlooking a bunch here yet, but my lunch break is over
Used railroad tank cars pre-certified to carry oil seem to sell for $20K each; that’s probably how I’d go if I needed an oil storage facility up and running fast. Well, in Oklahoma that is; anywhere coastal I’d be pricing used tankers.
But that’s $20K for just over 700 barrels capacity, maybe $25/barrel if you shop around for the cheapest, largest tankers you can find (you won’t be moving them much). It would take a fairly large price swing for that to be profitable as a pure investment move. If you think you know when the price swing is going to occur, you could maybe lease the tankers, or just plan to sell them off when you’re done with them, but the usual caution applies.
If DragonMilk’s in laws were to go that route, for 10K barrels he’d need 15 cars – $300K, assuming your prices are correct at a time when the oil storage business looks profitable.
Plus about 200-300K for a rail spur. Now you’re not talking generic farmland, you’re talking somewhere along a rail line, with some site prep work still needed: another boost to cost. I suspect in the end it’s probably cheaper than a tank, and probably faster to set up, but not by as much as looking only at the rail cars would imply. Maybe 700K instead of 1000K. And keep in mind you’re proposing used cars vs. a new tank; if we’re just aiming to make one trade it doesn’t matter, but if they want to enter this business long term it might.
I have no idea what the DOT regs are for inspection/maintenance, it might be easier since rail cars are standardized, or it might be harder because it’s fifteen inspections instead of one. Certainly buying/selling the oil will be easier, as long as the rail company doesn’t negotiate your profit away. I’m sure pipeline operators and refineries will accept rail deliveries.
And on top, they’re still going to have to build some form of spill protection structure or else accept the risk that the EPA decides to make you into an example. I’m not sure what that looks like given the constraint that you had to build the rail spur on the flat, same elevation and close to a rail line which you don’t own, and you presumably want to be able to move the cars later. I’m having trouble picturing the oil-tight door that closes over the rails, although it’s not a new problem so someone may have invented it. Certainly there’s still going to be some paving and a dike, although it can be lower with that 10% volume requirement.
Are Panamax ships still trading at scrap value? After the expansion of the canal was completed (4 years ago?) you could get brand new old-format ships because of the very strong economies of scale in shipping. If any of those haven’t been chopped up yet you might be able to get one re-certified and floating.
Doesn’t help in Oklahoma, though, unless you’re renting railcars to haul it to a port. And I suspect whoever currently owns the ships has already thought about this.
Oklahoma tends to be very friendly towards the oil industry, given how much of our economy it makes up. But given our lovely state government, who knows.
After looking into it a bit, it looked like there were plenty of companies willing to build a 10k barrel bolt-on facility that meets all applicable regs in less than a month or so…but not sure what the regulatory bit is – like is it ask for forgiveness rather than permission (build everything first, inspect later?), or will you get massively fined for building before approval like some states?
Great points on security/property management. Anyone experts on site security/minimal viable project?
Again, I need to be respectful and show why it’s a very risky undertakinig and sticking to real estate may be the preferable bet with ~1MM..
Anyway, thanks for the very long and helpful lunch break reply, it’s a great supplement!
I can’t answer your questions about cost, but some food for thought: if there’s not somebody for whom storing oil in Cushing is their day job walking around with a checkbook looking for a site to quickly build something like this, that should give your relatives pause.
They may want to consider leasing their property for this. If somebody who has experience storing oil and has contacts with people who build tanks for a living isn’t willing to lease empty land, that will tell you that no matter what your analysis looking from the outside, this is a place where there’s not a free $20 bill on the ground. Either getting the tank built will be hard, or maybe the costs of trucking the oil there will eat any benefits, or any of a million other things that only people who do this for a living will know.
Any idea how the fight between the German Constitutional Court and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) will shake out?
For those who don’t know, the Constitutional Court ruled that the European Central Bank (ECB) was overstepping its mandate and was making decisions with far reaching political consequences, without considering proportionality. Essentially, the argument is that the ECB is acting like a paperclip maximizer, but then with their monetary goals, while completely ignoring the negative consequences with regard to “public debt, personal savings, pension and retirement schemes, real estate prices and the keeping afloat of economically unviable companies.” In other words, the court argues that it is not permissible to potentially sacrifice everything else to uphold the Euro (or at least, doing what the ECB thinks is necessary for that goal).
The Court also argued that German parliament has the sole constitutional right to budget, but that the monetary policy creates a liability that the German parliament never signed off on, or can limit. So the ECB is violating the German constitution. Furthermore, it argued that the European Court of Justice went beyond its legal authority in approving these decisions.
It ruled that in three months, the German central bank is no longer allowed to participate in several programs, like buying bonds.
This ruling seems extremely risky to the EU, because it strikes at several immense weaknesses:
– The heavy dependence of the EU on national institutions. If nation states refuse to play ball, it is very hard for the EU to get their way. We’ve seen a lot of cases of sabotage in the past, where states simply obstructed rules they didn’t like. However, this is a case where the German court forbids the German central bank from executing EU policy. If it is actually the case that the ECJ only has final jurisdiction over EU institutions, while the national courts have final jurisdiction over national institutions, EU power can be immensely curtailed if the nations so desire.
– Who decides what the limits are to EU authority, the ECJ or the national courts? What happens if they disagree? What happens if nations disagree with each other?
– The backdoor implementation of a transfer union (permanent transfers from the north to the south) through monetary policy without a legal basis or democratic legitimacy. The ECB was created as a supposedly politically neutral institution that would do minimal interventions to keep inflation near the target and such. In reality, the huge differences between EU states that threaten the Euro, means that upholding the Euro requires far-reaching interventions, with a large political component.
—
So what are the options for the future?:
1. Implement these programs without the Germans. One problem is that Germany is the EU’s biggest purse. Another is that this creates a dilemma for the other countries. Why would they run these risks if Germany doesn’t? We might see more countries opt out.
2. The European Commission has threatened to file a case with the ECJ. Presumably, this court will side with itself. However, if the German court doesn’t back down, the German central bank will have to decide between obeying the ECJ or their constitutional court. Doing the former could be interpreted as a coup by the German central bank, where the German central bank is no longer obeying the German constitution (you might even see the German military occupy the German central bank). Yet if the German central bank obeys their constitutional court, what recourse does the EU have?
3. Put the liabilities of these program on the EU, rather than the nation states, hoping that they can have their cake and eat it too (tell investors that the collateral for these programs is strong, yet tell the nation states that the liability is not theirs and they can just let the EU go bankrupt if shit hits the fan).
4. Somehow convince the German constitutional court to reverse it’s opinion (good luck with that).
5. End these programs that the German court deemed to violate the German constitution and/or (partially) implement them differently. For example, have German parliament explicitly agree to them, have the ECB write papers calculating the downsides of the policies and argue that they are reasonable, etc.
In my view, 5 would be the reasonable, democratic and sensible thing to do. However, they may not deem it feasible. For example, it would mean having parliamentarians explicitly vote for a transfer union, which is not that popular in certain countries. You can easily get into a situation where either some nation states refuse to go along with that or many people within the nation states rebel (or both).
Would 5 hand veto power not only to Germany but the other NCBs that hold large amounts of ECB capital (France, Italy)?
All countries, I would say. Getting it passed as a proper treaty would require an unanimous decision by all member states. The difficulty of getting that done is presumably why they haven’t done so in the first place.
Various people have been proposing having different rules for different countries (with a lead group integrating more), but no normally selfish country will want to underwrite non-participating countries. Due to Nazi guilt, Germany has been most willing to accept deals that work out relatively poorly for themselves, which is one of the things that makes the EU relatively cohesive in the first place (other countries get German money and Germany gets
called Nazis for not being even more generousto feel like they are making up for the past). However, they are the ones refusing here. France and Italy want a transfer union because they (directly or indirectly through lowered interest rates) want German (and Dutch) money and when Germany pulls out, they will be the ones on the hook. That’s not the plan.I thought what Germany mostly got was a wildly underpriced currency to boost its mercantilist economic model.
Yes, I get told that the Dutch also benefit that way. I still don’t see why.
An underpriced currency reduces real incomes and boosts employment. However, the main issue of Germany and The Netherlands is stagnating wages, while unemployment is low. Due to the lack of workers, we’ve seen a ton of migrants coming. So the Dutch pay with lower buying power and declining working conditions, while the (top-tier) Polish profit from having well-paying jobs.
Or if you tease it out more, the Dutch elite profits, while the common man doesn’t.
Nothing against the Polish, but I don’t see where the common Dutch or German person profits in this scenario.
1. I don’t think it works that way. If it did, constitutions would be pointless as parliaments could just evade it by continuously making almost the same violating legislation. As far as I can tell, the ruling is also not just: ‘you have to stop participating in this specific program’. Any similar program would be unconstitutional, where the only reason the current one is allowed for three months is to process this ruling. No such three month period would exist for a new program.
2. Sure, that seems possible given the current distribution of seats in German parliament. However, it seems extremely risky politically with the current pandemic recession. I already foresee a big AfD boost coming once people start to reflect on the current crisis. In general, it is safe to say that solidarity in Europe will not increase. This could become a focal point for anti-establishment anger or just general discontent with how things are going.
3. At most it is 3D chess where one faction in the Government elite is pulling the emergency brake. Personally I would favor the German being a bit more selfish (although I have an obvious interest here, with German interests being very similar to Dutch interests).
It seems to me that it constraints the German central bank. So the ECB can announce whatever program they want, but if it doesn’t meet the requirements of the German constitutional court, the German central bank can’t participate.
I can’t speak for Aapje but maybe a way to rephrase 1 is: if this gets “evaded” then it makes the German Constitutional Court pointless. We can probably argue back and forth about whether that is good and necessary or not but:
I do not think that the BVerfG will acquiesce if the EZB decides to say “meet the old program same as the new program.” There will be a new suit and if the BVerfG is pissed (which they would have every right to be) it won’t take them five years. They can and do grant injunctive relief to plaintiffs.
This seems to be an intrisic problem with the instiutional and even philosophical foundation of the Euro: the idea that you could have a politically neutral monetary policy. There is no such thing, it’s mistake theory and technocracy at its peak hubris to believe that such thing is possible.
The ECB is ostensibly modeled after the Federal Reserve, except that the Fed is a branch of the US Government, it’s ultimately under the legal oversight of the SCOTUS which can arbitrate any disputes that it might have with other branches of the government and politically it’s under the oversight of the President and the Senate, albeit in a roundabout way.
On the other hand, who has legal and political oversight over the ECB?
Yep, if Germany gets away with this then Netherlands is next, probably followed by Slovakia, Malta, Luxembourg, and so on. The Eurozone would be effectively split into the pigs and frogs zone and the beer and casinos zone, with different rules.
To be fair, the idea of a “two-speed Euro” has been proposed before, but I doubt you could keep a viable monetary union this way.
Sanctions for violation of the threaties. Eventually, escalable up to suspension from the European Union.
It sounds quite absurd to think that Germany could be suspended from the EU, but in theory the laws are on the books.
But the EU can’t tax, so what is the collateral for this liability?
Effectively amounts to giving any Eurozone country veto powers over the monetary policy. E.g. next time Italy wants moar monies and the ECB says no, the Italian Constitutional Court can just find the ECB policy unconstitutional and have it revised, only for the German Constitutional Court to find it unconstitutional again. Good luck sorting that out.
IMHO, unless the German governments chickens out (verboten, Germans don’t do that) then the Euro is pretty much toast.
The plan was for the ‘southern’ countries to become like Germany, but for cultural reasons this is impossible. So the rules that were set in place that require the south to balance the budgets were violated time and again (which is why northern countries are so unwilling to show unlimited ‘solidarity’ with the south as they refused solidarity with the north so many times).
It’s classic technocratic hubris: our choices/culture/way of life/etc are superior, so we will make rules requiring adherence and when people experience the fruits of those rules, they’ll see the error of their old ways.
The European Council and the European Parliament elect the head of the ECB, but the major decisions are made by a council of the heads of the national central banks, who each have one vote (where the southern countries outvote the northern ones).
Then there is the European Court of Justice who can decide if the ECB violates the treaties/statutes.
This doesn’t seem very feasible unless you split the Euro into a Neuro (North Euro) and Seuro (South Euro). Yet splitting up the currency would be a huge pain (but is it less of a pain than a long slide down to oblivion?).
I don’t see this as realistic. The European Council was not even capable of fining France for violating the budget rules. The entire point of the EU was to prevent Germany from dominating, by binding it to France. Yet having France dominate Germany like that? Surely Germany is never going to accept that.
In the EU, all countries are equal, but Germany and France are more equal than the others. So that’s effectively the same as dismantling the EU. The Europhiles will never ever, ever, ever do it.
Like I said, there is no collateral. That’s why I don’t see it as realistic.
This very plausibly leads to dissolution of the Euro, but then because the transfer union that is needed to keep it afloat won’t be set up. Again, I don’t see the culture changing in the north or the south, so neither a large transfer union nor policy convergence seems likely to happen.
I do see that as a somewhat likely option. Again, because of that Nazi guilt. Ironically, such a decision would probably give an enormous boost to the far-right.
What everyone here seems to be missing is that the BVerfG is a seperate entity with more cachet, power and institutional independance than SCOTUS or frankly any other constitutional court.
The national press hasn’t quite cottoned on, probably because it is very complicated to explain, but this is shaping up to be a semi-serious internal German crisis. The federal government is really in quite a bad place here. I don’t think they want this. The ESM and associated things have passed over the political horizon. Now it’s back. And while a lot of the current government can be considered quite friendly to Europe disregarding a direct court order from the BVerfG is pretty suicidal. Germans semi-ironically speak of constitutional patriotism and there really is quite a large amount of trust in the system. The BVerfG is widely seen as an apolitical and neutral arbiter of law. Turning this into a political shitflinging fight in domestic policy really cannot be in anyones interest.
on the other hand, letting the court repeal the euro is… national economic suicide?
Has the court never heard the dictum that you should not issue rulings that cannot be followed?
It’s in no way a repeal of the Euro. The court didn’t say that these policies are not allowed, but that it is not allowed to be implemented in this way.
One of the main value of constitutions is to define the political process and force people to follow that process.
And the job of the Courts is then to find a fig leaf behind which the government can do things in express violation of said Constitution while the whole time claiming to uphold the Constitution.
Not really, at least not totally.
I haven’t read the full verdict and I obviously was not in the chambers when this was deliberated. But I can guarantuee they did this neither blindy nor impulsively.
The judges I know are deeply thoughtful people. Sure, by their function they are constitutional law scholars and thus to an extent maybe a little dogmatic. But they all know about and consider themselves an important part of and prerequisite to a functioning modern representative democracy. They didn’t do this because they can or because of base politcal considerations ala EURO BAD. This isn’t supposed to dunk on some party or interest.
Of course, at a certain point constitutional law seems to become politics or at least skate perilously close to it.
As I understand the ruling, they are basically saying that the way the EU is currently set up and the way it is (not) integrated into the German constitution doesn’t work. We did try that whole shebang with the european constitution but that didn’t work out so we are here. The political will for an ever closer union isn’t actually fully there.
The criticism that is always leveled at the EU, and that the BVerfG is supporting here, is that they are always increasing their influence/power through the back door.
There is something to be said about the fact that if the populace really wants economic suicide, maybe you give them economic suicide. Or at least make the people who say we are avoiding economic suicide politially liable. There is absolutely no mechanism by which a European Citizen could actively voice his disapproval of the policies of the ECB. There have been a lot of think pieces (and I think they are right) that this frustration and feeling of helplessness are what lead people to reject the idea of the European Union wholesale and vote for anti-EU parties even though they might not like the rest of their policies (whole other can of worms).
The BVerfG has put their finger in a wound and this will undoubtedly cause some pain. But this wound has been there for years and was not healing at all. Their order to the Federal Government is absolutely followable. This should be a giant wake-up call to the states and the EU that something needs to change.
I started out being in favor of the EU, but I now see it as unsalvageable (or rather, I see the leadership of the EU as such).
The kindest thing I can say about the EU is that its problems are largely the same, but worse, as what is happening in the nations themselves: one group (well-educated globalists) capturing the entire tetras* politica (except for Hungary, where the other group is doing the same).
The result is that it is not merely policy that stops having democratic legitimacy, but the very rules of conduct are violated when they obstruct one side, while they are wielded as weapons against the other side.
So I think that it goes beyond mere helplessness and into the territory of oppression.
* The media makes for the fourth pillar.
The bank will obey its national court, obviously. EU is toothless and member states are routinely ignoring it with no consequence. For a state that is the main sponsor of the whole circus this is even easier.
To be honest I’m surprised the euro currency has survived so long, it’s been a mess since its inception.
6. Finance the programs (directly or indirectly) through printing euros, rather than from debt. The Germans wouldn’t like that either (arguably for good reasons), but they couldn’t do much about it.
Conor Friedersdorf doing his boring “be charitable to the other side, listen honestly, and take their ideas seriously” thing. That poor guy’s never going to learn how to write proper outrage-fueled clickbait.
Reading it now. Just an idle thought: is “Critics are dismayed.” a line that would ever be out of place? It’s the written equivalent of a filler word, I think.
Sure, sometimes the phrase is turned into ‘critics are delighted at the failure of …’
Critics pounce.
In more ‘this recession is inconceivably large’ news, the BLS estimates that its own headline number of 14.7% unemployment actually understates the UE rate by roughly 5 percentage points. For a bit of context the UE rate in November of 2007, the last month before the official start of the GFC recession was 4.7%, and the UE rate hit a peak of 10%, for an total increase of 5.3 percentage points. So this recession is so large that a single methodological issue in collecting data for it causes a skew nearly on par with the entire UE change for the previous recession which occurred over nearly 2 full years.
The recovery aspect is also terrifying. It took almost 4 years from that peak of 10% to regain half of the UE rate increase. At that rate, with 20% as a peak (which it won’t be) we would be looking at 11.75% UE first quarter of 2024. Even at double the rate of improvement we would be looking at at almost 12% UE in early 2022. To get UE down to high single digits by Q1 of 2021 you need the UE rate to improve ~8x as fast as it did following the 2009 peak.
While we’re on this topic: does someone have a view on why the stock market seems to just not care?
Whatever you do you can’t view the stock market in a vacuum. In all financial theory investments are about opportunity cost. Treasury rates are currently very low, so if you take the 2 year rate of ~0.18% right now as the risk free rate and the ~1.8*% historical dividend rate of the S&P 500 you would rather own the S&P 500 right now even if you thought that it would decrease by 3% over the next 2 years.
Beyond this the Federal Reserve has bought a few trillion dollars in assets in the past couple of months which doesn’t make price discovery a functioning aspect of markets.
*to high since a lot of companies are cutting their dividends right now, but even at 0.9% over the next two years you would take a small hit to own the S&P in raw
Do you think it’s going to crater at some point when the reality of 30 million unemployed people catches up to us? I’m still sitting on the money I was going to play around with waiting for good deals, and my index fund I cashed out and parked.
Yes, my macro view is the same and I think all the preliminary reopening numbers have supported it so far. I know full well that a bounce could be months long and represent large gains from the bottom which is why when I mentioned that I was putting short positions back on 2 weeks ago that they were small in size (the latest one I put on represented ~0.25% of our total portfolio at the maximum loss).
My main concern right now is trying to get ahead of any possible spike in inflation as that is the most likely thing that would hurt our bond position in the near term.
I’ll second baconbits’ comments. The current state of the economy is mindboggling, and I don’t think the Federal Reserve’s money printer can just keep going forever. That said, I do agree that it’s critical to recognize that a significant reason that stocks haven’t tanked as much as you’d expect is because the alternative assets also look terrible — e.g. who wants to buy bonds with an effective negative after-tax, after-inflation yield? That can’t be sustainable forever, surely?
That said, I have very little confidence in my ability to time the market, so I haven’t sold any of my stocks, and I’m continuing to buy more with new contributions (although I’ve dialed down the contribution rates a little to beef up my emergency fund / cash holdings, just because of uncertainty about maintaining employment). I figure if this ends up being the recession that kills the Boglehead style of investing, then investors are all basically screwed anyway.
Best guess, the markets rationally expect another bailout, roughly equivalent in size to the CARES Act. Which means roughly $4 trillion injected into the economy of ~$21 trillion. So, while the market may crash at some point, it won’t as long as the government is willing and able to throw massive stimulus at the problem.
Everyone expects that losses will be nationalized, at no cost to owners of companies? (AKA repeated bailout).
I have been rebuffed for it here before, but I am team “Money printer goes BRRRRR”
on this issue.
Now I’m sure the actual strategies enacted by the Fed are a little more sophisticated, then simply printing money, and buying up bonds, but on the bottom line this is pretty much what happens. Until now this seems to be enough to prevent an liquidity crissis on top of the epidemic, and it seems to wash a lot of money into the stock market.
But I’m not sure it will be enough if/when this takes a couple of months more.
I am also on this team, sent printing presses into overdrive! Fortunately it appears there is far less resistance to it than during previous recession (yeah, I know about German Constitutional Court, it still counts as “less resistance than last time”). Optimistically perhaps policymakers learned useful lessons after all.
I don’t think “rate of improvement of the UE rate” is a meaningful statistic. Markets don’t predict anything like what your chartism predicts and I’ll take markets over chartism any day.
What market prediction are you talking about?
10 year bond rates are 0.65%, 5 year forward inflation expectations are 1.5%, which is lower than every reading from Feb 2009 to Feb 2016.
Sounds like you are trying to be insulting without knowing what chartism is, or what a prediction is.
Bloody working mens’ clubs, sticking their provincial noses in a hideously broken constitutional system. Wasn’t the Reform Act of ’32 enough for them?
Also oil markets aren’t ‘predicting’ oil prices back to pre corona levels for 8 years. Pretty much only the stock market is signalling a decent outlook, and the stock market is notorious for crashing from highs while people were shaking their heads asking how it could maintain its level. In 2000 the S&P climbed back up to 1520 in August, only 7 points off its high from 3 months earlier before starting a downleg that ate 45% of its price, in 1930 the dow rallied 45% off its low in 5 months (current rally ~ 40% of its low) in the middle of the GD.
Isn’t the stock market really mostly predicting that amazing performance by Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft (and perhaps a few niche makers of webcams and athleisure clothing) will partially offset major losses everywhere else?
One reason why the UE rate was so sluggish to recover post-2008 is because the construction industry was so badly damaged. In this case, the main damage seems to be to the leisure & hospitality industry, which seems likely to recover somewhat faster, since the demand is less flexible than it is in the case of housing.
That being said, I also doubt that we’re going to have UE < 10% by Q1 2021. It'll probably take until the end of 2021 for things to start really recovering.
It took 4 years for leisure and hospitality to hit its pre recession peak again in terms of total employed persons, and 18 months after the end of the 2008 recession, so much faster than construction.
I am not optimistic on that front though. Leisure only took a small hit in 2008 relatively speaking, with only a ~4.5% decline in total employed persons peak to trough while construction was more like a 27% decline, but now now leisure has taken an almost 49% decline with over 8 million people already out of work in that sector. I wouldn’t expect the recovery of one of the lightest hit sectors in 2008 to be the baseline for the hardest hit sector in 2020.
I think it’s almost impossible to know. We’ve never run the “government intentionally shuts down X% of the economy for months” experiment before.
I think it comes down to how long the shutdowns last. Market looks like it predicts a relatively short shutdown. Which of course doesn’t mean that will happen.
Will consumer demand pop back up after being held back for months, or will everyone be too terrified to spend? One positive here is that household debt is in a much different place than in 2008.
Tl;dr
Shrug, who knows
There’s talk of ‘revenge buying’ lately – people splurging when lockdown is over. I can’t help wondering whether this has elements of hope / propaganda, but some of the links seem legit and are also talking about changes in buying patterns, more e-commerce etc.
I do picture people buying things like new computers etc. with the money they have saved. Whereas hospitality, travel etc. may be in the dumps for quite a while.
I believe there is a substantial chance that post-lockdown, we just have another flare-up 2-3 months later. COVID-19 may have a seasonal component, in which case we may see a big flare-up in the fall. Based on that, I’ll be making purchases with an eye to things that will serve my family well if there’s another lockdown or partial lockdown or if lockdowns are politically impossible but the hospitals are jammed with pneumonia cases and we want to stay the hell out of the stores.
I feel the same way. I’ve been able to get most of the things we’ve needed to cope with the lockdown by mail order, or sometimes by finding them in retail establishments that were deemed essential for other reasons.
But I’ll be grabbing anything we haven’t been able to get that way at the first opportunity, and maybe starting some medium term projects as well (e.g. a greater variety of vegetables in our garden than we’ve been able to source so far).
This is it. We have no idea what the next several years are going to look like. You cannot compare 2008 to this, the conditions are wildly different across every metric you care to mention except the headline macroeconomic ones.
Two positive factors:
1. This event isn’t the market suddenly discovering a whole market segment is wildly overpopulated. Plenty of construction jobs simply never came back/only returned a decade later (peak construction employment was in 2006 — only matched last year in 2019). There is no unsustainable labor market here, this is the labor market being shut down intentionally, ready to be re-opened at government command.
2. The Fed was overly cautious in 2008 and 2009. It took several years of low growth and low employment growth for them to pursue QE at scale. The Fed is already running full bore right now. The dams have been opened on this one and were opened before the lockdowns really spread everywhere. Monetary policy is going to be extremely accommodating during this recovery.
In reality we cannot know what will happen until it does. But I think it’s safe to say that >10% unemployment going into 2022 is the VERY pessimistic case. <10% unemployment going into 2021 is probably the comparably optimistic case, but <10% unemployment sometime during 2021 and <5% unemployment going into 2022 isn't out of the question.
Of course it is. The leisure industry has dropped ~ 8 million jobs in 6 months.
Do you not understand that this is an unsustainable labor market? The government shutting everything down for months was unprecedented and now is not only a reality in action but also a higher probability of reoccurring in the future. The only way this position makes sense is if you think lockdowns are going to be lifted to 100% re-employment plus the government never threatening another lockdown ever again. Anything short of that and you have clear excess capacity in the leisure industry (pre covid) that will take years to fill.
This is just another myth by people who were disproven in real time. The Fed started loosening their policy in 2007, and they combined that with fiscal policy with the first stimulus bill being signed in Feb 2008. The FFR was cut from 5.25 to 2.00 in less than a year while fiscal authorities were adding spending (eliminating the tired monetarist response that the CB would neutralize any spending increases with tighter policy).
Ah yes, this old canard. QE1 was 600 billion dollars and was launched in November 2008 on the back of a 1.75 point cut to the FFR between September and December. The Fed had expanded its balance sheet by ~$1 trillion by March 2009, and it continued to expand by another ~$400 billion through June 2010. Meanwhile the ARRA was singed in Feb 2009 with fiscal spending in 2009 being ~450 billion higher than in 2008 on top of ~300 billion more in 08 vs 07, for a net of ~ 1 trillion in additional spending over the 2007 baseline by the end of 2009.
So from the end of 2007 to the end of 2009 we have a 4 percentage point cut in interest rates, $1 trillion in additional federal spending and over $1 trillion in balance sheet expansion by the Fed.
Oh no, you have it backwards. Monetary policy is extremely accommodating right now before the recovery is allowed to start, and policy becomes less impactful over time. Every future action will be relatively smaller due to the massive actions already taken.
Figures from a past recession aren’t very relevant, because this isn’t the same phenomenon. A better analogy would be WWII. If you count the soldiers as people who are not allowed to work (because they are fighting instead), just as someone shut in his house today is not allowed to work, then the unemployment rate was high. But it didn’t stay high when the war was over.
Suppose the whole lockdown had only been for a week, after which we had discovered a cure. For that week the unemployment figure would have been very high. Do you think it would still have been high a month later?
OTOH, the War was a very loud fiscal stimulus programme that was economically ruinous for two of the winning empires.
The official UE rate rose from 1.2% at the end of 1944 to 6.6% at the end of 1949. It was at 9.9% in 1941 when the US officially entered the war, so back of the envelope the equivalent of 50% of those who were ‘unemployed’ as soldiers were still unemployed 4 years after the war ended, and the peak UE rate for 1949 was 6.8% (ignoring a peak of 7.9% in October 1949 which looks like it is an aberration) making it more like 53% over 4 years. So ignoring a bunch of things we shouldn’t ignore (LFPR) to make it really simple- the post WW2 demobilization took roughly 4 years to hit peak UE after the end of WW2 and another 2 years after that for the UE rate to drop below 4% and (eyeballing) 3 years to hit the ‘natural’ rate of UE.
If we are going to use WW2 as our baseline without making any adjustments for the fact that the UE rate now is 2x the UE rate entering WW2 we could easily be looking at a 6-7 year adjustment period from the start of reopening to the point where we are back to ‘full’ employment.
The soldiers who took time off from their jobs to go fight World War II, did benefit from having a bunch of people who weren’t normally allowed/expected to work keeping those jobs running for them in the meantime. That’s got to have minimized the economic disruption quite a bit, in a manner with no current parallel.
That doesn’t sound right, a large part of the US industrial capacity was building things like bombs, tanks and fighter aircraft and that all stopped at the same time as the soldiers came back. The jobs that existed during war time disappeared at the same time as all that labor became available.
They were building bombs, tanks, and fighter aircraft in factories that had been building cars, locomotives, sewing machines, etc, etc, and went right back to building their civilian products when the war was over. Swapping out the dies in a stamping mill, doesn’t make the jobs disappear.
Possibly there were some jobs that did disappear, but I don’t think they represented a significant part of the economy. Certainly nobody was shutting down all the restaurants and theaters for the duration.
The company running the factory lost 100% of its purchase orders, and had to re-tool the thing because it was producing something for which demand basically went to zero. There’s a reason Keynesian economists were really worried about it.
So there’s WWII where factories went Cars -> Tanks -> Cars and that went reasonably well, while restaurants going Dine-in -> Nothing -> Dine-in is expected to be painful? There’s literally zero retooling needed this time, and the employees were only out of the labor force for 4 months instead of 4 years, so probably no retraining needed either. I don’t think we’re looking at much infrastructure decay either, not on this short of a time scale?
Unless your position is that once a role ceases to exist, it is much harder to bring back into existence? Highly seasonal industries seem like a counterpoint to this idea (and restaurants have both high turnover and failure rates, so their hiring processes should be relatively streamlined).
For the same reason that Keynesians thought that the UE rate would top out between 7 and 8% during the GFC- Kyenesians are generally wrong when it comes to predictions.
There is a massive difference between a durable good like a car and a consumption good like a meal in a restaurant. Almost no new cars were built during WW2 and so there were 4 years of back orders to fill, however if my family typically goes out to eat once a week, but hasn’t gone out for 3 months due to lockdown I am not likely to take them out to dinner every night for 14 nights to make up for those lost meals, nor am I likely to take them out twice a week for 3 months. Likewise a monthly haircut only needs one haircut to compensate for the 3 missed haircuts, nor am I going to go on two cruises or make two trips to my parents house to make up for lost travel.
Most of the immediate boom after WW2 was in durable goods production- housing, automobiles, infrastructure etc. Currently the opposite exists- there is more housing than there is demand for, there are rental car fleets sitting idle and threatening to swamp the used car market should their companies go under, and animals being slaughtered due to supply chain problems.
This isn’t WW2 where industry was being used to the tilt, with parts wearing out and few replacements and basic (for an industrial economy) wants going unfulfilled. If you were a trucking company getting paid to ship goods across the US during WW2 you were probably being used at above capacity and struggling to find things like replacement tires on the market so the first thing you did at the end of the war would be to put in a massive order of tires to replace the ones you have been driving thousands of miles on and hiring mechanics to repair all jury rigged trucks and probably ordered new fleets of trucks.
And then there was the baby boom, a massive shift in population demographics which caused an increase in highly specific demand that needed to be filled which helped sustain the post war surge in demand.
I think that there is good reason to think that the economy will recover much faster from this than other recesions. On the other hand stock market prices care about nominal not real future earnings. If the fed adopts the policy “Money printer goes BRRRRR” nominal future earnings will not be that reduced by covid.
I don’t think that’s correct. The stock market price is an estimate of the present value of future earnings. If there is a large inflation, the interest rates that those earnings are discounted back to the present at will rise accordingly. So the real value of the future earnings, not their nominal value, is what matters.
I’m not convinced that interest rates would necessarily rise to match the inflation. If there’s no safe store of value, people might have to take real losses no matter the investment.
Occasionally, I fiddle with screenplays. I like to think about historical people, and roles, as if they were set in a different anachronistic mode or genre. This has been done a few times like in “A Knight’s Tale” or “The Little Hours.” I think, even if it impacts historical accuracy negatively, it’s fun and helpful because it helps you cut through a lot of the stereotypical images that have been built up around figures or time period.
So for example, someday I’d like to do a pirate movie which has the madcap frying-pan-and-fire dynamics of crime movies like Snatch or Goodfellas (in vernacular obviously)…simply because the pirate mythology has been so tinged with high adventure and treasure island and the like that I think we miss how much their actual dynamics worked like uh…sorta combination heist movie, rise-through-the-ranks crime drama, and mercenary operation. There was structure there, and ambition, and coordination, but you could definitely get something hacked off if you looked at a guy the wrong way.
What other role contrasts are fun to think about? Were Babylonian priests more like modern lawyers, doctors, politicians, or academics? Were Medieval witches more like modern psychics or drug dealers? Were knights like marines or pro wrestlers? Were the great explorers more like astronauts or long-haul truckers?
I want a Peloponnesian War series on HBO in the style of house of cards, with Alcibiades as the lead character played with a captain jack level of frenetic decision making.
Presumably Alcibiades is picking up older men like Socrates, rather than sharing Kevin Spacey’s tastes.
Alcibiades was rich enough that he had a trireme. Being Alcibiades, he modified it to have a larger, more comfortable bed in the back.
I want the series to open with him…um…entertaining a gentleman caller on his trireme. When he’s done entertaining, he walks up out of the port down the long walls, treating us to glorious shots lovingly re-created classical athens and explaining the basics of Athenian politics and geo-politics. He gets to the Pnyx just in time for the gentleman caller to step forward to nominate Alcibiades for a generalship, and he grins at the camera then walks up to make a speech. End scene.
I think that will set the tone for the whole series.
I’d watch it.
cassander has been suggesting this one for a while, see e.g. here. Read starting from here, too.
@nick
Well, what do you expect? I don’t shill my bad ideas.
I’d fund that Kickstarter.
Wait, a story about pirates who go out and steal things? That’s crazy talk!
This doesn’t work well for a variety of good story-telling reasons, but I just want an exploration/colonization sci-fi where things don’t go horribly wrong. Marginally wrong is ok, challenges, set backs, and conflicts, but existing stories are all crash landings/malevolent super aliens/run away ai. I just want low-anxiety little house on the mare acidalium.
I think you have a very good story along these lines. You would need some actual struggle of some kind, probably a mix of man-vs-nature and man-vs-man, but it wouldn’t need to be an “oh, shit, we’re all doomed/mankind is doomed/aliens are killing us all off” sort of storyline.
The Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy?
Hadn’t heard of that, i’ll check it out. Thanks!
In fairness, some things do go pretty wrong.
I mean…they do, in interesting ways in the first one. But after that it’s just really boring terraforming with only one or two interesting conflicts I remember. I found them boring, but that seems like what z^4ort wants.
Wait, am I the only one who found the middle bit of the Martian the best?
My other ideal would be a more exploration oriented story, where the characters encountered strange new worlds, explored them, but then nothing tried to kill them. Like stargate, before the bad aliens showed up. Or event horizon before the bad aliens showed up. Aliens minus aliens would be pretty boring, but prometheus would be interesting.
To be fair, the environment on Mars will be trying pretty hard to kill the colonists through the entire story. Early on, they won’t be as good at outwitting it; later, they’ll be better at avoiding short-term doom but longer-term/slower-acting stuff can creep up on them.
I remember Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky being a rather charming example of this.
Someone posted a few weeks ago about the sci-fi 4X game “Aurora”,
frankly, while the game is mostly a combat simulator, my own model-trains-and-prosocial-attitude approach to the whole setup tended to produce stories that were more like this: Surveyors racing to distant planets largely to satisfy personal ego-driven rivalries, scientists having anxiety attacks when they suddenly realize they could potentially be the first person to represent humanity to some bizarre alien race, crew members unexpectedly hooking up after their engine blows out and they’re left to drift for six months without more company…
…with a little imagination that game can be so involved that I always completed my story arcs before the aliens showed up.
Little House on the moon crater
Heinlein’s _Tunnel in the Sky_ was something like that – youths abandoned accidentally on a planet where they were only supposed to survive for a couple of weeks. They had troubles but they managed okay.
Check out Semiosis
Rendezvous with Rama is a good one. We find a massive alien spacecraft flying through our solar system and send a team to check it out. They land and start exploring the inside, finding an alien ecosystem but no sign of a crew. Various one-off incidents endanger various crew members, but there isn’t a twist where suddenly hostile aliens show up or anything.
+1. I especially liked #2 in the series.
Charles Babbage as a tech bro?
Ada Lovelace demands more women in tech: there should be at least two.
That’s a good one.
As a related point, I’m just floored that no one has made a Beautiful-Mind/Theory-of-Everything style inquiry into the personal life of Erwin Schrodinger. The timeline is exactly right that you could plausibly portray him as having a major breakthrough *during* an argument with his wife about an extramarital affair.
I think we often forget that knights were not landholders who sometimes soldiered but soldiers who were compensated with land. The 19th century created this romantic image that tinges everything today. A modern military movie about a warrior aristocrat hoping to earn his knighthood could hit a lot of war movie beats without either being overly romantic or cynically subverting previous romanticism.
Despite their place in the popular culture, we’re still largely ensnared by Christian propaganda about Roman sports. The coliseum could be cruel. But being a charioteer or gladiator was more like being an F1 racer or MMA fighter: even losers generally (though not always) survived. Imagine a sports movie about taking down a gladiator opponent or beating a team. Even better, there was often interesting politics involved in the various teams. Seems like a good come from behind sports underdog story.
I’ve long wanted to see a domestic drama about building a castle. The main character could be a professional architect (as would be the norm). He would have to put up with budgetary constraints, unruly workers, princesses and kings being bratty and wanting a perfect new home, and all while trying to make a grand stride in defensive structures and the beauty of architecture. You could toss in some politics but I’d stick to making it primarily an interpersonal story.
There’s a lot of romantic comedies or dramedies from across time. Some of them would still hold up today: like the Chinese book where a grand, wealthy patriarch is in constant pain because he’s surrounded himself with young nubile wives and is addicted to boner pills. A lot of them translate pretty well, actually.
There’s a lot of early modern literature (from Japan to Spain) about naive countryboys making it in the big city. Indeed, they tended to be more cynical about the move than we are today. Someone trying to make it big in any number of professions (including theater, if you want to be obvious) could fit very well.
If you’re willing to wade into unfamiliar territory, religious orders often had very practical secret knowledge and were not shy about stealing it from each other. There’s a legend that a lot of early Chinese fortification practices were stolen from a pacifist Chinese religious order that got really good at building walls to avoid fighting. (The Japanese claim they eventually left China for Japan.) There’s the famous theft of silk worms from China (which was done by monks). Seems like a good heist movie, made all the more interesting because of the religious dynamics at play.
And, of course, the classic heroes journey is highly encouraged by aristocratic hereditary societies. Imagine the classic hero’s journey told about an actual heir to the throne. He’s some baron and then he gets word some distant relative died and he’s now the King of wherever. But there’s an evil usurper. Throw in some natural conflict about liking his home and having never been there and you’ve got an interesting conflict.
I mean, once you’re well into the Christian era, there was that time color-coded chariot racing fans briefly overthrew the state and the hereditary monarch was running to a ship when his base-born former-actress Empress blocked his path.
wow I’ve never thought about this before, basically a soccer riot that overthrew the government.
“Actress” being a euphemism for a much older and baser profession. So, yeah, the entertainers were running the show from all sides there.
@John Schilling
Well, maybe. In my experience, historians tend to see, rightly, that Procopius is a being a misogynistic jerk (however plausible his political ends) in that part of the Secret History, and to assume, perhaps charitably, that the “older and baser profession” was only a secondary part of a job-description that can fairly be summed up as “actress, in the
goodreally iffy old-fashioned sense.”What Procopius describes sounds well within the range of what actresses did in the ancient world. I mean, acting out a scene from mythology with something that looks, at least from across the hippodrome, like a striptease? Checks all the boxes. The after-dinner scene with the forty dudes is, for a girl in the public eye, only too plausible. What I just wonder is if she got her revenge on any of them once she became empress.
I think it should go without saying that a primary source by a court historian wherein he claims that his patron was a demon who flew his detachable head around the palace requires extra scrutiny.
AFAIK in ancient world being actress or prostitute was both considered as being equally low status jobs.
@matkoniecz
Sure. My point is that “euphemism” is too reductionist. It’s not so much that “actress” really meant “whore,” but that actress entailed whore, in both law and actual practice of the profession. That’s what Procopius is trading on, whether or not his specifics are any more true than the part about Justinian’s headless horseman stunt. To a modern reader, if anything he says about Theodora is true, hers was a pitiable childhood that saw her being molested both publically and in the quasi-private of rich men’s dinner parties from a very young age. That she managed to make of herself the heroic fighter who stands her ground during the Nika riot in the Wars (yes, Procopius again) says a lot for her.
Would be a great TV show. (Her later life, I mean, not the geese and the creepy dinner parties.) We even have a fictionalized fantasy version for the base: Guy Gavriel Kaye’s Lord of Emperors is pretty much “Game of Thrones as it should have been.”
@Le Maistre Chat
What makes it even better is that he did a panegyric of Justinian’s great works, too, as well as a serious, sober, Thucydidean style History with a capital H. The Convent of Repentance that Theodora made for the women who had been practicing her, uh, line of work and wanted to get out of it shows up in both the Buildings, as practically the greatest display of official charity ever, and in the Secret History. You can guess which one features ex-prostitutes hurling themselves to their deaths.
Oh, you’re talking about the lady who allegedly did the stuff with the geese?
Independent of any grudge Procopius may have had with Theodora specifically, numerous sources attest to the general overlap between “actress” and “prostitute” across the Hellenic world.
Harvey Weinstein may suggest that things perhaps haven’t changed quite as much as we’d like to believe…
@John Schilling
If you’re replying to me, I think I did say that. I only think–to split hairs, as one must–that “euphemism” is too simple. Is it a euphemism to call a late 19th-century stage-star an actress? Their reputations were often poor. How about a burlesque dancer who, uh, moonlights? That she is also a prostitute doesn’t mean she isn’t actually genuinely good at an art that also trades (as a lot of acting still does) in sex appeal.
EDIT: To my last parenthesis, what Matt M said. The difference is that Theodora doesn’t seem to have had much choice about entering her profession.
It’s pretty clear reading Casanova that actresses and dancers in the 18th c. were expected to be sexually loose. But the intended career path was to kept mistress, not prostitute.
@DavidFriedman: Unless Procopius was lying in the Secret History, actresses in Constantinople weren’t that lucky, getting molested at dinner parties rather than dripping out sexual favors serial-monogamously in hopes of following the tenure track to mistress.
It really does speak to Theodora’s character for her to grow from sexually abused minor to practically a warrior when Not!soccer hooligans overthrew her government.
Procopius doesn’t accuse her of being especially disreputable for an actress, just of being an actress. Accusing her of being a disreputable actress would have been redundant in Roman terms: being an actress carried a lifelong stigma legally equivalent to a prostitute.
Moreover, a lot of the rescuing of Theodora relies on believing every positive thing Procopius says about her and ignoring every negative thing. Being an actress is the least of Procopius’ accusations. For example, he accuses her of murdering her son from a previous relationship so that he wouldn’t come between her and Justinian. In spite of the fact Justinian was supposedly fine with it (regarding him a bit like a bastard child), she was worried it would remind him of her previous lovers.
Further, the incident where she stood up to Justinian as he fled is a literary parallel to an earlier incident in Roman history. It’s subtle but Procopius is (very, very subtly) comparing Justinian to Tiberius and the Pannonian mutiny, which was not a flattering comparison. Which isn’t to say he made it up out of whole cloth: there’s a lot of contemporary evidence that Theodora was held in high regard by Justinian (though not, as some accounts desperately want, as his equal).
With all that said, the broad outlines of the story are still impressive. But I don’t think scrubbing her of her negative qualities serves well. She can be a woman whose father died early, whose mother grifted to get by, who became an actress at an early age, and who worked and married into power and influence and became an important pillar for her husband while simultaneously not being his equal, being a murderer and torturer, and embarking on ill-conceived schemes because of her ignorance of court politics or how to make policy.
Indeed, in some ways this is a more complete story: one of the ways the Nika riots ended was by Justinian playing sports factions against each other. And one of thing that resounds through Theodora’s early life is her family’s involvement in those politics. It’s very easy to see the hand of the little girl whose mother begged a sports faction for charity (and received it) as an adult turning to that faction and using them to support her husband’s bid to retain the throne (and rewarding them afterward).
@Erusian
Yes, of course.
I don’t think Procopius’ audience would have taken for granted that every actress was so nymphomaniacal as he accuses Theodora of being. (EDIT: I described it, then thought better of it. You doubtless know the gory details; others may consult Secret History 9, at their own peril, here). The line about her procuring abortions constantly also suggests unusual depravity.
Those slurs cannot have been utterly in–how shall I put it?–in what passed then for poor taste. If it provoked revulsion at the writer and not Theodora, it failed. But it is so absurdly over the top as to constitute just such an accusation of being “especially disreputable for an actress,” just as Justinian is, in the Secret History, especially corrupt for an autocrat.
The proper comparandae for Theodora are probably the most prominent women in modern autocracies, and some of them probably are very impressive, and equally inhumane. So I would agree in principle with the rest of what you say.
(EDIT: In other words, I think we agree on the actress part, too? I’m really just saying that “bad, even for an actress,” with all the sneering you can put on “actress” is what Procopius wants us to think. We might read between the lines and see a more complicated, and human, figure, is all. And we can do that even for Nero, maybe especially for Nero.)
Considering raping an actress was a lesser crime than raping a non-actress, I don’t think that’s true. The abortions thing is meant to link her to murder (again) and to emphasize her religious unorthodoxy (she was a minority and abortion was associated with paganism).
Just because something is “over the top” doesn’t constitute a good reason for disbelieving it. I agree that Procopius is describing a woman who is bad in ways that extend beyond being an actress. But he also praises her at times and this praise often gets swallowed without the same level of examination. For example, his accusations that she secretly ran the empire is often take with much, much less skepticism than the criticisms people find unpalatable.
Sure. I objected to the glorification of Kim Yo Jong too. My issue is not that gender bias isn’t an interesting lens (though I think it should be combined with class and religious bias in Theodora’s case). It’s that there’s an annoying tendency to erase negative parts of women that female histories want to lift up, especially in the pop side of things. It reminds me of the “More. Female. Dictators.” meme.
(Likewise, there’s a tendency to make influential women liberals even when they weren’t. Jane Austen is particularly abused in this regard.)
I’m not even sure if you read the full of Procopius you don’t get a more human figure. Some of the mistakes she makes are understandable even in Procopius’s dim view of women and she does do some things right in the narrative. But the opposite of what I just said is that more misogynist writers take the opposite view. And of course, you can easily read between the lines or put a historical context to add more color.
Nero, meanwhile, suffers an even weirder dichotomy. He’s either this misunderstood artistic soul or the equivalent to Caligula. Again, either interpretation is far too extreme for the evidence we have.
The first third or so of Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven” is sort of this, but being compressed into a third of a movie means that a lot of stuff gets skipped over. I did appreciate their taking the time to show him taking possession of a very run-down Barony and trying to build it into something he could be proud of.
I’ll have to watch it.
The first and second seasons of the Spartacus TV show are close to this.
Thanks, I’ll take a look.
Spartacus is very much in the 300 vein of sword-and-sandal movies, unfortunately. There’s some nods to accuracy, but expect that all to get thrown out the window if there’s a chance to show somebody’s tits or somebody’s oiled thews or somebody’s messy decapitation.
It’s not all propaganda, or not quite. A lot of the modern belief in the unique cruelty of gladiatorial combat arises from a confusion between it and the other kinds of killing that happened in the arena. Seneca, who rather enjoyed a good fight between two properly armed and trained men, calls the slaughter of convicts “mere homicide” in Letter 7.3. The latter, of course, was what Christian martyrs faced, often in a virtually pornographic display of violence (Perpetua and Felicity are brought out into the arena naked, at first).
Of course, Christian preachers were against it all, even the bullfighting, and on grounds that often don’t seem especially strong. Augustine, for one, seems mostly to have felt that fan enthusiasm and fan rivalry both looked too much like what demons would enjoy. He knew that there were people who just went for a good time, without getting too carried away, but a philosophy of moderate enjoyment of sport doesn’t really enter into view. Granted the sheer scale of hooliganism that could occur (as theodidactus says, “a soccer riot that overthrew the government”), maybe that is understandable.
I wish he was around now to give his opinion on elections.
@Le Maistre Chat
Oh, we can only dream.
John Chrysostom would have been even more fun.
I think it’s fair to call it propaganda but I did try to go out of my way to point out it wasn’t all lies. Christians were murdered in pornographic displays of violence and it really was linked to pagan religious rituals. However, only the latter applied to gladiators. Since most were pagan, presumably they didn’t mind the religious undertones.
Christian objections stood on three basic pillars: Firstly, it was a pagan ritual. Secondly, it was murderous. Thirdly, it was immoral on grounds of excessive passion. (Reason four, arguably, was that Christians had died. But this didn’t stop them from adopting other institutions.) We really only sympathize with number two but they were all important at the time. Indeed, one of the reasons hippodrome racing lasted longer was because it was the one with the least pagan religious significance. Bull fighting and gladiator games had much more direct links to pagan funeral and religious rituals. While chariot racing was done at pagan funerals, it was in a vein more similar to (say) an archery contest (which was also common).
Chariot races are routinely linked to pagan ludi. Those will matter far more in late antiquity than funerary rituals. Putting it differently, I’m not sure the hippodrome’s much different from the beast-fights. Augustine, for example, and what I’ve seen of John Chrysostom show very little concern for the ongoing “pagan” quality of any festival. The pagan roots, sure, at least in polemic, but it’s a minor theme in sermons. They’re churchmen, not imperial officials, but if they’re not worried about it, probably laymen minded to continue the established entertainments are not. I’d suspect–as at least some others do–that they were just too expensive to keep up.
The Church was going through the oppression and elimination of the last vestiges of paganism even as Rome fell. For example, the Popes banning Lupercalia and so on. We don’t know their exact reasoning but we do know that horse racing was eventually allowed while gladiator games and hunts were not. We also know that horse racing was a later addition and one more associated with a series of contests of skill, whereas gladiator games and their hunts and animal rituals were all much older (going back to the Bronze Age and with echoes in Homer) and more linked directly to pagan religious ritual (there were secular races, there were not secular sacrifices).
We know they said it was the paganism. It’s, of course, possible to look at other motivations like political struggles or cost.
Pillars of the Earth is roughly this. A drama (domestic and various others) about building a cathedral. Doesn’t stick to the personal nature, but interleaves it with a few other tales.
I like the domestic aspect of a castle. But I’ll check it out!
This is more-or-less the setup to _The Goblin Emperor_, except the heir was previously in disfavor and was kept in a remote country estate.
Community but set at Trinity College in the 1660s
I guess it could have a very timely plague year season where they’re all social distancing and don’t have to even maintain the fiction of a class that they go to together. On Isaac’s uncontrollable Christmas/birthday special, he can’t tell the difference between Shakespearean genre productions and real life, and ends up accidentally inventing calculus.
You get a lot of this in theater. Regietheater is rife in opera, and rare now is the straightforward Shakespeare adaptation. There’s also the trend of recasting grand conflict as petty high school/college spats.
Executive cabinet discussions as rap battles.
Norse gods as corrupt oil salesmen.
50s farce Falstaff.
The Trojan Frat War.
That reminds me: 8 Mile except instead of Detroit he’s going down to the local lord’s great hall.
Another thing I’ve always wanted to do is a theater production where I set a shakespearean *history* in some implausible setting like a sci-fi. Change as little dialog as possible, no character names, just the set and costumes.
“West
SideCandor Chasma Story”?10 things I muS about you?
Much Ado About the Void
I mean, ending Hamlet on the Fortinbras alien invasion is pretty straightforward.
The Met recently did Parsifal as post-apocalypse.
MacBeth’s supernatural elements also lend themselves well to the concept.
I mean, ending Hamlet on the Fortinbras alien invasion is pretty straightforward
“Chasing the bubble reputation in the ion cannon’s mouth”?
H.E.N.R.Y. 8.0
Not quite the same thing, but, here’s a link to “Terminator the Second” – an adaptation of T2 parsed together using lines from various Shakespeare plays, replacing only proper nouns, pronouns, and verb tenses
http://watch.terminatorthesecond.com/
If you are interested in the converse, take a look at Ian Doescher’s William Shakespeare’s Star Wars. It’s A New Hope in really solid iambic pentameter with Shakespearean conventions. The next five are good, too.
(Oh my God, now there are eight others, not five. Since I haven’t seen the movies I will probably not read the last three.)
Only Fools and Aurochs, a comedy following the half-baked get-rich-quick schemes of Sumerian trader Ea-Nasir.
The third movie in Zach Snyder’s “300” trilogy, focused on Themistocles’ second career as a provincial governor in the cosmopolitan and not-evil Persian Empire. Force Snyder to make it in the style of The West Wing, along with a parallel making-of documentary where we get to watch Zach Snyder’s head explode.
Well Frank Miller and Zack Snyder already provided the cosmopolitanism. You could force Snyder to depict not-evil minor characters as towering black NBA players, disabled ogres with hand prosthetics, ninjas with clawed toes, etc.
If I’m allowed to submit things that already exist, the Laundry Files series postulates that being a spy is less James Bond and more Dilbert, with most of your life spent filling out paperwork and navigating a soul-crushing bureaucracy where operational security means you will get in serious trouble for misplacing paperclips.
I’ll jump in with another idea of mine: Gilgamesh and Enkidu have buddy-cop dynamics. Gilgamesh is the clean-cut adult with wisdom and experience, Enkidu is the impulsive badass who burns the rulebook every chance he gets.
My boyfriend and I had an idea the other day for a TV show following the hijinks of Billie Eilish playing a 19-year-old who came to San Francisco for the “Summer of Love” in 1967, trying to make her way in a totally anachronistic world of high real estate prices and intersectional multigenerational strife. The name of the show would be “OK, Boomer”, and that would be the catchphrase of the middle-aged neighbors constantly getting fed up at today’s earnest youth. The soundtrack could feature both classic psychedelic pop and contemporary music like that of Billie Eilish.
I’d like to see something set in the Roman Empire that uses accents that map roman preconceptions to modern American preconceptions (I imagine northern America for the Italics, southern American for the Celts, and British for the Greeks), rather then adhering to the convention that everyone prior to 1776 is British.
A spy thriller set in the Eastern Mediterranean at the very end of the Late Bronze Age, circa 1200 BCE. A game of “world” powers tied by diplomacy and trade, vying for supremacy on the background of natural disasters (eruptions, earthquakes, droughts), succession crises and usurpations (e.g. the Harem Conspiracy against Ramses III), colonial wars (e.g. between Egypt and Hittites for the control of Cyprus and Canaan), popular rebellions, and religious movements.
The resurgent Middle Assyrians, with their mass impalements and “universal kings”, work well enough as the Evil Empire — keep the secret of iron smelting out of their hands, or they’ll be able to field the largest army in history and take over the world! (Sprinkle in Phoenician human sacrifices and Babylonian temple prostitution for extra edge)
And, depending on how much anachronism or history/myth blurring you’re willing to tolerate, you can work in the Thera Eruption, Akhenaten’s heresy, Zoroaster inventing monotheism, the Trojan War, and the Exodus. Alternatevily, focus on the final part of the LBA Collapse and make a post-apocalyptic story.
A brief update on something I mentioned a couple of weeks ago: the NY State Board of Elections had ordered the cancellation of the Democratic presidential primary since only one candidate remained on the ballot. The Yang and Sanders campaigns (or what’s left of them) sued the board in federal court, arguing that their removals from the ballot violated the First Amendment, and got a preliminary injunction to restore all of the removed candidates to the ballot. So the primary is back on, and though it’s likely that Biden will have clinched the nomination by then, there’s a chance that New York will be the deciding state. Yay?
The board has appealed the injunction to the 2nd Circuit, and it’s possible the case will go to the Supreme Court after that. My guess is that ultimately, the primary will happen, for the practical reason that the ballots will need to be printed soon and there’s not enough time to reverse course yet again. This is setting aside the constitutional question of when an election overseer can legitimately observe that a candidate has dropped out of the race and remove their name from the ballot, which I predict the court will punt on, since it’s probably not going to come up again.
As far as I understand it, they technically just “suspended their campaign”, as the amount of votes/delegates they garner in later primaries gives them negotiating power at the convention and validation for party platform shifts.
As in they don’t expect to win and aren’t trying to, but still want to win votes.
The state law specifically says that “suspending” one’s campaign for FEC purposes amounts to “terminating” the campaign for NYSBOE purposes. Well, at least with regard to the NYSBOE’s newly granted power to remove a candidate from the ballot if they dropped out after the deadline for getting their names on the ballot for the original April 28 primary but well before the rescheduled June 23 primary. None of this factors into the court’s decision.
But can Bernie go to a tiny town and campaign in front of about 3 people and count as not suspended?
@BBA
Suspending a campaign doesn’t exist in the Federal Election Campaign Act, so a suspended campaign is the exact same as an active campaign, in the view of the FEC. The NYSBOE is making their own rules, not based on FECA. It seems quite plausible that they are allowed to do so, but not because it is consistent with FECA.
The legal challenge was over them changing the rules during the election process, which they for obvious reasons were not allowed to do.
I’m wondering how to think about pregnancy and covid-19. It seems like pregnant women are getting sick at similar rates to pregnant women and transmission to infants is pretty rare, and the infants are not obviously seriously affected. Anything we actually have evidence for suggests that things are fine.
OTOH I feel like I should have a pretty high prior that having low blood oxygen levels would be bad news for a fetus, and so would a high fever. Looking at 1918 you see large long-term effects from flu on children born during that pandemic and it’s not clear to me that we can possibly have any evidence relating to those effects for this pandemic. On the gripping hand, influenza is much worse for young children than covid-19 is.
Most of the pregnant women who tested positive in that study in NYC were asymptomatic, so maybe they’re either not having any particular lung problems, or the problems aren’t reaching the point of causing them any particular problems. (Plenty of pregnant women live at high altitudes, swim, fly in airplanes, exercise, etc., and the kids seem to do okay, so there’s probably a fair bit of reserve capacity there.)
Anecdata but I know a delivery nurse and due to legal reasons, while she knows the mothers have COVID, she cannot ask for the baby’s information. A single baby has died, but she cannot tell if it was due to COVID or not because of these privacy laws (HIPAA or something? I’m not a doctor). I assume that if COVID was dangerous to babies that she would have a lot more than one data point here, so the fact that it is only one baby means that we shouldn’t panic.
Yeah, I agree that we’d definitely know by now if there were obvious short-term impacts.
I’m more worried about the long-term effects of being born to a sick mother. If you read the MR paper I linked the long-term impacts of being born in an epidemic are really shockingly bad.
I listened to a podcast recently, from a researcher who studies children who were in the womb during various crises. Her first study involved a horrific icestorm that left large areas without electricity for varying numbers of days, or weeks. She followed those children until they turned 19. (Or maybe she’s still following them, and the ice storm was exactly 19 years ago today).
Even without the mothers getting sick while pregnant, she’s observing all kinds of statistically significant effects. What happens depends a lot on the stage of pregnancy- whatever was developing fast at the time of the maternal stressor tends to get affected. She’s also seeing extra obesity in these children, compared to children born a year earlier or later.
She’s also studied children that were in the womb during other high stress periods, in a variety of countries, and gave the impression that results tended to be similar.
I’d say that whether or not you get CV-19, if you are pregnant right now it will have effects on your child, but probably more at the “statistically significant” [i.e. higher chance of …] level than at the “obvious to laymen” level.
Of course if you get the disease while pregnant, we have no real idea what might happen, except that if the babies were being miscarried at an above average rate, someone would probably have noticed [and published] by now.
[Edit: with regard to the linked article, several of the results cited are also observed at a statistically significant level if the mother merely spent significant time without electricity in the aftermath of the ice storm. No need for maternal illness to create some of these effects.]
How vulnerable is this to p-hacking? There’s myriad factors that could be picked out in analysis, especially decades later. Some of them are going to end up significant.
That’s a very good question. This was a podcast, not a research paper, so I don’t even have as good an idea of this as I would have had from a paper – and even then, a lot of people seem to manage to fool themselves with research that appears valid until it fails to replicate because the next researcher didn’t treat “irrelevant” factors the same way. And nothing was said in this podcast about what parts of the data had been replicated with other subjects by other researchers.
I’m inclined to trust it, at least somewhat, but with a question-mark attached.
As someone who was trying to get pregnant (and who lost a pregnancy last year at 6 months), I got medium freaked out about this article about higher risk for stillbirth due to covid-19. I hope researchers will follow up on this.
Best of luck successfully having a healthy baby next time you get pregnant, whether or not it’s this year.
Please remember that “increased risk” is not destiny, and when risks are low in the first place (overall risk of second-trimester miscarriage) doubling or tripling them still means most mothers are not affected.
I know this has been discussed here before, but I’m creeping up on one mixed drink a day (usually a Manhattan or whisky sour around 4 or 5) and a tall IPA at dinner. In the Before Time, I would only have one drink per day, usually the IPA. Should I be worried?
(I am otherwise working productively and remotely and not going insane)
Yes: why are you making effete mixed drinks at all instead of drinking your liquor neat like a man?
(Serious answer: no, you shouldn’t be worried. Two drinks a day + staying productive is probably fine so long as it doesn’t grow to more and more drinks a day + being not productive. If you don’t have a personal or family history of alcoholism this shouldn’t be a concern, just keep an eye on it.)
Yeah, that sounds about right. I’m not sure if I’m more worried about drinking out of lockdown boredom or drinking out of a craving to have a drink, if that even makes sense.
In the Before Time, it wouldn’t even have occurred to me to have a mixed drink on a Monday. Now weekdays and weekends are all smooshed together and my habits are out of whack.
This, seek medical attention.
If my understanding of exponential growth is correct, if your daily drink consumption doubles every three months, within two years you’ll be having 256 drinks/day, which sounds terrifying.
I went from having 1-2 beers (higher alcohol) beers 3-5 days a week to 2 beers 7 days a week and then an occasional 3rd during the first 3 weeks so I cut alcohol out entirely for 4 weeks and last night had a few. I am going to try to keep myself down to less than a 6 pack a week for the near future, but the most important thing I have noticed in my life is that it is way easier for me to go from 2 drinks a night to zero than it is to go from 2 to 1, which means I basically always cut alcohol out entirely for multiple weeks if I want to cut back.
I also find it’s easier to abstain entirely for a day than to have just one. Usually for me that means a beer with dinner and a pour of whiskey for a night cap.
Not particularly worried about alcoholism – I’m not interested in getting drunk, just that beer with food tastes good and a whiskey to unwind is a pleasant mental signal that the day is done. But the calories are no good for the waistline.
Before we went work at home, I was doing pretty good at “no booze on weeknights”, but I’ve fallen off that weekend and a drink has become a bit of a crutch to transition to “ok the work day is done”.
This thread effectively diverted me from my mixed-drink craving. Now all I have to do is post the exact same thing every day for the next three months. (I just learned that my office building probably will not reopen until September.)
Based on my layman’s understanding of addiction I specifically avoid consuming any drug in a scheduled, regular fashion. Serves me well so far and is a very low hanging fruit to pick. Also variety is the spice of life and you don’t enjoy it any more if it becomes a habit.
Okay, finding recommended alcohol limits is a pain to convert between our two nations, but the US moderate drinking recommendation is 2 drinks a day for men, and they measure standard drinks as “12 oz of beer, 1.5 oz spirits”.
I don’t know how to make Manhattans or whiskey sours, the recipes online call for 2 oz of spirits for these, so you’re just a tiny bit over the recommendation limit.
If you’re only drinking the one bottle of beer plus the mixed drink, that should be around the two drinks a day (or a bit over). You’re okay, and I imagine it’s more from boredom and having the free time to do it because you’re at home not working. If you’re seriously worried, cut back on the spirits to maybe 3 or 4 times a week, or instead of the beer with dinner and a drink earlier, drink the mixed drink or wine with dinner.
You know best how you feel – if you’re at the point where you feel you need that drink, not just “I’m drinking because hey why not be sophisticated with cocktails”, then it’s concerning. If you could easily skip it, it’s no problem.
At this point it may be too later, right? Or at least quite hard to get back.
I found it illuminating to see statistics on actual drinking by actual Americans:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think-you-drink-a-lot-this-chart-will-tell-you/
About a third of adults in the United States basically don’t drink. Another third drink less than once a week. Out of the remaining third, a third average about a drink a day, a third average about two drinks a day, and the top third of that top third average about 10 drinks a day!
So you’ve moved from squarely in the third decile from the top to squarely in the second decile from the top. I imagine that in Europe your drinking would be much lower.
Also, my boyfriend and I have started doing more interesting cocktails (we now drink probably about four or five nights a week rather than one or two). He is a chemistry professor that watches a lot of food YouTube, and in particular found Cocktail Chemistry a good channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-o0CfpOyFJOfyWKtqS1hZQ
Does he have a spare ultrasonic bath lying about? Turns out you can do infusions (alcoholic and otherwise) orders of magnitude faster than they’d normally happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlQT4ptwLKs
He has definitely talked about this, but is too concerned about cadmium poisoning to bring home any equipment from lab.
It seems you can get cheapo ones designed to clean jewellery for $30-50. I might get one sometime.
Keeping your booze and carcinogenic heavy metals separate is probably a good idea.
If I’m doing the math right, 11% of American adults have 10 or more drinks per day?
That can’t be right. But if it is right, it would explain a lot…
There are huge problems with the study behind that chart. Basically, the author took existing survey data and assumed everyone actually drank about 2x what they said they did, based on discrepancies between the amount of self-reported consumption and industry or tax data on retail sales of alcohol intended for human consumption.
Other possible explanations for the discrepancy between self-reported consumption and retail sales that collectively strike me as more likely than “everyone is uniformly understating their actual consumption by a factor of two”:
1. Occasional drinkers are underreporting their drinking by a much greater percentage than regular drinkers. It’s easier to track consumption accurately if your consumption is consistent, and heavy drinkers in particular should have a pretty good idea of how often they need to buy more booze.
2. Some heavy drinkers are ignoring or misunderstanding survey instructions and defining “one drink” unreasonably generously and self-reporting as if they were occasional-to-moderate drinkers. E.g. counting a 40 oz bottle of beer as “one drink” when the actual definition intended was a 12 oz bottle.
3. Some self-reported non-drinkers are lying. A uniform 2x adjustment applied to a self-reported value of 0 drinks still “corrects” this to 0.
4. Not all alcohol sold for consumption is actually consumed as an alcoholic beverage: some is wasted and some is used for cooking. There’s also often a substantial lag time between when alcohol is purchased and when it gets consumed: for example, I personally have several partially-consumed bottles of liquor that I’ve owned for at least a decade.
5. There’s some bias in the sample selection that over-represents occasional drinkers and nondrinkers relative to their incidence int he general population
So basically the bottom line is “10% of adult Americans in 2001 self-reported averaging 5 drinks/day. Some people in that survey are probably lying or mistaken, but we’re not sure who or by how much.”
Ah good, thanks for pointing out some of these issues!
But as I say below, I think that we should expect some amount of fat tail here, and so in any case shouldn’t think that the average of the top decile represents the median member of the top decile very well, any more than the average income of the top decile of Americans is a good guide to the median income of the top decile of Americans.
Eric Rall has some good reasons to be skeptical of the details of this survey. But the interpretation you give also isn’t quite right even if we take the numbers at face value. The top 10% *average* 74 drinks a week, but that’s probably because the 90-95 percentiles average something like 30 drinks a week, then 95-97 percentiles average something like 40 drinks a week, the 98-99 percentiles average something like 80 drinks a week, and the top percentile averages whatever ridiculously large number is needed to bring the average for this whole decile up to 74 drinks a week.
I was once out drinking with a friend who was actively tracking his drinks using a phone app, because he was trying to cut back. It surprised me because he was at 30 for that week already on Saturday early afternoon, and was likely to get more that evening. (I was visiting the city for the weekend as a break from living in my smallish college town, so midday drinking seemed perfectly normal in the context.) A moderately small number of people drink a very large amount. It’s not quite as much of a fat-tailed distribution as the income distribution or the distribution of number of sexual partners, but it has a lot in common with both of those.
I was much more surprised at the large number that basically don’t drink. But I suppose this is something that is very hard to observe in the natural state. Most people actively socialize with people whose drinking habits are relatively similar to theirs. I tend to hang out not with suburban parents, but with urban academics, and in particular a subset of those that are selected for sociality and not having kids. And of course, I don’t directly observe people’s drinking habits unless we are in a context where people are drinking – and the people who don’t drink just often don’t show up in those contexts at all!
But I think in general, European drinking habits are all shifted upwards from the American ones. I don’t know how Asian patterns are (though there’s at least a culture in Japan and Korea of hard-drinking businesspeople) and I really know nothing of Latin American and African habits.
When I traveled for business I was surprised by how much my fellows drank. Usually a bottle with dinner for the table, and then going out for drinks to have a few more. That’s including times when no customer or client was present to impress.
But that may have been partly due to having an expense account and partly due to not having much better to do stuck in a distant city.
When I was in China for a week for training, the hosts drank a lot over the course of a lengthy dinner meal, but I don’t know if that’s generalizable.
My own personal habits (as a suburban parent) is, I only drink when someone else buys. It’s pleasant now and then, but alcohol is expensive and I don’t really enjoy getting buzzed. I’m pretty sure I’ve never bought an alcoholic drink in a bar or restaurant just due to cost reasons.
This equates to about one drink every other week when my buddy brings over some hard cider for game night, with a very rare bottle of wine my wife might pick up.
Both my parents have had bouts with alcoholism, so it’s probably for the best for me to be cautious. I don’t judge people who do drink more often (anymore than anyone else, anyway).
I am soliciting recommendations on some good reading, in English, about France in WW1. I feel that it is the side of the story I know the least (except for Italy, perhaps). There is a ton written in English about English speaking participants in the war, of course, and from my corner of Eastern Europe I can find a lot about Austria-Hungary, while Germany and Russia are fascinating for English speaking authors (for Eastern European authors of course as well, but they tend to be heavily biased in various ways).
But it is my impression that English war historiography is more interested in Germany than in France. E.g. I have Imperial war museum Book of the Somme, which features excerpts from letters and diaries of British and German soldiers, but not from French, despite them being major participants in the battle.
William Shirer’s Collapse of the Third Republic had a good section on WW1 in France. The main emphasis of the book, as the name implies, is on the later interwar years and the opening years of WW2, but the narrative of the book actually covers the entire lifespan of the Third Republic all the way back to the end of the Franco-Prussian War.
Tuchman’s The Guns of August is a fun and well-written read that covers up through the First Battle of the Marne. It covers all Western Front (and Russia) participants more or less equally, but it goes into more detail about the French perspective than I had before experienced.
The Price of Glory by Alistair Horne, about Verdun, is a classic.
What are everyone’s favorite conspiracy theories? I’m not talking about what you believe is true, I want to know what gives you the most entertainment value. They can be completely absurd, though I find that it helps for them to be plausible on some level, the sort of thing to make one go “Huh, that’d be neat.”
Personally, I’m in love with a theory about the JFK assassination. It holds that the second shooter was a government man, but it was an accident. Specifically, one of the armed guards heard Lee Harvey Oswald shoot and reflexively returned fire, tragically hitting the president. In the immediate aftermath, the people in charge looked at the situation and concluded that LHO’s shots alone were enough to kill JFK, so the poor second shooter didn’t really make anything worse. To publish what truly happened would see an innocent man destroyed in the court of public opinion, so they buried the story and pretended LHO fired all three shots.
One memorable summer, I sold sausage at a farmer’s market. One of my fellow vendors had this elaborate conspiracy theory that was sort of an annotated compendium of conspiracy theories.
It started with Peter being the Messiah’s regent, while John was his son by Mary Magdalene and his rightful heir. Somehow, this meant that the Jews of today weren’t really descendants of the Jews of Jesus’ time – those had been exiled after the fall of Temple and were the ancestors of modern Europeans. Also, Catholics had tried to maintain Peter’s primacy, after John was of age, which is a false regency. So John taught love, and we ought to love everyone, except that both Catholicism–really, Christianity as a whole–and Communism are based on hatred, because they are following Peter rather than Christ as revealed by John. Also, the Holy Grail was involved somehow.
It definitely won points for inclusiveness, although being buttonholed to listen to it while exhaustedly trying to pack up after the farmer’s market may have been sub-optimal for appreciating its finer points.
The claim that the Jews of today are descended from the Khazars rather than the actual Jews is a standard anti-semitic trope.
I know.
That was the thing about this set of theories–none of the elements were completely novel, but the synthesis was really rather impressive.
I’ve heard the claim that non-Jewish Europeans are descended from the Ten Lost Tribes, but I’ve never heard that they were descended from the Jews of Jesus’ time. That’s a very strange claim considering how well-documented it is that Europe was full of pagans at the time.
Calling aluminum foil “tin foil” is a conspiracy to trick people making tinfoil hats into creating useless aluminum foil ones instead. Tin foil hats do protect you from government mind control; aluminum foil does not.
I like that one.
On the other side of that argument, aluminum foil actually amplifies the signals that the government uses for mind control, and the idea of foil hats was spread as a meme to encourage the practice.
You are supposed to make the hats shiny side out.
Created I hope by me, out of this thread:
Low-flow toilet mandates were created to make it harder for drug dealers to flush their stash during police raids.
Nibiru, lizard people (classic but still hilarious) and a runner up for not actually being a conspiracy theory: the pythagorean counter-earth.
You could go around claiming that the government knows UFOs are alien spaceships sent by the Priest-kings of counter-earth, who worship the gods of Nibiru.
Huh. TIL. I thought that was just something from Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated. Though that series was shot through with so many weird references I shouldn’t be surprised. (H.P. Hatecraft, Harlan Ellison voicing himself, new ska music from the English Beat, shot-for-shot remakes from Twin Peaks with the original actor, etc.)
Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated explicitly cites it as “according to Zecharia Sitchin“.
Sitchin seems interesting in that he was smugly 100% wrong about cuneiform but was apparently just a harmless avuncular-looking crank in NYC (by way of Armenia and Israel) living a normal life, rather than a big con artist or using his conspiracy theory to insinuate dark politics.
By far No Forests on a Flat Earth. There are few worlds as majesticly magical as the one in which Devil’s Tower is a tree stump.
I was going to post this if you hadn’t.
This one’s my favorite, too.
Well I’m sure glad I clicked on this link
You’re right. That is an amazing scifi or fantasy story idea.
Probably works better as a world of magic to hand wave away the physics of the cube square law for insanely massive trees. Throw in some “the magic goes away” type narrative that turns the magical flora into stone as the mana is sucked out.
If we call them “archtrees”, there’s a whole mythology worked out for them already.
Modern art is CIA propaganda that got a little out of hand.
I thought the conspiracy theory was that modern art was communist propaganda that got a little out of hand.
No, apparently the CIA did fund Abstract Expressionism to counter the communist accusation that the west is nothing but a wasteland of consumerist pap.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html
I put about as much faith in unverified confessions by form CIA personnel about modern art as I do in former Air Force personnel claiming they were mopping the floor in Area 51 and glanced in a door, and, holy cow, there were a bunch of aliens on the table being dissected. It makes a really great story to say what people want to hear.
Funding modern art does have a much higher prior probability, though, even if the evidence on offer doesn’t move the needle much.
Modern art is money laundering. If you kill a guy for the mafia, they can’t just pay you a million dollars. Instead, they ask you to throw some paint at a canvas, and then they buy it for a million dollars.
So, the correct way to ask if someone is a hitman isn’t “I heard you paint houses” anymore, but “I heard you paint paintings”.
Related to this is my favorite, that Theodor Adorno was actually the composer of most of the songs by the Beatles, which were secretly avant-garde high art and not commercial at all. Amusingly, the first hit when I searched for a source on this conspiracy theory tells me that one of Jair Bolsonaro’s associates is a strong defender of this theory:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/shortcuts/2019/sep/10/a-little-help-from-my-neo-marxist-philosopher-adorno-fifth-beatle-according-olavo-carvalho
A slightly more thorough discussion:
https://rocknerd.co.uk/2016/10/13/theodor-adorno-of-the-frankfurt-school-wrote-all-the-beatles-songs-as-a-cultural-marxist-assault-on-america-possibly/
That’s hilarious, although it raises some questions. According to those links, Adorno was himself a composer in the style of the music he wrote about. But I’ve never heard any of it nor heard that it’s particularly well regarded. Taken to it’s logical extreme, would this mean that the high avant-garde really is just playing on a higher level than popular music? Apparently Adorno, who despised it, could write better pop music than the uneducated bourgeois who consumed it, but he could not write better twelve-tone music than Schoenberg (as judged by those advanced enough to appreciate twelve-tone music).
I guess I’m reading too much into this and the people who believe it really don’t see any problems with “Adorno = cultural Marxism = Beatles”.
I think it’s very important for everyone involved (in, you know, the human experience) to hold the following two facts simultaneously in their mind:
* The Shroud of Turin is ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, which bears his image due to a flash of divine radiance at the exact moment of the resurrection.
* Every single plausible alternative explanation is, somehow, weirder than that one.
Not following.
isn’t “some conman painted some blood on some cloth so they could make some cash selling fake relics” a really simple explanation?
I don’t want to suck you into a crying-of-lot-49/number-23 style conspiracy vortex if you don’t wanna go, but you opened the door.
I’ll state my bona fides early to improve my cred
* I’m an athiest
* The shroud can be reliably carbon dated to well after christ
Here’s the thing
* the image on the shroud is almost certainly not painted
The shroud can be reliably carbon dated to well after christ
Eh. There’s controversy over that, given the fact that the Shroud was damaged in a fire and patched up with contemporaneous fabric. I think there’s been definite contamination over the years, so I don’t know if we can get any good carbon dating without using a piece from the centre and that’s not going to happen as it would damage the image.
I’m agnostic on this, I’m happy to believe it’s Xth century production and not the actual burial cloth, but the evidence is not the firmest and most unimpeachable for any claims either very much pro or very much contra (for instance, I’m surprised by the part in the Wikipedia article that “The blind-test method was abandoned because the distinctive three-to-one herringbone twill weave of the shroud could not be matched in the controls, and a laboratory could thus identify the shroud sample”. Of all the potential problems, not being able to source a similar piece of cloth anywhere in the world from any fabric mill?)
The image isn’t in either blood or paint. There was blood obscuring the face when it was found, but that’s since been removed. It’s almost certainly not a painting; a 2D Fourier transform almost always shows some oddities due to linear brushstrokes on paintings. The shroud doesn’t have that. We don’t really know how it was made.
On the other hand, I’m not sure I’d agree that the usual hypotheses are weirder than the divine explanation. The early photography explanation sounds reasonably plausible for instance.
A random list of weird stuff about the image on the shroud:
* whether or not its 2D or 3D, it definitely doesn’t have brush strokes, or at least, the brushstrokes would have to be unbelievably subtle at every place the image was examined
* The image itself was not made with pigment, it’s caused (at least in large part) by chemical fraying of the shroud
* The human on the shroud is a *very* realistic human.
Additionally here are some slightly more controversial propositions:
* The injuries on the shroud are *very* realistic injuries
* The blood on the shroud is real blood
I’ve never quite bought the camera hypothesis. I was being somewhat deliberately hypoerbolic when I said every other explanation is literally weirder than the resurrection…I’d believe photography before Christ reborn obviously…but c’mon: the oldest photograph we have is quite good full body front and back image of a naked human? If you buy the “accurate wounding” hypothesis (which I do, though I note it is more controversial than the ‘not painted’ hypothesis) the explanation becomes even weirder…did they like, injure a guy with wounds consistent with the legendary wounds Christ received?
Any explanation needs to account for another anomaly: if the idea is simply that one would make the shroud to fool people or otherwise make money, it’s weird that the shroud differs from what a potential consumer would expect at the time: Naked jesus, crucifixion wounds that differ from the usual depictions of the crucifixion, etc.
My favorite theory, by N. D. Wilson (who also writes fun children’s books), is that some medieval relic-fakers actually crucified someone and let the sun bake his image into the cloth. Unfortunately, several details of this apparently don’t work out.
I’m about 75% convinced that you couldn’t make the shroud without, at some point, whipping a person, stabbing some stuff through their wrists, and having them lie down naked in that position.
The literature professor, Nathan Wilson, a 26-year-old English teacher at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, has proposed a rather ingenious method for creating an image that looks something like the face image on the Shroud of Turin.
Oh dear. If I’m looking for science debunking, I’m not so sure I’d pick a humanities graduate with a sideline hobby in photography as the rigorous scientific method I’d use.
But hey, it makes for a neat headline and a fun topic along the lines of the latest National Geographic No Really This Time Actual Tomb Of Jesus special – good fun if you don’t take it seriously one way or the other!
Nate Wilson is author of awesome children’s books, and his father is a well-known pastor whose blog (Blog and Mablog) is well worth reading–but he’s very Orange.
Worth reading for the name alone, honestly.
Isn’t it far more likely that someone in the medieval Near East found some shroud that had oddly preserved an image of the body, and then some crusader became convinced it was Jesus and brought it home?
Just like Constantine’s mother went on her pilgrimage and found some nails and pieces of wood that looked neat and wouldn’t take “no” for an answer when asking about whether or not they were the True Cross.
It seems far more likely that something oddly convincing looking happens by chance and then gets selected than that someone intentionally figures out how to make it.
I’ll admit I had not considered the possibility of an “accidental image” that then got touched up.
I just don’t see how that image gets on their by accident. Admittedly, I’m no chemist, but just look at the image really close (obviously it shows up better in negative): you can see the thick and thin parts of the beard, the folds of the nose, the bones of the knee, the ribs…the cloth would HAVE to be like, right-flush to capture all that without distortion. Plus, the body is posed too neatly beneath the shroud. Not to be crass, but the position of the hands is rather photogenically perfect to obscure the private bits. Now, maybe that’s how you lay out a body for burial, I dunno.
not saying it’s impossible, but it seems weird that both
1) some random effect transfers an image to cloth due to chemistry/heat/light
2) the body is perfectly positioned such that the body and face don’t look goblinoid
of course, this cuts against the more supernatural theories involving blinding lights, etc, as well.
isn’t “some conman painted some blood on some cloth so they could make some cash selling fake relics” a really simple explanation?
It is, except that you’d expect a mediaeval/Renaissance conman to make it look more like a painted image (see the various depictions of Veronica’s Veil/the Mandylion) rather than “vague rusty splotches that only really look like an image when photography is invented and negatives are made”.
Do I think the Shroud is indeed the burial cloth of Christ? I have no flippin’ idea. This is not a hill I will die on, I’m with the current position of the Church on it.
Do I think it matters hugely if it is definitively proven to be a fake? Not really. If I chose to venerate it, I would do so in the same way that one uses a crucifix – a sacred symbol representing the greater reality it signifies. A fake Shroud is as good for that purpose as “a painting of the crucifixion” to pray before. It’s an icon.
How many stained cloths existed back in the day and what proportion of stains look kind of like a 33 year old middle eastern man?
Truther Trutherism.
That some shadowy group routinely seeds conspiracy groups with utterly batshit and obviously wrong but interesting conspiracy theories to immunise those groups against more plausible conspiracy theories.
Don’t want people overlaying certain early 9/11 reports with scooby-doo cartoon clips while talking about it in a sarcastic voice? ie, what might actually win over some reasonable people?
No worries! Drown it out claims about steel and jet fuel that go against physical reality so that everyone dismisses the whole thing.
Or maybe I have too much faith in humanity and those groups are just really good at self-seeding with obviously untrue things.
TBH, this is what I think the whole “QAnon” thing is. The fundamental idea that some shadowy person close to the president needs to drip out secret information in a cryptic fashion to Boomers on the chans about who’s going to get arrested any day now makes no sense on the face of it. Because whether or not Boomers on twitter or the chans know that indictments are coming is immaterial to whether or not indictments are coming. And then on top of that time and time again they’ve made predictions that turn out to be wrong. So the thing is clearly fake. But maybe it keeps the kind of people who would believe something like that in check by convincing them all they have to do is wait rather than let them be sucked in by something crazier that requires action.
Isn’t the better explanation for QAnon that it’s just some rando messing with people? Like even granting that the government totally does run that sort of disinformation campaign, the number of bored randos vastly outweighs the number of CIA dudes. Any given conspiracy seems more likely to be a product of the randos, unless there’s some specific detail of Q that points to government involvement, and as far as I know he’s demonstrated no knowledge a rando wouldn’t have.
I’m not saying government involvement, but I think it’s gone on too long for a rando. That makes me think there’s some kind of purpose, but the only thing it accomplishes is confusing morons and making Trump supporters look bad. So…cui bono?
You underestimate dedication of trolls.
There is some person who spends several hours a day vandalizing Wikipedia (adding penis photos to random articles etc) and harassing editors.
Since 2007, still active.
Is it bad that I unironically believe this? Like, I’m not certainly convinced it’s true, but it doesn’t seem at all implausible to me.
If you liked that one I have a second: that in the field of cryptography there’s a particular norm/habbit that’s so ingrained that it’s like ringing a bell at pavlovs dogs:
If you mention rolling your own encryption then people immediately leap in from every direction to shout “NEVER ROLL YOUR OWN!!!!”
And there’s a reason that makes sense, it’s easy to screw up, but they take it exactly one step further than is logically sound because you can reasonably safely wrap even the crappiest encryption around an already encrypted block as long as you use different keys.
There’s a tiny chance of information leekage… but that also applies to literally every other line of code running on the system from the 10 million in the OS to every other line of code you write in your application for handling non-crypto steps.
This norm more or less guarantees that everyone uses a tiny tiny tiny number of standard libraries… which makes for a very tractable problem for any organisation that employs more mathematicians and cryptographers than any other org in the world and the budget to throw tens of millions at the problem of compromising standard libraries….
If the norm was “always encrypt with a standard library and then wrap in something custom” then it would cripple any attack vector that relied on compromising a handful of standard libraries. Sure the custom code is probably imperfect… but it would take human effort for every single one.
So.. again… if you happen to employ thousands of respected cryptographers and mathematicians it would be **extremely** easy to have them keep repeating a norm of “never roll your own” so often as to make the rest of the follow suit because it’s the sort of thing “respectable” people say.
The hilarious thing is that it’s so ingrained that the last time I mentioned this hypothesis on SSC a bunch of people lept in to reply “NEVER ROLL YOUR OWN” while repeating the standard justification without replying in any way to the argument about how it’s taken exactly one step beyond where it’s logically sound. Some solid training there.
I think you might be underestimating the difficulty of finding thousands of “respected cryptographers and mathematicians” that wouldn’t immediately start trying to figure out ways to let the world know that some authority figure was trying to spread deliberately misleading information.
I mean, even setting aside the difficulties of getting a thousand regular people on board with that sort of thing, every last single information security related person I worked with has been among the most principled, paranoid and/or anti-authoritarian people I know.
A far simpler explanation is that you want these kind of messages to be as simple as possible, ‘Don’t roll your own’ is a much simpler guideline than ‘Roll your own layer around existing libraries’. Plus, not adding more complexity than is needed is just good software engineering practice.
I understand your reasoning, and certainly it’s possible to do superencryption and get no worse, maybe better security. But the reason why there’s so much “don’t roll your own” sentiment is that a lot of people have rolled their own crypto over the years, and then their algorithms got broken more-or-less as soon as a competent person spent a few hours looking at them.
There are a fair number of encryption algorithms that have seen serious scrutiny and are highly regarded, so if you want some diversity, you don’t have to try to invent your own crypto algorithm.
For symmetric crypto, AES is the thing everyone defaults to (and if it ever gets practically broken, we are deeply f–ked). That has seen decades of cryptanalysis in the public crypto community, and I think its security is extremely well-understood. There are also quite a few places where people are using Chacha, Twofish, or triple-DES (ugh). Also occasionally RC4, which is badly broken but still out there. The Caesar competition gave us a bunch of additional authenticated encryption schemes that look very strong, and there’s a competition by NIST to standardize some lightweight authenticated encryption schemes–both those have provided a bunch of new algorithms/modes with a lot of analysis focused on them, albeit nothing like the amount focused on AES yet. There are also older schemes like CAST and Blowfish and IDEA that still seem quite strong. If you’re worried that NSA has somehow broken AES, you could choose any of those as a fallback and superencrypt with them.
Note that there’s a lot to get right with encryption besides the algorithm. Just thinking in terms of symmetric crypto, you need to look at the chaining modes used for any block cipher, and screwing that up can lead to attacks that bypass the strength of the cipher. Some modes include padding to get the plaintext to a full block. There are some clever attacks that exploit this to learn your plaintext by giving you slightly altered ciphertexts and seeing whether you respond with an error message or not. Also, if you do compression before encryption, the compression can create a side-channel (some messages compress better than others) and leak information about your plaintext. And so on.
Further, your implementation needs to be constant-time–that is, the time taken to do an encryption/decryption must not depend in any way on any secret information, such as your plaintext or your key. Screw that up, and an attacker will in some cases be able to send you a bunch of messages, observe the time taken for you to respond, and learn your private key.
This actually is a problem with AES if you implement it in a naive way–part of AES involves these look-up tables called S-boxes, and how long each lookup takes depends on the state of the cache. There are attacks where I give you something to encrypt/decrypt, watch how long it takes, and based on the expected state of the cache when you do the encryption/decryption, the time it takes for you to respond leaks information about your key. Most high-end processors now include hardware AES instructions that run in constant time–if you don’t have hardware support, you need to do a much more complicated kind of implementation to get constant time.
The side channel / padding stuff means that you should use the well-analyzed, hopefully properly-implemented crypto to encrypt the message *first*. Then, you can do superencryption with a second cipher, using an entirely independent key. That way, if your second layer leaks, it can’t weaken the first layer.
You also should care about authentication–ideally you use an authenticated encryption mode up front. Those are often somewhat fragile–the most common one is GCM, and it has the property that it requires a unique nonce for each message–reuse a nonce, and you leak your authentication key. (Yes, people screw this up all the time. No, they shouldn’t have standardized this glass-jawed mode, but by now it’s so widespread it’s hard to convince anyone to use anything else.)
There’s also a bunch of key management and public key stuff, but most people don’t try rolling their own public key stuff because it’s way harder to even get a public key encryption scheme to work at all, let alone be secure.
@silver_swift:
Isn’t finding thousands of “respected cryptographers and mathematicians” NSA’s literal charter? I don’t subscribe to NSA crpyto conspiracy theories, but something something Dual_EC_DRBG.
Edit: Just to be clear, I think a part of why don’t roll your own crypto is such standard advise is as a small bit a response to this conspiracy theory. It’s important to remind people that while saying you should only use these libraries might appear a bit sketchy, crypto is hard and it’s a lot easier to lose people’s SSNs or credit card numbers then the average fresh out of college dev thinks.
@silver_swift
The UK government encouraged their allies to use enigma when a huge number of cryptographers knew it was cracked. They didn’t tell everyone.
NIST Standard Elliptic Curve magic numbers.
there’s a long tradition of governments pushing people to use encryption that lots of mathematicians know is broken.
By comparison, spreading an **almost** totally logical social norm that mostly makes sense would be way way easier.
@albatross11
I’m not really focusing on the protocol itself, the code is much squishier in practice.
Imagine you wanted to compromise 99% of the worlds crypto traffic. How many of the most popular crypto libraries would you have to compromise? Assuming you were willing to spend 100 million bucks per library and had a team of good coders and mathematicians willing to play The Underhanded C Contest with contributions and/or at least one coder contributing to the library willing to trade his principles for a few million bucks willing to include the occasional “obviously correct” useful patch. How much would you have to spend to compromise 99% of all the worlds encrypted traffic?
If it’s logical for them to do so then it seems odd to assume they wouldn’t.
If I just pick a second popular crypto library under this assumption then it provides little or no protection.
This is why you’d only perform any home-rolled operations on data that’s already been encrypted with a mainstream library using a different key.
Any claims about risks of data leekage at that stage would also apply to litterally any other operation you might be applying to that already encrypted block, whether it’s running some home-rolled crypto, reformatting the bytes to stick them into tweets or passing them through a networking stack.
ya, people will screw up but it adds manual labour to try to find weaknesses in that outer layer.
The same, it seems plausible that it happened. Maybe because someone wanted to be paid for inventing dumb ideas and managed to convince his/her boss in CIA/KGB/whatever to authorize this.
I could swear I read an article about the CIA officially acknowledging it released fake UFO documents to UFO conspiracy theorists, but I can’t find the citation now so maybe I am making this up.
That’s exactly what you’d acknowledge if you were trying to keep UFOs a secret.
Englebert Dollfuss was assassinated by time travelers from the Future.
A classic discussion that comes up every time time travel is discussed is, “If you could time travel, would you go back in time and kill Hitler?” There are plenty of reasons to argue “No.” Leaving aside the ethical considerations, perhaps Hitler was needed to keep Stalin in check. Maybe war was inevitable, and the best we can hope for was a lesser war that minimized the total casualties.
Maybe that’s what we already got.
For those who don’t know, Mr. Dollfuss was a Fascist politician in Austria, elected as chancellor in 1932 (shortly before Hitler came to power). Through some clever political maneuvering, he shortly dissolved parliament and made himself absolute ruler, and looked to be a rival of up-and-coming Adolf across the border. The next couple years brought on a great deal of political turmoil, culminating in his assassination in 1934, arguably setting the stage for Germany’s annexation of Austria two years later.
Clearly, Dollfuss was actually a Mega-Hitler from another timeline, leading to a global war with billions of deaths. We should be thankful we got off so lightly.
Related: Someone from the future time-traveled into Rudolf Hess’s body, went half-insane from the shock of finding himself in the body of a leading Nazi, and personally defected to England with confused ramblings about how he needs to bring about a just peace right now.
Maybe there was a reason Franz Ferdinand was murdered in the first place. To stop the one War that was somehow worse than WW1 and WW2 together.
I have long maintained that Theodore Roosevelt was saved by a time traveler from the future to avert Taft’s bungling of WWI. And, like all good time travel tales, there were unintended consequences. TR splits the vote so that Wilson wins and bungles the job so badly that we end up way worse off with Nazism, WWII, the Cold War, etc.
Maybe they’re all right; time travelers just can’t stop mucking with that time period, making it worse each time they try to fix the last mistake.
This reminds me of one of my favorite web comics:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-03-19
Serendipitously, today’s comic is all on the morality of Hitler-killing.
I have a copy of David Icke’s The Biggest Secret (picked up for a buck at a yard sale) and nothing else ever published comes close to his lizard-people conspiracy. It’s entertaining just to pick up the book and read a sentence at random.
It’s embarrassing for us Brits – he was once upon a time the presenter of the BBC’s premier sports programme. I suppose we have to rely on our sense of humor to note he’s not just a nutter, but crazier than a box of frogs.
Icke has Neo-Nazi fans who think he’s really talking about the Jews. The Anti-Defamation League thinks so too.
I watched a documentary on him that concluded he really is talking about lizards, but I also a video from near the beginning of his lizard career where he accuses the lizards of drinking blood from blonde, blue-eyed infants.
I cannot shake the lizard part of my brain that believes that all viruses were created by a time-travelling mad scientist. The basic mechanism of viruses has the sort of evil simplicity that feels like it could only come from the mind of a human designing a weapon.
Someone needs to make an Apollo 13 style movie, played totally straight, about the heroes who faked the moon landing.
What if the moon landing was real, but Apollo 13 was faked to renew interest in NASA?
What if NASA was only created as a way to boost Hollywood ticket sales? clearly, people like “real” drama more than hard sci-fi.
Have posted this before, but just in case anyone hasn’t seen it – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE-tpiAiiHo
Broke: Moon landing real.
Woke: Moon landing faked.
Bespoke: …in a movie studio on Mars.
The “an oldie but a goodie” ones about Sinister Jesuit Plots where the Jesuits are these suave, worldly, fiendishly cunning gentlemen of taste and breeding who are exotically, if sinisterly, attractive in a way that influences women and weak-willed men into falling for their schemes. It’s much more amusing to contemplate than the messiness of contemporary Catholicism, which as Tolkien mentioned in a letter of 1963 to one of his sons, has been around since the beginning:
I mean, this one is just obviously true. Also possibly falls into the set of conspiracy theories created by their subjects to make themselves seem cooler.
I spent 20+ years teaching at a university run, as best I could tell very well, by Jesuits. You remind me of a comment by someone who, after dining at the Jesuit residence hall, said that after seeing what they meant by poverty he wondered what their definition of celibacy was.
Oh bless ’em, there’s plenty of jokes about various religious orders and the Jesuits always get the “if this is your notion of poverty, chastity and obedience…” ones.
I’m sure I’ve quoted these before, but they never go out of style!
(1) A man met a Jesuit and a Franciscan and jokingly asked, “How many novenas would I need to say to get a Porsche?”
The Franciscan asked “What’s a Porsche?”
The Jesuit asked “What’s a novena?”
(2) A Franciscan gets a haircut, and then asks how much he owes. The barber says he never charges clergy. The Franciscan thanks the barber and goes home. The next morning the barber finds a big basket of fresh bread from the Franciscans’ kitchens.
An Augustinian gets his hair cut by the same barber. The barber also tells him than he never charges clergy. The next day the barber receives a nice bottle of wine from the Augustinians’ wine cellar.
A Jesuit gets his haircut, and the barber again says that he never charges clergy. The next day, when the barber opens his shop, there are twelve other Jesuits already waiting for him.
I’m not sure if these are exactly “conspiracy theories” or just “crackpot theories”. But my two favorites are:
Plate tectonics is only *half* real – seafloor spreading is real, but subduction is clearly a hoax:
http://thelastoutpost.com/alternative-science/thegrowingearth.html
The best part is that he has a whole YouTube series putting his skills as one of the original illustrators of Batman to use: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7D72BE536454A8CF&app=desktop
My other favorite is Fomenko’s “New Chronology”, which claims that Ancient and Medieval history actually consist of a small set of events that were duplicated with very different errors, so that many people and events we think of as distinct are actually the same. Elisha, Jesus, St. Basil, and Gregory VII are actually the same person. Troy, Jerusalem, Rome, and Constantinople are actually the same city. Many of the apparent archeological sites are actually fakes made in the period we call the 17th century, when we know it became fashionable for nobles throughout Europe to make fake ruins. He proves this all by statistical correlations among the densities of events in each year in annals from the different periods. It’s a nicely disorienting look at history that makes it hard to get your grip on what a calendar or chronology even means!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Fomenko)
Expanding Earth was once one of a number of respectable hypotheses, alongside Wegener’s Continental Drift.
Since the details of the latter weren’t yet worked out, the former didn’t look so implausible in comparison.
I can’t find a link, but my favorite geological pseudo-science is that the continents were formed by separate collisions of large bodies. This explains why several continents are narrow at the bottom and wide at the top, because the objects that formed them were moving perpendicular to the elliptic, and so they splatted out.
Michael Flynn had a cute novel with the premise that the world was covertly ruled by the Society of Babbage, who have used computers to predict the course of history even as far back as when computers were just Difference Engines. Somebody from outside is recruited and objects that human behavior is too complex and chaotic for that to work. “That’s what everybody believes. But who told you that?”
I am always a big fan of the Denver International Airport conspiracy.
Basically the art in the airport is so goddamn weird that people think there must be an elaborate conspiracy behind it. This is of course total nonsense, but you can see why people think something must be up, because the art really is bizarre. I actually got to have a stopover there and it was fun to see just how weird it is in person.
I mean, I did know about the giant nightmare horse statue with glowing red eyes out front, and the insane murals, but before I got there in person I never knew the baggage claim was full of statues of luggage demons.
By the time I left I was pretty sure it was a conspiracy after all. A conspiracy to do what, I have no idea.
You have to remember that the horse statue actually killed its creator:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Mustang
I have family in Denver, so I’ve been to that airport for more than just a layover.
The mystery behind the conspiracy theory is that Denver had a perfectly serviceable airport, but they built a vastly larger new one ~30 minutes away from the city by Interstate. That’s not an evil conspiracy: the Denver Metropolitan Area has atrocious sprawl and the city government wanted to become an air travel hub (it’s at least Frontier’s hub now).
Then the statues they paid artists to decorate the place with all look demonic. But Western artists are under selection pressure to be the WEIRDest of WEIRD people, so that’s no evidence that they’re real Satanists giving away their evil plan to do evil things to unsuspecting Americans (the conspiracy theory is that the Denver airport will be a New World Order concentration camp).
But by the time I get to the mural that looks like package art for a villain from a non-PC timeline’s version of the GI Joe toyline, I don’t even.
Oh, and the giant horse statue, Blucifer? It killed its creator.
Denver is also a major United hub, right? Or at least, was until a few weeks ago. It’s better placed for cross-country connections than SFO or LAX, and has better weather conditions than ORD. I guess the only advantage it has over IAH for United is that being farther north makes it less out-of-the-way on great circle routes.
Yeah, now that I saw the blue mustang, I want to spray it with holy water or something…
I just heard about this and am fully on board now.
That treasure from the Knights Templar is hidden on Oak Island.
That Zheng He reached North America before Columbus.
Here’s one I made up: The 9/11 attack was faked, and in fact… the Twin Towers never existed in the first place. Anyone who claims to have seen them is in on the conspiracy.
xkcd’s “compromise” 9/11 theory is excellent as well.
1. Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (subject of a famous conspiracy theory) is the son of Queen Elizabeth.
2. Stalin engineered the Korean war specifically to get PRC and USA shooting at each other, to delay their allying against him for 20 years.
3. The prime minister of Italy rose to power by conspiring with the Masons to take over the media.
4. The Jeffrey Epstein story didn’t kill itself.
I recently read a piece that offered evidence that previous calculations on the progress of Covid were mistaken, and an explanation of why. The evidence was the case of Sweden, specifically Stockholm County. By their antibody survey, 17% of the population would have been infected by 11 April, rising to 25% by 1 May 2020. Both figures are far below estimates of herd immunity, yet number of new cases was nearly flat starting about April 5th, started declining about May 1st.
The explanation offered is that individuals differ in how easily they get the disease. I haven’t worked through the details of the model the piece offers, but I think the basic logic is pretty clear. The people who get the disease early will tend to be those most easily infected, whether for biological or behavioral reasons, and initial estimates of R will be based on them. But as the number who have been infected increases, the population of those not yet infected becomes less and less sensitive, since the most sensitive people are being removed from it.
You get herd immunity sooner than you would calculate if you assumed everyone identical, because R is getting lower due to the change in the composition of the not yet infected population. If the Swedish antibody data are correct, and if we interpret the decline in number of cases to reaching and passing herd immunity, then herd immunity was reached at something between 17% and 25% of the population having been infected not, as initial calculations implied, at something over 80%.
If that is right, then the U.S. and U.K. have been badly overreacting and the Imperial College calculation of the deaths by letting it run to herd immunity were high by a factor of three to five.
Harumph. I claim priority.
It takes hundreds of comments for someone to point out heterogeneity.
You get herd immunity sooner than you would calculate if you assumed everyone identical
Yes:
https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1258085658117242880
(with links to some citations)
Nate has also pointed out that “herd immunity” is already visible for the infection rate in Sweden. If each person normally infects 1.4, but 30% are already infected, that is going to make the actual infection rate drop below 1 (assuming heterogeneity). But before you think we can just do that,
1) it means a half-million dead Americans to get to that point
2) being at that point does not mean the pandemic is over.
The R_0 if people are just going to church and basketball games and licking toilets on airplanes like normal is 2 or 3. If the “natural” R_0 is 2.5 but 30% of people are infected, it means you have an R_0 of roughly 1.75, which is enough for the number of cases to grow by about 22x in a month.
Yeah that idea is I think reasonably well-known. I remember discussing essentially this idea with a friend in I think mid March, and it wasn’t original to me – I think I saw it on Twitter originally. A minute with google will turn up literature on heterogeneity such as this paper from 1984 discussing similar issues.
However, I don’t think it’s easy to know how much the heterogeneity in the population lowers R0. After all that requires modelling the relevant heterogeneities in the population, and we don’t know what they are, since we still (amazingly, disappointingly) don’t have a good handle on how the virus is usually spreading.
I agree. My first reaction reading the piece was that lowering the requirement for herd immunity from over 80% infected to more like 20% seemed too big an effect.
But then I thought about it and realized that there was no theoretical limit to how big the effect could be, depending on how inhomogeneous the population was. If, to take an extreme case, 10% of the population were very vulnerable and everyone else immune, you could get a high R at the beginning as it burned through the 10% but herd immunity would happen at something below 10%.
So it comes down to data. If the article is right about the Swedish data it suggest that, with Swedish behavior — social distancing but no lockdown — herd immunity happens at about 20%.
Heterogenity doesn’t lower R0, which is sort of the point. R0 is the expected number of people infected by an infected person, among a 100% vulnerable population. Which means that R0 is an average, and heterogenity will definitely exist. If it doesn’t, then 1-1/R0 is the formula for how many need to be immune for herd immunity.
But R0 is an average and we know that there are superspreaders who are pushing up the average. So for example:
Suppose you had a population of a town of 10,000 people where R0 is 3. (You assume it is 3 because your disease went through a very similar town and the first 100 people infected 300, then those 300 infected 900.) In this town, 90% are extreme introverts working from home, and 5% go to the big church every sunday and socialize, and 5% go to the night club. If you infect a church goer or a night clubber they will infect 25 other people each. Because R0 is an average, we calculate that the introverts will infect .56 people each.
Now you start infecting people: the church goers pretty quickly spread the disease among themselves, and the same with the night clubbers. Pretty soon they are all immune, after two or three rounds of transmission. Meanwhile, the introverts have been getting a few infections but haven’t passed them on much.
Once your church goers and nightclubbers are immune, your effective reproduction rate is less than .56 and you have herd immunity with maybe 12% of the population having ever had the infection. Whereas a naive 1-1/R0 formula tells you that you need 66% of the population immune for herd immunity.
Aren’t we missing the social element in all of this? Meaning that even though Sweden might have very few governmental/top-down restrictions, people are implementing their own restrictions (aka bottom-up). So that is lowering the transmission rate by a fair amount. So temporarily the “herd immunity” threshold is much lower. But once people stop changing their behavior (and this will probably be a gradual thing and perhaps behavior will change semi-permanently), then infection rate will increase, or perhaps simply not decrease as one would expect. Someone already made the point below and someone else posted an equation for the “total” number of cases, but just because herd immunity is decreasing transmission does not mean transmission stops. I believe it will definitely be a “slow burn” with potential for flare-ups.
But if you’re looking at a ‘hammer and dance’ strategy, Sweden is now possibly a model of what the ‘dance’ might look like.
Some of the closed populations like that korean cult and some of the cruise ships should give us a fair idea of how much of the population have some resistance.
Keep in mind, in epidemiology, anything that makes you less likely to pick up a disease counts as a protective factor. But that doesn’t mean they’re static.
So if a large chunk of the population react to the outbreak by isolating themselves then they look like a resistant chunk of the population.
But if people start going on TV shouting “crisis over, herd immunity achieved!” and that same group start coming out and socialising again then suddenly the resistance is stripped away.
That would tell you how much of the population has some biological resistance. Most of what is at issue here, though, is behavioral resistance. Some people are resistant to infection because they do not engage in behaviors likely to result in infection. We’d like to quantify that, but we can’t do it by looking at cruise ships and cult gatherings because the behaviors we are interested in are things like “doesn’t go on cruises” and “doesn’t join religious cults”.
The fact that even on a cruise ship, basic self-isolation was enough to prevent some 80% of the population from getting infected strikes me as incredibly promising, but what do I know…
Did infection actually *stop* spreading on any of the cruise ships? Or did they just find that it had reached only 20% or 60% or whatever of the population by the time they got evacuated? (In most cases this was only after a couple weeks.)
IIRC, the final rate of infection was comparable on the USS Theodore Roosevelt.
There’s also behavioral resistance like never touching one’s face except with freshly cleaned hands, even if no one else is looking. This should still be present in cruise ships and most cults.
Unfortunately you’re probably right that the measure is confounded beyond hope. Anyone’s guess is as good as mine as to what are the relative contributions of these two kinds of behavioral resistance.
Then again, I suppose those populations would be good for quantifying a lower bound of overall resistance, counting biological and some behavioral.
“There’s also behavioral resistance like never touching one’s face except with freshly cleaned hands, even if no one else is looking.”
I think that the base rate of this sort of behavioral resistance is likely substantially below 1%, except in populations consisting primarily of biomedical professionals or other people that regularly work with hazardous materials. I think it would be pretty negligible within most cruise ships and cults. (Or at least, would have been a few months ago – if you started new cruises or cults, they’d probably have a lot of people with this behavior now.)
+ people who cook a lot with chiles….
Is anyone able to give me a plausible explanation of what exactly went on with Obama and the investigation of Trump?
I’m aware of the various controversies since Trump became president. But what exactly is the understanding now about how this all got started? How does Flynn fit in to this issue, exactly? And how does Russia fit in, exactly? (I mean with Flynn and Obama specifically–I don’t need a rehash of every Russia-related allegation that has come up.) I know we don’t have all the details, and I know there are various partisan interpretations of this, and conspiracy theories, but what basic things do we know, and what do they plausibly suggest? I don’t want to get into whether certain things were justified so much as why they were done in the first place and at whose instigation.
Are people saying that they got a little drunk in on power, spied on Trump, realized it would look bad, and tried to cover it up, but it got out of control due to the intense anti-Trump feeling driving an interest in it? If yes, was Obama (or his administration) actually concerned about Trump’s foreign ties and investigating him for that reason? Or were they just investigating him because they had the power to do so and were naturally curious and wanted opposition data? Or were they trying to help the Clinton campaign?
Or was this somehow related to Comey screwing things up with relation to Hillary and then trying to distract from it? Or was Obama actually trying to derail the Trump presidency in advance because he thought Trump was particularly bad news or was resentful about the surprise Clinton loss?
It’s obvious that some in the bureaucracy were not going to accept Trump, and that things rapidly escalated after Trump took office among various officials, but Obama’s apparent involvement prior to leaving office strikes me as a very different matter. I’m confused.
I think you are going to have a very hard time getting straight answers on this from either side, especially since several of the underlying facts are not known (or frankly knowable).
Some general facts about this kind of situation not all of which may apply to this situation:
* It’s generally a fools errand to objectively discuss whether an investigation into anything (government corruption, drugs, illegal gambling, etc) is “justified.” In part this is because who “starts” the initiation is often unknown, or part of a grand causal chain that runs everywhere in the same way that every story is (so where does it begin? When some FBI agent’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss grumbled “I don’t like Trump” at a staff meeting? When Trump announced his candidacy? When Trump was first accused of financial creativity in the 90s? The first guy that thought “I’ll investigate Trump” back in 1987?). Also, given that almost no human motive is pure, especially any human with power, it’s easy to say ‘but for illicit motivation x, y would not have happened.” This is the reason why, in general, things like § 1001 or 4th amendment suppression arguments or criminal trials writ large rarely turn on the “legitimate basis” for the underlying investigation.
* It’s always worth asking “why not both”/”why not all”, especially since human motivations are complicated.
* We don’t know anything, we probably never will. There are fewer and fewer situations where actors are forced to commit or stipulate to facts, or give straight answers publicly. Blame whoever you want for that, you’re right. A few months back I posed a few hypotheticals that attempted to illustrate the difficulties involved in knowing anything with any kind of certainty in the current environment, as it pertains to the executive branch. As an illustration of the inherent complexity of this analysis, see my comment here, which at that point pertained to the Trump administration, but for the purposes of your question would pertain to the Obama administration.
100% agree–that’s why I said I didn’t want to get into it!
And when I say I want to know why, I don’t mean I want a great answer. Yes, simply rubbing someone in the FBI the wrong way can be the start of some major investigation, and that’s the whole story. It’s not odd to me that someone in the the FBI was curious about Trump at any time in the past. But I’m asking for an explanation of Obama’s involvement.
Absolutely, this should be kept in mind. But I doubt in this case all of them were true, or anywhere near equally significant. I’m sure partisanship played a role in any of the possible situations, but that can mean very different things. Was this all sort of predictable political intrigue during the campaign, when no one thought Trump would win, that was hard to explain away with all the drama surrounding Trump’s presidency, and turned into a kind of absurd series of cover ups? Or was there something more strategic going on? I don’t get what Obama’s issue with Flynn is, and it seems to be a pretty big issue.
Also a good point about many such situations, but I do think there are some things we can know here. I’m not looking for a bulletproof story, just a plausible take on what happened. Guess I’ll try and piece it together.
Flynn was almost certainly getting paid by Erdogan to facilitate some kind of kidnapping attempt on Fethullah Gulen.
Pretty sure Obama’s issues with him predate this by quite a bit. It seems obvious that Flynn is perceived as kind of erratic and noncompliant by the standards of the Washington consensus, so that may be enough to explain it, along with his views on foreign policy being incompatible with Obama’s. He apparently thought Obama’s Middle East policy was bad and wanted to cooperate with Russia in Syria, which was an unpopular view. He definitely has his enemies, so Obama finding him aggravating and having a few shouting matches with him could have been enough to explain this aspect. Still think the recently leaked tape where Obama acts appalled at his acquittal is absurd and not something I expected from Obama, which is why I was wondering.
The kidnapping is perhaps one of the “crazy ideas” that he is known for, but to be fair, I don’t think the article establishes anything like he was “almost certainly getting paid by Erdogan to facilitate some kind of kidnapping attempt.” It strongly insinuates that Erdogan may have been willing to offer him money to do so, but he was clearly paid to discuss options, and at some point kidnapping came up. It doesn’t sound like anything more than discussion happened, let alone a deal. And I’m not sure that this is the sort of thing that would appall Obama, either, but I don’t know enough of the context. (Not saying he’d cheer it on, just that he isn’t naive about these sorts of things and in his position knows people who do a lot of shady things.)
Can you offer a hypothesis why, if this is really as true as you portray it to be in the way you portray it (and would be an incredibly serious crime), it wasn’t charged or any part of the plea deal?
“Charged” is pretty easy to explain. They’re not going to charge something they can’t prove, and as I’ve emphasized above, its diabolically hard to get anything like “proof” in these situations.
The plea deal is more complicated. My personal working theory (I pledged at the outset that I wouldn’t get into my own theories but oh well) is that once they had a straightforward crime, indeed committed, they decided not to bog things down by going down rabbit holes. Tack a charge to the guy. Clean headshot. Happens all the time in federal cases.
One really important phenomenon that has come out of Flynn and Stone is that the routine practices of federal law enforcement are (finally) getting questioned at every turn because they look shady as heck. Some unqualified good that *might* come out of this is a more scrupulous DOJ and FBI, but I worry this special rigor is unique to both offenders.
This makes no sense to me. A crime that is massively bigger and more important than anything else they’ve got certainly doesn’t seem like “going down rabbit holes”. It would be as if they got a whiff of Paul Manafort’s tax evasion and bank fraud and thought, “Nah, we don’t want to go down that rabbit hole; we can get him on 1001.” Asking for 0-6 months for 1001 is soooooo far from a “clean headshot” if you actually have him literally getting paid by a foreign head of state to attempt literal kidnapping of a political dissident on US soil.
Well but the issue is precisely what you mean by “have him?” Have him on tape? Sure they’d do right ahead and do that. “Have him” in the sense that all his actions, known and rumored, add up to the clear conclusion that he’s doing that…not so. This is especially true because reality adds messy factors that complicate everything: is he really earnestly going ahead with the kidnapping or is he just telling people that so he can get money? Is the whole operation a double/triple/quadruple play and he’s really just going along with it to gather intelligence? Is the guy who told you about the guy who told you about this just shining you on? Does he have some legitimate basis for doing this? (And in case that last one sounds ridiculous just think about how hard it is to meaningfully discuss “legitimate basis” these days).
A prosecutor can do a lot of institutional credibility damage by bringing a charge they cannot prove, and dropping something like that out of thin air could easily torpedo a plea deal. If you can get a win,you take it.
I think this is the right question, and it’s the one that I want broblawsky to answer. If he thinks they have extremely good information (“almost certainly”), then it remains to be explained why they didn’t charge it. If the level of evidence is much lower, then perhaps we should rethink how we understand his words about “almost certainly”. So far, in the documents I’ve read, I’ve seen no indication that they even had an open investigation on this matter, much less that the factual record was developed enough that it was something that a prosecutor was even considering. The conversation was reported to have happened in the summer of 2016. The documents we have now about the genesis of the investigation of Flynn, the almost closing, the transference to Mueller’s shop, and the ultimate plea deal show no indication of this being anything they were even looking into. (Remember, we’re in the phase of the flip flop where everyone who is against Trump is rushing to remind the world how extremely low the predication requirement is for starting an investigation, yet we have no indication from any of these documents that they even had that extremely low level of predication.) The plea deal does reference Turkey, but only WRT a March 2017 FARA filing concerning “improving U.S. business organizations’ confidence regarding doing business in Turkey” and an op-ed.
So, let me actually go one further. If he “almost certainly” committed this extremely serious crime, why does it never show up in any of the official documents we have from all of the significant investigations surrounding him? Not even at the level of predication, much less as part of a plea deal? If they’re even trying to hang over his head, “We might not win, but we can make your life hell by prosecuting a borderline case on this issue (on which you have massive criminal exposure) if you don’t plead to this other thing,” it would show up somewhere. (The answer may be, “I think that maybe it was opened up separately in some document we don’t have access to yet,” but I want to know if there are any better theories.)
I’m just going to focus on this part, because I think it will go a long way toward explaining why bob can talk in “almost certainlies” and other people can be rightly skeptical and ultimately, we never touch bottom to something “hard.”
So to be abundantly clear: there is no concrete predication requirement, just the extremely fuzzy jimmeny-cricket-style one that’s in each of our hearts and says its rude to poke into other people’s business without good reason. This is because, in the preliminary phases of any investigation (especially one like this) it’s just gonna be “people are saying.” (IE “people are saying he had a meeting and at that meeting he said”…or even a step farther “People are saying he had a meeting with people that other people are saying want to do this.”). Tragically, for everyone involved, with these investigations its often quite hard to get beyond “people are saying”…you might find nice pieces of paper with everything written on them, but those pieces of paper are just going to say “people are saying [x]”
I’m not sure what Bob’s ultimately gonna say, but it’s likely going to match what’s stated here: https://thehill.com/policy/defense/421780-turkey-and-michael-flynn-five-things-to-know
Which looks pretty damning but of course it’s just stuff people said happened.
EDITS: concerning predication
Still think the recently leaked tape where Obama acts appalled at his acquittal is absurd and not something I expected from Obama
Haven’t seen that one, but with the Tara Reade accusation, however much it is being softpedalled in the media, and with the perceived lack of support for his former VP’s campaign by Obama, this strikes me as precisely the kind of deliberate leaking I’d expect.
Obama is/was a career politician, he’s not loud and flashy, doing a “high minded from the moral high ground oh how appalling that a Trump crony is exonerated on dubious grounds” signal to help deflect any heat from Biden is the kind of low-key, unobvious support for the Democratic nominee I’d expect – not coming out and going “Vote for Joe!” (that kind of stumping will come much later, if it comes at all) but “look at all the mud sticking to Trump!” subtle comparison.
I had not considered the possibility of a deliberate leak but that strikes me as a perfectly plausible theory.
As I said in my initial reply, I don’t think anyone can say he was “almost certainly getting paid by Erdogan to facilitate some kind of kidnapping attempt.” Maybe Erdogan was trying to assess his willingness, but there’s no claim any deal resulted. He was being paid as a consultant to discuss options of some sort. At best, you could say he almost certainly discussed it, which isn’t the same as seriously considering it, advising it, or bringing it up in the first place. I wouldn’t expect criminal charges because there doesn’t appear to be any evidence he agreed to do anything illegal with regard to this, let alone went through with it, and I’m pretty sure that kind of consulting is legal. There seems to be a belief that no one is ever allowed to talk to foreign governments or those connected to them. There are certain restrictions and declarations depending on one’s position, but I’m pretty sure consulting for foreign governments is a normal second career.
Agreed that the Obama thing was a deliberate leak, probably to pump up the faithful in a low-key way, but this just seems so forced, dramatic, and weak.
Let me offer a parable.
My friend comes to me one day, in tears, and explains that her husband Raymond is cheating on her. This is step one. At step one, am I “almost certain” that Raymond is cheating on my friend? I am. I trust my friend, she’s crying, she does not make such accusations lightly. I assume she can prove what she says.
But perhaps I’m a gullible fool…and after all, I do know Raymond. He’s no monster. So we go on to step two. I ask my friend “How do you know?”
She offers up five facts
* Raymond told her he was going to have to work late on Tuesday. He did not come home until 3 A.M.
* Raymond’s credit card shows he paid for 2 meals, 2 drinks, and 1 dessert on Tuesday night.
* Anthony says he saw Raymond at a motel on Tuesday night.
* Dallas says Raymond was bragging about cheating on his wife in a bar just this afternoon
* There is a cell phone video of Raymond, seated at a bar on Tuesday night. In the video, Raymond tells the whole bar that he’s a “swinging bachelor.” Raymond is not wearing his wedding ring.
Am I now “almost certain” that Raymond is cheating on my friend? The question isn’t “can I imagine a scenario in which Raymond is innocent?” of course I can. Maybe Anthony and Dallas are lying. Maybe Anthony and Dallas aren’t lying and there’s a totally innocent explanation for both behaviors. Maybe Raymond is messing around in the video. Maybe he took a client out to dinner. Maybe he was thinking about cheating and backed out at the very last second. We have no “hard evidence”, let alone “proof”…but damn the man anyway. I’m nearly certain he’s cheating on my friend, and we ought to act accordingly: At the very least, my friend should ask him for more information, perhaps in a way that doesn’t look like an outright grilling, so he doesn’t put his guard up.
The five facts lead me to a conclusion (and advice) by way of my internal, highly personal, assessment of the credibility of various actors and my understanding of what does and doesn’t look like “normal” behavior. It’s very hard to escape a situation where this is how we draw conclusions.
To clarify on this, I agree with you that this general approach is one Obama might take. But Flynn wasn’t charged with perjury, and Obama definitely knows that (and that it’s not unusual to fail to bring perjury charges or dismiss charges relating to Flynn’s actual crime, lying to the FBI.) There are several points in the record at which Obama’s legal judgment seems to go missing when he talks about Flynn. I thought this was out-of-context paraphrasing or simple gossip, but here we know exactly what Obama said, and I find it highly suspicious. Yes, maybe he was making it easier for laypeople to follow, or just misspoke. But this was a clip he wanted out there, and I just don’t buy it. He’s a careful speaker, and it was an odd thing to focus on. I don’t believe he thinks the rule of law is collapsing due to the Flynn case. The other comments about longterm bipartisan trends in American politics echo earlier concerns he has expressed, and ring a lot truer.
I agree with the point you make here, but the example you does not seem like a very good analogy to what happened with Flynn. In fairness, I was only basing my argument on the WSJ article originally linked, and the second link has more detail. But still, it looks like Flynn was hired by Erdogan associates to use his influence to convince the administration to turn Gulen over, and to turn the public against Gulen. I can see why people find this very bad, but it is not the same as being paid to kidnap him. We have no evidence of such a plan, as far as I know. It might have come up in conversation as Erdogan grew frustrated that there were no “legal” options, but there’s no good reason to think Flynn committed to doing it and was paid for his commitment. I think it is fair to say it is almost certain Flynn did shady stuff on behalf of the Turkish government, but not that he was paid to facilitate a literal kidnapping.
The evidence provided by my five facts is perfectly consistent with Raymond wanting to cheat on his wife, then backing out at the last minute. It’s also perfectly consistent with him trying to cheat and failing, hoping to cheat and getting nowhere, thinking about cheating but not acting on it, and grinding away the hours at work, taking a client to dinner, and dropping her off at a motel. Also, by my facts above we have no idea whether or not my friend and Raymond have an open relationship. Who’s to say?
Recall that when we’re discussing the early phases of an investigation, or allegations of misconduct, or the behavior of remote actors whose true motives we can never know for certain, we’re not talking about whether known behaviors are themselves a crime (you can always, always, always excuse behaviors with additional facts, even a smoking gun proves nothing if both parties reached for it). We’re talking about whether it’s fair to assume certain behaviors might constitute a crime. (and edit for what It’s worth I don’t think Bob is discussing literal kidnapping in the strictly legal sense…how could that be discussed? Kidnapping is something that has to be met element-by-element, then charged and proven beyond a reasonable doubt. We’ll never know enough to do that. I think Bob’s discussing this in the dictionary sense of “taking someone from where they live and holding them somewhere else against their will”).
Five facts:
* certain parties wanted Gulen literally kidnapped (in every sense of the word)
* those parties actively explored means of illegally carrying out this kidnapping. They also explored means of influencing politicians to carry out basically the same thing semi-legally (through extradition, then kidnapping)
* Flynn took money from those parties
* Flynn lied about his knowledge of where the money came from
* the parties who paid flynn seem to assume Flynn was helping them in their efforts to obtain Gulen
* Flynn did lots of stuff that made it easier for those parties to literally kidnap gulen, or extradite him in all manner of creative ways, *then* kidnap him
If Flynn’s my friend, I’m gonna need a lot more. If Raymond’s my friend, I’m likewise gonna need a lot more. The question is how many fair ways there are there to connect the dots.
EDIT: Added a sixth fact, also some stuff about kidnapping
@theodidactus
I get what you’re saying and agree with it. I guess where I see a difference is that if I saw Flynn go into a room with a woman, I’d probably guess he was hooking up with her. If I saw Flynn meeting with Erdogan associates, I’d believe he was offering to use his knowledge, connections, and influence to help them get their way with something. Many of these things would be shady, but my guess is they go to someone like him for help with political pressure and contacts, not kidnapping logistics. But there very few situations in which I would consider that the likely reason for meeting with someone to orchestrate a kidnapping, unless Flynn was known to be some sort of hitman-type figure, or had a history of kidnapping, or was assigned to coordinate an authorized kidnapping mission for his own country while working in intelligence. Or if the kidnapping had actually occurred shortly after the meeting and Flynn had no other explanation for being there, as well as possible connections to the kidnapping.
Had this man actually been kidnapped by Erdogan as part of a plot in which Flynn was involved, it would have been investigated, and it would have been a huge risk for Flynn in terms of major criminal charges. All the other stuff is much lower risk, most not even criminal, even though it ended up being used against him to get the lying to the FBI conviction. I’m pretty sure he knew he was being watched closely enough that he couldn’t pull that off. It just strikes me as unlikely that if they decided to make a move with outright kidnapping, they’d be using Flynn. I’m even not saying Flynn was above participating if they had. There’s just no evidence they actually made a plot to kidnap him. And I don’t think getting him extradited counts as kidnapping, even if he knows it will end badly. It would be morally objectionable, of course, but not a crime.
This all assumes that the articles quoted are essentially based in reality, of course. As you say, we’ll never know exactly what conclusions are the correct ones to draw from a story like this. Based on my reading today, I should add that this story may well be mostly nonsense. For whatever reason, there have been truly bizarre press attacks on Flynn, and I’d take almost nothing in good faith at this point. I have no doubt Flynn has done some shady things in his life, but I think there’s been some major disinformation involved lately. Matt Taibbi wrote up some really good stuff on the weird reporting surrounding Flynn, including here.
I’ll drop this subject shortly, but look at the WSJ article.
James Woolsey, ex-CIA, who makes all these allegations, goes there as part of Flynn’s team. He doesn’t seem to have had any hesitations going to this meeting, and doesn’t explain what he thought it was for. Woolsey says he arrived “in the middle of the discussion and found the topic startling and the actions being discussed possibly illegal.” This topic was, in his words, getting Gulen “to Turkey without going through the U.S. extradition legal process.”
I mean, what exactly was being proposed here that is only “possibly illegal”? The whole thing is very vague. They never say “by force.” Was it by false pretenses? The WSJ says others at the meeting support this account, but gives no more detail than that the idea was to take Gulen from the U.S. to Turkey, and that “The Turkish ministers were interested in open-ended thinking on the subject, and the ideas were raised hypothetically…” What?!? “Open-ended thinking.” This just sounds like trying to make something sound more sinister than it is.
Later in the article, you can see this turns out to relate to Syria, which was apparently the major point of contention between Flynn, Obama, and the establishment in general.
Was that literally the entire hypothetical — “what if we showed up at night and ‘whisked’ him away?” That’s what Woolsey seems to be saying, while also saying there was no suggestion of force being used somehow. You don’t need consultants to come up with the idea of going to his house–you’d need them for the next part, getting him to Turkey. But apparently literally nothing was said about what would happen next, or even the most basic approach to getting hold of him. This is just a totally unnatural account. “It seemed to be naive,” Mr. Woolsey said about the discussion. “I didn’t put a lot of credibility in it.” This truly reads to me like Woolsey was pressured by the FBI to say something against Flynn, but isn’t willing to actually lie, so he is pretending that things which were essentially jokes or non-literal suggestions were baffling to him–I just stumbled in and heard this crazy remark – why didn’t Flynn know that this was illegal? Guess he is kind of credulous! I almost had to step in and remind him there might be legal concerns here, but fortunately they moved on!
Woolsey seems to suggest that this topic was totally unexpected for him, and it is possible he thought he was there for what Flynn claimed was the actual purpose of the meeting, but The Hill article shows how shady the Inovo company that hired him sounds, so I don’t know what to make of that. But this really may have been nothing more than a joking reference to Turkey’s troubles with Gulen during a meeting mostly about something entirely different. It does sound like he tried to hide the fact that he was working on Turkey’s behalf, but then, shortly after, he wrote an op-ed defending Erdogan and going after Gulen, allegedly prompting the whole investigation. So he certainly wasn’t keeping a low profile! And I don’t understand the contents of the indictment of the Inovo guys–I get the failing to register thing, but it’s a crime to influence public opinion? Flynn had authority to make criminal referrals to someone? I find the press coverage here the most newsworthy aspect.
I’m not aware of any evidence yet of Obama’s personal involvement with the Flynn case. There is evidence in the recently-released documents that some White House officials were directly in the loop with the FBI, but Obama, himself, doesn’t make an appearance.
The closest involvement I’ve see in the documents comes from the IG report on Crossfire Hurricane. To set the stage, they got the Papadopoulos information. They had to figure out what to do with it. They could give the Trump campaign defensive briefings in order to warn them that the Russians might be tryna fux with stuff. Or, they could try to quietly investigate it. In a decision that is defensible in the abstract (and defensible/not defensible in the concrete probably depending upon your opinion of the quality of the information they had at the time), they decided, “If there is a Russian agent working in the Trump campaign, then giving them a defensive briefing might alert the Russians, and they could change their operations, so we’re going to do investigations instead of briefings.”
Their predication for Flynn was probably the weakest. There was nothing direct identifying him as being involved with anything untoward or related. It was really just, “He’s an adviser to the Trump campaign, has various ties to state-affiliated entities of Russia, and traveled to Russia in 2015.” Extremely light predication. And a first, they took extremely light steps, which probably seem reasonably proportional to the extremely light predication. They were going to close out his case until they saw that VPOTUS publicly claimed that Flynn told him something that the FBI knew wasn’t true. Currently, people are fiercely disagreeing about whether or not that justifies the FBI’s choice to interview him and then Mueller’s choice to prosecute a 1001 violation.
Anyway, getting back to Obama, at some point in the process, the White House came knocking – “Tell us everything you’re doing about Russia.” The FBI goes to brief Obama. Apparently, here, they decide that the investigation into (the possible Russian agents in) the Trump campaign is totally separate from any ‘Russia investigation’. They don’t tell Obama about anything they’re doing concerning the investigation into Trump campaign folks. And at this moment… Obama suggests they “think about giving defensive briefings” to the Trump campaign. I would give soooo much to know what they said to him at that moment. Did they really just totally swallow their tongues? Does this entire thing brewing in the FBI just narrowly skirt by oversight from the President because he didn’t ask, “Have you considered giving defensive briefings?” or any of a number of questions that would basically require them to go into some detail about what they were up to and why they made the choices they made?? But yeah, best I can tell from the published documents, this was the closest Obama got to personally being involved.
The whole story is a really bad look for the FBI for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is that at multiple steps along the way, they managed to narrowly skirt oversight from either DOJ or the White House for the more controversial things that they were doing. In this story, they just barely avoided letting the White House know what they were doing. In the story about the Flynn interview, not only did they not inform DOJ until they had already sent the guys over to interview him, they didn’t work the normal process through the White House Council, either. Comey described it as “getting away with it” (note, this was in the extremely early days of the Trump administration, not still during the Obama administration). But yeah, at least through the official documents, as far as I can tell, the FBI managed to avoid any real direct involvement of Obama in the Flynn case.
This is very informative and outlines what we do/don’t know. Thank you.
Apparently there is, though. If you look on page 44, Exhibit 4, the interview with Sally Yates. According to her, she first learned about Flynn’s phone call with Ambassador Kislyak directly from Obama in the Oval Office, on January 5th. This is odd because previously we were told Flynn became interesting because the statements he gave to VP Pence were not true (about not discussing sanctions), but that didn’t come to light until January 15th when Pence was on Face the Nation. So the question is, why was Obama personally paying attention to Flynn’s private phone calls 10 days before that?
You are correct. I had misremembered. I remembered Yates being surprised in a meeting at the WH, but for some reason, I had somehow mentally binned that as, “It was a moment when someone else in the room told Obama, and Yates was caught off guard,” and I think I mentally moved the timeline around, as well. There are a lot of moving parts here, and I screwed that one up. Good catch.
Upon rereading this section, it’s interesting that he kicked out Brennan/Clapper, because what I was referring to was on page 32 about ODNI GC Litt being the one who brought up the Logan Act and that Clapper was in the loop. It’s sort of presumed that something over here was the likely route by which Obama may have been originally informed, but I had misremembered the bit about Obama being the one to break it to Yates rather than someone else in the room.
This is depressing for the sake of, well, the entirety of the rule of law and government, because that strongly leans to “The FBI was mucking about with its own agenda telling nobody and doing whatever it bloody well liked in its own sweet time” and what, was the lich of J. Edgar Hoover back in his old office running things again? Somebody somewhere at some level had to decide “yeah, we’re doing this, tell the lads I’m signing off on the overtime”.
Thank you—need to reread and digest this, but this was helpful.
We can’t really know because we’re all looking at testimony and documents disclosed by people who, if they were up to no good, have a strong incentive to hide or obfuscate the truth. But my opinion is that a small group of people high up in the intelligence community (Brennan, Clapper, Strzok, etc) wanted to help their future boss get elected, so they used the NSA spy machine on her opponent, with the goal of either spying on campaign operations or obtaining dirt or scandalous information they could leak to the press (or do parallel construction if they found something criminal).
They needed some kind of justification for this, and since the NSA panopticon is for spying on foreigners, their justification must involve foreigners. They look at Trump’s campaign associates to see who they can plausibly (for some value of “plausibly”) target, and go after Carter Page because he knows Russians, and the Russians are a good bogeyman. They can’t go after Trump for ties to Israel because that looks like antisemitism, and nobody would believe China, but the Russians are fair game. They get a warrant stating that Page was a knowing agent of a foreign government, with no explanation of how this could possibly be, when just months before he was the star witness in prosecuting Russian spies. This warrant gives them “two hops” collection ability, so they can now collect all of Trump’s communications since Page knows Trump.
Hillary was supposed to win and the “investigation” would be quietly dropped. No one would ever know. But then the unthinkable happened, Trump won, this information started leaking out, and they had to double down, so we got the whole Trump-Russia conspiracy theory and investigations and Mueller and all that. Flynn is just part of this. I don’t see any evidence Obama was involved.
Can’t prove it, but that’s my opinion.
What evidence could falsify this belief?
Some evidence that Carter Page was a knowing agent of a foreign government would go a fair way.
That’s fair. Thank you for answering.
I think there are some problems with some of your other characterizations, but I want to note that this part is particularly important to get right. Traditional FISA, which requires the warrant, is about content of communications (i.e., they can listen in on your calls). It does not apply for two hops. If Carter Page talks to Person X and Person X talks to Person Y, they cannot collect the content of Person X’s communications with Person Y.
Separately, there is an authority to collect metadata. Among the various things that USAFA did, they enshrined the two-hop (instead of three-hop) rule for this and changed the process flow a bit. FBI would have to go to the telecoms to get metadata associated with Carter Page. Then, if Carter Page called Trump, they’d have to go back (with new “reasonable articulable suspicion” associated with Trump’s identifier) and ask for Trump’s data in a separate request. This process doesn’t involve the court, so the existence of the warrant for content collection doesn’t necessarily shed light on whether they did separate metadata collection (or subsequent derivative queries).
I could see the argument for, “Why wouldn’t they?” I can also see the argument for, “Different cases actually genuinely benefit from different tools. It makes a lot of sense to go after lots of metadata when you’re trying to pick a terrorist group out of comms network from a blob of random people in Afghanistan, but in cases like this, it’s much more important to know what they’re talking about.” If I had to guess, I’d say it’s reasonably likely they grabbed Page’s metadata, but it’s already unlikely enough that Page actually spoke directly to Trump, and I would be frankly pretty shocked if they took Trump’s number/identifier, said, “Yep, we have RAS for this,” and got his metadata, too (because, again, this has to be an affirmative step that they take; they can’t just query Carter Page, sit back, passively get Trump’s hopped metadata, and proclaim, “Oops! We didn’t really know that it was going to give us this!”).
This is something that genuinely may have just not come out yet (help us John Durham, you’re our only hope). If it did happen, I think it would be a massive scandal, and I think it’s almost certain that Durham/Barr would declassify and expose it, because I cannot overstate how much of a political boon it would be for Trump.
Gotcha, thanks for the clarification.
But when you say “data,” you mean the contents of his communications, correct? But they wouldn’t need any sort of authorization for his metadata, so by getting the FISA warrant on Page, they would be able to see all the records of who Trump called and when, correct? Pretty useful if you’re hoping Trump was calling a mob boss or Mistress #4,723 and you’d like to tip off the press.
Also, as an aside, I think there is an important distinction people need to make between access and authorization. They have to go back to the court for authorization to query the database for the information, but it’s not like the court is handing out passwords. If they were already someone with access to the database, they can query what they want. Now, there should be query logs of who accessed what, and if you accessed something without authorization you would be in trouble, but only if somebody’s looking.
No, sorry. That’s the one spot where I slipped up and didn’t include the meta.
This isn’t the case. Having a FISA warrant or not having a FISA warrant is irrelevant to whether or not they can get Trump’s metadata (who he called and when).
I see that I screwed up a second time. They don’t actually need RAS for the second hop. Ok, let me go through it slowly and try not to screw up this time. Totally without a FISA warrant, they can go to the telecoms and say, “This is Carter Page’s number. We have reasonable articulable suspicion… foreign intelligence information… mumble mumble… give us all his metadata.” Then, out of that set, they could conceivably take Trump’s number (if it’s there), go back to the telecoms and say, “We want all of this number’s metadata.” They can do all of this without a FISA warrant. And you’re correct that this could be pretty useful if you’re hoping he’s calling a mob boss or another mistress.
Sidenote: this seems like a very strong power, and it is. However, we should note that it’s not Super Special Foreign Intelligence stuff. It’s very close to the same thing as regular subpoenas used in regular domestic criminal law enforcement (or even civil actions… or discovery in criminal trials). The standards are really low, and FISA subpoenas basically string replace “is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation” with “is relevant for foreign intelligence information”. The controversy from the Bush/Obama years was that the gov’t was just collecting all the metadata and then applying the (low) standard on individual queries and that there were no judges/grand juries in the individualized process. Whereas…
…now, they don’t actually have “the” database of metadata. The telecoms have the data that they keep. If the gov’t goes and gets Carter Page’s metadata, that’s all they get. That’s all they can rummage around in. They don’t physically have Trump’s metadata. They would have to find Trump’s number in Page’s metadata and then take the affirmative step of going back to the telecom with Trump’s number to say, “…and we want all of this guy’s metadata, too.” (They don’t need independent RAS for this, which is what I screwed up above, but they do need to go back with Trump’s number, specifically.) There would be a record of this document, and it would be one of the top ten hypothetical bombshells I could think of Durham dropping. (This part of FISA has actually lapsed right now; there was talk of dropping it entirely. If Durham dropped this bombshell, I have to imagine it would never come back.)
Again, all of that is doable without a FISA warrant. The FISA warrant lets them go and collect the content of Carter Page’s communications, and that’s it. They can’t bootstrap this into the content of Trump’s communications, and they don’t need to use it to get Trump’s metadata.
Why are they going to the telecoms? Don’t they already have all this from PRISM/XKeyscore, all that? It’s already collected, they just don’t (pinky promise) look at it until they’re authorized to do so by the court.
XKEYSCORE is just back-end database software. I have no idea why anyone decided to focus any outrage on XKEYSCORE. PRISM is a collection method. So far, we’ve been talking mostly about legal process. Let me back up all the way to the beginning. First, you have legal authorities. These are parts of the statutes that authorize gov’t agencies to do stuff. Examples of commonly-discussed authorities are Traditional FISA, Section 215, and Section 702 (the names that stuck don’t always make sense). Each of these authorities has some amount of legal process involved, and methods by which they actually execute the collection.
Traditional FISA is concerning US persons (citizens, people on American soil, and I think a couple other categories), and the gov’t has to go to FISC with probable cause that a particular person is an agent of a foreign power (and other little things), and FISC has to approve the warrant. This is what happened with Carter Page. Traditional FISA usually authorizes ongoing surveillance of communications (like a Title III wiretap warrant in regular domestic criminal law enforcement). There are some other things possible here; the exact requests are redacted; we can assume they asked for this, and it’s probably the biggest deal thing. Now, they have to implement it using some method. Warrants are just pieces of paper; they don’t execute themselves. As far as I am aware, the process of executing a Traditional FISA ongoing surveillance warrant is the same as a Title III wiretap warrant. CALEA makes sure the telecoms have the ability to wiretap their phone lines, so the gov’t takes the warrant to the telecom; the telecom turns on the wiretap and forwards the content of calls to the feds. The details of this last bit may be a bit different for internet communications (there isn’t a CALEA or uniform standard here), but the basic idea is the same. They have a warrant and Carter Page’s GMail address? They go to Google, and Google starts forwarding them his email.
Moving on to Section 215. This is the metadata authority we’ve been talking about. The mechanism is that they take a subpoena-like piece of paper to the companies, and the companies give them the corresponding metadata. They’re allowed to collect the metadata of Americans this way. (Again, this used to be different, which might be the cause of some confusion. They used to actually collect it all in bulk and then put restrictions on querying. That changed in 2015.)
Throwing Section 702 in the mix is what really confuses a lot of people. Section 702 is a legal authority. It authorizes the gov’t to collect both content and non-content metadata of foreigners on foreign soil (for a foreign intelligence purpose and other minor qualifiers). Foreigners on foreign soil have never had 4A protections, so they don’t have to run the individualized legal process through a judge. Things get even more confusing when talking about Section 702, because there are two different collection methods – PRISM and Upstream. We’ve finally made it to PRISM. PRISM is actually just another version of the collection methods we’ve seen above – the gov’t takes their 702-based subpoena-like piece of paper to companies, and companies give them data.
There’s a lot of back story to why Section 702 became a thing, but you can imagine what they’re exploiting here. Especially in an internet world, tons of foreigners use products that are US-based. If TerroristA@yahoo.com sends an email to TerroristB@gmail.com, it could be the case that Terrorist A is in Afghanistan and Terrorist B is in Syria, but their communication is very possibly going through a server or two somewhere around Silicon Valley. The gov’t doesn’t have to go to Afghanistan or Syria or anywhere in between; they can just waltz down to California and have Yahoo! or Google give them the email. (One of the reasons why 702 exists is because doing this collection in the United States would have otherwise been a violation of ECPA. The existence of 702 is why many countries have started doing things like demanding data localization from the big internationals; they hate 702, because it genuinely gives US intel an advantage.)
Anyway, quick note that the second collection method for Section 702 is called Upstream. You’ve probably heard of NSA taps at the big fiber coming into/going out of the country. This is Upstream. Upstream was meant to cover some of the gaps in PRISM, but it is significantly more difficult to do and more dangerous. The FBI isn’t allowed to use Upstream (they can use PRISM), and there are a variety of additional constraints put on Upstream that aren’t put on PRISM. But fundamentally, the legal authority that lets them collect via Upstream is still Section 702 – they have to be [doing a variety of things to try to make sure that they’re only] collecting the data of foreigners on foreign soil.
In sum, PRISM collects a lot of stuff, but being authorized by Section 702, it’s all stuff that has been targeted to belonging to particular foreigners on foreign soil. They can’t collect Carter Page’s metadata or content data this way, because he’s a US citizen. Section 215 allows them to take Carter Page’s phone number to the telecoms and get all his metadata; if they can find Trump’s number in that trove, they can go back and ask for all the metadata associated with his number, but this is an affirmative step that would be memorialized on a piece of paper somewhere. We don’t know for sure if FBI did any of that, but we do know that they got a warrant under Traditional FISA to collect the content of his communications (but there is no method by which one can “hop” to either Trump’s data or metadata from this). XKEYSCORE is just database software and you should automatically discount the reliability of any journalistic outlet you read who claims that its existence is some massive outrage.
…clear as mud?
I mostly agree with this, except I think they intended to have dirt on both candidates. I think our surveillance / intelligence agencies are largely out of control and are a power unto themselves. This is like 100x as important as Trump’s latest follies for the long-term well-being of the US, but it gets approximately 0.01% of the coverage of Trump’s latest outrageous tweet.
Is anyone able to give me a plausible explanation of what exactly went on with Obama and the investigation of Trump?
(1) I have no idea, there have been so many wild swings at impeaching Trump and starting up investigations about him, his family, his associates, his administration members, and his dog (if he has one) that I can’t keep track of what’s going on
(2) Purely wild speculation on my own part and probably going to sound a little boo-outgroup, not to mention tin-foil hat territory, but given that (a) there’s the suggestion Clinton’s campaign wanted Trump as the Republican nominee because they felt out of them all, he was the candidate that would do most damage to the entire Republican campaign and the easiest to beat and (b) what you say there about “they got a little drunk in on power, spied on Trump, realized it would look bad, and tried to cover it up”, there may have been a certain element of quid pro quo going on, Obama/Obama administration officials paying off internal party favours to the Clinton campaign. If Trump was going to be selected as the Republican nominee, all well and good, but then to be sure of beating him you need the kind of dirt that political campaigns like to throw at their opponents. You need something juicy for the attack ads. So having the Obama adminstration use their powers to do a little bit of official dirt-gathering, via phone tapping etc., that could be passed on to the administration-in-waiting is something I could see happening, because yeah Hillary’s record strikes me as just that corrupt when it comes to climbing the next step of the ladder.
And then it got out of hand.
All the above rank guessing with nothing to back it up, just impressions.
I mean, just to provide the actual official answer –
The FBI found out the Russian government were actively trying to get Trump elected. This actually was borne out by all the investigations, and it wasn’t just buying Facebook ads – it is still the official position of the American intelligence community and the FBI that it was Russian intelligence that hacked the DNC and leaked their emails, and the Mueller investigation did conclude that the Russian government absolutely was acting to elect Trump; the part they couldn’t prove was the Trump campaign working with them on it.
Meanwhile, the Australian government informed the Obama administration that the Trump campaign was trying to work with the Russian government to get dirt on Hillary. This was based on George Papadopoulos getting drunk and telling the an Australian ambassador to the the UK that it was so. You can believe this was just drunken nonsense talk by Papadopoulos, but the Australians have confirmed that it happened and that they told the US government about it.
So we’ve got a foreign power committing crimes to interfere in an election, and we’ve got an allied government passing along intel that the campaign is in on it.
I’ve yet to see a compelling argument that this is not a perfectly valid basis to start an investigation – even if you think everything after that is a pernicious pack of lies.
No, Papadopoulos told the Australians that the Russians said they have Hillary’s emails. Not that the Trump campaign was working with them. That the Russians had Hillary’s bathroom server emails is the basic inference/joke that
literally everyonelots and lots of Republicans were making.Do you have a source for that? Not asking in a snarky/rhetorical way, would like to read more, the articles I was able to find are light on details of exactly what the Australians told the government.
From Wikipedia:
I think wiki in that sentence is doing the slightly weasely thing of conflating different sets of emails. What Mifsud told him was:
Mifsud tells Papadopoulos the Russians have “emails of Clinton,” (Page 7 of Papadopoulos’ plea) that is, Hillary’s emails. But what was hacked was emails of the DNC and John Podesta. While yes, technically Hillary’s emails would constitute “emails relating to Hillary Clinton,” they phrase it that way to make people think Papadopoulos knew about the Podesta/DNC emails before they were publicly announced in May/June.
It also seems odd that, while the hacking is still ongoing and undiscovered, the GRU agents allegedly doing the hacking are keeping some random Maltese professor in the loop on their state secret level espionage. The more likely explanations are either 1) Mifsud was making it up or 2) he/the Russians were talking about Hillary’s bathroom server emails which were frequently in the news.
Regardless, Papadopolous never tells Downer that the campaign is trying to get the dirt/emails from the Russians, just that the Russians have them.
Matt Taibbi wrote about this. Not sure if things have changed since, but it sounds like these things might be suspiciously competing stories rather than connected.
What does any of that have to do with Mike Flynn?
It’s what started the investigation in the first place, which is why they were interviewing Flynn about his meetings with the Russians, which is what he lied to the FBI about, which is what he got charged with.
Correct. They were just about to close out that case, because they had extremely thin predication on this and found nothing.
Spell this out, because this is a major contention of his defenders. The predication specified that the investigation was about trying to figure out whether he was a witting or unwitting agent of a foreign power. They had already looked into his contacts.
Then, he spoke with Ambassador Kislyak. Was there something in this call that was relevant to whether he was a witting or unwitting agent of a foreign power?
it is still the official position of the American intelligence community and the FBI that it was Russian intelligence that hacked the DNC and leaked their emails
I’m pretty sure I saw things about the Russians also trying to hack the RNC but not getting anywhere much, unlike the efforts to hack the DNC who made it easy for them or any hacker.
Meanwhile, the Australian government informed the Obama administration that the Trump campaign was trying to work with the Russian government to get dirt on Hillary.
And the Hillary campaign was working with people who were working with Russians to get dirt on Trump; the Steele Dossier juicy bits were all over the media. I don’t approve of either of these, but that seems to be the state of the art nowadays for political campaigns. If that justifies an investigation for the Trump campaign, I think that equally there should be an investigation into news entities about “Why did you publish Russian disinformation about a domestic political campaign?” What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
I’m quite sure the Russians would be happy to interfere in elections overseas to influence them to persons/positions favourable to them, and probably did something along those lines – just like every other government which engages in something similar, remember Obama doing his pal Dave Cameron a favour by making statements on the Brexit Referendum?
Okay, I dove in, and here is the impression that I get:
The FBI was poking around as usual, “monitoring” Trump, without a whole lot of legal justification, which I assume happens a lot. Obama naturally got updates on some of the FBI investigations, but probably wasn’t directing anything, and may not have known much about the Trump stuff. Some of the findings likely made it to the Clinton campaign, but I doubt that was the main reason they were doing it. Trump was not generally expected to win. Then he did. For various reasons, the FBI now had to do more explaining of its wide-ranging activities, and was somewhat uncomfortable with this unexpected and outsider administration coming in. So they insisted the snooping was part of necessary counterintelligence operations driven by reports about Trump’s ties to Russia, which had always been a pretext in the sense that the FBI was never seriously concerned about it, and this story got kind of out of control and became a political phenomenon, leading to an increased demand for ways to justify it. Some will dispute this last sentence, and maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t want to rehash the Russia stuff.
A couple years earlier, Obama had fired Flynn, and it was obviously not an amicable parting. He’d also alienated many in the foreign policy community with his unpopular ideas, such as believing the threat of Assad and Putin was exaggerated and that Syrian policy was a debacle. He also has a difficult, outspoken personality that predictably pissed a lot of people off, so he left behind some powerful enemies. I don’t know exactly what happened, but Flynn seems to have made a show out of antagonizing the Obama administration after leaving, culminating in the “Lock Her Up!” chant at the RNC. (I had forgotten that Flynn was a Democrat, and that he was the one who did that!) There seems to have been very deep personal hostility between Obama and Flynn, which is why Obama told Trump not to hire him. When Trump didn’t go along, Obama and others in the administration seem to have started brainstorming ways to screw around with him and make sure he wasn’t allowed a comeback. Maybe at first this was just trash talking of the disloyal Flynn as the administration wrapped up. But the FBI was looking around for justifications of its Russia probe, and having been monitoring the generally denounced behavior of Flynn for some time, saw an opening. They realized no one from the Obama administration (or establishment generally) was going to come to his defense in the slightest, and in fact would, if not participate directly, be happy to indicate that Flynn deserved it. Basically, Obama’s involvement is probably confined to being patently eager to see Flynn crushed, even on an obvious pretext, because of an acrimonious personal and professional history we’ll probably never understand fully. Because of this and because of a desire to defeat Trump in 2020, he continues to play dumb about or indicate approval of certain Russia-related FBI shenanigans connected to Flynn, but probably didn’t direct the FBI’s questionable activities or even know much about them while president.
Basically, the Flynn stuff has always signaled to me that the real driver here was not partisan warfare or the 2016 election specifically. It was internal establishment/FBI intrigue that was coming to the surface as a result of the election aftermath, and which became related with it in complex ways. Matt Taibbi wrote up some really good stuff on the shadiness surrounding Flynn, including here. Even if he lied to the FBI, there was just a lot of weirdness there that needed to be explained.
Great, so the whole mess was a combination of “state agencies operating their own little fiefs with no oversight from their ostensible superiors, spying and gathering dirt just because they wanted leverage/revenge on perceived opponents, enemies and persons of interest, and just because they could” plus “personal beef with guy who pissed off Obama and others in the adminstration who then looked for ways to fuck him over”? What a way to run a country!
I begin to see the appeal of conspiracy theories; it’s somehow more psychologically reassuring if there is “the Boss wanted this done and set his dogs loose to do it” explanation rather than “doesn’t matter who’s in charge nominally, we’re gonna do what we want and fuck the law, fuck the administration, and fuck the public”. Because with the first, there’s some hope of redress or prevention; with the second, if the actual President had no idea what was going on and information was being kept from him, then the entire set-up is screwed and needs to be eradicated root and branch, which will mean so much tearing-up that it will badly affect the entire structure in a wide-ranging way (does the FBI need to be scrapped altogether? do you need or want a replacement agency? how then do you manage federal-level law enforcement?).
it can be done.
My prediction is that we will not get control of our intelligence agencies at this point, and as a result, they will remain a persistent risk to anything like democratic government until someone with very anti-democratic intentions takes them over and uses them to hold power indefinitely.
Yes, exactly. Conspiracy theories in some ways make things simpler as well as complex. They tend to have very defined major interests and objectives they can point to as being served by the behavior. In real life, things are usually more personally or internally driven. And it’s systemic so you can’t really “fix” it beyond a certain point, especially as organizations get bigger and more powerful. While I think it is unlikely we’ll get rid of the FBI, it seems that this is just how it has behaved from the beginning. The nature of such an organization lends itself to creating scandals as much as uncovering them. It’s never going to be good about respecting boundaries, especially with modern technology and current levels of power. It’s easily turned into a political weapon, but not in the neat partisan way people want to believe.
Who the FBI chooses to target often involves a lot of strategy not directly proportional to wrongdoing, and this needs to be kept in mind when evaluating what is really going on. They’re always flipping people by using plea deals for crimes unrelated to the investigation or whatever. That’s legal, but it’s hardly something to be taken at face value. You have to look at why they’re doing it. It looks like they vaguely threatened to go after Flynn’s son to get him to fold–I really dislike that sort of thing. Of course, many FBI targets are guilty of something or did bad things, but that there is legal justification doesn’t excuse lack of basic curiosity when there’s clearly more to it.
ETA: And I really think the Russia stuff took on a life of its own in some ways, so that the function of claims about Russia early on may have been different than that of those made later, though people reconcile them and put them together as a clean story.
Every time I try to access the discord link I get an “invite invalid” code. I’d like to get on there…
The link in the sidebar should work.
Given current situation, I have found myself in need of a headset primarily to play DND on my laptop. Audio quality and mic quality do not have to be great but it needs to be an improvement over laptop mic. I care about durability and to some extent comfort but am quite willing to have something that fits quite tightly on my ears to ensure stability and would prefer something in that direction and would be happy to sacrifice some amount of comfort for that. Do people have advice about either a particular model to purchase or just the relevant search terms. I have found the different models bewildering and am not sure how to judge sound quality particularly as someone who is not an audiophile.
I use the HyperX Cloud for DnD and for gaming and it works very well and is very comfortable. I had one work for hours and hours every week for a total of about six years before one of the ears gave out.
I’ve had my Corsair Void for a while. I like them. Good quality, durable, comfortable. Wireless but you can run it wired if you wish.
I’m coasting. I am over 30, have a liberal arts bachelors, and have worked a series of admin jobs interspersed with travelling and unemployment. The pay is OK but the work is boring with limited progression (I spend a lot of time reading shit like this blog).
I’ve never been able to work out what I want to do and so have taken the easiest path, basically, and I need to make a change soon if I am ever going to do so. I would much rather have a job that I find interesting, enjoyable, satisfying than one that pays a bit more, although if one could be had that provides a good income in half the hours per week I would jump on it. The idea of doing pretty much anything that comes under the normal umbrella of ‘a job’ for 40+ hours a week for decades is anathema to me. However, the cost of education is prohibitively high and I am still unsure of myself so I find it very difficult to do anything.
I have (weakly) attempted learning python, but I find it boring and seems like it would take forever before I could do anything useful or interesting. Also, aren’t I about 20 years too late?
I’ve thought about doing a masters degree in politics, philosophy, and economics as I am interested in politics and world affairs, especially China and its relationship with the world (although pessimistically that seems like it is rapidly turning sour, so may not be a good thing to be studying), and also in philosophy generally, but I doubt that it would be a decent return on investment. It does have ‘philosophy’ in the name after all…
I’ve thought about attempting medical school (I believe grants can be had if successful) with an aim to becoming a psychiatrist, however, the years of cramming, examming, and all the messy regular doctoring needed before specialization is scary and I don’t think I could do it. Physiotherapy is a possible alternative but as I said I already have a bachelors and doing another seems impossible to afford.
Besides ‘stop watching youtube videos’, ‘pick one and do it, you idiot’, etc., does anyone have any advice? On possible paths, or methods you have used for getting yourself out of a similar predicament?
Not sure how much it applies to you but as a coder, any time I’ve tried to sit down and just “learn [insert language here]” it’s been a bit of a miserable failure because it’s inherently boring.
The greatest success learning languages has always been when I set out to make something specific that required I learn stuff about a programming language along the way.
So sitting down to “learn python” = disaster.
Sitting down to take some task I hate doing manually at work and automating it or setting out to make some kind of little game or similar: way way way more successful because the learning of the language ends up being instrumental rather than a terminal goal.
You also might be surprised how fast you can get to something at least slightly useful. A few dozen lines of scripts automating boring things made my workday far more relaxed.
I still occasionally get emails from grad students about my “learn matlab” project I made over a few weekends because I decided to make and publish a tool for one of my friends after we commiserated over boring grindy parts of our work over drinks and it turns out that a lot of other people had a use for a similar tool.
So my advice if you might want to go the programming route would be that rather than trying to decide what you want to do with your life, find something that interests you and find some edges where you wish someone would make a useful tool to do X and try making it.
Worst case scenario you lose a few hours and learn a bit of coding.
For example – draw a fractal or generate an image of family of dwarves. Or maze. Or some other fractal. Or generate statistics about longest, most common, most unusual words in a book.
I linked my repository, but I would probably recommend to look for tutorial if someone is completely starting. This is a part of materials that I used it in a programming lesson for a beginner. But with plenty of additional instruction.
+1
I have to say, this approach has never worked for me, despite the fact that it seems like a constant refrain in the programming world.
What happens is I come up with my neat idea, and sit down to execute. But then I have trouble installing the software – the dependency tree is broken due to the latest push someone made to github in some low-level repo. Well fuck, that took 5 hours. Ok, now let’s actually start – what’s the simplest thing I can think of…
3 iterations of making the simplest thing I can think of simpler, and I say “ok, hello world. You are going to print hello world to the command line and you are going to like it motherfucker!”
Fail at printing hello world. After another 5 hours of scrolling through message boards and looking at config files and reading error messages, it turns out an environment variable was set on my machine from a completely different program that was messing things up.
“Ok, *now* hello world…. it works! Ok, so I just want to do X – that should be easy, right?”
After scrolling through documentation on the language/framework/whatever, I still haven’t figured out how to do X. At which point, I say “screw it” and go drinking with friends instead.
On the other hand, the times when I’ve been successful at learning software, it’s because I sat down with a good book or tutorial that said “this thing is here. This other thing is over here. Here’s an example of how to do this common task. This is the rational behind structuring it this way.” And then I do some exercises and learn the syntax and get everything set up correctly *and then* I can try to do something useful.
The way things work, getting good pay for half the hours is not very common. Also, the kind of fun jobs you seek are typically extremely competitive (not necessarily in quality, but then in politics, connections, etc) and/or pay fairly poorly because lots of people want a fun job. Furthermore, nearly any job is only one part the good stuff and another big part unpleasantness.
So I think that you have unrealistic expectations.
Consider giving up on the idea of having a super-interesting job and instead, find something that pays decently and you are good enough at. Then use that money for things you enjoy (travel, having a family, hobbies, drugs, etc).
Thanks. I did mean well paid relatively – I am not expecting to earn as much half time as a good full time job pays.
You’re right, I know I am unlikely to get an ‘interesting’ job and that they come with their own downsides. But full time full boredom I don’t know if I can cope with. If I could work 9 months of the year or something…
There’s quite a few “50%” jobs in research.
In practice a lot of researchers get their salary through 2 grants that cover 50% of their salary each. I think it’s a bizare way to arrange things since it means a lot of researchers have to spend twice the time chasing their salary but for your goal it might not be a bad thing.
Research has an advantage on the “interesting” front and if you don’t mind a half salary in exchange for a 2 1/2 day week then it might be a viable option.
Some people do it for work-life balance and family commitments.
So in essence someone might start a job in research, work a few years of normal 40 hour weeks and then basically stop renewing one of their grants and go to 2.5 days a week.
Though most don’t want to take that salary hit.
Downside: academic research doesn’t tend to be crazy-high pay but if your cost of living is low and you aren’t looking for an expensive lifestyle then it might be acceptable to you.
+1. Work to live, don’t live to work.
Getting paid decent money for, say, 3/5 of full time is possible. Even more so with remote work, where often nobody cares how much time you spend as long as things get done. Current slacker success stories from my bubble:
– small-scale IT/sysadmin friend, getting odd jobs from a bigger “consulting” company
– another friend – a freelancer for a company issuing a transport/logistics periodical (the kind read by industry insiders, full of analyses, articles about new tech etc) and organizing conferences for that industry
– myself, doing driver programming in a niche field
All of us make comfortable living without much effort, probably my hours / day is highest but it averages out to 2-3h of productive work and maybe 30-60 min of meetings, emails and slack conversations.
One thing to note is that you usually get this kind of arrangement by starting in a full-time position, proving your worth, and downscaling your commitment because you are valuable to the company and they’d rather give you more freedom than see you go. This is not possible in every company.
On the other hand, if you’re bad with organizing your free time (which you kinda sound like from the post) maybe you’d actually want a 40+ hour/week position where you’re doing interesting and varied stuff? There’s plenty of those, in R&D departments in particular.
BTW: getting to anything useful or interesting with python takes about a week or two if you’re intelligent and have a project that excites you. And if you plan to be adjacent to any kind of science you’ll want to learn it anyway.
There’s a lot of real estate north of 30, so I’m going to assume that you’re nearer to 30 than 40. Either way, it’s certainly not too old. I learned python at 39 having lied my way into an academic position by saying I could code after a year of unemployment. Well, six weeks later I could, though I wouldn’t care to repeat the experience.
The upside for me was that having a good knowledge of coding opened up management roles where I wasn’t coding (much) but had leadership for software projects. This also had the pleasant side-effect of multiplying my income by a factor of five.
The bad news is that there is no pain-free way to do what you want to do. The good news that the only cost is pain.
I watched a co-worker start at my site doing admin work for travel costs and such, and she basically just kept applying to any other job openings at the site, while doing a great job at her current one. She jumped from admin over to Quality manager, then Safety, and now she’s like the head of Environment/Health/Safety for the entire company, with a President as her supervisor.
So don’t expect your entry level job to be great, ever. Use it as a springboard to bigger opportunities.
Perhaps your ultimate goal might not be a particular job but personal freedom or something? Maybe you could find contentendness in pursuing the Mr. Money Mustache/FIRE path, or something similar?
It sounds like you want early retirement. Coding could be a good path. I think one of the guys in my shop was a construction worker until he picked up coding in his 40s. Another good one could be the trades. I think it’s something like 80% of electricians in the US are over 50 or something. They get good pay that gets better with time, there’s demand, and potential to start your own business.
I would avoid any sort of schooling that you can’t do part time, or that will take more than 2 years to complete full time. I would avoid trying for fields that seem particularly “cool” (don’t try to be a Hollywood actor, for instance). Just look for a good-paying, stable job market, and then learn the skills to compete in it.
And *then* set your sights on the coolest, sexiest, most dream-fulfilling job in that market, and tailor your skills to be the best person for that job in the whole goddamned world. This will include gaining the relevant skills *and* proving your worth by being an effective worker in other jobs. The trick being that you might not ever get that dream job, but (a) it focuses you on the skills you need to learn, instead of having too many choices and learning nothing and (b) the experience you gain pursuing it will set you up to take on higher-paying, more comfortable, more rewarding jobs in the future.
One of the problems the US faced in the Vietnam War was the weakness of its partner. The South Vietnamese state wasn’t just poor; its army was badly run, its officials were routinely corrupt, and none of its many presidents seemed able to run the government or inspire the citizenry.
Let’s suppose the US had recognized the problem and tried to fix it from the top, by backing its own choice for president. The Vietnamese might have cried foul, but ultimately they would almost certainly have had to go along.
Who would have been the best choice for the appointment? I have to believe that somewhere among the South Vietnamese elite they could have found someone who was reasonably honest, effective, and well-connected.
After the coup against Ngô Đình Diệm, the South Vietnamese government remained unstable. So was there actually someone better?
After the coup, the government was dominated by the generals. They certainly tried a long list of men from that group, and none seemed particularly suited to the task. But perhaps someone from outside that group could have done the job if given the chance. The forty-some province chiefs would be a decent place to start looking.
I’m not sure I agree with the premise.
Syngman Rhee wasn’t a model of clean effective governance. Over 100,000 Koreans died in the instability and insurgency in the South prior to 1950 and the invasion.
While you are correct about Syngman Rhee – the difference between the southern and northern regimes was mostly one of degree, not kind, in the early going – it’s also important not to read too much into the parallels between Korea and Vietnam. There’s a lot of key differences.
The crucial difference is that in Vietnam the South needed to win a struggle for popular support and establish itself as a legitimate government, in Korea there was no such struggle. Why?
Let’s contrast Korea and Vietnam. In the first place, Korea did not become independent as a result of an internal national struggle. There were Korean independence groups of various ideological stripes, but none as large or as well-organized or equipped as the Viet Minh. These groups did not eject the Japanese from the peninsula – Japan voluntarily evacuated as part of the terms of surrender in 1945. Thus, from the beginning Korea’s independence was the result of the actions of other, larger nations. Then the country was artificially and “temporarily” divided at the 38th parallel, and each super power set up a puppet regime in “its” half. This is crucial – the Kim dynasty was not the result of a spontaneous love of Communism among Koreans, but was a foreign regime imposed by Soviet backers on the North. They plucked a struggling Communist guerrilla fighter out of Manchuria, groomed him in Moscow for a few years, gave him a heroic backstory, and then stuck him in Pyongyang in 1945. Personally, I suspect these origins are why the Kims so relentlessly mythologize their own origins and heroic deeds, because at heart they’re deeply insecure in a way that Ho Chi Minh never was.
Anyway, the result is that neither Korean regime could plausibly claim to be the true representation of the will of the Korean people. Both were authoritarian dictatorships dependent on foreign backing for survival.
Contrast this with Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were legitimately an army of independence, with widespread popular support through the nation. Vietnam was divided as a way for France to save face as it was more or less driven out of the country, and only the US’s blundering made it a Cold War flashpoint in the first place. While Ho needed Chinese and Russian weapons, that was more to wage his war against the US-backed South than to maintain his own regime, which was quite popular and secure. Many VC fighters were originally Viet Minh fighters – they fought for independence against the French and that struggle simply continued against the Americans and their puppets, who were standing in the way of the legitimate government of all of Vietnam. Remember, famously, that if the elections promised by the Geneva Accords had taken place, Ho Chi Minh would have won something like 80% of the vote.
That’s the largest factor why Korea and Vietnam are not the same, but there are other reasons, too.
For one, most South Koreans had experience of what Northern governance would be like. The North’s invasion in 1950 was brutal and killed tens of thousands of civilians in the scant few months the Kims controlled most of the peninsula. Then the war to hold back the North for the next 3 years helped forge a national identity and gave the ROKA institutional experience and confidence – something ARVN never really acquired. So while there WERE Northern sympathizers among the ROK populace, it was never a widespread movement that threatened the government.
By contrast, in Vietnam the only regime most Southerners knew had been either the French, or the corrupt and incompetent Diem/Theiu administrations and their American “advisors.” And it was, by and large, terrible. For most peasants, the VC shadow administration was much more just and responsive than Saigon. So the murder and oppression by Diem/Theiu stood in stark contrast with the imagined greener fields of rule by Hanoi. In Korea, this wasn’t so.
For a third reason, geography. The best efforts of Pyongyang notwithstanding, there is no easy way to infiltrate South Korea from the north. The terrain is mountainous and all traffic must pass through a narrow, heavily fortified border stretching across the peninsula. Thus, the only way large armed enemy formations are entering the country is by crashing over the Imjin river and driving armored columns towards Seoul, as in June 1950. This scenario was the #1 nightmare of the various ROK governments, and the people of Korea live with this constant possibility in their heads. Thus, protests against the governments were often curtailed via the reminder that everyone needed to cooperate in order to keep Communist tanks away from the Blue House (as in Rhee’s fall in 1960, or during the instability following the 1979 assassination of President Park).
In Vietnam, the Ho Chi Minh trail allowed the North to infiltrate entire divisions into the South without a fight. That meant that the threat was insidious, and hidden among the people in a way the Korean war was not, and so it was much, much more important to have the support of the average villager if you wanted to exercise any real control over the country. So Rhee could be as oppressive as he liked (to a degree) and the people would still back him, because they remembered the hardship of the last Communist invasion and didn’t want to go through that again. Diem did not have that “luxury” since most people did NOT have that memory, and besides, no invasion was really necessary since the Communists were already there.
It’s easy to point to the similarities between Vietnam and Korea, but it’s also important to keep in mind that the two conflicts differed in a thousand small but crucial details, too, and that’s ultimately why we were successful in one place but not in another.
Ho Chi Minh?
Amy Chua discusses this possibility in Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations
Realistically if we wanted a Vietnam free of influence from Moscow or Beijing, this was our best choice.
The biggest mistake the US’s best and brightest made in the early Cold War was assuming the Communists were a monolithic block, and that all the world was controlled by puppet strings from the Kremlin. Making the struggle ideological instead of national was a misstep – we could have been good partners with Ho Chi Minh.
the idea that the communists weren’t corrupt is dubious.
I don’t think a country that is ‘ripe’ for communism or has a communist revolution would instantaneously transform into the kind of stereotypical late-stage communist society.
I also don’t think that a political movement that adopts the symbols of another which emerged at a different time and place is going to mirror it precisely.
Assigning someone to lead Vietnam as if it were a colonial possession to be governed seems like a terrible idea no matter who give the poisoned chalice to. The whole issue with the South Vietnamese government was its corruption, the low social trust and a perception that they were stooges for a new colonial power. None of these are problems that can be fixed from without by spending more money and political capital on the problem.
I want to tell you about the greatest pun I’ve ever heard. I rowed varsity crew in college. I was in the lightweight 8 boat and we were pretty good, nationally ranked. Our captain and stroke seat was a guy named Ed, who went on after college to row with an elite boat club in Boston and had a realistic shot at making the Olympics but never quite did. Before one race when they were calling for the light 8’s to launch, we couldn’t find Ed, and we were starting to panic. One of the women rowers called us the “Ed-less Oarsmen” 🥁
Classic!
Could I get a good and detailed article about whether the Post Office (pre-covid) was being abused or not by being required to have their pensions funded?
I do not want an appeal to authority. I have plenty of authorities that have appealed to their authoritiness that I should trust them on this issue. We are too far past that.
As a ground rule: if a company has a single employee, with 30 years under his belt, and who is going to retire in 5 years with a big pension, I say they should have that person’s pension mostly funded right now.
I found Elizabeth Bauer’s articles on the topic reasonably well explained, and the Tax Foundation’s primer has lots of citations.
The answer is that it’s complicated (as usual), but the USPS has defined benefit pensions (which already have been pre-funded for a long time) and offers medical benefits to retirees that it can’t just rescind (unlike most private companies, which reserve that right). It’s the latter liability which went from pay-as-you-go to fund-up-front-based-on-actuarial-predictions starting in 2006. That transition was front-loaded from 2006-2016 which looked sane when the law was passed (partly because the USPS was allowed to decrease its actual pension contributions because it was way ahead of schedule on funding those, so it had extra money available at the time), but caused trouble when postal revenues fell dramatically starting in 2008. From 2016 onwards the cost of funding the plan is similar to that of pay-as-you-go (it was ~25% higher in 2019).
I have basically positioned our finances for a deflationary recession so I am fairly aggressively looking for arguments/signs that an inflationary period is going to begin, so what follows is simply an attempt to make that case and not a prediction: So the case for near term inflation looks something like this in my view-
The CPI report that came out today showed a -0.8% inflation rate and a -0.4% core inflation rate. Of note
And
So a very large decrease in prices relative to the history of the series.
The breakdown is very important though- energy prices were the largest contributor with a 10% seasonably adjusted decline with gasoline prices dropping 20.6%. The next largest (non energy) drops were airline fares (-15%), vehicle insurance (-7.2%), apparel (-4.7%), this is where the case for rising inflation (as measured by CPI) in the near term starts. As it stands the oil collapse into April could be a one off event, and broadly the 3 month drop (CPI hit to gasoline was -3.4%, -10.5% and 20.6% for Jan, Feb, Mar) has been a significant factor in holding down headline CPI. Now oil prices have bounced back to well below their Dec prices but well above their April/May lows. If* oil prices were to stabilize in the $22-$32 range then the next few CPI reports will likely have either a neutral or positive energy component for oil.
Similarly airfares have dropped for 3 months (-0.3%, -12.6%, -15.2%) and a flatline in prices or even a small increase would flip them from a large drag to a neutral to upwards pressure.
Shelter was flat (0.0) but rent and OER were up slightly (0.2 each), while lodging (hotels and dorms etc) dropped by 7.1% after a drop of 6.8% for Feb-Mar. Missed rent and mortgage payments and forbearance will be a drag on the housing industry but won’t directly be a drag in rental prices and OER until empty units hit the market, and policy is currently aimed at keeping people in their homes and stalling evictions. It is a reasonable (but far from certain) proposition that as the economy reopens the drag of lodging decreases or disappears and shelter starts being a net upward pressure on CPI.
On the upward pressure side we have food, and specifically food at home, leading the way. Food costs rose 1.5% and food at home 2.6% after posting increases of 0.3% and 0.5% the month prior. The increase is food costs was very broad based with only a small number of goods showing declining prices with those goods being heavily weighted toward luxury items such as cakes, other fresh fruits (ie not apples, bananas or citrus) and prepared salads. Food away from home posted a 0.1% increase with full service meals and snacks dropping by 0.3%. There is a plausible world (again not near definite) where reopening leads to increasing restaurant prices with fewer people per restaurant plus higher input costs from slow to recover supply chains with lower competition (restaurants that don’t reopen) which puts upward pressure on the food component of CPI.
I think you can construct a reasonable, but highly conditional and short of compelling, case where this combination of things occurs.
1. Energy prices stabilize and rise some due to the combination of much lower production and a very low baseline.
2. Rental prices stay flat to slightly increasing due to technical details about the market, while lodging prices stop declining.
3. Auto insurance discounts due to lower driving stop and reverse slowly as driving picks up again.
4. Food prices remain elevated and rising as the supply chain fails to rebound (restaurant closures would fall in this category), especially with potential shocks from a trade war with China.
5. (and this is probably the big one) no large drops in other categories that were near 0 in this past report, and there are some significant candidates here (auto prices, used and new, i’m looking at you here).
*There are going to be a lot of ifs.
I feel like I should know this, but I don’t, so I’ll ask?
When they update these numbers, do they also update the “basket of goods” itself?
Like, falling airline fare prices don’t do people any good when nobody is flying because they’re terrified of getting the plague.
I don’t know. I know that they re-weight the basket but I don’t know when/how quickly.
> I know that they re-weight the basket but I don’t know when/how quickly.
I was wondering about this too. My quick searching seems to say that in 2002, they switched from updating the “market basket” every 10 years to every 2 years. But despite updating to a new basket every two years, there is still a 3-4 year lag from the collection of data to the utilization.
In the examples I can find: “There is a time lag between the expenditure survey and its use in the CPI. For example, CPI data in 2016 and 2017 was based on data collected from the Consumer Expenditure Surveys for 2013 and 2014” (https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm) and “The weights used in the CPI in 2014 & 2015 are based on consumer expenditures in 2011-2012” (http://washstat.org/presentations/20141028/reed.pdf).
I think this means the the current market basket used to weight the CPI was probably established in 2016-17, and unless the BLS speeds up their process, the current 2020 Covid-affected spending patterns won’t affect the defined basket until 2023-24.
So basically, none of the inflation/deflation numbers we see for the next two years are going to be meaningful, at all.
Got it.
Fifty percent cash, fifty percent canned goods?
(That was a joke, but I’m still curious about your take on the strategy.)
1 rental property (illiquid as all get out since its a twin attached to our main residence)
401k entirely in T bonds, 67% standard, 33% TIPS
Gold at today’s prices worth roughly 5/8ths of the 401k value.
Cash about 3/8ths 401k value
3+ months of calories
productive vegetable garden
Hmm. I think of gold as an inflation hedge, not a deflation hedge. Am I missing something?
Yes, I wish I had started a vegetable garden before now. The produce in stores seems distinctly inferior to what it was B.C. but at least for now one can still get it.
Otherwise that’s much like where I am at, except I am not as convinced as you of what’s coming, so I’ve still got some equity funds. But my only justification for that position is the efficient market hypothesis — the crowd seems to think we’ll muddle through.
Thanks.
Cute.
Gold is weird, it was very volatile around the Lehman collapse (what wasn’t?) but it did well from late 2008 through mid 2011 with UE rising through late 2009 and inflation remaining low for a few years, and gold has done well in terms of Yen while Japan has muddled through low inflation/deflation for the past 30 years.
We don’t have a good historical comparison for an absolute crash, but gold held over over the span of the great depression with dollars being revalued down against gold and prices falling in dollar terms for long stretches.
With that said if the Dollar Milkshake Theory ends up correct then we could see gold tank, easily to $1400, and conceivably to $1100, still my bonds should do well in that scenario for long enough to hold onto gold for its rebound in a pinch.
No stocks whatsoever?
None.
Don’t forget some quantity of machined-steel implements, and appropriate additional supplies made from brass, gunpowder, and lead…
The last point you mention seems important to me. A lot of businesses want to reopen, but at lower capacity. I think this may well be a bad idea that will lead to a lot more business failures, as these businesses restart their expenses but aren’t able to earn anywhere near enough revenue to cover them. But if the businesses do manage to survive, it will be by drastically increasing prices. Perhaps the “basket of goods” will change in response – instead of one $30 restaurant meal a week, people will go for one $120 restaurant meal a month. But there’s a plausible mechanism here for some sort of increase in the price level if supply of many services (and some goods) is restricted by pandemic protocols.
It seems like this is going to drive cost-push inflation–prices go up because producing goods and services takes more resources, rather than because more people want stuff and so they’re bidding up the prices. That’s inflation, but I think it will look pretty different from demand-driven inflation….
Cost push inflation tends to be self limiting, the higher prices actually lead to higher production, but when there is a cap on production via a cartel or government restriction it can manifest for a longer term.
I think there’s some danger in focusing on the CPI and how it’s impacted (though very important for your TIPS), but forgetting that that’s a proxy for inflation not the actual thing, and at the moment there’s reasons to believe it might be a less then perfect proxy. The standard basket of goods is going through huge shifts and swings on short timescales (both at an individual level and society level) and it’s probably not capturing that well.
The stronger inflation case is prob. from a monetary perspective. The government is using borrowed / printed (or eqv.) money to try to keep incomes whole during the lockdown. But many goods and services aren’t being produced. That’s more money chasing less goods and services. Right now a lot of that extra money is being parked in banks (and by all appearances stocks) since people can’t spend it or are being cautious. but that could come flooding back into deferred consumption at some point triggering at least a pulse of inflation (which has the danger of becoming self-perpetuating in an inflationary spiral). But there’s countervailing forces as well, so personally I’m not sure what to expect.
+1. It seems likely that price of many things is going to drop and price of many others is going to rise. Whether this will lead to an increase in given inflation index might heavily depend on the construction of said index.
I agree with this as a general principle, however I think you sell CPI a bit short. Understanding the breakdown of its components has three solid benefits
1. Understanding how price shifts might impact me and my family in our decision making
2. Understand how TIPS might act against other asset classes
3. Being better prepared for a shift in policy response if CPI does change direction.
The last point being the most important, while I don’t think CPI is a particularly good metric on its own (especially not in a crisis) I do expect that policy makers will be forced to react in some way to a rise in CPI.
Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. It has nothing to do with some prices getting higher and some getting lower. It only has to do with the demand for and supply of money. Currently the demand for holding money has increased and the Fed has not adequately increased the supply. Therefore we are experiencing deflation. The future path of inflation will depend primarily on what the Fed does. Bond spreads anticipate low but positive inflation over the next few years, based on the currently expected policy path.
And the original definition of inflation was simply an increase in the money supply! Wow, see all the neat and interesting and completely useless conclusions I can draw from that one!
Your definition tells me, or anyone else, nothing. You can tell me your interpretation of why prices moved a full month after that opinion had any value or merit, it is a perfect ex post, un-falsifiable definition that tells us nothing of use.
So a few years ago, for my birthday, my wife bought me the Keith Haring “Double Retrospect” 32,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. I can’t possibly do it–I would need an extra room in my house and 10 years of free time–but it’s a fun artifact to have around.
The punchline is, my wife paid $300 for it, and it is now selling on Ebay for over $5,000 (since it was only available in limited supplies in the first place, and is now out of print).
Anyone else out there unintentionally/accidentally/fortuitously own something that has now become extremely valuable?
I was seeing that price even before COVID-19. The question now is, how do I find a rich person who’s bored enough to pay me $10,000 for my jigsaw puzzle?
Post a link to the auction in a jigsaw puzzle enthusiasts community/forum?
If you’ve seen them selling on ebay, you could try that. You can make listings that are just for a particular price rather than committing to an auction.
Though if you make more than a small amount of money on ebay you get an extra form to figure out what to do with next time you file taxes, as I’ve learned.
I was surprised to find out my copy of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, a $30 bargain purchase at the time, now sells for $200 used. The game sold poorly at release and had a low print run, but its main character Ike’s appearance in Smash made him fairly popular. 10 years later, Fire Emblem is wildly popular and people want to play the game Ike came from, but strangely Nintendo has never rereleased it in any form. Though there are semi-credible rumors of a remake in the works.
In a previous life (25+ years ago), I reviewed video games for a major national magazine. At one point I had literally 2,000 Nintendo, Sega, name-your-system games taking up an entire room in my apartment, including some that I imagine are extremely rare collectors’ items now. I sold them all to a used-game store for a couple thousand dollars cash. Sometimes I wish I had rented a storage locker instead so I can pay for my kids’ college educations.
I was surprised as well. I gave my GameCube and games to my nephew as a Christmas gift, and when I was looking at the used game store to see if there was anything additional he might like to give him, happened to see that Path of Radiance was hundreds of dollars. I ended up not giving that particular game to him with the rest, because it would have been pretty unfair to basically give him an extra $200 that I wasn’t giving his sisters.
I bought a guitar for $70 that turned out to be a valuable collectable, sold it for $900.
“Never regret a good trade” and all that, but valuable collectible guitars are worth much, much more than $900. A standard American Stratocaster can set you back about $3k for a particularly nice model, and that’s an off-the-shelf guitar at your local shop.
I got my banjo from a pawn shop in the time before eBay was popular. I paid $900 for it, and it was worth about $3,500 at the time, and is now over $5,000. I ran into the pawn shop guy about a year later, he remembered me as the guy he sold the banjo to and was faux-mad because he discovered eBay a few weeks later, looked up the banjo and was pissed. But hey, I still play it to this day, so I think it found a good home.
You know what’s weird? I’ve sometimes been to thrift shops/used book stores/etc. where I’ve nicely alerted the owner that he’s selling an item for way less than it’s worth. Rather than thanking me and upping the price, I always get a defensive reaction, like I’m challenging his ability to appraise things. So I’ve actually wound up paying *less* for something than I was prepared to.
Yeah, I didn’t say anything when I saw it, I was just worried it was priced so low because there was something wrong with it. I got a promise* from the pawn shop guy that I could have it inspected and could return it if it wasn’t okay, took it to my banjo teacher who signed off on it and congratulated me, and I told the pawn shop guy it was a deal. I do kind of wonder how he got it that cheap, though…
* I mean, I have no idea if the pawn shop guy would have honored the promise, but thankfully I didn’t need to find out.
I’ve collected pokemon toys since I was a kid. A surprising amount of the merchandise released in the johto and hoenn era (2002-2006 or so) has increased dramatically in price, due to its limited availability outside of Japan when it was released. I have several plush that I bought for 15 dollars that are now worth 150-300 each. There are also the giant plush, which retailed for around 200-300 and are now worth anywhere from 1500-3000, depending on the Pokemon. (Those were outside of my price range when I was younger, alas.)
Edit to add: I used to buy cheap pokemon items, usually from Japan, and resell for a profit. It made a surprising amount of money. I had to stop doing it a few years ago, however, when I almost qualified as a “small business” on my taxes.
It seems fairly possible to me that a lot of businesses in the travel & hospitality sector might be hit hard enough that they’ll need to auction off assets to cut costs or pay creditors. Are there any uses for things like cruise ships, commercial planes, and hotels that don’t make sense now, but would if they could be acquired for pennies on the dollar?
Seasteading!
If I was a small or medium size business unaffected by the downturn that had considered getting a plane for business travel in the past, now would definitely be the time to purchase. And with all the pilots furloughed you could set up a flight department for half the cost.
Maintenance costs and most other operating costs have not changed much. Yes, jet fuel is 70% off one year ago, but that’s only 10% below 2000 levels and operating an airplane was still super expensive back then. And fuel is not nearly as big a factor for corporate operators as it is for airlines, since a corporate jet will often fly less in a year than an airline will fly in a month.
The only difference now is that the used airplane you buy might be a bit newer and a bit more fuel efficient. Neither of those factors is going to swing the business case, especially for a corporate flight department that flies very little. And you will still need to spend millions dollars refitting the interior if you want anything resembling a corporate jet on the inside.
Finally, the main category of airplanes that will be for sale are widebodies. Only the very, very largest companies could even begin to justify owning a widebody. And you would not want a widebody to be your only plane: not only are they way more expensive to operate, they cannot fly into most of the GA airports you’d want to use.
I wonder whether we might see more conversions of widebodies into firefighting tankers…
Overheads like salaries, capital cost, insurance and depreciation are a much higher portion of overall costs for a corporate flight department, since they don’t fly nearly as many hours. That means that getting a turbine powered airplane like a King Air or light jet or caravan for pennies on the dollar, or even half price, would reduce costs by a whole lot.
In normal times, annual capital cost + insurance +depreciation would be 3-4x the hourly cost for an airplane that flies 30k nm per year. With a half price aircraft you’d have no depreciation, half the insurance and capital cost. You’d be close to halving the biggest expenses of the business. And then salaries will be much much lower than you’d ever get in normal times.
And there will be lots of aircraft of all types on the market soon if the economy gets as bad as it is meant to, not just wide-body jets. Lots of airlines of all sizes all over the world are struggling.
I don’t think anyone is forecasting 50%+ declines in values for turboprops. Their values tend to be more resilient because the aircraft lifetimes and model cycles are longer and they can be readily converted for cargo use, which will be more resilient and in more demand given the reduction in passenger traffic. How many are even in scheduled pax service today? Must be a tiny fraction.
You still depreciate used aircraft. I’m not sure what you’re getting at there, but it isn’t consistent with how any business big enough to buy an airplane would account for it. I’m also not sure insurance would drop as much as you think. You’re not just insuring the value of the aircraft.
Meanwhile, charter rates should drop in lockstep with everything else, and I would expect marginal customers to move to charter / fractional ownership vs. buying an old turboprop.
Here in NZ, there are 25 cessna caravans. 16 of them did tourism scenic flights or tourist skydiving and haven’t moved for 6 weeks. 6 are still doing scheduled pax though their numbers are way down. 3 of them do a combination of pax and cargo and they have barely flown one of them in the last 6 weeks. So, no dedicated cargo at all. My company has one of them and we would sell it in a heartbeat but there is no point even putting it on the market: it is sale-proof. There isn’t any cargo market suddenly appearing and the recovery back to 2019 will take years.
Africa is probably the same, lots of luxury charter, regular charter and scenic aircraft which will be doing nothing for a long time. Hawaii, Indonesia, Philipines, continental US, Grand Canyon, any place with tourism or rich people flying around for fun will have lots of machines for sale when these companies go bust or cut back. And with the economy being what it is, nobody will be buying them with a plan to start a new venture or expand. They might buy them to mothball for the future but only at a price that lets the thing sit for a few years until the market picks up.
So while it may not be a drop of 50%, for just about every aircraft it will definitely be the best time ever to buy them if you have a use for it.
For tax and accounting purposes you’d claim depreciation yes, but if you bought an airplane very cheaply at the bottom of a recession then the actual value isn’t going to go down. And most of the cost of insurance is a % of hull value. Maybe that is different in the US where liability is a much bigger concern.
Under what conditions does it really make sense for a company to have a corporate jet these days? Not occasionally-charter-a-plane-for-a-big-conference thing, or CEO-one-upmanship sort of thing?
If you’re routinely sending teams of executives to business meetings across a wide area, e.g. to negotiate contracts, the jet probably still costs more than the competing business-class airline tickets but the scheduling flexibility may make up for it in saving expensive time. But this has to be a very common occurrence to justify having your own jet rather than just chartering at need.
Here’s a good video about the economics of private jets:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYPrH4xANpU
Bear in mind there are cheaper options than jets that make sense for some small businesses. There’s a LOT of small airports around that can be accessed by non-jet aircraft. Mostly they are hassle free as well, with just a chain link fence and gate between your plane and the car park.
You can see all the airports here (the blue or purple dots)
https://skyvector.com/
I suggest buying a cruise ship at fire-sale prices and converting it to carry oil.
Transport ships are relatively cheap to build compared to their running costs, which is why Old Panamax ship values plummeted to scrap value once the bigger locks opened.
You will simply be outcompeted by ships that are actually designed to carry oil. Note that for obvious reasons, there are a bunch of regulations for oil tankers (for example, to greatly reduce the chance that they will become uncontrollable and crash into something like a zombie). Retrofitting this on a cruise ship is surely going to be extremely expensive.
If you can acquire cruise ships, commercial planes or hotels now for pennies on the dollar they make the most sense as investments to be used in a year or two as cruise ships, commercial planes and hotels.
I need help identifying titles in a particular genre I am imagining exists. Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sharing Knife series is set in sort of a frontier/homesteader world, sort of similar to Little House on the Prairie. There’s magic, but there’s not nearly as much magic as there used to be – the people who can still use it can do some neat tricks, but couldn’t launch a fireball at you or anything like that. The people who can’t use it are most of everybody and are just regular farmers besides sometimes being consumed by evil monsters.
I want that same diminished magical environment, but set in a moderately-to-very shitty present day. The closest I can think of of the top of my head to this is the Shadowrun universe which is magic-in-the-ghetto in a lot of ways, but that’s different because magic isn’t going away so much as it’s come back full force.
Following: I love the Sharing Knife books. (I still think World of the Five Gods is better, but it’s a close race.)
I agree that the five gods books are better (I haven’t read all the Penrics, though) but for the purposes of this conversation they are inferior in that they are exactly what I want them to be. The sharing knife books are exactly what they should be, but not exactly what I want – I keep thinking “I want this, but set off of 27th and Van Buren”.
It sounds like you’re interested in Urban Fantasy + Here There Were Dragons?
I’m sure such series exist, though I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Except Stephenson’s recent Rise and Fall of DODO, but magic there is even more diminished than I think you have in mind.
Very close. I think the only difference is Here There Were Dragons as depicted by tropes seems to depict magic being completely or very nearly gone in an extreme way I’m not imagining, but that’s pretty much it. I’ll take a look at the book you mentioned for sure.
At the time the book starts (in essentially our own world), there is no working magic anywhere and only one person with firsthand knowledge of magic ever having worked even a little bit. With a bit of scientific assistance, it turns out that magic can be brought back in a few small areas. Then people with varying agendas start thinking about how to use that (va cneg ol zntvpnyyl gvzr-geniryyvat gb cnfg renf jurer zntvp jnf zber pbzzba).
Off the top of my head, “California Bones” by Greg van Eekhout might fit the bill? It’s a weird alternate-history where California is a mageocracy, but the ‘osteomantic’ magic driving it is a limited resource that’s running out.
Although it focuses pretty heavily on the handful of people who are powerful magicians, magic is nowhere near as prevalent and balls-out powerful as Shadowrun.
Neil Gaiman’s American Gods has (I think) some of what you’re looking for, but not quite. And it’s not exactly obscure, so you’re probably already familiar with it.
The only other thing that comes to mind is some British series about blood-driven magic, but a) it impressed so little I can’t remember the book or author and b) trying to search for urban fantasy and blood magic is not helpful because apparently that’s a popular theme with hack fantasy writers who like sexy witches.
I could actually use some good fantasy recommendations myself. Some of my favorites are Lois McMaster Bujold, Steven Brust, Tim Powers…
I’ll check both of those out, thank you – I have American Gods on a shelf somewhere but had forgotten about it. Gaiman is sometimes a little…. cynical, I guess, for my tastes , but that might scratch the itch. The other seems like a decent bet too. Thank you!
Possibly the Peter Grant series by Ben Aaronovitch, starting with Rivers of London (published in the US as Midnight Riot), might be what you’re looking for. It’s a magical police procedural set in present-day London (often in poorer areas), and there is very much a sense that magic used to be more common- though I get the sense that, rather than the magic going away for its own reasons, most of the wizards killed each other in WW2.
I was trying to remember these – I like them, and think they meet the description.
Fluff, but entertaining fluff.
Let’s say I’m in the hotel business and my hotels rely a lot on conferences for business. What are smart things to do once conferences are no longer out of the question but danger remains?
There’s obvious things like more cleaning of surfaces and perhaps UV blasting frequently.
What about humidifiers in the conference rooms and hallways? It sounds like there’s some evidence that humidity may mitigate transmission. What else?
Ventilation. Get fresh air in frequently.
Have people speaking and yelling less. So, a microphone for the speaker instead of the “direct to ear” fad?
I don’t know if wearing masks is that much fun.
For more information, see here:
https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them
Probably have everyone sit in rows facing the speaker instead of around a table facing each other. Ventilation is good, but not if it blows from one person to another.
Except that the actual point of conferences is for people to talk to each other, not to listen to speeches. If they can’t do that in your conference rooms, they’ll do it in the halls. You’ve got a better chance of getting it right in the conference room.
I suspect conferences are one of the last things we should restart while there’s still (significantly higher than normal) danger, then.
If the point is to talk to as many strangers as possible, and subsequent to that, it’s probably noisy and you need to speak loudly as you mill about, you’re probably worse than cruise ships or churches.
Nowhere near cruise ship or church levels in properly-run conferences, just quiet conversations with plenty of spacing. If you screw things up by saying “no sidebar conversations”, those just move into more crowded spaces so don’t do that.
Okay, we’ve been to different conferences.
I think the only way to have a safe conference would be to have the conference outdoors and/or the participants wearing masks (transmission might be low enough outdoors to not require masks or perhaps masks are sufficient to allow it to be indoors, but at this point no one knows for sure, so safest would be to do both).
My idea is not to ventilate during the talks by having a ventilator blow the air in circles, but to open all the windows in the pauses and get fresh air in.
But @zoozoc is right, an outdoor conference would be paradise. I’ve always dreamed of a conference on a picnic meadow, or in beach chairs. Currently, of course two meters apart, with plenty of space for sunshades and tables with cocktails upon. Dump that Powerpoint, roll a whiteboard outside for the presenter. In Platon’s Academy, people weren’t sitting around, they were strolling in a grove of olive trees.
Here’s another opportunity to have Covid improve our way of life!
Has anybody looked into having UV blasting specifically in the air circulation systems, between the intakes and outtakes?
Here is an article that I found useful.
https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them?fbclid=IwAR1j163iP3bL65neUK6kEvdh0aFTWDDGW1BrE4WuMHxZm8RIRClXz0mYNg0
Basically recycling air is bad and will probably cause others to get sick. Having fresh air from outside would prevent this. But a conference sounds like exactly the type of thing that would cause COVID-19 spread because people are spending a lot of time all together in the same room talking/breathing.
I am a “deep technical specialist” in a very large global company. I consider the company pathological in it’s systems of management and in it’s willful, selective blindness of certain classes of risk and misconduct.
I recently asked myself the question “Why do I get paid as much as I do?” and did not expect the answer to be as insightful (at least to me) as it was:
It’s not because my job requires me to spend so much time away from home with working remotely – plenty of people see their family only for an hour in the morning and 2 hours in the evening due to demanding work hours and commutes, and don’t get compensated for it.
It’s not because my job is hard or exposes me to significant risk.
It’s not due to a skills shortage in my field.
All of the above may be true but I don’t think they hold the most explanatory power. I think I get paid a lot of money as compensation for never being allowed to question the underlying assumptions and structures of the system. I think an analogous situation is being a Russian mail-order bride for an American billionaire: I’m wanted for my assets, and having me on the team means that my employer/partner gains legitimacy. I’m allowed free-reign within my small sphere of competency but if I question the decision-making process it get’s parsed as an insult and a lack of gratitude for the position i’ve been granted.
On the face of it this might seem like a dead-end for job satisfaction and wellbeing. On the contrary i’m getting more and more utility out of it the more I think like this. Letting go of the idea that my income is the fruit of my towering intellect (hah) and iron discipline is to disabuse myself of a rather egotistical delusion. Acknowledging that the vast majority of people are functionally estranged from their families whilst maintaining the appearance of being at home is humbling and makes me more compassionate. Admitting that most people could do what I do if they were so inclined allows me to be a better teacher and mentor.
Has anyone else passed through the zero-point of their career and come out the other side in a similar way?
Smart people can always convince “Joe Sixpack” (those are beer cans, not abs) that they should get paid more because they’re smarter, because they’re smarter. (Not a typo).
Do you really believe that anyone is competent enough to do your job, or just that even if an incompetent person was put in charge, it wouldn’t cause any damage?
If an incompetent person was put in charge, any damage they caused would be swept under the carpet and never attributed to technical skills gap, because that would force the company to examine itself.
I’m not sure I understand your reasoning. “I think I get paid a lot of money as compensation for never being allowed to question the underlying assumptions and structures of the system.” If that were it, couldn’t they find someone to more cheaply not question things? (I would think not questioning is a pretty easy skill to acquire!)
Your later sentence may explain things: “I’m wanted for my assets, and having me on the team means that my employer/partner gains legitimacy.” In other words, there are skills that you possess that are useful not because they are useful to the tasks, but because they demonstrate to others “this is the type of person on our team.” This point seems quite separate from the first one — you could still in principle display these attributes to people outside, but internally question the system.
“I think I get paid a lot of money as compensation for never being allowed to question the underlying assumptions and structures of the system.” If that were it, couldn’t they find someone to more cheaply not question things?
At a certain level, high salaries are their own justification: you pay them because that’s what you were paid and increases commensurate with seniority/promotion depend on them (if you cut down at lower levels, it gets increasingly hard to justify “so why aren’t you getting a cut the same way?” and then the figleaf is off, it’s all about naked power – ‘I get this because I can award this to myself’). It’s the excuse for high salaries/compensation packages in charities and the public service: “we need to match private sector remuneration, else these highly qualified people wouldn’t work for us!”
No, it’s like the Ben and Jerry experiment with wage structures; eventually you have to give in because people want to be paid those scales because “everyone else is getting them”.
Deiseach, I’m not sure I understand the distinction in your comment between “we need to match private sector remuneration, else these highly qualified people wouldn’t work for us!” and “people want to be paid those scales because “everyone else is getting them”.”
It seems like you’re saying that the latter is the truth, whereas the former is a falsehood. But they seem like restatements to me- if they don’t match private salaries, people won’t work for them, because they want the same pay that everyone else (in the private sector, mostly) is getting. I mean, “the value of a thing is the amount someone is willing to pay for it” is paraphrased constantly in business.
I think the idea here is “I’m being paid a certain and high amount for my skills and my time. I’m being paid even more on top of that to not use those same skills to raise questions about what my management does.”
A company might pay N to a baseline employee, 1.2*N to a skilled version of baseline, 1.1*N to an unquestioning baseline, and 1.1*1.2*N to a skilled unquestioning baseline.
Not the same, but similar in a sense – I decided I was all done with ambition, and was just going to accumulate a nice heap of retirement savings, and get the h**l out of the pathological environment.(*)
I feel reasonably certain that if I put the effort into a lot of BS, I could climb another rung on the local technical ladder, picking up a few really nice bonuses on the way followed by a nice fat raise – in about 5 years.
At the point when I came to that conclusion, I was in my late 50s, and close to paying off my mortgage. It was too late to really do the FIRE thing. But it was incredibly liberating to realize that putting up with BS in an attempt to increase my salary/achieve another promotion was no longer cost effective; better to simply arrange things such that I wouldn’t be working long enough for the increase to matter.
Have an exit strategy and keep an eye on any rats that might be about to depart the sinking ship.
I mention to others: “You get paid for the parts of the job you don’t enjoy.”
I volunteer in EMS because I gain personal satisfaction for developing and maintaining a skill-set I want to have. But I’ve had other people tell me “I’d do this job for free if I didn’t have to write trip sheets.” In essence, they are being paid to do the parts of the job that aren’t enjoyable.
I am by training, profession, and inclination a software developer. Were I to switch full-time careers I’d almost certainly take up programming on the side. But being willing to program for free doesn’t mean I’m willing to program any arbitrary thing for free. There’s a big difference between writing software to scratch your own itch, and writing particular software (and the associated documentation, user support, etc., etc.) which is part of a saleable product. There’s no way I’d put up with the annoyances of the corporate world without being paid well.
Just like with your other examples, plenty of people are never allowed to question pretty much anything for a rather modest salary. If anything, the correlation is reverse – do you thing minimal-wage workers are often invited to question their company’s system? And what about VCs or top technical specialists?
This seems like a testable hypothesis. Find out what the salaries for the same kind of work are at less dysfunctional employers? The gap is the “accepting bullshit” premium the company is effectively paying you.
Slacking off before I have to participate in a payroll training webinar in ten minutes time, so for your entertainment needs (if you’re truly desperate and have watched everything on Netflix already) – the Virtual Eurovision!
Tuesday night was the first half, tonight will be the second half. Not as fun as the real thing but pick your potential “that could have been a winner”.
Covid-19 confusion – I often read that people who die from Covid-19 are commonly comorbid with hypertension. These statements, while probably true, seem misleading to me.
The word comorbid has a medical definition that means a patient has two conditions needing treatment at the same time and does not imply any causation. I don’t believe that is the way most non-professionals understand it. The “morbid” in there is frightening and stories in the media often imply the presence of hypertension causes a higher risk of covid-related death. Virtually never is hypertension define in the media. According to the American Heart Association:
Among adults age 20 and older in the United States, the following have high blood pressure:
– For non-Hispanic whites, 33.4 percent of men and 30.7 percent of women.
– For non-Hispanic blacks, 42.6 percent of men and 47.0 percent of women.
These numbers go up with age group and are roughly similar to the covid comorbidity reported. I see no reason to suspect any causality here.
So we have these possible causal flows:
-Old age increases risk
-Living in a nursing home increases risk
-Being black increases risk
-Being poor increases risk
-Hypertension increases risk
-Hypertension treatment drugs increase risk
-more???
It will be a long time I suspect before all these get teased out. Hopefully, the pandemic ends before we know all the answers.
Following up on some discussion about this, an article about progressive politics and the Religious Left, in the form of a review of a new book.
And in further “I’m bored because I haven’t been forwarded the files to work on yet” news, I hope you will all be appropriately sensitive in future when referring to persons engaged in adulterous liaisons. Luckily, the Associated Press stylebook has the guidance you need!
Yes, let’s not offend the delicacy of adulterers. That would be so bad and not nice!
I love that it was called “archaic.” Of course we don’t use the word mistress too often anymore. But it’s not as though we call them companions, either. The former has not been replaced in common parlance; it’s just off limits now.
“companion” sounds to me as an archaic euphemism.
BTW, is “financially supported by” actually required part for term “mistress”? I am not a native speaker and I always though that “has long-term sexual relationship with a man who is married to someone else” is the defining part.
I am with matkoniecz, financial support might be present in a decent number of cases but is certainly not essential.
My cynical take on this is that the new approved terms are meant to be used when talking about women involved with politicians, celebrities or other people who are influential/rich/powerful.
If you’re writing a kiss’n’tell story about Horrible Other Side Politician who cheated on his wife, you may want to present the mistress in a sympathetic light as she is your source for all the juicy scandal. So she was his “lover” or “companion”, which makes it sound like “I was just an ordinary girl swept off my feet by this powerful man whom I fell in love with, it was just my bad luck the dirty cheating rat was married”. You don’t want to introduce any notion of “ex-mistress trying to squeeze more money out of the affair by pressuring the guy to pay up more and if he won’t, getting the cash by selling the story”, as that would make your version of the story less sympathetic.
If you don’t want to offend Particular Rich/Powerful Guy, you may also want to be discreet about referring to the ex-mistress; calling her his “lover” makes it sound more romantic – two hearts that beat as one, star-crossed, brought low by Cupid’s arrow! The Francesca da Rimini gambit, as it were. (Which I am not sympathetic to; yes you may genuinely have fallen in love, yes it’s tough, but he’s married and this is wrong).
Saying “Bob Famousguy had a string of mistresses” or “Susy Slapper was the mistress of Bob during his third marriage” is a bit too coldly factual about the lust and avarice involved – so judgemental!
So, homewrecker is out, huh?
A proper mistress is I believe expected to take care not to wreck homes.
And, I agree that the term as colloquially used does imply a financial asymmetry to the mistress’s benefit.
I think financially supported is suggested by the term, but not strictly implied. “Kept mistress” would make it explicit.
If the woman is supporting herself, “lover” would seem the more natural term.
If the woman is supporting herself, “lover” would seem the more natural term.
Yes, but “lover” is softening the situation, Alice and Bob could be lovers without either Alice or Bob being married to anyone else. I agree that “mistress” does not necessarily involve financial transactions, but there is the element of “he pays the rent for your accommodation/he buys you expensive gifts” – isn’t one of the things that sparks suspicions of an affair that Husband is buying gifts/there are unusual expenditure patterns that don’t relate to Wife and can’t be otherwise explained? (e.g. “oh that jeweller’s receipt for a bracelet? a birthday present for my sister Anne” and you see Anne wearing the bracelet).
Some of the nose-in-the-air fingerwagging about the term being “sexist” amuses me, as there are indeed terms for men in similar situations. Granted, we may not refer to a man as someone’s “master” (well, unless it’s one of those kinds of relationships) but there are terms for the men having the mistress from “fancy man, gallant” to “philanderer”, and terms for the men who are “in a long-term sexual relationship with, and financially supported by, a woman who is married to someone else” from “kept man, cicisbeo, cavalier servente, gigolo” to the modern “sugar baby” (admirably non-sexist as they may be equally kept by a sugar daddy or sugar momma).
I am a native speaker, and that’s my understanding, too. If Alice is Bob’s mistress, it means Alice and Bob are sleeping together despite Bob being married to Carol. The usual assumption is that when Carol finds out about this, she and Bob will soon be divorced.
ETA: I don’t think there’s an implied financial relationship there. That *could* exist but I wouldn’t assume it from hearing the word.
I think it’s more like:
Girlfriend/lover: not in a financial relationship.
Mistress: probably but not definitely in a financial relationship.
Yeah, I think “mistress” implies a certain level of commitment or obligation that is less than one owes to a wife, but more than one owes to a girlfriend/lover. This may be financial or it may not be, but it implies that whatever the arrangement is, both parties expect it to continue indefinitely, and would be (justifiably) upset if the other just suddenly ghosted them.
What might happen when the wife finds out seems highly dependent upon the culture. IIRC the main driving force behind the plot of Anna Karenina was something like “Everyone understands that every self-respecting upper-class Russian man will have a mistress, but he’s expected to keep it hidden so as to not embarrass the wife.”
I don’t think there is an implication of adultery — a bachelor could have a mistress.
@David Really? Can you show a source that uses it that way? I don’t think I’ve ever heard it so. In that case it’s a girlfriend or a fling or a friend with benefits or something like that.
Wikipedia’s list of royal mistresses includes Wallis Simpson. And a google for “Justinian’s mistress” comes up with bignum references to the future Empress Theodora.
At less elevated levels, it’s going to be harder to come up with citations, but I think the general sense is (as Conrad Honcho says) that an attractive younger woman with no visible means of support and in a long-term relationship with a wealthy older man is going to be referred to as a “mistress” rather than a girlfriend.
Alright, thanks. It makes sense to have such a word in a noble/royal context where the relationship can be acknowledged but is clearly not going to lead to marriage for social or political reasons.
I believe the proper term there is “concubine.”
Concubinage is a formally recognized relationship in a narrow set of societies and circumstances where such relationships are formally recognized. It never really caught on for the type of relationships that are not officially recognized, should ideally be tactfully ignored but since we sometimes have to talk about them we have “mistress”.
The AP is doing their part to make Firefly real.
Well, if you meant by that a season two, I wouldn’t be complaining….
But it’s not as though we call them companions, either.
Maybe we should go back to the Greek – hetairai. If we’re going to be calling them “companions”, that is. Perhaps whoever is updating the AP stylebook is a fan of Firefly?
I feel like while Firefly went to great lengths to insist that it’s prostitutes were classy and normal and high-status, the “companion” was still closer to being a streetwalker than to being a mistress.
The one we know seems pretty high status compared to other companions, but she’s still traveling around the galaxy and bedding new men on a weekly basis. Nobody seems to have much of a long-term claim to her, erm, services, as such…
I rewatched the series recently, still holds up really well. On this point I think you are right. Inara makes a big deal about how with companions, they are the to choose, which separates her from the literal sex slaves but not necessarily from all prostitutes.
I believe Inara was as atypically adventurous for a Companion as e.g. Shepard Book was for a monk, so I don’t think we can draw a strong conclusion from her case.
In particular, note that flying to a different planet to take new clients every week, is not a thing that any prostitute needs to do to make a living any more than their contemporary counterparts need to fly to a different city every week. The ones who do, are either doing it for its own sake or are so close to the apex of their profession that there are only a handful of potential clients in their league per planet or city.
Inara can show up on a random planet with maybe a week’s notice, and secure engagements with local VIPs. That’s several steps removed from being a streetwalker.
Right. I don’t mean to imply that she has the status of a streetwalker. But I don’t think what she does maps to a conventional “mistress” by any stretch of the imagination.
It is, nonetheless, possible that most Companions have long-term arrangements that more closely map to the general concept of a “mistress”. We simply don’t know, because we don’t see any other active Companions.
I think there is an obvious and significant difference-in-distribution between religious right-wingers and religious left-wingers:
Right-wing religious thought is more likely to boil down to “God says we should do X; therefore X is good; therefore we should do X”
Left-wing religious thought is more likely to boil down to “God says we should do good; X is good; therefore we should do X”
When religion inspires right-wing politics it’s often providing both motivation and direction; when it inspires left-wing politics it’s usually only providing motivation. There are more cases where right-wingers cite a passage in scripture that could not also be interpreted to support left-wing positions than vice versa.
I think this is why the presence of religion is more obvious in right-wing than left-wing politics, even if the left-wingers are no less devout.
Is is possible to tease out an “essence of left/right” that endures through the ages, such that we could place Biblical characters on the spectrum? I’d like to, but I’m not sure how, and I feel like it’s too uncharitable to the left to say that they are definitionally the ones who take their cues from the broader culture/world instead of God.
Jeremiah, for example, strikes me as the ancient equivalent of a performance artist, which would be coded left-wing. Teresa of Avila would probably be waylaid into some sort of BDSM group in the modern era, again a left thing.
Teresa of Avila would probably be waylaid into some sort of BDSM group in the modern era
??? 🤨
I fear you may be getting your Teresas and Thereses mixed up, if you don’t mean Catherine 🙂
I would appreciate some development of this statement!
Ecstasy of St Teresa
I think it doesn’t map well to left/right, but there’s an important distinction between the strands of revealed religion that looks for themes (natural law/Thomist, theologically rigorous Reformed) and those that look carefully at the details of what’s commanded (Orthodox Judaism, most Anabaptist groups). I wouldn’t describe the first as “taking it’s cues from the culture vs God”, but the second group often does so describe it.
That sounds like the iNtuitive/Sensing division in MBTI.
In this model, Jesus was a radical left-wing figure.
In this model, Jesus was a radical left-wing figure.
And David and Jonathan were gay lovers, and Naomi and Ruth were lesbians. I read the news today, oh boy.
A lot of Jesus’ teachings seem to have been exactly along the lines of “do good because God says so” rather than “follow the rules because God says so.”
@albatross11
For a lot of believers, this doesn’t parse as well as it could. Imagine this conversation:
Bob and Jane aren’t having a typical conversation most Christians would have. Bob’s view that the rules are just arbitrary bullshit he has to follow and nothing else would be out of place to most; it might exist as a fringe view, but it’s more typical of people who are rejecting the rules outright.
Another conversation:
This Bob’s view is not universal, but drastically more common than “I follow rules because rules exist and for no other reason.”.
One thing we can do to try and parse Jesus’ teaching on rules is to look at instances when he ran into rules and rule-breakers, of which there are a few.
John 8: Jesus is approached by a crowd that has captured an adultress; she was caught red-handed and her guilt isn’t contested by any person present. The group is religious in nature and attempting to draw Jesus into a theological trap.
So, parsing it down, Jesus questions the “rightness” of a crowd of sinners brutally judging another sinner. They, guilty, withdraw. He then doesn’t declare the sin not a sin or the rule invalid; he forgives, but tells her to stop breaking rules.
Matthew 12 and Mark 2, where Jesus is trying to eat and people are bothering him about that:
Another group stops Jesus when he’s trying to eat on Sabbath; he points out that there are exceptions to the rules – priests can and need to work on the Sabbath and necessity, and David once took holy bread from a temple in a time of necessity with the blessing of the priest there. In the David instance, it was necessary that his men fulfill certain conditions for it to be right(temporary abstinence from sex/contact with women), something that would have been known to Jesus’ questioners and emphasizes that this is more complex than “This rule is about suffering and you aren’t suffering enough”.
Mark 2 has another element – This particular rule was supposed to serve people, not hurt them, and he’s in charge of it anyway. Again, he’s questioning the application of the rule, and not the rule itself.
So here Jesus says “Yes, there are rules, but the rules have exceptions” and “This is a good rule that helps people, but you are enforcing it in a way that makes it hurt people”. He doesn’t invalidate the rules or say they shouldn’t be followed.
Matthew 7:
Here, in a chapter mostly about rule-following and law, Jesus mentions at length that God isn’t going to give you bad stuff to hurt you, but instead gives you good stuff to nourish you.
Another criticism of application of the rules then occurs; why are we focusing on other’s sins when we have sin ourselves? Note that this doesn’t say that planks OR specks are alright and fine; both are supposed to be removed from eyes if present. It’s just that you should focus on your own first; Jesus would rather you make yourself pious as opposed to enforcing piousness on others. But this is still a demand for individual piety.
Later in the same chapter, Jesus says that being nice IS the law, and that the rules ARE nice – that’s the golden rule; if you are truly walking around trying to maximize everybody like you would for yourself, you are going to follow the law on accident if nothing else.
Then, somewhat converse to the “take it easy and just be nice and it will all work out” stance that ignores the harshness “being nice is the law and the law is being nice” relationship he then immediately warns that this is hard, and most people will fail at it.
Matthew 19:
Here Jesus encounters a rule, says that it’s wrong in that it isn’t harsh enough; his own disciples say “Hey, Jesus, isn’t this rule too harsh the way you want it?” and he says “If you can’t get married and stay married, then don’t have sex for your entire life.”
Shortish Summary
Most of the time when Jesus interacts with a rule, he doesn’t question the validity of the rule, but he often questions how it’s enforced. Most often he points out that either the spirit of the rule is being ignored for excessive legalism, or that the people who are enforcing the rules like to do so to others while ignoring their own sin.
His foil in most of these situations are the Pharisees, who are letter-of-the-law correct to a fault, but also possess the spirit of gigantic assholes.
In this context, it makes a lot of sense for Jesus to take a stance of “The rules exist, but you lack the loving spirit necessary for them to be helpful; you’ve turned the nice, helpful rules into a harsh legalism I dislike and that you should stop”.
It’s an oversimplification for someone to say “these laws are important – I will harshly force others to follow them; me being the enforcer means I’m good, right?”. But I think it’s also a mistake to take Jesus pointing this out as him saying “Just be nice, y’all – rules are dumb!” if most or all of the examples of him interacting with rules show him questioning application instead of content.
I am certainly no theologian, but it seems to me that a lot of Jesus’ teachings, also echoed in a lot of what the early church did, were recognizing places where the rules/laws/etc. were getting in the way of doing good (as defined by “love God and love your neighbor”, I think) rather than their intended goal of helping you do good.
This makes sense in the context of the idea that the rules are supposed be be helping you do the right thing. Divorce, especially in Jesus’ day, was legally permitted but I think was also a pretty awful way to treat your wife–potentially leaving her in a really bad position unless she had family who would take her in. So Jesus updated the law there to guide people toward doing the right thing. Adultery is bad but so is stoning people to death, so Jesus put a stop to the stoning while still telling the woman to knock it off with the adultery.
Jesus also spent a lot of time interacting with people who’d been shunned from the rest of society–the woman at the well, lepers, Samaritans[1], tax collectors, etc. That didn’t mean he condoned everything they’d done, but it did mean he broke a social rule (shunning people for not following the laws in some way) where the rule was doing harm and making people worse instead of better. Part of this was making it clear that some things weren’t anyone’s fault (lepers and people born with various disabilities weren’t the result of someone’s sin and so shouldn’t be treated as such), but other parts were accepting the possibility of someone genuinely repenting (the tax collector promising to give half his wealth away and to pay back anyone he’s cheated fourfold).
This also makes sense in light of the fact that basically all branches of Christianity have gotten rid of a huge amount of Jewish law, and instead we have our own rules, somewhat different by denomination, but more-or-less never requiring circumcision, refraining from eating pork, etc. Those laws weren’t appropriate for helping us be good anymore, but different laws and rules and guidance can help us do the right thing, and become better people, and do what God wants us to do. (Which I think are all at least pointed in the same same basic direction.)
[1] I think the Samaritans didn’t much like the main line of Jews either.
That’s why I pulled up all the examples I did – they contradict a literal read what you just said. In the applicable portion of them, he criticizes the application of the rules, but not the rules themselves. So he doesn’t say “The sabbath rules are bad, and gone now” he says “You are using the rule incorrectly”. This is a big distinction.
More or less agreed, with the exception that stoning people isn’t definitively banned by this passage – Jesus definitely had mercy and offered grace here, but I don’t see anything that carries the weight of “capital punishment is now not a thing”.
Social rules are distinct from scriptural rules – All this example does in furtherance of “Jesus isn’t a rules guy” arguments is show that he doesn’t agree with absolutely every rule from any source whatsoever.
This would be more applicable if Jesus were to, say, dishonestly collect taxes or partake in prostitution – those would be actually breaking rules. The latter would make the prostitute feel even more accepted, but we don’t find he does this.
This is a good example of why it’s important to cross-reference why and how this would have been biblically significant. In this case, there’s absolutely no rule against Jesus touching this guy.
The relevant section here is Leviticus 13; it contains the regulations about skin diseases. In it, a priest(important) examines the person with the disease and uses a number of guidelines to declare them clean/unclean. If they are unclean(by their standards, likely to be contagious) they are segregated until they are cleansed(healed), at which point they are welcomed back. Note that this is a rule about where people with a confirmed sickness can live and how they have to act; there’s no rule against the non-sick touching them, particularly for people in a priestly role.
What Jesus is doing here is not declaring lepers to be clean – there’s no indication he’s going “Guys, let the people with infectious skin diseases that might devastate your community back in – it’s fine! Love!”. What he does do is cleanse the person of their uncleanliness and welcome them back into the fold.
This is not an example of Jesus invalidating a rule; this is an example of him removing a person from the applicable group to whom the rule applies through supernatural healing, which is sort of his thing. It’s not accepting leprosy but instead defeating it to clean and redeem a human.
I bring this up because it’s important – if we are going “Jesus isn’t a rules guy” then we need examples where he disapproves of a rule, not where he disapproves of the rule’s enforcement or defeats a disease to remove someone from the rule’s territory.
I agree with this.
This is IMO the most valid argument here, because it definitely gets into some fuzzy stuff on which there’s a fair amount of disagreement. I’m going to spend too much time on this because I think it’s necessary.
I think the bolded bit in the quote above makes a big assumption that needs to be justified, I.E. that these sects got rid of these rules themselves, unilaterally, because they weren’t useful anymore. This is important because if the churches got rid of the rules themselves in contradiction to what Jesus said, that doesn’t tell us anything about Jesus; it just tells us the churches were disobedient.
If Jesus appeared to be a rules guy and the churches can go “Well, yes, the entirety of the old testament and Jesus are very concerned with rules but we aren’t, because they are inconvenient to us in some way, or there seems to us to be a better way”, then they could also use the same rationale to neutralize any concept in the Bible entirely.
Now, there’s sects of Christianity who actually do believe this, although they’d phrase it differently. But there are a lot that don’t, and it’s important to look at why.
For lots and lots of Christians, they are drawing from abrogation theology or dispensation theology. A super short version of this is they are drawing from a few references (Hebrews 8, Jeremiah 31) that the old covenant with Moses (which is the foundation for the law, for the most part) has been replaced by the law as remains in the new testament. They look for rules that have been “renewed” in the new testament as their new laws.
So that’creates another group, those that think they aren’t bound to old testament law, but who think that this is because the rules were changed for them, rather than them simply ditching rules they didn’t like/knew better than.
This brings up two gotchas:
This first doesn’t work particularly well, since the source of the “New Covenant means the old law is dead” is Paul in Hebrews, but he’s also the source of most of the law renewals. If you are rejecting Paul’s ability to accurately relate God’s thoughts on things, then you lose most of the renewed laws, but you also lose the foundation for a grace-based new covenant relaxation of the rules.
Once you reject the new covenant, you are left with Jesus’ words in red from before the new covenant was supposed to begin, and as I pointed out, where he encounters a scriptural rule he either leaves it alone, makes it more strict, or only complains about third-party enforcement methods/motivations.
This leaves you with a biblical message where your individual obligations are with very few disputed exceptions consistent with Old Testament law.
You can do this as well, but as above, what you are left with is an abbreviated bible that leaves you under the old covenant, with a few possible exceptions for very specific things(circumcision, prohibited foods).
Shorter Summary of the long new covenant bits:
“We ditched these rules ourselves because they are dumb or not useful” doesn’t tell us anything about Jesus, just about those who ditched the rules. Jesus remains pretty consistent on the rules being important.
“Those rules were ditched for us, new covenant” has better legs, but is reliant on the reliability of Paul, who still holds a lot of things to be sinful and avoided; that leaves you with a new set of rules, but still a set of rules. Adultery and homosexuality would still be sins an individual was obligated to avoid, for instance.
If the speaker is God, those two statements would be identical, making Jesus the platonic ideal of a moderate.
That article about the religious left does ring true for me.
I have a few old friends who fit that category. They have the outspoken religious zeal of a true believer, and passionately believe that the progressive cause is God’s work.
My personal interpretation is that the secular-progressives of the world don’t notice the religious zeal of some of their supporters; it might be that they don’t interpret it as ‘religious zeal’.
Possibly because they are blind to the way in which secular progressivism, as a movement, has the goal of of
Saving the LostAwakening People to the problems of various minorities in this fallen world. Aftercoming into Communion,being Born Again, becoming Woke, the progressives obviously need to repent of their individual role in perpetuating the problem, and then preach a new gospel to the unbelievers who haven’tbeen convertedbecome Woke.Mistress is also a term for a rich single man’s kept lover. At least that’s how the likes of Barbara Cartland use this word. Maybe it’s an old-fashioned use?
Some (most? all?) bayesians seem to be content with defining 50% for a prediction of a binary proposition as “the evidence is equally strong either way”, however, this never quite sat well with me.
If you insist on such a definition, how do you deal with a distinction where you need to make 2 sets of 100 binary predictions in the following way?
In the first set you are indeed unsure about any event happening, they are all independent from each other, but you are sure all events have equal chances of occurring versus not, and so about 50 will happen while 50 won’t. Therefore it’s very unlikely that you’d see far deviation from this. For instance with a truly fair coin, you’d be very surprised if all 100 came back tails, and you would find this very hard to believe.
While in the second set you have even less information and knowledge, you cannot say that about 50 will happen and about 50 won’t; it is very well possible that all 100 will happen or all 100 won’t; none of those outcomes would be surprising.
Further background can be read here and here. While I am waiting for my hitherto interlocutor to respond to this, I’d also like to attempt to court the wider community (you!) for an answer to this question.
In those situations you absolutely want to assign the same probabilities to each individual event; the difference is in the joint probability distributions.
If I want to communicate fully my predictions about a future containing two possible events A,B, it is not sufficient to define P(A) and P(B) (and by implication P(~A) and P(~B)); instead, I need to specify P(A&B), P(A&~B), P(~A&B) and P(~A&~B)
If A and B are independent, then I know that P(A&B) = P(A)P(B), etc, and so all I need to is define P(A) and P(B), and we can work out the joint probabilities from them. But if not, that won’t be possible; all I can say about P(A&B) is that
P(A) + P(B) – 1 <= P(A&B) <= min(P(A),P(B))
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_probability_distribution is a wikipedia page that goes into this in more detail.
I’m not really a bayesian, but isn’t that what the joint probability distribution is for?
If you have a set of 100 binary outcomes, any possible prior can be encoded as a set of weights over 2^100 entries (one for each possible combination of outcomes).
Assigning the same weight to each outcome gives each possible outcome a 1/2^100 chance. This model finds “all true” surprising to the exact same level it finds “First half all true, second half all false”, “evens true, odds false”, “primes true, composites false” or indeed any other possible combination, surprising. Yet if you ask it to give you the probability of “k true, 100 – k false” regardless of which specific events were true or false, you’ll get (n choose k)/2^100 as the probability. This means the uniform probability encodes a belief in independence (kind of, see below).
At the other extreme, a belief the events are perfectly correlated would assign 50% to all true, 50% to all false, and 0 to everything else.
To get your “it is very well possible that all 100 will happen or all 100 won’t; none of those outcomes would be surprising”, you need to weight the events in a particular way. You end up giving “all true” a weight equivalent to all the possible “50 out of 100 are true” events (easiest way is to scale each event by 1/(n choose k), then renormalize).
This is feasible and it still gives each individual event a 50% chance of happening, but is it truly “less information” than the previous prior? I’d say no, because this model actually rules out anti-correlation. It evenly assigns probabilities over the range “perfectly independent” to “perfectly correlated”, but that leave the other half (“perfectly independent” to “perfectly anti-correlated”). So you’ve ruled out a lot of possible arrangements.
That is, the probability mass for “evens all true, odds all false” only is a little bit due to “these are all independent events”, a lot of it comes from “odd-numbered events are just the negation of the even event right before them”, “All events in the same mod 4 equivalence class have the same outcome” and a gazillion other weird possibilities.
As a followup, doesn’t that mean that “these events are, for sure, independent” and “these events may or may not be correlated or anti correlated in arbitrary ways” result in the same joint probability distribution?
As far as I can tell, yes? The only way to get these two to start making different predictions is to assume we’ll run the 100 events, then run them again, and ask for a joint distribution for all 200. The “definitely independent” model updates only the base probability of each event, while the “maybe there’s a correlation” model treats the outcomes as evidence for certain kinds of correlation, and against others, which means they no longer cancel out perfectly.
No they don’t. Evidence equally strong either way results in a 50% posterior probability only if the prior probability was already 50%.
If anyone is still following this, A LOT of what we talked about here is discussed on the latest episode of All the President’s Lawyers, including “why not charge on the Gulen issues” and “is there a predication requirement” and so on.
https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/lrc-presents-all-the-presidents-lawyers/dropping-the-charges-against-michael-flynn
Stream of consciousness of things they’re missing because they’re not thinking like a rightist.
-They broadly compare the use of 1001 to general use against the public. The guest even says, “Yes, I think there are problems with general use against the public,” but focuses more on, “I bet the gov’t won’t take this approach in any other case.” Well, unfortunately, that runs pretty hard into the principles they used for applying 1001 in other high profile cases. It reeks of, “Rules for thee, but not for me.”
-They buy McCord’s argument that there is predication due to “Flynn lying publicly” and waving toward possible blackmail, but that’s not actually what they have evidence for. It’s known that VPOTUS said something that was not true; it is assumed that Flynn lied to VPOTUS and VPOTUS was repeating that lie. Fact is, politicians lie to the public. I don’t like it, but we don’t ever treat those things like grounds for prosecution. It is entirely plausible that Flynn told VPOTUS the truth, and the two of them got together and said, “Here’s the story we’re going to roll with in public, because of political reasons.” I don’t like it, but I know that all politicians on both sides almost certainly do these things sometimes, and I don’t want the FBI basing barely-credibly, seemingly politically-motivated prosecutions on this type of thing. The time had long passed for them to provide defensive briefings to the WH and wash their hands of it – and many many officials have been on record saying that such a thing would have been the normal course of events in any other administration. On top of that, there’s still a gap (thanks Conrad for pointing this out). After Jan 4 (when they were going to close the investigation, but learned of his conversation with Kislyak), it was almost two weeks before VPOTUS publicly stated the falsehood. I don’t think anyone has put forth a worthwhile rationale (stipulating that Logan Act don’t count) for why that conversation was evidence in their investigation that he was an agent of the Russian government.
-Unlike some on r/law, I have little problems with amicus briefs. I know they’re not a party to the case, but I understand how non-party equities can sometimes be important. That said, the guest’s spin on this is that the judge is using this as an opportunity to get at the motives of the gov’t behind this filing. It smacks of, “When I do something, we appeal to the idealized principles and most minimal requirements for what I’m allowed to do, but when my opponents do something, it has to be pretext for bad motivations and we can’t let bad motivations stand.” This is why there was a lot of haranguing about this in the immigration EO SCOTUS case – you can’t have the public perception be that some politicians aren’t allowed to do the same things that any other politician can do because we think they’re a bad person doing things for bad reasons in their heart. Nobody is ever going to seriously suggest that anyone should use their power to look into possible bad motivations behind any previous filing against Flynn.
-They sort of skip over the “why wasn’t this charged”. Didn’t give even a moment to, “Why wasn’t the nonprosection agreement specifically-stated, as is required?” If that was indeed part of the deal, then it needs to be part of the public record. (They later discuss how future governments may wiggle out, broaden the scope, and prosecute directly on FARA even if this is dismissed with prejudice. It reeks of the fact that they didn’t do this one properly. And in any event, I don’t think they said anything about kidnapping at all (which was subject to prior discussion here); just an op-ed saying that he (the Turkish gov’t) thought it was good policy to extradite the guy. I think that’s about right for credibility on the kidnapping accusations – not even mentioned.
-Concerning the entire Trump/Russia thing, I was always of the standpoint, “There are some potentially problematic things here, and they could even be really bad, but it’s also possible that everyone comes out okay and some things just sound bad.” Turns out the latter was true. But it’s the small things when you realize that people still can’t acknowledge that. Like where he says that Flynn’s cooperation didn’t give them Trump in the way they were hoping for – he insinuates that if only Flynn had really cooperated, Trump would surely be finished this time. When the reality is probably that the dude cooperated and gave up what he had… but there just wasn’t anything there. (I just hit play again after writing this, and it’s comical to hear him go on to say that prosecutors need to be careful to avoid seeming like they’re trying to coerce specific testimony against a specific person, but it never quite hits his brain that maybe that really was what was going on and that Flynn just didn’t actually have the goods on Trump.)