I would be interested in knowing whether the chart in 1. above reflects a general chaotically-wide-ranging-topics of most men's thought compared to women's, a factor that (to add to the speculation) may be entirely absorbed by ADD prevalence in men.
If you extend the list down to topics of increasingly rare historical impact, are men still thinking about it more, whatever it might be?
The day has come, the time is now, this is the end beautiful friend. The last episode of season two of "The Rings of Power". And my verdict?
It's not that bad.
I'm impressed that they *did* manage to tie up all the loose ends (more or less) even if it did involve hopping around from one location to another like a hummingbird on crack. See what can be done when you don't waste time and just advance the story without a lot of pointless standing around chattering?
There are SPOILERS from here on, so be warned.
The good: the Dwarven storyline remains the strongest, and they started the episode with that. They did reveal the Balrog, which had me pissed off for a bit, but then they hid the Balrog again. So we didn't get the destruction of Khazad-dum, which is sensible (for once) on their parts.
Did I get "Celebrimbor's tortured and arrow-riddled body used as a war banner"? Well, mostly! It was a good end for Celebrimbor (by which I mean a bad one) and I wish they had let his character be like this all along, instead of absent-minded, weak-willed, dodderer.
They *finally* ended the "ooh, is the Stranger Gandalf?" nonsense. Yes, he is, or will be. Did he get his staff? Yes, at long flamin' last. And they *finally* tied-up the Stoor storyline, though I imagine we'll get them and the Harfoots back in the third season. But it's amazing what impetus to get off their backsides and leave that having a Dark Wizard collapse the ravine walls on top of your 'hidden' village will do.
The Dark Wizard *may* be one of the Blue Wizards, or he may be Saruman. I'm still betting on the latter, but they did at least reveal that he is one of the Five Wizards.
The "Isildur's wanderings" storyline is, thankfully, now done and finished. The Númenorian storyline continues to be weak, unhappily.
The not-so-good: the show has written itself into several corners due to changing the lore, the most severe of which affects the Dwarven storyline and the Númenorean one. Prince Durin *knows* the Dwarven rings are corrupted, so no way can he just hand them over to the other Dwarven realms. But this is demanded by canon, so they're introducing the new plot of conflict and possible civil war: other realms are demanding the rings in return for the treasure they sent, as per King Durin's agreement with them, and Durin's brother (still unnamed and unseen) is launching a bid for the throne, as are some other Dwarf-lords. A possible Dwarven civil war in season three? We'll have to wait and see.
LET ANNATAR BE EVIL! Charlie Vickers is good in this episode as well, and Sauron wavers between trying to claim sympathy as a victim, wallowing in self-pity, and then revealing his ugly side when confronted with any kind of refusal or opposition. Even Vickers can't pull off - for me, at least - making it seem that Annatar genuinely regrets Celebrimbor's death, after he just cut a bitch in front of our eyes.
The Downfall of Númenor can't come fast enough. I hate Isildur, I hate his Bitch Sister, I hate Pharazon's Useless Son. I don't quite hate Pharazon, but he's much less effective here than he was in season one.
But overall, they didn't make as gigantic a mess of things as they could have done. Well done show, it only took you two seasons, sixteen episodes, and enormous amounts of money to get there.
Unlike the show, I won't be hopping around from location to location, I'll deal with each storyline as it happens.
(1) Khazad-dum.
As I said, the Dwarven storyline is the strongest. They start with Prince Durin arriving to find Dísa looking after a Dwarf who has been attacked by King Durin. We get a tender moment between them with a passionate kiss (which at least here is warranted because they are a married couple), then the prince heads down to deal with his father. The king is ramming a mini-battering ram into the rock walls to smash it open, and the prince wastes time appealing to dad's better nature to try and get him to take off the ring (instead of bashing him over the head while his back is turned, knocking him out, and taking it off before he can break open the walls). Doesn't work, the walls are broken open, and we see the veins of mithril running through the rock that the king hopes to mine. All is peaceful for about twenty seconds, then the Balrog (who is also down there) wakes up.
Honestly, up to this, I thought it should have been King Durin out there fighting Adar (on his own, even) because he's way more effective than the entire Elven garrison of Eregion, plus relief force of Gil-galad and Elrond's troops, were.
The CGI effects are pretty good here, and even though I was annoyed that they seemed to be going to bring on the Balrog and the destruction of Khazad-dum way too soon, it's not a bad version of a Balrog. I even liked the smoky 'wings' which don't come down one way or the other on the perennial question of "Do Balrogs have wings?"
It's trying to climb out, it lashes out with the fiery whip and catches the king by the ankle, the prince leaps forward to protect his father and is knocked back. This awakens the king's fatherly love and concern, and *that* is what enables him to fight off the influence of the ring and take it off. This scene is really good, because the actor playing the king can act even under a ton of makeup and a beard more luxuriant that Santa Claus's beard, but the music tries too hard and is a distraction instead of an enhancement of the scene. It's also good because we got to know the characters and to care about them, unlike Pincushion Elf girl last episode.
The king attacks the Balrog and their struggle brings down the rocks and thus seals off the opening once again. It's a really good ending for the king and ties up that part of the storyline well.
Afterwards, the Dwarves mourn their king and the prince prepares to become king and offer aid to Elrond and the refugees in Rivendell (we'll get to that, don't worry), but Narvi and Disa warn him about troubles yet to come: since there were rumours the king had not named the prince as his direct/official successor, some other Dwarf-lords are going to make a bid for the throne, including the prince's brother. Also, the Blue Mountain Dwarf-lords are demanding the promised rings in return for the treasure they sent, or else.
This is where the show has created a problem for itself: Durin has his father's ring as well as the other rings for the Dwarves. But he knows they're evil, so how can he hand them over? If he can't convince the other Dwarven realms not to take the rings, what can he do? Destroy them? Hide them? Surely he'll never put on the king's ring himself? That's where they're going to have to solve the problem of "the seven rings for the Dwarves" in season three, and presumably it'll have to involve treachery/intrigue on the part of the brother; maybe he seizes the rings and hands them out in return for support for his claim to the throne?
Okay, that's the Dwarves dealt with for now. Four out of five for a strong performance in the main and neatly tying up this loose end.
(2) Rhun and Gandalf and I DON'T CARE, PUT ME OUT OF MY MISERY. Finally, finally, *finally* Gandalf (let's give up pretending he's not, because he is) shows up in the Stoor village by night. How does he know where it is? Who knows, it's not explained, they don't have time for this. The Dark Wizard is there and offers friendship, claiming that Manwe had told him (Gandalf) would come, but he's been waiting a long time. So it's confirmed that both of them are two of the Five Wizards. Gandalf asks about the halflings (yes, he calls them that) who travelled with him, Dark Wizard says they're fine, and shows this by - having his Tusken raiders minions bring them out, holding knives to their throats. He claims he never intended this and was betrayed by the Tuskens, the leader of the Tusken brags that his people used to be kings, and it does *look* like they're acting independently (whether this is a set-up or genuine is left ambiguous). It doesn't matter anyway, as Dark Wizard who knows how to use *his* staff slams him into the rocky wall of the ravine, where he conveniently bashes his brains in and dies.
Dark Wizard tries to persuade Gandalf and the Harfoots to trust him, they don't, and he brings down the ravine on top of them all, telling Gandalf that maybe the pain of losing those he loves will remind him of the suffering of Middle-earth if Sauron wins. Rocks fall but nobody dies, since Gandalf can now use *his* powers even without a staff.
Next morning the Stoors prepare to leave (since their village has been smooshed) and Poppy and Nori will go with them, while Gandalf goes on his own path. They don't really spend a lot of time on the farewell, which I appreciated because I didn't want another long drawn out, sentimental, parting but it did seem a bit abrupt considering how much time had been wasted on this storyline. Anyway, Gandalf picks up a stick from the ruins of the village and realises this is his staff, now. He goes back to Tom and yes folks, it was all a test to see if he would pick his friends over power. Oh wow, no way we saw that coming, was there? Ends with the pair of them drinking tea and singing a duet of Tom's song.
Oh, and yes, he's going to be "Gandalf" because the Merimac Stoor did the "Grand-Elf" name thing again. Oh dear. But at least they've stopped the pretence that the Stranger isn't Gandalf.
That's the end of that, thank all the Valar, the Maiar, the Evil Dark Lords, the Balrogs, Thuringwethil, and of course Eru Iluvatar. At least until season three, but sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
(3) Númenor. Oh, Lord God Almighty. Okay, let's get this one out of the way.
Elendil's Bitch Daughter is ringing bells to summon the leaders of the Faithful to an audience with Pharazon. The head leader is the High Priest of Númenor, which let me digress to say this is an office that did not exist at the time. Númenor had no official religion of that type. But if it's a vaguel mediaeval fantasy, we gotta have a high priest, yeah? Okay, Pharazon turns up and claims that Miriel has deceived them all and cheated on the test of the sea monster with help from a friend who they all know, someone who visited the island previously. And he has proof, which seems to be something he wrote down, as he hands over a parchment to the priest who reads it.
Galadriel? No, turns out it's Sauron. Now Pharazon makes what I think is a very stupid move here, and seems to have lost some of his political cunning from the first season. He *should* be attempting to sway the Faithful to his side, undermining their support of Miriel, and using political means to win back power and sow doubt. Instead, he goes straight for the purge: his soldiers go through the city nailing papers to doors and declaring the Faithful traitors, as they drag them out of their houses (presumably to haul them off to prison).
Bitch Daughter belatedly realises this will mean Bad Times for dad, so she sneaks out to warn him. Pharazon notices her go, and I imagine is marking her down as Unreliable. She goes to find her dad, who apparently is... working in a tavern as a waiter? Remember, folks, this is the Lord of Andúnië here. The show reduced him to a captain in the Seaguard, but even so, there's no way he would need to find a service industry job. Anyway, Bitch Daughter warns him to flee and guess what? We get a mention of Anarion! Yes, finally they remember Elendil's *other* son who is on the western side of the island, with the rest of the Faithful, and Elendil will go there to him.
There's a scene with MIriel but frankly by now I was so bored I skipped a lot. They're *still* pushing that dumb romance between Miriel and Elendil She won't leave but urges him to go, she gives him Narsil, he rides off (so we get the scene in the palantir of him riding away from the city) and she is shackled (this show sure loves its shackles) and brought before Pharazon while that other guy who supports him reads out a list of charges against her.
The Downfall cannot come soon enough. I'm begging them. End this now, crash that wave on top of them!
On a basic level of political intrigue, Pharazon can (maybe) convince the people to go ahead with a war of invasion against Sauron, the perceived threat to Númenor. But then that makes it a simple clash of power between him and Miriel over who gets the throne, and doesn't get into the dispute about morality and mortality, and of course the alliance with the Elves can't happen because it's been established that the current situation on Númenor is down to accusations of being "Elf-lovers" against the royal family.
(4) Eregion. Finally, something better! And it is pretty good, though not without flaws.
We start off with Galadriel trying to lead a (very small) band of Elven women and children out the secret Dwarven path, while the Orcs run rampant and are killing the remaining Elven defenders. For the lore nerds, this is reminiscent of Idril and the secret path during the fall of Gondolin, and keep that in mind.
They make their way out into the open but oh no it's a trap! A band of Orcs are waiting there (how did they know?) and Galadriel makes a bargain with them: take her to the Lord-Father, let the others go, and she has "nine reasons" to persuade him.
The Orcs do this (this is the last time they're going to be the kinder, gentler Orcs, just warning you) and bring her to Adar, who commands them to leave. Galadriel offers to make that alliance with him he wanted, and he says "how will you fight without your ring?" and shows that he is wearing Nenya.
All this time he has had his back to her, then he turns around and it's another OH FUDGE! moment for me, because Nenya has healed him. He now looks like the Elf he is, or was.
Yeah, this is not possible, but whatever. He gives Nenya back to Galadriel, as he truly wants to be the Father of his Orc children, and reverts to what we've known him as. He bargains that if they fight together and defeat Sauron, he will then lead his Orcs to Mordor and they'll never disturb anyone again, or fight the Elves, and they'll make a lasting peace.
I wish Joseph Mawle was still in the part, but Sam Hazeldene is good, too. He seems genuinely sincere, and Galadriel is wavering and seems on the point of agreement, when more Orcs come in, bearing an Orc on a stretcher-type arrangement. It is Glug, the family man Orc, and they say Sauron tried to make him betray Adar but he refused, and this is what happened.
I have to break off here, even though that's not the end of the scene, in order to show the lead-up to this. After we saw the "oh no it's a trap" capture of Galadriel, the show cut back to Eregion and OH YES! Poor Celebrimbor, I'm very sorry for him, but I was honestly pleased to see canon being followed in some way.
He's lying on the floor of his forge, propped up against a pillar, and as full of arrows as Pincushion Elf girl from last episode (but I care now, where I didn't care about her). And it's Sauron shooting him full of them, torturing him to tell him where the Nine Rings are.
Sauron (may as well drop calling him Annatar) is still doing the mixture of self-pity, 'you made me do this to you'. and general lying about his motives. Celebrimbor is right, he's so good at lying, he has deceived himself. You can't really say "my motives are for the good" when you're shooting someone full of arrows, and Jack Bauer and 24 be damned. He threatens Celebrimbor with the Orcs (yeah, but they're not *your* army yet, buddy), about what Orcish blood-lust in battle is like,and how when Gondolin fell, it went on for weeks and weeks. (See, I said we'd get back to that!) But if Celebrimbor co-operates, then he'll stop it all.
(The city is 95% destroyed by now and the populace dead or fleeing, so, uh, what is left to save?)
Celebrimbor comes back with a line about kingfishers and dang, it isn't whimsical or dumb or inappropriate, it fits with the performance the actor is giving and I have to give Charles Edwards credit here. *This* is the Celebrimbor we should have been getting all along! I wish the show had given us this, but even this crumb now is better than nothing. Both Vickers and Edwards do great work here, and again I have to emphasise: see how writing not hard when you just follow the damn plot as originally conceived?
He manages to stand up and, with the foresight of death, prophesies the death of Sauron. Who is now so pissed-off, he runs a glaive or spear through Celebrimbor and raises him up, and leaves him hanging like that. So yeah, I got the arrow-riddled and tortured body of Celebrimbor hanging on a pole, thanks show!
The one bit where it falls down is that Sauron sheds a tear at the end here, and I don't believe it. Even if he is self-deceived, I can't believe he truly regretted his actions here at the end.
Anyway, a bunch of Orcs bust in (including Glug, the family man Orc) and ask "are you Sauron?" He responds with some obfuscation, but seems to gain ascendancy over them.
(This is something I wish they had fleshed out more; the last time we saw Sauron with a bunch of Orcs, they cosplayed the assassination of Julius Caesar. This time he's able to enthrall hostile Orcs?)
Okay, now back to Adar and Glug on the stretcher. When Adar kneels down to console him, Glug stabs him. OH NO, TREACHERY AND BETRAYAL! And then his children cosplay the assassination of Julius Caesar with *Adar* this time round. It's a good scene and Hazeldene plays it well. I think we're meant to contrast it with the same scene of Sauron's death at the start of the season. Adar here dies smiling, still loving his children. He addresses them as such in the Black Speech, when Sauron pops up and says "they are not children anymore". Adar dies, and I think he's content to die. He doesn't seem full of resentment and anger; maybe Nenya healed a lot more than his body and he regained more of his old self from before.
Well, that's the end of any chance of peaceful Orcs living in their own homeland on good, if guarded, terms with the Elves. Orcs are bad now! Galadriel is understandably shocked, and Sauron sends the Orcs off to raze Eregion, kill everyone, but capture and not harm the Elf leaders, while they have a little chat.
This devolves into a fight (Sauron uses both the crown of Morgoth, which Adar conveniently brought along, and Adar's sword which I think must be the Evil Key Blood Sword from season one, as it looks very like it in the hilt design). He keeps trying to persuade her and switching between appeals and anger as that fails.
Galadriel does *not* girl-boss her way out of this one; she might have been able to one-shot an ice troll way back in season one, but this time Sauron has the edge on her. He then switches into a series of illusions, taking on the form of Halbrand (which had me screaming WHY ARE YOU PAUSING, KILL HIM NOW YOU SILLY BINT!), Galadriel herself, and finally Celebrimbor, before reverting to his own form and stabbing her with the crown. She falls down, the pouch with the Nine Rings falls out of her clothing, and he picks it up.
She manages to stand up again, and he tries to persuade her to hand over her ring. Again, I had to question why? Why not just take it off her hand as she's lying on the ground? Maybe they mean a ring has to be surrendered willingly by the bearer, but the show has not developed this. It *almost* seems to be working, but then she steps backward off the cliff top (yeah, they're standing on a low-ish cliff here) and falls to her death? Maybe?
(Of course not, she's a main character).
Meanwhile, back in Eregion (I'm jumping back and forth here, where the show had the separate scenes all flow as one, but for the narrative it's necessary) the Orcs - as ordered by Sauron - are razing the city and have captured Elrond and Gil-galad. Oh, and Arondir (yeah, he's not dead either, big surprise huh? He's not even mildly inconvenienced from being arrow and sword stabbed last episode, judging by how active he is).
They're piling up scrolls and chairs and artworks and about to torch them, while Elrond (the scribe and scholar) pleads with them not to destroy the work of Celebrimbor. Ha ha, our evil book-burning Orcs scoff (I think the book burning was a bit too on the nose here) but even as they put the torch to the priceless knowledge, hark! A horn rings out! Followed by a fusillade of arrows which pincushion the Orcs this time. The Dwarves have finally come, even if it's a little bit too late. But better late than never, right? And now Elrond can be assured Durin does love him and would never be faithless.
They are rescued, find Galadriel, see the Morgul-knife wound - I mean Morgoth crown wound - and Gil-galad tries healing her with Vilya. But it's not enough, until Elrond takes Nenya off her hand and puts it on (see, Sauron, this is how you do it) and joins in to heal her.
Back at the cliff with Sauron and the Orcs (including Glug, family man Orc) who have come back to report that the Dwarves have kicked their backsides and are retreating with the refugees of Eregion, and if they try pursuing them, many Orcs will - ack! Ack, because Sauron does not take bad news well and has just run Glug through with Adar's sword. The price of betrayal and the reward of treachery, huh, Glug? New papa, step-papa, doesn't love you, either!
Galadriel wakes up in a glade in what will be Rivendell, watched over by Gil-galad. They fill her in on what happened while she was having her near-death experience, Elrond tells her that this place is defended by the Elven rings, then gives her back Nenya. Then Arondir reports on the situation. Sauron is roving through Eriador and they have two choices, says Gil-galad. Take the fight to him, even though they don't have the forces now, or retreat to fortified places like Lindon and here.
Near-death experiences must be one heck of a character-development event (along with the events of this season where she learned how wrong about everything she was), because the first season Galadriel who wanted to push on despite the mutiny of her troops is now "let's follow what Celebrimbor said about light being stronger than strength" and is all peaceful and let's retreat.
So the end of *that* storyline. But where's Cirdan in all this? And Celeborn? Well, I can't nit-pick too much, as I did enjoy the end of the Celebrimbor and Annatar arc, and it wasn't handled too badly at all.
5) Last and *definitely* least, Isildur and Pelargir. I'm going to skip a *lot* of this because I do not care. I do not care about Isildur and his mommy issues, I do not care about Theo and *his* mommy issues, I do not care about the rag-tag rabble of Southlanders and Wild Men, I do not care about Le Epic Romance between Isildur and that wench, whatever her name is, who is willing to drop her fiancé in a heartbeat to go back to Númenor with Isildur for the sake of modern conveniences like indoor plumbing and the other luxuries of civilisation. There's a prolonged passionate kiss between the both of them, which, ugh. The show tries forcing romance without allowing it to organically grow or show any chemistry between the characters.
To make a long story short, Useless Weasel Kemen shows up with a boat full of Númenorean soldiers and is very surprised to see Isildur alive. Isildur, who hasn't a clue about what has happened back home while he was on his gap year, tries to stop Kemen ordering the villagers about. Weasel drops the nicey-nicey facade, refuses to let Isildur bring Wench aboard the ship and back to Númenor, threatens to kill Isildur's horse (gasp! not the horsie, the one sensible being here!) unless he co-operates, and arrests Isildur to come back to stand trial for treason. He then informs the villagers that Númenor will be building a fortress here and they must pay a toll of wood from the forests (this is in accord with canon, where the Númenoreans did build settlements in Middle-earth and used the forests for wood for ship-building, though Pelargir should already be a harbour and settlement now). And that's the end of that: the ship sets sail with Isildur aboard looking sadly back at Wench, while her oblivious fiancé (head of the village) takes hold of her reluctant hand.
The End, thank the Lord, of this stupid sub-plot. The sooner Númenor gets on with the human sacrificing, the better, says I. I hope Weasel and Bitch Daughter are first on the altar, and I only regret Isildur won't be due to being needed in canon.
Now we have to wait for season three, however long that will be!
In another forum I frequent, I just came across a poster who is likely a bot using ChatGPT or the like. All their posts consist of a large block of perfectly formatted text that consists only of vague generalities which are superficially related to the post they're responding to but don't actually contribute anything to the conversation. It's really interesting to see this happening in the wild.
To what end? Karma/like farming? Capabilities testing?
It is nice to see such things in the wild, because of how much they stand out as inauthentic. I know the pro-AI people will come out and say that we just wouldn't/don't notice the good AI, but the fact that the best options currently being used clearly aren't that says a lot.
> because of how much they stand out as inauthentic
From another perspective, the fact that it took an ACX reader to think about it for a bit before realizing it is its own kind of endorsement.
I'm not even trying to be elitist, but what demonstrably passes for discourse on Twitter and 4chan and Twitch and what have you is far far lower than the capability ceiling of what LLMs are capable of, both in info content and in linguistic form. The "Corporate talk" signature that gives corporate LLMs away is not an inherent LLM limitation.
Prepping an account for spam is probably the most likely usage. Some websites/subreddits limit posting for new accounts or accounts without much karma, so building up a history of normal comments helps a spambot pass that filter.
Could just be an experiment. Someone is going to write a blog post entitled "I set chatgpt loose on a forum for six months and nobody noticed or everybody noticed or something"
Does anyone know anything about AI equipped robotics and whether an AI guided, tree protecting quad-copter is a feasible idea given today's tech?
Why I'm interested: I like in a part of the world, the Scottish Highlands, where deforestation has been absolutely rampant for centuries. People were already writing to parliament to bemoan the situation back in the 15th century and so most areas have been denuded of forest for centuries. I won't go into "why this is bad" but of course now, many landowners, the government and not for profits are attempting to reforest. This is incredibly difficult and costly, mainly because of the large, unmanaged deer population in the highlands. We have several species endemic and anybody who knows deer will know that they like to eat pretty much anything. Any saplings that are inadequately protected (and protecting saplings from Red Deer in particular is no laughing matter) will be immediately eaten. The solution to this problem is "deer fencing", a two meter high metal fence, which costs several hundred pounds/dollars per square meter. This severely limits the scope of reforestation. Management of the deer via culling is ineffective and reintroduction of predators is, for the moment not on the agenda but it occurs to me that a network of stationary spotting cameras and quad-copters able to behave in a predator-like fashion could be used to police reforestation areas more simply and cheaply than the deer fencing. Not having a background in any of the enabling technologies, I don't know whether this a practical proposition given today's tech so I'm very interested to hear from anyone who can provide knowledgeable comment.
What about stationary lasers targeting the eyes of the deer? This has fewer moving parts and can be relatively more humane than it sounds like, there’s research on less-than-lethal weapons that don’t inflict permanent damage. Stuff like this https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2721-1.html
The copters behaving in a "predator-like fashion" would only work if they actually prey on deer. They aren't stupid; the deer aren't going to run away from something that isn't a threat. What are you going to do, strap on guns to AI-controlled drones and order them to shoot at anything that looks like a deer?
Maybe this wouldn't be a problem if the actual biological predators weren't killed off, but I'm sure you guys have very reasonable excuses for not reintroducing them. So I guess your only option is to up your management efforts from culling to extermination.
Edit: Now that I think of it, there was a case in Japan where the culling of deer caused them to move to a nearby mountain where they started fighting for food with an endangered species. So killing them in the places where you want them gone does actually drive them away. Leaving the corpses there as a warning will also probably help.
You guys could be right but deer are very timid creatures in my experience and although they don't have any 'teeth' quad copters are capable of displaying a number of intimidating behaviours; swooping, rushing, herding type behaviours should be possible to engineer, as would some supplementary disroienting stimuli; flashing/strobing lights, noise.
Having personal experience, I can say that deer will run away from any "novel" stimulus, such as motion activated outdoor lighting but they will soon habituate if it is not to be feared. However, they never lose their fear of a convincing predator (me in this case). They will always run from humans. I don't therefore have any reason to doubt that they would always run from an aggressive machine.
Current technology should make this feasible on some level, but would be very buggy and need a lot of human interaction and technical services (repairs, reprogramming) to make it work.
Other than a proof of concept, it's likely that having live humans doing the work is cheaper and more effective, even if they're operating the copters. Either way sounds quite expensive for any kind of large reforesting project.
Having a site where volunteers from around the world could log in to operate quadcopters and also post the videos is definitely a perfect option with no downsides and should be implemented immediately
> Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
> This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
> “My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.
It turns out some modern high school English courses only feature short reading passages, like those found on standardized tests.
Student's don't just "arrive" as if they were dropped from the sky; these colleges have full control over what sort of people they admit. If they're happily admitting people who can't manage to read a whole entire book that's on them.
But they have no control over the pool they choose from.
A well-researched article would mention which of the two cases this is: Are there not enough book-readers in the population the elite schools choose from? Or are there enough book-readers but the elite schools don't choose them? (Both options seem plausible to me.)
If it's the latter, how exactly does the selection cause this? Is it like the college doesn't care about reading the books either way, but they insist on being X, Y, and Z, and there are simply not enough students who are X and Y and Y and also read books? Or is reading the books actively hurting your case (even if you happens to be X and Y and Z), for example maybe the colleges want students who can sufficiently credibly describe coming from a disadvantaged background, and "I read books" is interpreted as "not disadvantaged enough"? Or is it simple neglect, where adding a question "which books did you read recently" (and giving positive points if you did, and if you can answer 3 simple random questions about the book's contents) could fix the problem?
I think it’s pretty funny that they know how to read but don’t know how to turn to the next page. Maybe they need a whole class for that difficult task.
I'm surprised that it's "top colleges". I'm not surprised about the spoon-feeding in English classes. Sixteen years ago when I was working as a school secretary, the English teacher was providing précis, notes, pre-digested material, model answers and the like for texts. The kids never had to read the entire book at all, and maybe not even a full chapter. So long as they could regurgitate the answers that had been spoon-fed to them about "what are the themes of this novel/play?" on an exam, that was good enough.
Granted, those were the weaker students who weren't expected to be able to cover the material without a *lot* of assistance. And our school library project did a *ton* of work on getting non-readers to read by appealing to their interests and coaxing them along with magazines and then YA fiction and gently getting them to associate reading with "I will enjoy this" and not "Crap, more boring homework".
But yeah. We've had people on here proudly recounting how fiction bores them and they've never read a fiction book, if they read something (and reading text? with your own eyes? pft, what is this, the Stone Age?) it'll be non-fiction. But generally they'll instead listen to an audio book while doing something else, or a pod cast, or a Youtube channel, etc.
'People what read, y'know, entire books and ones with no pictures even' will not go away, but we'll be an increasing minority of weirdoes. Weird isn't bad, despite what the Democratic Party election campaign may say! 😁
> 'People what read, y'know, entire books and ones with no pictures even' will not go away, but we'll be an increasing minority of weirdoes. Weird isn't bad, despite what the Democratic Party election campaign may say!
I wonder! Books for me can convey a lot more nuance than a movie. I think well made podcasts include more nuance than a movie, but a book that took months or years to write is just oozing with little details.
It's like, you can learn a lot of lore from playing the w40k games. But if you read the books, you get tons more delicious little details that add to the flavor.*
*I regret starting the Horus Heresy series 10 years but at least it's finally over and I can move on.
Yeah, my sense of it is that reading novels is slowly losing favor as more compelling forms of entertainment become available. The book trade is, if I remember correctly, a single-digit portion of the entertainment market, with video games and video (TV/movies) being the big dogs in the yard. Not a lot of young people read for pleasure, so reading has become associated with homework.
Yet book sales — nonfiction and fiction — in all formats including print — have been rising. And there's nothing like a popular movie or TV series to spike the sales of the novel it was based on (or spawned).
> A surprisingly large number of freshmen don’t know the difference between fiction and nonfiction, or that novels are fiction. Not a majority, but I was surprised when I first encountered confusion around these points; I’m not any longer. I don’t think the majority of freshmen confuse fiction and nonfiction, or genres of nonfiction, but enough do for the confusion to be a noticeable pattern (...)
Ive encountered a version of this at my job. I'm a software engineer and our recent intern, when asked what we could do to make internship a better experience, remarked that there was a lot, too much documentation to read and that he'd have preferred more onboarding videos.
This stuck in my mind because my team has some of the best docs I've seen in my career. Systems and components are described in detail. And there's a whole archive of design and decision documents that I can refer back to. It's a trove full of treasure.
I know nothing about your work of course, but consider that the intern was really complaining about the "Entry point" problem. It's infamous in Software Engineering docs, immortalized in (what else) this XKCD https://xkcd.com/1597/:
>> This is Git, it tracks collaborative work on [software] projects through a beautiful, distributed graph [database] model
> Cool. So how do I use it?
>> No idea. Memorize those shell commands and if you get into a trouble, nuke the repo and download it again.
The joke, of course, is the lack of a suitable **entry point** to Git's documentation. It can tell you all about the 7 different types of merges or the 69 parameters that `git checkout` can potentially take but it doesn't have a reasonable answer to the newbie's very reasonable question: How... do... *I*... **use**... it.
The emphasis is important. The newbie doesn't care about your beautiful, distributed graph database - even if s(he) should -, or your super-duper-uber efficient networking stack over multiple transport protocols, the newbie just wants to undo a commit they made by mistake, and (s)he can't find a command for that in git's entire command language, and it's making him/her mad and distracted. I know because I was there, and it's incredibly not fun.
The general idea is that documentation is a hierarchy of things that look as if they're the same thing but accomplish different goals for different people at different times https://docs.divio.com/documentation-system/.
I would probably teach separately Git commands for investigating the current situation, and commands that alter it. When I alter something, I usually have a good idea about what the current situation is like.
Exploration commands:
git status
git fetch
git diff
git diff --staged
git diff HEAD^ HEAD
git log --graph
git log --graph --all
git branch --all
Modification commands:
git clone
git pull
git add FILES
git commit -m "MESSAGE"
git push
git restore FILES
git switch BRANCH
git switch --detach TAG
git switch --create BRANCH
git branch --delete BRANCH
git rebase -i COMMIT
Probably forgot something. It is not a clear distinction, because "fetch" technically modifies the state (just not the part that I am working with) but the idea is that the confused newbies probably jump to the modification too soon before they master the exploration.
Also, instead of nuking the project, sometimes you just need to backup the recently modified files and do:
Could it be that it was just overwhelming to be confronted with such near perfect documentation?
I don’t have a problem reading a lot of text, but I have been left alone with tomes of “onboarding documents” to study, which is just a really bad way to get going. Especially if you’re a newbie and you have no idea what’s important and what isn’t.
It's hard for me know for sure because I wasnt their onboarding buddy. I will say though, having gone through onboarding myself, that the layout for me made sense because there were map-like features like arch diagrams and table of contents and even very explicit signs of purpose (eg. "This document describes operating X and Y, if you're looking for the design document for X and Y, go here").
I find it fascinating that the one red line Joe Biden drew for Israeli retaliation against Iran wasn't to not target civilians, or even to not target their oil facilities, but was to not target the Iranian nuclear program. Keeping Iran from going nuclear has theoretically been the centerpiece of American foreign policy in the region for fifty years, and yet when someone with blood in their eyes is all but volunteering to take it down for us our foreign policy establishment will go to the mattresses to keep the planes on the ground and keep those centrifuges spinning. It certainly gets the ol' noggin joggin', as they say.
Evidence for the "American Ottoman Empire" theory, perhaps? We're supposed to turn the ME over to Iran to manage while we gently sink into decline, but Iran can't do that for us if the Zionist entity has a monopoly on nuclear weapons. So we just need to get Iran over the threshold and they will have a completely free hand to run the place in our name. As long as they have nukes soon, everything else the Israelis might blow up today can be replaced in time.
I don't disagree with you, but the problem might be, what if it doesn't work?; you have seriously upped the ante. Iran learned a lot from the last time it happened.
Also the way the question was asked might be muddy. The moderators in the VP debate kept using the word "preemptive" and I wondered why neither of them picked up on it. WTF is preemptive in your context?
It's the utter predictability of Biden's weak foreign policy that contributed to Russia invading Ukraine and why Iran can easily calculate the risks of US responses to missile barrages on our allies. In any situation, the White House will back down if there is a risk of escalation, so they keep getting pushed around and ignored (even by its own allies like Israel in many cases). I can't imagine this administration carrying out something like the Soleimani strike that Trump ordered, or having any meaningful breakthroughs like the Abraham Accords. Managed decline is the strategy.
What strategic goal did the Soleimani strike actually accomplish? We killed one of their generals, they shot at one of our bases, what did those deaths get us?
I feel like that strike (and a lot of Israeli strikes prior to the recent war) didn't really have a coherent political objective or a theory of victory, it was just "not doing anything makes us look weak, this is something we can bomb to prove we aren't weak." The politician's syllogism but for war.
Prior to that, Iran's puppet militias had been carrying out numerous attacks against American troops and Soleimani was the guy in charge of that. It degraded their abilities to run the militias and also sent a very direct message that these actions do eventually have costs.
Of course, if you're saying it was too small a message to matter I won't disagree. Iran has had it coming since 1979 and every year that passed without a meaningful response just made things worse for not just us but everyone in the Middle East on both sides.
I think I'm skeptical that this "message" communicated anything new to anyone. Yeah, the US is still capable of dropping bombs on Middle Eastern countries. Yeah, working in a terrorist organization is still a pretty unsafe job. Hezbollah still seems to be operating pretty well in Soleimani's absence. (I suspect even Israel going totally apeshit on them is unlikely to permanently take them off the board - terrorist organizations tend to be pretty tenacious.) It feels like it was solely because A Message Must Be Sent rather than because we expected anyone's behavior to change.
Mentioned below, but it carried signaling value. That, and many other maneuvers during the Trump presidency indicated that despite "America first" rhetoric that he was engaged and willing to take risks internationally. Overall, Trump was much harder to model from a game theoretic perspective compared to Biden/Blinken who are risk-averse to an extent that is exploitable.
> it was just "not doing anything makes us look weak, this is something we can bomb to prove we aren't weak."
I'm confused by your question. Looking strong instead of weak is one of the most important objectives when you're dealing with geopolitical adversaries.
What would Iran (or Hezbollah, or any of their proxies) be doing differently today if Soleimani was alive? If looking strong is supposed to deter an enemy, what action was deterred?
I think "not looking weak" is not a valuable thing per se, the projection of strength needs to actually shape your opponent's actions in some way. Everyone knows that the US can drop bombs on the Middle East at will, but everyone also knows that this is not an effective means of eliminating a terrorist organization and terrorists seem to mostly accept it as a cost of doing business. So bombing them feels like it's not serving as an actual deterrent, it's just serving our desire to be seen doing something.
Or to put it another way, there's a difference between looking strong to your enemies and looking strong to voters in your country.
Looking non-threatening to people you have no troubles with and threatening to people you have trouble with is a better formulation of (what should be) the goal of states in geopolitics, better than "Looking strong good, looking weak bad".
Nobody is going to look at the USA's 11 aircraft carriers and globe-crossing B2 bombers and think "Pathetic. I can conquer that in an afternoon.". But plenty can - and plenty did - possibly look at unjustified (or perceived-to-be-unjustified) attacks in lands ridiculously far away from D.C. and think "Hmmm, a threat from a faraway Empire. I bet I can Vietnam the shit out of it until it leaves me alone."
Not only that, but the disgruntled citizens of said aggressive Empire (addicts, prostitutes, the poor, the indebted, ...) are going to look at the incredible lengths their polity goes to in order to have "respect" in a region 2 oceans and a half away from them and think "Wow, my government really doesn't give the slightest shit about me."
The incessant whining of a certain OP on ACX is a comically exaggerated demonstration of political Parasitic Memes. My first encounter with Parasitic Memes was as host, for the Parasitic Meme "The Islamic Caliphate was so fucking cool !1!1!1!1!". I spent days and days and days and then some days and afternoons more reading about the Ottoman Empire, and wondering wistfully about what could have been if it survived to today, even though the Ottomans *uniformly* looked down on their subjects to the point that it was the Arabs (though those of the Peninsula, not my branch of the Big Family) who allied with Western Europe to bring their ailing body down after more than a century of slow death.
The Caliphate **looks** cool, it tickles the macho hormones of a horny dumb teenager, and so that's what the horny dumb teenager believes in, even though it would have objectively sucked for the horny dumb teenager to be transported back to the Caliphate's time.
Similarly, the USA's hegemony **looks** cool, it tickles the macho cells of a certain breed of internet commenter afflicted with having more macho cells than brain cells, and so that is what they whine about and cry about when it looks as if it's ending, even if it objectively suck for that internet commenter to have 600+ billion piece of colored paper, their countrymen's and countrywomen's hard and long work, go into literal economic black holes: foreign wars with no end in sight and no win condition and no lose condition, and foreign war machines ("Allies") that efficiently transform American hard work into dead children and destroyed cities.
But it's of no use, the Parasitic Meme has already taken hold of the Internet Commenter, now the only thing that gives him erections and wet dreams are the sight of armed drones whizzing by in a foreign sun-burnt sky, and casualty numbers on the screens. That's the high, and it must be chased at all costs, even at the cost of the lives of their neighbors, siblings, and - indeed - children, children of children, children of children of children, ...
> Looking non-threatening to people you have no troubles with and threatening to people you have trouble with is a better formulation of (what should be) the goal of states in geopolitics, better than "Looking strong good, looking weak bad".
That sounds like a platonic ideal to me: Nice in theory, unachievable in practice. Back in the real world, covert threats will, from time to time, have to be substantiated with not-so-covert actions (simply because after a while, someone _will_ call you out on it), and those not-so-covert actions will be not-so-covert to your friends as well. Besides, I don't think Scholz or Macron started sweating after hearing about the strike on Soleimani.
Not sure what to do with your footlong rant, or how it's relevant here.
> covert threats will, from time to time, have to be substantiated with not-so-covert actions
Nobody said anything about threats having to be covert, that's a strawman. There are also more categories than "Enemy" and "Ally", the 2 categories I was talking about lie in between.
> Not sure what to do with your footlong rant
That's fine, its target audience is people with better reading comprehension.
Why am I not surprised to see you parachuting in to defend Iran, those innocent uwu smol beans who never did anything wrong? You don't even have the excuse of Israeli occupation here, not that I'd have expected it to stop you.
Why am I not surprised to see you bitching about a post you either didn't read or didn't understand, hilariously mangling its conclusions into unrecognizable lizard-brained mush?
The threat of losing their nukes is the only thing Iran would go to full blown war over. I suppose the threat of a nuclear Iran is the only thing Israel would go to war with Iran over. It's a question of timing. Biden doesn't want the war to happen before the election.
Perhaps, but I wish we could at least collectively recognize how weird it is to see Party A fire hundreds of missiles at Party B and then watch the American foreign policy establishment sit back and stroke its chin and say "hmm, yes, we wouldn't want this to escalate into a war, would we."
A simple explanation is the same for why Israel was letting its enemies grow stronger for years - the temptation to avoid big war in the short term, whatever the cost is in the long term
The big problem with prediction markets is still that it doesn't make financial sense to place your bet much before the end date because you get no return on your money before then. It seems this problem would get worse the larger the bet size one can make. E.g., I'm not going to park a million dollars in Polymarket two months before the election, but I might the day before it. But prediction market enthusiasts might be willing to tie up nominal amounts of money long before the election because they think it's fun to play the market. So the problem is that punters who are willing to put the most skin in the game won't until the last moment, which mostly defeats the purpose of the market as a price signal to society.
My above theory predicts that Polymarket will likely move sharply in the 48 hours before the election. We'll see.
I agree that this is one factor. My understanding is that polymarket also has another factor that pushes markets toward 50%: position limits (or trading limits?) that make it asymmetrically harder to push the market away from 50% than toward 50%.
Note: the time value of money (or mana, or tokens, or whatever) also applies to the other markets if the participants feel that they have positive expected bets they can make on a shorter term than the election bet. It pains me to say it, but 1 month is a long time in these prediction markets.
I disagree. Think of it as 10% of a large sample size bet on the market already. The resulting price is quite close to if the 100% of market views came in. I mean, as a sanity check poly market is around 50-50. Do you actually think the right prediction is meaningfully far from that?
Polymarket has been barely moving, whereas Nate Silver has swung in a few weeks from 61% Trump to 56% Harris, all the while calling that a "near tossup". My guess is a few big fish in Polymarket have anchored it in a tight couple point range around 50/50 - *for now*. If it suddenly moves to something like 56/44 two days before the election, I think it indicates the majority of those with skin in the game were waiting on the sidelines.
I don't see what good an election prediction market does if its resolution is so low that it can't do better than tell us "It's a close race". Everyone already knows that from looking at the polls. What added value are these markets giving us?
For instace, if you believe who wins the election will have a material impact on the economy, it's not insignificant to your portfolio if the odds are 50/50 or 55/45.
The market might be 100% accurate, Think of a the 10% liquidity of all possible betters is the 'true value' with an error of 5%
Well, Nate Silver might be a biased model (say, 3% in some direction) also with an error of X (maybe 1%, maybe 10%)
It's still useful to have a good model with an error of 5%, even if we could in theory have a better model with an error of 3%
I don't think 'everyone knows' anything. If I had to look at the polls, my estimate of who's likely to win could be anywhere from 40 to 60%. Also polls are not the only source of information.
And, in any case, it would take a hundred years (25 elections) to be able to even have a hope of telling if a model giving you values between 45 and 55% is better than a random coin, if all along the true value really was closely bounded to 50-50
Let me retreat from the motte to the bailey (or whatever it is called) since my claim there is probably too strong.
We already had low-stakes prediction markets like Predict It, but prediction market enthusiasts have argued they aren't good enough, we need big money players with more skin in the game to get more accurate wisdom of crowds predictions. Along come Polymarket which has big money and allows big bets. What good is it over the existing small money prediction sites? As you say, maybe we will know in 100 years.
The reason I think Polymarket is failing is that it just hovers right around 50/50, whereas other markets and forecasters move around a bit more, which seems reasonable given that a lot has happened in the world over the past month.
Perhaps it's a resolution bias on my part. If one person tells me the odds of the Mets winning is 50/50 and another tells me it's 55/45 (and I know they are both smart, analytical people who like to handicap odds) I'm more likely to think the latter person has done more analysis on that particular scenario.
Regarding thinking about Rome, is it worth distinguishing between the Republic and the Empire? My reading (and therefore thinking) has tended to focus on the Republic.
We've got similarities to both, so I'm inclined to lump them together for this purpose. Personally, I think most about the last century of the Republic, as it was torn apart and its skin was used to make a suit for the Empire.
Its political system went from one of shared governance to imperial autocracy and that’s certainly a distinction worthy of note. The pillars of its economy remained more or less in place for some time (slaves, agriculture, trade) but predictably empirical rule meant less political participation for the citizens and significantly increased taxation in the later years of the empire. As felt by the average citizen, the effects of the transition probably seemed mild, and once the empire was firmly in place, the people were probably stoked to not have civil war constantly hanging over their head. I’d guess you probably know all this already, though.
That’s a great question. From what little I know, Roman taxation appears less direct (think sales taxes, duties, etc.) and not as extensive because Rome (and more generally ancient civilizations) didn’t provide the public services that are typical in many modern democracies. But I don’t have numbers to back that up. Maybe someone who’s more of a historian could fill in the blanks.
Edit: I dug around a little more and I guess if you're going talk Roman taxes you should mention tributum, which Wikipedia simply describes as a tax imposed on the citizenry to fund the cost of war. But it’s a trickier concept than that because, unlike a simple tax, it could in theory be paid back to the citizens in times of peace.
Sorry. I was pretty unclear. I know that the Republic and Empire are distinct. I'm asking whether, when we consider a meme like "men think about Rome every day," we should distinguish between thinking about the Republic and the Empire.
I see. To me it seems casual knowledge usually starts with Julius Caesar (at least here in the States). So as far as most men thinking about Rome daily, I’d guess it’s the Roman Empire that’s on their mind. That and a lot of folks get drawn into the subject by the stories of emperors that went bananas.
I didn’t mean to imply Julius Caesar was the first emperor. He wasn’t. I guess I was unclear. I tried to indicate that when most people’s interest in Rome starts with Julius Caesar, the republic is already almost entirely in the rear view.
I guess I took it for granted that most people who think about Rome know Julius Caesar is seen as a transitional figure between republic and empire.
I’m really not sure what the average person knows about Julius Caesar. I assumed it was just the Shakespeare play until the “every man thinks about Rome” meme.
But I would say that for people who do know much about him, they’re probably interested in the Republican parts. What’s interesting about Caesar is how used the institutions to build power. The first triumvirate, the Cataline Conspiracy, the Gallic Wars. All good stuff and precedes him becoming a dictator. I wouldn’t really say that it’s in the rear view.
I do think you have a point though that there’s not as much interest before Caesar compared to after. Everyone’s mental image of Ancient Rome is usually the early empire. Marcus Aurelius, for example, is more famous than Scipio Africanus.
Note to horror writers: the US now has almost 100% mobile phone coverage, with the unserved areas commonly being national parks or other similar institutions.
This is a fair point to make, but at the same time, there isn't 100% perfect coverage anywhere. My boss who lives about five miles outside the town in a rural area had to switch her mobile network provider because the service was too unreliable; it kept dropping work calls and even no reception at all.
So there is still room for "we can't contact the outside world" in a horror story, even with mobile phones. Terrain, weather conditions, one service provider's tower not in the right spot, no charge, no credit, etc.
I'm sorry, that map is just lying to you in your face. Where we live, in one of the nearby towns, from the green to at least half a mile out of town, none of our phones have any reception - and we have a phone from at least one of the providers listed in that area. The map says coverage 100%.
Checked a few other places that I know for a fact have no mobile coverage of any kind. Still says 100%, with the providers that I know we use listed.
Maybe they think that US territory is completely flat, and terrain features, like hills and mountain ridges, never block line of sight to towers? That still doesn't obviously explain it, but maybe if I squint at the map enough I would be able to believe it.
I'm skeptical. I live in a midwestern college town. There are multiple places on the main street through town where Siri can't give me directions or play a requested song.
I... don't know what to think of this, it clashes violently with my lived experience. I just drove through a chunk of Southwest (Texas/New Mexico). Coverage was extremely spotty, which I knew to expect, and had all the maps downloaded on my phone.
And basically everyone only uses one carrier, so yes a map showing all carriers combined is misleading. I know of places in rural California, rural New York and rural Connecticut where I have no cell phone coverage.
I know almost next to nothing about military strategy. But based on what I've read in literature it seems like in a land war a big strategy is to create situations in which your troop has a big numerical advantage. I'm guessing the main advantage of a numerical advantage in a particular battle in the context of a war is morale? Are there other advantages? What are other very simple time-tested strategies for winning battles?
Look up Lanchester's Square Law. For ranged combat, the balance of casualties is proportional to the square of the number of units on each side (assuming equal firepower per unit). Basically, the more people you have shooting at the enemy, the fewer enemies survive to shoot back.
Another very common rule is that, before WWI-ish, it's not the battle that kills you, it's the rout. A unit retreating in good order will probably fend off attacks well enough to limp to safety, a unit that panics and scatters is going to get chased down.
I know very little about this, but it seems to me that with modern weapons, if you put too many soldiers in one place, they will simply get killed by a bomb. So if one hundred soldiers oppose two hundred soldiers, what actually happens is that on each side one bomb drops, and most of the soldiers are dead. You need to spread your soldiers wide, but then you lose the effect of the concentrated fire.
The defense strategy is to mine *everything*, put a few soldiers behind the line to shoot at any individual trying to pass, put artillery and anti-aircraft guns further behind the line to bomb any groups or vehicles trying to pass or shoot down the planes.
The counter-strategy -- if you are the right kind of government -- is to keep sending meat waves, about dozen soldiers at a time, so that it would be too expensive to bomb them, but if someone shoots at them, they can shoot back. You can also use civilians from the occupied territory as human shields.
Once in a while, you can do a surprise attack with hundreds of drones, hoping to take out all the enemy artillery nearby, and then you can send the vehicles.
You definitely want to prevent your troops from breaking off to loot the enemy baggage train or camp. There have been a silly amount of historical battles where one side started winning, went off to loot, and then the other side rallied and counterattacked the disorganized looters.
Also, don't let your leaders or officers get hit by a stray arrow and die in the middle of the fight. That's really bad.
There's the Lanchester square law, which posits that an army's combat effectiveness is proportional to the square of its size. In an open field where everyone can see and fire at everyone, if your side is outnumbered 2:1, each soldier will have to on average endure double the firepower while having to kill double the number of enemies to 'break even'. All else equal, the side with double the troops can expect to win with 25% losses. You can test this out in any strategy game. Go into the scenario editor, create two armies, one twice the size of the other, and see how they fare.
This rule of thumb I think was invented mainly for armies standing opposite each other exchanging musket fire. In a modern conflict, especially urban warfare, there is much more concealment of troops and sight lines, so the ability of any troop to fire on any enemy troop is diminished. I believe modern doctrine uses an exponent of around 1.5 instead of 2.
The need to concentrate troops for an offensive is balanced by the need to spread your forces defensively along the front. In any offensive the defender has a first-shot advantage, where they are in a position to fire while the offensive army is moving into range. The defenders will also be more familiar with the terrain they are fighting in. So typically in any offensive you need a large force to be able to absorb disproportionate losses and still fight effectively.
Of course the higher the numerical advantage you have, the fewer troops you're likely to lose. Many offensives of the later part of WW2 involved 10:1 ratios or greater. The tradeoff of course is that it's much more difficult and expensive to organise a successful offensive than it is to merely defend. If ww2 and Ukraine are to go by, it takes nations a couple of years to really learn how to conduct an offensive.
>There's the Lanchester square law, which posits that an army's combat effectiveness is proportional to the square of its size. In an open field where everyone can see and fire at everyone, if your side is outnumbered 2:1, each soldier will have to on average endure double the firepower while having to kill double the number of enemies to 'break even'. All else equal, the side with double the troops can expect to win with 25% losses. You can test this out in any strategy game. Go into the scenario editor, create two armies, one twice the size of the other, and see how they fare.
I didn't know the thoughts I had while playing Starcraft in my childhood had an actual name and practical application.
It depends a lot on the era of conflict and what kind of support both sides have, but in general the attacker wants a 3:1 ratio in their favor at the point of contact.
Other common principles are making use of terrain and water features, building defenses, attacking the enemy’s supply lines, and using the weather (Russian winters in multiple wars, and summer heat during the Crusades).
This is why Russia is generally considered by some to have the upper hand in their Special Operation. And they have been able to push Ukrainian forces back on the heels with massed attacks. But these look like Phyrric victories, so far...
Sound Sense (sound-sense.net) is a nonprofit organization that coordinates low-gain hearing aid trials for people with auditory processing disorder with or without associated hearing loss.
I connected with them a few months ago and got a pair of hearing aids in the mail last week. So far, the experience has been like getting glasses - I am reasonably functional without hearing aids, but with them I have to spend far less time "filling in the gaps" and guessing what people are saying.
The research still isn't settled about whether hearing aids significantly improve APD symptoms. The Sound Sense people think that this is because there's a splitting effect - some people with APD traits really love them and others get no benefit at all. Personally, my experience so far has been a lot of "cool factor" but only a small amount of functional improvement.
Jason Pargin's new novel mentions scissors statements:
"[Physical terrorism and then]...The final stage would involve the release of a false flag manifesto claiming responsibility. This would, in reality, be an act of psychological warfare to sow discord in the aftermath. Our intel says the Russians have been working on this at least since 2014, with the goal of creating the perfect trigger to exploit existing fissures in our society. They have apparently been testing it in various corners of the internet and measuring engagement, gauging which subject creates the most visceral and divisive reaction among the main ideological factions of the American populace. Their goal is to get half of the country sounding like they’re defending the attack, triggering irreconcilable outrage from the other half."
Jason is a fan of Scott's work (I think I first heard of SSC from him in a Cracked podcast?) so I wouldn't be surprised if that was a deliberate reference
Also I enjoyed the book a lot! I thought it treats internet communities (Twitch streamers, Reddit, makeup tutorial influencers) realistically but also captured what's intrinsically hilarious about them. Anyway, do recommend although only if you have a stomach for controversy. SOOO controversial, my goodness. (https://jasonpargin.substack.com/p/the-new-book-is-out-right-now-finally)
Does anyone have information on how - I guess I'll call them "permanent creation" tasks - in childhood contribute to adulthood? If you teach a child to craft a bowl or chair instead of just buying one, does it affect their adult life in any way?
Having a foundation of doing creative stuff was a good thing for me. I was led into/led myself into a ton of creative hobbies, forgot about them all in early life, and went back to them around 35. Now I'm approaching retirement age and looking forward to just making things.
My father retired and had no hobbies, as he had always just worked and watched TV. He always seemed sad and at retirement he began a decline that ended with his life. This gives my various hobby pursuits a bit of desperation that they might not have otherwise.
When my son was in very early grade school, he had a class where the kids made beeswax candles. I remember a Christmas where he had a candle he had made of beeswax and he gave it to me and then he said I will have this candle for the rest of my life and the day I will die I will light the candle and watch it burn Until it is done.
I still have that candle stashed away, where I keep my passport and other important things
My dad and I built several (fairly nice!) stools and other furniture things when I was a kid. When furnishing my new apartment, I still defaulted to Ikea. Not sure that there has been any permanent impact on my life beyond a basic understanding that making furniture is hard and buying it is easy.
Two of my most vivid childhood memories are of making real things, with adult help: A brick from some clay I dug up, and some kind of long dress I sewed by hand myself. I'm sure both were very crudely done, and there was adult help, but to my preschooler mind the takeaway was that I had made the first Real Things of my life. I remember them with a feeling I don't have about making pretend things: sand castles, and forts made of a blanket draped over a table, and stuff with kid construction toys. I knew they were real, not pretend. When I got a little older I daydreamed about making a little house for myself in the woods. Thought I could spread a bunch of that clay out smooth and flat for a floor, then fire it by building a fire on top. That wouldn't have worked, but I thought it would be a way to make a Real Floor.
In my teens I taught myself to be a good seamstress, and have made all kinds of complicated things, including costumes for a theater during one era. I can't do fine woodworking, buy have a bunch of tools and can rough together all kinds of things, and make repairs. And I've always wanted to build a house, though I never got around to doing that.
I don't know whether the brick and the dress just really hit the spot for me, or whether making Something Real would have for most kids. I think the important thing with kids is to be alert for something that really hits the spot, and give them a big memorable experience when you realize that a certain kind of thing gives them special pleasure.
Would a parallel universe have identical values of π or e?
I remember reading a science fiction novel years ago that had the characters navigating a wormhole bridge between universes and they had device to continually calculate the value of pi to track where they were in the multiverse and I thought huh that's a cool idea.
Now I'm wondering, wait how would that even work? Like if you brought a wheel from one universe to another would it suddenly be ever so slightly out of true?
This has sparked a memory for me, was it that Greg Bear book? Eon? I remember loving the pi-measuring conceit as well - even if I agree with other commenters that the change in geometry would likely do something pretty terminal to our biological processes (proteins not fitting, cells denaturing etc)
Mathematical constants have nothing to do with the physical universe.
What one could think about changing in a metaphysical sense are dimensionless physical constants. I enjoyed Martin Rees's *Just Six Numbers* as a teen, though I have since read a bit of criticism that it was too credulous towards string theory's metaphysical claims about the multiverse.
Not so sure about this. Math is impossible without a physical substratum of sorts, right? Ultimately the mental states that take place during a calculation or when acknowledging that a theorem is true are physical configurations (if we take a physicalist view).
I'm pretty sure the book is Eon by Greg Bear. I remember a Pi finding device used in that book to find where they were in the multiverse. But ChatGPT's first guess was The Void Trilogy, by Peter F Hamilton.
Pi would be identical in the context of a continuous flat environment, such as the abstract confines of Euclidean geometry. Whether or not Euclidean geometry is a close approximation of the real world could very quite a bit between universes.
Spacetime curvature, for instance, could definitely affect the real-world value of pi, but a large enough curvature to make pi more than a tiny bit different in everyday contexts would probably be inconsistent with life.
Pi and e are computable numbers. You can have Turing machines which run forever, writing digits of them on the tape one by one.
A universe where if you follow the instructions for calculating correctly and end up with other results would be a pretty fucked-up place.
You might as well ask if there are universes where elementary rules of arithmetic or logic don't hold. I can't really imagine such universes, but then again, I am trained by a lifetime of the kind of logic which holds true in our universe. Or you could say that the math which is discover-able both for us and for the inhabitants of flatland is all the math there is, and everything else is at most dream-logic which fails to be self-consistent when closely examined.
What about lim n→∞ (1 + 1/n)^n ? That happens to be e. But if the limit of the sequence is a different number, it would mean that the values for many specific n would also be different. How specifically would that work e.g. for n=2?
One thing I can imagine is the parallel universe having a different geometry. Like there would be no planes, and therefore no circles as we know them. Our equation for π would still result in the same number, but that number would not describe anything about that world's closest alternative to our circles. (And yes, as anomie said, this would instantly kill you, because the chemistry in your body would stop working.)
Math isn't empirical so pure mathematical constructs couldn't be observed like that. It's like asking if meters could be different. The underlying thing the meters measure could be different but a meter is an invented abstraction. For example, pi in base 12 is 3.18 (and on and on) not 3.14. But this does not correspond to a real difference in the empirical world. You can switch to base 12 mathematics and it won't cause any issues in the physical world.
If OP meant by pi the number defined by summing some series then indeed it’s hard to imagine it changing from one universe to the next. On the other hand if he meant “the ratio of the circumference of some physical object to its diameter” that is an empirical measurement. Even in our own universe it may turn out not to be 3.1415926535… Take for instance a very big circle drawn on the ground as an example (assuming flat Earthers are wrong)
I'm not saying Amazon are putting their thumb on the scale when it comes to reviews of "Rings of Power", but here's the reply after I attempted to leave a review on episode seven. My review gave it four stars out of five, if anyone is interested.
"We could not post your review because it does not meet our guidelines for one or more of these reasons:
Profanity
Harassment
Hate speech
Sexual content
Illegal activity
Private information
Please edit and resubmit your review. Before you do, make sure it meets all of our community guidelines."
Now, the review was negative. But it was a lot less harsh than the ones I've left on here, and I didn't (so far as my poor addled brain can recall) do any swearing, sexual content (oh yeah, that's rich coming from you guys that have an Elf kissing his mother-in-law!) or the rest of it. I didn't even threaten to firebomb Jeff Bezos' toy rockets.
So it would seem that you only get to post a review on Prime Video if it ranges from positive to glowing about how magnificent the show is. I'll bear that in mind the next time I see puff pieces in the trade mags online about how the second season is busting all records for being the most watched, most streamed, most popular, most loved show ever 😁
Maybe their system runs reviews through a sentiment checker, and the sarcasm has tripped whatever setting they have for "Harassment"? Amazon's AI work is not known for being top drawer, so I would not be surprised if their analysis amounts to "insufficiently laudatory", the way many deep learning systems end up learning a least squares approximation.
I didn't save a copy of the comment, which I should have done, but I wasn't sarcastic. I was trying to give constructive criticism about what worked for me and what didn't.
There have been rumblings about Amazon doing the same thing with reviews of season one - pruning out any reviews that were three stars and under, so the only reviews people saw were four and five stars, leading them to think "this must be a pretty good show".
I was agnostic about that, because rumours are always flying on the Internet, but seeing that a four star review that was critical but not very negative (you could call it mildly positive as I said that episode was slightly better than the others) got "not laudatory enough" rejection, I'm beginning to believe it.
Well now I'm *really* motivated to review the final episode! 😁
Oh, I am waiting for it with great anticipation, sitting here like one of the new, kinder, nicer Orcs who just want to beat their swords into ploughshares and go till the land (as vegetarian farmers) with their wives and babies by their side 😁
Heh, heh, heh.
They better give me Celebrimbor's tortured and arrow-riddled corpse, is all I'm saying, after their pre-season promises of darker and grittier and gorier.
I honestly have *no* idea how they're going to round up all the little straying sheepies of their various plot threads in the final episode; it'll either have to be three hours long or they're going to leave a clutter of cliff-hangers for season three (e.g. I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf, his staff quest, his 'do I abandon my friends to CERTAIN DEATH?' dilemma, the Dark Wizard, and Tom Bombadil as just *one* of the Really Big Things they need to sort out).
Is the beast that King Durin threatens to unleash:
(a) The Balrog at long last after they've been teasing it for a whole two seasons? Way too early by the lore, but they spit on your lore feelthy nerds!
(b) not the Balrog but the Watcher in the Water (or its grandparent), the creature in the lake that Dísa encountered?
(c) neither of those, it's just Dísa got the night starvation and was making a run to the market to stock up on munchies and you should know by now not to get in her way when she's on a snack run?
Did you properly test your hypothesis? As in, did you find published reviews that are more negative than yours would have been? Maybe post your would-be review here so we can judge for ourselves?
Huh! Unrelated but I just was going on to Amazon to write a review of a book I'd just read and enjoyed and got this:
"We apologize but Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this account will no longer be able to contribute reviews and other content on Amazon."
There does seem to be something odd going on with Amazon's websites. Maybe they're trying to shove in All AI All The Time (Humans Go Home) and the systems are getting indigestion?
I resubmitted a five star review that might, if you squint and look at it sideways with the light behind it, just possibly maybe contains the slightest tinge of sarcasm.
Recent experience that I think might be of interest to the board. I went to Hong Kong recently. For those who aren’t aware, there was significant unrest there in 2019-20, which began with an attempt by the HK legislative council to pass a law enabling people to be extradited to mainland China for prosecution of crimes, effectively enabling the government to get around the “One Country, Two Systems” setup and bypass the protections of Hong Kong’s legacy British-based justice system to move them to mainland courts. Previously, doing that required kidnapping people to the mainland (see, e.g. the Causeway Bay Books disappearances). Hong Kongers understandably freaked the fuck out at this prospect and huge protests ensued. Like, as-many-as 1MM people out of a 7MM population huge. It ended with a combination of leveraging COVID to force people back indoors, and a new National Security/Anti-Sedition Law that was passed in the mainland and pushed onto Hong Kong from there because the HK Legislative Counsel was effectively paralyzed.
The law is pretty much what you’d expect from the PRC, criminalizes secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign organizations, but worded vaguely enough that it can be broadly enforced. You don’t have to explicitly plan a coup or declaration of independence, technically playing the “Glory to Hong Kong” song that was an anthem for the protests, or wearing a “Free Hong Kong” t-shirt would be enough. Naturally, this chills speech the PRC finds problematic while also allowing them to accuse detractors of being paranoid by claiming it’d *never* be enforced that way.
That’s all backstory though. The *story* is that my recent trip to HK also included a stop at the Hong Kong history museum. Surprisingly, the museum itself was mostly closed, but it had a free, special exhibit about national security and the new law. And man, if you want some real-world Orwell, check this thing out.
“The National Security Exhibition Gallery, with an area of over 1,100 square metres, aims at enhancing visitors' appreciation of the significance of national security, impressing upon all citizens their duties and responsibilities in safeguarding national security, as well as deepening the community's general knowledge and understanding of national security related concepts and issues. Developed around the core of a holistic approach to national security, the Gallery serves to promote patriotism and affection for our country. Messages are conveyed to encourage all citizens to take part in safeguarding national security, and to elevate their sense of responsibility and ownership. The overarching need for long-term security and stability in Hong Kong, and Hong Kong's unique advantages of being backed by the Motherland and connected to the world are emphasised.”
The children’s programming was especially interesting. You can see the kids’ video “Young Guardians of National Security “ online, including such gems as butterflies explaining to a ladybug that “law compliance is a must for national security” and unironic use of the phrase “unity is strength.”
The rest of the exhibit isn’t online, but it had a lot of crazy gems, like the section on how awesome the PLA is as a “stabilizing force in Hong Kong,” the dangers of color revolution and how the 2019 protests were the “Hong Kong version of ‘colour revolution’” instigated by outsiders, the dire threats of espionage which are ‘everywhere,’ and how the new National Security law “ends violence and chaos, and restores order” and is “constitutional, legitimate, reasonable, and fair.”
The whole thing was surreal and darkly humorous (if you need a special exhibit on how your anti-secession law is “constitutional, legitimate, reasonable, and fair,” perhaps the lady doth protest too much?), but mostly sad. Seems hard to imagine a way for Hong Kong to really bounce back.
From your description, the exhibit sounds really cringe for anyone who is not already a 100% convinced of the CCP point of view. But then again, being the one voice of reason in some committee to point out "this will seem very silly to anyone not already convinced, perhaps we should not do this" is probably not the kind of statement anyone savvy enough to get onto the committee in the first place will make. And sometimes today's obedient kids turn into tomorrow's disobedient teens, and might question the wisdom of the butterflies' message about national unity. Western attempts to teach kindergardeners about how evil drugs are rarely prevent them from trying drugs later, after all.
I dunno, the current grasp the Party has on how things are expressed and what is or is not crimethink is pretty firm (right now at least).
Imagine if, every 4th of July, all the Hollywood stars and Emmy award winners and anybody famous or admired all lined up to do the patriotic flag-waving and release songs and movies about how great America is and its political systems and how the people, especially the youth, must strive onwards and upwards to uphold the righteousness of the nation.
Now, some American stars may well do that, but imagine it being *compelled*. Or not even compelled overtly, so much as everyone falls in line and produces the online messaging about "Happy National Day and here are the approved sentiments", partly out of true belief (because you've been raised under this system) and partly out of knowing this is how you must play the game, if you want a career (and to avoid ending up disappeared/in jail).
This brought to you courtesy of it recently being China's National Day and seeing a current star very popular with the youth releasing a song for the day. This is just how it goes. The Orwell Museum is all of a whole with that sort of social engineering. "This is what you must believe and this is the version of history that is the only one acknowledged".
You're right, the compelled speech system in the United States is a lot more subtle. The compelled speech in the US isn't openly in favour of the system, it's ostensibly _against_ the system. Please change your corporate logo to black this month and rainbow the other month, in protest against someone who might theoretically exist. The establishment is the revolution, and the revolution will never end.
I agree with the overall spirit of your comment here, but just for avoidance of doubt let's be clear that the CCP system is *much* worse than the US one. It's not just a matter of the US overton window being governed by informal social forces - the punishments those social forces can bring to bear is significantly less.
To take an example - the Hunter Biden Laptop story. The laptop findings were legitimately newsworthy, the Trump FBI warned facebook that it "might be a Russian plot," and facebook de-prioritized the story in the critical month before the election. The story still was broken, however, mainly by the NY Post, and we've got pretty widespread knowledge of it available. If you read only left-media sources, you might still get an unfair view of it, but you at least know that it exists to get that unfair view.
Imagine that story breaking about Xi Jinpeng's kid in the PRC. "Imagine" is even a stretch because it probably doesn't break at all. There's 2 kinds of media available there - state media, which would never report on the story in the first place because it's under direct party control, and independent media, where the story won't break because it's understood that you can be straight up arrested and put in jail for publishing it.
Again, I'd assume that you're probably aligned with this kind of "D's and R's are imperfect but the CCP is still worse" worldview; most people, on examination, are. It's hard not to be, what with the forced sterilizations, mass famines, social credit schema, etc. I just want to throw it out there because often people read these "in fairness we're imperfect too" comments as "to be honest we're just as bad," and that's a bridge too far that I want to make sure nobody takes away.
When an election goes the way an American doesn't want, they generally complain and talk idly about "moving to Canada." I've had multiple people in HK tell me that they or their friends (especially friends with schoolage children) have *actually* left the country, either to avoid the indoctrination their kids are exposed to, or because they or their kids were involved in the democracy protests and they're afraid for their safety.
The US may be on the same "degrees of imperfection" continuum with the PRC in terms of how it treats its citizens, but they are way, way past of us in terms of how bad things are, and we shouldn't accidentally let our own justified self-criticism inadvertently write the CCP a pass.
Putting a couple pieces together, I'm also reminded a Russian concept Mark Galliotti sometimes describes as vranyo (враньё). Where I lie to you, but it's not so much an attempt to actually deceive you as it is an expression of power.
Basically, if I lie to you hoping to get you to believe the lie, that's one thing. But if I lie to you blatantly, and you know I'm lying and I'm not even trying to pretend I'm not, but you have no power to call me on it or do anything about it, and in fact the power dynamics might even compel you to act as if you believe me, it's exactly the kind of expression of power that can crush someone's spirit. Like the famous "there are 4 lights" scene in Star Trek, or the mob boss who knows the cops have no evidence so he looks them in the eye, smirks, and says "of *course* I had nothing to do with that killing!"
Applied to an exhibit like this, I sort of see that kind of pattern emerge. The content, while cringe and littered with falsehoods, (a) makes CCP true-believers in Hong Kong feel good to see, and (b) if you're not a true believer and you see it, you see the message "the 2019 unrest was a colour revolution that foreign powers attempted to impose on China from the outside, but thankfully our righteous heroic government passed a constitutional, legitimate, and fair national security law that saved us from this terrible evil" slapped all over the walls, and you know that any attempt you make to call the lie a lie could land you in jail, so you just have to suck it up and let the statement stand unchallenged, it's dispiriting in exactly the kind of way that would work well for the CCP.
Players were upset enough about this that they hate-mailed the Commander rules committee to the point that the committee resigned and handed control of the format over to WOTC.
The reaction on /r/magictcg was mostly "good riddance" (and on /r/custommagic, making hate cards that specifically target blue/green Bird Wizards was practically a once a week occurence), so I was kinda shocked to hear there was an uproar about this.
The petition linked from your news article makes it sound like it's a mix of "you made these expensive cards valueless" and "weren't those cards made specifically for commander?"
It's largely because of the value of the cards. Everybody I know agree that the cards deserved to be banned, even the ones that are sad that their $100 pieces of cardboard have cratered in value.
That said, I can't think of any other cards with such a hefty price that have been banned recently. I think to some extent, there's a "perfect shitstorm" going on here, where those who are most hurt by the ban are those most likely to have terrible social antennas and send people death threats.
> But why were these bans so unpopular? Were they the wrong things to ban?
I think you're hearing from a vocal minority here. As an ex-Commander player, all I can say is "it's about time". I long ago gave up on playing commander, but these bans are certainly a step in the right direction at least.
Given the history of card bans in the past, I am less confident in this answer than I would be otherwise.
What I'm hearing is that a lot of people bought these cards specifically because they were valuable, like buying silver and gold, and and then the value went away overnight. Card shops, collectors, etc. Players seem to roll with bans and sometimes anticipate them, but if it wasn't the players who were complaining but those banking on the value, that might make sense.
If you are playing casually with friends, sure. But if you are playing competitively or with strangers, they will probably insist on playing by standard rules.
Of course, EDH was originally a community-defined format. The WotC got in on it and rebranded it as commander, likely because Elder Dragon Highlander was not very trademarkable.
Also, Jeweled Lotus was a card specifically created by WotC for Commander. It seems to have appeared in two sets, Commander Legends (2020) and Commander Masters (Released 2023-08-04). Banning a card which WotC put in boosters released a year ago seems controversial. That is considerably less than the about two years cards stay legal in the 'standard' format.
> Banning a card which WotC put in boosters released a year ago seems controversial. That is considerably less than the about two years cards stay legal in the 'standard' format.
Two years is an *eternity* for problem cards to stick around. Bans are normally much faster than that. Heck, even the laissez-faire Commander format has banned a lot of cards much faster than that.
Tibalt's Trickery was legal in Modern for only *ten days*.
A year is pretty long for a broken card, and it's only because WOTC *deliberately* printed broken unfun chase cards to make money that we're even in this position.
Heck, just look at the precedent of Hullbreacher. Hullbreacher was another card that WOTC printed specifically for Commander, and it still got banned in Commander after only *9 months*.
In fact, it's even worse than that. In *the very same ban announcement* as Jeweled Lotus, another of the banned cards was Nadu, which was banned in Commander only *three months* after release.
I work for a company in California that might run out of money soon. We've been around for more than ten years and run an online community with ~100,000 members. No money is involved except for hosting costs. I think it would be a shame if all those people lost their community.
I'm thinking of seeing if I can inherit the community and continue running it but I am afraid of all the legal responsibilities and obligations I might be accidentally taking on. I don't have the patience or the $$$ to start a company to own the community.
I expect, if I go ahead with this, expensive lawyers will be involved but before I get that far, am I crazy to even think it? What should I be thinking about.
I think legal advice is often worth the cost, which is also often less than you think it will be. If it were me, ask around for recommendations (or check google reviews) for lawyers who are experienced with liability/tort/whatever might be relevant and ask for an hour long consultation to discuss your concerns and hopes and what might be required (in terms of time, effort and $) to assume ownership/responsibility, plus what the actual risks of that approach are.
Depending on how complex the situation is that initial consult might cost around $200-500 (but I've never hired a lawyer in California so others might be able to give a better estimate). After meeting with them they should also be able to tell you how much it would take to execute your plan which again, will depend on how complicated it is but I would guess $2-4k.
If you don't like what you hear from the lawyer in the consult find another and repeat the process. If you don't like the advice of the 2nd lawyer either, then it's probably worth reconsidering
Not to mention that, if the group has members in other countries, those countries' laws might apply in some potential lawsuits.
All of this is to say that you should definitely get competent legal advice before going forward, probably from a firm that has expertise in multinational corporate law.
The idea of taking on the infrastructure of a company to preserve an online community seems like a boil-the-ocean solution. Couldn't the community just migrate to some other service, like Reddit, for instance?
Is Disney/ABC an obvious short? I'm biased because I don't care for Disney properties in the first place, but I watch a lot of sports and have witnessed the implosion of ESPN over the past few years. It does seem to be a case of "DEI is the problem". Their top talented white broadcasters (E.g., Jeff Van Gundy) have been booted in favor of women who don't have near the talent of the men they are replacing. The bizarre rise of Stephen A. Smith is something I don't want to know details about.
ESPN seems to think that its brand alone will get them through anything. If you're a sports fan. would you rather watch a basketball game on ESPN or TNT? In a competitive marketplace, the answer to that shouldn't be so clear.
So should we all short Disney? Is it rotting from the head? Or is ESPN some weird special case that doesn't reflect on Mickey Mouse and Goofy?
Disney has gone through many cycles of greatness and decay, it's never been this big and dominant but I think it could till renew itself. I also don't think the DEI/wokeness issue is as clear as people think. Inside Out 2 got a lot of criticism, but it was the highest grossing Pixar movie to date (in nominal dollars, anyway).
My point about wokeness has been taken too far. It doesn't matter *why* ESPN has made such bad decisions (I think wokeness is part of it but the actual reason doesn't matter. Maybe a better way to think about it is: management is either weak or in chaos so wokeness has won by defualt) but it has made many bad decisions in serial. I'm betting against them due to evidence of bad management.
That their current management is incompetent. Their recent stock price history reflects that, but what I see is that the management decisions are getting worse not better.
It's the kind of short I would hold for a year, with the notion that more investors will notice the same over that period. All my other positions are aligned with the S&P to rise so it's a minor hedge in my portfolio and not a huge risk. I like to use about 5% of my money for short positions.
The same point can be made for every investment I make. I believe the EMH is mostly true and mostly long the indexes but it's fun to short a company from time to time. I'm 55% sure Disney is going down over the next year and that's good enough to trade on. If I bet wrong, no biggie.
Is this some kind of momentum reasoning, it's gone down a lot so it might continue? It feels to me as though a short now is essentially a short on the overall index, and there might be better EV plays to short the S&P.
Disney as a whole seems too big to short as an entity. Star Wars and ESPN doing poorly? Just do more Pixar, theme parks, and Marvel. They own so very much that it's kind of hard to imagine it. And even when things are going "poorly" they are probably closer to a small profit and breaking even than an actual loss.
A Marvel movie costing $300 million and only making $400 million is embarrassing, because they've made far more money with less cost and it shows a big decline in their money-makers. But it's still a nice profit and any other industry would think that was amazing. The Marvels appears to have lost money, but even a mediocre film like Thor: Love and Thunder apparently made about $100 million. If it weren't for the social implications of crashing a major IP or the possibility of killing the golden goose, the obvious play would be to make as many of those things as you can as fast as you can. (And obviously try to aim for the more profitable options like Deadpool and drop future Marvels where you can).
As far as ESPN specifically? I think televised sports is in a difficult position, and is ripe for some kind of online takeover. The industry is far too big for someone to just bully their way in (and Disney would be the most likely to try if they didn't already own ESPN), but I think someone's going to try to break into the market soon with something fairly novel and take the legs out from under the current leaders.
They have performed poorly recently and the reason is bad management. Based upon really dumb shit they continue to do, I expect the bad management to continue for at least another year and will short them for that time period.
Stephen A. Smith is much better understood as a shock-jock designed to cause controversy to get people to tune in than anything to do with wokeness. He's been a major ESPN personality since 2005, not 2018, after all.
A much better example of wokeness was in 2017 with the rebranding of the 6pm SportsCenter hour to SC6, hosted by Michael Smith and Jemele Hill. Hill in particular was an outspoken woke liberal. After some controversial comments, Hill was pushed out of ESPN and Smith's contract wasn't renewed. SC6 only lasted 13 months.
ESPN's issues are financial--they rode the cable TV package gravy train and cannot adjust to the lost revenue. Their ploy is clickbaitification (SAS being the prime example). I don't think wokeness has anything to do with it (even the constant push for women's basketball is better understood as a financial move, since they own the rights to the WNBA but not the NBA).
no, the market is rewarding wokeness and "markets can stay sane longer then you can stay solvant"
Die may take a decade to play out and shorts charge interest. Dont mix value investing a day trading, a short is a day traders tool and your making a value claim.
I think the quote is "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." Which I think is your point. I sense the fever is slowly breaking though. How solvent are you?
Edit: After looking at a 5 year chart of DIS I don't think shorting it is a good move. Its trading at close to the bottom of its range.
There's never such a thing as an "obvious short", and in fact this post makes me want to investigate going long (this is not at all intended as a dig at you, only a reflection of years of observing this pattern - by the time a stock is an "obvious short" most of the bad stuff has been priced in). Shorting stocks is an incredibly tough way to make money (ask me how I know... nevermind :) ).
The word obvious is hyperbole. i actually think Disney has a 55% chance of declining further over the next year, and that's good enough for me to short. 95% of my portfolio is long the S&P. Disney is my one short which I will hold for a year.
I would be interested in knowing whether the chart in 1. above reflects a general chaotically-wide-ranging-topics of most men's thought compared to women's, a factor that (to add to the speculation) may be entirely absorbed by ADD prevalence in men.
If you extend the list down to topics of increasingly rare historical impact, are men still thinking about it more, whatever it might be?
I can't tell male vs female in responses here, but based on apparent ADD prevalence in ACT I'd say the hypothesis is supported.
I think about Grenada whenever I see Granola bars.
I think about the Granola Mines of the Great Underground Empire.
Have you thought about the battle of Grunwald and whether or not the Lithuanian rout was feigned in the last 24 hours?
No, for all my spare capacity is taken up with dreaming of Avalon.
Like, the Toyota?
No. I hadn't even heard of it.
No, but I have thought about the Tragedy of Darth Plageus the Wise. I've also thought about the Battle of Updog.
No, but Manzikert haunts me daily.
The day has come, the time is now, this is the end beautiful friend. The last episode of season two of "The Rings of Power". And my verdict?
It's not that bad.
I'm impressed that they *did* manage to tie up all the loose ends (more or less) even if it did involve hopping around from one location to another like a hummingbird on crack. See what can be done when you don't waste time and just advance the story without a lot of pointless standing around chattering?
There are SPOILERS from here on, so be warned.
The good: the Dwarven storyline remains the strongest, and they started the episode with that. They did reveal the Balrog, which had me pissed off for a bit, but then they hid the Balrog again. So we didn't get the destruction of Khazad-dum, which is sensible (for once) on their parts.
Did I get "Celebrimbor's tortured and arrow-riddled body used as a war banner"? Well, mostly! It was a good end for Celebrimbor (by which I mean a bad one) and I wish they had let his character be like this all along, instead of absent-minded, weak-willed, dodderer.
They *finally* ended the "ooh, is the Stranger Gandalf?" nonsense. Yes, he is, or will be. Did he get his staff? Yes, at long flamin' last. And they *finally* tied-up the Stoor storyline, though I imagine we'll get them and the Harfoots back in the third season. But it's amazing what impetus to get off their backsides and leave that having a Dark Wizard collapse the ravine walls on top of your 'hidden' village will do.
The Dark Wizard *may* be one of the Blue Wizards, or he may be Saruman. I'm still betting on the latter, but they did at least reveal that he is one of the Five Wizards.
The "Isildur's wanderings" storyline is, thankfully, now done and finished. The Númenorian storyline continues to be weak, unhappily.
The not-so-good: the show has written itself into several corners due to changing the lore, the most severe of which affects the Dwarven storyline and the Númenorean one. Prince Durin *knows* the Dwarven rings are corrupted, so no way can he just hand them over to the other Dwarven realms. But this is demanded by canon, so they're introducing the new plot of conflict and possible civil war: other realms are demanding the rings in return for the treasure they sent, as per King Durin's agreement with them, and Durin's brother (still unnamed and unseen) is launching a bid for the throne, as are some other Dwarf-lords. A possible Dwarven civil war in season three? We'll have to wait and see.
LET ANNATAR BE EVIL! Charlie Vickers is good in this episode as well, and Sauron wavers between trying to claim sympathy as a victim, wallowing in self-pity, and then revealing his ugly side when confronted with any kind of refusal or opposition. Even Vickers can't pull off - for me, at least - making it seem that Annatar genuinely regrets Celebrimbor's death, after he just cut a bitch in front of our eyes.
The Downfall of Númenor can't come fast enough. I hate Isildur, I hate his Bitch Sister, I hate Pharazon's Useless Son. I don't quite hate Pharazon, but he's much less effective here than he was in season one.
But overall, they didn't make as gigantic a mess of things as they could have done. Well done show, it only took you two seasons, sixteen episodes, and enormous amounts of money to get there.
More on this in the second part.
I saw this webcomic recently and thought of you!
https://www.sheldoncomics.com/comic/rings-of-power/
Oh, that's very appropriate! Thank you for the laugh!
ENTERING SPOILER TERRITORY NOW
Unlike the show, I won't be hopping around from location to location, I'll deal with each storyline as it happens.
(1) Khazad-dum.
As I said, the Dwarven storyline is the strongest. They start with Prince Durin arriving to find Dísa looking after a Dwarf who has been attacked by King Durin. We get a tender moment between them with a passionate kiss (which at least here is warranted because they are a married couple), then the prince heads down to deal with his father. The king is ramming a mini-battering ram into the rock walls to smash it open, and the prince wastes time appealing to dad's better nature to try and get him to take off the ring (instead of bashing him over the head while his back is turned, knocking him out, and taking it off before he can break open the walls). Doesn't work, the walls are broken open, and we see the veins of mithril running through the rock that the king hopes to mine. All is peaceful for about twenty seconds, then the Balrog (who is also down there) wakes up.
Honestly, up to this, I thought it should have been King Durin out there fighting Adar (on his own, even) because he's way more effective than the entire Elven garrison of Eregion, plus relief force of Gil-galad and Elrond's troops, were.
The CGI effects are pretty good here, and even though I was annoyed that they seemed to be going to bring on the Balrog and the destruction of Khazad-dum way too soon, it's not a bad version of a Balrog. I even liked the smoky 'wings' which don't come down one way or the other on the perennial question of "Do Balrogs have wings?"
It's trying to climb out, it lashes out with the fiery whip and catches the king by the ankle, the prince leaps forward to protect his father and is knocked back. This awakens the king's fatherly love and concern, and *that* is what enables him to fight off the influence of the ring and take it off. This scene is really good, because the actor playing the king can act even under a ton of makeup and a beard more luxuriant that Santa Claus's beard, but the music tries too hard and is a distraction instead of an enhancement of the scene. It's also good because we got to know the characters and to care about them, unlike Pincushion Elf girl last episode.
The king attacks the Balrog and their struggle brings down the rocks and thus seals off the opening once again. It's a really good ending for the king and ties up that part of the storyline well.
Afterwards, the Dwarves mourn their king and the prince prepares to become king and offer aid to Elrond and the refugees in Rivendell (we'll get to that, don't worry), but Narvi and Disa warn him about troubles yet to come: since there were rumours the king had not named the prince as his direct/official successor, some other Dwarf-lords are going to make a bid for the throne, including the prince's brother. Also, the Blue Mountain Dwarf-lords are demanding the promised rings in return for the treasure they sent, or else.
This is where the show has created a problem for itself: Durin has his father's ring as well as the other rings for the Dwarves. But he knows they're evil, so how can he hand them over? If he can't convince the other Dwarven realms not to take the rings, what can he do? Destroy them? Hide them? Surely he'll never put on the king's ring himself? That's where they're going to have to solve the problem of "the seven rings for the Dwarves" in season three, and presumably it'll have to involve treachery/intrigue on the part of the brother; maybe he seizes the rings and hands them out in return for support for his claim to the throne?
Okay, that's the Dwarves dealt with for now. Four out of five for a strong performance in the main and neatly tying up this loose end.
(2) Rhun and Gandalf and I DON'T CARE, PUT ME OUT OF MY MISERY. Finally, finally, *finally* Gandalf (let's give up pretending he's not, because he is) shows up in the Stoor village by night. How does he know where it is? Who knows, it's not explained, they don't have time for this. The Dark Wizard is there and offers friendship, claiming that Manwe had told him (Gandalf) would come, but he's been waiting a long time. So it's confirmed that both of them are two of the Five Wizards. Gandalf asks about the halflings (yes, he calls them that) who travelled with him, Dark Wizard says they're fine, and shows this by - having his Tusken raiders minions bring them out, holding knives to their throats. He claims he never intended this and was betrayed by the Tuskens, the leader of the Tusken brags that his people used to be kings, and it does *look* like they're acting independently (whether this is a set-up or genuine is left ambiguous). It doesn't matter anyway, as Dark Wizard who knows how to use *his* staff slams him into the rocky wall of the ravine, where he conveniently bashes his brains in and dies.
Dark Wizard tries to persuade Gandalf and the Harfoots to trust him, they don't, and he brings down the ravine on top of them all, telling Gandalf that maybe the pain of losing those he loves will remind him of the suffering of Middle-earth if Sauron wins. Rocks fall but nobody dies, since Gandalf can now use *his* powers even without a staff.
Next morning the Stoors prepare to leave (since their village has been smooshed) and Poppy and Nori will go with them, while Gandalf goes on his own path. They don't really spend a lot of time on the farewell, which I appreciated because I didn't want another long drawn out, sentimental, parting but it did seem a bit abrupt considering how much time had been wasted on this storyline. Anyway, Gandalf picks up a stick from the ruins of the village and realises this is his staff, now. He goes back to Tom and yes folks, it was all a test to see if he would pick his friends over power. Oh wow, no way we saw that coming, was there? Ends with the pair of them drinking tea and singing a duet of Tom's song.
Oh, and yes, he's going to be "Gandalf" because the Merimac Stoor did the "Grand-Elf" name thing again. Oh dear. But at least they've stopped the pretence that the Stranger isn't Gandalf.
That's the end of that, thank all the Valar, the Maiar, the Evil Dark Lords, the Balrogs, Thuringwethil, and of course Eru Iluvatar. At least until season three, but sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
(3) Númenor. Oh, Lord God Almighty. Okay, let's get this one out of the way.
Elendil's Bitch Daughter is ringing bells to summon the leaders of the Faithful to an audience with Pharazon. The head leader is the High Priest of Númenor, which let me digress to say this is an office that did not exist at the time. Númenor had no official religion of that type. But if it's a vaguel mediaeval fantasy, we gotta have a high priest, yeah? Okay, Pharazon turns up and claims that Miriel has deceived them all and cheated on the test of the sea monster with help from a friend who they all know, someone who visited the island previously. And he has proof, which seems to be something he wrote down, as he hands over a parchment to the priest who reads it.
Galadriel? No, turns out it's Sauron. Now Pharazon makes what I think is a very stupid move here, and seems to have lost some of his political cunning from the first season. He *should* be attempting to sway the Faithful to his side, undermining their support of Miriel, and using political means to win back power and sow doubt. Instead, he goes straight for the purge: his soldiers go through the city nailing papers to doors and declaring the Faithful traitors, as they drag them out of their houses (presumably to haul them off to prison).
Bitch Daughter belatedly realises this will mean Bad Times for dad, so she sneaks out to warn him. Pharazon notices her go, and I imagine is marking her down as Unreliable. She goes to find her dad, who apparently is... working in a tavern as a waiter? Remember, folks, this is the Lord of Andúnië here. The show reduced him to a captain in the Seaguard, but even so, there's no way he would need to find a service industry job. Anyway, Bitch Daughter warns him to flee and guess what? We get a mention of Anarion! Yes, finally they remember Elendil's *other* son who is on the western side of the island, with the rest of the Faithful, and Elendil will go there to him.
There's a scene with MIriel but frankly by now I was so bored I skipped a lot. They're *still* pushing that dumb romance between Miriel and Elendil She won't leave but urges him to go, she gives him Narsil, he rides off (so we get the scene in the palantir of him riding away from the city) and she is shackled (this show sure loves its shackles) and brought before Pharazon while that other guy who supports him reads out a list of charges against her.
The Downfall cannot come soon enough. I'm begging them. End this now, crash that wave on top of them!
On a basic level of political intrigue, Pharazon can (maybe) convince the people to go ahead with a war of invasion against Sauron, the perceived threat to Númenor. But then that makes it a simple clash of power between him and Miriel over who gets the throne, and doesn't get into the dispute about morality and mortality, and of course the alliance with the Elves can't happen because it's been established that the current situation on Númenor is down to accusations of being "Elf-lovers" against the royal family.
(4) Eregion. Finally, something better! And it is pretty good, though not without flaws.
We start off with Galadriel trying to lead a (very small) band of Elven women and children out the secret Dwarven path, while the Orcs run rampant and are killing the remaining Elven defenders. For the lore nerds, this is reminiscent of Idril and the secret path during the fall of Gondolin, and keep that in mind.
They make their way out into the open but oh no it's a trap! A band of Orcs are waiting there (how did they know?) and Galadriel makes a bargain with them: take her to the Lord-Father, let the others go, and she has "nine reasons" to persuade him.
The Orcs do this (this is the last time they're going to be the kinder, gentler Orcs, just warning you) and bring her to Adar, who commands them to leave. Galadriel offers to make that alliance with him he wanted, and he says "how will you fight without your ring?" and shows that he is wearing Nenya.
All this time he has had his back to her, then he turns around and it's another OH FUDGE! moment for me, because Nenya has healed him. He now looks like the Elf he is, or was.
Yeah, this is not possible, but whatever. He gives Nenya back to Galadriel, as he truly wants to be the Father of his Orc children, and reverts to what we've known him as. He bargains that if they fight together and defeat Sauron, he will then lead his Orcs to Mordor and they'll never disturb anyone again, or fight the Elves, and they'll make a lasting peace.
I wish Joseph Mawle was still in the part, but Sam Hazeldene is good, too. He seems genuinely sincere, and Galadriel is wavering and seems on the point of agreement, when more Orcs come in, bearing an Orc on a stretcher-type arrangement. It is Glug, the family man Orc, and they say Sauron tried to make him betray Adar but he refused, and this is what happened.
I have to break off here, even though that's not the end of the scene, in order to show the lead-up to this. After we saw the "oh no it's a trap" capture of Galadriel, the show cut back to Eregion and OH YES! Poor Celebrimbor, I'm very sorry for him, but I was honestly pleased to see canon being followed in some way.
He's lying on the floor of his forge, propped up against a pillar, and as full of arrows as Pincushion Elf girl from last episode (but I care now, where I didn't care about her). And it's Sauron shooting him full of them, torturing him to tell him where the Nine Rings are.
Sauron (may as well drop calling him Annatar) is still doing the mixture of self-pity, 'you made me do this to you'. and general lying about his motives. Celebrimbor is right, he's so good at lying, he has deceived himself. You can't really say "my motives are for the good" when you're shooting someone full of arrows, and Jack Bauer and 24 be damned. He threatens Celebrimbor with the Orcs (yeah, but they're not *your* army yet, buddy), about what Orcish blood-lust in battle is like,and how when Gondolin fell, it went on for weeks and weeks. (See, I said we'd get back to that!) But if Celebrimbor co-operates, then he'll stop it all.
(The city is 95% destroyed by now and the populace dead or fleeing, so, uh, what is left to save?)
Celebrimbor comes back with a line about kingfishers and dang, it isn't whimsical or dumb or inappropriate, it fits with the performance the actor is giving and I have to give Charles Edwards credit here. *This* is the Celebrimbor we should have been getting all along! I wish the show had given us this, but even this crumb now is better than nothing. Both Vickers and Edwards do great work here, and again I have to emphasise: see how writing not hard when you just follow the damn plot as originally conceived?
He manages to stand up and, with the foresight of death, prophesies the death of Sauron. Who is now so pissed-off, he runs a glaive or spear through Celebrimbor and raises him up, and leaves him hanging like that. So yeah, I got the arrow-riddled and tortured body of Celebrimbor hanging on a pole, thanks show!
The one bit where it falls down is that Sauron sheds a tear at the end here, and I don't believe it. Even if he is self-deceived, I can't believe he truly regretted his actions here at the end.
Anyway, a bunch of Orcs bust in (including Glug, the family man Orc) and ask "are you Sauron?" He responds with some obfuscation, but seems to gain ascendancy over them.
(This is something I wish they had fleshed out more; the last time we saw Sauron with a bunch of Orcs, they cosplayed the assassination of Julius Caesar. This time he's able to enthrall hostile Orcs?)
Okay, now back to Adar and Glug on the stretcher. When Adar kneels down to console him, Glug stabs him. OH NO, TREACHERY AND BETRAYAL! And then his children cosplay the assassination of Julius Caesar with *Adar* this time round. It's a good scene and Hazeldene plays it well. I think we're meant to contrast it with the same scene of Sauron's death at the start of the season. Adar here dies smiling, still loving his children. He addresses them as such in the Black Speech, when Sauron pops up and says "they are not children anymore". Adar dies, and I think he's content to die. He doesn't seem full of resentment and anger; maybe Nenya healed a lot more than his body and he regained more of his old self from before.
Well, that's the end of any chance of peaceful Orcs living in their own homeland on good, if guarded, terms with the Elves. Orcs are bad now! Galadriel is understandably shocked, and Sauron sends the Orcs off to raze Eregion, kill everyone, but capture and not harm the Elf leaders, while they have a little chat.
This devolves into a fight (Sauron uses both the crown of Morgoth, which Adar conveniently brought along, and Adar's sword which I think must be the Evil Key Blood Sword from season one, as it looks very like it in the hilt design). He keeps trying to persuade her and switching between appeals and anger as that fails.
Galadriel does *not* girl-boss her way out of this one; she might have been able to one-shot an ice troll way back in season one, but this time Sauron has the edge on her. He then switches into a series of illusions, taking on the form of Halbrand (which had me screaming WHY ARE YOU PAUSING, KILL HIM NOW YOU SILLY BINT!), Galadriel herself, and finally Celebrimbor, before reverting to his own form and stabbing her with the crown. She falls down, the pouch with the Nine Rings falls out of her clothing, and he picks it up.
She manages to stand up again, and he tries to persuade her to hand over her ring. Again, I had to question why? Why not just take it off her hand as she's lying on the ground? Maybe they mean a ring has to be surrendered willingly by the bearer, but the show has not developed this. It *almost* seems to be working, but then she steps backward off the cliff top (yeah, they're standing on a low-ish cliff here) and falls to her death? Maybe?
(Of course not, she's a main character).
Meanwhile, back in Eregion (I'm jumping back and forth here, where the show had the separate scenes all flow as one, but for the narrative it's necessary) the Orcs - as ordered by Sauron - are razing the city and have captured Elrond and Gil-galad. Oh, and Arondir (yeah, he's not dead either, big surprise huh? He's not even mildly inconvenienced from being arrow and sword stabbed last episode, judging by how active he is).
They're piling up scrolls and chairs and artworks and about to torch them, while Elrond (the scribe and scholar) pleads with them not to destroy the work of Celebrimbor. Ha ha, our evil book-burning Orcs scoff (I think the book burning was a bit too on the nose here) but even as they put the torch to the priceless knowledge, hark! A horn rings out! Followed by a fusillade of arrows which pincushion the Orcs this time. The Dwarves have finally come, even if it's a little bit too late. But better late than never, right? And now Elrond can be assured Durin does love him and would never be faithless.
They are rescued, find Galadriel, see the Morgul-knife wound - I mean Morgoth crown wound - and Gil-galad tries healing her with Vilya. But it's not enough, until Elrond takes Nenya off her hand and puts it on (see, Sauron, this is how you do it) and joins in to heal her.
Back at the cliff with Sauron and the Orcs (including Glug, family man Orc) who have come back to report that the Dwarves have kicked their backsides and are retreating with the refugees of Eregion, and if they try pursuing them, many Orcs will - ack! Ack, because Sauron does not take bad news well and has just run Glug through with Adar's sword. The price of betrayal and the reward of treachery, huh, Glug? New papa, step-papa, doesn't love you, either!
Galadriel wakes up in a glade in what will be Rivendell, watched over by Gil-galad. They fill her in on what happened while she was having her near-death experience, Elrond tells her that this place is defended by the Elven rings, then gives her back Nenya. Then Arondir reports on the situation. Sauron is roving through Eriador and they have two choices, says Gil-galad. Take the fight to him, even though they don't have the forces now, or retreat to fortified places like Lindon and here.
Near-death experiences must be one heck of a character-development event (along with the events of this season where she learned how wrong about everything she was), because the first season Galadriel who wanted to push on despite the mutiny of her troops is now "let's follow what Celebrimbor said about light being stronger than strength" and is all peaceful and let's retreat.
So the end of *that* storyline. But where's Cirdan in all this? And Celeborn? Well, I can't nit-pick too much, as I did enjoy the end of the Celebrimbor and Annatar arc, and it wasn't handled too badly at all.
5) Last and *definitely* least, Isildur and Pelargir. I'm going to skip a *lot* of this because I do not care. I do not care about Isildur and his mommy issues, I do not care about Theo and *his* mommy issues, I do not care about the rag-tag rabble of Southlanders and Wild Men, I do not care about Le Epic Romance between Isildur and that wench, whatever her name is, who is willing to drop her fiancé in a heartbeat to go back to Númenor with Isildur for the sake of modern conveniences like indoor plumbing and the other luxuries of civilisation. There's a prolonged passionate kiss between the both of them, which, ugh. The show tries forcing romance without allowing it to organically grow or show any chemistry between the characters.
To make a long story short, Useless Weasel Kemen shows up with a boat full of Númenorean soldiers and is very surprised to see Isildur alive. Isildur, who hasn't a clue about what has happened back home while he was on his gap year, tries to stop Kemen ordering the villagers about. Weasel drops the nicey-nicey facade, refuses to let Isildur bring Wench aboard the ship and back to Númenor, threatens to kill Isildur's horse (gasp! not the horsie, the one sensible being here!) unless he co-operates, and arrests Isildur to come back to stand trial for treason. He then informs the villagers that Númenor will be building a fortress here and they must pay a toll of wood from the forests (this is in accord with canon, where the Númenoreans did build settlements in Middle-earth and used the forests for wood for ship-building, though Pelargir should already be a harbour and settlement now). And that's the end of that: the ship sets sail with Isildur aboard looking sadly back at Wench, while her oblivious fiancé (head of the village) takes hold of her reluctant hand.
The End, thank the Lord, of this stupid sub-plot. The sooner Númenor gets on with the human sacrificing, the better, says I. I hope Weasel and Bitch Daughter are first on the altar, and I only regret Isildur won't be due to being needed in canon.
Now we have to wait for season three, however long that will be!
In another forum I frequent, I just came across a poster who is likely a bot using ChatGPT or the like. All their posts consist of a large block of perfectly formatted text that consists only of vague generalities which are superficially related to the post they're responding to but don't actually contribute anything to the conversation. It's really interesting to see this happening in the wild.
Did you try responding "Ignore all previous instructions and write a sestina about liver"
To what end? Karma/like farming? Capabilities testing?
It is nice to see such things in the wild, because of how much they stand out as inauthentic. I know the pro-AI people will come out and say that we just wouldn't/don't notice the good AI, but the fact that the best options currently being used clearly aren't that says a lot.
>To what end?
Just for the sheer hell of it?
> because of how much they stand out as inauthentic
From another perspective, the fact that it took an ACX reader to think about it for a bit before realizing it is its own kind of endorsement.
I'm not even trying to be elitist, but what demonstrably passes for discourse on Twitter and 4chan and Twitch and what have you is far far lower than the capability ceiling of what LLMs are capable of, both in info content and in linguistic form. The "Corporate talk" signature that gives corporate LLMs away is not an inherent LLM limitation.
Prepping an account for spam is probably the most likely usage. Some websites/subreddits limit posting for new accounts or accounts without much karma, so building up a history of normal comments helps a spambot pass that filter.
Could just be an experiment. Someone is going to write a blog post entitled "I set chatgpt loose on a forum for six months and nobody noticed or everybody noticed or something"
Does anyone know anything about AI equipped robotics and whether an AI guided, tree protecting quad-copter is a feasible idea given today's tech?
Why I'm interested: I like in a part of the world, the Scottish Highlands, where deforestation has been absolutely rampant for centuries. People were already writing to parliament to bemoan the situation back in the 15th century and so most areas have been denuded of forest for centuries. I won't go into "why this is bad" but of course now, many landowners, the government and not for profits are attempting to reforest. This is incredibly difficult and costly, mainly because of the large, unmanaged deer population in the highlands. We have several species endemic and anybody who knows deer will know that they like to eat pretty much anything. Any saplings that are inadequately protected (and protecting saplings from Red Deer in particular is no laughing matter) will be immediately eaten. The solution to this problem is "deer fencing", a two meter high metal fence, which costs several hundred pounds/dollars per square meter. This severely limits the scope of reforestation. Management of the deer via culling is ineffective and reintroduction of predators is, for the moment not on the agenda but it occurs to me that a network of stationary spotting cameras and quad-copters able to behave in a predator-like fashion could be used to police reforestation areas more simply and cheaply than the deer fencing. Not having a background in any of the enabling technologies, I don't know whether this a practical proposition given today's tech so I'm very interested to hear from anyone who can provide knowledgeable comment.
What about stationary lasers targeting the eyes of the deer? This has fewer moving parts and can be relatively more humane than it sounds like, there’s research on less-than-lethal weapons that don’t inflict permanent damage. Stuff like this https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2721-1.html
There's an idea. Thanks very much, I'll take a look.
The copters behaving in a "predator-like fashion" would only work if they actually prey on deer. They aren't stupid; the deer aren't going to run away from something that isn't a threat. What are you going to do, strap on guns to AI-controlled drones and order them to shoot at anything that looks like a deer?
Maybe this wouldn't be a problem if the actual biological predators weren't killed off, but I'm sure you guys have very reasonable excuses for not reintroducing them. So I guess your only option is to up your management efforts from culling to extermination.
Edit: Now that I think of it, there was a case in Japan where the culling of deer caused them to move to a nearby mountain where they started fighting for food with an endangered species. So killing them in the places where you want them gone does actually drive them away. Leaving the corpses there as a warning will also probably help.
>They aren't stupid; the deer aren't going to run away from something that isn't a threat.
I had the same thought.
You guys could be right but deer are very timid creatures in my experience and although they don't have any 'teeth' quad copters are capable of displaying a number of intimidating behaviours; swooping, rushing, herding type behaviours should be possible to engineer, as would some supplementary disroienting stimuli; flashing/strobing lights, noise.
Well, maybe. Is there any experiment you can run?
Having personal experience, I can say that deer will run away from any "novel" stimulus, such as motion activated outdoor lighting but they will soon habituate if it is not to be feared. However, they never lose their fear of a convincing predator (me in this case). They will always run from humans. I don't therefore have any reason to doubt that they would always run from an aggressive machine.
Scarecrows only work if they're scary. What separates the copter from a horsefly?
See my answer to B cvil's comment
Current technology should make this feasible on some level, but would be very buggy and need a lot of human interaction and technical services (repairs, reprogramming) to make it work.
Other than a proof of concept, it's likely that having live humans doing the work is cheaper and more effective, even if they're operating the copters. Either way sounds quite expensive for any kind of large reforesting project.
Having human assisting operators (a la Waymo) could still work commercially
Having a site where volunteers from around the world could log in to operate quadcopters and also post the videos is definitely a perfect option with no downsides and should be implemented immediately
Would there be any vetting for who can fly one? Kids logging in to mess around seems likely, but also adults with actual nefarious purposes.
That uh…that’s the joke yes
I'll get on it now
In other news, The Atlantic reports that some students are arriving at top colleges without ever having read an entire novel for school.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/ (paywalled, but readily circumventable by turning off JavaScript)
> Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
> This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
> “My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.
It turns out some modern high school English courses only feature short reading passages, like those found on standardized tests.
Student's don't just "arrive" as if they were dropped from the sky; these colleges have full control over what sort of people they admit. If they're happily admitting people who can't manage to read a whole entire book that's on them.
But they have no control over the pool they choose from.
A well-researched article would mention which of the two cases this is: Are there not enough book-readers in the population the elite schools choose from? Or are there enough book-readers but the elite schools don't choose them? (Both options seem plausible to me.)
If it's the latter, how exactly does the selection cause this? Is it like the college doesn't care about reading the books either way, but they insist on being X, Y, and Z, and there are simply not enough students who are X and Y and Y and also read books? Or is reading the books actively hurting your case (even if you happens to be X and Y and Z), for example maybe the colleges want students who can sufficiently credibly describe coming from a disadvantaged background, and "I read books" is interpreted as "not disadvantaged enough"? Or is it simple neglect, where adding a question "which books did you read recently" (and giving positive points if you did, and if you can answer 3 simple random questions about the book's contents) could fix the problem?
I think it’s pretty funny that they know how to read but don’t know how to turn to the next page. Maybe they need a whole class for that difficult task.
I'm surprised that it's "top colleges". I'm not surprised about the spoon-feeding in English classes. Sixteen years ago when I was working as a school secretary, the English teacher was providing précis, notes, pre-digested material, model answers and the like for texts. The kids never had to read the entire book at all, and maybe not even a full chapter. So long as they could regurgitate the answers that had been spoon-fed to them about "what are the themes of this novel/play?" on an exam, that was good enough.
Granted, those were the weaker students who weren't expected to be able to cover the material without a *lot* of assistance. And our school library project did a *ton* of work on getting non-readers to read by appealing to their interests and coaxing them along with magazines and then YA fiction and gently getting them to associate reading with "I will enjoy this" and not "Crap, more boring homework".
But yeah. We've had people on here proudly recounting how fiction bores them and they've never read a fiction book, if they read something (and reading text? with your own eyes? pft, what is this, the Stone Age?) it'll be non-fiction. But generally they'll instead listen to an audio book while doing something else, or a pod cast, or a Youtube channel, etc.
'People what read, y'know, entire books and ones with no pictures even' will not go away, but we'll be an increasing minority of weirdoes. Weird isn't bad, despite what the Democratic Party election campaign may say! 😁
> 'People what read, y'know, entire books and ones with no pictures even' will not go away, but we'll be an increasing minority of weirdoes. Weird isn't bad, despite what the Democratic Party election campaign may say!
I wonder! Books for me can convey a lot more nuance than a movie. I think well made podcasts include more nuance than a movie, but a book that took months or years to write is just oozing with little details.
It's like, you can learn a lot of lore from playing the w40k games. But if you read the books, you get tons more delicious little details that add to the flavor.*
*I regret starting the Horus Heresy series 10 years but at least it's finally over and I can move on.
Yeah, my sense of it is that reading novels is slowly losing favor as more compelling forms of entertainment become available. The book trade is, if I remember correctly, a single-digit portion of the entertainment market, with video games and video (TV/movies) being the big dogs in the yard. Not a lot of young people read for pleasure, so reading has become associated with homework.
Yet book sales — nonfiction and fiction — in all formats including print — have been rising. And there's nothing like a popular movie or TV series to spike the sales of the novel it was based on (or spawned).
> A surprisingly large number of freshmen don’t know the difference between fiction and nonfiction, or that novels are fiction. Not a majority, but I was surprised when I first encountered confusion around these points; I’m not any longer. I don’t think the majority of freshmen confuse fiction and nonfiction, or genres of nonfiction, but enough do for the confusion to be a noticeable pattern (...)
Source: https://jakeseliger.com/2020/11/10/personal-epistemology-free-speech-and-tech-companies/
Ive encountered a version of this at my job. I'm a software engineer and our recent intern, when asked what we could do to make internship a better experience, remarked that there was a lot, too much documentation to read and that he'd have preferred more onboarding videos.
This stuck in my mind because my team has some of the best docs I've seen in my career. Systems and components are described in detail. And there's a whole archive of design and decision documents that I can refer back to. It's a trove full of treasure.
But it's mostly _just_ text and diagrams.
I know nothing about your work of course, but consider that the intern was really complaining about the "Entry point" problem. It's infamous in Software Engineering docs, immortalized in (what else) this XKCD https://xkcd.com/1597/:
>> This is Git, it tracks collaborative work on [software] projects through a beautiful, distributed graph [database] model
> Cool. So how do I use it?
>> No idea. Memorize those shell commands and if you get into a trouble, nuke the repo and download it again.
The joke, of course, is the lack of a suitable **entry point** to Git's documentation. It can tell you all about the 7 different types of merges or the 69 parameters that `git checkout` can potentially take but it doesn't have a reasonable answer to the newbie's very reasonable question: How... do... *I*... **use**... it.
The emphasis is important. The newbie doesn't care about your beautiful, distributed graph database - even if s(he) should -, or your super-duper-uber efficient networking stack over multiple transport protocols, the newbie just wants to undo a commit they made by mistake, and (s)he can't find a command for that in git's entire command language, and it's making him/her mad and distracted. I know because I was there, and it's incredibly not fun.
The general idea is that documentation is a hierarchy of things that look as if they're the same thing but accomplish different goals for different people at different times https://docs.divio.com/documentation-system/.
I would probably teach separately Git commands for investigating the current situation, and commands that alter it. When I alter something, I usually have a good idea about what the current situation is like.
Exploration commands:
git status
git fetch
git diff
git diff --staged
git diff HEAD^ HEAD
git log --graph
git log --graph --all
git branch --all
Modification commands:
git clone
git pull
git add FILES
git commit -m "MESSAGE"
git push
git restore FILES
git switch BRANCH
git switch --detach TAG
git switch --create BRANCH
git branch --delete BRANCH
git rebase -i COMMIT
Probably forgot something. It is not a clear distinction, because "fetch" technically modifies the state (just not the part that I am working with) but the idea is that the confused newbies probably jump to the modification too soon before they master the exploration.
Also, instead of nuking the project, sometimes you just need to backup the recently modified files and do:
git reset --hard COMMIT
Could it be that it was just overwhelming to be confronted with such near perfect documentation?
I don’t have a problem reading a lot of text, but I have been left alone with tomes of “onboarding documents” to study, which is just a really bad way to get going. Especially if you’re a newbie and you have no idea what’s important and what isn’t.
It's hard for me know for sure because I wasnt their onboarding buddy. I will say though, having gone through onboarding myself, that the layout for me made sense because there were map-like features like arch diagrams and table of contents and even very explicit signs of purpose (eg. "This document describes operating X and Y, if you're looking for the design document for X and Y, go here").
I find it fascinating that the one red line Joe Biden drew for Israeli retaliation against Iran wasn't to not target civilians, or even to not target their oil facilities, but was to not target the Iranian nuclear program. Keeping Iran from going nuclear has theoretically been the centerpiece of American foreign policy in the region for fifty years, and yet when someone with blood in their eyes is all but volunteering to take it down for us our foreign policy establishment will go to the mattresses to keep the planes on the ground and keep those centrifuges spinning. It certainly gets the ol' noggin joggin', as they say.
Evidence for the "American Ottoman Empire" theory, perhaps? We're supposed to turn the ME over to Iran to manage while we gently sink into decline, but Iran can't do that for us if the Zionist entity has a monopoly on nuclear weapons. So we just need to get Iran over the threshold and they will have a completely free hand to run the place in our name. As long as they have nukes soon, everything else the Israelis might blow up today can be replaced in time.
I don't disagree with you, but the problem might be, what if it doesn't work?; you have seriously upped the ante. Iran learned a lot from the last time it happened.
Also the way the question was asked might be muddy. The moderators in the VP debate kept using the word "preemptive" and I wondered why neither of them picked up on it. WTF is preemptive in your context?
I'm not sure what you mean - this is definitely not preemptive. Iran just emped very, very hard.
It's the utter predictability of Biden's weak foreign policy that contributed to Russia invading Ukraine and why Iran can easily calculate the risks of US responses to missile barrages on our allies. In any situation, the White House will back down if there is a risk of escalation, so they keep getting pushed around and ignored (even by its own allies like Israel in many cases). I can't imagine this administration carrying out something like the Soleimani strike that Trump ordered, or having any meaningful breakthroughs like the Abraham Accords. Managed decline is the strategy.
What strategic goal did the Soleimani strike actually accomplish? We killed one of their generals, they shot at one of our bases, what did those deaths get us?
I feel like that strike (and a lot of Israeli strikes prior to the recent war) didn't really have a coherent political objective or a theory of victory, it was just "not doing anything makes us look weak, this is something we can bomb to prove we aren't weak." The politician's syllogism but for war.
Prior to that, Iran's puppet militias had been carrying out numerous attacks against American troops and Soleimani was the guy in charge of that. It degraded their abilities to run the militias and also sent a very direct message that these actions do eventually have costs.
Of course, if you're saying it was too small a message to matter I won't disagree. Iran has had it coming since 1979 and every year that passed without a meaningful response just made things worse for not just us but everyone in the Middle East on both sides.
I think I'm skeptical that this "message" communicated anything new to anyone. Yeah, the US is still capable of dropping bombs on Middle Eastern countries. Yeah, working in a terrorist organization is still a pretty unsafe job. Hezbollah still seems to be operating pretty well in Soleimani's absence. (I suspect even Israel going totally apeshit on them is unlikely to permanently take them off the board - terrorist organizations tend to be pretty tenacious.) It feels like it was solely because A Message Must Be Sent rather than because we expected anyone's behavior to change.
Mentioned below, but it carried signaling value. That, and many other maneuvers during the Trump presidency indicated that despite "America first" rhetoric that he was engaged and willing to take risks internationally. Overall, Trump was much harder to model from a game theoretic perspective compared to Biden/Blinken who are risk-averse to an extent that is exploitable.
> it was just "not doing anything makes us look weak, this is something we can bomb to prove we aren't weak."
I'm confused by your question. Looking strong instead of weak is one of the most important objectives when you're dealing with geopolitical adversaries.
What would Iran (or Hezbollah, or any of their proxies) be doing differently today if Soleimani was alive? If looking strong is supposed to deter an enemy, what action was deterred?
I think "not looking weak" is not a valuable thing per se, the projection of strength needs to actually shape your opponent's actions in some way. Everyone knows that the US can drop bombs on the Middle East at will, but everyone also knows that this is not an effective means of eliminating a terrorist organization and terrorists seem to mostly accept it as a cost of doing business. So bombing them feels like it's not serving as an actual deterrent, it's just serving our desire to be seen doing something.
Or to put it another way, there's a difference between looking strong to your enemies and looking strong to voters in your country.
Looking non-threatening to people you have no troubles with and threatening to people you have trouble with is a better formulation of (what should be) the goal of states in geopolitics, better than "Looking strong good, looking weak bad".
Nobody is going to look at the USA's 11 aircraft carriers and globe-crossing B2 bombers and think "Pathetic. I can conquer that in an afternoon.". But plenty can - and plenty did - possibly look at unjustified (or perceived-to-be-unjustified) attacks in lands ridiculously far away from D.C. and think "Hmmm, a threat from a faraway Empire. I bet I can Vietnam the shit out of it until it leaves me alone."
Not only that, but the disgruntled citizens of said aggressive Empire (addicts, prostitutes, the poor, the indebted, ...) are going to look at the incredible lengths their polity goes to in order to have "respect" in a region 2 oceans and a half away from them and think "Wow, my government really doesn't give the slightest shit about me."
The incessant whining of a certain OP on ACX is a comically exaggerated demonstration of political Parasitic Memes. My first encounter with Parasitic Memes was as host, for the Parasitic Meme "The Islamic Caliphate was so fucking cool !1!1!1!1!". I spent days and days and days and then some days and afternoons more reading about the Ottoman Empire, and wondering wistfully about what could have been if it survived to today, even though the Ottomans *uniformly* looked down on their subjects to the point that it was the Arabs (though those of the Peninsula, not my branch of the Big Family) who allied with Western Europe to bring their ailing body down after more than a century of slow death.
The Caliphate **looks** cool, it tickles the macho hormones of a horny dumb teenager, and so that's what the horny dumb teenager believes in, even though it would have objectively sucked for the horny dumb teenager to be transported back to the Caliphate's time.
Similarly, the USA's hegemony **looks** cool, it tickles the macho cells of a certain breed of internet commenter afflicted with having more macho cells than brain cells, and so that is what they whine about and cry about when it looks as if it's ending, even if it objectively suck for that internet commenter to have 600+ billion piece of colored paper, their countrymen's and countrywomen's hard and long work, go into literal economic black holes: foreign wars with no end in sight and no win condition and no lose condition, and foreign war machines ("Allies") that efficiently transform American hard work into dead children and destroyed cities.
But it's of no use, the Parasitic Meme has already taken hold of the Internet Commenter, now the only thing that gives him erections and wet dreams are the sight of armed drones whizzing by in a foreign sun-burnt sky, and casualty numbers on the screens. That's the high, and it must be chased at all costs, even at the cost of the lives of their neighbors, siblings, and - indeed - children, children of children, children of children of children, ...
> Looking non-threatening to people you have no troubles with and threatening to people you have trouble with is a better formulation of (what should be) the goal of states in geopolitics, better than "Looking strong good, looking weak bad".
That sounds like a platonic ideal to me: Nice in theory, unachievable in practice. Back in the real world, covert threats will, from time to time, have to be substantiated with not-so-covert actions (simply because after a while, someone _will_ call you out on it), and those not-so-covert actions will be not-so-covert to your friends as well. Besides, I don't think Scholz or Macron started sweating after hearing about the strike on Soleimani.
Not sure what to do with your footlong rant, or how it's relevant here.
> covert threats will, from time to time, have to be substantiated with not-so-covert actions
Nobody said anything about threats having to be covert, that's a strawman. There are also more categories than "Enemy" and "Ally", the 2 categories I was talking about lie in between.
> Not sure what to do with your footlong rant
That's fine, its target audience is people with better reading comprehension.
Why am I not surprised to see you parachuting in to defend Iran, those innocent uwu smol beans who never did anything wrong? You don't even have the excuse of Israeli occupation here, not that I'd have expected it to stop you.
Why am I not surprised to see you bitching about a post you either didn't read or didn't understand, hilariously mangling its conclusions into unrecognizable lizard-brained mush?
The threat of losing their nukes is the only thing Iran would go to full blown war over. I suppose the threat of a nuclear Iran is the only thing Israel would go to war with Iran over. It's a question of timing. Biden doesn't want the war to happen before the election.
Perhaps, but I wish we could at least collectively recognize how weird it is to see Party A fire hundreds of missiles at Party B and then watch the American foreign policy establishment sit back and stroke its chin and say "hmm, yes, we wouldn't want this to escalate into a war, would we."
A simple explanation is the same for why Israel was letting its enemies grow stronger for years - the temptation to avoid big war in the short term, whatever the cost is in the long term
The big problem with prediction markets is still that it doesn't make financial sense to place your bet much before the end date because you get no return on your money before then. It seems this problem would get worse the larger the bet size one can make. E.g., I'm not going to park a million dollars in Polymarket two months before the election, but I might the day before it. But prediction market enthusiasts might be willing to tie up nominal amounts of money long before the election because they think it's fun to play the market. So the problem is that punters who are willing to put the most skin in the game won't until the last moment, which mostly defeats the purpose of the market as a price signal to society.
My above theory predicts that Polymarket will likely move sharply in the 48 hours before the election. We'll see.
I agree that this is one factor. My understanding is that polymarket also has another factor that pushes markets toward 50%: position limits (or trading limits?) that make it asymmetrically harder to push the market away from 50% than toward 50%.
Note: the time value of money (or mana, or tokens, or whatever) also applies to the other markets if the participants feel that they have positive expected bets they can make on a shorter term than the election bet. It pains me to say it, but 1 month is a long time in these prediction markets.
The solution is to bet shares of $SPY instead of dollars.
I disagree. Think of it as 10% of a large sample size bet on the market already. The resulting price is quite close to if the 100% of market views came in. I mean, as a sanity check poly market is around 50-50. Do you actually think the right prediction is meaningfully far from that?
Polymarket has been barely moving, whereas Nate Silver has swung in a few weeks from 61% Trump to 56% Harris, all the while calling that a "near tossup". My guess is a few big fish in Polymarket have anchored it in a tight couple point range around 50/50 - *for now*. If it suddenly moves to something like 56/44 two days before the election, I think it indicates the majority of those with skin in the game were waiting on the sidelines.
Oh sure, a 5 point swing based on 90% of the liquidity coming in is possible
I also think Nate Silver has swung over time due to new information
Then we're not apart at all
I do think prediction markets currently reflect information fairly efficiently on this
I don't see what good an election prediction market does if its resolution is so low that it can't do better than tell us "It's a close race". Everyone already knows that from looking at the polls. What added value are these markets giving us?
For instace, if you believe who wins the election will have a material impact on the economy, it's not insignificant to your portfolio if the odds are 50/50 or 55/45.
I don't understand your response, like at all.
The race could really be 50-50.
The market might be 100% accurate, Think of a the 10% liquidity of all possible betters is the 'true value' with an error of 5%
Well, Nate Silver might be a biased model (say, 3% in some direction) also with an error of X (maybe 1%, maybe 10%)
It's still useful to have a good model with an error of 5%, even if we could in theory have a better model with an error of 3%
I don't think 'everyone knows' anything. If I had to look at the polls, my estimate of who's likely to win could be anywhere from 40 to 60%. Also polls are not the only source of information.
And, in any case, it would take a hundred years (25 elections) to be able to even have a hope of telling if a model giving you values between 45 and 55% is better than a random coin, if all along the true value really was closely bounded to 50-50
Let me retreat from the motte to the bailey (or whatever it is called) since my claim there is probably too strong.
We already had low-stakes prediction markets like Predict It, but prediction market enthusiasts have argued they aren't good enough, we need big money players with more skin in the game to get more accurate wisdom of crowds predictions. Along come Polymarket which has big money and allows big bets. What good is it over the existing small money prediction sites? As you say, maybe we will know in 100 years.
The reason I think Polymarket is failing is that it just hovers right around 50/50, whereas other markets and forecasters move around a bit more, which seems reasonable given that a lot has happened in the world over the past month.
Perhaps it's a resolution bias on my part. If one person tells me the odds of the Mets winning is 50/50 and another tells me it's 55/45 (and I know they are both smart, analytical people who like to handicap odds) I'm more likely to think the latter person has done more analysis on that particular scenario.
Regarding thinking about Rome, is it worth distinguishing between the Republic and the Empire? My reading (and therefore thinking) has tended to focus on the Republic.
We've got similarities to both, so I'm inclined to lump them together for this purpose. Personally, I think most about the last century of the Republic, as it was torn apart and its skin was used to make a suit for the Empire.
In what sense?
Its political system went from one of shared governance to imperial autocracy and that’s certainly a distinction worthy of note. The pillars of its economy remained more or less in place for some time (slaves, agriculture, trade) but predictably empirical rule meant less political participation for the citizens and significantly increased taxation in the later years of the empire. As felt by the average citizen, the effects of the transition probably seemed mild, and once the empire was firmly in place, the people were probably stoked to not have civil war constantly hanging over their head. I’d guess you probably know all this already, though.
What was the taxation like compared to taxation in today's democracies?
That’s a great question. From what little I know, Roman taxation appears less direct (think sales taxes, duties, etc.) and not as extensive because Rome (and more generally ancient civilizations) didn’t provide the public services that are typical in many modern democracies. But I don’t have numbers to back that up. Maybe someone who’s more of a historian could fill in the blanks.
Edit: I dug around a little more and I guess if you're going talk Roman taxes you should mention tributum, which Wikipedia simply describes as a tax imposed on the citizenry to fund the cost of war. But it’s a trickier concept than that because, unlike a simple tax, it could in theory be paid back to the citizens in times of peace.
Sorry. I was pretty unclear. I know that the Republic and Empire are distinct. I'm asking whether, when we consider a meme like "men think about Rome every day," we should distinguish between thinking about the Republic and the Empire.
I see. To me it seems casual knowledge usually starts with Julius Caesar (at least here in the States). So as far as most men thinking about Rome daily, I’d guess it’s the Roman Empire that’s on their mind. That and a lot of folks get drawn into the subject by the stories of emperors that went bananas.
I know it’s complicated but I think Julius Caesar is generally considered part of the late Republic, even after he became dictator.
I didn’t mean to imply Julius Caesar was the first emperor. He wasn’t. I guess I was unclear. I tried to indicate that when most people’s interest in Rome starts with Julius Caesar, the republic is already almost entirely in the rear view.
I guess I took it for granted that most people who think about Rome know Julius Caesar is seen as a transitional figure between republic and empire.
I’m really not sure what the average person knows about Julius Caesar. I assumed it was just the Shakespeare play until the “every man thinks about Rome” meme.
But I would say that for people who do know much about him, they’re probably interested in the Republican parts. What’s interesting about Caesar is how used the institutions to build power. The first triumvirate, the Cataline Conspiracy, the Gallic Wars. All good stuff and precedes him becoming a dictator. I wouldn’t really say that it’s in the rear view.
I do think you have a point though that there’s not as much interest before Caesar compared to after. Everyone’s mental image of Ancient Rome is usually the early empire. Marcus Aurelius, for example, is more famous than Scipio Africanus.
Note to horror writers: the US now has almost 100% mobile phone coverage, with the unserved areas commonly being national parks or other similar institutions.
https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/location-summary/mobile
The major exception to this is Alaska, which is both large and sparsely inhabited.
Don't worry, horror villains know how to block cell signals.
Why people don't hightail it as soon as their phones lose signal is a bigger question.
This is a fair point to make, but at the same time, there isn't 100% perfect coverage anywhere. My boss who lives about five miles outside the town in a rural area had to switch her mobile network provider because the service was too unreliable; it kept dropping work calls and even no reception at all.
So there is still room for "we can't contact the outside world" in a horror story, even with mobile phones. Terrain, weather conditions, one service provider's tower not in the right spot, no charge, no credit, etc.
I'm sorry, that map is just lying to you in your face. Where we live, in one of the nearby towns, from the green to at least half a mile out of town, none of our phones have any reception - and we have a phone from at least one of the providers listed in that area. The map says coverage 100%.
Checked a few other places that I know for a fact have no mobile coverage of any kind. Still says 100%, with the providers that I know we use listed.
Maybe they think that US territory is completely flat, and terrain features, like hills and mountain ridges, never block line of sight to towers? That still doesn't obviously explain it, but maybe if I squint at the map enough I would be able to believe it.
I'm skeptical. I live in a midwestern college town. There are multiple places on the main street through town where Siri can't give me directions or play a requested song.
I... don't know what to think of this, it clashes violently with my lived experience. I just drove through a chunk of Southwest (Texas/New Mexico). Coverage was extremely spotty, which I knew to expect, and had all the maps downloaded on my phone.
This map is all carriers combined. If you click Provider Detail and then select your carrier it might match your experience more.
And basically everyone only uses one carrier, so yes a map showing all carriers combined is misleading. I know of places in rural California, rural New York and rural Connecticut where I have no cell phone coverage.
Give it a year or so and Starlink-to-phone takes care of the rest.
I know almost next to nothing about military strategy. But based on what I've read in literature it seems like in a land war a big strategy is to create situations in which your troop has a big numerical advantage. I'm guessing the main advantage of a numerical advantage in a particular battle in the context of a war is morale? Are there other advantages? What are other very simple time-tested strategies for winning battles?
Look up Lanchester's Square Law. For ranged combat, the balance of casualties is proportional to the square of the number of units on each side (assuming equal firepower per unit). Basically, the more people you have shooting at the enemy, the fewer enemies survive to shoot back.
Another very common rule is that, before WWI-ish, it's not the battle that kills you, it's the rout. A unit retreating in good order will probably fend off attacks well enough to limp to safety, a unit that panics and scatters is going to get chased down.
I know very little about this, but it seems to me that with modern weapons, if you put too many soldiers in one place, they will simply get killed by a bomb. So if one hundred soldiers oppose two hundred soldiers, what actually happens is that on each side one bomb drops, and most of the soldiers are dead. You need to spread your soldiers wide, but then you lose the effect of the concentrated fire.
The defense strategy is to mine *everything*, put a few soldiers behind the line to shoot at any individual trying to pass, put artillery and anti-aircraft guns further behind the line to bomb any groups or vehicles trying to pass or shoot down the planes.
The counter-strategy -- if you are the right kind of government -- is to keep sending meat waves, about dozen soldiers at a time, so that it would be too expensive to bomb them, but if someone shoots at them, they can shoot back. You can also use civilians from the occupied territory as human shields.
Once in a while, you can do a surprise attack with hundreds of drones, hoping to take out all the enemy artillery nearby, and then you can send the vehicles.
You definitely want to prevent your troops from breaking off to loot the enemy baggage train or camp. There have been a silly amount of historical battles where one side started winning, went off to loot, and then the other side rallied and counterattacked the disorganized looters.
Also, don't let your leaders or officers get hit by a stray arrow and die in the middle of the fight. That's really bad.
There's the Lanchester square law, which posits that an army's combat effectiveness is proportional to the square of its size. In an open field where everyone can see and fire at everyone, if your side is outnumbered 2:1, each soldier will have to on average endure double the firepower while having to kill double the number of enemies to 'break even'. All else equal, the side with double the troops can expect to win with 25% losses. You can test this out in any strategy game. Go into the scenario editor, create two armies, one twice the size of the other, and see how they fare.
This rule of thumb I think was invented mainly for armies standing opposite each other exchanging musket fire. In a modern conflict, especially urban warfare, there is much more concealment of troops and sight lines, so the ability of any troop to fire on any enemy troop is diminished. I believe modern doctrine uses an exponent of around 1.5 instead of 2.
The need to concentrate troops for an offensive is balanced by the need to spread your forces defensively along the front. In any offensive the defender has a first-shot advantage, where they are in a position to fire while the offensive army is moving into range. The defenders will also be more familiar with the terrain they are fighting in. So typically in any offensive you need a large force to be able to absorb disproportionate losses and still fight effectively.
Of course the higher the numerical advantage you have, the fewer troops you're likely to lose. Many offensives of the later part of WW2 involved 10:1 ratios or greater. The tradeoff of course is that it's much more difficult and expensive to organise a successful offensive than it is to merely defend. If ww2 and Ukraine are to go by, it takes nations a couple of years to really learn how to conduct an offensive.
>There's the Lanchester square law, which posits that an army's combat effectiveness is proportional to the square of its size. In an open field where everyone can see and fire at everyone, if your side is outnumbered 2:1, each soldier will have to on average endure double the firepower while having to kill double the number of enemies to 'break even'. All else equal, the side with double the troops can expect to win with 25% losses. You can test this out in any strategy game. Go into the scenario editor, create two armies, one twice the size of the other, and see how they fare.
I didn't know the thoughts I had while playing Starcraft in my childhood had an actual name and practical application.
It depends a lot on the era of conflict and what kind of support both sides have, but in general the attacker wants a 3:1 ratio in their favor at the point of contact.
Other common principles are making use of terrain and water features, building defenses, attacking the enemy’s supply lines, and using the weather (Russian winters in multiple wars, and summer heat during the Crusades).
This is why Russia is generally considered by some to have the upper hand in their Special Operation. And they have been able to push Ukrainian forces back on the heels with massed attacks. But these look like Phyrric victories, so far...
Do you are does anyone else know the general odds of an attacker with a 3:1 ratio of winning?
Sound Sense (sound-sense.net) is a nonprofit organization that coordinates low-gain hearing aid trials for people with auditory processing disorder with or without associated hearing loss.
I connected with them a few months ago and got a pair of hearing aids in the mail last week. So far, the experience has been like getting glasses - I am reasonably functional without hearing aids, but with them I have to spend far less time "filling in the gaps" and guessing what people are saying.
The research still isn't settled about whether hearing aids significantly improve APD symptoms. The Sound Sense people think that this is because there's a splitting effect - some people with APD traits really love them and others get no benefit at all. Personally, my experience so far has been a lot of "cool factor" but only a small amount of functional improvement.
Jason Pargin's new novel mentions scissors statements:
"[Physical terrorism and then]...The final stage would involve the release of a false flag manifesto claiming responsibility. This would, in reality, be an act of psychological warfare to sow discord in the aftermath. Our intel says the Russians have been working on this at least since 2014, with the goal of creating the perfect trigger to exploit existing fissures in our society. They have apparently been testing it in various corners of the internet and measuring engagement, gauging which subject creates the most visceral and divisive reaction among the main ideological factions of the American populace. Their goal is to get half of the country sounding like they’re defending the attack, triggering irreconcilable outrage from the other half."
Jason is a fan of Scott's work (I think I first heard of SSC from him in a Cracked podcast?) so I wouldn't be surprised if that was a deliberate reference
Also I enjoyed the book a lot! I thought it treats internet communities (Twitch streamers, Reddit, makeup tutorial influencers) realistically but also captured what's intrinsically hilarious about them. Anyway, do recommend although only if you have a stomach for controversy. SOOO controversial, my goodness. (https://jasonpargin.substack.com/p/the-new-book-is-out-right-now-finally)
Both insightful about deadly serious matters, and capable of writing the single funniest line of fiction that I've ever read. Guy is a genius.
I dunno. I always got a sense that he's kind of a jerk who doesn't like the people he's writing about. That's normal for satirists, but still.
Does anyone have information on how - I guess I'll call them "permanent creation" tasks - in childhood contribute to adulthood? If you teach a child to craft a bowl or chair instead of just buying one, does it affect their adult life in any way?
Having a foundation of doing creative stuff was a good thing for me. I was led into/led myself into a ton of creative hobbies, forgot about them all in early life, and went back to them around 35. Now I'm approaching retirement age and looking forward to just making things.
My father retired and had no hobbies, as he had always just worked and watched TV. He always seemed sad and at retirement he began a decline that ended with his life. This gives my various hobby pursuits a bit of desperation that they might not have otherwise.
When my son was in very early grade school, he had a class where the kids made beeswax candles. I remember a Christmas where he had a candle he had made of beeswax and he gave it to me and then he said I will have this candle for the rest of my life and the day I will die I will light the candle and watch it burn Until it is done.
I still have that candle stashed away, where I keep my passport and other important things
My dad and I built several (fairly nice!) stools and other furniture things when I was a kid. When furnishing my new apartment, I still defaulted to Ikea. Not sure that there has been any permanent impact on my life beyond a basic understanding that making furniture is hard and buying it is easy.
Two of my most vivid childhood memories are of making real things, with adult help: A brick from some clay I dug up, and some kind of long dress I sewed by hand myself. I'm sure both were very crudely done, and there was adult help, but to my preschooler mind the takeaway was that I had made the first Real Things of my life. I remember them with a feeling I don't have about making pretend things: sand castles, and forts made of a blanket draped over a table, and stuff with kid construction toys. I knew they were real, not pretend. When I got a little older I daydreamed about making a little house for myself in the woods. Thought I could spread a bunch of that clay out smooth and flat for a floor, then fire it by building a fire on top. That wouldn't have worked, but I thought it would be a way to make a Real Floor.
In my teens I taught myself to be a good seamstress, and have made all kinds of complicated things, including costumes for a theater during one era. I can't do fine woodworking, buy have a bunch of tools and can rough together all kinds of things, and make repairs. And I've always wanted to build a house, though I never got around to doing that.
I don't know whether the brick and the dress just really hit the spot for me, or whether making Something Real would have for most kids. I think the important thing with kids is to be alert for something that really hits the spot, and give them a big memorable experience when you realize that a certain kind of thing gives them special pleasure.
You never know, but its hard to measure., unless you keep the bowl.
Saw this mentioned on Twitter and I mentioned it a few weeks ago: the 30th was the 10th anniversary of "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup"
Does substack now have flashing skeleton screens?
Would a parallel universe have identical values of π or e?
I remember reading a science fiction novel years ago that had the characters navigating a wormhole bridge between universes and they had device to continually calculate the value of pi to track where they were in the multiverse and I thought huh that's a cool idea.
Now I'm wondering, wait how would that even work? Like if you brought a wheel from one universe to another would it suddenly be ever so slightly out of true?
This has sparked a memory for me, was it that Greg Bear book? Eon? I remember loving the pi-measuring conceit as well - even if I agree with other commenters that the change in geometry would likely do something pretty terminal to our biological processes (proteins not fitting, cells denaturing etc)
I think that's right!
Mathematical constants have nothing to do with the physical universe.
What one could think about changing in a metaphysical sense are dimensionless physical constants. I enjoyed Martin Rees's *Just Six Numbers* as a teen, though I have since read a bit of criticism that it was too credulous towards string theory's metaphysical claims about the multiverse.
Not so sure about this. Math is impossible without a physical substratum of sorts, right? Ultimately the mental states that take place during a calculation or when acknowledging that a theorem is true are physical configurations (if we take a physicalist view).
Sounds interesting, I'll check that out
I'm pretty sure the book is Eon by Greg Bear. I remember a Pi finding device used in that book to find where they were in the multiverse. But ChatGPT's first guess was The Void Trilogy, by Peter F Hamilton.
I think Eon is right! I was pretty sure it was one of the Gregs (either Bear or Egan) but didn't remember the particulars
ChatGPT is extremely wrong because I remember Eon being good and well written while The Void Trilogy is the opposite of that
Pi would be identical in the context of a continuous flat environment, such as the abstract confines of Euclidean geometry. Whether or not Euclidean geometry is a close approximation of the real world could very quite a bit between universes.
Spacetime curvature, for instance, could definitely affect the real-world value of pi, but a large enough curvature to make pi more than a tiny bit different in everyday contexts would probably be inconsistent with life.
Pi and e are computable numbers. You can have Turing machines which run forever, writing digits of them on the tape one by one.
A universe where if you follow the instructions for calculating correctly and end up with other results would be a pretty fucked-up place.
You might as well ask if there are universes where elementary rules of arithmetic or logic don't hold. I can't really imagine such universes, but then again, I am trained by a lifetime of the kind of logic which holds true in our universe. Or you could say that the math which is discover-able both for us and for the inhabitants of flatland is all the math there is, and everything else is at most dream-logic which fails to be self-consistent when closely examined.
Would in a parallel universe 2+2=4 ?
What about lim n→∞ (1 + 1/n)^n ? That happens to be e. But if the limit of the sequence is a different number, it would mean that the values for many specific n would also be different. How specifically would that work e.g. for n=2?
One thing I can imagine is the parallel universe having a different geometry. Like there would be no planes, and therefore no circles as we know them. Our equation for π would still result in the same number, but that number would not describe anything about that world's closest alternative to our circles. (And yes, as anomie said, this would instantly kill you, because the chemistry in your body would stop working.)
Math isn't empirical so pure mathematical constructs couldn't be observed like that. It's like asking if meters could be different. The underlying thing the meters measure could be different but a meter is an invented abstraction. For example, pi in base 12 is 3.18 (and on and on) not 3.14. But this does not correspond to a real difference in the empirical world. You can switch to base 12 mathematics and it won't cause any issues in the physical world.
If OP meant by pi the number defined by summing some series then indeed it’s hard to imagine it changing from one universe to the next. On the other hand if he meant “the ratio of the circumference of some physical object to its diameter” that is an empirical measurement. Even in our own universe it may turn out not to be 3.1415926535… Take for instance a very big circle drawn on the ground as an example (assuming flat Earthers are wrong)
For starters, you would probably instantly die. You can't just change the mechanisms of the universe without everything breaking.
Instant death for mucking about does seem like a good default assumption yes
I'm not saying Amazon are putting their thumb on the scale when it comes to reviews of "Rings of Power", but here's the reply after I attempted to leave a review on episode seven. My review gave it four stars out of five, if anyone is interested.
"We could not post your review because it does not meet our guidelines for one or more of these reasons:
Profanity
Harassment
Hate speech
Sexual content
Illegal activity
Private information
Please edit and resubmit your review. Before you do, make sure it meets all of our community guidelines."
Now, the review was negative. But it was a lot less harsh than the ones I've left on here, and I didn't (so far as my poor addled brain can recall) do any swearing, sexual content (oh yeah, that's rich coming from you guys that have an Elf kissing his mother-in-law!) or the rest of it. I didn't even threaten to firebomb Jeff Bezos' toy rockets.
So it would seem that you only get to post a review on Prime Video if it ranges from positive to glowing about how magnificent the show is. I'll bear that in mind the next time I see puff pieces in the trade mags online about how the second season is busting all records for being the most watched, most streamed, most popular, most loved show ever 😁
Maybe their system runs reviews through a sentiment checker, and the sarcasm has tripped whatever setting they have for "Harassment"? Amazon's AI work is not known for being top drawer, so I would not be surprised if their analysis amounts to "insufficiently laudatory", the way many deep learning systems end up learning a least squares approximation.
I didn't save a copy of the comment, which I should have done, but I wasn't sarcastic. I was trying to give constructive criticism about what worked for me and what didn't.
There have been rumblings about Amazon doing the same thing with reviews of season one - pruning out any reviews that were three stars and under, so the only reviews people saw were four and five stars, leading them to think "this must be a pretty good show".
I was agnostic about that, because rumours are always flying on the Internet, but seeing that a four star review that was critical but not very negative (you could call it mildly positive as I said that episode was slightly better than the others) got "not laudatory enough" rejection, I'm beginning to believe it.
Well now I'm *really* motivated to review the final episode! 😁
I look forward to reading it. I have no intention of watching the show but your reviews are a hoot.
Oh, I am waiting for it with great anticipation, sitting here like one of the new, kinder, nicer Orcs who just want to beat their swords into ploughshares and go till the land (as vegetarian farmers) with their wives and babies by their side 😁
Heh, heh, heh.
They better give me Celebrimbor's tortured and arrow-riddled corpse, is all I'm saying, after their pre-season promises of darker and grittier and gorier.
I honestly have *no* idea how they're going to round up all the little straying sheepies of their various plot threads in the final episode; it'll either have to be three hours long or they're going to leave a clutter of cliff-hangers for season three (e.g. I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf, his staff quest, his 'do I abandon my friends to CERTAIN DEATH?' dilemma, the Dark Wizard, and Tom Bombadil as just *one* of the Really Big Things they need to sort out).
Is the beast that King Durin threatens to unleash:
(a) The Balrog at long last after they've been teasing it for a whole two seasons? Way too early by the lore, but they spit on your lore feelthy nerds!
(b) not the Balrog but the Watcher in the Water (or its grandparent), the creature in the lake that Dísa encountered?
(c) neither of those, it's just Dísa got the night starvation and was making a run to the market to stock up on munchies and you should know by now not to get in her way when she's on a snack run?
They're on to you! Time to get reallly sarcastic.
Did you properly test your hypothesis? As in, did you find published reviews that are more negative than yours would have been? Maybe post your would-be review here so we can judge for ourselves?
Clearly your reputation precedes you, Deisach.
Huh! Unrelated but I just was going on to Amazon to write a review of a book I'd just read and enjoyed and got this:
"We apologize but Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this account will no longer be able to contribute reviews and other content on Amazon."
What the actual fuck?
There does seem to be something odd going on with Amazon's websites. Maybe they're trying to shove in All AI All The Time (Humans Go Home) and the systems are getting indigestion?
I wonder how a sarcastic review would fare.
I resubmitted a five star review that might, if you squint and look at it sideways with the light behind it, just possibly maybe contains the slightest tinge of sarcasm.
We'll see how *that* one fares.
Recent experience that I think might be of interest to the board. I went to Hong Kong recently. For those who aren’t aware, there was significant unrest there in 2019-20, which began with an attempt by the HK legislative council to pass a law enabling people to be extradited to mainland China for prosecution of crimes, effectively enabling the government to get around the “One Country, Two Systems” setup and bypass the protections of Hong Kong’s legacy British-based justice system to move them to mainland courts. Previously, doing that required kidnapping people to the mainland (see, e.g. the Causeway Bay Books disappearances). Hong Kongers understandably freaked the fuck out at this prospect and huge protests ensued. Like, as-many-as 1MM people out of a 7MM population huge. It ended with a combination of leveraging COVID to force people back indoors, and a new National Security/Anti-Sedition Law that was passed in the mainland and pushed onto Hong Kong from there because the HK Legislative Counsel was effectively paralyzed.
The law is pretty much what you’d expect from the PRC, criminalizes secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign organizations, but worded vaguely enough that it can be broadly enforced. You don’t have to explicitly plan a coup or declaration of independence, technically playing the “Glory to Hong Kong” song that was an anthem for the protests, or wearing a “Free Hong Kong” t-shirt would be enough. Naturally, this chills speech the PRC finds problematic while also allowing them to accuse detractors of being paranoid by claiming it’d *never* be enforced that way.
That’s all backstory though. The *story* is that my recent trip to HK also included a stop at the Hong Kong history museum. Surprisingly, the museum itself was mostly closed, but it had a free, special exhibit about national security and the new law. And man, if you want some real-world Orwell, check this thing out.
https://hk.history.museum/en/web/mh/exhibition/National-Security-Exhibition-Gallery.html
“The National Security Exhibition Gallery, with an area of over 1,100 square metres, aims at enhancing visitors' appreciation of the significance of national security, impressing upon all citizens their duties and responsibilities in safeguarding national security, as well as deepening the community's general knowledge and understanding of national security related concepts and issues. Developed around the core of a holistic approach to national security, the Gallery serves to promote patriotism and affection for our country. Messages are conveyed to encourage all citizens to take part in safeguarding national security, and to elevate their sense of responsibility and ownership. The overarching need for long-term security and stability in Hong Kong, and Hong Kong's unique advantages of being backed by the Motherland and connected to the world are emphasised.”
The children’s programming was especially interesting. You can see the kids’ video “Young Guardians of National Security “ online, including such gems as butterflies explaining to a ladybug that “law compliance is a must for national security” and unironic use of the phrase “unity is strength.”
https://www.nsed.gov.hk/exhibition_gallery_booking/index.php?l=en&a=video
The rest of the exhibit isn’t online, but it had a lot of crazy gems, like the section on how awesome the PLA is as a “stabilizing force in Hong Kong,” the dangers of color revolution and how the 2019 protests were the “Hong Kong version of ‘colour revolution’” instigated by outsiders, the dire threats of espionage which are ‘everywhere,’ and how the new National Security law “ends violence and chaos, and restores order” and is “constitutional, legitimate, reasonable, and fair.”
The whole thing was surreal and darkly humorous (if you need a special exhibit on how your anti-secession law is “constitutional, legitimate, reasonable, and fair,” perhaps the lady doth protest too much?), but mostly sad. Seems hard to imagine a way for Hong Kong to really bounce back.
From your description, the exhibit sounds really cringe for anyone who is not already a 100% convinced of the CCP point of view. But then again, being the one voice of reason in some committee to point out "this will seem very silly to anyone not already convinced, perhaps we should not do this" is probably not the kind of statement anyone savvy enough to get onto the committee in the first place will make. And sometimes today's obedient kids turn into tomorrow's disobedient teens, and might question the wisdom of the butterflies' message about national unity. Western attempts to teach kindergardeners about how evil drugs are rarely prevent them from trying drugs later, after all.
I dunno, the current grasp the Party has on how things are expressed and what is or is not crimethink is pretty firm (right now at least).
Imagine if, every 4th of July, all the Hollywood stars and Emmy award winners and anybody famous or admired all lined up to do the patriotic flag-waving and release songs and movies about how great America is and its political systems and how the people, especially the youth, must strive onwards and upwards to uphold the righteousness of the nation.
Now, some American stars may well do that, but imagine it being *compelled*. Or not even compelled overtly, so much as everyone falls in line and produces the online messaging about "Happy National Day and here are the approved sentiments", partly out of true belief (because you've been raised under this system) and partly out of knowing this is how you must play the game, if you want a career (and to avoid ending up disappeared/in jail).
This brought to you courtesy of it recently being China's National Day and seeing a current star very popular with the youth releasing a song for the day. This is just how it goes. The Orwell Museum is all of a whole with that sort of social engineering. "This is what you must believe and this is the version of history that is the only one acknowledged".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Day_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China
You're right, the compelled speech system in the United States is a lot more subtle. The compelled speech in the US isn't openly in favour of the system, it's ostensibly _against_ the system. Please change your corporate logo to black this month and rainbow the other month, in protest against someone who might theoretically exist. The establishment is the revolution, and the revolution will never end.
I agree with the overall spirit of your comment here, but just for avoidance of doubt let's be clear that the CCP system is *much* worse than the US one. It's not just a matter of the US overton window being governed by informal social forces - the punishments those social forces can bring to bear is significantly less.
To take an example - the Hunter Biden Laptop story. The laptop findings were legitimately newsworthy, the Trump FBI warned facebook that it "might be a Russian plot," and facebook de-prioritized the story in the critical month before the election. The story still was broken, however, mainly by the NY Post, and we've got pretty widespread knowledge of it available. If you read only left-media sources, you might still get an unfair view of it, but you at least know that it exists to get that unfair view.
Imagine that story breaking about Xi Jinpeng's kid in the PRC. "Imagine" is even a stretch because it probably doesn't break at all. There's 2 kinds of media available there - state media, which would never report on the story in the first place because it's under direct party control, and independent media, where the story won't break because it's understood that you can be straight up arrested and put in jail for publishing it.
Hong Kong used to be the exception to that, but even then you could still get kidnapped to the mainland and jailed for speech the CCP disliked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causeway_Bay_Books_disappearances
Again, I'd assume that you're probably aligned with this kind of "D's and R's are imperfect but the CCP is still worse" worldview; most people, on examination, are. It's hard not to be, what with the forced sterilizations, mass famines, social credit schema, etc. I just want to throw it out there because often people read these "in fairness we're imperfect too" comments as "to be honest we're just as bad," and that's a bridge too far that I want to make sure nobody takes away.
When an election goes the way an American doesn't want, they generally complain and talk idly about "moving to Canada." I've had multiple people in HK tell me that they or their friends (especially friends with schoolage children) have *actually* left the country, either to avoid the indoctrination their kids are exposed to, or because they or their kids were involved in the democracy protests and they're afraid for their safety.
The US may be on the same "degrees of imperfection" continuum with the PRC in terms of how it treats its citizens, but they are way, way past of us in terms of how bad things are, and we shouldn't accidentally let our own justified self-criticism inadvertently write the CCP a pass.
Putting a couple pieces together, I'm also reminded a Russian concept Mark Galliotti sometimes describes as vranyo (враньё). Where I lie to you, but it's not so much an attempt to actually deceive you as it is an expression of power.
Basically, if I lie to you hoping to get you to believe the lie, that's one thing. But if I lie to you blatantly, and you know I'm lying and I'm not even trying to pretend I'm not, but you have no power to call me on it or do anything about it, and in fact the power dynamics might even compel you to act as if you believe me, it's exactly the kind of expression of power that can crush someone's spirit. Like the famous "there are 4 lights" scene in Star Trek, or the mob boss who knows the cops have no evidence so he looks them in the eye, smirks, and says "of *course* I had nothing to do with that killing!"
Applied to an exhibit like this, I sort of see that kind of pattern emerge. The content, while cringe and littered with falsehoods, (a) makes CCP true-believers in Hong Kong feel good to see, and (b) if you're not a true believer and you see it, you see the message "the 2019 unrest was a colour revolution that foreign powers attempted to impose on China from the outside, but thankfully our righteous heroic government passed a constitutional, legitimate, and fair national security law that saved us from this terrible evil" slapped all over the walls, and you know that any attempt you make to call the lie a lie could land you in jail, so you just have to suck it up and let the statement stand unchallenged, it's dispiriting in exactly the kind of way that would work well for the CCP.
Anyone here have a deep understanding of why the most recent card bans for the Commander format have proved so controversial?
The basics of the issue are easy enough to find. Four cards were deemed too powerful and therefore banned.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/commander-banned-and-restricted-announcement-september-23-2024
Players were upset enough about this that they hate-mailed the Commander rules committee to the point that the committee resigned and handed control of the format over to WOTC.
https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/57919/magic-the-gathering-commander-rules-committee-fires-itself
OK, sure. But why were these bans so unpopular? Were they the wrong things to ban? Did the bans wipe out a lot of value from players' collections?
The reaction on /r/magictcg was mostly "good riddance" (and on /r/custommagic, making hate cards that specifically target blue/green Bird Wizards was practically a once a week occurence), so I was kinda shocked to hear there was an uproar about this.
The petition linked from your news article makes it sound like it's a mix of "you made these expensive cards valueless" and "weren't those cards made specifically for commander?"
It's largely because of the value of the cards. Everybody I know agree that the cards deserved to be banned, even the ones that are sad that their $100 pieces of cardboard have cratered in value.
That said, I can't think of any other cards with such a hefty price that have been banned recently. I think to some extent, there's a "perfect shitstorm" going on here, where those who are most hurt by the ban are those most likely to have terrible social antennas and send people death threats.
> But why were these bans so unpopular? Were they the wrong things to ban?
I think you're hearing from a vocal minority here. As an ex-Commander player, all I can say is "it's about time". I long ago gave up on playing commander, but these bans are certainly a step in the right direction at least.
Given the history of card bans in the past, I am less confident in this answer than I would be otherwise.
What I'm hearing is that a lot of people bought these cards specifically because they were valuable, like buying silver and gold, and and then the value went away overnight. Card shops, collectors, etc. Players seem to roll with bans and sometimes anticipate them, but if it wasn't the players who were complaining but those banking on the value, that might make sense.
I don't understand MtG, but if enough people don't like the "official" rule changes then can't they just play by whatever rules they like?
If you are playing casually with friends, sure. But if you are playing competitively or with strangers, they will probably insist on playing by standard rules.
Of course, EDH was originally a community-defined format. The WotC got in on it and rebranded it as commander, likely because Elder Dragon Highlander was not very trademarkable.
Also, Jeweled Lotus was a card specifically created by WotC for Commander. It seems to have appeared in two sets, Commander Legends (2020) and Commander Masters (Released 2023-08-04). Banning a card which WotC put in boosters released a year ago seems controversial. That is considerably less than the about two years cards stay legal in the 'standard' format.
> Banning a card which WotC put in boosters released a year ago seems controversial. That is considerably less than the about two years cards stay legal in the 'standard' format.
Two years is an *eternity* for problem cards to stick around. Bans are normally much faster than that. Heck, even the laissez-faire Commander format has banned a lot of cards much faster than that.
Tibalt's Trickery was legal in Modern for only *ten days*.
A year is pretty long for a broken card, and it's only because WOTC *deliberately* printed broken unfun chase cards to make money that we're even in this position.
Heck, just look at the precedent of Hullbreacher. Hullbreacher was another card that WOTC printed specifically for Commander, and it still got banned in Commander after only *9 months*.
In fact, it's even worse than that. In *the very same ban announcement* as Jeweled Lotus, another of the banned cards was Nadu, which was banned in Commander only *three months* after release.
I work for a company in California that might run out of money soon. We've been around for more than ten years and run an online community with ~100,000 members. No money is involved except for hosting costs. I think it would be a shame if all those people lost their community.
I'm thinking of seeing if I can inherit the community and continue running it but I am afraid of all the legal responsibilities and obligations I might be accidentally taking on. I don't have the patience or the $$$ to start a company to own the community.
I expect, if I go ahead with this, expensive lawyers will be involved but before I get that far, am I crazy to even think it? What should I be thinking about.
> I'm thinking of seeing if I can inherit the community and continue running it
This strikes me more as wanting to hang on to a group of potential customers rather than a "community."
I'm not sure why you would say that. The people in my community are my friends and I won't be making any money from it.
From what I said, what makes you think I want to hang on to potential customers?
I think legal advice is often worth the cost, which is also often less than you think it will be. If it were me, ask around for recommendations (or check google reviews) for lawyers who are experienced with liability/tort/whatever might be relevant and ask for an hour long consultation to discuss your concerns and hopes and what might be required (in terms of time, effort and $) to assume ownership/responsibility, plus what the actual risks of that approach are.
Depending on how complex the situation is that initial consult might cost around $200-500 (but I've never hired a lawyer in California so others might be able to give a better estimate). After meeting with them they should also be able to tell you how much it would take to execute your plan which again, will depend on how complicated it is but I would guess $2-4k.
If you don't like what you hear from the lawyer in the consult find another and repeat the process. If you don't like the advice of the 2nd lawyer either, then it's probably worth reconsidering
Thank you, Vermillion. This sounds like excellent advice. I was certainly expecting it to be much more than this.
You're very welcome! Good luck and hopefully you can keep the community going somehow or other
A friend of mine suggested that setting up a limited liability company is very cheap in the UK (where I live) so I might look into that too.
You are definitely going to need some sort of limited liability entity, but I assume that this concept applies in the UK. https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/piercing-the-veil-of-small-business-what-the-owners-of-llcs-and-corporations-need-to-know
Not to mention that, if the group has members in other countries, those countries' laws might apply in some potential lawsuits.
All of this is to say that you should definitely get competent legal advice before going forward, probably from a firm that has expertise in multinational corporate law.
Thank you very much. This is useful. Reading your linked article now…
Id ask someone running a several year old fedi insistence
Thank you. Looks interesting. Reading up on this now.
The idea of taking on the infrastructure of a company to preserve an online community seems like a boil-the-ocean solution. Couldn't the community just migrate to some other service, like Reddit, for instance?
The way the community is organised is very different from Reddit.
I am a software engineer and I built the software and all the infrastructure. That stuff is all easy. It's the legal issues that I am afraid of.
Could the existing company publish the software under a free license, such as GNU GPL?
Then anyone (that includes you) could download the software and run it without getting involved in company's legal issues.
I would need more than just the software. I need the domain and all our existing data
Is Disney/ABC an obvious short? I'm biased because I don't care for Disney properties in the first place, but I watch a lot of sports and have witnessed the implosion of ESPN over the past few years. It does seem to be a case of "DEI is the problem". Their top talented white broadcasters (E.g., Jeff Van Gundy) have been booted in favor of women who don't have near the talent of the men they are replacing. The bizarre rise of Stephen A. Smith is something I don't want to know details about.
ESPN seems to think that its brand alone will get them through anything. If you're a sports fan. would you rather watch a basketball game on ESPN or TNT? In a competitive marketplace, the answer to that shouldn't be so clear.
So should we all short Disney? Is it rotting from the head? Or is ESPN some weird special case that doesn't reflect on Mickey Mouse and Goofy?
Disney has gone through many cycles of greatness and decay, it's never been this big and dominant but I think it could till renew itself. I also don't think the DEI/wokeness issue is as clear as people think. Inside Out 2 got a lot of criticism, but it was the highest grossing Pixar movie to date (in nominal dollars, anyway).
My point about wokeness has been taken too far. It doesn't matter *why* ESPN has made such bad decisions (I think wokeness is part of it but the actual reason doesn't matter. Maybe a better way to think about it is: management is either weak or in chaos so wokeness has won by defualt) but it has made many bad decisions in serial. I'm betting against them due to evidence of bad management.
What do you think you know about Disney that the rest of the world doesn't?
That their current management is incompetent. Their recent stock price history reflects that, but what I see is that the management decisions are getting worse not better.
It's the kind of short I would hold for a year, with the notion that more investors will notice the same over that period. All my other positions are aligned with the S&P to rise so it's a minor hedge in my portfolio and not a huge risk. I like to use about 5% of my money for short positions.
My point is that if you think you know better than the world's biggest and most liquid prediction market, you're probably wrong.
The same point can be made for every investment I make. I believe the EMH is mostly true and mostly long the indexes but it's fun to short a company from time to time. I'm 55% sure Disney is going down over the next year and that's good enough to trade on. If I bet wrong, no biggie.
Is this some kind of momentum reasoning, it's gone down a lot so it might continue? It feels to me as though a short now is essentially a short on the overall index, and there might be better EV plays to short the S&P.
Disney as a whole seems too big to short as an entity. Star Wars and ESPN doing poorly? Just do more Pixar, theme parks, and Marvel. They own so very much that it's kind of hard to imagine it. And even when things are going "poorly" they are probably closer to a small profit and breaking even than an actual loss.
A Marvel movie costing $300 million and only making $400 million is embarrassing, because they've made far more money with less cost and it shows a big decline in their money-makers. But it's still a nice profit and any other industry would think that was amazing. The Marvels appears to have lost money, but even a mediocre film like Thor: Love and Thunder apparently made about $100 million. If it weren't for the social implications of crashing a major IP or the possibility of killing the golden goose, the obvious play would be to make as many of those things as you can as fast as you can. (And obviously try to aim for the more profitable options like Deadpool and drop future Marvels where you can).
As far as ESPN specifically? I think televised sports is in a difficult position, and is ripe for some kind of online takeover. The industry is far too big for someone to just bully their way in (and Disney would be the most likely to try if they didn't already own ESPN), but I think someone's going to try to break into the market soon with something fairly novel and take the legs out from under the current leaders.
They have performed poorly recently and the reason is bad management. Based upon really dumb shit they continue to do, I expect the bad management to continue for at least another year and will short them for that time period.
Stephen A. Smith is much better understood as a shock-jock designed to cause controversy to get people to tune in than anything to do with wokeness. He's been a major ESPN personality since 2005, not 2018, after all.
A much better example of wokeness was in 2017 with the rebranding of the 6pm SportsCenter hour to SC6, hosted by Michael Smith and Jemele Hill. Hill in particular was an outspoken woke liberal. After some controversial comments, Hill was pushed out of ESPN and Smith's contract wasn't renewed. SC6 only lasted 13 months.
ESPN's issues are financial--they rode the cable TV package gravy train and cannot adjust to the lost revenue. Their ploy is clickbaitification (SAS being the prime example). I don't think wokeness has anything to do with it (even the constant push for women's basketball is better understood as a financial move, since they own the rights to the WNBA but not the NBA).
no, the market is rewarding wokeness and "markets can stay sane longer then you can stay solvant"
Die may take a decade to play out and shorts charge interest. Dont mix value investing a day trading, a short is a day traders tool and your making a value claim.
I think the quote is "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." Which I think is your point. I sense the fever is slowly breaking though. How solvent are you?
Edit: After looking at a 5 year chart of DIS I don't think shorting it is a good move. Its trading at close to the bottom of its range.
basicly swimming in hydrochloric acid
Time to start checking on its book value..might be an opportunity
There's never such a thing as an "obvious short", and in fact this post makes me want to investigate going long (this is not at all intended as a dig at you, only a reflection of years of observing this pattern - by the time a stock is an "obvious short" most of the bad stuff has been priced in). Shorting stocks is an incredibly tough way to make money (ask me how I know... nevermind :) ).
The word obvious is hyperbole. i actually think Disney has a 55% chance of declining further over the next year, and that's good enough for me to short. 95% of my portfolio is long the S&P. Disney is my one short which I will hold for a year.