My question was more along the lines of the "(not so) the great (wo)man" hypothesis.

Let's imagine that Jill Stein was permanently abducted by aliens. What do we think would happen?

Would the Green Party just collapse?
Would the former member just join the Democrats?
Would they start a new party?
Or maybe someone new would take over who could do a better job?
I think we'd likely just get someone who's functionally equivalent.

Is she really responsible for the problems of the US Green party?

As near as I can tell the EU Green parties had a different trajectory. They initially started winning seats in parliaments on purely environmental platforms. Those MPs actually started pushing green agendas in various parliaments. That, in turn led to more people voting for them. Eventually that had to adopt policy positions beyond the environment and they tended to be pretty left.

The US never had Green party members in a position where they could actually do anything useful about the environment. That means they could never fulfill their primary goal in the US. So when they tried to branch out the same way the EU Green parties did, they just turned into a vague hodgepodge of leftists ideas.

Is there any suggestion that Jill Stein's replacement would have any chance of saving the US Green party?

I pulled this same thing in college. I was a CS major in the late 90's and I took a class from the writing department on changing discourse in a new digital era.

The professor was really good at literary analysis and knew next to nothing about computers. He was spot on that big changes were afoot but he was as wrong as anyone else on what those changes were (spoiler: we all thought we would have an alternate universe in Cyberspace TM).

We had the option of creating a website as our final project and we realized that if we just put in every possible feature we'd get an A. Animated backgrounds? Moving fonts? Music? A goofy mouse pointer? No feature was too dumb. If it was something you couldn't do on a piece of paper, we added it to our website.

We got our A. It was a dirty A but we took it.

I'm guessing you haven't spent much time in countries where people leave offerings to various Buddhas and Bodhisattva in the hopes of positive interventions in love and business.

If we're just talking math, triangles can be defined in terms of 3-element subsets of all 3 (A)ngles and 3 (S)ides:
SSS - unique
SAS - unique
ASS - may be unique depending on the lengths of the sides
ASA - unique
SAA - unique
AAA - infinite solutions

Maybe someone cleverer than me can figure out how that maps on to love and gender.

My bad. Maybe we could extend that policy to other aggressors?

That’s a great comparison. We should stop sending weapons to both aggressors.

It kinda looks like your arguing that voting doesn’t work.

Maybe.

Kessler Syndrome doesn't impact the ability to produce or launch satellites.
It impacts the ability of satellites to function in orbit but it's not a fixed limit.

Humans have a pretty good track record of developing technologies that break through insurmountable theoretical barriers.

The original article said the Navy hadn't provided all the details.

It looks like those 15+ people included at least one person who should have been monitoring for such things and a bunch of people who wanted to follow sports.

They didn't give the password to most of the crew and they tried to keep the commanding officers in the dark. It sounds like everyone involved faced disciplinary action.

Those chiefs and senior chiefs who used, paid for, helped hide or knew about the system were given administrative nonjudicial punishment at commodore’s mast, according to the investigation.

It looks like that's an administrative process. https://jagdefense.com/practice-areas/non-judicial-punishmentarticle-15/ Potential penalties are listed near the bottom.

The original article goes into more detail https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/

It sounds like there were over 15 people in on the scheme. At some point people noticed that there was some wi-fi network called "STINKY" and rumors started circulating about it. It took a while for those rumors to reach senior command. Then they changed the name to make it look like a printer, which further delayed the investigation.

It doesn't look like they actually scanned for the access point. I suspect that's because it would be hard on a ship. All the metal would reflect signals and give you a ton of false readings.

They only eventually found it when a technician was installing an authorized system (Starshield seems to be the version of Starlink approved for military use) and they discovered the unauthorized Starlink equipment.

The Starlink receivers have gotten fairly small. It seems like that was pretty easy to hide among all the other electronics on the ship.

The original article says there were over 15 people involved https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/

With that many people, it's only a matter of time before someone spills the beans.

There are several steps they could have taken to make it much harder to discover. I expect more and more people will take those steps and we'll never hear about it.

We're likely to see a variant of Moore's law when it comes to satellites. Launch costs will keep going down. Right now we have Starlink with a working satellite internet system and China with a nascent one. As the costs come down we'll likely see more and more countries, companies, organizations and individuals will be able to deploy their own systems.

A government would need to negotiate with every provider to get them to block signals over their country. Jamming is always hard. You could theoretically jam all communications or communications on certain frequency bands but it's not clear how you would selectively jam satellite internet.

There's a much bigger story here.
Think about how hard it was to discover this access point. Even after it was reported and there was a known wi-fi network and the access point was known to be on a single ship, it took the Navy months to find it.

Starlink devices are cheap and it will be nearly impossible to detect them at scale. That means that anyone can get around censors. If the user turns off wi-fi, they'll be nearly impossible to detect. If they leave wi-fi on in an area with a lot of wi-fi networks it will also be nearly impossible to detect. A random farmer could have Starlink in their hut. A dissident (of any nation) could hide the dish behind their toilet.

As competing networks are launched, users will be able to choose from the least restricted network for any given topic.

I've had a lot of success with a combination of Skritter and the Chairman's Bao (TCB).

Skritter has been my favorite vocabulary building app. For a bunch of reasons:

1. Supports SRS. It makes study time very efficient by making you practice the stuff your bad at rather than stroking your ego by asking you questions you're good at. The only downside is that it doesn't stroke your ego for you you'll need to do that yourself by noticing how fast your vocabulary is increasing.
2. Great writing practice. It recognizes strokes, in the proper order and corrects you when you're wrong.
3. A rich set of company and user generated "decks" (curated vocabulary lists) and the ability to create custom decks.
4. Automatic deck creation. You can integrate with other apps (like the TCB) to reinforce your learning.
5. The developers are a small team but they're fairly responsive.

The Chairman's Bao is a graded news reader. They create a bunch of articles based on vocabulary from different HSK levels. They have a nice integrated dictionary that will tell you about specific words in the context of that text. They also let you export those words to your Skritter lists.

Yes and emergent behavior goes both ways. Organizations have many properties that the individuals they're made up of don't have and they lack many properties that individuals have. Organizations don't have feelings. Even in the rare cases when the feelings of the people in those organizations are homogeneous, the organizations almost never manifest those feelings without significant alterations.

Are you seriously comparing Joe Rogan with NATO strategists?

There's a bit more to it than that.

NATO is a strategic alliance lead by the US. NATO doesn't have any feelings and isn't pleased or displeased about anything. Instead it generally does whatever is the US believes is most strategically advantageous.

Those strategist are typically smart people who listen to all kinds of things. They're definitely careful about what they say though and won't go around promoting information they don't want suppressed.

There's nothing false about all the dead civilians.

This is a horrible ad hominem attack and actively fuels racism.

Wanting Israel to stop its genocide is a good thing. Antisemitism is a bad thing.

If you insist on equating the two, antisemitism will stop being a bad thing. That would be bad.

This is just insane. No normal person would doubt that arms shipments are a military subsidy.

Reply or not. I'm blocking you.

That sounds just fine. I'm pretty suspicious of someone who claims that being able to save 30 seconds typing that post would make you more tech savvy.

A rational person would take the information in context. The shooter was not acting in isolation. The shooter was part of an organized military that is heavily subsidized by the US government.

What's hyperbolic about the last sentence? It's an easily demonstrated fact that the US sends billions of dollars in military aid to Israel. It's an easily verified fact that this is a large portion of Israel's military budget.

If you look hard enough you can always find a nit to pick.

When there are billions of dollars of heavy weapons pounding the entire area to dust, it's completely disingenuous to talk about who paid for a particular bullet or gun.

The entire operation is heavily subsidized by US military donations.

I think that true "tech-savvyness" isn't really a generational thing.

Some people are just really curious about how stuff works. When they see something they aren't satisfied with, "Just do it." or "Shit just works." They want to know how and why it works. When you hand those people a computer, machine or flower they'll poke at it and try to understand it better.

It's not clear that typing skills are actually needed for that.

I max out at around 80-100 WPM but I only sustain that when I'm transcribing something. When I need to learn about technology, it's much more about reading than typing. When I actually need to do some coding, I spend much more time staring at the screen and looking up stuff on Stackoverlow than I do actually typing.

Most of Z is not savvy at all, just like with every generation. And just like with every generation, some of them will push the envelope of technology. I doubt that lack of typing will slow those folks down.

Weapons. That's the connection.

The US sends vast arsenals to Israel and Israel uses those weapons for genocide and other war crimes.

That's outrageous. We should immediately stop funding Hamas.

No more weapons packages.
No more military funding.
The Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group should stop supporting them now.

China knows that the US has a lot of economic leverage. They've been working very hard to change that and a lot of those efforts have flown under the radar.

BRI is pretty obvious and it's seen as one of the major reason the ASEAN countries are pivoting towards China. But consider the whole South China Sea issue. Everyone frames it as a contest over sea resources and few people consider the strait of Malacca. It's a potential choke point for all trade west of Southeast Asia. While China is working to be able to defend that they're also working with Thailand to build a canal that would bypass the straight of Malacca all together. All of that is primarily to reduce US leverage and those initiatives tend to work more often than they fail.

US is by far it’s largest customer

That's true and there's also more to it.

The US is China's largest single trading partner but China has many many trading partners.

May nations now trade or at least negotiate in blocks. Both ASEAN and the UE, as blocks, do more trade with China than the US does. When it comes to individual nations the US isn't as far ahead as it might seem. Russia, Vietnam and Taiwan together trade more with China than the US does, despite having a combined GDP that's a tiny fraction of the US.

The key issue is that China has been working really hard to make itself less dependent on the US. They still have a way to go but they're much less vulnerable than they were a few years ago.

The current president of the USA is a Democrat.

Democrats used to say, "The buck stops here."

I have no idea why you keep bringing up that particular deal. It's not like it's the only or even last deal the US has signed.

The US hasn't stopped. The US went out of its way to ensureassure Israel that there wouldn't even be any delays in shipments.

The US is blatantly enabling genocide and it's currently headed by the Biden administration.

The rest of the world combined isn't funneling billions of dollars worth of weapons into the conflict.

This feels like one of those 90's purity tests. I'll play

1. I read daily.

2. I have native fluency in two languages and I'm learning a 3rd.

3. I'm terrible at playing the violin but I can do it and I can read sheet music.

4. My wife and I cook almost all our meals.

5. I'm not good at woodworking but I do most of the woodworking around the house.

6. I know next to nothing about painting. I'm bad at painting walls and my art painting looks worse than what my kids do.

7. I'm OK at writing.

8. No. I'll help my wife in the garden but if it's left to me, everything will die.

9. Come on. Who doesn't like swimming.

10. Photography is kind of meh for me. That's more my wife's hobby.

11. I took the family to the path of totality this summer so we could see the solar prominence through a 10" Newtonian.

12. Hiking is fun for the whole family.

13. I fletch and put tips on my own arrows. I'm an OK shot with a bow.

14. I made a crappy BBQ fork by making some metal really hot and hitting it with a hammer. I've been experimenting with lost PLA metal casting.

15. We used to travel. Now we have kids.

16. I encouraged my kids to read comic books when they were learning to read.

17. I helped my kids make some pretty awesome costumes. My typical Halloween costume is a hat. That only counts as a costume because I don't normally wear hats.

18. I debate too much. My wife hates it.

19. I used to drink like a fish. I quit several years ago.

20. There are some MTG cards somewhere in the house.

21. I rarely watch any movies, animated or otherwise.

22. I went to a goth club once about 20 yeas ago and the girls I was going with insisted on putting black makeup on me. Makeup is hella uncomfortable. Never doing that again.

23. "Crypto" is a word that often means the speaker knows nothing about cryptography.

24. Don't smoke.

25. Seals never hurt me. Why would I club them?

26. I once injected a marijuana and now I'm dead.

27. What is the difference between a Funko and a boblehead? Why would either of them constitute a hobby?

28. I'm not arguing. You're arguing.

29. I don't watch porn. I'm a connoisseur of sophisticated erotica.

30. I've taken way too many statistics courses to find gambling interesting.

31. Manosphere sounds like a dumb nickname for one of your nuts.

PS How do women feel about infographic makers that get confused between 15 and 16?

You might not be the target audience. I'm not currently the target audience either.

My wife and I are really into cooking. We have a whole bookshelf of cookbooks, a metrowire rack full of "kitchen stuff" and we use it daily.

There was definitely a time when this book would have been perfect. This book seems to cover a lot of stuff that's obvious to me now but wasn't always.

If you're food plan is a bulk package of Ramen, any help on how to make it not the same as every other day is culinary gold.

The original post claimed that anyone who doesn't believe in a Uyghur genocide is a fascist. That's a very specific and extreme position. Even just redefining it as, "ethnogenocide" or "cultural genocide" is shifting the goalposts. They're not even clearly defined terms. If I accuse someone of murder without evidence, it's pretty sketchy of me to then say, "Well, can you at least admit that you've committed some crimes?"

If we're going to discuss a new claim that claim should also be supported by evidence. There's extensive literature on the importance of primary sources when analyzing history or current events. Wikipedia and various media outlets can be excellent resources for initial overviews on a topic but they're not primary sources. It's often difficult to find primary sources, particularly for current and recent events and that just means that claims on the topic aren't supported by evidence. These are all great first approximations but when there's any doubt, primary sources are what ultimately count.

So what do we actually know about the Xinjiang and the Uyghurs?

We can start with the easy ones.

China includes Uyghur text on its currency. That's a pretty cheap thing to do but it's a pretty strange decision if you're trying to suppress a culture. It's easy to verify though.

China has a staggering number of mosques. They're all over the country and it's easy to find Halal food. Xinjiang itself has more mosques than all of Europe and North America combined. There is some controversy here. There are a lot of claims that China is actively reducing the number of mosques. China claims that it's just doing renovations and demolishing unsafe structures. We've all seen what satellite pictures of destroyed buildings look like. We often get them of locations in active war zones. Why don't we have those for Xinjiang? Mosques are also easy to see from space so we can see that they're still there. It doesn't prove lack of intent but it's strange to leave all those religious centers for a culture they're trying to erase.

Xinjian has experience multiple terrorist attacks per year for decades. This is also easily verified. It obviously doesn't justify human rights abuses but it clearly warrants some preventative action. Every nation responds to terrorists in some way, so a critique of a particular response really should provide at least a suggestion for a better one.

China mandates quality of life protocols for inmates who are incarcerated as part of their terrorism prevention practices. We know this because it says so in the "Xinjiang Cables" which Adrian Zenz published as part of his claims about a Uyghur Genocide.

China is making massive infrastructure investments in Xinjiang. It's a key location for the belt and road initiative. If we had any doubt we could just look at all the new construction on satellite images. The effects are harder to verify. China claims that GDP growth in Xinjiang actually exceeds that of the rest of China and independent estimates agree. It's even harder to know how to interpret this. The negative interpretations are either that the wealth is primarily accruing to non-Uyghurs, ie Han, or that the increase wealth itself is a form of cultural genocide. The second seems patently ridiculous. A large wealth increase will obviously change a culture but not in the "genocide" direction." We don't really know how much of that wealth is going to Uyghurs vs Han in Xinjiang but we certainly don't have any evidence that Uyghurs are being economically harmed.

China has mandated that classes be taught in Mandarin. This isn't disputed. It's often cited as evidence of cultural genocide but it's a fairly standard practice. The US is a bit unusual in that it's one of 9 countries that don't have an official language. While language can be an important part of cultural identity it's also an important tool for social interaction. The reason there are so many people who speak English as a second language (or primary language in lieu of their mother tongue) is that it provides significant economic advantages. The same holds true for Mandarin, particularly for people living in China. That's not the same as suppressing Uyghur though. You can find numerous images of publicly displayed Uyghur writing in Xinjiang.

The strongest evidence in support of human rights abuses is from eyewitness testimony. The problem is that we can't generally verify any of it. The explanation is generally that we need to protect their anonymity for the safety of family members who are still in China. That might be true or it might not be. We can't tell. We do have numerous Muslim leaders who have visited Xinjiang and then provided positive and public assessments of the treatment of Uyghurs. The value of confidential informants is in breaking a story, not in supporting it. That requires verifiable sources and the vast majority of the verifiable reporting supports China's version of the situation. In this case I'm using "verifiable" simply to mean that we can check who made the claim and that they actually made the claim, not the stronger requirement of being able to verify that the claim was true.

So in light of all this, what exactly is the "ethnocide" or "cultural genocide" that China is supposedly conducting? What can we confidently point at and say, "We're sure this is happening and it's clear evidence of human rights abuses."

Could be.

A plan like that would be pretty risky. I suspect they just didn't think it through much. I think their sales are mostly driven by people who didn't care about anything besides a AAA Monkey King game.

Most people in the US have no idea how much pent up demand there was for this game. Monkey King is an insanely popular character. Imagine if Star Wars was a 500 year old franchise and nobody had ever made a decent video game about it. All your life you grow up with weird foreign characters you've never heard of and then someone comes along and says, "We're going to make it and we're pulling out all the stops on the graphics."

If the developers did anything short of kicking puppies in public, people would still line up to throw money at them.

No idea.

It's hard to tell what their sales would have been had they left those terms out.

Most studios can only dream of having their marketing backfire that successfully.

That seems to be highly dependent on where they are.

In some cities, everyone on public transport behaves themselves. They're clean and there's no fear that they'll be harassed or assaulted. Some people really like that and get afraid or skeeved when they think about some public transport systems.

In other cities public transportation riders are expected to "live and let live". Officials won't stop you from doing anything unless it presents an imminent danger. Some people love the freedom from that sort of system and hate the idea of someone forcing them to behave a certain way.

There are, of course, many reasons why certain public transport systems are more like one than the other; money, age, geography, preferences, etc. While there are great arguments for public transportation and I'm a huge fan of improving the infrastructure around it, I can also recognize that a lot of people's actual experience of public transport doesn't paint it in a good light.

But it's so satisfying.

https://steamdb.info/app/2358720/charts/

Yeah. It clearly killed their sales.

I'm sure the Game Science folks are re-evaluating their life choices and wondering where they went wrong.

Just started playing Shapez 2. https://shapez2.com/
Hot damn, is that addictive.