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In 2-3 days the New York Times is going to breathlessly report that Biden called up Netanyahu, scolded him, and gave him yet another ultimatum.

Armorosus Diligentia

I think.

“Early in the Reticulum – thousands of years ago – it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.

“Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.

“Yes – a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”

“What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.

“Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors – swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”

“As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millenium A.R.”

“Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was sort of a Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”

“So, are Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies?” asked Arsibalt, utterly fascinated.

“The ROBE evolved into something totally different early in the Second Millennium,” Sammann said dismissively.

“What did it evolve into?” Jesry asked.

“No one is sure,” Sammann said. “We only get hints when it finds ways to physically instantiate itself, which, fortunately, does not happen that often. But we digress. The functionality of Artificial Inanity still exists. You might say that those Ita who brought the Ret out of the Dark Age could only defeat it by co-opting it. So, to make a long story short, for every legitimate document floating around on the Reticulum, there are hundreds or thousands of bogus version – bogons, as we call them.”

Excerpt from Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Welcome to the brave new bogon world.

Gwynne Dyer is one of my personal heroes. If you’re unaware, he also made a 7 part documentary series about War that I found shortly after college and was very influential on me.

Ah! Thanks for clearing that up. I understand your point. I’m not certain I agree though. As I wrote to another user downthread:

Maybe ultimately convincing judges to ban nitrogen hypoxia is a good thing over the long run, even if it results in short term harm. But that is not a calculus I feel comfortable solving on behalf of others who will suffer while I remain insulated from the consequences of this decision.

Using the stark, open, and obvious violence of a firing squad might make execution less palatable to the masses, but honestly, when are “the masses” actually exposed to footage of a criminal execution in the United States? We don’t normally film executions, and even when we do, we certainly do not broadcast them. Despite being one of the most carceral nations, typically unless a person has actually personally experienced prison, he or she largely has no idea what even goes on at that level, let alone death row.

I don’t give that. I don’t give it a bit.

I wasn’t aware you were living in a reality where executions aren’t currently happening several times a year.

Here in this timeline, even though there are still executions, thankfully they are on the downswing and hopefully on the way out for good. But at least over the short term, even though every execution deserves to be robustly challenged, activists cannot be expected to win every battle. We also need to plan for what happens if we lose.

States like South Carolina and Idaho have already begun pivoting back to the electric chair and firing squads, and while no anti-capital punishment activist is to blame for it, speaking personally it certainly would not sit right by me to know that I played a part in denying the use of an execution method like nitrogen hypoxia, and the inmate, on whose behalf I was fighting for, wound up dying via electrocution in severe, debilitating pain over the course of 2-15+ minutes instead.

Maybe ultimately convincing judges to ban nitrogen hypoxia is a good thing over the long run, even if it results in short term harm. But that is not a calculus I feel comfortable solving on behalf of others who will suffer while I remain insulated from the consequences of this decision.

There is no execution method in the world that will be given to a willing participant, almost by definition. The specific point and debate in this thread isn’t about whether or not execution is right. Most people on this forum certainly are at least skeptical of capital punishment. I certainly am against it.

The debate instead is, “given that capital punishment will occur because Southern states are the way they are, which we can agree is horrible in and of itself, what is the least bad way to do it?” The discussion around which execution is least bad is valuable from the standpoint of harm reduction. Currently, choices are what exactly? A multistage cocktail of euthanasia drugs that paralyze the executee before stopping their heart? The electric chair? Firing squad? Hanging? Beheading? Everything you pointed out and more are applicable to these methods as well.

You might argue that this makes any execution method unethical, and you’re right! Congratulations. You agree with pretty much everyone in this thread.

To be fair, we’ve had 250 years of bad voting systems to put us into this problem. I don’t think there are any realistic short-term solutions at all. We’re not going to be able to turn this ship on a dime, especially because democratic politics is driven by public opinion, but being in power is a position of influence over public opinions, so it’s self-reinforcing to a certain extent.

Support third parties, vote strategically, push for voting reform to bust the first past the post duopoly.

Horseradish wasabi is good. I’ve also had real wasabi, which is even better.

I like wasabi.

I think the study is probably irreproducible bullshit, but at least I like wasabi.

Alas, I have “Americanwhoisfamiliarwithmetricitis.” I’m afraid it’s terminal.

Honest question, not being catty or anything. Why is this news, exactly? This is a nearly every winter occurrence to get below -50C in Yakutsk, the average winter day is -42C. (It also gets up into the 90s during the summer, Yakutsk is a wild place.)

This would be roughly equivalent to a news article saying Detroit is down to 10F today, i.e. colder than normal, sure, but not really beyond the pale for a December day.

Honestly asking because I’m just wondering if this is the start of the “there can’t be global warming because it’s cold somewhere” coverage for this winter season, or if this is intended to be a fun TIL article for the lucky 10000.

Hey at least we got the CEO of a Saudi oil company heading up the climate talks. I’m sure that he’s perfectly willing to set aside his own personal interests and take one for the team and reduce his profits by leaving Saudi oil in the ground, and encouraging (or even requiring???) everyone else to do the same, right? Right?

Both sides are bad, but they are not equivalent, and we indeed shouldn’t flatten the landscape.

In the interest of being constructive, what do you propose is the best way to voice this opinion off-handedly?

I mean, I think he’s evil. But I also remember Microsoft in the 90s: the EEE strategy, the monopolistic bullshit with web browsers, the FUD against competitors, the Strong arming of computer manufacturers to not offer alternatives, etc.

I mean, Snowden is, as I understand it, a libertarian idiot, but I think what he uncovered was extremely important, and the fact that he sold other secrets to the Russians in exchange for asylum, while certainly not great, is understandable considering that the alternative for him was rotting in solidarity confinement in an awful a federal hellhole prison.