I wonder if Trump’s comments about port automation are a distraction technique. By saying these things the port unions won’t strike soon after inauguration, and he’ll have room to browbeat them later. Or I suppose it’s possible he really means what he says.
Trump is completely pay-for-play. He got some union support, and some union bosses said some nice things about him, so he is offering some payback. The merits of automation simply doesn't factor into his thinking.
Also, your description of the Palmer Luckey quote is wrong. The statements were not "unrelated", they were part of the same paragraph, which the author excised the middle of without, in my opinion, significantly changing its meaning.
>A Trump administration will see an intensification of the role Anduril already tries to play in the Biden admin: terrorizing migrants at the border, surveilling indigenous reservations, and manufacturing weapons for the military.
> Or as Luckey puts it: “Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims. You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom.”
The actual quote (as referenced in the "updated to more accurately reflect Palmer Luckey’s statements" version of the article!):
>“Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims. I think that it’s reasonable for the philosophers to degrade those people and whine about how they’re sick in the head, but society needs them. Even if I’m sick in the head, we need people who are willing to fight for our country—and I’m not doing that directly, my life’s not on the line. But you need people like me, who are sick in that way, who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence.”
I agree that Luckey's reference to "two different parts of an hourlong talk" is misleading here. (My charitable interpretation is that he was referencing, or confused by, the "in order to preserve freedom" part which wasn't part of what he said here-- it was the interviewer's words). But his claim that the reporter inverted his meaning is mostly correct. If you watch the original talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az81MHug0Nw&t=1530s) it's clear from Luckey's inflection that he's making a distinction between the people who are excited about violence and his own outlook which is a different type of purported "sickness", i.e.:
> Even if *I’m* sick in the head, we need people who are willing to fight for our country—and *I’m* not doing that directly, my life’s not on the line. But you need people like me, who are sick in *that* way, who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence.”
And this is in the context of him defending, in a qualified way, the second kind of sickness-- the belief that *tools* of violence are a worthy object of effort. In principle they're just a means to the end of preserving good things, he says, but it's okay to be excited about how effective they are. He doesn't give any impression of being excited about the violence itself, let alone endorsing it. His statement about the philosophers being reasonable makes that clear. And collapsing the quote without any indication of doing so would be bad journalism regardless.
As I wrote, I disagree that the meaning was changed or misrepresented. I would summarize his point as "I am valuable to society because I am not distracted by moral scruples which are, in this case, irrelevant". In my opinion, both quotes convey that meaning accurately.
In my opinion, it's not wrong or bad journalism to remove some text from a quote if doing so doesn't substantially change its meaning. That said, I can definitely understand that there are some arguments for the opposite view. For example, people may disagree on what excisions qualify as legitimate.
"In particular I think Nate is being rather unfair in his assessment of the cost of the clock adjustments. Indeed, he proves too much - if clock adjustments are almost free, why not have more adjustments?"
Yes, we absolutely should make more adjustments! A LOT more adjustments--but smaller ones. Like go forward or backwards 10 seconds a day, every day, for all of spring and fall. Most of the clocks are fully automated anyway. No one will notice on a day-to-day basis, except the sun will always rise at more or less the same time throughout the year. Everyone gets the best of both worlds (except for the sickos who want the sun to rise at 9 AM).
"Recycling is a psyop to convince people that plastic can be used abundantly and sustainably without consequences."
He has it backwards. Recycling is a psyop to convince people that plastic CANNOT be used abundantly and sustainably without consequences. It absolutely can, but people who want you to feel guilty for living a comfortable modern lifestyle want to use recycling as the nose under the camel's tent of "plastic is bad for the environment." It isn't. Even if you think burning oil is bad because it emits CO2 into the atmosphere, converting oil into plastics and then burying the plastics when you're done with them doesn't even do that.
Ran this by Claude and it has doubts about the logic: This is an interesting but flawed argument. Let me break down why:
1. Lifecycle emissions: Manufacturing plastic from petroleum actually produces significant greenhouse gas emissions during the extraction, refining, and manufacturing processes - before the plastic even becomes a product.
2. Waste issues: Most plastic that isn't recycled doesn't get "locked up" safely. It often ends up in landfills where it can release methane (a potent greenhouse gas) as it very slowly breaks down, or in the environment where it creates severe ecological problems.
I thought plastic releases methane when exposed to the sun, which it wouldn't be in landfills. Also landfills can and do capture methane to use for fuel.
This would be a case of double standards - organic materials (eg. cardboard) release lots of methane when they rot, too, and take plenty of energy and thus emissions to manufacture, though in both cases the "lots" really pales in comparison to other categories of sources.
If you switch electricity generation to clean sources the rest is mostly a rounding error. (Noting that "transport" is also a decent chunk but the transition to electric vehicles is happening and shifts most transport emissions to being electricity generation emissions)
> Hotels are still mostly failing to let you check in on your phone
I'm not on Twitter and so can't read threads, but I hope somebody there mentioned Kasa. Their MO seems to be to finding underutilized multifamily housing in a good location, retrofitting it for keyless entry and self service everything, and operating it as a budget hotel. Based on my experience so far the quality isn't perfect but the core thesis-- that millennials want hotels to work more like airbnbs-- is very on point.
Had an idea reading about Sami Petersen's work, “Sequential information design with imperfect recall.” and, “We can run multiple versions of a system, in identical environments. Copies need not have any memory of what their other selves did. This lets us make the AI uncertain about its location—even if it knows the structure of the game it’s in.”
We have a much better idea of what works and what doesn’t at scale to align human intelligence and human societies than we do with AI. If you want an AI to act a certain way at scale, maybe have its internal structure replicate human societies that act how you want. Replicate the psychology and beliefs of the people, the larger governing structure, the whole thing, and alter details for alignment subtleties. It seems like it would be really easy to figure out what levers to pull for proper alignment, just look to history.
Re. Daylight savings time. To make it worse, different countries change their clocks on different days.
So if you have, for example, a regular conference call with participants from multiple countries, and it mostly happens at, say, 3pm your local time, there are going to be a couple of weeks of chaos where some participants are on their local dst and some aren’t, and relative to your local time zone the time of the meeting may jump an hour and then jun back.
and of course for people in the southern hemisphere the meeting time shifts by 2 hours, but with a couple of weeks in the middle of it being shifted by 1 hour because the shifts aren't on the same weekend.
> Baba Yetu is otherwise not special, but it is Grammy-level because it is part of the game.
Soft disagree on this. Christopher Tin's work may or may not be Grammy-level in itself but it is sui generis-- there's no one else who does what he does nearly as effectively, whether it's for video games or mainstream classical music or even movie music (Hans Zimmer is the first composer I considered comparing him to). Baba Yetu is increasingly a staple of normal choral repertoire. Three or four other tracks on Calling All Dawns were fast favorites for me even without the Civ associations; ditto Songo di Volare even though I've never played Civ 6.
Well, in the interests of not all bubbles being bad and differentiation being Good, Acktually, I guess I can move the circles on the Venn of Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias. Superficially similar content and beliefs, with EA cleaving at the joints. That's a bit disappointing.
A big trouble in my attempts at public hangouts is that people just will not keep their damn phones away unless there's something strongly compelling to force the issue...like a specific focused activity or game, except by definition that detracts from the casual Just Chillin' vibe. Becomes more of a modified limited hangout. To some degree it's a skill issue (I could probably be more proactive about criticizing this tendency), to some degree it's selection effects (the sorts of people who share natural affinity like hobbies also disproportionately suffer ADHD and thus phone susceptibility)...that's one thing I appreciate about podunk places with shitty reception. It's not like the phone literally won't work if you really need it, but all the most addictive "leisure" has just enough Trivial Inconvenience that people are willing to put up with flesh and blood humans again. Recreating those circumstances is tricky otherwise.
"You buy a $300 <s>cardigan</s> pair of your first non-fast-fashion garbage pants and show up to <s>$15 game nights</s> MtG prereleases and FNMs, friends note this is unusual" ...uh...hm. And I notice my actual irl response to this was to switch friends. I don't have a problem, man, I can quit whenever I want...(but in all seriousness I think it's been helpful to befriend people who genuinely suffer from professionally diagnosed bipolar etc, precisely to avoid such calibration errors. Not every friendly criticism is alarming, but if they Bring The Receipts, better update harder!)
Relatedly, the Modern unban has me regretful for the once-upon-a-time <$5 Splinter Twin I traded away for peanuts years ago. It's not an "investment", just like sports gambling isn't investing, but I can sigh in regret about ill-advised trades all the same. Gonna be real interesting to someday cash out the collection, assuming the whole game doesn't flop before then. (Fuck Marvel Universes Beyond.)
> HS2 in the UK forced to spend 100 million on a bat tunnel
Oh you missed the best bit that came out this week. The bat tunnel won't actually stop bats https://archive.ph/U2KyC
I mean, that makes it less than 1% worse!
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/monthly-roundup-25-december-2024
I wonder if Trump’s comments about port automation are a distraction technique. By saying these things the port unions won’t strike soon after inauguration, and he’ll have room to browbeat them later. Or I suppose it’s possible he really means what he says.
Trump is completely pay-for-play. He got some union support, and some union bosses said some nice things about him, so he is offering some payback. The merits of automation simply doesn't factor into his thinking.
"Starbucks recycling, like much other recycling, isn’t actually a thing that happens."
Glass, aluminium, and any other recycling where someone will actually pay you money to do it are very much a thing.
On the consumer side, it's pretty much aluminum (worth it, but only barely) vs. everything else (not worth it).
Other metals will also be paid for, it just doesn't come up very often at all - junking old cars is the only thing that comes to mind
Patrick McKenzie doesn't live in Japan.
Also, your description of the Palmer Luckey quote is wrong. The statements were not "unrelated", they were part of the same paragraph, which the author excised the middle of without, in my opinion, significantly changing its meaning.
Original article:
>A Trump administration will see an intensification of the role Anduril already tries to play in the Biden admin: terrorizing migrants at the border, surveilling indigenous reservations, and manufacturing weapons for the military.
> Or as Luckey puts it: “Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims. You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom.”
The actual quote (as referenced in the "updated to more accurately reflect Palmer Luckey’s statements" version of the article!):
>“Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims. I think that it’s reasonable for the philosophers to degrade those people and whine about how they’re sick in the head, but society needs them. Even if I’m sick in the head, we need people who are willing to fight for our country—and I’m not doing that directly, my life’s not on the line. But you need people like me, who are sick in that way, who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence.”
I agree that Luckey's reference to "two different parts of an hourlong talk" is misleading here. (My charitable interpretation is that he was referencing, or confused by, the "in order to preserve freedom" part which wasn't part of what he said here-- it was the interviewer's words). But his claim that the reporter inverted his meaning is mostly correct. If you watch the original talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az81MHug0Nw&t=1530s) it's clear from Luckey's inflection that he's making a distinction between the people who are excited about violence and his own outlook which is a different type of purported "sickness", i.e.:
> Even if *I’m* sick in the head, we need people who are willing to fight for our country—and *I’m* not doing that directly, my life’s not on the line. But you need people like me, who are sick in *that* way, who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence.”
And this is in the context of him defending, in a qualified way, the second kind of sickness-- the belief that *tools* of violence are a worthy object of effort. In principle they're just a means to the end of preserving good things, he says, but it's okay to be excited about how effective they are. He doesn't give any impression of being excited about the violence itself, let alone endorsing it. His statement about the philosophers being reasonable makes that clear. And collapsing the quote without any indication of doing so would be bad journalism regardless.
As I wrote, I disagree that the meaning was changed or misrepresented. I would summarize his point as "I am valuable to society because I am not distracted by moral scruples which are, in this case, irrelevant". In my opinion, both quotes convey that meaning accurately.
In my opinion, it's not wrong or bad journalism to remove some text from a quote if doing so doesn't substantially change its meaning. That said, I can definitely understand that there are some arguments for the opposite view. For example, people may disagree on what excisions qualify as legitimate.
Thank you for posting the full excerpt
"In particular I think Nate is being rather unfair in his assessment of the cost of the clock adjustments. Indeed, he proves too much - if clock adjustments are almost free, why not have more adjustments?"
Yes, we absolutely should make more adjustments! A LOT more adjustments--but smaller ones. Like go forward or backwards 10 seconds a day, every day, for all of spring and fall. Most of the clocks are fully automated anyway. No one will notice on a day-to-day basis, except the sun will always rise at more or less the same time throughout the year. Everyone gets the best of both worlds (except for the sickos who want the sun to rise at 9 AM).
I've had my watch for almost 40 years, and it already gains about 1 second/day. 10 seconds/day would be awful, it's not easy to re-set.
"Recycling is a psyop to convince people that plastic can be used abundantly and sustainably without consequences."
He has it backwards. Recycling is a psyop to convince people that plastic CANNOT be used abundantly and sustainably without consequences. It absolutely can, but people who want you to feel guilty for living a comfortable modern lifestyle want to use recycling as the nose under the camel's tent of "plastic is bad for the environment." It isn't. Even if you think burning oil is bad because it emits CO2 into the atmosphere, converting oil into plastics and then burying the plastics when you're done with them doesn't even do that.
Ran this by Claude and it has doubts about the logic: This is an interesting but flawed argument. Let me break down why:
1. Lifecycle emissions: Manufacturing plastic from petroleum actually produces significant greenhouse gas emissions during the extraction, refining, and manufacturing processes - before the plastic even becomes a product.
2. Waste issues: Most plastic that isn't recycled doesn't get "locked up" safely. It often ends up in landfills where it can release methane (a potent greenhouse gas) as it very slowly breaks down, or in the environment where it creates severe ecological problems.
I thought plastic releases methane when exposed to the sun, which it wouldn't be in landfills. Also landfills can and do capture methane to use for fuel.
This would be a case of double standards - organic materials (eg. cardboard) release lots of methane when they rot, too, and take plenty of energy and thus emissions to manufacture, though in both cases the "lots" really pales in comparison to other categories of sources.
If you switch electricity generation to clean sources the rest is mostly a rounding error. (Noting that "transport" is also a decent chunk but the transition to electric vehicles is happening and shifts most transport emissions to being electricity generation emissions)
> Hotels are still mostly failing to let you check in on your phone
I'm not on Twitter and so can't read threads, but I hope somebody there mentioned Kasa. Their MO seems to be to finding underutilized multifamily housing in a good location, retrofitting it for keyless entry and self service everything, and operating it as a budget hotel. Based on my experience so far the quality isn't perfect but the core thesis-- that millennials want hotels to work more like airbnbs-- is very on point.
Had an idea reading about Sami Petersen's work, “Sequential information design with imperfect recall.” and, “We can run multiple versions of a system, in identical environments. Copies need not have any memory of what their other selves did. This lets us make the AI uncertain about its location—even if it knows the structure of the game it’s in.”
We have a much better idea of what works and what doesn’t at scale to align human intelligence and human societies than we do with AI. If you want an AI to act a certain way at scale, maybe have its internal structure replicate human societies that act how you want. Replicate the psychology and beliefs of the people, the larger governing structure, the whole thing, and alter details for alignment subtleties. It seems like it would be really easy to figure out what levers to pull for proper alignment, just look to history.
> have its internal structure replicate human societies that act how you want
I don't think we know how to do that.
I assume this is an autocorrect issue, but it's Jesse Singal, not Jesse Signal.
Re. Daylight savings time. To make it worse, different countries change their clocks on different days.
So if you have, for example, a regular conference call with participants from multiple countries, and it mostly happens at, say, 3pm your local time, there are going to be a couple of weeks of chaos where some participants are on their local dst and some aren’t, and relative to your local time zone the time of the meeting may jump an hour and then jun back.
and of course for people in the southern hemisphere the meeting time shifts by 2 hours, but with a couple of weeks in the middle of it being shifted by 1 hour because the shifts aren't on the same weekend.
As a quick aside: I read it as "Tyler Cowen asks, should we try to bring back public *hangings?*" and was really confused by the following paragraphs
> Baba Yetu is otherwise not special, but it is Grammy-level because it is part of the game.
Soft disagree on this. Christopher Tin's work may or may not be Grammy-level in itself but it is sui generis-- there's no one else who does what he does nearly as effectively, whether it's for video games or mainstream classical music or even movie music (Hans Zimmer is the first composer I considered comparing him to). Baba Yetu is increasingly a staple of normal choral repertoire. Three or four other tracks on Calling All Dawns were fast favorites for me even without the Civ associations; ditto Songo di Volare even though I've never played Civ 6.
I remain convinced that Google has never watched anyone use their products. Especially maps.
Well, in the interests of not all bubbles being bad and differentiation being Good, Acktually, I guess I can move the circles on the Venn of Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias. Superficially similar content and beliefs, with EA cleaving at the joints. That's a bit disappointing.
A big trouble in my attempts at public hangouts is that people just will not keep their damn phones away unless there's something strongly compelling to force the issue...like a specific focused activity or game, except by definition that detracts from the casual Just Chillin' vibe. Becomes more of a modified limited hangout. To some degree it's a skill issue (I could probably be more proactive about criticizing this tendency), to some degree it's selection effects (the sorts of people who share natural affinity like hobbies also disproportionately suffer ADHD and thus phone susceptibility)...that's one thing I appreciate about podunk places with shitty reception. It's not like the phone literally won't work if you really need it, but all the most addictive "leisure" has just enough Trivial Inconvenience that people are willing to put up with flesh and blood humans again. Recreating those circumstances is tricky otherwise.
yeah, I'm increasingly coming around to policies like "leave the phones by the door"
I do gravitate towards gatherings with tabletop gaming, but even there it's hard to resist the allure of phones
"You buy a $300 <s>cardigan</s> pair of your first non-fast-fashion garbage pants and show up to <s>$15 game nights</s> MtG prereleases and FNMs, friends note this is unusual" ...uh...hm. And I notice my actual irl response to this was to switch friends. I don't have a problem, man, I can quit whenever I want...(but in all seriousness I think it's been helpful to befriend people who genuinely suffer from professionally diagnosed bipolar etc, precisely to avoid such calibration errors. Not every friendly criticism is alarming, but if they Bring The Receipts, better update harder!)
Relatedly, the Modern unban has me regretful for the once-upon-a-time <$5 Splinter Twin I traded away for peanuts years ago. It's not an "investment", just like sports gambling isn't investing, but I can sigh in regret about ill-advised trades all the same. Gonna be real interesting to someday cash out the collection, assuming the whole game doesn't flop before then. (Fuck Marvel Universes Beyond.)