> "The number density of primordial black holes with a mass above this cutoff [MP BH > 1.4×1017g] is far too small to produce any observable effects on the human population."
Ideally, trying to reform the government & its activities shouldn't require a team to burrow all the way down to the literal payments system & call individual balls and strikes.
But I assume that is indicative of how unresponsive the bureaucracy has become to political direction from the president & secretaries.
Look I get where you're coming from, but those "checks and balances" can't be the thing you defend because they've largely done neither and in fact allowed this insanity in the first place.
Bureaucracy is there to protect us from people like Trump and Elon. Congress can pass laws and the president can issue orders. This action threatens the US financial system, which threatens the economic stability of most of the world. In terms of human suffering this could have massive impact. We now have a psychopath (well, at least one) with his fingers around our throats. We're all waiting to see what comes next, but it won't be good.
No there hasn't. When someone named the 6 DOGE guys kicking in doors at OPM and TReasury Musk spluttered on his social media platform that the person was committing a crime by naming them and then deleted the person's account.
What have you actually learned? And consider that there's no way for anyone to argue that information was already available to the public, because the main activity of DOGE so far ahs been taking government web pages or entire domains offline. With no organized archival process, how do you equate significantly less availability of information with 'transparency'?
I mean, I've been watching my feed scroll by with the various monetary alotments they've discovered. Finally, someone's taking a critical glance at the $$ dedicated to increasing atheism in Tibet (no, I'm not kidding).
Wow, your feed tells you you're better informed now? Compared to what? As I pointed out, you have no way to check how much of this information was previously published, a point you chose to ignore.
I'm curious about whether you ever attempted to find details of USAID spending, pulled budget docs from their site or filed a FOIA request or anything like that. If you had done so and run into a brick wall, I would understand your saying that there had been a lack of prior transparency. But your posts reads as if someone just drew your attention to something you weren't aware of before, and you've mistaken that for transparency when in fact it's just a talking point designed to grab your attention.
I thought the article was pretty level headed. Here’s the status, here’s the future, here’s what AUKUS is doing, here’s what China is doing and is capable of doing. What smugness or jingoism were you referring to?
I actually found it refreshing to not have a “journalists’” opinions and world-view slathered all over the article. I’m smart enough to form my own opinions about things, thanks.
Joint checking, savings, investments, home ownership, cars, everything. I do most of the account management and planning because she hates doing it.
We have no concept of fairness in spending. If she wants something truly expensive we talk about it and how it fits in our budget. I do likewise, but in general we both kinda know what the boundaries are, and there’s zero score keeping. She probably spends 3x on herself compared to me, and I’m fine with it. I know she has the best interests of the family at heart.
Large purchases like cars are the result of weeks of research, discussion, planning, budgeting, etc.
> She probably spends 3x on herself compared to me, and I’m fine with it.
Plenty of people are "fine with it" until the court awards spousal support on the basis of lifestyle acclimation rather than needs.
50% divorce rate, 75% of which is initiated by the wife, and don't require you to have done anything wrong. Effectively, you're playing roulette and you've staked your entire financial future on Red. I really hope it works out for you.
If you mean the subsequent detonation of an ICBM in the atmosphere, I think we are in uncharted waters there. The expert discussions of what effect the atmosphere-EMP would be is fascinating/horrifying to read.
> I think we need better regulation of these companies to prevent them from doing actual damage rather than trusting them to self-regulate against hypothetical ones.
What is the actual damage you are concerned about and determined to regulate? Simply saying "environment, workers, and the economy" is so broad I can't imagine what an effective regulation would look like. How would you even word the regulation?
However the evidence that these companies are doing real damage now is all around us.
I already gave the example of Microsoft using billions of litres of fresh water to cool data centres during a drought.
In the case of labour the SAG-AFTRA strike, a contributing factor was the use of AI in the industry.
There are some estimates that the carbon emissions of these training efforts dwarf the airline industry and will grow to consume, like crypto, more energy than small countries soon [0].
Not sure that we need to be protected against hypothetical, super-intelligent, self-aware AGI systems that are, if even possible, decades away when people are using what we have today to lay off labourers by training models on their work and replacing them.
In your water example, perhaps that liter of water used to cool the datacenter is offering software to a hospital that offers life saving treatments. How will you measure the trade-off of a liter of water used one way vs. another?
Likewise, how can we distinguish between a ton of carbon emitted in the datacenter vs. a ton of carbon emitted by an airplane? Again, you might train an AI and emit one ton of carbon and that AI a save a million lives. Contrast that ton of carbon emitted with any number of frivolous airline flights by rich talking heads.
It may sound like I'm being deliberately difficult/obtuse, but this is exactly why regulation is so difficult to do well, especially in such a rapidly innovating space.
We don't really need to argue hypotheticals to make progress. We know that airlines move people around and someone taking a trip on that airplane might be a doctor who could end up being at the right place at the right time to save the world!
That doesn't mean we give up and don't regulate the airline industry.
We can put caps on how much water data centres are allowed to consume in a given period in order to protect vital ecosystems and ensure enough fresh water for other uses.
We can write labour laws that protect workers from employers training models on their employees' work and then laying them off.
There's a lot we can do that isn't being done, "because innovation."
Population is a single, low-resolution parameter into a theoretical ship-building-capacity equation, which really needs a basket of parameters. Raw resource availability, fuel capabilities, naval training, coastline details, etc.
Great Britain historically had a fraction of the population of France and other European powers, but consistently out-produced the rest in ships and projecting naval power.
During a peacetime economy. Don't forget during war time, your factories are being bombed. You're pre-war numbers don't indicate what your war time numbers will be. China's manufacturing tends to be focused around the easter coast and it's rivers. The USAs is spread throughout the country. The USA is pretty good at setting up factories. My understanding is China is more into single large factories. The USA is a net exporter of oil (that greases the entire machine). China is an oil importer (not good when you country is being sieged during war).
You seem to be having a kind of a blind bias. You argue that during war time China will be less productive; and the opposite will be for the US: more productive. As if China can't target/hit back at the US. Both have massive geography and given that the US is likely the attacker, China only has to play defense.
> The USA is a net exporter of oil (that greases the entire machine). China is an oil importer (not good when you country is being sieged during war).
This seems to be their largest risk (if you are playing defense). They seem to be going crazy on solar though.
I think the unspoken assumption here is that China is already producing at near-maximum capacity, while the United States is barely trying and has lots of headroom.
Is the assumption correct?
I haven't been able to find a study on America's plan for local naval production capacity given such a conflict, which is kind of stunning to me. Perhaps there are classified studies.
This conflict (assuming it lasts multiple years) would play out across the Pacific, possibly offering replays of old Pacific battles from WW2. Large numbers of naval assets and expeditionary forces squaring off across millions of square miles of blue-water ocean. Lots of naval tonnage attrition.
America is either guarding it's planned production capabilities close to the chest, or they anticipate winning such a conflict quickly without the tonnage attrition I just referenced.
Again, China's production is centered in a specific area, along the coasts in the east and associated coastal waterways. American production is spread throughout the country. The USA has a distributed highway system for transportation. China has a strong focus on shipping lanes. The USA has a long record of projecting military power. China does not. The USA has a strong 'get shit started' track record. China has a mass produce track record. The American dynamic is better situated to recover production during war time than China.
Solar is not going to fuel missiles, ships, and attack aircraft. It's not going to grease the machines in the factories.
We did night CTF (~9 pm) at our local grade school campus. Easily 40-50 kids. We just rode our bikes to the gathering. Similar rules to what this article had, except no out of bounds. We had kids making huge circuits around a nearby corn field to evade detection.
It was indeed someone of my best childhood memories.
Unfortunately it was all brought to an end because people kept calling the cops. They’d see kids after dark at the school and just assume we were up to no good. No property was ever damaged, the principal knew what we were up to, etc. Wholesome fun.
After the fifth time of coming home with a “the cops showed up” story, our well-meaning parents asked us to please find another game to play.
We did this at boyscout camp until one year my buddy shattered his ankle hitting a hole running in the dark. One ambulance ride, several surgeries, major issues with morphine withdrawal, and that was the end of that.
We played it in the fall at a campground. Our cadet group had the group camping and we played in the 50-100 campsites that weren't occupied for the season. So lots of running between campsites through the pine trees.
The only problem was that the roads were blocked off at the end, with picnic tables, with chains from the picnic tables to the trees beside them.
Our fastest guy found a chain in the dark with his waist. Fortunately he just got turned over and not injured.
I did the same thing except it was a barbed wire fence, cut my neck, shoulder and stomach up- had to get stitched up by my friend’s mom but worked out okay.
Woof, major bummer. We did similar games. Once i was sprinting at max speed and i leapt… but my dangling foot caught a very low hanging chain. My body began to rotate rapidly. Instinct kicked in and as a nearly crashed down I miraculously turned it into the highest speed tuck n roll of all time. As I finished the roll, almost completely unscathed, i leapt again to free my friend from “jail”. I think we were playing manhunt vs ctf. Such a vivid memory because it was so frightening but ended up so positive.
One time in Highschool at a party we played a game of “Fugitive” across a few miles of neighborhood. I don’t think anyone crossed any private property, but the police showed up and told us “You’re scaring the heck out of some people”. We’d basically finished up anyway.
It’s tragic that this kind of fun gets quashed. Arguably avoidable with a little community communication. I generally think it’s a product of fear-mongering. People being told that their neighborhoods are under attack from nebulous “others” who don’t look or sound like them. A ghost story.
It’s super sad how much childhood joy and fun is being sucked out if the world purely due to nosy busybodies. And the fact that police even respond to these (when they won’t even show up if you’re actually robbed) is also ridiculous. Mind your own business, people.
Seeing a lot of similar stories here. We used to do a game of hide and seek on our massive dead end street. Wed use peoples bushes and cars to hide. I still remember the sound of crotchety old mr peabody chambering a round in his shotgun behind us one night. Pitch black. Never saw his face, just heard him let us know we were about to die if we didn't leave. Pretty sure he knew it was 2 little kids
Our games cover a couple of miles of almost unoccupied property. But teenagers don't always make the best decisions and sometimes treat others' property as their own. It can be super disconcerting to have somebody dressed all in black climb over your back fence, run across your porch and disappear around your garage.
Even when you make a clear rule that you can't go past the power line and into the neighborhood, somebody sometimes does.
Do you really want the police to ignore a distress call of prowlers trampling their tomatoes?
Imagine a scenario where some kid is apprehended by a police officer and brought to face the angry homeowner. Restitution cannot be made by having the child buy a new plant to replace the damaged plant. So the child has to buy two ripe tomatoes a week for four weeks to provide the homeowner with some compensation.
No court hearing. No criminal record. Parents involved, but nobody too worked up. Just a valuable life lesson about respecting others and taking responsibility. The angry homeowner still hires the kid to mow their lawn. No hard feelings.
Do we really want our police to be judge, jury, arbitrator, and parole officer?
Well, in this little sketch of Mayberry, my answer is yes. If only we could always exist in the sunny side of Mayberry. It only takes one person in this story to take us out of Mayberry. Fortunately, there are millions of people who do their part everyday to maintain some sense of Mayberry in their community. Some of them are even police officers.
You may have a bit of a caricature of America - the stories you here are generally exceptions, not rules, if they were mundane everyday American life, they won't be news.
It'd be a bit like me seeing a biography of a French alcoholic and riffing on it with "Tbf if I lived in France and I was out to eat [in their fabulous elaborate traditional gourmand cuisine], I'd buy at least one bottle of wine with a meal.
Not a huge fan of people drinking too much, but needs must when it comes to your country I suppose."
I’m not sure it is such a new thing. In the 1970’s we had ann old lady across the street that would call the cops when anyone rode their skateboard on the street or the sidewalk.
> And the fact that police even respond to these (when they won’t even show up if you’re actually robbed) is also ridiculous.
Do keep in mind that these stories aren't taking place in downtown SF or Seattle. In most of the US police respond very quickly to most calls, including real crimes.
And in this case (fugitive) it's likely that the callers didn't know there was a game going on, all they knew was that there were some people acting very strangely in their neighborhood. Dispatch can't distinguish between a legitimate crime spree and overworried neighbors.
I'm certainly glad to have grown up when I did. Lots of fun memories of fugitive when we weren't cooking up fireworks or something from the Anarchist Cookbook.
Most of we thought was fun would probably be in jail time these days.
There was a lot of risky Behavior, but it was all non-violent so if anyone got hurt, it was us, or sometimes our parents property. I don't know how kids these days are supposed to learn you need to cook up white phosphorus Outdoors and not in your friend's kitchen
Risky behavior can be something as simple as burning ants with a magnifying glass. It might seem obvious not to allow children to play Cops and Robbers with BB guns, but guess what they can do with a 9V battery.
We played tag or hide and seek at a school one time after dark. We were probably 16 or 17 since at least some of us could drive by then. Cops called all of our parents and said we'd go to jail if it happened again.
The funniest thing to me was my parents just straight yelling at me about it as my only rule at that time was "don't get in trouble with the cops". I tried explaining it was just tag, the cops were over reacting. They didn't buy it. I told them "I was with Friend A and Friend B. I'm telling you the cops were being ass holes". They immediately changed their tone to "oh, if A and B were there, those cops were ass holes"
One time in about 8th grade we had a cap gun fight around a school around dusk. It didn’t end well when a person driving by saw flashes, heard bangs and kids yelling at each other. The local police showed up, sirens blazing and couldn’t figure out what was what, we ended up talking to them and things got sorted. We got a firm warning about how that could have ended poorly and to pick other activities to entertain ourselves.
>hey’d see kids after dark at the school and just assume we were up to no good.
That sounds totally crazy to me, did these people get into any trouble or fined for just calling the police like that? I assume you're american, in my eastern european country they would NOT be happy about getting called 5 times for this...
It's not entirely impossible to get fined or arrested for calling the police in the US but you have to go extremely far out of bounds. Calling the police because there are kids near the school (hehe) is completely acceptable.
If anything it's the opposite: if you do anything slightly out of the usual - all the way to walking through a neighborhood that doesn't know you - there is a good chance someone will call the police. And that some patrol car will check it out just for breaking the dullness of the day.
Some of the cops who respond (because they might ALL head there, if it sounds fun enough), some will be smiling and relaxed and civil, while others will be very much looking for trouble and aggressive from the start. Such that for example, using plastic pistols in dark or day in public is a serious bad idea in the US.
Can confirm. As a high schooler, I used to meet up with friends in the middle of the night at an elementary school playground. Mostly we would just swing on the swings and chat. Occasionally we'd share a 6-pack of beer, shame on us.
One night, somebody called the cops, who called school district security. When they drove up we left without saying hi because we get it, we're not wanted here.
Well they called the cops back, who chased us down (we ran, 'cause we were stupid). I was apprehended and from the back of the cop car I counted six other cop cars and a helicopter all looking for my friends for the crime of being near a school at night (the cops never mentioned the beer).
Some cop noticed the beer, most likely - and they were one of the good guys.
Another one might have taken this opportunity to start an in-depth "investigation" (read "bullying spree") to figure out who sold the beer and who bought it and passed it on (if anyone in that bunch might plausibly have been underage.)
Seems likely. It's still weird to me that it was worth all of that taxpayer money to keep the helicopter in the sky while they searched for my friends (most of whom took to the storm sewer and were not caught).
Our community has to stage mock events to give these folks some practice. We burn funds every once in a while on purpose to maintain readiness as we suppose. If you plan ahead, you can include hotdogs and soda in the budget.
Yeah that makes sense. We weren't large enough to justify it though. They cancelled the program a few years later (2010ish). I haven't seen a police helicopter over this town since.
I live in a town of less than 3000 people and regularly see/hear the local county shariff's military grade helicopter loitering around for no good reason.
You may be right, but as a former resident of several towns of a similar size hearing a helicopter almost always meant somebody was in critical care and going to a big hospital.
Ours was obvious, at least at night, because it was typically shining its spotlight on some spot on the ground.
Sometimes it would follow you around with the spotlight until a squad car came and pulled you over and accused you of a crime which a similar vehicle was involved with. In my case, the not-me truck was illegally harvesting rock from a park, but my truck bed was visibly empty from the sky so I don't know why they bothered summon the car.
The difference is that those helicopters don't just loiter around or hover over residential neighborhoods - they land at the nearest open field (in my case the town has a small airport) and immediately transport the patient 60 miles to a hospital. The helicopter I am talking about is definitely a military style helicopter and I'm 99% sure it's operated by the county sheriff's department. Gotta justify that budget somehow and there isn't much more fun way to do that than getting to play with big-boy-toys like helicopters.
Once when it happened to me and the whole gang responded, the "lead responder" was clear that he considered that this was a bullshit call and that WE totally had the right to do what we were doing and HE was sorting out a nuisance call to the police. He may also have been playing "good cop" - it's not like I was trusting him. While one of his buddies had parting words for me: "Do you realize what it looked like <insert saucer eyes>?" and "It could have been XXXXX, so of course police has to respond."
About a helicopter, the problem is compounded because that whole outfit needs some quota of flying hours to remain certified. It might be a boring area, and any opportunity to take it out and fly then counts as training, if nothing else can be written up for that flight. That there is a helicopter guarantees that it will be used. And same for SWAT and such.
I bought alcohol for some underage people who asked one time, not perceiving it as a risk because who could tell why I was buying it or watch me give it away? Not until today did I understand what could have happened.
I like to say that in suburban USA, it’s illegal to be underage in public after dark. Cops will harass you for no reason, detain you for no crime, question you with no motive other than to try to peg you with a crime, on the assumption that you don’t know your rights and won’t assert them. If you try to assert your rights they will work harder to try to put a crime on you. And then we wonder why our kids get addicted to screens and don’t leave the house. It’s insanely fucked up and it stems from bored cops fucking with kids because they have nothing better to do.
Can’t speak for the whole country, but in the Midwest, rural community I grew up in, people had a “better safe than sorry” attitude, and would call police on mere suspicion that you were up to no good or that something was amiss.
Even told them afterward how wrong they were, they’d probably shrug and say it was still good for the police to check.
i’ve had the cops called on me frequently for stuff like breaking into my own house?? they’re also really on edge, i’ve had them shout at me to take my hands out of my pockets which… fair i guess?
not to stereotype, but America just has lots of SAHM busybody types
It sounds that the neighboirs doing those calls, did it
to cause problems for the poster above, not to be helpful (basically harassment via fake calls to the police).
I bet they would NOT call the cops if real thieves showed up.
The more calls the police get, the more money they are able to justify by pointing to the amount of calls received.
And, I think, generally it would be a much more enjoyable call to go talk to some parents about a few kids, than to respond to more demanding complaints.
Yeah. I cringe that this mentality is also exported from the US to other countries. I firmly believe that breaking a leg, getting lost in the woods for an hour, being able to play somewhere without any adult supervision, really made me a stronger, more capable, stress-resistant adult.
