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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Yes, you can make the argument that a hyper-modern vehicle is a vastly more effective weapons system, so the disparity in cost is justified.

    That isn’t what we are seeing in Ukraine - relatively modern NATO-standard tanks are being knocked out by old artillery, immobilized by old mines, and killed by cheap drones. Industrial warfare in the vein of WWI and WWII is clearly not dead yet.

    This isn’t to say Russia would win a direct conventional war against the west, but we also can’t sit here smugly and claim it would be a steamroll like Gulf Storm given the observations from Ukraine.


  • The raw spending figure isn’t what is important, but the PPP figure. Russia’s economy is about 1/5th the size of the EU’s in PPP, and its defense sector is vastly more efficient on a monetary basis than the west - The US alone has given Ukraine close to $60 billion and it is a fraction of the hardware that Russia has produced with fewer dollars.

    This isn’t a ‘Russia stronk, Europe bad’ post, it just bears emphasizing that Russia has a large industrial base and has brought much of it into arms production over the past two years. The West hasn’t, and defense procurement remains an almost artisanal process where high tech goods are bought - in low volumes - at inflated prices.




  • With refresh rates like that, you must be talking about LED billboards.

    These are different from consumer monitors, which mostly use constant LED backlights and a liquid crystal layer to determine color.

    An LED bilboard is going to have a fuckton of singular LEDs - each of which can emit exactly one color - arranged in groups to form full pixels capable of displaying many colors. There is no extra LCD layer between your eyes and the billboard LEDs.

    The reason for the high refresh rates is because each led must be extinguished and and relit to redraw the image, and the eye is very good at picking up this strobe effect.

    The difference vs. a consumer display is that the backlight in a typical monitor is constant. Refreshes the screen involves sending updated instructions to the LCD layer, twisting the crystals and possibly changing the color they allow through.

    To make a crude concrete example:

    Imagine I am shining a white flashlight in your face. In front of the flashlight I put a colored piece of plastic so the light hitting you is colored. Then I change the plastic to one with a (slightly) different color. I do this 120 times per second. That is a typical consumer display.

    Now imagine I am shining a colored flashlight directly in your face. Then I turn it off and grab a flashlight of a different color and shine it in your face. Imagine I do that 120 times per second. That is an LED billboard.

    Which do you think is more likely to give you a headache?

    One final complication - the brightness of the LEDs is variable over time, they received a modulated signal rather than a steady voltage, so at lower refresh rates there will be a noticeable ripple across the image, similar to how early CRT screens could look.

    Increasing the refresh rate hides a lot of these problems.




  • Immigration is a football wedge issue that cannot and will not be addressed.

    The solution is already known, stricter enforcement of penalties for employers of undocumented workers. But that would actually fuck a sizable portion of the economy, as these workers are vital to a lot of low-wage labor (harvesting and food processing in particular).

    Instead the plants and the feds play a game where the authorities give advance notice of ICE raids, and take a couple people and the employers face insignificant penalties.

    As with any other mass behavior, adjusting it requires altering the economic incentives. People come here for higher wages, they come here illegally because the legal method is expensive, arbitrary, and time-consuming, and the opportunities open to illegal migrants are still enticing enough. Stopping illegal migrants requires removing those opportunities.

    That might make some shareholders a penny less wealthy though, so we can’t have it. We’ll just keep arguing about this for the next 500 years and accomplish nothing, just be sure to vote for US because the other side wants to do the BAD THING on immigration.




  • The problem with the principal refusing to escort the officer is then they are obstructing a police investigation, and that is a crime. It isn’t fair to put this burden on them, the blame lies squarely with the police chain of command.

    In fact the root problem of all things police is that once police decide to do something, even if that thing is illegal, interfering is a crime.

    This is how we end up with people being charged with resisting arrest, and no other crimes that would warrant an arrest. This is also how we end up with a bunch of people live streaming George Floyd’s execution, because stopping a cop from killing someone is a crime.



  • AND you’re assuming youtube wants to continue the already unsustainable ad-based model at all

    No, I was explaining how people who do not watch ads are still valuable to YouTube today. It doesn’t matter if they want to move away from serving ads in the future or not, the points above are still valid.

    Netflix is actually a great parallel. They need people to watch the shows and buzz about them to draw in more subscribers. YouTube is the same way, they need people sharing videos and funny comments to scrape attention away from other bits of entertainment.

    Further, this isn’t a binary outcome. Each time YouTube makes it a little harder to block ads, a slice of people who don’t want to put in the effort will start watching them. It is trivial, on the software side, to fully block a video from playing if the ad is not served. To date, they have not done that, and I sincerely doubt they ever will - because ad-free viewers are still valuable.

    Yes, they would prefer if everyone watched ads. But they would still prefer ad-free viewers to watch YouTube and add to the network effect than to spend their time elsewhere.


  • ‘Those people’ are still incredibly valuable for YouTube.

    They watch content, and interact with creators which increases the health of the community and draws in more viewers - some of whom will watch ads.

    They choose to spend their time on YouTube, increasing the chances they share videos, talk about videos, and otherwise increase the cultural mindshare of the platform.

    Lastly, by removing themselves from the advertising pool, they boost the engagement rates on the ads themselves. This allows YouTube to charge more to serve ads.

    Forcing everyone who currently uses an adblocker to watch ads wouldn’t actually help YouTube make more money, it would just piss off advertisers as they would be paying to showore ads to an unengaged audience that wouldn’t interact with those ads.



    1. Hans has admitted to cheating in the past
    2. Hans played a near-perfect game as black against the best player in the world who hadn’t lost as white in years
    3. Hans made some suspiciously good moves quickly, without much time passing
    4. Magnus played a very rare opening that Hans was somehow able to perfectly respond to without skipping a beat

    From these, many people think he cheated. The vibrating butt plug is unlikely, but what is more likely is that Magnus’ prep got leaked and Hans was able to hyper-prepare for a specific line of play.