Because I'm not an *anything* absolutist. Things like absolutism and zero tolerance are attractive because they make decision making easy in a complex world -- too easy. Sometimes you ought to be forced to wrestle with tough calls; to choose the lesser of two evils or between alternative goods when you can't have both.
And for that reason the way Daily Stormer was forced off the Internet disturbed me, even though I *despise* those people. It's the easy call: here's a problem that's attracting a lot of negative attention, so let's make it go away, and by "go away" we mean sweep it under the rug so someone else has to deal with it. Does anyone think that will make those people disappear? That it will stop others from becoming radicalized? I for one think it will work in their favor. Authoritarians love to view themselves as victims just as much as they love to be victimizers; those are two halves of the same coin for them. They adore being wronged, because in their very tiny minds that gives them permission to wrong others.
Coffee shops go back to the late 1400s, and then as now a big part of what you're paying for isn't coffee; it's a place to go. Sometimes you need a change of scenery; or neutral ground on which to meet someone.
Anyone who swills coffee all day would find it cheaper to make his own rather than to pay someone else to do it. That's always been true; the economics of coffee houses have never made sense on a coffee-only basis. The unwritten and universally understood rule of the coffee house is your "overpriced" coffee also buys you the right to hang around for what would be an unreasonable amount of time in any other kind of establishment.
Of course a lot of people today who *do* dash in to grab a cup off coffee and go. They're subsidizing the people who are banging out the next chapter of their novel, meeting so she can decide whether he's too creepy to go on a real date with, plotting revolutions, or maybe even honing their VC pitch. That's why Starbucks plays music. *They* know you don't hear it after 30 seconds; it's there to mask conversations so they don't carry.
Primates are particularly suited for the study because they can shift their attention without moving their eyes. Most animals do not have this ability.
Saccadic masking occurs during eye movement, so this is a different phenomenon; or perhaps it is the same phenomenon but it turns out that eye movement isn't really the triggering condition.
I say they are the same people who would have been Democrats forty years ago. Here in Massachusetts of all places they commonly fly the Confederate flag, something that would have been shocking back then in the cradle of abolitionism.
Very few people, I think, have the sense that taking "proprietary information" is stealing; this is particularly the case for information that you yourself had a hand in creating.
As an information technology, it is a point of professionalism to recognize the proprietary nature of data you have worked on, but I wouldn't expect most people to grasp this automatically unless they'd signed an NDA. In fact when it comes to list of clients, which in politics a donor amounts to, knowledge of that list and relationships with people on it are a key part of your negotiating position as an associate in a firm like a law firm or advertising agency.
Then there is accessing a database you no longer are supposed to have access to, but again understanding the difference between having a password and having authorization is a distinction I wouldn't count on most people grasping, or if they grasp it, respecting. Anybody who handles proprietary information needs to be briefed on the limits of their authorization, but the fact that the user credentials were never revoked tells me the people managing this data don't have a handle on the problem that ex-staffers pose.
Actually this is fairly typical of rocket science, at least as I understand it. Spacecraft are complex systems where they only way to avoid catastrophe is to get an almost incomprehensible number of easy-to-overlook details right. Maybe it's the unit conversions, or the temperature rating of the booster O-rings, or the combustibility of cabin materials in a pure oxygen atmosphere.
Maybe this is not what we programmers would technically call a "programming error", although other people might characterize it that way, but it comes from a practice that is all-too-familiar: cutting values from one source and pasting them into another, something you do for convenience but which opens the door for details to be wrong in an unexpected way.
There's a reason the term RiNO exists. Establishment "Republicans" are just globalists in disguise.
To enforce the pretense of ideological and intellectual conformity.
The earliest Presidential election I remember was Nixon v. Humphrey; back then there was a different term for Establishment Republicans than RINO. We called them "Republicans". People who are now non-Establishment Republicans were called "Dixiecrats".
People pay piles of cash to subsidize ICE vehicles too.
There are in fact two big piles, in fact. The first and larger pile is the non-governmental pile: this is the least visible pile because it's spread out over the population in things like medical bills. Air pollution in the US causes 16,000 premature births, and that alone costs the public 4.3 billion annually.. Overall cost to the US health care economy from ICE air pollution is on the order of $40 billion a year, conservatively. That's not counting the subjective costs of being sick or dying prematurely, it's straight up health spending.
Many of the public costs of ICE nobody so far as I know have even attempted to quantify, like the cost of noise. The noise cost of ICE vehicles is mind-boggling if you think about it: just take the difference in value of a real estate property located on a noisy street vs. a quiet one and multiply that by all the properties which are exposed to high levels of traffic noise. Surprisingly noise pollution has a health cost too, estimated in the billions for heart disease alone.
The second big pile is the government spending pile. This takes some explicit forms, such as the costs of drafting, monitoring and enforcing vehicle pollution regulations. But most of it is squirreled away under other headings. Do you really think that we'd spend a dime in the Middle East on defense if there were no oil there, or if oil were as worthless as sand?
The externalized costs imposed public by internal combustion engine car are staggering. They're just as much public subsidies as any government program, and they're much larger than e-car subsidies. The only difference is that they aren't gathered into a single line item in the budget, which means we don't automatically have to argue for or against the fairness of that subsidy every year. In fact the burden distribution for ICE vehicle external costs is wildly arbitrary and unfair. It's just easy to ignore that.
The whole point of e-vehicle subsidies is to bring down net externalized public costs for vehicles all types in the long term.
In 1668, John Wilkins attempted to construct a language which works the way you want language to work: everything made sense, everything was systematic, down to the way words were formed. Robert Hooke (of Hooke's Law fame) even wrote a scientific paper in it, describing the operation of a pocket watch. It never caught on, because making everything consistent and sensible also makes things unbearably cumbersome.
People use language to accomplish things, and the construct words to do useful things, not adhere to sensible axioms. "Interstellar space" to describe the space between stars (int itself a vague notion) just isn't a useful concept. However "interstellar space" describing the places outside the heliopauses of star systems is a useful concept.
I think what he says is plausible. I think it's also plausible that Kapersky did favors for the FSB. The question is which is more plausible. They could both be true.
The bottom line is that you shouldn't trust any vendor entirely, especially ones with known ties to state security agencies. It's quite reasonable for US defense and intelligence contractors to avoid Russian products, and it would be just as reasonable for Russian firms to avoid American products.
You have to do a threat assessment. If you're involved with national security, then vendor connections to a hostile government are a red flag. If you're a commercial company, connections to foreign governments that are known to do industrial espionage are a red flag.
A lot of that stuff is crystallizing human judgment, resulting in a system which is good enough to replace that judgment in many cases, with additional characteristics like untiring consistency and cheapness of scaling that allow that judgment to be applied in ways we couldn't before.
This path this takes us down doesn't lead to a plug-in replacement for humans at any point we can envision yet, but I think it does lead to unsettling consequences in the foreseeable future.
Take state surveillance in a place like Britain, which has more surveillance cameras than any other nation in the world on an absolute basis, never mind per capita. The limits of such a network are the humans you need to monitor it, classify behaviors and follow individuals as they move around. It is not much of a stretch to imagine that monitoring to be entirely automated in twenty years or so, as machine recognition and classification capabilities advance.
This may have consequences more subtle than the obvious ones. First, the amazing capabilities of such a system may give it a credibility beyond what it merits. As with a psychic, a system telling someone something that amazes them inspires a false confidence in that system, even when it can be conclusively demonstrated that that confidence isn't justified. I cite as an example of this drug screening, in which the application of reasonably reliable tests results in an unreliable system because of the base rate fallacy. Amazement is so much more persuasive than math. And there's voting machines too; a good demo of technology can inspire faith in capabilities not demonstrated, like reliability and security.
And as we now have a generation of people who are incapable of using maps to navigate, reliance on such a system may erode the development and maintenance of the human judgment. We will both become less inclined to challenge the results of machine classifications of human behavior (which after all are just an automated opinion), and less capable. Eventually we may see more and more areas of human judgment atrophy as good-enough but cheaper artificial substitutes become available. This could lead to intellectual stagnation.
I also see potential economic consequences, such as the elimination of virtually all menial jobs and a significant reduction in routine mental jobs. I know economists pooh-pooh this, citing the Industrial Revolution as a counter-example: rather than destroying jobs, it created jobs as the price of goods dropped and standards of living soared; but that is just one example of an encounter with a wave of disruptive technology introductions, hardly enough to conclude that proves some kind of inevitability of that results. The nature of the technology matters. The circumstances matter too.
Yes, for example "crypto-fascism" means a hidden affinity for fascism. "Cryptobiology" is hidden or secret biology.
"Cryptography" comes from the root words meaning "hidden writing" or "secret writing".
People are sloppy with words; the only thing that really matters is whether that they make themselves understood -- presuming there's enough meaning in their utterances to even raise that question. If you want to play the word-police card in response to the sloppy use of "crypto", the deck is stacked against you here by etymology.
Actually, it was the government getting less intrusive that caused airlines to become so abusive. Years of lax attitudes toward anti-trust laws in mergers, resulting in the fact that virtually all flights in the US are controlled by five airlines where once there were over a dozen. These remaining airlines repeatedly show non-competitive behavior, such as following each others' leads in introducing new fees. Even after massive PR debacles for an airline profits aren't the least bit affected, because people often don't have much of a choice.
I remember when insurance was cheap, but health care costs have gone up faster than inflation every single year since 1960, and if you think about it, it makes sense. Back then they didn't have hip replacements, or treatments for most (now) survivable cancers. If you're old enough you remember the old joke about the doctor telling you to "take two aspirins and call me in the morning." That's because aspirin was pretty much what he had to work with; there was no Ibuprofen; nor was there Viagra, Lipitor, Xanax, or Prozac. Medical imagery meant a crude x-ray; MRIs, CAT scans or ultrasound had yet to be invented. We keep more people alive to a sick and medically expensive old age than ever before.
There's really only one practical way to stop the rise of insurance costs: find a way to keep the population healthier.
Well, it may have a bit of cooling-off effect like a waiting period for purchasing a handgun.
Every administration leaks; both intentionally with planted leaks and as part of political infighting. This is why despite administrations always complaining about it it is almost never pursued to the point of prosecution. In general people who make it to that level have a lot of political experience and while they disagree with each other, don't want to see the administration actually damaged. So they're circumspect, careful to limit the damage their leak will cause and sophisticated about estimating exactly how much embarrassment that entails.
The Trump Administration leaks are much more deeply embarrassing, because most of them are new to this game and aren't used to operating under such hostile and obsessively close observation. I'm sure there's a lot of "seemed like a good idea at the time" leaks that a few hours of cooling off would have stopped.
I don't have any problem with someone who wants to see how high he can shoot himself in a steam rocket *for thrills*. Or for the satisfaction of building and operating a really dangerous contraption.
The problem I have is the arrogant ignorance of thinking that *proves* something.
When I was in college I learned to read tarot cards on a lark; I saw them in the bookstore and the design appealed to me. It turned out I was really good at it, uncannily good at it. But it's purest egotism to believe that kind of thing makes you special or magical. An honest postmortem of an uncanny-seeming reading will show that it's the subject's reaction to the often divergent interpretations open to you as a reader that guide you to a reading that is personally significant to them.
The point is that you can convince yourself you have access to truth that other, more ordinary people around you don't have, if you never look for a truth that's bigger than yourself.
If he wanted to see the curvature of the Earth, he could launch a weather balloon; for an attempt on an altitude sufficient to see the Earth's curvature you can obtain the balloon itself off of Amazon for about $100; along with the instrument package your total costs would be well less than $1000. It's been done by student groups, he could do this also.
So I'd characterize this person as stupid rather than heroic. In fact he's a specific kind of stupid -- the kind that stubbornly won't learn from the experience and work of other people. The method he has chosen will never get him to an altitude where he'd be able to see the curvature of the Earth according to estimates of the Earth's diameter that date back to the ancient Greeks.
If he'd had the intelligence to learn from the work of others, he'd have chosen a different approach than a steam rocket. There's a reason nobody uses them except for near-Earth applications. They are easy to build but hard to scale. The simplest technology that will get him high enough to disprove the Earth being a sphere of roughly the accepted diameter is a balloon; it's very cheap for non-manned applications and the cheapest and safest choice for manned excursions into the stratosphere. In fact there are commercial companies developing tourist ventures that will allow you to see the curvature of the Earth with your own eyes.
Long before any steam rocket is big enough to get the altitude he'd need to disprove anything, it's cost will greatly exceed that of a conventional rocket -- not to mention a balloon. So the best he will do is launch himself as high as a rocket he builds can take him, and what will that prove? Nothing, because it's not high enough. If he'd bothered to research the question he'd know that.
I wouldn't characterize risking your life in a futile attempt when there are safer, cheaper, and more feasible alternatives as "brave". It's stupid. In fact it's a kind of stupid that arises from moral cowardice: an unwillingness to open your mind to ideas.
That actually leads to some testable predictions. If the effect is due to a tendency for light to be deflected downward over a distance, the distance to the horizon should increase more rapidly as you ascend than it would under the spherical Earth theory.
Of course the spherical Earth theory also leads to testable predictions -- like the ability to sail around the world and return to your original position using inertial guidance.
It's always important to question what kinds of experiences make up the composite average.
Here's another thing to consider: even if we just go by *average*, what do we do to compensate people for their lost months of life expectancy? If the answer is nothing, it is in effect a wealth transfer from a large number of people to the owners of the power plant.
Especially if you count coal into the tonnage. Trains are the only way economical way to transport coal from the mines to power plants, and the trains that do this are mind-bogglingly vast.
Much of the US long-distance passenger rail network uses freight tracks, and the coal trains are given higher priority on some sections over passenger trains. I crossed the country some years ago on the California Zephyr, which was often delayed for hours by passing coal trains. They left the tracks a mess too. The rolling stock used on the Zephyr is capable of speeds of 100 mph, but in places has to crawl along at jogging speed because of track conditions.
This isn't different than any other facility which consumes a lot of electricity, like a data center. You don't use the power lines in the street meant to support a handful of houses with 100 amp service. If you're supporting a fleet of trucks you get your own connections to the grid.
At some point, as fleets become large and the networks they serve become complex, there will be quite a bit of operations research type thought spent on optimizing where to put charging, but it's not a "gee this is too hard to figure out" problem, not at the outset anyway.
Well, I did take a few history classes in university -- enough to learn that taking politicians' public rationalizations at face value is a lousy argument, even when it feeds your pet preconceptions.
The Nazis certainly exploited anti-Communist hysteria when it suited their purposes -- but that was their fundamental style -- do anything that suited their purposes and rationalize it publicly. Even the famous street fights with communists were theater. Privately they weren't nearly as concerned with communism as the were with whoever was standing in their way, and Jews of course. That was sincere at least.
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Because I'm not an *anything* absolutist. Things like absolutism and zero tolerance are attractive because they make decision making easy in a complex world -- too easy. Sometimes you ought to be forced to wrestle with tough calls; to choose the lesser of two evils or between alternative goods when you can't have both.
And for that reason the way Daily Stormer was forced off the Internet disturbed me, even though I *despise* those people. It's the easy call: here's a problem that's attracting a lot of negative attention, so let's make it go away, and by "go away" we mean sweep it under the rug so someone else has to deal with it. Does anyone think that will make those people disappear? That it will stop others from becoming radicalized? I for one think it will work in their favor. Authoritarians love to view themselves as victims just as much as they love to be victimizers; those are two halves of the same coin for them. They adore being wronged, because in their very tiny minds that gives them permission to wrong others.
Coffee shops go back to the late 1400s, and then as now a big part of what you're paying for isn't coffee; it's a place to go. Sometimes you need a change of scenery; or neutral ground on which to meet someone.
Anyone who swills coffee all day would find it cheaper to make his own rather than to pay someone else to do it. That's always been true; the economics of coffee houses have never made sense on a coffee-only basis. The unwritten and universally understood rule of the coffee house is your "overpriced" coffee also buys you the right to hang around for what would be an unreasonable amount of time in any other kind of establishment.
Of course a lot of people today who *do* dash in to grab a cup off coffee and go. They're subsidizing the people who are banging out the next chapter of their novel, meeting so she can decide whether he's too creepy to go on a real date with, plotting revolutions, or maybe even honing their VC pitch. That's why Starbucks plays music. *They* know you don't hear it after 30 seconds; it's there to mask conversations so they don't carry.
From the article:
Primates are particularly suited for the study because they can shift their attention without moving their eyes. Most animals do not have this ability.
Saccadic masking occurs during eye movement, so this is a different phenomenon; or perhaps it is the same phenomenon but it turns out that eye movement isn't really the triggering condition.
I say they are the same people who would have been Democrats forty years ago. Here in Massachusetts of all places they commonly fly the Confederate flag, something that would have been shocking back then in the cradle of abolitionism.
Very few people, I think, have the sense that taking "proprietary information" is stealing; this is particularly the case for information that you yourself had a hand in creating.
As an information technology, it is a point of professionalism to recognize the proprietary nature of data you have worked on, but I wouldn't expect most people to grasp this automatically unless they'd signed an NDA. In fact when it comes to list of clients, which in politics a donor amounts to, knowledge of that list and relationships with people on it are a key part of your negotiating position as an associate in a firm like a law firm or advertising agency.
Then there is accessing a database you no longer are supposed to have access to, but again understanding the difference between having a password and having authorization is a distinction I wouldn't count on most people grasping, or if they grasp it, respecting. Anybody who handles proprietary information needs to be briefed on the limits of their authorization, but the fact that the user credentials were never revoked tells me the people managing this data don't have a handle on the problem that ex-staffers pose.
Actually this is fairly typical of rocket science, at least as I understand it. Spacecraft are complex systems where they only way to avoid catastrophe is to get an almost incomprehensible number of easy-to-overlook details right. Maybe it's the unit conversions, or the temperature rating of the booster O-rings, or the combustibility of cabin materials in a pure oxygen atmosphere.
Maybe this is not what we programmers would technically call a "programming error", although other people might characterize it that way, but it comes from a practice that is all-too-familiar: cutting values from one source and pasting them into another, something you do for convenience but which opens the door for details to be wrong in an unexpected way.
There's a reason the term RiNO exists. Establishment "Republicans" are just globalists in disguise.
To enforce the pretense of ideological and intellectual conformity.
The earliest Presidential election I remember was Nixon v. Humphrey; back then there was a different term for Establishment Republicans than RINO. We called them "Republicans". People who are now non-Establishment Republicans were called "Dixiecrats".
People pay piles of cash to subsidize ICE vehicles too.
There are in fact two big piles, in fact. The first and larger pile is the non-governmental pile: this is the least visible pile because it's spread out over the population in things like medical bills. Air pollution in the US causes 16,000 premature births, and that alone costs the public 4.3 billion annually.. Overall cost to the US health care economy from ICE air pollution is on the order of $40 billion a year, conservatively. That's not counting the subjective costs of being sick or dying prematurely, it's straight up health spending.
Many of the public costs of ICE nobody so far as I know have even attempted to quantify, like the cost of noise. The noise cost of ICE vehicles is mind-boggling if you think about it: just take the difference in value of a real estate property located on a noisy street vs. a quiet one and multiply that by all the properties which are exposed to high levels of traffic noise. Surprisingly noise pollution has a health cost too, estimated in the billions for heart disease alone.
The second big pile is the government spending pile. This takes some explicit forms, such as the costs of drafting, monitoring and enforcing vehicle pollution regulations. But most of it is squirreled away under other headings. Do you really think that we'd spend a dime in the Middle East on defense if there were no oil there, or if oil were as worthless as sand?
The externalized costs imposed public by internal combustion engine car are staggering. They're just as much public subsidies as any government program, and they're much larger than e-car subsidies. The only difference is that they aren't gathered into a single line item in the budget, which means we don't automatically have to argue for or against the fairness of that subsidy every year. In fact the burden distribution for ICE vehicle external costs is wildly arbitrary and unfair. It's just easy to ignore that.
The whole point of e-vehicle subsidies is to bring down net externalized public costs for vehicles all types in the long term.
In 1668, John Wilkins attempted to construct a language which works the way you want language to work: everything made sense, everything was systematic, down to the way words were formed. Robert Hooke (of Hooke's Law fame) even wrote a scientific paper in it, describing the operation of a pocket watch. It never caught on, because making everything consistent and sensible also makes things unbearably cumbersome.
People use language to accomplish things, and the construct words to do useful things, not adhere to sensible axioms. "Interstellar space" to describe the space between stars (int itself a vague notion) just isn't a useful concept. However "interstellar space" describing the places outside the heliopauses of star systems is a useful concept.
I think what he says is plausible. I think it's also plausible that Kapersky did favors for the FSB. The question is which is more plausible. They could both be true.
The bottom line is that you shouldn't trust any vendor entirely, especially ones with known ties to state security agencies. It's quite reasonable for US defense and intelligence contractors to avoid Russian products, and it would be just as reasonable for Russian firms to avoid American products.
You have to do a threat assessment. If you're involved with national security, then vendor connections to a hostile government are a red flag. If you're a commercial company, connections to foreign governments that are known to do industrial espionage are a red flag.
A lot of that stuff is crystallizing human judgment, resulting in a system which is good enough to replace that judgment in many cases, with additional characteristics like untiring consistency and cheapness of scaling that allow that judgment to be applied in ways we couldn't before.
This path this takes us down doesn't lead to a plug-in replacement for humans at any point we can envision yet, but I think it does lead to unsettling consequences in the foreseeable future.
Take state surveillance in a place like Britain, which has more surveillance cameras than any other nation in the world on an absolute basis, never mind per capita. The limits of such a network are the humans you need to monitor it, classify behaviors and follow individuals as they move around. It is not much of a stretch to imagine that monitoring to be entirely automated in twenty years or so, as machine recognition and classification capabilities advance.
This may have consequences more subtle than the obvious ones. First, the amazing capabilities of such a system may give it a credibility beyond what it merits. As with a psychic, a system telling someone something that amazes them inspires a false confidence in that system, even when it can be conclusively demonstrated that that confidence isn't justified. I cite as an example of this drug screening, in which the application of reasonably reliable tests results in an unreliable system because of the base rate fallacy. Amazement is so much more persuasive than math. And there's voting machines too; a good demo of technology can inspire faith in capabilities not demonstrated, like reliability and security.
And as we now have a generation of people who are incapable of using maps to navigate, reliance on such a system may erode the development and maintenance of the human judgment. We will both become less inclined to challenge the results of machine classifications of human behavior (which after all are just an automated opinion), and less capable. Eventually we may see more and more areas of human judgment atrophy as good-enough but cheaper artificial substitutes become available. This could lead to intellectual stagnation.
I also see potential economic consequences, such as the elimination of virtually all menial jobs and a significant reduction in routine mental jobs. I know economists pooh-pooh this, citing the Industrial Revolution as a counter-example: rather than destroying jobs, it created jobs as the price of goods dropped and standards of living soared; but that is just one example of an encounter with a wave of disruptive technology introductions, hardly enough to conclude that proves some kind of inevitability of that results. The nature of the technology matters. The circumstances matter too.
Yes, for example "crypto-fascism" means a hidden affinity for fascism. "Cryptobiology" is hidden or secret biology.
"Cryptography" comes from the root words meaning "hidden writing" or "secret writing".
People are sloppy with words; the only thing that really matters is whether that they make themselves understood -- presuming there's enough meaning in their utterances to even raise that question. If you want to play the word-police card in response to the sloppy use of "crypto", the deck is stacked against you here by etymology.
If you wrote an Eliza-like program to put "cyber-" prefixes before common nouns, you could call it "Cybercyber", of "Cyber-squared".
Actually, it was the government getting less intrusive that caused airlines to become so abusive. Years of lax attitudes toward anti-trust laws in mergers, resulting in the fact that virtually all flights in the US are controlled by five airlines where once there were over a dozen. These remaining airlines repeatedly show non-competitive behavior, such as following each others' leads in introducing new fees. Even after massive PR debacles for an airline profits aren't the least bit affected, because people often don't have much of a choice.
I remember when insurance was cheap, but health care costs have gone up faster than inflation every single year since 1960, and if you think about it, it makes sense. Back then they didn't have hip replacements, or treatments for most (now) survivable cancers. If you're old enough you remember the old joke about the doctor telling you to "take two aspirins and call me in the morning." That's because aspirin was pretty much what he had to work with; there was no Ibuprofen; nor was there Viagra, Lipitor, Xanax, or Prozac. Medical imagery meant a crude x-ray; MRIs, CAT scans or ultrasound had yet to be invented. We keep more people alive to a sick and medically expensive old age than ever before.
There's really only one practical way to stop the rise of insurance costs: find a way to keep the population healthier.
Well, it may have a bit of cooling-off effect like a waiting period for purchasing a handgun.
Every administration leaks; both intentionally with planted leaks and as part of political infighting. This is why despite administrations always complaining about it it is almost never pursued to the point of prosecution. In general people who make it to that level have a lot of political experience and while they disagree with each other, don't want to see the administration actually damaged. So they're circumspect, careful to limit the damage their leak will cause and sophisticated about estimating exactly how much embarrassment that entails.
The Trump Administration leaks are much more deeply embarrassing, because most of them are new to this game and aren't used to operating under such hostile and obsessively close observation. I'm sure there's a lot of "seemed like a good idea at the time" leaks that a few hours of cooling off would have stopped.
Interestingly, "crusade" has the same connotation in the Arab world that "jihad" does here, and vice versa.
Jihad literally means "striving".
I don't have any problem with someone who wants to see how high he can shoot himself in a steam rocket *for thrills*. Or for the satisfaction of building and operating a really dangerous contraption.
The problem I have is the arrogant ignorance of thinking that *proves* something.
When I was in college I learned to read tarot cards on a lark; I saw them in the bookstore and the design appealed to me. It turned out I was really good at it, uncannily good at it. But it's purest egotism to believe that kind of thing makes you special or magical. An honest postmortem of an uncanny-seeming reading will show that it's the subject's reaction to the often divergent interpretations open to you as a reader that guide you to a reading that is personally significant to them.
The point is that you can convince yourself you have access to truth that other, more ordinary people around you don't have, if you never look for a truth that's bigger than yourself.
If he wanted to see the curvature of the Earth, he could launch a weather balloon; for an attempt on an altitude sufficient to see the Earth's curvature you can obtain the balloon itself off of Amazon for about $100; along with the instrument package your total costs would be well less than $1000. It's been done by student groups, he could do this also.
So I'd characterize this person as stupid rather than heroic. In fact he's a specific kind of stupid -- the kind that stubbornly won't learn from the experience and work of other people. The method he has chosen will never get him to an altitude where he'd be able to see the curvature of the Earth according to estimates of the Earth's diameter that date back to the ancient Greeks.
If he'd had the intelligence to learn from the work of others, he'd have chosen a different approach than a steam rocket. There's a reason nobody uses them except for near-Earth applications. They are easy to build but hard to scale. The simplest technology that will get him high enough to disprove the Earth being a sphere of roughly the accepted diameter is a balloon; it's very cheap for non-manned applications and the cheapest and safest choice for manned excursions into the stratosphere. In fact there are commercial companies developing tourist ventures that will allow you to see the curvature of the Earth with your own eyes.
Long before any steam rocket is big enough to get the altitude he'd need to disprove anything, it's cost will greatly exceed that of a conventional rocket -- not to mention a balloon. So the best he will do is launch himself as high as a rocket he builds can take him, and what will that prove? Nothing, because it's not high enough. If he'd bothered to research the question he'd know that.
I wouldn't characterize risking your life in a futile attempt when there are safer, cheaper, and more feasible alternatives as "brave". It's stupid. In fact it's a kind of stupid that arises from moral cowardice: an unwillingness to open your mind to ideas.
That actually leads to some testable predictions. If the effect is due to a tendency for light to be deflected downward over a distance, the distance to the horizon should increase more rapidly as you ascend than it would under the spherical Earth theory.
Of course the spherical Earth theory also leads to testable predictions -- like the ability to sail around the world and return to your original position using inertial guidance.
It's always important to question what kinds of experiences make up the composite average.
Here's another thing to consider: even if we just go by *average*, what do we do to compensate people for their lost months of life expectancy? If the answer is nothing, it is in effect a wealth transfer from a large number of people to the owners of the power plant.
Especially if you count coal into the tonnage. Trains are the only way economical way to transport coal from the mines to power plants, and the trains that do this are mind-bogglingly vast.
Much of the US long-distance passenger rail network uses freight tracks, and the coal trains are given higher priority on some sections over passenger trains. I crossed the country some years ago on the California Zephyr, which was often delayed for hours by passing coal trains. They left the tracks a mess too. The rolling stock used on the Zephyr is capable of speeds of 100 mph, but in places has to crawl along at jogging speed because of track conditions.
This isn't different than any other facility which consumes a lot of electricity, like a data center. You don't use the power lines in the street meant to support a handful of houses with 100 amp service. If you're supporting a fleet of trucks you get your own connections to the grid.
At some point, as fleets become large and the networks they serve become complex, there will be quite a bit of operations research type thought spent on optimizing where to put charging, but it's not a "gee this is too hard to figure out" problem, not at the outset anyway.
A hack it may be, but I don't find it all that interesting. Interesting hacks make a point.
Nazi ideology was a slapdash thing. It was always, *always* emotionally fraught.[
As for eugenics, that was a big thing in the UK and the US too. Most upper class and upper-middle class people believed it.
Well, I did take a few history classes in university -- enough to learn that taking politicians' public rationalizations at face value is a lousy argument, even when it feeds your pet preconceptions.
The Nazis certainly exploited anti-Communist hysteria when it suited their purposes -- but that was their fundamental style -- do anything that suited their purposes and rationalize it publicly. Even the famous street fights with communists were theater. Privately they weren't nearly as concerned with communism as the were with whoever was standing in their way, and Jews of course. That was sincere at least.