Uriel238 [all pronouns]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • The eventual outcome of this sort of thing is more widespread use of steganographic data storage schemes. We already have plenty, such as ones that make your data look like unused LTS blocks of garbage and code blocks with multiple hidden partitions, so that you can open one block showing pedestrian data and the court unable to prove there are other hidden blocks.

    These are technologies that already exist for those people who are really interested preserving their renegade data.

    But if I own a business and I don’t want my rivals reading my accounting, and open crypto is illegal, I may go stegan whether or not I have secret slush funds.


  • It sounds like you haven’t observed the conversation.

    And it’s not the tech companes so much as the Linux community who have pushed for e2e.

    Considering how many abuses (pretty clear violations of the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States) have been carved out by SCOTUS during mob investigations and the International War on Terror, no, the people of the US want secure communication. The law enforcement state wants back doors and keep telling tech folk to nerd harder to make back doors not already known to industrial spies, enthusiast hackers and foreign agents.

    You’re asking for three perpendicular lines on a plane. You’re asking for a mathematical impossibility.

    And remember industrial spies includes the subsets of industries local and foreign, and political spies behind specific ideologies who do not like you and are against specifically your own personhood.



  • I’m not an academically trained scholar regarding left-wing theory, but I’d assume that communists and social democrats are still part of the same group, with one naming themselves after a shorter-term goal-state, and the other naming themselves after a longer-term goal-state.

    When we talk about state models such as republic, democracy, autocracy, we’re either describing a current status, or a model we might want to follow or avoid. When we talk about ideologies (conservatism, liberalism, communism, feminism, etc.) they assert specific values and presumptions that might or might not be true or workable. For instance, in the communist ideal, every participant has exactly the same amount of political and material power; influence is perfectly distributed. But we have no idea how a state like that would look, or work, or if we could ever get there.

    Every model and every ideology has problems and concessions we don’t understand and have to correct for. The one-person = one-vote thing seems intuitive for democracy, but has terrible side effects, and we’re still sorting out alternative election models that might work better.

    All this is to say it’s a really bad idea to treat any one of them as a racehorse or football team or a banner under which to rally and consolidate political power. None of the models or ideals we have are perfect or absolute, and we have to be prepared to adjust them on the fly, especially as we contend with corruption and bad actors who exploit vulnerabilities.

    I suspect everyone on the left ultimately seeks a society in which everyone is materially provided for, in which liberties are as extensive as possible while providing for protections and considering human biases towards certain abberant behavior (e.g. drunk driving) in which there are as few social strata as possible and power is as well distributed as possible. The models that accommodate all these, even to partial degrees, are still very fuzzy. (Western civilization has been working on them for only three hundred years or so.)

    So we’re at least in the same book, if not on the same page.




  • Um no.

    A state can decide what it names itself or names a part of itself (e.g. Black Lives Matter Plaza). The story of Ukraine illustrates this.

    But geographers and cartographers don’t decide what to name a place or get orders from states by fiat (unless the mapper is a state agent working for a department) They name things based on what they’re called.

    The gulf is known to most of the world and the International Hydrographic Organization as Golfo de México or in English, Gulf of Mexico, and calling it the Gulf of America (say by Google Maps) is political allegiance signaling, that they are MAGA or MAGA collaborators.

    If you want to be spicy you can call it Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl or the House of Chalchiuhtlicue based on the South American deity of the sea. It has a nice ominous Siege of R’lyeh feel that reflects the tempestuous weather of the ocean expanse.


  • As I explained to Google (from Dan McClellan) _references do not assert from fiat what things are called. A dictionary definition is not an official definition but what a word means or what a thing is called at the moment.

    Most of the world calls it the Golfo de México or in English speaking regions, the Gulf of Mexico. Changing all the maps of the world won’t change this.

    Now granted, a state chooses what to call itself (such as the changing of The Ukraine to simply Ukraine but that is the incorporated entity that is the sovereign nation of Ukraine.

    As the US does not have sovereign control of the Gulf of Mexico, it doesn’t get to declare the name of a region of international waters.

    This whole thing just makes the GOP, MAGA, the Trump administration and by proxy the people of the United States xenophobic and barbaric as hell. It’s not a good look.





  • Aargh! Okay, I’m going to fix this and the fine tuned universe argument all at once.

    Nature does not care about your silly numbers and hypotheses. All of our scientific mechanics are models of the observed universe. The ones we call theories are just models good enough to be usefully predictive as to forecast outcomes, allowing us to safely land airplanes, build bridges, make safe pharmaceuticals (or super addictive ones, if we want), split atoms safely to produce power (or unsafely to level cities) and so on.

    We care about the math and the numbers because they give us results that are consistent with nature. But nature is doing what it’s doing because it’s behaving as a giant causal engine (ever-smaller forces that drive observable phenomena, at least until we get to Planck scale). So when it comes to the fine tuned hypothesis, to quote a Texas physicist whose name I can’t remember These numbers ain’t for fiddlin’

    If there are any storm gods at all, anywhere in the world, to the last, they are content to allow lightning to behave strictly according to static-electricity electrodynamics. And ball lightning happens whether or not we have a model that explains it. (Presently, we don’t.)

    If one or more of the many-worlds hypotheses are true, no given universe cares what its science-savvy inhabitants have determined and whether their mathematical models allow for models that are factual. Facts don’t care about your feelings. Facts don’t care about your science either. It’s more that the science does is best to describe what’s going on in the facts.

    Irreducible complexity is solved.

    PS: This also stabilizes the cosmic horror scenario of Azathoth’s dream, that Azathoth gibbers in the center of the universe dreaming its whole, and each and every one of us is a mere figment, who will vanish to oblivion when eventually he awakes: From what we can observe Azathoth has been dreaming consistently for thirteen billion years, and doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to wake up, and his dream is profoundly consistent so that the mathematics we use to send probes from planet to planet, eventually into the outer solar system always works. Azathoth has our back!


  • The history of advertising indicates otherwise, as does Das Kapital by Karl Marx. Capitalists will always push the limits, ever seeking to maximize profits.

    However upper management appears to want to hold royal court and subjugate their serves (the worker pool), since the goal of profit maximization set by shareholder primacy contraindicates common practices like micromanagement, over-surveillance of the workforce (keylogging, and prohibition of private use of the internet) and crunching, all which reduce workforce efficiency (by a lot) and yet are typical.

    In the 1980s, when Reagan deregulated children’s programming, a lot of shows that were essentially half-hour-long commercials (say, the entire Transformers franchise) were released and sold a lot of toys. The weird thing is when we oversaturate a generation with commercials, they develop a tolerance to them, and the marketing industry has been losing that battle since the 1950s, when an hour long show would have a thirty-second sponsor spot.





  • It won’t affect much except bleeding edge theoretical physics. Much the way we don’t need relativity to make airplanes fly (but round-earth gravity models help for long distance flights).

    Physical laws are mathematical models that reflect natural forces and predict outcomes (accurately that we can fling cans of passengers across the world safely). It wouldn’t be the first time we discovered that some previously constant forces are actually variable (much the way the force of gravity is affected by distance, noticeable only when you lob something high enough.) We shrug and change the variables, and some physicists near retirement may balk and say it’s ridiculous, as Einstein did regarding Heisenberg’s probability-based quantum mechanics.


  • It took decades before Hasbro Easy Bake Ovens were marketed in the US in Yellow and Black rather than Mattel Barbie™️ Fuchsia Pink (💕) which is still the standard in US department stores. Curiously gender neutral colors started from demand in Sweden and expanded outward.

    In the nineties, Barbie was built like only a select few Playboy Bunnies (Jessica Rabbit’s dimensions are physiologically impossible. A robot, maybe) and Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader action figures were ripped like He-Man (or soon-to-be Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger).

    Gender roles are (to me) extremely weird.