Notices by KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)
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KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Sunday, 18-Feb-2018 02:28:35 UTC 
KFist
@lain CARDASSIA DID NOTHING WRONG
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KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Feb-2018 05:42:37 UTC
KFist
@turbomoist @awg Resentment is one of the greatest emotional indicators of where you are in life. Resentment towards a person usually stems from having a dialogue with that person then suddenly realizing that said person isn't entertaining any of your ideas and really doesn't give a shit about what you have to say. Or more specifically, it's when your expectations for that person are completely incongruous with the person's actions. Then you feel contempt for that person if you have any backbone. Both emotions tell you that there's something deeply and fundamentally wrong with the social interaction at hand. So you have to adjust for that.
I had this epiphany more than a year ago now, and it completely flipped my social interactions upside down. I realized that I resented most of the "friends" I had in my life, and I figured that I had to adjust my expectations and actions accordingly. From then on, I only ever opened myself up when a conversation involved mutual respect. Boom, I lost a lot of "friends" but the ones I kept remain rock-solid to this day simply because every single one of our conversations were dialogues (not debates or monologues) and were grounded in mutually-acknowledged and mutually-given respect.
Now, there's an issue with that sort of approach. Respect is a two-way road, and it's also earned (not given). So how can you really respect someone you don't know? You just give them that baseline of being polite and socially-adjusted, and you simply don't disrespect someone until they disrespect you. You don't have to respect someone new, you just have to not outright disrespect them until reason is given. It's a stupidly convoluted way of saying "do unto others etc etc" but it's usually better to lay it out in actual terms instead of aphorisms and platitudes. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Monday, 22-Jan-2018 01:00:35 UTC
KFist
@fate @sim Democracy has failed insofarasmuch as the method of franchisement has failed. The first failure was giving the franchise to those who have no stakes outside of their own immediate survival, and the second failure was giving the franchise to the individual rather than the family. Namely, democratic rule went from being a landed vote, to a sex-aligned vote, to being a universal vote. Give or take some steps along that intermediary step, such as going from landed vote to universal vote directly.
The underlying issue is the disconnect between the voter and the nation, especially within a welfare-state political structure. The focus of any particular vote goes from "what is best for each individual region within a united nation" to "what is best to the single largest demographic or numerical plurality of demographics within a given politically-structured catchment area." The plight of the poor, especially within a welfare state, becomes the political issue of the day, the month, the year, regardless of any other considerations. Simply promising more gibsmedats to the largest demographics within a political catchment area is enough to win.
To another extent, the superficially-relevant issue of gerrymandering is a mask for the fundamentally incorrect axiom that the city-dweller is just as important as the rural denizen. If 10,000 farmers/loggers/truckers/riggers/miners in a disparately-represented rural area provide enough material and economic wealth to support a city of 1,000,000 (who in turn support an elite of 1,000 businessmen/wealth-creators as per the Pareto principle), then are their votes really equal? Should the efforts of 9,998,000 parasites outweigh the efforts of 11,000 producers?
And here comes the fundamental issue of modern democracies: Universal suffrage. Universal suffrage should not exist. It simply cannot work. The past 100 years have taught us this lesson. The past 20 are simply hammering this lesson into the brains of those who are terminally and fatally asleep. https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/478446 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Aug-2017 22:24:01 UTC
KFist
@nepfag @dolus Oh god, this blog is essentially more than a decade of "I am a high-tier programmer at Microsoft, and today's article is why [Horrible Windows API Feature] is entirely due to [Some Fucking Rich Company That Is Using Software From Windows 3.1]"
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Friday, 07-Jul-2017 00:25:51 UTC
KFist
http://www.firstmenonthemoon.com/
Every July I visit this site and live through these moments. They're some of the most important in human history, and it's been almost 50 years. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Jun-2017 01:12:07 UTC
KFist
@clacke @dokidoki The model was plausible but not predictive. Most IPCC models, since the 90s, vastly overstate the effect of AGW and carbon dioxide, as the actual results have shown. In addition, there's a lot of questions still to be answered if effective models are to be made and proper action to be taken.
For example:
What's up with the disparity between radiosondes, weather balloons, and satellites, which all underread compared to sites taken near cities and towns, at all altitudes? Those raw sources outside of cities are always adjusted using the cities as calibration targets, almost always ignoring the urban heat island effect.
What's the actual effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? They correlate heavily with temperature, but ice cores always show that they lag -after- changes in temperature, even accounting for carbon dating recalibration.
If carbon dioxide really is the primary driver of warming periods, where did the carbon go during glacial periods? There's no biomass, permafrost reservoirs, or other carbon dioxide sinks large enough to explain a carbon dioxide-driven warming during post-glacial temperature recovery periods and interglacial periods, without invoking industrialization-tier carbon dioxide outputs.
How about oxygen isotope ratios? They show a far stronger correlation with temperature, and also show that there are interglacial periods that experience extremely rapid temperature rises by 3-5C.
Do IPCC models explain the little ice age? The roman climatic optimum? The Younger Dryas events? Do they have explanatory mechanisms for those events? What were driving those events? What causes the planet to go into and out of an ice age? What drives the smaller climatic events?
Okay, the models might not explain events on that timescale, maybe just 20-100 years out. But what are their fundamental explanations about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation? The North Atlantic Oscillation? Both have major effects on all parts of the world for years at a time.
How can you reasonably model a complex 6-cell 100km layered chaotic system that's 5.15*10^18kg in mass? Do we know all the factors involved? How are atmospheric models being evaluated? How accurate are they? How well do they explain their successes or failures given their fundamental assumptions and first principles? How do we know that
Why are we mostly ignoring solar cycles, solar forcing, and milankovitch cycles? How can we explain Mars' temperature increase, nearly exactly concurrent and correlated with the Earth? There's no AGW going on there.
We use glacier levels from the end of the little ice age as the base level of glacial retreat, but not only was the LIA the coldest it's been in 8500 years, but as the glaciers recede they're finding remains of forests and landscapes that had been overrun by the glaciers, dating from the medieval warm period and roman warm period. Have we truly zeroed our temperature models?
Why was the mandate of the IPCC even "set out to prove AGW is true" rather than "go out and see what's going on with climate change and figure out first principles for a model"?
Yes, global warming is occuring, but are we truly causing it? To what extent? What's the baseline? The climate has been extremely dynamic, all by itself, without any help from industrialization. We have to look at that. Yes, humans are a factor, but what about the others? The other factors were all investigated and dismissed decades ago using old techniques and old methodology, and haven't been raised since because it goes against the IPCC dogma.
These questions don't get investigated because to do so requires you to put your scientific career on the line. There is no funding for these investigations apart from the often and clearly politicized funding by oil companies and others with clearly vested interests, and because of that this also brings another stigma to a scientist's career. The dogma is too strong, and climate change/global warming has been brought out of the scientific sphere and into the political and ideological. No actual science can get done in these conditions, because the dogma is that "the science is settled" and all we can do now is react to climate change of seemingly apocalyptic proportions.
But putting all our eggs into the AGW basket prevents us from reaching any actual understanding and preparing any actual measures to react to the global climate. That's what I have issue with.
And for a better explanation of the current methodology of creating and evaluating IPCC models, here's a good article about their underlying science or lack thereof:
http://motls.blogspot.ca/2017/03/selection-of-climate-model-survivors.html
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KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Saturday, 27-May-2017 02:33:45 UTC
KFist
@dogjaw @hakui @delores
Robert Heinlein touched on this deeply and fundamentally in Starship Troopers, the best book to have ever been mangled by a horrendous adaptation.
"There is an old song which asserts that 'the best things in life are free.' Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted . . . and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears."
"Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal - else a balancing takes place as surely as current 'flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority . . . other than through the tragic logic of history. The unique 'poll tax' that we must pay was unheard of. No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead - and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple."
"Superficially, our system is only slightly different; we have democracy unlimited by race, color, creed, birth, wealth, sex, or conviction, and anyone may win sovereign power by a usually short and not too arduous term of service - nothing more than a light workout to our cave-man ancestors. But that slight difference is one between a system that works, since it is constructed to match the facts, and one that is inherently unstable. Since sovereign franchise is the ultimate in human authority, we insure that all who wield it accept the ultimate in social responsibility - we require each person who wishes to exert control over the state to wager his own life - and lose it, if need be - to save the life of the state. The maximum responsibility a human can accept is thus equated to the ultimate authority a human can exert. Yin and yang, perfect and equal." https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/393848 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Thursday, 04-May-2017 03:46:51 UTC
KFist
@dolus
>Users can only install software from Windows Store on Windows 10 S (including Universal apps, and AppX-packaged Win32 software), and system settings are locked to only allow Microsoft Edge as the web browser and Bing as the search engine. https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/452634 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Friday, 31-Mar-2017 22:25:53 UTC
KFist
@shpuld @nepfag @hakui @fl0wn @lambadalambda Dunno, there's a lot of interesting things. Forests by the plains, forests with rivers, forests by the sea, forests within other types of forests, forests with some lakes in them, forests with marshes in them, a forest with an impact crater hidden within it, forests with some biking trails in them, forests with some wooden walking trails in them, forests by Russia, forests by Latvia, the list goes on.
Forests are pretty cool, bro. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Friday, 31-Mar-2017 22:16:29 UTC
KFist
@shpuld @nepfag @hakui @fl0wn @lambadalambda I like Estonia's tourism board. Last year when I was planning my summer trip I actually thought of going there except it was going to be a solid day of travel across 4 flights to get there. Went on a direct flight to Tokyo instead.
But anyways their tourism board begins and ends with "Look we have old buildings and a lot of forests! A lot of forests! Tons of forests! With trails! See our forests! We speak English!"
It was extremely tempting.
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