The US is huge — you can’t jam everything everywhere. Talking about just cities, you still can’t jam everything everywhere.
But yes, targeted suppression/oppression (depending on your allegiance) will almost certainly use jamming — in fact, I’ve spoken with some Antifa about how they jam EMS frequencies at their events.
This reminds me the way the software was distributed in eastern countries when there was no internet. People went to market to meet other people, and they were peddling/colporting (look up the term in French) cassettes with the software.
The same can happen now - people would walk down the streets to certain places, to become hubs of information, but with no physical contact. Of course those places would be were the jammers would head to.
Actually this sounds like a good theme for book... however as long as I live on this world, I've noticed that if I invent something, there are already two people on the internet who have invented it already, so... please give me the title :)
To save others the search: Colportage is the distribution of publications, books, and religious tracts by carriers called "colporteurs" or "colporters"
Also, amusingly, France is most definitively in Western Europe, so I’m a bit confused about GP’s link between Eastern Europe and “go look up this French word”.
Italy’s demand was completely unreasonable and CloudFlare threatened to end business in Italy, including informing impacted partners.
People talking about EU sovereignty and US hegemony then crying Italy isn’t allowed to dictate terms globally are showing they’re not people with principles — they’re just losers who would be every bit as hegemonic as the US, they just lack the power to be and are publicly crying about it.
CloudFlare already does business that way — eg, enforcing local laws inside the country.
CloudFlare’s objection to Italy’s demands were that Italy demanded CloudFlare censor websites outside of Italy for everyone, globally. CloudFlare refused to do so and said they’d stop providing services to Italy.
Do you realize what you’re asking for in ClodFlare listening to Italy? The US will get total say over what content can be hosted anywhere in Europe (by CloudFlare), due to that precedent being set (and their greater ability to coerce ClodFlare).
Your comment is contradictory: you phrased it as respecting sovereignty, but your actual demand is that CloudFlare allow the US to enforce edicts on the EU.
That’s because home labor and quality often aren’t priced in:
- a chef is faster
- a chef will produce better quality
- but a chef charges for their time
A restaurant often is paying half the price to ingredients and half to overhead; which means you can get it “cheaper” despite paying more for ingredients — since 150% as much on ingredients is still only 75% cost, once you don’t count personal overhead.
You need a lot of efficiency on the professional side to offset that cook time and kitchen space are “free” on the home side of the equation.
Another interpretation is that the apparatus and not just light is made from ether — and so the signal is lost because the measuring apparatus is also subject to the local distortion.
That interpretation is also consistent with LIGO: we can detect those ether disturbances because the distortion of our motion on the apparatus doesn’t cancel the signal in the same way.
QM posits that fields which constitute matter and fields which constitute EM are both manifestations of an underlying phenomenon — that’s the whole idea behind unification. (And we’ve already successfully unified such fields.) My comment is just applying that theory to interpreting the Michelson-Morley experiment.
Please don’t reply with such trite anti-scientific comments, which conflate actual scientific claims with nonsense.
If you have an actual objection, then you should present it. But argument by mockery because you fail to understand modern physics lowers the quality of the discussion.
Field theories are aether theories; as is GR. (Wilczek says as much.) You’re fixated on a particular model of aether, rather than addressing the broader concept. But that’s as illogical as me insisting atoms aren’t real because the Bohr model of electron shells was wrong.
The current aether for light is called “EM field”; matter is made of other fields demonstrated to unify at high energies by the LHC and similar experiments, within the standard model. But you knew all that.
You’re just pretending ignorance to avoid addressing my central thesis: fields are aethers.
Well, yes, of course. This is a discussion of Michelson-Morley interferometers. In that context the word "aether" has a very specific and well-established meaning, and it is not at all the same as a quantum field.
> fields are aethers
You are free to employ the Humpty Dumpty theory of language and redefine the word "aether" if you like. But in the context of Michelson-Morley interferometers, no, quantum fields are not "aethers". The whole notion of making the word "aether" plural in that context is non-sensical. In the context of Michelson-Morley interferometers there is only one aether: the luminiferous aether, a hypothetical physical substance that exists in three-dimensional space. Quantum fields are not even remotely like that. They are not physical. They do not exist in 3-D space. They cannot be directly measured. Physical objects are emergent properties of fields, but they are not "made of" fields. The constituents of a piece of lab equipment are particles, not fields.
There’s now a large segment (and several generations) of society for whom the system has never worked, even if the growth of retirement accounts masks the loss of wealth and well-being.
Some people prefer to believe the media they consume over their lived reality.
My parents fall into this trap, they keep telling me things have never been so bad yet they live materially better lives than their own parents and their children.
Populism is best understood as the general public asserting elites have “broken the deal” that legitimizes their rule — and the public withdrawing their assent from the regime.
They are correct that the technocratic managerialists on the past century have failed — and failed in a way damaging to the state/nation. (For US and EU at least.) In so far as we’re all discussing that (and have been for several years), they’ve been wildly successful.
We come from decades if not a century of spectacular growth and yet "technocratic managerialists have failed", what, where, how?
The United States comes out of 25 years of unprecedented growth, in spite of two major economical recessions and has outpaced the majority of advanced economies.
You’re using top line numbers to make that assertion, but gains are not evenly distributed.
There’s prolific ink spilled on the failures of technocratic managerialism over the past 40 years as gain become decoupled — and particularly over the past decade as the breakdown has reached critical mass.
I am not a supporter of Nigel Farage and his many different parties in the UK ('Reform' just being the latest incarnation), and I don't believe his policies offer any real answers.
But what the rise of Reform does show us is the utter disillusionment with the mainstream parties of the UK, who have spent the last several decades afraid to make meaningful changes. They tell people they can't have what they want because it would be too risky/expensive/whatever. We can't do that, the bond markets won't like it. We're running high on debt so we can't afford to make this better. Here, I'm going to add 0.4% to this tax so we can give this service an extra 0.3% budget.
All the while government takes more in tax every year but the country feels like it's in a state of managed decline as services struggle. People wonder where all the money is going and there's no particularly good answer. And the managerial politicians' cautious approach hasn't led to economic growth either, so people don't feel like things are getting any easier.
With that background it's hardly surprising that the populace flock to someone loudly offering change, even if it's bullshit change.
(I left the UK a few years ago but I do visit and keep up on the news. Australia is on a similar path but less extreme, though with accelerating house prices and other forms of inequality, and the collapse of our traditional centre-right, expect things to get more populist in the coming years)
> People wonder where all the money is going and there's no particularly good answer.
That's because people don't want to open their eyes, it's mostly going in pensions and public services and is increasingly more paid with debt.
As for decades and decades politicians have avoided to become unpopular by raising pension ages (or did it way too slowly), those are the results.
Look at what happened in France under Macron when he raised pension age or tried to stop the bleeding in public financing: raise in national populism yet again, as if the far right in France (or the far left) had some magic wand (same for reform UK) to stop the bleeding.
Actually, if you look at the rightist populist across Europe (Poland, Hungary, Italy) they made the problems worse by actually jumping into very (historically) leftist measures such as throwing even more money at the public (benefits, pensions) at the expense of public debt.
Poland feels it slightly less because it has more growth (largely attributed to the nearly 2 millions of Ukrainians that settled there bringing with them their skills and tons of money).
While I sympathise and agree with the point, it’s easiest to blame political parties but the electorate are also to blame.
They simply want to have their cake and eat it too. Plenty of times post-GFC where parties have tried or proposed much needed reform only for the voters, gerrymandered by the press, to throw their toys out of the pram. Theresa May’s “demantia tax”, Starmer’s winter fuel allowance for example.
Sadly it feels like it’ll probably be taken out of everyone’s hand, through some sort of economic crash or worse, to get people to be realistic again.
To me this is a prime example of the problem - they were really just fucking around at the edges anyway. It wasn't any sort of major reform. That old scene from Futurama often springs to mind -
"I say that your 3% Titanium tax goes too far!"
"And I say that your 3% Titanium tax doesn't go too far enough!"
Completely. That was the thing about the winter fuel allowance. It was largely a nothing burger and yet they couldn’t allow them to get it through. You could see almost immediately after they pulled back, what little confidence and ability the government had melt away. It’s been more of the same ever since
It's not my contention really that the UK or other nation can or can't afford to do things differently, it's more that that is the constant refrain coming from mainstream politics, along with a multitude of other excuses for relative inaction.
> I don't believe his policies offer any real answers.
Indeed, it's a shame that people are too dumb to realise they're just lining themselves up to be fleeced by a different "elite", instead of actual change.
Yes, that is the other side of the coin, that people are not just attracted to change because of loss of faith in the mainstream, but actually going over to support the populists.
And this is not aimed at you, but I do see all too often that people in the more mainstream spaces look at that side of the coin exclusively. "They're supporting reform because they're racist/stupid/brainwashed/propagandised". Sure, sure, those are definitely factors. But the opportunity to do that brainwashing and propagandising is there for a reason.
And those two effects feed off each other in a way that either one of them could never accomplish, the 'sum' (or rather the difference or negative sum) is much larger than those parts individually.
In the UK at least the biggest portion of welfare goes to the state pension.
It’s hard to deal with that when people have been paying into the system for their whole working lives on the promise that they will be looked after in old age.
It’s hard to see how you can fix this whilst pensioners continue to vote whilst young people don’t.
>It’s hard to deal with that when people have been paying into the system for their whole working lives on the promise that they will be looked after in old age.
They weren't paying "into the system". They were being taxed.
Treat it for what it was, and stop feeding the pyramid scheme.
Meanwhile we bail out large corporations on mere speculation they might fail. I don't know where you live, but around me a large chunk of the population have nothing to fail down to other than homelessness which is a huge drag upon the economy.
That's about 25% of UK government spending. 33% if you include pensions.
The UK does have an issue with a lowering number of people in productive work and ever more on various kinds of disability payout, it's true, but this -
If education is welfare then so is everything. Defence is welfare becuase before you might have to hire private security. Police and fire serviecs are welfare because they used to be private. etc....
Ok so can you name me a single piece of government spending that isn't welfare Or are you advocating for governments to just cease existing all together.
The answer is the ultra-wealthy. Those on welfare are getting increasingly poor, while the ultra-wealthy are getting increasingly wealthy. It's clear where the money is going, and it's not to poor people.
Evolution is highly path dependent and stochastic, so I’m not sure your logic follows.
Eg, the laryngeal nerve in giraffes is ridiculous — but having gone down that path before their current form, there’s little way to fix it. They’re now stuck in a local optima of long necks (good) with poor wiring (bad).
Vision has evolved numerous times, with estimates suggesting eyes or light-sensitive spots have appeared independently at least 40 to 65 times, possibly even 100 times, across different animal lineages.
Hearing has evolved numerous times independently, at least six times in major vertebrate groups (mammals, lizards, frogs, birds, crocodiles, turtles) for airborne sound and at least 19-20 times in insects
Vision and hearing have evolved so many times because they give an absolutely huge survival advantage.
To my knowledge, photosensitivity has arisen a few times independently and eyes again a few times from shared photosensitive receptors in animalia but I'm fairly sure hearing in the groups you mention is a tetrapod synapomorphy.
Yes it it path dependent; my example alludes to it. Birds benefit from being able to sense the magnetic field for navigation precisely because they evolved the ability to fly, and the endurance to do that over long distances. In that context, not losing your bearing is a fitness advantage.
A new MUD needs a way to build several thousand rooms, mobs, items, etc. LLMs can help with that process, though I wouldn’t trust them alone with things like balance.
Similarly, existing MUDs adding new areas need hundreds of rooms, mobs, items, etc. In my experience MUDs tend to stagnate when there’s no new content for long time players.
Some of the coolest MUDs I played in had effectively only two useful rooms, and no mobs or items to really speak of. They were barely more than a couple of IRC chat rooms, but with the ANSI colors support and complex script languages a MUD Engine directly over telnet could provide to a good MUD client.
There were far more genres of MUDs than just the Diku-style ("EverQuest-like", to use as analogy the graphic MMO that took a lot from the Diku-style of MUD) that needed to be "endless" content farms of mobs and items and new areas full of more mobs and items.
But also many of the fan favorite Diku-style MUDs were procedurally generated and no one was actually building all those thousands of rooms/mobs/items by hand even then. In theory you could use an LLM as a part of procedural generation process, but that's not the kind of content I would have wanted from a good MUD at the time I was heaviest playing MUDs. (But then I also didn't play many Diku-style/Diku-inspired MUDs, either. I was more on the Socializer side of things at the time.)
I’ll admit YMMV and my comment should’ve been better scoped — but it sounds like you’re not disagreeing that for those, LLMs are useful in the way I suggested.
But yes, targeted suppression/oppression (depending on your allegiance) will almost certainly use jamming — in fact, I’ve spoken with some Antifa about how they jam EMS frequencies at their events.
reply