blix

Patronage programs for people with advanced degrees is a woefully inadequate solution to the current economic pressures. Large segments of the first-world working and middle classes hollowed out by globalization had already turned against it before AI even came on to the scene. People are generally hostile to patronage directed towards people above them on the ladder.

the denouncing of heresy may be even more important.

You don't want the people to be uneducated, because you have no control over their thought processes, which could be dangerous an unpredictable. And it leaves space for someone else to educate them in way that conflicts with your interests.

Ideally, you would want them to be intentionally educated to a specific type of manipulable gullibility, where they are receptive to your messages, but resistant to messages from other sources.

The effort significantly predates the recent changes in US media ownership. I would actually argue that the ownership change is mostly orthogonal to the ongoing trend of centralization and top-down manipulation of digital information sources.

A shift change of the prison guards more than a material change to the prison.

I'm not gonna argue whether it is true or false, but the scale of the conspiracy you are proposing is pretty massive. Multiple orders of magnitude bigger than anything that is currently within the mainstream public consciousness.

In this case, I think a network of mostly independent actors whose interests happen to align makes more sense. But maybe sometimes those interests are a little different than what people commonly understand them to be.

It is not jist Bibi, but also the IAEA and other international organizations. And at least the last 5 US administrations. I suppose they could also all be in Israel's pocket though.

Iran's 60% enriched uranium stockpile is really not up for debate. Iran is happy to tell everyone that they have it. With the proper equipment, 60% can go to 90% in a single month. So the question is how advanced is the Iranian infrastructure for the final enrichment step, and (less commonly talked about) how ready they are to actually make a fission bomb out of that material. The latter task is not considered to be very hard, North Korea did it after all, so the main focus has been on the former. There does seem to be some decent information that the centrifuge array has been under active development at various points, and has been consitently, actively targetted by Mossad/CIA for at least the past 20 years or so. For example, Stuxnet was a joint CIA/Mossad operation that begain in 2005 and continued through both GWBush and Obama.

Unfortunately, even with some nice bribes from Obama, Iran was always a little cagey with the IAEA inspectors, and officially kicked them out in 2021. So after that, the only sources for the state of Irans nuclear infrastructure information effectively became Iran itself and Mossad.

I am not convinced that a population that just recently had 30k people die in a revolt is gonna immediately rally around their oppressors after a foreign power kills 2k. I have yet to see compelling evidence that formerly IGRC-hostile segments of the population have switched alleigances. It is possible. But one could also imagine an exhausted population that is tired of a goverment they despise putting a target on their backs. The Iranians I personally know suggest that the second idea is more true, but it is anecdotal evidence with heavy selection bias. Another factor is that Iran has an unstable food and water supply, and people who lack food and water tend to focus their anger on whoever is closest that has food and water.

The Trump administration is actively interested in the dissolution of the current global economic order. This is why they are relatively unbothtered by the global economic shock that is a Strait of Hormuz closure, whereas the globally-oriented neoliberal administrations of the past wanted to avoid this at all costs.

Destroying the gulf states would dramatically reduce the importance of the Strait, which would make mining it or otherwise shutting it down somewhat pointless anyway. It is a bit of mutually assured destruction, but the USA is probably in the best position of anyone to weather that storm.

I suppose it is more powerful in an absolute sense than just temporarily shutting down the Strait, but like Russia's nukes, I think the threat is more useful than the play itself. Unless they are just looking to take others down with them.

What action can Iran take today that they couldn't take a year ago? No one who has been paying attention should be surprised that Iran can shut down the straight. It has been a known factor for decades.

They have less leverage. The have so much less that they are forced to openly use their last and most powerful card for their survival, when they never have had to before. That is a position of weakness, not strength.

All policy aimed at preventing nuclear Iran has one goal: buy time. I think it is hard to argue that time has not been bought (though how much and whether the price was right is another question). The only semi-stable long term option is a friendly Iranian government. The IRGC's main purpose is to occupy Iran, so anything that makes them weaker, less stable and more decentralized improves the odds of successful internal revolt in the long run. It is really hard for me to see how any of this has made the IRGC more stable in the long run.

The threat of the strait closure has always been a major factor in Iran policy from all relevant nations, it is just now explicit. It's hard to take the Russia point seriously when the war forced both Russia and Iran to shift resources form the Ukrainian theater to the Persian Gulf; it seems to be close to a wash. It's also kinda silly to gas up using interceptors for their intended purpose as "heavy damage" or catastrophize about rounding errors in damage to USA assets, while simulatenously writing off the total effect of all USA/Israel actions as inconsequential.

Disruption to global fossil fuel supply chains was also a goal of this war, so I am not sure you should list it as a negative. In the current state of the world, USA interests and global economic interests are becoming increasingly decoupled, and one shouldn't assume they are automatically aligned.

Also this has probably done more to hasten the world's weaning off fossil fuels than any action by any other government.

The Pax Americana was already over when Russia siezed Crimea.

I inspect and modify my own weights literally all the time. I just do it on a more abstract level than individual neurons.

I call this process "learning"

I did some cursory research and that seems to be a common estimate for modern osmosis-based desalination energy costs.

If you have a better estimate, feel free to supply it.

Fukuoka's desalination plant treats about 16400 m^3 of water per day. Assuming 3kWh per m^3 of water, this works out to a time-averaged power consuption of ~2000kW.

The osmotic power plant generates about 100kW, so it's about 5% of the total desalination energy requirement.

Applied physics. I'd prefer not to get too specific. Most of my peers are working for the US DoD or DoE now.

I wish this comment was more representative of my personal experience in science.

Instead I got PIs happy to say that weak evidence "proved" their theory and to try suppress evidence that negatively impacted "fundablity". The most successful scientists I worked with were the ones who always talked like a PR puff piece.

The technology enables the policy. If the cost and risk were higher, there would be fewer strikes.

The issue is not really with the difference in impact between drone attacks and other types of aerial attacks, but with the dramatic increase in scale, resulting from reduced cost and risk.

It probably would have been more accurate to say something like "mass extra-judicial assasination/execution of individuals opaquely labelled as 'militants,' including US citizens, in foreign jurisdictions" instead of "drone strikes," but the latter is shorter and I thought would be understood as implying the former.

"Shocking" carries a meaning of a being sudden, surprising, or startling.

It's this aspect that is being challenged, not the emotional reaction.

Obama also created ICE as we know it today. And normalized drone strikes.

Using something similar to a benzene ring with spokes sticking out of it is absolutely a reasonable choice for depicting sodium hexametaphosphate in a schematic. This is actually a pretty common choice in scientific literature regarding this molecule.

experienced players who know their teammates well can reliably get 3-4s. if you only go for safe 2s against these opponents you will lose every time.

I've seen almost no one outside during the day all summer lol. Phoenix this summer has the deadest daytime sidewalks of any place I've ever lived.

My doctor told me after an intestinal surgery that I would never be able to eat vegetables again.

Do you really think the engineers building a robot to go into Fukishima have never once looked at the first handful of google results for "radiation hardened camera"?

I believe GP is a riff on the common joke among physicists: "Anyone who claims to understand quantum mechanics is either lying or crazy."

To be more specific in the case of magenetism, you can say that, for example, ferromagnetism arises from the alignment of magnetic moments into cohesive domains, where the individual magenetic moments arise on the atomic level from unpaired electrons in the d or f orbitals.

But if you poke at that (incomplete) answer a little bit, things start to get complicated. How exactly do magnetic domains align? What if there's a disruption in crystal structure? Are there other sources of magnetic moments? Where does the magnetic moment on an elementary particle come from? The answers to these questions get pretty complicated and questions like these motivate a lot of active scientific research.

Other than the typo in the equation, the Voronoi snippet is pretty straightforward and easily understandable.

It's probably the blog post author who doesn't understand this subject.

I'm just trying to answer your question, but I don't think you're exactly clear on what you want to know. It's ok, no need to get defensive about it.

Whether or not 'one end of the wire gets heavier' depends on what your doing. If you are using the wire to power an LED from a battery, then no, because electrons are removed from one end and placed into the other at equal rates. Charge and mass within the wire are both globally and locally conserved.

If you do something where charge/mass isn't conserved such as removing electrons from one side (i.e. by rubbing a fork on a carpet) or by using an electric field to 'tilt' the electrons to one side, you can create a (very small) mass imbalance. This activities are not usually considered to be useful electrical current.

In order to get a sustained current, you need to put electrons in one end and take them out from the other in equal numbers. Thus mass doesn't change.

However, if you're talking about static electricty, you can actually create a mass imbalance by taking a few electrons away from one side or putting some electrons on the other. It's a very, very, very small change in mass.

One of Maxwell's other equations links the E-field to charge density. You can't talk about the time derivative of the E-field without also talking about the time derivative of charge density.

It's true that interactions between charged particles invoke photons, but you can have charged particles (and their associated E-fields) travelling at constant velocity in a vaccum and still define an associated current density without considering photons. I'm not sure your interpretation produces a useful intuition for this situation.

One of the underlying ideas of the paper is that, in conventional metals where conduction band electrons are much more wave than particle, you can still measure when they 'enter' and 'exit' the material through perturbations in the field, that is bursts of photons that occur when electron waves interact with an obstacle.