Erik Haugen @ech@qoto.org

@VoxDei @freemo In a lot of counties – I mean places that this ruling is directed at – this is not remotely an honest description of what was going on. You could be a world-class expert in firearm usage or whatever and not get a CCW in these places. And the problem was not hoops to jump through to prove your expertise: they just didn't issue.

@freemo "130 miles to be at the lower end of LEO and service the ISS." But it's whizzing by at 5 miles/sec; most of the work is just getting up to speed, isn't it?

I guess the higher up you go the better, (less air etc?), but unless your elevator is quite a bit higher than these numbers you don't really get the main savings of a space elevator.

@freemo tl;dr – I don't have anything intelligent to add about maximum heights using rock or other modern material...

How high would it have to be? 100km to "space", but what application does a 100km space elevator have?

I found something saying that 10 miles is the max mountain height, but I think that was taking into account how fast mountain growth processes are vs. erosion, so I don't think it applies to this project: we can probably go quite a bit higher.

I agree it seems like if you go wide enough the rocks can probably support 100km without basically liquefying and squishing outward? I think? But I think the crust will deform a ridiculous amount, so be sure to take that into account. :)

@birwin @JustinMac84 @emma_cogdev @Sheril I hope you aren't driving your car to the nettle patch.

@Robru3142 @emma_cogdev @JustinMac84 @Sheril ah but see tree nuts there on the very bottom. Is that wrong?

@colo_lee @JustinMac84 @emma_cogdev @Sheril Yeah the graph might be more usable if it was in terms of per serving or something. (Also I'd like to see beans or something on there, as an alternative to meats – but soymilk is looking good so I'll go with that.)

One thing gets through accurately: clearly beef and other animal products, as they're typically farmed, are high-impact foods.

@Sheril I appreciate easy-to-consume data like this, because it seems like our assumptions about what choices are better or matter most are often (almost always?) wrong. (paper vs. plastic bags, cloth vs. disposable diapers, for example) So it's great to be able to focus our attention back on things that matter. thanks!

@JustinMac84 @emma_cogdev @Sheril It's fine – it's high up on the list because the impact per kg is high, but you don't consume very many kg of coffee per day. (I'm assuming this is kg of beans.)

I mean, nearly everything we consume has some kind of impact, of course, but I doubt drinking a cup of coffee has more impact than a dinner of prawns (the next lower item on the list).

I think one take-home point of this post is things like this: I would have assumed that buying beans and then brewing coffee myself was wildly less harmful than buying bottles of brewed coffee, just because of the transportation cost of the water in the coffee bottles. But maybe that assumption isn't quite right.

@freemo – "isnt any good way to verify it personally" that's part of it, I think – an unwillingness to believe anything you didn't personally verify. Like, go outside and look at the ground or whatever: it looks flat. So to accept this premise that it is round instead of what it obviously looks like, they'll want to see something *personally*.

At some point, to function at a certain level, so to speak, you need to take some stuff on trust: like things you learned in science class and so on.

Also: I think there's also a personality that wants to find meaning in everything – so like the idea that something happening implies somebody did it by design.

Both of these are maybe related by failure to apply Bayes' theorem. You kind of know this subconsciously: you think something is true with some probability, but then as you see evidence that probability in your mind changes according to the evidence. Basic underpinning of science, right? But you need to have some way of evaluating these probabilities and adjustments. If there's something missing in you that makes it hard for you to do it, then you're going to have the kinds of problems that I'm outlining.

Re. moon landings, you really need to be conspiratorially-minded (or wildly ignorant): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_evidence_for_Apollo_Moon_landings – if this is a conspiracy, then just wow.

@mikejackmin sounds good. It certainly suffers from the problem that a lot of people who care about (lowercase) social justice are very opposed to Critical Social Justice. But yeah you might be right this is a good term.

#politics

tl;dr – What is a good name for the thing people are criticizing with labels like "CRT" or "SJW" or "woke" (or in olden times "PC")?

There's a certain flavor of activism/politics that has picked up steam in the Left in the last 10 years, and especially the last 3 or so. The ideas aren't new, of course, but I think it's fair to say their market share has grown quite notably in recent years.

The core is:
* Concern with identity-based oppression: a lot of problems in the world are because some group with power is oppressing some other group (white->POC, cis->trans, rich->notrich, het->gay, etc, etc, etc) Ideas like intersectionality and so on.
* To address the above, question core liberal ideals that have failed us: if equal treatment under the law ends up not being so equal, then maybe stop trying and instead do something to enforce outcomes. Think: Kendi's anti-racism, as he so eloquently describes it. Or think: the "critical" in "critical theory".

Some additional comments: there's an emphasis on whose narratives we listen to – after all who best to talk about the problems faced by the oppressed group other than someone from that group? The oppression is systemic – not necessarily someone deliberately oppressing. It infects us all. Anticapitalist, usually.

So: leftist idpol, but with a skepticism of liberal values (here by "liberal" I don't mean Left as the word sometimes does in US politics)

It seems uniquely difficult to name and categorize political philosophies like this; it's never going to be a clean taxonomy, in a sense, where each person rigidly adheres to a menu of positions. Add to that a lot of the names given to these kinds of things are pejorative.

Given that, is there a good name for this? "Critical theory" & "western Marxism" describe adjacent scholarly traditions, but maybe not the pop-politics part of it, so maybe not ideal? "cultural marxism" is used for ~this, but is probably not accurate (it's not all that Marxist, etc) and might make people think you're an anti-semitic conspiracy-monger. "critical social justice" maybe?

@freemo @JonKramer @Free_Idealist @pyranose @georgetakei I do not want to weigh in on what counts as "left" or "right", but just what is this: "(66%) of the GOP beleive abortion should be legal under extenuating circumstances such as a dead fetus" – no! Pretty much absolutely nobody wants to ban whatever surgery is indicated for miscarriages/etc. Yikes!

This reminds me of something. Awhile ago, there was a poorly-worded bill in CA that righties were saying was going to legalize infanticide. When this was pointed out, it was immediately fixed of course to clarify that it didn't do that. But this didn't stop some people from continuing to scaremonger about CA democrats wanting to kill children or whatever. That scaremongering is absurd, and a ridiculous thing to do.

Spreading this idea that republicans want to force women to carry dead fetuses is equally asinine. You all should stop doing it.

@TruthSandwich @freemo ok this happening actually sounds somewhat possible.

@TruthSandwich @freemo to me the part that isn't comparable is that Stein (and possibly West) was in the general, and Kennedy won't be. So he is unlikely to take many votes from a contender in a swing state in the general.