skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on On vulgar materialism in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...]

    From the article:

    In 1914, before the First World War, there was this belief: “a European war would be economically disastrous, the moneyed classes won’t let it happen”. Europe went to war anyways, and the war was in fact an economic disaster as everyone knew it would be. Why were those people wrong? Because the rich were not in control: the Tsar and the Kaiser and the Emperor were in control.

    I thought of this in 2022, in the lead up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, whenever I would read someone argue: “Russia invading Ukraine would be economic suicide, the oligarchs won’t let Putin do it, they want to keep their yachts and villas”. Then Putin did it anyways, and the oligarchs had their assets in the West seized. Because the oligarchs are mis-named. They have no political power whatever and live and die by Putin, who appoints them to run stuff, and they get to live well, as long as they are loyal. They are the recipients of political patronage, not the source of it. When the wars start anyways, the same cynical people change their tune, suddenly it’s the armaments industry that’s behind it all, the war was profitable after all.

    The default lens through which modern people look at the world is vulgar materialism: a stylized, populist version of historical materialism where everything is explained by money, states are weak, democracy is a fiction, corporations and the rich run the world, ideology and religion and nationalism and language have no explanatory power and are merely covers for secret, underlying material motives.

    Once you notice it, you see it everywhere: you’ll hear people say that the Rwandan genocide was a scam to sell machetes or the war in Gaza is about oil or ISIS beheadings are caused by a lack of economic opportunity. People on the right justify skepticism of medicine by invoking Big Pharma, and climate skepticism on climate scientists seeking grant money. Glyphosate is probably the most studied molecule in history at this point, but no amount of studies will convince people it’s safe, because corporations are evil.

    [...]

    Second, we can ask: in the real world, does money give you influence over the state? To some extent, yes. Some lobbying efforts succeed. America is one of the few countries in the world where it’s legal to advertise prescription drugs to the public, for example. But corporations don’t have veto power over the state. If e.g. Pfizer spends billions on a clinical trial, and some guy at the FDA says no, and wipes that investment, who wins? The FDA wins. Pfizer can’t do shit.

    There’s also an invisible graveyard problem, where the success of lobbying is very salient, because it’s often shockingly offensive. But there are many contrary cases that are less salient because, well, if you ban something, it doesn’t happen. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not approve a single nuclear reactor from its creation in 1975 until Vogtle 3+4. What has Westinghouse done about that? Nothing successful, apparently. It’s not like they’re getting paid to not build reactors.

    Big Tech has a lot of smart people and a lot of money. Do tech billionaires run California like a private fiefdom? Reader, they don’t even run San Francisco. The best they can do is maybe help a slightly more moderate Democrat get elected as mayor.

    9 votes

  3. Comment on California legislature agrees to upload driver’s licenses to national database in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Withdrawing its opposition under behind-the-scenes pressure from Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawless threats from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the California legislature has agreed to fund and revise state law to authorize the upload of information about all driver’s licenses and ID cards issued by the state to the private SPEXS national ID database operated by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA).

    The budget compromise between Gov. Newsom and the legislature announced last night includes “guardrails” intended to give an illusion of protection for license and ID data.

    [...]

    Once this data is transferred to AAMVA, components of the DHS or other Federal or state law enforcement agencies will be able to obtain it from AAMVA by court order. Such a subpoena or warrant could, and probably would, include a gag order prohibiting AAMVA from disclosing it to the state of California or to the individuals whose data is disclosed.

    [...]

    That data could be misused in many ways, but it’s especially likely be weaponized against immigrant and transgende Californians who are already being targeted by Federal agencies and other states.

    The summary of the proposed “budget trailer” bill released last night says that it “Limits data sharing to only that required by federal law.” But that’s not true. “Compliance” with the REAL-ID by California or any other state is optional, not required. Neither the Federal REAL-ID Act nor any other Federal law requires, or could require, California or any other state to share any data with AAMVA, a private nonprofit corporation.

    3 votes

  5. Comment on Generals.io: a simple yet very cool online real time strategy game in ~games

    skybrian
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    Is there an exaplanation somewhere about what this game is about and how to play?

    Is there an exaplanation somewhere about what this game is about and how to play?

    2 votes

  6. Comment on Generals.io: a simple yet very cool online real time strategy game in ~games

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Oops, original post is here.

    Oops, original post is here.

    2 votes

  7. Comment on Five million Americans dropped ACA health insurance after the GOP let prices rise in ~health

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Five million fewer people are currently enrolled in ACA marketplace plans compared to the record high reached last year. More than 1 million fewer people picked a plan for 2026, and then 4 million more either disenrolled or failed to pay their premiums and therefore dropped coverage.

    Prices in the market skyrocketed after President Trump and Republicans in Congress failed to extend extra financial help for enrollees last year. The Department of Health and Human Services published a report about the data on its website Friday.

    The report says 19.2 million people are currently enrolled in ACA insurance now.

    At its high, 24.2 million people were in the ACA marketplace in 2025, according to government figures.

    [...]

    The higher health insurance costs are tough for consumers in an economy still plagued by overall inflation. As congress let the prices go up, people made tough decisions about family budgets, where to work, whom to marry and more.

    [...]

    It's also a problem for insurance companies, several of which have announced they will not be participating in ACA markets next year, including Cigna.

    5 votes

  9. Comment on Gander social launching on Canada Day in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    For me the issue is that they haven't published any technical details at all about how their system will work. Maybe they'll do that after they launch?

    For me the issue is that they haven't published any technical details at all about how their system will work. Maybe they'll do that after they launch?

    2 votes

  10. Comment on Gander social launching on Canada Day in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
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    I’m wondering if Gander uses regular PDS’s that interoperate with Bluesky. There’s no technical information that I was able to find. If you have an account, does your account have a dtd? Do tools...

    I’m wondering if Gander uses regular PDS’s that interoperate with Bluesky. There’s no technical information that I was able to find. If you have an account, does your account have a dtd? Do tools like pdsls work with it?

    Gander claims to use AT Proto and to somehow make sure your data stays in Canada, but both can’t be true if it participates in AT Proto in the normal way, because PDS’s are public and designed to be replicated without asking permission. (Bluesky is designing a new protocol called Spaces to allow more privacy.)

    3 votes

  11. Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news

    skybrian
    Link
    Man with same name as U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan is eligible for Alaska’s primary ballot, judge rules …

    Man with same name as U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan is eligible for Alaska’s primary ballot, judge rules

    Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews’ ruling overturns a June 15 decision by Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher to disqualify the challenger and keep him off the primary ballot. Matthews’ ruling can be appealed to the state Supreme Court.

    Attorneys for the state have said Tuesday is the deadline for a final ruling so that ballots for the Aug. 18 primary can be printed.

    The judge ruled that the Division’s decision to exclude Dan J. Sullivan because his candidacy was not “in good faith” was not based on the Constitution, Alaska law or the Division’s own regulations. The retired teacher from the small fishing community of Petersburg filed to challenge the incumbent.

    …

    The challenger Sullivan has said that sharing a name and party affiliation with the incumbent gave him “an instant megaphone.” But the 69-year-old retired teacher and former U.S. Forest Service employee said he had considered a run for some time and had grown frustrated with the senator.

    He initially was certified on the state’s candidate list as Dan J. Sullivan, with the senator listed as Dan S. Sullivan and identified as the incumbent

    3 votes

  12. Comment on US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It depends what hype you were listening to. It's supposed to be pretty good.

    It depends what hype you were listening to. It's supposed to be pretty good.

    1 vote

  13. Comment on Base Power brings cheap batteries to residents in power-starved PJM in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    PJM Interconnection, which serves 67 million people across 13 states from the mid-Atlantic to the Midwest, has become a poster child for how not to keep up with soaring energy demand. Startup Base Power is taking a whack at that problem by installing a network of unusually large home batteries in one corner of that regional grid.

    Starting today, the first 2,000 customers in Illinois utility ComEd’s territory who sign up with Base Power can get a 40-kilowatt-hour home backup battery for just $95 up front. Subsequent customers will pay $295, still a mere sliver of the $10,000 or more that a backup-capable home battery normally costs. All these customers will then buy retail electricity from Base Power at a 25% discount to the prevailing ComEd rate, which was 10.4 cents per kilowatt-hour this summer. Customers sign a 12-year battery agreement, but can pay a $500 deinstallation fee if they want out early.

    This business model gives customers in Chicagoland more options for cheap and resilient power while also giving Base Power the rights to operate the battery fleet in response to broader market dynamics. Base Power will be adding capacity in the northwesternmost territory of the constrained regional grid, but its unique model allows it to avoid PJM’s ossified procedures for expanding large-scale grid production.

    “We are deploying capacity behind the meter at the residential home, where an interconnection already exists, so we don’t wait in the interconnection queue,” said Base Power’s founder and CEO Zach Dell. ​“There’s some work around that, but it’s certainly less onerous and much faster than the large-load interconnection queue.”

    PJM famously hosts the densest corridor of data centers, in northern Virginia, but the AI buildout has taken off in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania as well. While hyperscalers stare down yearslong waitlists for new gas turbines to meet their colossal power needs, Base Power can install miniature power plants every day, which add up over time.

    [...]

    Several layers of policy and regulation made Illinois the right entry point for Base Power in PJM. The state allows retail competition, so Base Power can sell power directly to customers. However, it still has to get permission from a wires utility to hook up the batteries to the distribution grid, and ComEd stood out as a partner.

    [...]

    Base Power will also tap into a new Illinois policy to encourage virtual power plants that was created by the Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act, which became law in January. Starting this summer, battery customers can receive a rebate if they install a battery and agree to discharge it to the grid for multiple hours during the evening peak on a certain number of summer nights. It’s a simple way to ensure that the batteries make themselves useful, and Base Power will apply that rebate to support its very low pricing.

    3 votes

  15. Comment on Pre-modern armies for worldbuilders, part III: paying for it in ~humanities.history

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Now I should be clear here: dealing with costs in non-monetary ways doesn’t make those costs go away. Someone, somehow has to bear the costs, regardless of if the state pays in grain or coin or tax remission or simply makes someone do it for free (in the latter case, the forced laborer is bearing the costs). In all of these cases, labor still has to be taken out of the civilian economy and it has to be subsisted while it does something military in purpose, be that soldiering itself or providing for military capital. Just because something isn’t paid for in money does not make it ‘free.’

    However, it is also the case that the cash revenues of many states are both really complex and often quite limited. The thing to understand is that these are generally traditional polities with tax regimes that are also customary and traditional, which is to say that the ruler often has very limited latitude to simply change the system without triggering intense resistance. As a result, rulers often focus on developing revenues in the areas where they do have substantial latitude, even if those areas are smaller parts of the overall economy (remember: most of the economy is in farming).

    [...]

    A lot of tax systems, when one looks closely at them, have these sorts of quirks. Roman taxes were, for instance, divided into two categories: tributum (a property tax based on land) and the vectigalia, which covered a wide variety of state revenues from things like renting state owned land or state monopolies (as on silver mining). Rates of tributum outside of Italy (where the tax wasn’t collected after the 160s, since the whole point of having an empire is to make someone else pay taxes) were often set by truly ancient tradition, with the Romans generally preferring (for reasons of local stability) to preserve whatever taxes existed before they conquered a region, merely redirecting them to the Roman treasury (the aerarium Saturni). But that too might mean that while Roman revenues could be vast, they could also be remarkably inflexible as changing tax rates on a region was a breach of tradition which could provoke instability (and was ‘being a bad emperor’ to boot!). The workaround of all of this was the emperor’s private purse: property of successive emperors becoming a parallel form of revenue called the fiscus (the word for a household’s private money supply, literally a box of cash in the house), which at least notionally could be a bit more flexible.

    In short, these state revenues tend to be messy, complicated and idiosyncratic, the product of generational layers of both innovation and stubborn tradition. But even as an economy grows, state revenues may stay stubbornly static.

    [...]

    When the state shifts an expense downward to individuals or communities, we say that the cost is devolved on to them. Devolution is thus a strategy for shifting costs off of the state balance sheet and given the above discussion, you may already be able to see the value: for a polity that has a lot of economic activity happening which (because of low administrative capacity, sticky traditions or a lack of coinage-based economics) it cannot effectively tax, devolution provides a means of shifting military costs directly onto those economics actors.

    In historically-inspired or fantasy worldbuilding, this is a strategy that is often both neglected and unintentionally evoked. It is neglected in that it is rarely explicitly placed as part of the system: no one says, “oh, the town guards have to buy their own equipment” and generally the town guards never look as motley as they ought if that were the case. On the other hand, the basic nature of the ‘adventuring party’ involves a lot of devolved costs: the state needs monster hunters, but it expects those hunters to equip and supply themselves and often doesn’t do much to pay them (though part of this is ‘payment in loot,’ discussed below). But cost devolution was very common and worked on both smaller and larger scales.

    [...]

    That said, the recruitment principle matters a fair bit here. You can compel farmers to reach into their own resources a little bit, but if you want them to really dig deep for a war effort, they need to motivated by something beyond compulsion. Systems that devolve heavy infantry service – which demands a considerable investment in armor – are generally entitlement-principle recruitment systems. We see this with the hoplite armies of ancient Greece, the citizen-militia armies of the Roman Republic and also the heavy infantry militias of many medieval towns: what gets these men to work harder in order to afford to be able to shell out for that expensive equipment is the fact that their status in the community and their political position in the community are connected to it. Polities that are unwilling to devolve any political power to the commons are going to struggle to get the commons to buy expensive equipment or be highly motivated on the battlefield.

    [...]

    Taking loot, meanwhile, was an expected part of nearly all pre-modern warfare and so the promise of loot was a regular inducement for service. What I want to note here is that the promise of loot was almost never sufficient inducement: it was very rare for armies to serve only for loot. Instead, promises of loot were layered on top of other recruitment principles: loot and pay, loot and social status, loot and a role in the community. And that should make sense for two reasons. First, loot is never guaranteed, it requires winning, which generally only one side is going to do. Indemnities – which unlike loot, flow entirely to the state, rather than at least partially to individual soldiers – require winning the war and imposing a peace and again, only one side is generally in a position to impose indemnities (and often neither side is!).

    [...]

    This is something, I will note, that RPG-economies (both table top and computer) get quite wrong. The problem is three-fold on the one hand, these games invariably underestimate the cost of simply subsisting even a small adventuring party. Food and basic clothing consume quite a lot of resources in a pre-modern context, but that would be irritating to players and so it is often ignored or the cost reduced massively. Second, the loot gained is often over-valued, with itemization systems that fail to take into account that an old, busted hauberk pulled off of a corpse is not going to command the same market value as a shiny new one, freshly crafted to order.

    But most importantly, these economies fall apart because they assume an insane amount of fighting and an absurd ‘win rate.’ Recall that, for an aged hoplite, having been in three battles was quite a respectable number even in a very violent period in ancient Greece. By contrast, your typical Dungeons and Dragons adventuring party has been in three battles before they unlock their subclass features at level 3. Moreover, most of the combatants on the losing side of a battle typically flee. In a battle between two armies of 10,000 men, we might expect the winning army to have lost around 500 men (5%) and the losing army to have lost perhaps 1,500 (15%), so that is 9,500 survivors splitting the loot of 1,500 fallen (2,000 even if they’re willing to rob dead comrades). So while your D&D party or Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord company sustains itself by splitting the loot of dozens of foes for every party member, in an actual army, you’re lucky to get your ~1/6ths share of a fallen foe.4 Loot is still a factor, but one cannot expect to run an army on it, long-term.

    That said, loot distribution can have interesting distorting effects even if it isn’t enough to relieve the whole burden of running an army. Loot is a high-variance sort of thing: many soldiers get none, but some soldiers, if they are lucky to be on the right campaign, might get a great deal, potentially enough to alter their social position and status. Again, this simply cannot happen to everyone in a society, but it can happen to select individuals. Some of Alexander’s soldiers did get rich off of his conquests and certainly some Romans did too, although it is worth noting that in most societies, the structure of power channels looted wealth upwards: most of it ends up in the hands of the elite (as was certainly the case for both of those examples). Often this was institutionalized, with the proceeds of conquest being distributed in shares based on rank, with higher ranks getting a larger slice of the pie.

    6 votes

  17. Comment on US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    The way they exaggerate a talking point about a possible loan guarantee into a “asking for a bailout” shows why they’re not to be trusted. At the same time, I don’t see why someone at OpenAI...

    The way they exaggerate a talking point about a possible loan guarantee into a “asking for a bailout” shows why they’re not to be trusted.

    At the same time, I don’t see why someone at OpenAI thought that could possibly happen.

    8 votes

  18. Comment on US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    The stated goal of having only a limited release of Mythos was to allow defenders to patch security bugs in important software before attackers get a chance to exploit them. I think that still...

    The stated goal of having only a limited release of Mythos was to allow defenders to patch security bugs in important software before attackers get a chance to exploit them. I think that still applies?

    I suppose you can twist that into “have access before competitors do” but it depends on what kind of competition you mean. We shouldn’t want to be neutral about the arms race between patching security bugs and exploiting them.

    2 votes

  19. Comment on US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    When did OpenAI ask for a bailout?

    When did OpenAI ask for a bailout?

    8 votes

  20. Comment on US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Nobody's asking for a bailout. Why bring that up?

    Nobody's asking for a bailout. Why bring that up?

    14 votes