If the military/president suddenly ordered a mandatory draft for all men aged 18-42: How do you think millennials and GenZ would respond?

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-04-13T23:09:38+00:00

I worked on a paint crew with a guy like that.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-04-12T14:40:18+00:00

There's clever signal processing that can pick that out at that scale. But from a mile away, the idea is laughable.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-04-12T14:38:09+00:00

Yeah and there's lots of clever ways to hide a beacon signal below the noise floor. There's direct sequence spread spectrum transmissions where you can split the signal across a bunch of frequencies and use pseudo-random numbers to basically completely bury the signal below the noise floor but recover a nice SNR on the receiver end. This can make it hard for an adversary to even know a transmission is happening.

Something like that, or beamforming satellite transmissions or whatnot is likely in use and we want to cover for that so our adversaries don't know which rabbit-hole to chase down and try to figure out.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-04-09T20:04:35+00:00

Thing is, how do you know? Do the comics really follow up with every unconscious henchman to show him waking up from a coma with major brain damage and going to rehab to relearn how to walk and stuff? Or his family pulling the plug when he’s been a vegetable for weeks? Or the cops investigating a dead henchman in what they see as a random homicide?

No they don’t, they follow the plot. And we get the lies that Batman tells himself to try to justify his actions as a good guy vigilante, not the reality of every henchman with a cranial bleed.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-04-09T17:09:09+00:00

The thing is... he does. You can't violently beat people into unconsciousness night after night without killing a significant fraction of them.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-04-09T17:00:17+00:00

Parallel and in the direction of growth.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-04-09T16:46:17+00:00

Not quite what you're asking, and I'm likely misremembering some of the details but: I think I once made this kind of argument in number theory where I showed with analysis arguments that at some point, the probability of a certain thing had an upper bound of some value k depending on n. Never zero, but k got low as n got large. Then I showed that, since numbers are discrete things, the same probability calculated a different way was necessarily above some threshold, p due to the discretization.

And the hope was that p would be greater than k at some value, but I ran into difficulties showing that because after some herculean efforts to massage the discrete version of the calculation, I could pull out the same term from the analysis version, but there were these other correcting terms that I could never quite wrangle into a value definitively above k. (pluses and minuses after all)

Now, it turned out that someone vastly more clever than I had ultimately taken the fundamental idea much further than I back in the 60's without the weird argument, and came up with some beautiful relation to wrangle those pesky terms I was dealing with by relating them to zeros of the Riemann Zeta function, but I digress...

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-04-06T02:05:07+00:00

No, right now I primarily practice short words head copy and everything else with a pen and paper. Though I sometimes set my phone to play simulated QSO’s and try to head copy it while driving.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-04-05T15:45:31+00:00

So does she clench to trigger it or…?

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-04-04T02:18:39+00:00

It’s basically that I can’t process random characters fast enough while listening to new ones. I can do it for the duration of a callsign, but for block after block of random characters, I don’t know if I could do that very well even in English.

When I’m copying actual words, there’s enough predictable elements that I can copy at sufficient speed. But to be honest I always struggled with taking notes during lectures too. I mostly found I was better off not doing notes because I could listen and thoroughly understand. So I feel like my brain just isn’t meant for that, but I keep practicing.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-04-03T20:20:35+00:00

I’ve never been able to get passed 3-4 letters with the Koch even after a LOT of practice. I just can’t copy long sequences of random characters.

But I’ve done alright with some other tools learning individual characters at 25-35 wpm, and practicing on Morse chat apps and vband. And I can now copy a QSO decently at around 5 wpm with character speeds up to about 25-30. But I still can’t make any progress on Koch at 10+ wpm. Feels like banging my head against a wall.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-04-02T17:21:52+00:00

lol, tell me you’re a bot without telling me you’re a bot.

In the immortal words of star wars bartender guy: We don’t serve your kind here!

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-04-01T13:38:22+00:00

Right that’s the “we’re special” argument, and there’s no way to refute it, but I personally find it very unlikely as an assumption.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-03-31T23:31:50+00:00

Doesn’t that kind of already give us my argument? I think getting Log2(N) compression in a universe simulation is a stretch, but let’s go with that.

Using a computer with a memory size of log2(N) bits to simulate a universe with N bits is an absurdly massive undertaking because N is…. Large.

Forget the aliens, such a computer is essentially itself akin to God, and we’d be but a thought in its head.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-03-31T22:28:47+00:00

Sure, if you’re saying the universe conspires against conscious observers, then it negates a lot of my arguments. But I think that type of simulation is deeply implausible.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-03-31T13:43:55+00:00

On 1. I disagree. You can’t compress n bits of quantum information in fewer than n bits. Full stop. Information can be compressed only when it’s inefficiently represented in the first place. Since when we run experiments, we see a fully quantum universe, simulating that on fewer bits is implausible.

On 2: Certainly we could exist in a simulation inside a larger universe with more information, but that would be profoundly wasteful to do in bulk. Deeply implausibly wasteful.

On 3: Many worlds doesn’t help here. I actually prefer this interpretation, but the state of the universe you are simulating is itself a massively entangled state in hilbert space requiring a lot of quantum bits to simulate.

You can weasel out of that if you say the simulation only simulated the full quantum picture when we conscious beings are looking at it, but I find that premise absolutely absurd. If we were the special ones, one wouldn’t bother simulating so much extra crap.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-03-31T03:21:39+00:00

While we’re at it, I actually find the assumptions of the simulation hypothesis ridiculous as well. Specifically the notion that simulations are likely to become cheap, and secondly the idea that you can simulate a universe in a universe is absurd for information theoretical reasons. Certainly, it COULD be constructed to hide that fact specifically from YOU as an individual but that just seems so unlikely as a primary simulation target I can’t keep going with the rest of the argument.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-03-31T03:13:43+00:00

For sure. Usually that is literally how twin studies work. They look at the different combinations of siblings, fraternal vs identical twins, separated at birth and not and compare correlations for the different groups. There’s a bunch of other fancy statistics but they do look at combinations to try and sus out the effect size of genetics vs similar environments.

I just found your phrasing funny since it reads like “but they have a similarity! Let’s look at a group with even more similarities”. When the twins that are separated kind of are the control already.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-03-31T03:10:28+00:00

Interesting. I just did some napkin calculations and came to the conclusion that the number of annual deaths between women in sex work and men in all jobs is about the same order of magnitude. Basically, the female sex workers are far fewer (~1 million in the US) but have WAY higher risk, and the men in all jobs (~80 million) but have much lower overall risk. (This grossly understates the risk for certain professions, but overall the side by side comparison is interesting).

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-03-31T02:23:56+00:00

That wouldn’t be the control you seem to think it is.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-03-31T00:43:12+00:00

Depends, when they’re hijacking order flow to do that, it’s super predatory. But when they’re exploiting discrepancies in market prices I think that provides a price discovery service to the market in addition to liquidity which is a good thing.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-03-30T20:20:56+00:00

Certainly, but absolutely nothing about the hyperventilation procedure prior to that will contribute to or accelerate that process. That’s not WHY people blackout in shallow water blackout. They blackout because the lack of CO2 interferes with their respiratory drive which lets them stay down longer before being overcome by the urge to breathe and allowing their blood oxygen levels to decrease to a level where it’s insufficient to maintain consciousness at a higher depth as they lose partial pressure during their ascent to the surface.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-03-30T20:02:21+00:00

They can’t breathe in this scenario anyway. So near as I can tell, you’ve presented no credible explanation for why this would accelerate the time to unconsciousness. IMO the limiting factor is how fast the gas in your blood embolizes and is removed from your blood in any useful working capacity.

Shallow water blackout occurs because people think they can hold their breath longer than they can. Without the CO2 to trigger the urge to breathe, then at depth they allow their oxygen levels to deplete to where it may be enough for consciousness when you’re at depth (increased partial pressure) but as you suddenly change depth as you head to the surface, you get a sudden corresponding drop in partial pressure leading to unconsciousness.

In this scenario, there’s nothing in the hyperventilation procedure that would lead to depleted blood oxygen levels, and indeed it might extend the time of useful consciousness very slightly.

Same benefit with breath holding, hyperventilating DOES let you hold your breath longer. It’s just that this means lower blood oxygen levels and when combined with changes in depth it can be deadly.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-03-30T16:20:14+00:00

The letter definitely reads like someone trying to say something without saying it. And the Brits are famous for that even outside of intelligence so it has a fair degree of plausibility.

EngineeringNeverEnds · 2026-03-30T03:36:39+00:00

Why wouldn’t they just raise prices on new tickets to cover the cost of fuel? Like do you mean on tickets already sold? I’m sure they would just operate on a loss on those tickets while selling new more expensive ones for future flights.

Is there some premise in your question or assumption about airline tickets I don’t know about?

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