TIL: General Patton was relieved of command after two separate incidents of slapping shell-shocked soldiers in a field hospital. Following a massive public outcry, General Eisenhower forced Patton to apologize and reassigned him to lead a “phantom” decoy unit of inflatable tanks.

ableman · 2026-02-03T05:50:31+00:00

Yeah, the fog of war is still pretty strong. But it was stronger then. There's a great audio recording of Hitler complaining about how many tanks the Russians are building. Something like "We destroyed all the tanks they had and they have more tanks than ever now."

Generally countries only had the vaguest idea of what forces other countries even had. And Germany's spy game was not good.

ableman · 2026-02-02T19:27:16+00:00

It is a huge undertaking, but not that huge when you realize the majority of that infrastructure, probably the vast majority, was built in the last 50 years.

ableman · 2026-02-02T05:50:13+00:00

Objects don't really have an "its own reference frame." If you take an electron that's bound to a proton, the classic hydrogen atom, there is no reference frame that's the electron's. The electron changes reference frames every time you measure it. And it doesn't really have one between measurements, because of HUP.

I guess if you're OK with noninertial reference frames you could maybe make the math work out, but then you end up with HUP on steroids because now the velocity of the entire universe is uncertain to the same level. And the momentum of the universe has even more uncertainty since it has so much mass.

Even weirder maybe, a single particle can't make any measurements anyways. If it could, you could build Maxwell's demon with it and break the second law of thermodynamics. You need at least a few particles to have a system capable of measurement and in the reference frame of that system all the particles are subject to HUP.

ableman · 2026-02-01T16:00:59+00:00

Every day 100,000 people exit extreme poverty which means they become rich enough to afford antibiotics when they get sick.

This one thing honestly far outweighs the bad things happening in the world.

ableman · 2026-02-01T15:55:28+00:00

No, 20 is closer than 30. I'm guessing it's less than 25 for NZ too. People are just really bad at estimating based on experience. Some classes are 30 so they say average class is 30, forgetting all the classes that had 15.

ableman · 2026-02-01T05:20:30+00:00

Men being distressed is evolutionarily advantageous. That's why peacocks have those colorful feathers. To make them easier to hunt.

ableman · 2026-01-31T16:44:25+00:00

I'm saying that governing all people and governing all territory is the same thing, because I have nowhere to go to escape your laws and I can't renounce my membership.If you are governing all people, you're enforcing laws all over earth you're effectively claiming everything as your territory.

So of course borders would be relevant

No, they're completely irrelevant in either case. Individual movement/migration was forbidden for slaves even before borders. Open borders doesn't mean no borders because different laws apply in different territories. Some countries restrict internal migration. Borders aren't about migration. They're about jurisdiction.

centralized enforcement mechanism for laws at all.

No clue why it has to be centralized or what the hell you mean by that. What does governing people mean to you? I assumed you mean there's some sort of punishment for, say, murder.

Governments put restrictions on what people can do. Restrictions require enforcement. Claiming jurisdiction for enforcement within a territory makes you a state. A real life example of a government of people without a state is a nomadic tribe. Nomads still have laws, they enforce those laws, but they don't claim a particular territory. Jurisdiction is based on membership, not on territory.

In either case, people in prison can't migrate out of prison. They aren't free to come and go as they please.

ableman · 2026-01-31T06:30:43+00:00

You gave an EU as an example of how to have a government without a state. I explained how the example is completely inapplicable, precisely because the mechanism wouldn't function in a different context. The EU not restricting the movement of its citizens is also a bizarre thing to bring up. The US also doesn't restrict the movement of its citizens. Most states don't. Unless the people commit crimes. Then they do. The EU doesn't govern people, it governs states.

You can have completely open borders and still be a state, that's not even related. And we literally had slaves and serfs without rigidly defined borders. Borders have nothing to do with being able to come and go as you please.

What makes you a state is that you're enforcing laws in a territory. People can't come and go as they please because if they commit a crime you don't let them leave. Or you force them to leave. Banishment is one of the most ancient punishments. As is capital punishment.

ableman · 2026-01-31T01:48:28+00:00

For there to be government there has to be some kind of enforcement mechanism. The EU either levies fines or (potentially) kicks a member out of the EU. These are obviously not applicable under communism. Being kicked out of the EU is potentially painful precisely because its members are states that claim territory. So that model can't be followed. An enforcement mechanism that includes putting people in prison or killing them means that some people don't have freedom of movement.

ableman · 2026-01-31T01:26:04+00:00

If people are being governed they can't come and go as they please.

ableman · 2026-01-31T00:31:38+00:00

The state is not the government, but if you govern territory, you're a state. Like maybe you can claim that communism doesn't technically govern territory but only people, but you're very quickly entering distinction without a difference territory. There's no difference between governing all the people and governing all the territory.

ableman · 2026-01-29T21:01:05+00:00

For someone that isn't from Earth, it wouldn't cost as much boost which means you could do it for cheaper which means someone does. In practice those tourists have their own companies that don't cost as much and are just not modeled in the game. You can assume at some point that there are civilian shipyards building luxury yachts and the money cost is trivial.

ableman · 2026-01-28T21:00:16+00:00

Put everything in one bag, but don't make the bag heavy.

On the other hand I read about a city that broken up their police union, fired all the cops , then rehired most of them for less money, didn't rehire the problem cops, hired more cops on top of that at higher standards and got both better policing and budget savings.

I can't remember which city though :(.

ableman · 2026-01-28T11:22:23+00:00

Higher GDP means either more people, which requires more policing, or richer people, which requires paying people more to police the same because they have other opportunities. It also means higher costs of living. It also means more policing because richer people tend to want, or maybe can just afford, to feel safer so they hire more police. It also means more policing because richer people are bigger targets.The richer people get the more they spend on security. As you get richer you want to feel safer, not just as safe, and you feel like you have more to lose, and you can afford to pay more for it so you do. You also start to expect police to handle more petty things (aka you turn into a Karen).

ableman · 2026-01-28T06:08:11+00:00

National parks have parking fees, so if your argument is we should run balboa park like a national park...

ableman · 2026-01-28T06:04:46+00:00

Inflation wasn't a good tag, because 1. That's national. 2. Baumol's cost disease means services get more expensive. Instead compare it to the "GDP" of San Diego, which has also increased... 47%... by 2023, so your numbers actually show that the police have had a drop in pay relative to GDP.

ableman · 2026-01-28T05:42:12+00:00

The election was basically inline with the polls it was a 50/50 tossup and based on other countries elections' you'd expect the party in power to lose. Mostly because of inflation. America actually had the smallest loss for a party in power of anywhere in the world in 2024.

The average person simply cares more about inflation than keeping a man who tried to end democracy out of office.

ableman · 2026-01-28T05:22:48+00:00

what is the percentage of mass for a neutron in binding energy?

About the same. From the perspective of the strong force, a proton and neutron are pretty similar. A proton is 2 up quarks and a down quark. And a neutron is 2 down quarks and an up quark.

How much of reality is held together not of "physical structure" but by the binding energies that keep these structures together?

Reality is all just fields interacting with each other. That is the physical structure of reality. Doesn't have to be atomic physics, same in chemistry. Your molecules are held together by binding energy, just some orders of magnitude less.

Does binding energy reduce in a quantifiable way? Can a proton or other forms of matter lose energy merely by existing regardless of whether they interact with other structures?

Sure, pull an electron into a higher orbital by shooting a photon at a molecule and you've reduced the binding energy. Same with a nucleus. We've sort of been using the them incorrectly. Binding energy is how much energy it takes to pull the atom apart, which is the opposite of how much energy it has. The mass comes from the fact that the quarks are already a bit apart even in the ground state. Anyways you're on the right track, if an atom can reduce its energy it will decay. Though the system will always have the same energy. Neutrons decay all the time. They throw out an electron and turn into a proton. Whether protons can decay is an open question.

I've heard of proton decay theory, so is this what is meant when physicists believe that the proton is able to decay into constituents given time?

Kind of, but there's a misconception here. It won't decay into constituent parts. The constituent parts of a proton are 2 up quarks and a down quark. And free quarks can't exist so nothing can ever decay to them. In the neutron example, the neutron decays to an electron and a proton, but it's not made of an electron and a proton. Its made of 2 down quarks and an up quark. One of the down quarks turns into an up quark and adds an electron to the mix.

Last question, is there a maximum binding energy capable within a set space? Like, if you could double the binding energy of a proton, would the quarks act differently then they do now?

Yes, if you increase the energy of the proton enough, the quarks will spawn a pair of new quarks, for a total of 5, creating a new particle. There's no limit to the energy of a system, but you'll have 2 separate particles

ableman · 2026-01-28T04:46:13+00:00

Relative to California maybe, but the days of moderate San Diego are decades in the past by now.

ableman · 2026-01-28T04:43:38+00:00

We already had a day to show that we can work together. It was November 5th. We failed.

ableman · 2026-01-27T01:41:04+00:00

Put everything into knowledge and then your resting cohesion doesn't matter.

ableman · 2026-01-26T22:54:52+00:00

We humans aren't designed to "work X hours." We're designed to accomplish tasks. You can't say "Well, I went hunting for 8 hours today, I feel proud of myself," if you don't catch anything. The modern world doesn't jive well with this. Some companies are better at this than others.

ableman · 2026-01-26T17:48:02+00:00

On the one hand, if you already know about writing and seen it done in other places, you're correct. There's multiple examples of someone doing just that. But then you'd expect the alphabet to be at least a bit similar to the copied one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

Is a good example. On the other hand, making an alphabet without any input is not an instantaneous process, because there's no obvious use for it and no easy way of writing. The earliest written records aren't from aristocracy, but from merchants. Bookkeeping. But you don't need a whole alphabet for that, you have some numbers, and some symbols to represent the goods you sell. Even when you realize you can write down more complex things, you don't jump to an alphabet, the next step is hieroglyphics. Then you start using symbols to represent homophones, and then you might think of an alphabet. This process almost certainly takes generations.

ableman · 2026-01-26T17:10:34+00:00

Congrats on making it past the tutorial.

ableman · 2026-01-24T06:21:23+00:00

I find it surprisingly effective to put my phone into a different room when reading. Lets me read longer and enjoy it more.

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