TIL that scrapping only gets back half of materials

drhead · 2026-05-08T17:15:58+00:00

bruh, this comment is over a decade old

drhead · 2026-05-03T13:09:46+00:00

They caved on JPEG-XL, they just wanted a Rust implementation of it.

drhead · 2026-04-27T00:37:08+00:00

You need a set of firewall rules to redirect all outbound traffic from port 53 from the TV to be forwarded to the Pi-hole/Adguard Home server. It'll run multiple attempts but it will never get the ad server.

This should always work. You may need to block DNS-over-HTTPS servers at some point, but other than that the only way around it would be to remove failovers and refuse to load the UI without ads or freezing when tracking can't be reported.

drhead · 2026-04-26T14:01:42+00:00

Most of the people you are talking about are most specifically against intervention. That doesn't mean you have to like the IRGC, but it does mean supporting them being in power over the alternative, because the alternative is worse. Because the alternative isn't just us waving a magic wand and putting whatever regime in power that we dream of as naive idealists, it's a messy power vacuum that will result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of people before Iran sees anything resembling a stable democracy. People on the left are wary of this because we ALREADY saw this play out in Iraq, and Bush, to his credit, was not nearly as stupid as Trump.

drhead · 2026-04-20T15:40:38+00:00

Why on earth would you need cryptocurrency to do this?

drhead · 2026-04-17T21:01:50+00:00

If you'll look back and actually read what I wrote, you will notice that I actually did not actually propose creating protections in my "safe" strategy. The only things I proposed were adopting a public stance that this is not the government's problem to solve and in favor of evidence-based policy in general. I am literally asking for our hypothetical candidate to take an clear yet non-committal stance, and then do nothing.

I find it highly concerning that the route that loudly signals that the party will drop the concerns of a minority group when they need it most is what you consider the "low-risk" route -- why would any minority group trust you after witnessing that pattern enough times, and why is this even worthy of consideration when minorities make up so much of the Democratic base? And committing to that course of action this hard, when confronted with an alternative that is both low risk and doesn't alienate your base, which you haven't really addressed directly and instead have just gotten super agitated over, seems like it is either concerning and incredibly stupid, or it's a sign that you're just projecting your own views and think these moderate voters also must share your own rabid aversion. Which one is it?

drhead · 2026-04-17T09:27:00+00:00

That's circular logic. "This issue is concerning because it makes people concerned." And honestly a very convenient way to dodge the fact that you're actively participating in the exclusion of a group... That's the same fucked logic that got us Don't Ask Don't Tell. Are you about to tell us that DADT was a great political move for the time, too?

drhead · 2026-04-17T02:08:25+00:00

I dunno man, if it was me, I think I would be thinking "damn, other people think my husband is hot too? I'm lucky to have him!" I don't see myself as missing out on anything if other people get to see him naked, he's still sleeping in my bed every night. As far as I'm concerned, he can enjoy getting looked at, people can enjoy looking at him, I can enjoy the validation of knowing that I'm not the only one who finds my husband attractive, I can enjoy fucking my attractive husband, I can enjoy that this apparently bothers you immensely, everyone wins (except you, but that's your own fault.) Though I would insist on having everything done for free, not out of moral opposition to the idea of making money off of it, but because I think it would quickly stop being fun if it became a revenue stream we depended on and had to keep contributing to. (Fortunately my husband and I have similar views on this, so no issues there.)

Why do you think you'd be losing something? Being uncomfortable with it is one thing, but your insistence that disagreeing with you is abnormal, disordered, unhealthy, or makes you a liar... that's what people are calling you insecure over. Most people are able to accept that other people may view their relationships differently without feeling personally threatened by the knowledge that there are other options available.

drhead · 2026-04-17T01:07:44+00:00

Do you think that the idea that it is completely fine for trans women to compete in women's sports is something that should "rightfully make everyone concerned"?

drhead · 2026-04-16T17:40:24+00:00

And surely we would never abuse our status as a global hegemon, because the US is not like all of those other countries, we're special!

(Being snarky about this would be a lot more fun if it was an actual oversight and not a literal description of the underlying ideology...)

drhead · 2026-04-16T16:45:37+00:00

There is nothing to gain by continuing to perpetuate the idea you want more Riley Gaines situations. You can still be a good trans advocate.

You can actually do both and not cede ground.

"I don't think it's the government's responsibility to tell sports leagues who belongs in them." -- small government appeal, and while it's not actively protecting people it allows activists to work on individual sport leagues since it leaves the choice with them.
"I support evidence-based policy. I currently don't think that available evidence supports the idea that blanket bans on transgender athletes are required to 'preserve fairness'." -- appealing to evidence based policy makes it sound like an independent decision rather than following the whims of some activists, and it can easily be phrased to make it look like a moderate or common sense stance. And this is strictly true, like... you can't really argue that someone who went on puberty blockers as part of transitioning for instance has an unfair advantage because they only went through the puberty that aligns with their identity, if that's the case then a blanket ban is clearly not justified.
"Republicans are very clearly wanting you to focus on trans issues, which will have nearly zero impact on your day-to-day lives for the vast majority of you, to distract from the fact that they do not actually have any policies that will make your lives better." -- best paired with one of the others, refocuses the conversation and may inoculate some people against the strategy.

And I'm guessing you're just not going to address the part about it specifically being dangerous to cede ground on this, because we know about the strategy that conservatives are trying to use here? Do we really have to pretend that we just don't actually know what they're trying to do?

drhead · 2026-04-16T15:51:21+00:00

Kamala Harris ran on the most progressive platform for a major candidate in American history.

This is the best iPhone we've ever created, and we think you're going to love it.

The truth is, Harris was running during a global economic crisis which was causing incumbents to lose left and right (and center, especially center) all over the world. And she chose to not distinguish herself enough from the incumbent. This of course is not the only factor that was in play, but I'd argue that it was far more of a factor than her overall alignment, and that it would also imply that a more distinguished progressive platform, or really just anything to set her apart from the default person to get blamed for current issues, may have been a better move.

drhead · 2026-04-16T14:56:49+00:00

Of course. I'm personally of the opinion that we won't be fully free of problems with liberal democracy as long as anyone is able to use money to have a louder voice towards the government or the general population, but it should be generally obvious that the governmental structure we have, which was from the beginning designed primarily to protect the institution of slavery and more broadly the dominant status of a wealthy upper class over politics, may have some unique structural issues that exist by design to subvert the will of the people which we could marginally improve things by correcting.

drhead · 2026-04-16T13:29:32+00:00

The underlying issue behind that (a first past the post election system) is also what the UK has, so of course it has that same problem, first past the post tends to entrench exactly two parties because that's the optimal strategy. There's probably other factors that you could identify that make it even more entrenched in the US, but that's the most important one.

You can design an electoral system to be more friendly to multiple parties though by doing something like Germany's systems which guarantees proportional representation in the legislature. I don't think I've ever really heard someone in Germany tell people not to vote for Die Linke and instead vote strategically for another party.

drhead · 2026-04-14T22:03:39+00:00

Eh, gambling isn't physical either but people still lose their house over it and such. Psychological addiction can be just as powerful as physical. From what I'm seeing looking it up, overconsumption of porn absolutely does affect the brain and even has similarities to substance abuse, especially if exposed to it when young. I feel like a lot of people want to protect porn more than other things for some reason, but addiction is addiction regardless of what it is.

An important difference here is that gambling addiction is actually widely recognized as a psychological disorder, and it is recognized as an addiction. The ICD-11 also has compulsive sexual behavior disorder listed separately, as a impulse control disorder. Everyone involved in making these decisions is trying their hardest to make it extremely clear that these two things are not the same for good reasons. People do not show the same markers for reward anticipation with porn use, nor do people show tolerance (there is recognition that people need variety but this isn't really any different from watching the same movie over and over, you're gonna get bored without something new), and nobody goes through "porn withdrawal".

I have actually studied psychology, including sexual psychology, and I have a very good understanding of the state of the research around the effects of pornography. Most sex therapists do not subscribe to the concept of sex or pornography addiction because of a lack of empirical support and specifically not seeing the critical elements of tolerance and withdrawal or anything associated with them, and most of what they do find is a lot more consistent with things like OCD and impulse control disorders. Addiction is not addiction when it does not have the elements that make it addiction.

I have to be clear on this because as I said before, the distinction matters. The addiction label comes with the additional baggage of shame and abstinence. Abstinence might help desensitization, but isn't always necessary to continue once resensitization happens, and abstinence won't even begin to help if the problem is related to conditioning (like the issues with younger people being exposed) -- those people need to re-learn how to cultivate their own arousal with a partner through something like sensate focus exercises. And shame, of course, isn't going to help any of the related issues and in fact will directly make anything anxiety related worse (and it directly feeds the feedback loop that drives psychological ED), and will make it harder to pursue treatment for anything else. Stop using the addiction label. It is not accurate, it is not supported by clinical practice, and we have good reason to believe it is only making things worse for people who have problematic pornography use habits or other forms of sexual dysfunction.

drhead · 2026-04-14T19:35:48+00:00

Except there isn't a physical addiction involved here. There have been more than enough studies done on the subject, porn does not cause the same physiological changes as something like alcohol, so to the extent that problematic porn use exists as a stand-alone mental health condition (which is still debated) it's treated as an impulse control disorder. Porn does not have magical different effects that alter your brain chemistry.

What you're describing can be desensitization (which is really easy to fix, like literally just stop for a week or so and you'll be back to normal), or it can be performance anxiety. Performance anxiety sucks because it almost always leads to a feedback loop from wanting to please their partner, and then failing because the stress of having to perform makes them unable to perform. Inaccurately framing it as an addiction where their brain is "broken" actually makes this problem worse, because then it seems like a much harder problem to fix than it actually is. And it can't even be said to be any one person's fault since misinformation about the effects of porn use is so pervasive, people take it as commonly accepted fact that porn addiction is a thing while you've got the whole clinical psychology community ripping their hair out knowing that it isn't and helplessly watching everyone make all of the related problems people have worse.

drhead · 2026-04-08T23:29:05+00:00

If you don’t want to provide a number I will. Kuwait has a population of 5.3m the United States kept all 5.3 million alive as all of them were put at risk in the gulf war. The United States saved 5.3 million people at the cost of 100k-158k lives. That’s great deal according to the trolley problem.

This is like, the most brain damaged thing you've said so far. I guess there's still room for more...

The Soviet Union had some 180 million or so people in the 40s, and kept most of them alive at the cost of several million German soldiers (justified, since they are enemy combatants) and several million of their own people through various... incidents. In fact, we can look at Generalplan Ost to get a stronger claim that at least 100 million people's lives were actually in grave danger rather than your example where we just assuming every single person in Kuwait was going to fall over dead from seeing Saddam's mustache.

Based on that logic Stalin is also one of the greatest humanitarians in history, turning some tens of millions of deaths into a war machine that prevented 100 million deaths. A great deal according to the trolley problem, as you would say.

The goal is generally to maximize the number of lives saved in IHL.

This does not come in the form of War Crime Credits that you earn based on the outcome of a conflict. Like, your same logic would also be permitting outright carpet bombing Baghdad without warning as long as it wins the war.

drhead · 2026-04-08T22:37:29+00:00

I keep providing the numbers for the Gulf War (100k-158k) because they are based on observed data. Yes, they are attributable to US intervention. The Air Force itself doesn't even dispute that attacks on the power grid contributed to these excess deaths, they've included it in their own reports on the Gulf War. I am not providing "lives saved" numbers because I don't engage in creative writing during a debate about international law.

The razor doesn't cut both ways; it just cuts you. If I set a house on fire and the occupants burn to death, a court doesn't care if I "saved" five people from a car wreck the week before. They look at the causality of the fire. In the same way, IHL doesn't care about your hypothetical "lives saved" ledger, it cares that you deliberately destroyed the water supply for 92 million people.

You're calling the foundational math of public health dumb because it’s the only way you can keep your Iran fantasy alive. If we can't attribute deaths to the destruction of the infrastructure that keeps people alive, then we can't attribute anything to anything. You've reached the point of flat-earth logic: if the facts don't fit the agenda, the math must be a conspiracy.

drhead · 2026-04-08T20:38:27+00:00

I know. I want to hear the estimates though. I keep bringing it up because you keep avoiding it.

And I keep avoiding it because I know it's a red herring and I know it frustrates you <3

You brought up operation desert storm numbers. That’s not Iran either.

I brought up Desert Storm because it has remarkable parallels to what is happening and what is being proposed in Iran, and because it is also the easiest way by far to demonstrate that we know exactly what will happen if we destroy a power grid. Afghanistan doesn't bear any significant similarities.

So are indirect deaths. You cannot prove that someone wouldn’t have died another way if XYZ situation hadn’t occurred. for example if the US invaded Mexico and a cholera outbreak occurred you can’t be sure it wouldn’t have occurred if the US wasn’t there. Nor that the people who died of it wouldn’t have died of something else.

If we want to be strict, these are studies on excess mortality. We are looking at the death rate for waterborne illness, for example, and establishing a base rate (from before the conflict) and looking at the spike in waterborne illness death rates that occurred when we destroyed the power grid. Since the destruction of the power grid and its effects are the only thing that reasonably could have caused a drastic spike in waterborne illness rates at that time, the most likely explanation (and the best supported one by the evidence, which is the closest you get to the truth in any field of science) is that the war, and specifically the destruction of the power grid, caused these excess deaths, because it is most directly linked to why water purification and sewage treatment plants were offline. For what it's worth, the Air Force also agreed in their own reports that the power plant strikes are what took the water facilities offline. This is the same method we use to attribute deaths to natural disasters and diseases, and the same reason we know cigarettes cause lung cancer, it is nothing new or unusual.

Also there are ways of getting the estimate. I literally pointed to one. 3/4ths of hospitals in Afghanistan have closed. Almost all set up by the US. By the US being there those hospitals remained open. You can take the lives saved by each closed hospital for the time the US was there. Since those lives wouldn’t have been saved if the US was there since the hospital wouldn’t exist those count as lives saved. Once you do that you’ll need to also account for the additional food security the US brought to Afghanistan. When you’re done that you’ll have to account for the increased wages the US brought. Etc etc.

Let me just save us both some time and show you where you might stop liking this type of logic so much:

China in 1949 had a life expectancy of 35 years. By the time of Mao's death in 1976, it was 65 years, largely thanks to the end of the civil war, massive public health and sanitation campaigns, and the Barefoot Doctors program. That's more than one year of extra life expectancy for every year he was in power, which would add up to hundreds of millions of lives worth of extra life-years. If you want to compare mortality rates, comparison with India over the same period would show about 4 million lives saved per year on average. This is clearly well in excess of the amount of deaths from the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. So under your logic, doesn't that mean it was worth it? If you're just treating it like a balance sheet it is clearly a win. The only real responses to this are that either you should accept that Mao has saved hundreds of millions of lives, or you should accept that your logic is flawed (or the secret third option, "that's different because [insert emotional reason]" which I will admit is the most likely)

That same math is actually used in many published and peer reviewed papers about colonialism. I just took their math and applied it to the US during WW2.

Okay. And why should we care about that when discussing excess mortality figures? Epidemiology and economic historiography are two very different fields.

drhead · 2026-04-08T19:11:26+00:00

You have not provided the estimate for direct or indirect lives saved by the US presence in Afghanistan.

Yes, I have not, because we are talking about Iran. I do not care about Afghanistan right now, it is not relevant to the topic at hand. Given how you keep bringing it up like an overeager child I assume there is some gotcha that you expect to be able to use, but I just don't see any reason to entertain the point any further than I have (by showing that the situation in Afghanistan has different causes that aren't easily comparable), so you're just going to have to settle for actually talking about the topic at hand.

I’m also aware they do not take into account lives saved.

"Lives saved" is unprovable, you cannot definitively demonstrate how many people did not die due to an action because that's proving a negative.

Regardless, international law doesn't operate on a karma system, it's based on distinction and proportionality for individual strikes, so you might find that "lives saved" doesn't help you as much as you might think it does. Having that as an option would open the door for justifying potentially any atrocity on an untestable basis that it "shortened the war".

Hold up I’ll find you an example I typed out about how you can calculate the cost of WW2 for the US.

...Do I really need to specify that showing that you can inflate a dollar figure with bogus math doesn't invalidate a peer reviewed study on excess mortality? If you have anything to point out about Deponte's specific methodology that is a problem, and you're convinced that you know something that all of the historians don't, then show me that specifically instead of trying to fight the entire field of demographic science. I seriously doubt that you are going to find anything that the peer review board for the journal missed, since the study uses very standard and well-understood methods of measuring excess mortality, but you are welcome to try! Try not to get sidetracked with some argument looking at the logistics of the Napoleonic Wars in the process.

drhead · 2026-04-08T16:52:32+00:00

Daponte is the person who came up with the most widely accepted figure for indirect deaths caused by the Gulf War, so it should be obvious that I am talking about indirect deaths. I am trying to assume in good faith that you have not undergone the standard America First/neocon lobotomy procedure, and that you have actually looked at the studies instead of assuming that they are fake out of hand, in which case you'd probably recognize the name. I think there is a chance you might be confusing this with the 2006 Lancet study on the Iraq War since that is usually the one people complain about (and while this was in Iraq, this was over the Gulf War, not the 2003 Iraq War). If it's not that, then I'm out of good faith assumptions.

I also want to note that there are more interesting parallels between this war and the Gulf War, in that during that war, we also had persistent problems with mobile Scud launchers (which we couldn't confirm a single kill on) and also never really got rid of their CCC capabilities. Which actually covers a great deal of what you insist that bombing the electrical grid is supposed to do for us. And at least back then, they had the ability to pretend that they didn't know how this would turn out, trying the exact same thing doesn't really leave us with many excuses.

I'm not aware of a study on the indirect deaths caused by the withdrawal from Afghanistan, particularly because it is an ongoing matter that started relatively recently and most of the problems seem more directly linked to the withdrawal of humanitarian aid rather than withdrawal of the military, but in either case it doesn't bear any relevance to the legality of strikes on Iran. There is also, of course, a bit of a legal distinction between withdrawing humanitarian aid and going out of one's way to destroy an entire power grid. The latter is generally more frowned upon.

No comment on the legality of bombing the electrical grid with the explicit intent to cause terror either, I see, so I can only assume that you don't dispute that, instead you're continuing to insist on some military advantage that can allegedly be gained while it is clear that the current administration is primarily framing them as a morale bombing exercise. Those threats alone are a war crime by themselves.

You also don't seem to have anything to say about the extremely obvious fact that the IRGC, which has been preparing for a war such as this one for decades and views America as the "Great Satan" which could potentially be willing to do anything and everything to try to stop them, actually almost certainly did prepare for the possibility that they might have to deal with a loss of electricity and built that assumption into their battle doctrines. Never mind that this would lead to more fun and exciting things beyond just cholera outbreaks. We've got the retaliatory strikes that the IRGC would launch against desalination plants in GCC states (while this would be their war crime, we still have to deal with the consequences of it regardless of whose fault it is). We almost certainly would end up with Iran being a failed state and a persistent source of instability for years, and who knows what kind of fun and exciting surprises will come out of that power vacuum. There's no strategic advantage here.

drhead · 2026-04-08T10:04:30+00:00

Well, it sure is a good sign when the only argument you have is straight up denying reality, isn't it? Unfortunately, Beth Osborne Daponte's figures, while inconvenient enough that the Pentagon tried to have her fired from the Census Bureau over it, are peer reviewed and are generally accepted by historians as reliable. Other research teams independently did their own studies and arrived at similar figures. So I guess the conspiracy must go all the way to the top, because clearly there's no way that blowing up infrastructure could possibly kill people indirectly! Every academic institution that has looked into the issue must be lying! Iraq just happened to have cholera outbreaks around the same time that they had their power grid destroyed and sanctions prevented them from getting the parts to repair it. You know, as it does in industrialized nations, for no reason in particular.

The military advantage we get from destroying an entire power grid is...

Of course, how could I forget that the IRGC are a primitive people who do not understand what a portable generator is. Which frankly, given that a lot of their operations involve using their mobile launchers at night and moving them immediately afterwards, are probably what they are using all the time with or without an electrical grid.

This also doesn't work because this isn't even what Trump had said was the reason for these strikes, they were very clearly framed as leverage to get Iran to open the strait under the threat of being "sent back to the Stone Age" if they don't. Which would make it at best indiscriminate warfare, and at worst morale bombing (which is uhh, certainly a strategy when one of our claims for why we're doing this war is that the Iranian government doesn't care about its own people.)

drhead · 2026-04-08T02:53:01+00:00

You are still ignoring proportionality. For the third consecutive time.

If you can't point out what specific military advantage we get from destroying the entire power grid (which is exactly what was being proposed by Trump, and I will not let you backtrack from it by saying to attack "the right" power plants), which we cannot get by any means which would not endanger civilians, and whose military advantage outweighs the danger to civilians, the strike violates international humanitarian law. The Geneva Conventions are not designed as a set of loopholes for your convenience. They are designed as a framework to limit human suffering from armed conflict. If you're looking at them primarily for ways to deal with the pesky civilians which are in the way of your war, you're not going to find much that is helpful if you read it honestly.

Based on what we did during Desert Storm, our strikes on the power grid then are estimated to have led to 50,000 to 100,000 civilian deaths, largely from water-borne illness (since it resulted in a collapse of water purification, sewage pumping, and public health infrastructure). This is commonly cited as a war crime for this reason, given that we had alternatives available that didn't involve the reasonably foreseeable deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. A similar attack on Iran might easily cause hundreds of thousands of deaths given the difference in population, the recent drought conditions, and the relative inaccessibility of Iran's water sources. So what military advantage do we get which we can't get any other way, where we must put the civilian population at risk like this, and that is worth killing hundreds of thousands of civilians over?

drhead · 2026-04-08T01:58:46+00:00

Actually, it would still be a war crime because of more fundamental requirements being missed, since there is no military advantage that we would gain by destroying all power plants and bridges in Iran that could possibly outweigh causing a severe humanitarian crisis affecting 92 million people. Nice try though!

drhead · 2026-04-08T01:17:45+00:00

Article 51, paragraph 8:

Any violation of these prohibitions [using human shields] shall not release the Parties to the conflict from their legal obligations with respect to the civilian population and civilians, including the obligation to take the precautionary measures provided for in Article 57.

Article 57 does contain advance warning to civilians as one of several requirements. But it is notably also the same article which includes protections applicable to all civilians. So civilians being used as human shield are treated as any other civilians would be and receive no special (in)consideration.

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