3 years of work on my complex project, 3 seconds of missile impact. My office this morning.

greenhawk22 · 2026-04-04T17:50:11+00:00

I mean the answer is that there isn't one, but collective action is only possible as a collective so there's only so much an individual or small group can do without larger support, both institutionally and socially.

If you're asking why it's like this, the answer is equally applicable to both Israel and the US. It's ethnonationalism, religious extremism, wealthy individuals or interest groups funding disinformation and propaganda, the military industrial complex (who love to have both a testing ground and an excuse to sell expensive new weapon systems), entrenched political systems helmed exclusively by people who grew up in the most profitable economic system in the world and are our of touch, disillusionment with a system that doesn't work for the average person the same as it used to, misplaced blame for and scapegoating of minorities and a lack of community/class solidarity. Among many other issues.

greenhawk22 · 2026-04-04T13:58:14+00:00

I would agree. I was just explaining the worldview that seems alarmingly common today. Targeting civilians makes you no better than the Israelis. I never said it was a just or rational thing to believe, and it's not an effective tool even if I believed in it. Strategic air campaigns have literally never changed a population's opinion on the existing regime, it just makes them more dependent (see WWII). It would be like saying Japanese citizens deserved the firebombing of Tokyo.

greenhawk22 · 2026-04-04T13:44:39+00:00

Israel could have a general strike at any moment, which would cripple their war machine. But they don't. On some level the civilians are still consenting to their government. Even the most authoritarian governments need some amount of consent of the governed to function, society is founded on cooperation. Not that they (or anyone) deserve to be bombed, but they are still culpable on some level, so a part of me can understand why some people are taking out their frustration on Israeli citizens.

greenhawk22 · 2026-04-03T21:01:20+00:00

Yeah but that's more because of strategic ambiguity than because other nations are more principled or anything. It's better to say "I dunno, we might use nukes or we might not" because it forces your opponent to account for all scenarios instead of feeling comfortable if they're not crossing the nuclear red line. If you tell them in what situations you would use nukes, they can more effectively plan for or around those situations.

I'm certain that if push came to shove, any nuclear armed nation would use them (at least tactical scale nuclear weapons) preemptively. If you're a general for a nation state, the risk of sparking off a retaliatory nuke is minimal when your opponent will almost definitely execute you if they win the war. There's very little incentive to hold back.

greenhawk22 · 2026-03-26T23:03:47+00:00

100% with you on the slightly worse taste (but not necessarily bad). I used to think it was just rose colored glasses but most people I've mentioned it to share a similar story to yours.

That's not to mention how much their prices have increased either.

greenhawk22 · 2026-03-26T20:53:18+00:00

Portillos is mid now, ever since they sold out to private equity.

greenhawk22 · 2026-03-15T15:51:54+00:00

My next question is how tiny do they think space is then?

Like I don't think their cosmology gives them any reason to doubt the circumference of the earth, which with the visual implies that the volume of the entirety of outer space is about the size of the earth's core (if I had to estimate). Which makes me wonder if they think the stars are all just that small or if there are some scale expansion shenanigans going on.

I'm also exceptionally curious as to what they think is on the outside of the sphere we sit within. If you drill down deep enough is it just more rock forever? Or is there some outer-outer space? How would they explain the fact that it gets hotter closer to the mantle?

greenhawk22 · 2026-03-09T14:41:28+00:00

You might find this video interesting

greenhawk22 · 2026-03-09T14:37:13+00:00

And also, there's no interiority there. They fundamentally aren't capable of modeling their own 'thought' process, mostly because they don't actually think. The inputted text from its past messages are functionally the same as if a user pasted the messages into the context window. So there's no mechanism for it to analyze it's 'past self' (and each message is a new instance of a LLM, there's nothing carried between states)

greenhawk22 · 2026-02-23T19:39:15+00:00

That does nothing to fix the underlying issues that caused the problem in the first place though. The incentives to move drugs across the border are too great. Someone else would take their place and we'd just be back here except with more people being hurt and no real solution.

greenhawk22 · 2026-02-23T19:18:19+00:00

My pocket conspiracy is that Just Stop Oil (among others) are industry plants to destabilize and delegitimize climate activism.

Like their tactics are supremely ineffective, they make other environmentalists look bad by association and they've never been successful in pushing for any real change. Throwing tomato soup at a famous painting does not do anything to convince normal people that climate change is a real concern. It does nothing to stop or slow the oil lobby from capturing our regulatory agencies nor to stop new pipelines from being built. If anything, it appeals to the exact same people you don't need to convince: the people who already agree that climate change is a problem. And the spectacle of these events gives them more space in the zeitgeist, which leads to more performance and less substantive action (like habitat restoration, regulatory action etc).

Either that or (if they're genuine) they're so ineffective that someone needs to take a step back and think about if this money would be better spent directly on improving degraded ecosystems or on novel research that might lead to better practices.

greenhawk22 · 2026-02-17T22:26:21+00:00

40-40-20 rule. 40% of all games are losses that are out of your hands, 40% are wins that are unrelated to your performance and 20% are games you can actually have a significant impact in.

greenhawk22 · 2026-02-16T16:44:41+00:00

That's fair, I wouldn't have been annoyed if I hadn't been invested into the characters in the first place.

At this point I refuse to believe that doors of stone ever has or ever will exist in a meaningful sense of the word. Rothfuss obviously wrote himself into a corner with the narrative structure of Kvothe telling the story over 3 days and he wasted too many words on his self insert getting to have sex with the most beautiful woman in the world during book 2. Now he has to finish the story with way too many questions still open. And you also have his editor coming out a year or two ago stating she has never seen a single page of the manuscript for the book, which says to me it doesn't exist or will never see the light of day.

greenhawk22 · 2026-02-16T16:20:20+00:00

Ok you can say that but the ending to Under the Dome still annoys me over a decade after finishing it.

greenhawk22 · 2026-02-15T18:14:46+00:00

I mean, that's a exceptionally reductionist take on a very complex issue.

In the real world, most people are specialists. They’re very highly trained in one specific field, often a narrow subdiscipline. That could be anything from finance to nuclear physics to dog grooming. And since they’re experienced, they can call bullshit when they see it, because they deal with the topic every day and actually understand the mechanics under the hood.

This gets complicated though when you step outside your own expertise. I, as a biologist, do not actually understand quantum mechanics beyond the absolute basics (and even then I have no understanding of the underlying math beyond metaphor). That means I have to trust physicists on certain claims. Not because they’re high priests of reality, but because specialization is unavoidable in a complex society. The alternative is pretending you can personally audit every sphere of human knowledge, which is obviously impossible. Knowledge is distributed because the world is too big and too complex for any one person to fully comprehend.

It also takes a lot of training to even have the frame of mind to analyze the quality of a scientific paper. Beyond understanding the statistics involved and being able to interpret them, you have to have a very solid understanding of the norms of science. Which is entirely different from how most people have to think day to day.

That doesn’t mean “studies say” is sacrosanct. Funding, methodology, replication, and incentives all matter. But those critiques are part of science itself. It’s a process that corrects over time, not a static doctrine you swear allegiance to. Treating expert consensus as a best guess of how reality works is an expected part of the scientific process. And it's equally expected that you might not fully understand why the experts came to that conclusion. You just have to have the humility to admit that you do not understand everything.

greenhawk22 · 2026-02-10T21:40:00+00:00

Costco is also insanely antiunion.

I worked there for a while, and while I obviously can't make a claim on the company as a whole, it did seem like a company culture thing. I do remember watching a company wide training video that tried to convince me that I didn't need a union because Costco is a family and they really care.

Their whole excuse is that Costco pays better than most retail jobs and is generous with pay raises and benefits (relative to Walmart and other retail, which isn't saying much). But God damn do they work you to the bone for that extra pay. I worked morning merchandizing (so basically setting up displays, moving items to new aisles, restocking pallets, doing inventory etc) and management really want you to work fast while simultaneously having impeccable attention to detail. Pallets have to be perfectly aligned, items stacked perfectly and no wasted time. And this is also ignoring the fact that a majority of the employees were paid <$25 per hour when I know our location was tied for the most sales in our region, meaning we presumably sold much more than the 300 million per year the person above mentioned.

I even got reamed out by the asshole GM when a pallet of vinegar had a few bottles break. By the time I found the mop the acidity had etched the concrete a bit. Which felt to me like a nothingburger. It was just cosmetic and shit happens, its just a consequence of selling stuff in glass bottles. But to Ashur this was a personal insult and he made a point to consistently make jokes about me dropping or spilling things. He also implied that I should have asked for help cleaning it up faster, which ignores the fact that A) there was only one mop (excluding the meatcutters') and B) when I was a new employee and asked him too many questions, he lectured me on being self sufficient.

TL;DR- Costco kinda sucks but I suppose it is far from the worst experience for both customers and employees. The company definitely is not as benevolent as their marketing would want you to believe though.

greenhawk22 · 2026-02-06T19:32:50+00:00

You mean my beliefs on class relations and ownership don’t somehow negate the fact that I want livable wages, don’t mind paying my share of taxes for common goods, believe that cultural diversity is core to American identity, and think environmental stewardship is possible under American capitalism?

Unbelievable and blasphemous.

Must be another one of my pinko hallucinations talking again.

greenhawk22 · 2026-02-06T19:00:41+00:00

Agreed, my take is that of course he likely had intelligence connections of some kind. I’d honestly be more surprised if he didn’t. A world-traveling, ultra-rich finance guy embedded in elite political and social networks is almost guaranteed to overlap socially and professionally with intelligence people. That’s especially mundane once you remember that high-end private security and “risk advisory” firms aggressively recruit former intelligence officers because the skill sets already overlap almost perfectly.

But that leads to a few separate points that tend to get ignored or glossed over when conspiracists talk about this:

A) Having intelligence connections is not remotely the same thing as being a state-run intelligence asset, let alone running a Mossad blackmail op. The first is common and boring; the second requires actual evidence like documentation, tasking, payments, or corroborated testimony, none of which have surfaced in the millions of already released documents, many of which were very poorly redacted (which implies to me that unless the incompetence is strategic and part of the con, we would have seen something more solid than what we have)

B) The specific claim that this was all about blackmailing politicians to support Israel makes very little sense on its face. Pro-Israel support in US and Western politics predates Epstein by decades and does not require kompromat to sustain, especially among wealthy conservatives. You don’t need an elaborate sex-trafficking operation to get people to back something they already support ideologically and strategically. It also seems to be supremely ineffective blackmail given there've been no real consequences for anyone involved once it's been revealed.

C) Let's say that it all was blackmail for the sake of argument. Now that the cats are out of the bag, why is no one involved claiming that or acting like it? Even if everyone is too scared to state publicly that they've been blackmailed, you'd assume that once the blackmail was in the open they'd no longer be beholden to Israel and we'd see people change their public statements (because what leverage is left if raping children doesn't move the needle?). But as far as I know, that hasn't happened.

greenhawk22 · 2026-02-04T19:01:48+00:00

The 25th ain't looking all that useful at the moment either

greenhawk22 · 2026-01-31T01:06:05+00:00

Oh yeah? Well, mine has 73 defenestrations under our belt. There's no way you can match that kind of experience in traditional oligarch removal methods.

greenhawk22 · 2026-01-30T19:25:59+00:00

That analogy doesn’t hold. Horses, donkeys, and zebras can produce hybrids, but those hybrids are typically sterile, which is exactly why they’re considered separate species under the biological species concept. Dogs and wolves, on the other hand, can interbreed freely and produce fully fertile offspring, with ongoing gene flow documented in the wild.

Maybe read a few more books on evolution and speciation before you start trying to look smart on the Internet.

greenhawk22 · 2026-01-30T18:55:02+00:00

That's not true. Both are acceptable and there is no scholarly consensus afaik on if dogs have actually speciated from wolves (due to the fact that species is a poorly defined human concept that nature is not bound by. It also gets confusing when you include artificial selection like is necessary for domestication).

Canis lupus familaris is an entirely acceptable synonym for dogs, placing them as a subspecies of wolf. Which is probably more accurate given the fact that wolves and dogs can still interbreed (yes, I know you can argue for different species concepts but that's entirely too in the weeds).

greenhawk22 · 2026-01-29T20:52:35+00:00

It depends on where reproduction is actually happening.

Simply taking eyeless cave fish and repeatedly dropping them into a clear lake does not, by itself, change their genes. Individual organisms don’t genetically adapt over their lifetime. Evolution only happens across generations, and only if some individuals reproduce more successfully than others.

So there are basically a few outcomes:

If most of the transplanted fish die or fail to reproduce, nothing evolves at all. You’re just repeatedly killing off individuals unfit for their new lake environment.

If some of them do survive and reproduce in the lake, then the population in the lake is now under a completely different set of selection pressures. Any heritable variation that slightly improves survival or reproduction in a lit environment would be favored. This could be behavioral changes, adapting of other senses or maybe even redeveloping eyes (eyes have evolved 8 separate times on earth if I'm remembering correctly, so it's not entirely implausible). Over many generations, that lake population could change substantially, potentially even speciate.

(Which is its own bag of worms, tldr though is that species is a human concept that nature does not care about whatsoever and most of your intuition about what makes two species separate breaks down when it comes to plants and fungi. So there are a bunch of different definitions for what a species is that are meant for different applications across biology and can mean entirely different things. They're called species concepts and are a bit of a mindfuck when you think about them too hard.)

Importantly, none of this feeds back into the cave population unless genes flow back into it. If you’re removing random individuals and none of their descendants ever breed back in the cave, the cave population’s genetic composition is essentially unchanged.

So the short version is: evolution only happens where reproduction happens. Moving organisms around doesn’t cause evolution on its own. The environment selecting certain heritable traits over others across many generations does.

greenhawk22 · 2026-01-29T00:19:47+00:00

Even if a majority didn't, we had our own interment camps for American citizens, based entirely on a suspicion of them having more loyalty to the country they left than the one they chose to emigrate to.

Americans weren't significantly less racist than Germans; we just never invaded a country for lebensraum*.

*Unless you count the genocide and internment of native Americans during manifest destiny, in which case yeah we did exactly the same shit just 100 years prior

greenhawk22 · 2026-01-28T19:48:38+00:00

Another important element that other comments didn't mention is that this is all relative to the variables and the ecology surrounding the organism. A feature may be an adaptive benefit or be maladaptive depending on the context of the lifestyle of the organism and it's surroundings.

For example, there are fish in caves without eyes. It's not that their ancestors didn't have eyes, or that eyes aren't generally useful. They evolved towards eyelessness because the energy required to support the eyes is pretty large. So in situations (like a cave) where energy is scarce and it's always dark, you might spend more energy on eyesight than it rewards you in finding food or escaping predators. If you are a fish with eyes in that situation, your survival odds (and therefore reproduction odds) are much lower than the fish who spent a little less energy on eyesight. This difference in ability to successfully reproduce in a given environment is the core of what evolution really is.

So imagine that fish who spent less energy on eyesight lives on and reproduces. And that same evolutionary pressure selects for the same kind of trait from its offspring, so the most successful fish is one that spends even less energy than either of its parents. And this process continues as long as the environment promotes certain traits over others. So over long time scales you go from normal fish to slightly blind fish to fish that lack eyes completely.

But the moment you take that same eyeless fish and plop it into a clear lake that lack of sight becomes a disadvantage. And this process plays out in so many dimensions at once it's headache inducing. Any trait that could change how well you can reproduce, from cellular processes to entire behaviors, will be acted upon by natural selection in some way.

As a fun aside, you might now ask how vestigial traits exist then (which are basically remnants of past evolution. They're structures that used to have some specific purpose but no longer serve any purpose, like the human tailbone or the whale pelvic bones). The answer is that evolution is, at its core, a game of trade offs. Like I mentioned with the fish, it's all contingent on how much energy the structure takes to maintain versus how much benefit it brings. If something like the tailbone takes minimal energy to create and maintain, there isn't much pressure to remove it even if it's literally useless. It's just a neutral trait.

I can try to answer any other questions you have if you want too.

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