industrialangel

[industrialangel]

As of around roughly 2AM, Fox News has called the 2024 presidential election for Donald J. Trump.

Every lawsuit, every felony charge, every cry of authoritarianism, every deplatforming, every newsroom choosing to embrace "moral clarity," every book thrown out of a library, every firing, every peaceful protest and every riot, every empty campaign slogan, every hope for a permanent majority – all of them have failed.

Cultivate strength. Respect agency. Seek mastery. Only a man who bends to reality more than he bends to social consensus can possibly hope to defeat him now. Live. Survive. Once every blue state is a hub of meta-rational excellence, the envy of every European social democracy, this man's grasp will be broken, and you will escape the shadow of the new Ronald Reagan.

What do you think - are you a bad enough dude to out-govern the President?

[industrialangel]

[industrialangel]

L

[industrialangel]

yeah i know all about "dialectical materialism," yknow, ceramic, glass, all that stuff. #ilovecapacitors

[industrialangel]

As I gaze at the structural column in Copley Station, cracked nearly in two and held together with zip ties that have been carefully painted over to match the column underneath, I feel my soul intertwined with that of a small Italian boy of days gone by, who also stopped to look up at a large, groaning, newly painted tank full of molasses

[industrialangel]

Guess I should throw out some Gaza Ceasefire Thoughts - from a political history perspective it certainly is interesting:

-- As for the deal itself, it is pretty much "the best one could realistically hope for", though funnily enough the details aren't that surprising. Israel for some time has had very little strategy in Gaza (beyond "release the hostages or we keep blowing up random blocks"), and so them agreeing to these terms is the expected outcome. Hamas also lacked any real strategic options, but in the summer you could at least argue "the status quo of radicalizing the population and shredding Israeli reputation is beneficial", so you can see why both sides really weren't committing to anything before in the summer. Things have changed since then, though.

-- The straight-up-humiliating defeat of Hezbollah in the fall was a complete game-changer for the strategic situation. As much as Hamas had a strategy it was "wait for Hezbollah/Iran to carry the weight of the fight", and that was going not-awfully through the summer. Then Israel absolutely shattered Hezbollah to the point where their ability to control Lebanese politics is up-for-grabs, and any real thread to Israel is temporarily gone. Meanwhile Iran stacked that defeat with the revolution in Syria and their own military capacity losses, and while there is real tension in Iran between realist & radicalist factions, the current winds are blowing towards retreat. Combine that with the death of Sinwar, and the new Hamas leadership had no cards left to play. By the same token, Israel has few fights left to win.

-- This is why negotiations resumed in earnest in October/November, and right now you are seeing some pretty heavy exaggeration of the role of the Trump administration in this deal. It has been being hashed out for months, you can easily point to articles about progress throughout both of those months (example) and the Biden administration was heavily involved in the Doha talks. These things just take time, and both sides had a dramatic incentive shift recently. That is carrying the most weight here - talks were "90% complete" before any Trump reps arrived on the scene.

-- But the election certainly did play a role here, primarily because it was inducing uncertainty and changing incentives in the US. While it was going on you can see how both sides could "hope" that new administrations might let them gain an advantage, and understood that commitments from the Biden administration in August just weren't very meaningful. Additionally, while not very important the war was "an issue" in the election, and so the "action space" of politicians was shaped by that. Why not just...wait, and see how things go, right? Now there is no more reason to wait, you know what you got.

--I don't want to take all credit away from Trump on this, though. A theme I will continue to harp on, the "Imperial Presidency" has advantages. Biden was a perpetual faction appeaser, and you could credibly call his bluff on any decision around the war by going "you won't take the heat from your own party on this" from the left or the right. Trump can much more credibly claim "I don't give a fuck what I 'said on the campaign trail', I say what goes, make a deal or I will absolutely spite you". This is not a great strategy in a lot of contexts, but in foreign policy you need this sometimes. Dems really do need to take notes here, more unity in either direction and more strong brinksmanship from Biden would have been better.

--Now let's walk that back a bit - it is way easier for the Trump administration to play hardball. Elections make hard decisions much more difficult to pull off, as political factions can punish you more easily. The Dems have an asymmetric disadvantage here - they are inherently the "dove" party facing a topic where the median American voter is generally hawkish, and they are the party that contains a notable split within itself on the issue. Meanwhile Republicans all agree. No longer facing electoral pressure, it is much easier for Republicans to play a "Nixon goes to China" card and credibly browbeat Israel. No one will really doubt the Republicans are anti-Israel even if they do that, and Dems can't accuse them of foul play because the party itself is split on the topic. This is "unfair" in a certain sense, for sure, but such is politics.

--I would be assigning way less credulity to the complaints amoung the Israeli far-right about Trump or Netanyahu "betraying" them. The far-right in Israeli is a powerful force, for sure, but by no means do they command the majority. They want to annex the West Bank and all that, but most Israelis disagree, the military isn't on board, it would jeopardize US/Arab ties, etc. Never say never but that was not really in the cards - if it was they would have done it already. Slow-roll settlement expansion is the plan, that will continue, but meanwhile there is nothing left to do in Gaza. Netanyahu is of course going to say publicly "oh boo hoo my hands were tied by the Americans I'm so sorry" while he gets almost all of his realistic goals. This is politics 101 stuff - though if the approval vote on Thursday goes sour then I am wrong on this, part of why I am posting it today. (Also another reason to not assign too much credit to the Trump admin - easy to "bully" someone who wants to be bullied)

Okay done - hopefully the ceasefire sticks, obviously this has been a disastrous war for almost all involved, never look the imperfect status quo horse in the mouth. It isn't the world one would want but it is better than the one we have right now.

[industrialangel]

This website is elite. This website is the blueprint, it's the pinnacle. There is no website like it. I lwill never leave this website

[industrialangel]

big pharma will try to sell u $20 cold medicine like spicy ramen doesnt cost like a dollar a pack and orgasms are free

[industrialangel]

National zoo has new pandas!

[industrialangel]

there's a file called whatever_YYYYMMDD.csv with data generated every day

every day, we process the day's data and also reprocess a few days back

the way this is done involves copying over the various whatever_YYYYMMDD.csv files for the last few days from one folder to another

the way this is implemented is via a script that takes the earliest date and latest date we're processing today, converts them to a number in YYYYMMDD format, and loops between them

not a date. a number.

if one of those numbers is 20240612 and the other is 20240615, this is fine. it just hits every number in between them, which matches up to every existing whatever_YYYYMMDD.csv file in between those dates

if one of those numbers is 20240630 and the other is 20240703, this is slightly less fine. It's going to check a bunch of numbers that do not correspond to any dates, like 20240646. so it runs dozens more times than necessary, trying to move files that don't exist. fortunately computers are pretty fast and this adds very little time.

if one of those numbers is 20241230 and the other is 20250102, then instead of checking for seventy or so nonexistent files it checks for some nine thousand or so. each one of those is pretty fast. less than a second. but not, like, much less than a second.

several hours worth of delay in a process that should take seconds, which has been happening longer than i've been working here, every year, for a few days around new year's. which it seems nobody noticed for a number of reasons mostly adding up to 'several hours worth of delay are invisible unless you're specifically looking for it and nobody had a reason to look for it until now'

[industrialangel]

[industrialangel]

Throwback to when I took painkillers and woke up with Photoshop open on my computer to this image I had made

[industrialangel]

[industrialangel]

I got an enchanted womb tattoo but all it does is glow when I'm near fresh Thai green curry

[industrialangel]

[industrialangel]

I love when you buy computer parts and the manufacturer doesn't know what other computer parts you want to plug them into so they give you every cable ever conceived of by man just in case

[industrialangel]