Readit News logoReadit News
zxcmx commented on Beirut Port Explosion   forensic-architecture.org... · Posted by u/AliCollins
serf · 5 years ago
> Have you ever thought about your house? The whole damn thing is fuel.

analogizing a house, the purpose of which is to store and house human occupants, ran by non-professionals, to a dock store-house that houses hazardous compounds and is staffed by employees is pretty useless.

Yes, most everything is fuel.

Storing large amounts of explosive chemicals is beyond the scope of purpose behind a household.

Dock storehouses routinely deal with hazardous/dangerous goods. They are built to do so with the premise that the staff that run them will follow strict (and in most cases clearly written) guidelines.

In other words : I don't need to demonstrate explosion-readiness as a strict rule before home ownership -- but most countries require groups that house and manipulate explosive or combustible goods to demonstrate both their skill in manipulation, and their disaster planning in the worst case.

zxcmx · 5 years ago
Yes, you're right. They deeply failed as a port authority and a warehouse.

I was trying to explain why civilian city leadership might not have good intuition for why the storage issue would be a problem for them.

zxcmx commented on Australian Special Forces Killed 39 Afghan Civilians   wsj.com/articles/australi... · Posted by u/justicezyx
zxcmx · 5 years ago
Problem: how do you have an elite murder squad that just kills exactly the people you want and no others? What if grandma gets in the way?

How about Hamed, who might know a guy who knows a guy, who might jeopardise the goals of Murder Squad? How important is not murdering random people vs achieving mission objectives? What if Hamed is a prisoner and slowing Murder Squad down will jeopardise the mission?

It's eerily analogous to the AI alignment problem. It seems like not having hard core elite Murder Squads would be preferable to pretending we can ask people to do their job in a moral vacuum.

I don't pretend to be right on this, and I expect reasonable people to disagree, but if you set up the incentives to prioritise mission success over human life, you will obviously get mission success at the expense of human life and a culture that is proud to kill people to get the job done (thats what makes them different from infantry). "Isn't that what you asked for?"

zxcmx commented on Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive   blog.archive.org/2020/11/... · Posted by u/tosh
ghaff · 5 years ago
Content creator is a vanishingly small lottery winner occupation now and in the future unless it’s connected to a product in some way.
zxcmx · 5 years ago
How much of every corporate job is communicating / consensus vs doing?.

Arguably "content creation" is core to every > middle class job now - you have to get people onboard to get things done. Personally I still think writing is more valuable but perhaps the knowledge creation and sharing (_inside_ companies) of tomorrow will be done by making and watching videos.

I very much do not want to be part of that future, but I recognise it a likely possibility.

zxcmx commented on Beirut Port Explosion   forensic-architecture.org... · Posted by u/AliCollins
holler · 5 years ago
From a laymen's perspective, it's hard to imagine just how negligent the port authorities could have been in managing the warehouse. 2750tons high-explosive Ammonium Nitrate? Check. 50tons Ammonium Phosphate? Check. Stacks of flammable wooden pallets among Ammonium Nitrate? Check. 1000 flammable rubber car tires? Check. 23tons of explosive fireworks? 5 rolls of detonator cord? Check. I mean... how/why?
zxcmx · 5 years ago
Have you ever thought about your house? The whole damn thing is fuel.

Do you store things in the attic? plastic tubs? How about the basement? cardboard? Do you have wool, paintings, plastic toys, plastic anything, wooden anything? Look around you and the places you keep things. Oh my god curtains they are more or less just flame conduits.

Your couches, your clothes, everything around you is fuel for a massive fire. It can be a bit scary when you really evaluate it. I bet you have never thought seriously about the risk before.

Admittedly at a city level, 3 kilotons of ammonium nitrate in a strategic location should definitely have set off some real thinking but on a personal basis most people are surrounded by fuel and don't think about it at all.

zxcmx commented on Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)   vice.com/en/article/wjweb... · Posted by u/elorant
falcolas · 5 years ago
SSL certificates, which require you to trust someone you’ve never met with the entirety of your digital life. From your social connections to your bank account and everything in between, you’re putting your faith not only in their honesty, but in their ability to limit mistakes.

Not that there’s a better solution yet, but technical solutions like SSL certificates still boil down to trust, and in whom you place your.

zxcmx · 5 years ago
This is also true for your computer hardware, the software you run, the medicines you take, the food you eat, the water you drink...

I guess my point is that that human trust is so pervasive and fundamental that there are diminishing returns to eliminating it.

What will always remain in style I think is accountability. So trust, but have supply chain integrity such that you know who it is that you're trusting and who is responsible when things go wrong.

zxcmx commented on Better disposable coffee cups can be made with waste from sugar cane   economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/jkuria
UweSchmidt · 5 years ago
We need more environmental tech, but we also have to adapt our behaviour a little bit.

How can you make something that is degradable in an environmental friendly way, but also last forever? Something has to give.

zxcmx · 5 years ago
I wonder if a hybrid approach between disposable and "keep cup" could work.

The "default" takeaway option could be the short-lasting paper cup.

For car, office or just comfort, you could have a squashy, silicone (stands high temp) outer that would usually only need to be cleaned if the inner cup fails.

A silicone shell with disposable inner would work well for me, at least. The shell would rarely need to be cleaned and can be easily pocketed.

Deleted Comment

zxcmx commented on A court ruling in Austria could censor the internet worldwide   slate.com/technology/2020... · Posted by u/pseudolus
zxcmx · 5 years ago
Users everywhere have had to put up with U.S law for a long time. The laws and norms of the USA are more or less "fully baked in".

Try posting a nipple or copyrighted track, for example.

If Facebook had come from a different place, all songs and body bits might be Ok but perhaps discussion of government would be banned. I can't tell if that would actually be a better facebook than the one we got.

zxcmx commented on The “Dying Seas” of the Anthropocene   oceans.nautil.us/feature/... · Posted by u/dnetesn
pmiller2 · 5 years ago
Why do we need to attach a number to it for it to be a valid concern? The ocean is undoubtedly changing in ways that, if allowed to continue, will cause massive ecosystem damage, leading to secondary effects on land, such as increased warming and higher CO2 levels. Why is that not enough to convince anyone who matters to do anything?
zxcmx · 5 years ago
There are lots of things being done, but much more could be done - and for that we need to convince governments, which takes data.

In particular we need to convince governing bodies that action is in their direct and immediate economic interest, which again takes data.

zxcmx commented on The “Dying Seas” of the Anthropocene   oceans.nautil.us/feature/... · Posted by u/dnetesn
pmiller2 · 5 years ago
I read that page through, and didn't find it particularly compelling. Do you have anything that isn't 5 years old, and that doesn't try to talk around the issue by redefining terms?

What I mean is that when I think of when I would say "the ocean is dying," I'm referring to things like declining fish populations, coral reefs dying off, and the oceans themselves getting warmer and more acidic.

These things are undoubtedly happening. We have measured them, and we are causing it. Your link seems to say something like "the ocean isn't dying, because we still can do something about it." I'm not particularly concerned with this "ocean health index" they mention. I am not concerned with what we "can" do; I'm only concerned with what we are and will be doing. And, at this rate, what we are doing is not enough.

zxcmx · 5 years ago
If you don't find the OHI (https://www.conservation.org/projects/ocean-health-index) credible, I'm not sure there's much more I could write that would convince you. Sorry :/

The point is that the oceans are large, there are different concerns, and conditions vary across location and species.

If you want to answer a question like "how healthy are our oceans?" you need to first work out what that might mean, and then measure that systematically like the project I linked you to.

u/zxcmx

KarmaCake day1716March 31, 2017View Original