icegreentea2
As long as the other knobs show a generally positive relationship between input and output, then obviously turning the knobs up will generally result in higher output.
The questions are:
* What are the downsides of turning up the knob? Both in terms of the specific knobs you're turning, as well as "going to 11" in a more general sense.
* Why do people and organizations find it difficult to turn the knob to 11?
My take is that intensity is painful. This brings two things that have to be overcome:
You must somehow build a pain tolerant organization. You can do this by selecting for pain tolerant people, by inoculating a mission/message that positively improves pain tolerance (make people believe that it's worth it), by creating organizational structures that attenuates the pain feedback loop (ie, somehow insulate decision makers from the pain, while finding ways to mitigate or work around the pain where it is felt... ie, probably just accepting the churn) or other means.
The other thing to overcome is that pain is supposed to be instructive, and provide useful negative feedback. As you build up your pain tolerance, you ideally are still able to extract real information from the pain signals. If you achieve pain tolerance through blocking off or ignoring all pain signals, then you are probably at higher risk of just... doing stupid things.
But it costs a lot to feel confident in SLBMs, especially if the top of your target list includes the USA.
Otherwise, if you're talking about the USA specifically... ICBMs should probably be considered an expensive hedge.
Finally, "optimal" depends on your definition. China has chosen a public "no first strike", while also avoiding launch on warning likely for a variety reasons. China's publicly stated "minimal deterrence strategy" (which they seem to be walking away from) was probably at least partly a pragmatic choice, driven by resource constraints. Also, for what its worth, it does seem like China is also walking away from a strict "no launch on warning" policy as well.
The lack of launch on warning (this is my speculation) was probably a combination of lack of technical capability (both ISR and C2), wanting to maintain tight central control, and wanting to play up the advantages of being "the third player".
Here's a whole recent report on China's nuclear force: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2025.2...
The device works through line of sight, so blocking line of sight from the emitter to your open eyes (for example, by looking away and shielding with your arms) may be helpful.
Testing indicates that test subjects reached their pain threshold in ~5 seconds (typically reacting within 3). Proper application of this device in a riot situation likely involves pulsed application, at sufficient standoff range (between targets and a barrier or your riot police/troops), precisely to reduce the risk of operators feeling that they need to dwell, with the standoff range providing enough buffer to allow operators to feel like they can illuminate, wait for initial reaction, shut off, and then read the full reaction.
In your general scenario, you can replace this weapon with any other riot control tool, and get basically the same shitty situation. Once the government/police/whatever have decided that you are in a riot/mob, then you're not going to be treated as an individual, you're going to be treated as an element of a threat. This is true of dudes with shields and batons, beanbags, water cannons, tear gas, horses, whatever.
It's safety is basically completely a function of the operator. Since the beam will keep depositing energy (ie heating), if the beam is held on a target, it will incur more and more heating (and potentially harm).
In proper usage, safety is ensured through the combination of operator training, selection of proper settings, and induced compliance. If you have a shitty operator, risk of over exposure increases. The nature of this device means that it's not a barrier, it's a beam.
During earlier testing, they were able to induce second degree burns on a test subject due to incorrect power and duration settings.
The fact that it was a lockout, and not a strike, that the lockout lasted a whole season, and that the players ended up voting like 90% in favour tells you which side the leverage is on.
The players might bring the majority of the value, but the current CBA sets the salary cap to basically a 50/50 split between players and owners.
It truly is cartel-like behavior, but I don't think the union can do much as long as hockey players want to make a lot of money playing hockey in North America.
When the article talks about Canadian officers serving as deputy corps commanders, that's referring to Canadian participants in exchange programs. The US military has exchange programs which do 1:1 exchanges with allied forces. For example, a Canadian might end up as as a US deputy division or corps officer, and an American might end up as a Canadian brigade staff officer or deputy commander. The exchange programs are part of a broader American program to build military-military ties, increase interoperability, and maybe grant unique perspectives.
NORAD spots must be filled, and will be filled. It just means that you're probably not getting the best or most motivated candidates anymore. The exchange slots will probably whittle away.
Once you can no longer achieve mutual deterrence (perhaps because you are a nation who has a streak/role of engaging in interventionist wars of choice, or maybe you are planning for the case when deterrence fails, and you are now under attack), you have to decide how to protect your assets, if even in a limited way.
An airbase which gets overwhelmed and lost after 5 days of bombardment is an airbase that hopefully was able to contribute 5 days of value to your effort. It's true that the costs will not always work out in your favor.
The Barracuda would be really really useful a lot (probably most) of targets and missions, but we can't pretend like there's no tradeoff in performance and additional limitations. Very roughly a Tomahawk has twice the range, and 7 times the payload.
The idea that human kind would in its moments of fear and panic reach back and put an anti-social predator in charge is also thematic. In traditional conceptions of hierarchy of "thinking", we would perhaps imagine the self/meta conscious self as being "the top layer", with the layer represented by vampires perhaps being a lower layer (we would imagine it being above "the reptile brain" though). Yet here, humanity (or human command) has chosen to invert the order. The self-awareness layer is capable and does "let go", because while it loves to take the credit for what the mind actually does, it does in fact understand self preservation (generally), and does understand that sometimes, it just needs to... not really be in control.
Final spoilers - and then there's the extra twist which is that the vampire captain was apparently being puppeted by a computer AI system (also implied to be not self aware) the whole time anyways.
So really, we have a pair of non-self aware intelligent systems probing each other. One deploying scramblers, the other deploying the human crew as end effectors.
It is also worth pointing out that that 83% of republicans (vs 90% of independents) still believe that the government is widely corrupt. Like given the ~20% "crazy threshold" in basically any type of political polling, 80% of republicans is effectively "every single republican you could ever convince".
I would not lose sleep over polarization in this context.
They take two pictures, each taking up half the total observation period. If you subtract the two images, the deltas should be the cosmic ray flashes. You can then subtract those out. They use two pictures as opposed to more to minimize the impact of readout noise.
To deal with "stuck pixel" type errors, they can slightly shift the camera between the two observations. They can counter act the shift before doing the initial subtraction.
The article says "The team suspects these deformities and tumors indicate a lengthy history of inbreeding".
The paper abstract says "possibly because of an accumulation of expressed deleterious alleles that caused disturbances in developmental processes".
It's perfectly ok for scientists to write down and publish their speculation, as long as it's suffiently clear. I think it's quite clear in this case.
There's a lot of different and overlapping programs in play here. I do not believe that autonomous F-16s are intended to be operational assets. That said...
VENOM - program that shows you can bolt on autonomous flight control into a standard F-16. Previously, the X-62A (a one-off prototype based F-16) demonstrated autonomous dogfighting back in 2023.
VENOM provides USAF/DARPA with a lot of high performance autonomous platforms (bolt-on F-16s) that they can then use to develop and validate software, tactics and training for actually fighting with autonomous systems. This would presumably be critical for getting the most of the CCA (aka loyal wingman) programs currently in development.
The AIR program referenced is basically "how do we get autonomous systems to control and fight effectively as a team (presumably arbitrary mixture of manned and unmanned systems) in a beyond visual range fight".
The ACE program referenced was basically "how do we get autonomous platforms to dogfight" with related questions like "how can we augment the human pilot in a dogfight - ie, how can we hand off the actual flying and execution of manoeuvres, and using all of the sensors to autonomous systems, and let the pilot choose actions, instead of hang flying the actions".
But to be more specific:
* Protein supplements make it easier for your body to get the protein required for whatever demand you're putting on it. You need higher protein intake to growth than to sustain muscle. If you were on protein supplementation during a growth phase, and then transitioned to a maintain, and stopped supplementing, while making sure your actual diet was sufficient, then you could in principle maintain your muscle mass with no problem. The extrapolation of this is that in principle, you could always replace protein supplements with "real food", regardless of phase and get pretty much the same benefits. There may be lifestyle/ease/cost tradeoffs.
* Creatine supplementation helps your body get "a little extra" work done. The direct boost that creatine grants you is real, but also like... small. I think it's often visualized as "it helps you get that one extra rep/half rep". Where creatine pays off is that by sustainably helping you get that one extra rep, it helps create greater demand on your body over time, therefore promoting more growth. If you stopped creatine supplementation, you would probably lose that "extra rep", but all the extra growth that you got would be locked in.
* Caffeine... well, that's far more psychological. Leaving the world of sports, as a knowledge worker, I've committed myself to my addiction. The withdrawal is real, and even if I worked through the headache, I definitely do not feel as sharp.
Top 4 at the latest ASL are all born before 1995 - they're all millennials. None of them are from the first generation of BW pros, but they've been in the game for a long time.
If I were China, I'd probably be backdoor signalling that they would consider these launches to be potential nuclear strikes to try to get them off the table.
This particular study (AHS-2) was initially funded by the NIH (and has continued with NIH and mixed funding): https://publichealth.llu.edu/adventist-health-studies/videos...
The reality is that a lot of counties/areas in one state are significantly more economically integrated (or drawn to, or dependent) to areas in other states. This can result in border regions swapping time zones.
For example, the 4 Michigan states you highlighted - given the reality of UP, those areas probably interact with Wisconsin probably even more than the rest of the UP. You see similar population clusterings on the WA/MT and OR/ID borders.
But what about the why? Why do we seek ever more predictive models? Obviously more predictive models allow us to just... do more and better things. And I think it's fair to say that that's enough justification in itself. But is there no substance behind the idea that we seek ever more predictive models because we believe it to be a (perhaps the only) systemic way towards "the truth"?
Put in other words, do you actually believe that there is no room for truth in science? Just concurrence and agreement with observation?
I guess I'm just nitpicking on your use of the phrase "science is about". I do agree that perhaps a better subtitle (without needing to reach for contortions in language) would be "which ones are more true".
For the red dot observations, I believe this things have been measured by at least 3 of the 4 devices on board - NIRCam (near infrared camera, has very limited spectral capabilities through its filter wheel), NIRSpec (near infrared spectrograph) and MIRI (mid infrared instrument).
I cannot pretend to have the actual expertise, but it does seem vanishingly unlikely that all 3 instruments could create consistent artefacts in the same location.
If a founder is able to spin and control both the loss of a major potential customer, and the low customer satisfaction rate (weak follow up from pilots) to the investors, I simply cannot imagine that doing 2 product lines is that much of a big deal.
More personally, I'd feel that if it truly were a coldly rational decision, the founder would feel confident in defending his choices (at least against any initial suggestions to the contrary) without resorting to anger.
The founder gets angry. He promised the VCs 10% of Spain’s oven market. The entire market. “We can’t sacrifice any of them.”
It’s not just greed. The 5 million was raised with the entire market on the slide. The founder isn’t choosing between right and wrong: he’s choosing which promise to break.
I wonder what the author had in mind when he wrote "which promise to break". Is the founder thinking about his promises to the VCs? Or thinking between the VC and customers?
I think this is the most human moment of the entire story. Everything else is pretty standard tropes (and just like everyone in this chain, these tropes ring very very true). They're almost systemic issues.
But this is a moment where the one person who is supposed to actually have agency (the founder!) actually has a choice. I don't want to nitpick the technicalities of the choice (it seems pretty straightforward to me that getting to 10% of total market would more than justify multiple product lines), but the psychology here.
Why is the founder uncomfortable breaking promises to investors, but more comfortable selling a garbage product? Is he just hopeful?
It is a form of farming subsidy that was specifically structured to avoid passing money through the government, and structured to control price volatility.
This is separate from the commercial market concentration in Canada, which is definitely real. To a degree, this is just the reality of being a smaller market. The depth and breathe of the American economy is definitely at play here.
If you compare Canadian super market consolidation vs Germany or UK (for example), you find a much more similar situation.
One thing to note and I guess might be a bit of the puzzle is that the data clearly indicates that trans-gendered men have lower upper and lower body strength compared to cis-men, while the opposite scenario (transwomen compared to cisgender women) appears much less conclusive.
The trans-women vs cis-gender strength effects are heavily influenced by a single study. There are only 7 studies for upper body strength, 5 of which lean towards showing greater trans-women strength, 1 that leans towards reduced, and 1 (Alvares 2025) which clearly indicates reduced strength. Similarly for lower body strength there are only 4 studies with a similar pattern (once again, the Alvares 2025 producing the clearest TW weaker than CW effect).
The Alvares 2025 study compares amateur volleyball players. There are 7 trans women in that study versus 8 cis-gender women. Average hours per week of activity (or volleyball? Unclear, I'm working off the meta-review's summary table) is 4 for TW and 14 for CW. Average age is 30 (28-33) for TW and 26 (22-29) for CW.
I don't think that makes the Alvares study useless, but I do feel that it's deeply limited. 4 hours vs 14 hours a week is a pretty big difference in activity level.