I think you are overly focused on how things are done in the US, where it is thankfully quite rare to outright starve.
In Africa it is quite common to kill foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy. Bureaucracy and rent-seeking has nothing to do with it, it's just child soldiers being brainwashed to kill their enemies at any price.
OK that is true and I didn't mean to imply it was happening everywhere. Sorry to offend. At the same time, my point that "it's not always just bureaucracy" is sadly still quite true too.
Yeah, quickly browsing this source it looks like Gaza is the primary location where aid workers are in danger (by a long shot. 181 killed in a year). Followed by Sudan, which is in an active civil war (60 aid workers killed).
That's bad, but it doesn't seem incredibly common.
The rest of africa looks to be pretty tame by comparison.
There are quite a few in non-war zones - e.g. Nigeria has 47 just being killed or kidnapped by armed gangs in the country as they seem to have really taken defunding the police to heart. I wouldn't call that pretty tame.
No, that 47 number is for all incidents in Nigeria.
The number of killed is 12 according to this report. I should also mention the fact that these aren't killing "foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy". Instead the report calls out just general crime being the primary reason for the deaths.
> Nigeria saw a significant increase in all victim types (killed, injured, kidnapped) from 2023 to 2024, with fatalities up to 12 from just 2 the previous year. Ongoing insurgency and criminal activity made road ambushes the most common attack location, with small arms fire and assaults both rising as types of violence. More kidnappings and violent robberies occurred at personal residences across several regions than in previous years, highlighting the increasing risks of targeted attacks.
Well yes, I think if you’re talking about war torn countries then yes. But when you talk about stable countries, poverty still exists and the inefficiencies of the bureaucracy and its impact on distribution is still the same.
And hunger isn’t that uncommon in the US, where a extreme poverty rate is still 4-5% of the population.
Technically you could have negative feedback result in a system that diverges further and further from some baseline, until it eventually collapses. This is usually because the gain of the feedback signal is too high.
> that's enough to know the range to each other transmitter, right?
Only in a flat environment without too much atmospheric distortions. As soon as you get multipath effects from eg waves bouncing off buildings and mountains then the computational complexity goes through the roof. Also I don't think you should underestimate how much the signal degrades in a "target path" vs the "direct path". The article mentions -60 dB and I think that is fairly optimistic. The transmitter power needs to be HUGE to make it work, so it would be much easier to have stationary transmitters. Normal radars manage to do this because they are highly directional, but multistatic radars need to look in all directions at once and need to up the power as a result.
Multistatic radars (of which bistatic are just the case with N=2) are like the nuclear fusion of radar systems: everybody agrees it would be neat to have them, but they're always 20-30 years in the future. In practice it is extremely difficult to maintain the precise timing synchronization required for radar systems. Especially when used in moving vehicles or in sparsely populated areas the expected error goes WAY up to the point of unusability.
The survivability gains are also overhyped since 1. the enemy can just blow up the transmitters leaving you with a bunch of useless receivers and 2. most air defense doctrines already treat radars as something that should be distributed widely, so you can lose a few without the whole system collapsing.
The article goes into this only briefly, but modern radar systems don't just send out any random pulse but they very specifically tailor the waveform going out in order to do cool signal processing tricks like pulse compression. There is also the matter of frequency. The lower the frequency, the bigger the antenna you would need to get a proper direction reading out of it. Fire control radars typically operate in the X-band, around 10 GHz. Most civilian radio transmitters are around 100 MHz, so you'd need impractically large antennas and even then the bandwidth limitations would severely limit spatial resolution. One saving grace here is that stealth airplanes are typically most highly optimized against X-band radars from the direction they're going to bomb (forward), so you might have a better chance with a normal system, but then you still might not have a precise enough target to actually shoot at.
So while the multistatic system does offer some advantages, in practice it's just cheaper and (importantly for military use) requires less fiddly bits in the field to just use normal monostatic radars. Civilian use also doesn't benefit greatly from being multistatic. It's a bit like Tesla turbines or hyperloops: cool idea and it even "works" in a way, but the normal way of doing things is just way better when budgets and engineering realities come into play.
Source: I was a radar engineering officer in the Dutch navy about a decade back.
Can you expand on this? It has always seemed to me that while programming does indeed like to couch itself in magical terms ("he's a database wizard", "this compiler stuff is black magic", etc), it is fundamentally understandable and replicable. All layers of programming build on their lower layers and this stuff is understood well enough that you can go to university to learn about it in detail.
Programming is technology but not "occult" technology, and I don't really see the added value of treating it as occult. Quite the opposite actually, most good programmers I know acquired their skill because they have a decent grasp about the entire system rather than treating most of it as a black box.
You can go study religious spells in a school as well. There are catholic universities teaching exorcism, and buddhist schools teaching tantric magics that give you superpowers. The critical difference is that I don't believe in either of these things, so I've labeled them "occult". I believe in programming and I'm not calling it occult, but there's little to objectively distinguish it from those other practices.
This is simply a reflection of my beliefs though, not an objective reality of the world. I trust that the TRM for my chip accurately reflect the details I can't observe for myself. Many devs don't even go that far down and trust that their OS, or programming language to behave as they expect. We're all dealing with black boxes on some level.
To quote a reasonable definition from an actual scholar on this subject, Jesper Sorensen:
Thus, magic is generally conceived of as referring to a
ritual practice aimed to produce a particular pragmatic and locally defined result by means of more or less opaque methods.
This pretty much perfectly describes how programming is perceived by normal people. I could also quote Malinowski, who argued that magic must have a kind of "strangeness" to differentiate it from non-ritual speech. And programmers regularly describe difficult bits of code as magical (e.g. magic constants, or fast inverse square root) even though these are easily explained in most cases.
> but there's little to objectively distinguish it from those other practices.
Isn't there? I would say that the key difference is that programming actually works, and works reliably. Even if it is opaque to normal people, at least the programmer themselves has a reasonable ability to understand why their program will work and critically can "call their shot": they can reliably predict the effect a certain program will have. Magic is not like that: even if the practitioner claims to understand how it works, their success rate is typically abysmal. AFAIK there are zero faith healers or other magic types whose claims consistently hold up when inspected, but programmers and other engineering types do it all the time. That's the objective difference right there, even if normal people struggle to discern the two.
Of course it's replicable to us high wizards who have studied it for most of our lives and now understand it in depth. So is the actual magic in many fictitious universes.
All technology is like this to some extent, but a lot of technology is grounded enough for the average person to see the rough operation of it. You look inside a washing machine, there's a part that spins around. Attached to it by a rubber belt is a smaller part that spins around, and has electric wires on the other end. Your explainer points to that and says "that's an electric motor - it converts electric power into spinning motion" and you say "ok".
AFAIK learning to program these days is a fairly normalized process where people start with basic commands (ie hello world stuff), then move on to control flow (if/while/for) and eventually on to object oriented programming, higher order functions and all the rest. Some people even go on to do things like "craft your own interpreter" and "NAND to Tetris" to really round out their knowledge, but most do not and that's fine. I think that some of the simplest programs are just as "explainable" as your washing machine example. Conversely, there are plenty of machines complex enough that an average person has no idea how they work. A MRI machine for instance is just a collection of metals and hoses and most people would seriously struggle to point out which parts do what and why. It's still not magic though.
I guess the difference between magic and science to me is that "not everyone can learn magic", but the core bit that makes science work is that in principle everyone can learn it. In practice of course we cannot know everything and so have to rely on the expertise of others, but that is a limitation in the humans and not in the knowledge. Meanwhile for "magic" you have to be chosen by the gods/genetically gifted/cursed/whatever.
In a universe where magic is just another skill that anyone can learn, that reasoning goes right out the window of course.
A lot of other magic systems are in principle open for anyone to learn. I mentioned this a bit more in the other comment, but buddhist spells are open to everyone in principle. The chosen/gifted one is a feature of western magic systems because of our own cultural expectations.
For sure. Despite all the talking about "self-deification" and all that shit, they sure seem to care a lot about what society (and their imaginary demons) think about them.
> A definition by which every human alive ever qualifies as a magician
Exactly correct.
Chapter 2: "No, every act of your life is a magical act; whenever from ignorance, carelessness, clumsiness or what not, you come short of perfect artistic success, you inevitably register failure, discomfort, frustration. [...] Why should you study and practice Magick? Because you can't help doing it, and you had better do it well than badly."
If you called him on it he would say that was on purpose, then talk your ears off about how. He was a ferociously effective charlatan, which is why people still remember the name he made up for himself. (And even invented a rhyming couplet to prate as a pronunciation guide!)
Will you still think I'm fucking with you if I call your comparison a lot more insightful than I think you realize?
White nerdy kids have just been relatively less desperate up to now, socioeconomically speaking. You used to have to be a real hardcore loser, as a not otherwise messed up white boy, to embrace Crowley or hermeticism or any of that other shit that's only interesting to the poor kids and the crime kids and the kids from fucked-up families, who hang around smoking cigarettes together just off school property. (Hello.)
But now, as we exit the second "gilded age" for the second "great depression," the prospect of success in "straight" life, the white folks standard college/job/marry/kids/Epstein-client script, proves a mirage, and the same immiseration of opportunity comes for American whites that American blacks have always known. Thus proliferate get-rich-quick schemes among those certain they are deserving - i.e., con games among suckers, Crowley's native element. Given how much his speed habit led him to write, it's no surprise he comes roaring back. (He did have a sense of character and of history, hence making sure he left behind an appealing - as appalling! - set of lies.)
I have a lot more respect for B.I.G., who at least in my recollection never pretended he was other than one in a million. But when somebody like any of these guys starts saying he sees himself in you or vice versa, you had better keep your knees tightly together and a hand over your drink.
No this was much more substantial and I quite enjoyed it, I was thinking along these lines when offering the comparison, but you have a flowery way to put it.
That is to say, this is the first I'm hearing of this Crowley guy directly, but I have heard murmurs of "magick" down stream in video game culture. So while I agree with the broad social analysis, and have even brushed the aesthetic diffuse through culture, I don't really see any practitioners or other indicators to suggest this is being taken seriously.
From most this would be no compliment. Out of you I genuinely appreciate it. I don't think you could show me greater kindness if you were trying, and I want you to know it means a lot.
If your moral development is at the level where you need to use neighborhood yard signs to make your argument, should you really be trying to educate people on the internet yet?
Philosphical treatments have got a bad rap because it is so easy for conmen to convert them into fake hope, but when properly applied they are still amazingly effective. It's just that "properly applied" is very often not profitable because all the applicable texts and practices have been quite literally known for thousands of years and are available through well known texts in the public domain.
And Sytse if you read this: beterschap en als dat niet helpt: sterkte. Cancer sucks.
In Africa it is quite common to kill foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy. Bureaucracy and rent-seeking has nothing to do with it, it's just child soldiers being brainwashed to kill their enemies at any price.
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