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The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.

and that is supposed to mean what in this context?

It means if you want the world to be different than it is, get out there and start making it that way. You are a participant, not an observer.

>It means if you want the world to be different than it is, get out there and start making it that way.

You keep avoiding to answer the main question: How?

And when you answer how, answer why that hasn't already worked.


The same way it’s always done: political organizing. Find groups that are working towards the world you want and start chipping in and getting involved. It takes time, there’s no magic wand, and we should’ve started 20 years ago, but none of that changes the answer: if you want the world to be different, get out there and start doing the work.

And, it has worked - it worked in the 30s to get the New Deal through and expand unions, it worked in the 60s to advance the environmental and civil rights agendas, it worked in the 80s to dismantle the New Deal, it worked in the 90s to promote gay rights, it worked in the 00s to make Christian Nationalism a national political force, it worked in the 10s to get a fascist elected and then re-elected, and god willing it’ll work in the 20s to get these fucks out of office again too.


What do you mean "how"?

You live it. This is basic shit.


As someone put it, “it turns out 4d chess is topologically isomorphic to checkers.”

As the joke goes, $10 to tighten the bolt, $90 to know which bolt to tighten.

It's still faster and cheaper to just build the right thing to begin with. As the old saying goes, spend your time sharpening your ax.

Yes, but only if you have an ax to sharpen. With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make progress. You can take this pretty up high too - sometimes it takes building multiple products or companies to get it right

> With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make progress

Way too often that is used as an excuse for various forms of laziness; to not think about the things you can already know. And that lack of thinking repeats in an endless cycle when, after your trial and error, you don't use what you learned because "let's look forward not backward", "let's fail fast and often" and similar platitudes.

Catchy slogans and heartfelt desires are great but you gotta put the brains in it too.


Without commenting about the frequency of negligence myself, I suspect at least that you and GP are in agreement.

I doubt GP is suggesting ‘go ahead and be negligent to feedback and guardrails that let you course correct early.’

Plugging the Cynefin framework as a useful technique for practitioners here. It doesn’t have to be hard to choose whether or not rigorous planning is appropriate for the task at hand, versus probe-test-backtrack with tight iteration loops.


If you start a business without a concrete idea of the timber you need to achieve the idea you have, an axe will be all but useless.

Iran did the same before the conflict in response to prior Israeli attacks - the two drone waves they sent that were intercepted were both demonstrations of capability, not actual attacks.

Unfortunately I’m not sure their current audience is gonna pick up the implied threat.


Iran even has a history of calling in their attacks to ensure no one gets hurt.

I don't think they did it this time, but they have in the past.


How do you know their intentions?

It's also a bit unreasonable to launch live munitions that have some 90% probability of being intercepted by a given system on a good day, while intending for "just a warning"


> How do you know their intentions?

Because they declared them loudly.

When they launched the drone strikes on Israel, they gave Israel and the US warning time so they could be intercepted. The second time, they gave them much less warning time.

The Iranians have a long history of negotiating loudly via their actions, which anyone who's spent any reasonable amount of time studying Iran knows and has seen in action. They're really not a mystery, they're very transparent, we just don't like what they're saying.


It’s more like if David and Goliath are in a standoff

David takes a small rock and whips it at a sensitive spot on Goliath’s ankles that most people don’t know about (Diego Garcia)

David knows Goliath will probably dodge it, and most likely kick it away given it’s importance, but there’s a point being made by shooting: if it hits then that’s a win, but if gets knocked down it’s a warning that they know where they need to hit for it to hurt


FTA:

> The kids also weighed in on the debate around the extent of the ban. The two options bandied in Salem were a “bell-to-bell” policy or just inside classrooms. The latter would allow kids to use their phones during passing period and lunch. Several advocated for that change. That mirrored the debate within the Oregon legislature. It ultimately led to a stalemate and the need for Gov. Kotek’s executive ruling.

It sounds like the legislature broadly agreed on the ban, but couldn’t agree on a couple final details. Insofar as an executive is useful, that’s the case for it: calling the shot in the face of several good (or bad!) options but no clear winner.


There is a reason why no US president in the last 40 years has gone through with the fantasy of attacking Iran. When even George W. Bush decides against a war, it means something.

I think George himself is the reason we wound up in Iraq and not Iran. That cabinet was just itching to invade a country full of brown people and oil we could "liberate". Afghanistan obviously didn't scratch that itch and all those people, just by nature of what was going on in the world earlier in their careers, f-ing hated Iran. Buuut, Iran would've been a tough sell. Meanwhile, just over the border there's this other other country full of oil and brown people that's run by a guy the world already considers bad, the propaganda will be easier, the coalition that's keeping him under control is kinda falling apart so we can use the threat of regional destabilization and terrorism to get buy in, the Bush family regrets leaving him in power so any "out of band" advice he may seek is going to be favorable, etc, etc.

Well I'm not sure about any of that.

I will say this: a demonstrably better foreign policy to the good for the USA and everybody else is our own energy sufficiency trending into green energy.

Two, Israel and surrounding countries get they're act together themselves. Own you're own liberty. Like Aeschylus' Oresteia the furies are out of control.

Three, the general we in the US who voted for trump, the senate that approved the idiots running the executive branch, must move away from shadow boxing culture warfare. It's a waste. The dems lost twice to trump; they are out of touch. The current slate of Republicans are a sinister combination of wusses, liking trumps broader policies, but executing them so malignly and incompetently it's breaking into systemic destruction from law to prices. Im not a liberal; nobody is owning me with smart ass memes. We are simply failing each other while debt increases, our friends in the world are cold hearted to us (derservedly), while congress will not discharge its constitutional responsibilities.

I think im gonna volunteer to help with 2026 voting. Its our next shot at righting this rotten ship.


Of course, wanting to be technically correct: Iranians are Aryan (Iran is a variant spelling), and literally Caucasian (they live near the Caucasus on the Asian continent).

In other words, they're the prototype "White People", at least by claims - over and back. Not that that stops anyone anyway. Certainly doesn't stop people who merely claim to be Aryan :-P

Irony, that.


To give an idea of how badly the Bush administration wanted to attack Iraq, Richard Clarke mentioned going into the White House situation room the day after 9/11 and seeing them talking about invading Iraq, and wondering how messed up your priorities had to be to be doing that.

Well, hindsight's 20/20.

Trump just doesn't have the snap that Biden had when he was that age, much less Bush.


Foresight, in this case, was also 20/20. Just because they didn’t listen doesn’t mean they weren’t told.

Yeah it’s pretty obviously a stupid idea to attack one of the masters in drone warfare.

Iran mass produces drones and have optimized them for the modern battlefield in the Russian war against Ukraine.

You don’t win wars with jet aircraft anymore. You win them with (cheap, mass produced) drones. And the US only has expensive drones that can be manufactured at a low rate.


>the US only has expensive drones

How do you think "Daddy" Warbucks got his name ;)


Guess I'll be the contrarian on this one - I've got a pair of the Max's and love them. I use them primarily for watching movies and TV (I live in an apartment and am not a sociopath), and the "spatial audio" is incredibly good. Apple's got a "Sound" to their products that isn't neutral, but is very detailed and tends to disappear pretty quickly. Both the noise cancellation and the "transparent" mode are phenomenal. They're a bit buggy, yes, but not tangibly worse than any other bluetooth headphones I've owned. They're heavy, but I don't wear them outside - they're solely for home use. I'm personally excited to see these get a refresh.

In this case, it seems to be serving as a useful filter function.

Yeah, I got the sarcasm, but that's ok.

I'll water my indoor tomatoes, basil and thyme. It is way more productive than blabbering about gardening in the internet.


there's no free lunch - the plants are just rearranging what you give them.

I agree. Potatoes transform light into starch. With traditional farming you get a huge "free" solar collector. In vertical farming you have to pay for the light.

So the alternative is to grow lettuce that has a greater price to energy ratio.


More than just light - the chemical profile of the soil is the feedstock for all of the interesting chemistry the plant does. The air can provide oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon, which are the backbone of a lot of the chemistry, but anything more exotic than that is coming from the soil. They're factories, not alchemists.

Hydrogen comes from water. They have surplus of Oxygen from CO2 and water, so much that they give it away. Carbon comes from the CO2 in the air.

Other nutrients like phosphorus or potassium come disolved in water, but in intensive farming they must be added to the soil, so it's the same that dissolving in the hydroponic solution. Perhaps it's more efficient in hydroponic than in soil.

Nitrogen is more tricky. There is plenty of Nitrogen in the air but not in a useful form, so in most cases it must be added as fertilizer. In some cases like soy the plants have helper bacteria that transform the nitrogen from the air into useful forms. This conversion takes a lot of energy, so I don't expect the lack of wind to be a problem, you still need some air movement to keep the CO2 high and the O2 low. (Anyway, farming soy under artificial light is probably not profitable for the same reason farming potatoes under artificial light is not profitable.)

The most important thing you lack inside a vertical farm that you get almost for free in a big faring field is sunlight (i.e. energy).


co2 is mostly free and plentiful, and also the main ingredient for plant biomass.

which is why lettuce grows just fine.

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