SatanicNotMessianic

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SatanicNotMessianic,

Losing multiple cities to a tiny domestic invading force of mercenaries after completely losing control of said force due to lack of command discipline, and finally only being able to force them to disband by threatening the families of the mercenaries involved isn’t exactly a sign of strength, though, is it? It’s not exactly what we’d expect of a professional modern military.

It would be like if Erik Prince took his Blackwater army and started marching on Washington, capturing towns along the way, and the US army was helpless to stop them until the American government threatened to hunt down and kill the family members of Blackwater mercenaries.

That would be considered unusual, and not really a sign of political or military strength.

SatanicNotMessianic,

I would think American leadership completely dysfunctional if they allowed that situation to occur. If they did not have enough command authority to trust that the US military wouldn’t confront Prince with immediate and overwhelming force when ordered, the US would be a laughingstock. The scenario is borderline unimaginable in a developed country with anything resembling a modern political infrastructure.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Russia. I was originally trained as a Sovietologist, when that was still a thing you could be an -ologist of. I could talk for hours about strategic weapons systems and Russian prep for NBC warfare and what the politics in the Kremlin were like under the troika approach and why the fascistic tendencies of Putin in rejecting Russian political history in favor of personal enrichment and plundering the nation have irrevocably broken Russian politics.

But that’s for another day. Putin responded the way dictators in developing nations do, not like someone who actually has command and control over their modern military forces. I mean, it’s a Russian tradition to threaten the families of people who publicly disagree with leadership. In the US, the forces brought to bear against Blackwater’s attempted putsch would have been so overwhelming that his own men would have arrested him. But as much as I hate Blackwater and think Prince should probably be in prison for war crimes, their cadre was recruited from a different class of people than Wagner.

SatanicNotMessianic,

Are the two obviously differentiated like that?

In most of the American English accents I’m familiar with, they’re pronounced “WI men” and “WŌ man.”

If I try to sound out using an I in both, the only way they sound different to me is if I move the accent to the final syllable, to mane it stand out. Something like “wi MEN” vs “wi MAN.”

If so, I’d love to hear where you’re from.

SatanicNotMessianic,

It’s all of a kind to me whether someone is into crystals or crucifixes. Honestly, I prefer the crystals folks. They’re less likely to actively and vocally prefer my non-existence. But to be honest, I really don’t see a difference between casting a spell to get a job and praying to jesus to get a job. The more it becomes a major focus of one’s existence, the more problematic it is, but I suspect that both numerically and by percentage, there are fewer fundamentalists on the witchy side.

SatanicNotMessianic,

Maybe my gauge is calibrated differently, but I wasn’t trying to be condescending. At most, I thought a christian might consider it condescending because their mainstream religion was being compared to a fashionable new age fancy at best.

Christians - some of them - think that the existence of Aquinas means that their religion is intellectual at its core, wh i in their minds renders paganism mere cosplay. I’ve had exactly that argument made to me.

In any case, that was just a benign musing. When I condescend to condescend, it’s ridiculously obvious. Apologies for any offense - it was friendly fire.

SatanicNotMessianic,

That’s a fair point, although I do think they ceded first place in the past couple of years. Unvaccinated adults are now three times more likely to be republican than not. They’re not only numerically outnumbering the new agers, they’re anti-vaxxing from the halls of government and via mass media, as opposed to facebook moms in suburban california who also sell essential oils.

SatanicNotMessianic,

The fact that the situation you mention in the spoiler is acknowledged in the show to be problematic from both a professional and personal perspective is dealt with in the show, iirc. It’s something Ted needs to come to grips with, and is in no small part related to his internal troubles. It’s not played for laughs or character development, and to the extent that the therapist wasn’t reported or sanctioned it is unfortunate but realistic.

SatanicNotMessianic,

The Uruk-hai were more tolerant of daylight than other orcs. I think it was mentioned a couple of times by the fellowship folks, and there was also a scene when they had captured Merry and Pippin and had to keep running day and night. The commander made fun of the others for being weaker against the daylight.

Also, cavalry can generally defeat a pole arm formation by flanking and using a combined arms operation. They need projectile weapons (arrows/muskets/cannon…) or infantry to keep the pikemen engaged. If the pole arm unit forms a square, it’s largely protected against cavalry but has increased vulnerability to missile weapons and is fairly immobile.

Or just send in the ents.

SatanicNotMessianic, (edited )

While that’s understandable, I think it’s important to recognize that this is something where we’re going to have to treat pretty carefully.

If a human wants to become a writer, we tell them to read. If you want to write science fiction, you should both study the craft of writing ranging from plots and storylines to character development to Stephen King’s advice on avoiding adverbs. You also have to read science fiction so you know what has been done, how the genre handles storytelling, what is allowed versus shunned, and how the genre evolved and where it’s going. The point is not to write exactly like Heinlein (god forbid), but to throw Heinlein into the mix with other classic and contemporary authors.

Likewise, if you want to study fine art, you do so by studying other artists. You learn about composition, perspective, and color by studying works of other artists. You study art history, broken down geographically and by period. You study DaVinci’s subtle use of shading and Mondrian’s bold colors and geometry. Art students will sit in museums for hours reproducing paintings or working from photographs.

Generative AI is similar. Being software (and at a fairly early stage at that), it’s both more naive and in some ways more powerful than human artists. Once trained, it can crank out a hundred paintings or short stories per hour, but some of the people will have 14 fingers and the stories might be formulaic and dull. AI art is always better when glanced at on your phone than when looked at in detail on a big screen.

In both the cases of human learners and generative AI, a neural network(-like) structure is being conditioned to associate weights between concepts, whether it’s how to paint a picture or how to create one by using 1000 words.

A friend of mine who was an attorney used to say “bad facts make bad law.” It means that misinterpretation, over-generalization, politicization, and a sense of urgency can make for both bad legislation and bad court decisions. That’s especially true when the legislators and courts aren’t well educated in the subjects they’re asked to judge.

In a sense, it’s a new technology that we don’t fully understand - and by “we” I’m including the researchers. It’s theoretically and in some ways mechanically grounded in old technology that we also don’t understand - biological neural networks and complex adaptive systems.

We wouldn’t object to a journalism student reading articles online to learn how to write like a reporter, and we rightfully feel anger over the situation of someone like Aaron Swartz. As a scientist, I want my papers read by as many people as possible. I’ve paid thousands of dollars per paper to make sure they’re freely available and not stuck behind a paywall. On the other hand, I was paid while writing those papers. I am not paid for the paper, but writing the paper was part of my job.

I realize that is a case of the copyright holder (me) opening up my work to whoever wants a copy. On the other other hand, we would find it strange if an author forbade their work being read by someone who wants to learn from it, even if they want to learn how to write. We live in a time where technology makes things like DRM possible, which attempts to make it difficult or impossible to create a copy of that work. We live in societies that will send people to prison for copying literal bits of information without a license to do so. You can play a game, and you can make a similar game. You can play a thousand games, and make one that blends different elements of all of them. But if you violate IP, you can be sued.

I think that’s what it comes down to. We need to figure out what constitutes intellectual property and what rights go with it. What constitutes cultural property, and what rights do people have to works made available for reading or viewing? It’s easy to say that a company shouldn’t be able to hack open a paywall to get at WSJ content, but does that also go for people posting open access to Medium?

I don’t have the answers, and I do want people treated fairly. I recognize the tremendous potential for abuse of LLMs in generating viral propaganda, and I recognize that in another generation they may start making a real impact on the economy in terms of dislocating people. I’m not against legislation. I don’t expect the industry to regulate itself, because that’s not how the world works. I’d just like for it to be done deliberately and realistically and with the understanding that we’re not going to get it right and will have to keep tuning the laws as the technology and our understanding continue to evolve.

SatanicNotMessianic,

This used to happen occasionally during the cold war. US/NATO defecting to the USSR didn’t happen often, but it did happen occasionally.

You’ve already gotten read on that take on the military, so I’m not going to bother with that. I will say that it seems like this young person has some mental and behavioral issues, given his rank at his age and his disciplinary history. I would think he’s not someone who tends to make sound judgments or think things through.

In general, the military tries to actively avoid people with these kinds of issues, and will generally not reward this kind of behavior when it comes up. There are a lot of things you can point a finger at the military about with regard to behavior toward civilians or abuse within the ranks, but in this case it looks to me like things were more or less working, to the point that he decided to run away and join the circus.

SatanicNotMessianic,

Exactly this.

Rudy, as wrong as it feels to say about 9/11, benefitted from being in the right place at the right time. His decisions as mayor (including locating the emergency command center in the WTC complex against recommendations and going with first responder radio equipment that was inadequate to the task) resulted in 9/11 being worse than it could have been.

It was decided that, at the time, America needed to see heroes. Rudy and W were the obvious candidates. Investigatory pieces were seen as tasteless if not actually harmful, and Rudy was able to go on cruise control with “a noun, a verb, and 9/11.” He got a lot of mileage out of an incident where his incompetence made things dramatically worse.

And I’m not even addressing the Disney version of NYC. The scariest thing people are facing in Times Square now is a Russian-accented Elmo that’s overly aggressive to tourists.

SatanicNotMessianic,

A significant part of what Tesla is, is Elon Musk. If not for Musk’s wild and broken promises, Tesla wouldn’t be as overvalued as it is. Tesla without Musk would probably make better cars, but without him running the world’s biggest confidence game from the top office, it wouldn’t have the valuation it currently has.

SatanicNotMessianic,

Let’s sink a bunch of money into functionality which we have no experience with and that other people are currently doing better. Then let’s blame the actors and writers for us not making as much money as we’d like to make.

SatanicNotMessianic,

I had a friend who was very self-conscious about her nipples. She used to wear band-aids over them whenever she was wearing a tee shirt or something that might let them show through or even just poke out a bit.

You can get them in various sizes, and as far as I know they stay on pretty much all day. If you have chest hair, maybe look for something a bit less aggressive when it comes to removing them.

Unless you’re into that.

SatanicNotMessianic,

I think my gmail account by itself is of legal age.

I F*cked up and I need help.

Hey guys. I’m new to Linux and I’m running Linux Mint 21.2 Cinnamon. Yesterday I have f*cked up. I was testing things in users and geve myself standart priveledges insted of Admin ones I had from beggining and then restarted PC. I then tried log back into users tab and change myself back to Admin but even tho the password is...

SatanicNotMessianic,

It’s been a little while but he probably didn’t finish setting up sudo so there’s no sudo users file of approved users.

I would just try su.

SatanicNotMessianic,

When I’d set systems up, creating a password for the automatically created root account was one of the first steps in the process after setting up the basics. You could then set other accounts to have root privileges, or set up sudo to allow your personal account access via sudo, but even sudo acts as UID 0. If your setup didn’t do that, or if you set your account name up as UID 0, then you can always boot off of another source and mount the internal hd, right?

Does the government keep capitalist interests on the top ?

Lately since covid has begun, there has been a high job insecurity in multiple fields , while the logical thing to do would have been improving job security laws, at least our govt( the name does not matter really) has brought laws , that gives power to the capitalists to abuse labour laws , or to fire employees more easily! I...

SatanicNotMessianic,

That’s not exactly true.

What is true is that the officers of the company have a duty to act in the best interest of the company, as they evaluate it. That might mean more pay hikes and stock grants. It might mean cost cutting and job losses while executives get bonuses. It might mean offshoring jobs or keeping them local. If the board disagrees with the leadership vision or execution, they can fire people. But there’s no law that governs what a ceo can or can’t do with regard to profit or success, as long as they can show they were acting in the best interest of the company. That’s not hard to do if they managed to not break other laws, like embezzlement.

For instance, if Musk answered to a board of directors at twitter, he would have been fired a while ago, but they couldn’t have him arrested for tanking the company.

SatanicNotMessianic,

Every complaint is a confession. You can literally just start with every political complaint that gets Fox in a tizzy or that gets shouted from congressional podiums and use that to start a criminal investigation into the people and organizations backing the complaint. You should be able to generate a lot of cases like that.

After which of course you’ll be ordered to shut down the investigation.

SatanicNotMessianic,

I can’t decide whether to make a duck with a DA joke or something about the T-Birds, but I’m not sure I have an audience for those.

I’m going to go watch some Sha-na-na.

SatanicNotMessianic,

No it is not.

Rumble is the truth social of video, and in fact also runs the cloud service that hosts truth social.

There might be a less reputable source for information, but I can’t think of one.

SatanicNotMessianic,

I’m not sure what market you’re in or what your budget is, but the pains that you’re talking about (other than the actual price of the houses) can be mitigated by working with a competent realtor. You want someone who both knows that particular market and also knows how to identify comparable sales. That means knowing the neighborhoods you’re looking at as well as prices and trends.

I’m not a realtor, but I did buy a house fairly recently in an extremely hot market. People here will bid $300k over asking and waive all contingencies. That’s just the nature of the market right now - at least in some areas.

Basically, look at the asking price but use something like redfin or zillow to get their estimation of what the selling price of the house will be. The sites will also (try) to show you comparable houses. The sites tend to err on the high side with estimated values, but if you’re not in a market that’s open to bargain hunters it will be close.

It’s a big step - probably bigger than it should be. I believe that the majority of American families have the majority of their net worth invested in their house.

Closed bidding is how it’s always worked, though. Generally, the people selling the house will pick the top two or three offers and make a counter-offer or otherwise solicit additional offers. When a market is hot, they can additionally push for a quick closing. As a rule of thumb, you’ll probably spend less for houses that have been on the market for a while, but you can likely expect the same kind of issue when it comes time to sell it. If you buy in a desirable market where houses sell within a few weeks, you’ll again probably see that kind of thing when you sell. Bargain hunting in real estate - waiting for the chance to get a smart offer approved - can lead to you being frozen out - or worse, getting taken for a ride that more informed buyers are staying away from. It can be like buying stocks in that way, except with hundreds of thousands to millions on the line with a single investment.

Anyway, find a realtor you can trust - possibly through a referral. Ask around at work or something if none of your friends has someone. It makes the process a lot smoother. This depends on the state, but the seller may pay the realtor’s commission, and in any case should be considered part of the cost of buying a house.

SatanicNotMessianic,

The fact that you would consider your counterfactual a mirror image is itself problematic.

In the case of the Foundation, it supports exactly what it purports to support. They’re like the EFF and other civil rights organizations. If you consider the EFF left wing, I think that says a bit more about where you stand.

The original article was outrage-bate blog spam, with random Capitalized Words and the prolific use of “scare quotes.” It doesn’t even say anything. No charges of misinformation. No citation of law. Just “They have a Billion Dollars!!” kinds of sentences.

On the other hand, the CEO of a company - particularly a small company - lends his personality to the company. It often makes sense to co-identify them, given that the CEO has an incredible amount of influence.

So if you are saying that libertarian software project : libertarian institutions :: conservative ideas : homophobic legislation, I guess you’re just really endorsing the position of judging the company by the politicians and politics it supports. If you see prop 8 as being as fundamental to the conservative position as internet freedom is to an organization specifically dedicated to preserving internet freedom, all I can say is that I hope more people start to see it that way.

SatanicNotMessianic,

As compared to the rest of the yard…

SatanicNotMessianic,

Reddit has lost 2/3 of their valuation in less than a year, and that was before the protests. That’s not a success kind of metric. And that number is from the institutional investors saying how much they’re marking down their investments - it’s not like some people trying to tank the stock.

Basically, the metrics which have not not all been made public have made the people and institutions with a collective billions of dollars already invested in the company are the ones saying it’s in the basement.

SatanicNotMessianic,

For anyone else who is wondering - the game works great on the steam deck. I actually prefer it over my macbook pro because it’s easier to read the screen. I’ve gotten hours logged into the game so far.

It is a perfect update of the franchise. The storylines and writing are top notch, and the technology is blowing me away with how they managed to update everything while keeping the feel.

SatanicNotMessianic,

The only problem I’ve run into is my own muscle memory difference between the switch and deck layouts. The way they’ve done the radial menus, and especially the turn-based combat, make controller confusion much less of a factor. My thumb still gets confused between A and B more than. anything else, but BG is very forgiving.

As a point of reference Cyberpunk to be pretty tough in the real time parts. Stray is a bit more forgiving and had been my most played deck game before BG.

I can already tell I’m going to play this one through the end though.

SatanicNotMessianic,

Reddit’s valuation is down from $15B when they closed their last round of pre-IPO funding. They were hovering in the $5B neighborhood before the APIpocalypse, and I find it hard to imagine that they’ve gained significant value since then. That’s a loss of 2/3 of the investments from their institutional partners and VCs. I hardly think they’re feeling like they deserve a victory lap.

The only reason why you wouldn’t pull an IPO due to a company’s value cratering by 2/3 is because people are looking to get whatever cash they can out of it before it completely collapses. If reddit were a healthy company, the valuation tanking would never have happened. If they were a survivable company, they would have pulled the IPO and made the organizational and policy changes necessary to restore at least some measure of value.

Spez is Musking the site because, like Musk, he is watching his business crash and burn and he has no idea what to do beyond making people pay him to be allowed to create and moderate content he can then resell.

The effects of the decisions being made will not be immediately obvious, especially when reddit doesn’t publish KPIs that show they’re hemorrhaging value. Twitter is notorious for releasing clutching-at-straws metrics in order to not have to address that the company Elon paid $44B for is now worth about $20B and falling.

Firing the mods and replacing them or bringing them to heel is at best a pyrrhic victory because they have not yet figured out how to stem the bleeding, and spez idolizing Musk’s moves at twitter shouldn’t instill a lot of confidence.

SatanicNotMessianic,

You don’t choose to be a paladin. Paladinhood chooses you.

SatanicNotMessianic,

I’d like to find this out too. My main computer is a Mac, so I will likely just buy it and try it out on there, but I hope it works cleanly on the deck.

I read just a couple of days ago that they’re committed to supporting the deck, but as of now I don’t see the supported icon.

I have had issues with some “works great” games - cyberpunk in particular has an issue with things like text size so I’ll try it with the deck hooked to a monitor and with a keyboard and mouse - but I’m hoping that BG3 will work out of the gate,l (so to speak).

SatanicNotMessianic,

I feel like there’s something wrong with Florida but I can’t put my finger on it.

SatanicNotMessianic,

GotG3 was the first Marvel I honestly just liked in a while. It has started to feel like the mojo has been lost - that spark of whimsy and fun. It feels stupid to say something like the Marvel franchise has become formulaic given that it’s always been so, but they’ve definitely been feeling like they’re just ringing the cash register recently. GotG3 was a pleasant surprise for me.

SatanicNotMessianic,

He is offered an interesting shape, but he is not so in-kleined.

SatanicNotMessianic,

I think it depends on how you’re counting. I think the number of charges he’s been indicted on is nearing 80. There’s the NY fraud case, the stolen secret documents case, and now this election interference case. I’m not sure what else is pending.

But you also have another defamation case for E Jean Carol, who successfully sued him a few months ago after which he doubled down. I think I remember a few other cases going forward. On the other hand, cases he tried to bring against companies like CNN have been dismissed.

It’s good he’s getting his fans to pay for his legal fees under the guise of still being able to win the 2020 election, because every dollar Trump puts into a lawyer’s pocket is one less that goes to elect republicans to congress or state office. He’s basically setting piles of GOP money on fire while they watch.

SatanicNotMessianic,

It’s certainly going somewhere, and I am in no way, shape, or form saying that Trump’s lawyers are true and worthy of their wealth. I am saying I’d rather a Trumpy lawyer spend the money on another boat than have that money go into the campaign to re-elect Bobo or MTG. It’s like watching Steve Bannon’s friend use the money they grifted from the MAGAs to crowdfund The Wall instead a) spend the money buying himself a yacht and b) openly boast about ripping the MAGAs off in order to buy the boat. I’d rather the money go to a worthy cause, but if we can’t have that I’m happy they’re setting fire to it rather than putting it into elections.

SatanicNotMessianic,

I’ve lost track of the number of indictments. I think we’re at about 80-ish? I’m really hoping we can get it to a nice round 100 if we can get additional charges for perjury, violating court orders, and the like.

But Georgia is on my mind.

SatanicNotMessianic,

Yep, that helps!

Of course, Georgia is expecting to make an announcement by the end of the month.

SatanicNotMessianic,

After having this book lying around on my kindle for years, I finally finished it a few months ago. I think it is the only Trek novel I’ve ever read. Although I enjoy the franchise - in some ways more than I enjoy many of the actual shows - I tend to avoid franchise-driven novels in general due to a perception of poor writing.

Stitch is actually pretty well written - at least as well as one of the better episodes. Garak - he of ambiguous loyalties and sexuality - becomes a fully fleshed out character with a backstory and a complicated professional and personal life. Garak was and remains one of my favorite characters in the franchise, and this book lived up to the character and cemented his status. The author, Andrew Robinson, is the actor who played Garak, and I’ve always enjoyed interviews with him where he gives insights into his character. Originally, Garak was going to be more transparently bisexual, but the studio decided not to follow that line because it was considered too controversial for the time. Robinson, however, made sure to play the role in a way that let the viewers in on. that aspect of his character without getting a protest from the studio.

I will be picking up the audiobook so I can do a re-read. The fact that Robinson is the narrator means I’m going to be actively listening and not just playing it in the background.

SatanicNotMessianic,

That’s entirely fair. I unfortunately have less time for personal reading than I used to, so I end up either being much choosier than I was when I was younger, or more often I go back to re-read ones I know I loved. It’s easier to fall asleep to those sometimes.

I will take a look at your suggestions. The last sf books I really enjoyed were the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky. There’s not a lot of hard sf that centers on biology (as opposed to physics), but the author absolutely nailed it. I’m incredibly impressed with the premise and the story, but the science was correct while still being brilliant and innovative. Imagine a civilization of human-level intelligence giant spiders, but whose psychology and society are done as spiders, not humans in spider costumes. On the other hand, I tried Project Hail Mary by Martian author Andrew Weir, and the science was so bad that I made it only about a quarter of the way through before giving up. I don’t need all of my sf to be hard sf, but if you’re going to be writing hard sf you have to get the science at least plausible.

Anyway, I really liked Garak in the show and thought his arc was among the most interesting. This book, however canon-y it’s considered, answered a lot of questions that were raised or hinted at in the show with enough depth and resonance that I wonder how much he was able to draw on character notes and how much was coming out of his head-canon as a follow-on from just grokking the character so well.

SatanicNotMessianic,

I think Nintendo knows it’s market pretty well. I have both a switch and a steam deck andO have a lot of the same games on each. The deck is obviously the higher power unit. I got it just a short time ago to try to play through my backlog, although to be honest I’ve logged more hours on new purchases like Stray and Dredge. It’s a good system.

The switch outshines it in a couple of places, though. First, they got the form factor - specifically the size and weight - better than steam did. It’s smaller and lighter, and I think the battery lasts longer. More importantly, the games that run on the switch were made for it. There’s no squinting at tiny fonts or trying to figure whether and how to use the trackpad to control the mouse bits. If it’s on the switch, I can be pretty sure it is playable on the switch. I’m still getting used to the issues with scaling down the desktop experience to a deck, but already I’m thinking I won’t be playing a lot of cyberpunk without booking up a mouse, keyboard, and monitor.

In short, the deck and windows handhelds need to perform at the level of a (low end) desktop (because they’re playing desktop games) as well as worry about scaling and transforming the UI. The switch doesn’t have that problem, and the trade off is a more limited (but still extensive) library.

The switch is my first Nintendo device since the NES, and the first party content isn’t what made me finally try it. I like playing games like Diablo on it. I think Nintendo, by owning the entire stack, can serve up a better and more curated experience. If I didn’t have a library of a couple hundred steam games that I’ve never played, I’d probably not have considered getting the deck. I am enjoying it, and some games are phenomenal, but from a performance-that-actually-impacts-the-user perspective, Nintendo might just come out on top.

SatanicNotMessianic,

Is there a text version of this video?

I’m interested, but what I’m wondering is the power requirements. If I’m remembering the rule of thumb correctly, it takes about 1000 watts to drive a 10k btu ac unit, plus a bit of engineering overhead. 10k btu is fairly modest and will cool about 300-400 sq ft. I’m not sure what a 1000 watt solar setup would look like - my quick search looks like people use a 100 watt setup with relatively portable panel arrays, and use them to charge an external battery which then supports a higher draw, but I imagine it wouldn’t be able to run around the clock or even for extended periods without a big array.

Am I wrong in my reasoning? Sorry, I just have a hard time with videos as opposed to reading.

SatanicNotMessianic,

44 fish out of 1000+ might be extremely significant.

If we’re going to say “what is the likelihood of pulling up a fish with 180x cesium levels?” then the number 44/1000+ might seem like we should say “It’s not very significant.” And for some phenomena, that’s an okay assessment. It’s the same as 4.4/100+, which is a less than 5% chance. Of course, having a 5% chance of getting shot on the way to work is a bit high. It probably means your work is being in active combat.

You also have to measure downstream effect. If there were 44/1000 and 1000 was the average catch size, that means that for a single catch, 44 fish that I can only assume are poisonous or at least medically dangerous. How many people would those 44 fish serve? Could we expect 50-60 downstream deaths or cases of cancer? How many shipments of 1000 fish, with 44 having 180x cesium levels, are going to make their way into the coastal cities and food distribution in the area?

But even beyond all of that, you cannot look at a statistical number intended to characterize something like this and make an interpretation as to its significance without more data. In this case, the number we’re measuring significance against is “Out of x fish, how many do we expect to have 180x cesium?” If the answer is “40,” then 44 is likely not significant. If the answer is “less than 1,” then I suspect 44 is extremely significant. It’s multiple orders of magnitude from baseline, which means that something very very different and quite possibly unexpected and extremely bad is going on.

Basically - and I’m not accusing you of this in any way - some people will use this kind of non-analysis to deliberately mislead their readers about health or safety or environmental issues. It’s nothing against you, OP. It’s just that I taught and still sometimes teach this kind of thing, and I want to make sure that people are aware when they read this sort of thing.

SatanicNotMessianic,

My point isn’t about 1000 or 10000. It’s that we shouldn’t make assumptions as to the interpretation of statistical characteristics without sufficient additional data.

SatanicNotMessianic,

Space Force, baby! The newest and most well respected branch of the military!

SatanicNotMessianic,

I haven’t seen the film yet so I don’t know if they get into this, but a large number of the scientists involved with the Manhattan Project were working because they were terrified that the Nazis would build a bomb before the Allies. When, for several reasons, that failed to happen, they were relieved that the bomb wouldn’t have to be used. They felt betrayed when it was used against Japan, who were not developing a bomb and who could have been defeated using conventional means.

SatanicNotMessianic,

That looks like an adaptation from a 15th C style helmet called a sallet, worn with a bevor.

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