PrinceWith999Enemies @ PrinceWith999Enemies @lemmy.world

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I know. I’m thinking of a full court press kind of thing integrating US and foreign intelligence services. Something that goes beyond airdrops of flyers and Tokyo Rose broadcasts.

The US has seen the potential efficacy of targeted full-on intelligence operations to create social-political disruptions. We’ve also seen (admittedly not in living memory) the political effectiveness of the Underground Railroad. I think that the operational disruption would go beyond the loss of manpower, especially if it included senior officers.

It’s harder to operate in Russia than in the US, but today’s Russia also isn’t exactly North Korea. They’re kind of a kleptocracy, which creates its own vulnerabilities.

Sorry, I’ve reached the age where 1990 is permanently 20 years ago. The incident I was thinking of was a Sov pilot defecting in 1976.

There had been a handful of other incidents made public. I’m unaware of the reverse happening anywhere. They did manage to shoot down and capture a a U-2 in 1960, which was both a major intelligence coup and a diplomatic catastrophe.

For a while I used “Loading…”

No matter how much Iraq my brain I can’t think of a single intelligence asset that exploited gullible American politicians.

Couldn’t god just make the abortion not work? Maybe give the doctor a heart attack, or make Jesus appear on the sonogram like he does on toast?

1. DNA and fingerprints for biometric records
2. I would be willing to bet the budget of the program that the number of people willing to go through that would not even be a rounding error.

I’m just spitballing here, but I’ve done this kind of thing.

1. Establish a program where any defecting Russian soldier will receive a bonus of $20k USD and a work visa in one of a list of countries.
2. Defecting with military equipment increases the bonus based on the combat and the intelligence value of the equipment. 30-some years ago, I believe we were offering $1M to anyone defecting with one of the new MIGs. I think we got a couple out of that program.
3. Defection bonus can also scale with rank and intelligence value of the soldier. Defecting general? $1M. Defecting colonel? $250k. More money for info, and you can land a job as a “consultant” with western intelligence. Maybe throw in a condo.
4. The Russians are quite famous for punishing or executing innocent family members in revenge for such actions. They will have difficulty doing so if the number of defectors are in the thousands to tens of thousands, but the initial people will likely be those who have less of a concern there.
5. Expend funding for in-country intelligence assets to construct an Underground Railroad for defectors. Assign an initial $5B USD to develop networks in major cities to smuggle the families of defectors out of the country with arrangements made for visas etc.

If you were to sit down with a spreadsheet right now, you could come up with a rough estimate for the cost of eliminating one Russian asset - soldier, tank, air defense system, whatever. A program like the above would reassign those costs, with the additional benefit of saving the lives of Ukrainian troops and civilians (because it’s non-combat attrition) and having a potentially cascading effect (the more people that quit, the more others are likely to quit since it reduces both manpower and morale).

I don’t think it’s a big deal yet (although morale is a big deal), but it possibly could be.

They go through that in the article. I’m sympathetic, but it looks like a lot of spin on shaky statistics.

I think that the second amendment is not only stupid, but demonstrably stupid in the modern context. Not only does it not secure “freedom” (pretty much every developed nation scores higher on the freedom indices than the US without any such concept), but it absolutely correlates with a loss of freedom, if by freedom we mean freedom from fear of police violence, crime, and political violence. The US is literally off the charts when it comes to measuring actual quality of life metrics like access to healthcare, like social mobility, wealth inequality (which itself correlates to everything from teenage pregnancy to drug abuse), and so on. All of those guns aren’t doing anything to secure what are considered basic human rights in the rest of the developed world.

In fact, one could argue, our obsession with guns distracts us from taking actions that could actually secure those rights. There’s a very practical reason why republicans push for gun rights while stripping voting rights and civil rights. One represents a threat to authoritarianism, and the other does not.

I know guns. I have shot and been shot at at the request of my government. I have owned personally many firearms - handguns, rifles, shotguns, and BB guns. I grew up around them. I eventually reached the point where I concluded that the pragmatic basis behind the current justification of the “right to bear arms” has no reflection in the reality of nations, and in fact contributes to a reduction in freedom.

I’m for securing abortion rights, with or without the 2A. I’m for a reinterpretation of the 2A, with or without abortion rights. Making it a trade off is like “If I take away your cancer, would you accept ten million dollars?”

I never managed to do that.

Now I’m kind of glad that I never tried.

Potemkin election.

Here’s what’s interesting though. The constitution itself sets several rather arbitrary qualifications for the office of president, so clearly they didn’t think that limiting people’s choices by making some candidates illegal was anti-democratic. They decided that the will of the people could not be permitted if it were to elect someone too young, or foreign born. It is anti-democratic, but it’s also fully constitutional. The constitution was written by several people who were rather skeptical of democracy and sought to limit its influence.

That’s close to what I was trying to say. If I were to introduce you to my cat, I would say something like “This is Spot, he’s very friendly.” I’d use the same pronoun I’d use for people. Likewise, we might I hear Attenborough say “The mother lion is feeding her cubs.” You can even hear “The female spider devours her mate.” Using it in those senses would actually feel just a little weird, to be be honest.

On the other hand, we would say “There’s a spider. Put it outside.” There’s no gender context. We’d even say “There’s an ant. Kill it,” even though there’s about a 99% chance that ant is female. So in that sense, your point still holds. You’d even say “Look at that stray cat! Let’s rescue it!” even though that exact same cat would become a he or a she when you got them home (see what I did there?). On the other hand, “it” is considered extremely impolite when used for people. The employee handbook says “When a customer enters the store, you should greet them.”

Here’s the trick about the ant question. An ant colony, in a very real sense, is an animal unto itself. The colony, in a sense, is what reproduces, and in an even more tangible sense it is the colony upon which natural selection acts. The queen is essentially the reproductive organ, and the ants themselves make up the brain, nerve system, and muscles. The ant colony is an emergent property of all the ants working together, just the same as you are an emergent property of all your cells working together. So an ant colony can be a coherent animal “it” or a bunch of ants “they.”

Anyway, my real point is that when people ask that kind of question about AI, they are of course asking whether it is a “thing” or a “being.” Most biologists (at least those of my stripe) don’t subscribe to the high school biology text’s definition of what constitutes a living system. We’re more likely to talk about system complexity, scale, and adaptation. “Sentient” really just means it’s capable of sensing things. “Consciousness,” on the other hand, implies that the being in question has an internal model of the external world, which it uses to predict and react. That one is a continuum.

Look at it like this:

You’re in a position of privilege where your sexuality and gender identity are part of what constitutes “normal” for most people. All sexualities and genders are normal, of course, as far as I’m concerned. I’m going to guess by the nature of your post that you’re a cis-gender heterosexual male. You have a bit higher percentage of society that’s going to think of your positions as “normal” than, say, that of a gay man or a trans woman.

It’s like when a white person stands up against racism, or men march for women’s rights. When we tolerate intolerance, we allow it to spread. This is a good use of privilege. It’s expected that a gay person will be against homophobia and that a black person will be against racism. Being a “normal” person and being against those things is, by itself, calling out homophobia and racism. The community can use all the allies it can get.

I would point out one thing though. It sounds like you’re made uncomfortable being associated with the ideas behind the slurs. It’s fine to want to be seen as holding your identity, but it could also be because you harbor some negative stereotypes as well, perhaps unconsciously. I wouldn’t be insulted if someone thought I was black, or Mexican, or a trans man. If it’s an honest mistake on their part I might correct them (because it could lead to an awkward situation), but if someone were to call me an inapplicable slur, it would be just funny, not insulting. I might be offended that they thought it was okay to use such a word as an insult, but not that they thought they could insult me with it.

Then you should probably read my answer.

That was a joke. That’s what the Chinese lab was doing, so if the Russians were looking for biolabs like this one, that’s what they were looking for.

Theoretical biologist here, so bear with me.

Of course you’re referring to the singular, personal “they” like we use for a person whose gender we do not know or if they prefer that pronoun. But as some LGBT-phobes like to point out, “they” is also the plural of “it.”

“It is my favorite of all of them.”

I’m not pointing that out to be pedantic though.

The implication is that an AI is an “it” because it’s not a person. “It” is not a self. Let’s unpack that. We use gendered personal pronouns for a number of classes that are arguably not persons. We use them for dogs and cats. It’s used commonly for other animals in nature shows, where everything from lions to fish can be referred to as a gendered pronoun by the host, especially if they’re talking about reproduction. You’ll also hear people refer to animals as an “it,” especially (I’d believe) in the case of food animals rather than pet animals. If it doesn’t have a gender (eg a bacterium), pretty much everyone will use “it” unless they’re waxing poetic.

So, the nematode C elegans has exactly 302 neurons. It’s an “it” in that it’s a hermaphrodite, but it’s certainly alive. I would bet, in at least a reproductive context on nature shows, they’d refer to our favorite worm as “he” and “she.” I would suspect we can emulate a nematode to a level of precision such that there was no substantive difference between the computer model and the worm. We could say the nematode possesses intelligence - primarily encoded evolutionarily over evolutionary time, but still. So would our AI nematode be an “it” because it’s a non-alive thing, or is it an it because it is not gendered?

And just to throw another theoretical biology stick in the spokes, is an ant colony an “it” or a “they,” and why?

The problem I see is that she matters absolutely zero. There is no person in the United States who would be influenced by Clinton who was not already a Biden voter. She’s also not going to scare away anyone who feels like they have to hold their nose and vote for Biden. She’s not going to win or lose any Trump voters. She’s not going to win or lose any Stein voters. I think the only person this is going to help is Clinton.

I’m not sure. Was Ukraine accused of manufacturing at-home test kits outside of FDA regulations?

Absolutely my favorite time travel movie, although I still have no idea how to interpret the ending.

My favorite time travel story, however, is when Stephen Hawking threw a party for time travelers.

Hey everyone, Stephen Hawking is throwing a party, and we're all invited! One catch: Stephen Hawking is dead, and the party was in 2009. Still, the invitation stands.

What if you threw a party and nobody came, but that's exactly what you expected? That's precisely what famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking did on June 28, 2009. He rented a space at Cambridge University and got balloons, decorations, and, of course, the champagne. Then he sat in the empty room for a few hours and left.

Only then did he send out the invitation.