alluring heian courtesan

I do not understand Wisconsin voters. Good for them for not electing another trump judge, but where was this energy back in November? You'd think fewer people would give a shit during off years, not more (proportionally; I know turnout is lower, I'm just saying I'm surprised conservatives didn't show up in droves considering how much money trump and musk have sunk into this cycle).

The effect of Musk associating himself with the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin was to cost the Republican candidate 5% of the vote. As in, other GOP candidates in Wisconsin are doing 5% better tonight, because Elon Musk is absolutely radioactive.

The GOP won last year because of the inflation-driven anti-incumbent wave that took down every government that was in power during the pandemic.* Musk's money just bring's Musk's stench.

*Canada soon to be an exception for hilarious reasons, although it did require the Prime Minister stepping aside.

All of this is true, but there is also a theory that these days special elections structurally favor Democrats: the median voter is deeply unengaged and only tunes in for the big races, while the kind of high-neurosis (said with affection!) highly-engaged politics junkie who knows about and turns out for these things is way more likely to be a Democrat now.

It's great that Wisconsin was won, but I'm not sure I want to get too optimistic about what these one-offs mean for the Dems' chances in "real" races.

I read Annihilation recently, and while I concede that it was well-written in terms of prose style and pacing, it left me with little desire to continue the series. A puzzle-box novel should leave you feeling you understand at least a little bit of the puzzle by the end.

I suppose as the resident Annihilation fanboy around here, it's my job to respond. I like it mostly as

a) a moody, atmospheric tone poem, in the same way I play Metroid Prime for the setting and soundtrack and not the plot,

b) one of the better attempts from recent-ish fiction to do Lovecraft (or even pre-Lovecraft) cosmic gothic horror, and

c) a character study of the Biologist, who remains either my favorite or second-favorite schizoid character in fiction, possibly after Stevens in Remains of the Day

But if none of those sound resonant, it's probably not the book for you. It certainly does not explain or really even hint at what's going on. The third (and now fourth) books do, but if you didn't like the first one I doubt you'll get much more out of going that far.

(ok fine and d) just slightly kinking on all the mind control despite the text's determined refusal to do so)

OK I actually do have one other thing to say. This is definitely hyperspecific to me, and it's a very tangential focus of the book, but I found Annihilation's depiction of romance and marriage pretty moving, which doesn't happen to me with many novels.

(some minor spoilers below the cut)

I read Annihilation recently, and while I concede that it was well-written in terms of prose style and pacing, it left me with little desire to continue the series. A puzzle-box novel should leave you feeling you understand at least a little bit of the puzzle by the end.

I suppose as the resident Annihilation fanboy around here, it's my job to respond. I like it mostly as

a) a moody, atmospheric tone poem, in the same way I play Metroid Prime for the setting and soundtrack and not the plot,

b) one of the better attempts from recent-ish fiction to do Lovecraft (or even pre-Lovecraft) cosmic gothic horror, and

c) a character study of the Biologist, who remains either my favorite or second-favorite schizoid character in fiction, possibly after Stevens in Remains of the Day

But if none of those sound resonant, it's probably not the book for you. It certainly does not explain or really even hint at what's going on. The third (and now fourth) books do, but if you didn't like the first one I doubt you'll get much more out of going that far.

(ok fine and d) just slightly kinking on all the mind control despite the text's determined refusal to do so)

I read Annihilation recently, and while I concede that it was well-written in terms of prose style and pacing, it left me with little desire to continue the series. A puzzle-box novel should leave you feeling you understand at least a little bit of the puzzle by the end.

I suppose as the resident Annihilation fanboy around here, it's my job to respond. I like it mostly as

a) a moody, atmospheric tone poem, in the same way I play Metroid Prime for the setting and soundtrack and not the plot,

b) one of the better attempts from recent-ish fiction to do Lovecraft (or even pre-Lovecraft) cosmic gothic horror, and

c) a character study of the Biologist, who remains either my favorite or second-favorite schizoid character in fiction, possibly after Stevens in Remains of the Day

But if none of those sound resonant, it's probably not the book for you. It certainly does not explain or really even hint at what's going on. The third (and now fourth) books do, but if you didn't like the first one I doubt you'll get much more out of going that far.

Once you deliver some frigates it can be clear that frigates are shit but you can do so much with having everyone imagine a frigate, an imaginary frigate could do anything!

Wait, hold up, this logic is pretty sus. Not awful, but not the whole picture. Three big points: A: Warfare today ain't like warfare in WW2. In 1942 the US had to mount up a task force with specially-prepared refueling ships to send out two aircraft carriers on two weeks sailing into the middle of nowhere below just to pretend to bomb Japan:

Meanwhile today currently deployed missiles on Okinawa can strike half of the Asian continent in hours:

The "tempo" of a naval military operations is just radically different now. Japan in WW2 could never hope to, post "decisive battle", strike a single one of the major US naval shipyards to disable production. All they could do was win defensive battles. Meanwhile, if the US were to fight an opening battle against China that was so decisive as to give the US uncontested naval and air supremacy (big if, just roll with me), the air and naval assets on hand could strike every single Chinese port with a wave of missiles and bombers instantly. Now, you can debate how well that will work and how likely that will be, not doing that here - the point is just that Decisive Battle Doctrine is now eminently reasonable in a way that it was never for Japan. The plan is coherent.

B: The United States would not, in any way, be fighting on "China's shores offensively from California". It would be fighting on Taiwan & Japan's shores defensively:

The US has never been planning a solo offensive against China, it is serving as part of a defensive alliance with regional partners out of an extant network of heavily developed bases and strike positions. Refueling and logistics will be based out of Taiwan, Okinawa, Luzon, and Kyushu. This is a logistical tie in a lot of ways, China is obviously "closer" than the US but not as close as Taiwan, the actual battleground! Generally the goal is for the Philippines & South Korea to join as well - more speculative, sure, but not unreasonably so (well, pre-Trump, but that is an own-goal)

C: There is a pretty common illusion about the US shipbuilding in WW2, namely that before the war the US must have been a massive player in commercial shipping? But it was not - US shipbuilding completely failed to keep up with the post-Civil War revolutions in steam shipping, and while due to cabotage laws (Jones Act!! *shakes fist*) we had a large freshwater shipping merchant marine, only 8% of US international trade pre-WW1 was carried on domestically-made ships. A state which didn't really reverse itself after WW1 - most amazingly, "between 1922 and 1928 not a single oceangoing ship was built in the US"!

What actually happened in WW2 is that - with some prep in the late 1930's - the US engaged in a crash course re-industrialization where ship tonnage output increased thousands-fold in a few years. There was not a previous base gigantic shipping industry to pivot (though mothballed WW1 shipyards certainly helped), one was built from scratch. For a tangent, this actually is load-bearing for how stupid Japan was! Ludicrously stupid, yes, but ehh maybe 5% less than you thought - they saw a US in the 1930's that did not output any ships in quantity, and thought maybe WW1 wouldn't repeat itself.

All of this is to say that current civilian shipbuilding capacity is not that indicative of future military shipbuilding capacity. And this makes sense, as the vast majority of civilian ships add no value to a military conflict! All of that has to be retooled. Are ships even going to be the production constraint? Can China make enough missiles to arm the ships its shipyards could put out? Armor plating? Radar systems? Fuel? Can the US, for good measure? To be clear I totally bet China will have the advantage here - just that the headline "230:1" numbers are pretty meaningless. That is fake info.

(There is a quantity vs quality debate here in modern military circles - could you just output 10,000 motorboats with machine guns piloted by raspberry pi's and overwhelm a Ticonderoga-class cruiser? We may learn someday, but there are many who think not - all of those 10,000 motorboats will be shot to scrap by precision-targeted long range munitions. This was the equivalent US experience in Gulf War 1, which has been instrumental to US doctrine - Iraq had one of the largest armoured forces in the world, and all those tanks meant nothing in the face of modern air superiority.)

C.5: Finally, just to tie things back to point B - the plan isn't to fight a solo offensive war. It is to fight an allied defensive war. With South Korea and Japan. Which, well:

Oh hey look at that - South Korea & Japan outproduce China. Other numbers say China does by the way, you can measure things differently. But I think you get the point.

Anyway, shockingly, US military planners are not a bunch of fucking dumb dumbs? Congress is, but when DoD sits down to plan out a military op they think through the basics. No one is saying China's manufacturing dominance isn't a huge issue, DoD has been saying that very loudly for decades. But they aren't planning a Pickett's Charge in response - or at least not one as obviously so as the above outlines.

That single quote probably wasn't the best to include, a lot of of your points are right and I think the better points of the article were toward the end about the Potemkin readiness for the sake of impressing Congress. But I don't think the point about industrial capacity before and during WWII holds a lot of water: in the event of a shooting war over Taiwan, assuming it happens within the next 30 years, China is also going to undergo a WWII-style crash industrial scale-up, and they'll be doing it from a much bigger baseline, both in industrial capacity and population able to be mobilized to work there. If we assume a "total war" footing on both sides of the Pacific, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume the 230:1 ratio will approximately hold start-to-finish. I don't think going "well what if they can't make missiles" significantly dents this analysis, nor do I think the presence of South Korea and Japan significantly change this calculus: they don't have nearly as much headroom as China does.

EDIT: I think I also dispute the point about deployed missiles in Okinawa. This reminds me too much of the point Bret Deveraux always makes about the somehow-inexhaustible faith from both military and civilian leadership in the ability of strategic air power to win wars, despite its ongoing inability to do so, especially when the projections say we would run out of missiles basically immediately. I am not a military planner, but those hypothetical missile strikes look to me to be not all that different from Pearl Harbor: a momentary setback which the target dusts off, re-arms, and proceeds like nothing happened.

But I might be doing too much armchair generaling way outside my area of expertise now and so I'm not sure I'll keep going.

Once you deliver some frigates it can be clear that frigates are shit but you can do so much with having everyone imagine a frigate, an imaginary frigate could do anything!

Don't get why they didn't just recycle the boops. Everyone liked them, they were straightforward, it was apparently not hard to reset the counter etc

McRib effect

I wanted to read more about the economics of that but

???

that's not...wait were people actually saying that?

The stock market is some sense a cross between those apocalyptic witch doctors who perform rituals to calm the animal spirits in an electric clock and those scientists in fantasy books trying to mathematically explain away magic as swamp gas.

Not a majority but enough

lol, I had never heard of this. When I said "McRib effect", I just meant the artificial scarcity of having a product be only intermittently available makes it more desirable and that's what I assume Tumblr is doing with the boops.

Back in the 2000s when conspiracy theories were still fun, instead of depressing signs of our impending doom, people said the intermittent McRib was McDonalds manipulating pork futures, which I find a lot more fun than whatever Investopedia is talking about here.

Ever since the 08 crisis (and probably before) there's been recurring "Universities in crisis" pieces about how American higher education institutions appeared to be heading towards nonviability and it happened over a long enough time that we all could go "Nothing Ever Happens" and be maybe a bit worried but only a bit.

I have been on this beat for a long time and continue to be on it, but I will admit this is the first time Something Actually Has Happened, there is nothing even remotely comparable in previous administrations. I think they will weather it fine because "the uni system" simply works and can't be easily replaced. But for once someone is actually trying to prove the negative case.

The more rigorous analyses of this problem were the ones which noted the “demographic cliff”, i.e. that American TFR fell off a cliff during the financial crisis and never recovered, and so the real crunch for universities would begin at “GFC + 18 years”, which is pretty much exactly where we are.

That the cliff also lines up with all the Trump shit is an unexpected bit of even worse news, but it’s not a “this time is different” situation: people really were saying as far back as (I think) 2015 that 2025-2030 would be when higher education began to implode.

That is an argument but I think a mislabeled one! Ofc it is all about your intended meaning of a "crisis in higher ed". If you mean "the lowest ranking private schools will churn out as net students slowly decline" then sure, that had been going on for decades and it will continue.

But who cares? That isn't what people mean on average by the "death of higher ed" imo - they mean the figurative death of *top* schools as arbiters of success and class. They mean students will stop caring so much about Harvard apps, Goldman & Google won't distinguish between MIT & CalTech, the rich will stop donating $200 million pots to name buildings after them. And even all that chained down in scale to good-but-not-Ivy schools. The demographic shift is not going to materially affect the top 50% of schools in the US in any notable way.

I was more responding to @collapsedsquid than you: the implication I took from the first post was "people kept saying there was a crisis, but it's only now that Something is Happening, so the earlier predictions were bunk and are just a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day", and my reply was "some people were making amorphous and unfalsifiable predictions of eternal crisis, but others made pretty concrete predictions about what would break and when, and those so far look pretty accurate". I could be doing a sharpshooter fallacy here, but I really have seen the demographic cliff projections for quite a while.

But I do disagree with your opinion that the demographic shift isn't going to affect the upper half of schools. Like I said, I think it will wipe out much of the job market for tenured academics, which might be the last blow to the already-shaky PhD pipeline. AIUI even at elite universities undergraduate enrollment is collapsing for a bunch of liberal arts disciplines; if people see no future in those fields, they will stay away even harder and eventually even at the elite schools these programs and departments will close for lack of use.

Don't get why they didn't just recycle the boops. Everyone liked them, they were straightforward, it was apparently not hard to reset the counter etc

McRib effect

Ever since the 08 crisis (and probably before) there's been recurring "Universities in crisis" pieces about how American higher education institutions appeared to be heading towards nonviability and it happened over a long enough time that we all could go "Nothing Ever Happens" and be maybe a bit worried but only a bit.

I have been on this beat for a long time and continue to be on it, but I will admit this is the first time Something Actually Has Happened, there is nothing even remotely comparable in previous administrations. I think they will weather it fine because "the uni system" simply works and can't be easily replaced. But for once someone is actually trying to prove the negative case.

The more rigorous analyses of this problem were the ones which noted the “demographic cliff”, i.e. that American TFR fell off a cliff during the financial crisis and never recovered, and so the real crunch for universities would begin at “GFC + 18 years”, which is pretty much exactly where we are.

That the cliff also lines up with all the Trump shit is an unexpected bit of even worse news, but it’s not a “this time is different” situation: people really were saying as far back as (I think) 2015 that 2025-2030 would be when higher education would begin to implode.

And yet we still have those people complaining that a 1500+ SAT score isn't enough to get them into their top university, still too competitive. Even as the kids are apparently all becoming illiterate too which is not something I think they factored in then.

Elite universities were never going to have a problem with demographic change, they'll always get more applicants than they need. Associate degree programs and community colleges will probably be fine too. But it will wallop state schools and small liberal arts colleges, which means even fewer tenure-track positions, which in turn makes the entire traditional academic pipeline even less viable.

Ever since the 08 crisis (and probably before) there's been recurring "Universities in crisis" pieces about how American higher education institutions appeared to be heading towards nonviability and it happened over a long enough time that we all could go "Nothing Ever Happens" and be maybe a bit worried but only a bit.

I have been on this beat for a long time and continue to be on it, but I will admit this is the first time Something Actually Has Happened, there is nothing even remotely comparable in previous administrations. I think they will weather it fine because "the uni system" simply works and can't be easily replaced. But for once someone is actually trying to prove the negative case.

The more rigorous analyses of this problem were the ones which noted the “demographic cliff”, i.e. that American TFR fell off a cliff during the financial crisis and never recovered, and so the real crunch for universities would begin at “GFC + 18 years”, which is pretty much exactly where we are.

That the cliff also lines up with all the Trump shit is an unexpected bit of even worse news, but it’s not a “this time is different” situation: people really were saying as far back as (I think) 2015 that 2025-2030 would be when higher education began to implode.

this random substack guy is making a compelling case that i should watch The X-Files:

chat is it that good. is such a thing mathematically possible.

also, bonus: i’m kind of in love with this guy’s footnoted description of Ronald Reagan vs Carter lmao

It is good, although it does have the TNG problem where people gushing about it tend to remember the really good episodes, and forget how many marginal or outright bad MOTW ones there were also. I don't know how much you can skip and still get the meat of the Mulder/Scully relationship, but maybe use IMDB to drop, like, the bottom quintile.

"Reverend Lua of the Universal Life Church" is such a badass-sounding title for the rather-more-mundane reality of "i spent ~3 minutes filling out an online form so i could legally marry my friends"

I think I’ve mentioned this on Tumblr before, but my university lets me set my name and title to anything I want on the personnel portal, and whatever I put is what they use for all official communication. So a couple times a year I get letters to “Admiral 81k” asking for donations.