Bay 12 Games Forum

NASA's big budget increase looks confirmed in the latest spending bill. Breakdown of where the money is going.


Climate conference ends in a document. More than it looked like they would get on Friday, although still not amazing.

A better article on the new bill.

It is essentially enshrining an active executive order (originally Regan's, but amended by Bush) in legislation. Techdirt see this as negative, legitimising the collection. I'm less opposed to it in principle for two reasons;

1) Saying that legislation legitimises executive orders is akin to saying that executive orders are not legitimate forms of government, which I disagree with.

2) Legislation is far more open to debate and reform than executive orders (IMO). The potential for debate and revision are higher, especially for topics such as these where the subject comes up in each appropriation bill. The actors cycle more frequently and are more accountable, as well as being able to make names for themselves by aligning with current anti-surveillance trends of thought.

In this case I do think it was a silly law. I don't imagine that they would ban such collections, but they haven't even put in place serious oversight. The five year limit is absurdly high. There is no requirement for any minimisation procedures or similar. I feel they ought to have made any collection at least equal in accountability to the FISA programs.

As for why I don't see them banning such collection, the 12333 collection is (as noted in the section 309 title) incidental. It's information collected as part of surveillance of a legitimate target (eg, non-citizen outside of US territory targeted for some reason). Unless the US gets out of the signal intelligence game entirely you are going to have such surveillance and going to have incidental collection of information that this law addresses. Which (and again, IMO) is where you want aggressive congressional standards for minimisation and accountability.

@KKK
So... to be a devil's advocate.
Is simply being a member of the KKK sufficient grounds for dismissal if they have done nothing wrong otherwise?

Cause yea, witch hunt and all the shenanigans that entails...

Look at it on a practical level. Some day this guy might arrest a minority member and have to testify in court as to why. The defence lawyer can bring up the fact that he is a publicly known clan member.

His biases and judgement are called into the spotlight and every arrest - hell, every action - he makes that could have any racial or prejudicial basis exposes the force to an easy civil rights suit. They are already reviewing all their past action for potential bias. Keeping them on the force would only make matters worse down the line.

They didn't commit a crime, but at the same time things don't have to rise to that level to make someone unsuitable for their job. If I was a schoolteacher who moonlighted as a supporter of PIE and the latter came out, I would justifiably lose my job even if I had never committed a crime.

I can't remember if I remembered to link this or not, but the 2002 study it links to - and particularly the extensive discussion - are well worth a read.

From the concluding sections of that discussion;

These studies have demonstrated that the decision to shoot may be influenced by a target person’s ethnicity. In four studies, participants showed a bias to shoot African American targets more rapidly and/or more frequently than White targets. The implications of this bias are clear and disturbing. Even more worrisome is the suggestion that mere knowledge of the cultural stereotype, which depicts African Americans as violent, may produce Shooter Bias, and that even African Americans demonstrate the bias. We understand that the demonstration of bias in an African American sample is politically controversial given the nature of this task, and we offer two considerations. First, the results of a single study are not definitive. Our findings should be replicated by researchers in other labs with different materials before generalizations are made. Second, our goals as psychologists include understanding, predicting, and controlling behavior. Ultimately, efforts to control (i.e., reduce or eliminate) any ethnic bias in the decision to shoot must be based on an accurate understanding of how target ethnicity influences that decision, even if that understanding is politically or personally distasteful.

The studies reported here suggest that Shooter Bias is present among White college students (Studies 1–3) and among a community sample that consists of both Whites and African Americans (Study 4). The effect is robust and clearly a cause for concern, no matter the underlying cause. On the basis of our data, though, bias does not seem to simply reflect prejudice toward African Americans, and there is reason to believe the effect is present simply as a function of stereotypic associations that exist in our culture. That these associations can have such potentially profound consequences for members of stigmatized groups is a finding worthy of great concern. Since the death of Amadou Diallo, New York has witnessed a number of similar, though less publicized, cases, and Cincinnati, Ohio, has added Timothy Thomas’s name to the list of unarmed African American men killed by police officers. Social psychological theory and research may prove invaluable in the effort to identify, understand and eventually control processes that bias decisions to shoot (and possibly kill) a person, as a function of his or her ethnicity.

The further studies back up their results, finding a similar bias in police samples, if somewhat reduced as a function of training.

The biggest problem I have with the response to these shootings is the way, to borrow a phrase, the victims are put on trial for their own murder. They are thugs. They had a history of violence or crime. They came from violent families. They weren't sufficiently deferential to the police. They were otherwise doing something wrong that otherwise justified their death.

This simply feeds back into the stereotypes that in turn justify (or at least guide) the shootings in the first place. Black bodies are seen as weapons and black teens seen as inherently violent and that helps justify lethal force in defence against them. And every time there is a shooting there is another effort to rebuild and reinforce those stereotypes.

So long as the stereotypes exist there are going to be shootings due to police (or others) seeing black people as an inherent threat that needs lethal force to stop. But so long as such shootings are happening we are going to have such stereotypes spread among police because they can't afford to not justify such shootings to themselves, the media and the wider world.

Obama designates $263 million of federal money for police training.

$75 million of that is specifically for body cameras, looking to put 50,000 on the streets.


On the protests, I don't see them as part of or representative of a 'movement' at all. There is a clear and separate political dimension to the reaction, and the riots simply aren't a part of that. They are a natural reaction of anger and rage, separate to the political and measured reactions, which, again, are being condemned and dismissed in equal measure.

Trying to make the riots representative of the 'movement' as though they were part of the political strategy of an organised group is just another method of marginalising the serious protests and refusing to hear the message that people are trying to get out.

Which isn't to say that rioting (and the associated anger) isn't often representative of the community alongside the more measured actions, but using it to paint the broader movement as violent seems like a deliberate effort to dismiss them without engagement or thought.

Looking at that, SotSII Enhanced Edition is in the current flash bundle, so that's only $1 for Steam keys alongside other games. Any reason to prefer SotS Compete over II?

The scientists can do models, but the models are only as accurate as the data and if theres something you're missing (like some parameter or effect you don't know about), then the model might not be very accurate either.

Eh, this is true for simple models, but when looking at something like climate...

We are talking about a genuinely chaotic system. As in Chaos Theory. As in;

Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.

We simply can't create a model of reality that is anything but an approximation. The most complex and precise model has to approximate individual atoms to general rules of fluid dynamics or some other generalisation. Climate models in general are based on grids of cells (this site has some nice illustrations), approximating the interactions between them based partially on observed, partially on calculated behaviour.

You can get reasonable predictions out of them, don't get me wrong, but there is a reason you don't make weather forecasts (even on a national level) for longer than seven days into the future. It's why most grand climate models (particularly the IPCC reports) are general temperature range projections, as in the lower image in that last link.

@palsch: Yet politicians do that all the time.

Only in a few fields are the outcomes of their decisions so widely ranging, have such a substantial impact on lives or are so irreversible. I'd say that environment/climate are maybe second to decisions about war in that field. Economic decisions (the usual area where politicians show contempt for facts) are trivial in comparison, reversible in months or years and usually having only second-order deaths involved.

Didn't they already try ocean-fertilizing, with effects a couple of  magnitudes smaller than what was expected?

Lohafex. Early results were poor, but it seemed to fade away after that without much publication of their longer term results.

I actually disagree about the fine-tuning part: Because the system we're trying to influence is so huge, fine-tuning in and of itself should be a piece of cake - but there's the issue of inertia, so fine-tuning might take a very long time.

Eh, fine-tuning a chaotic system such as the climate, with so many external and internal factors constantly changing, lead times on nearly any change being both large and hard to predict, plus feedback factors that can lead to runaway or dampened effects based on the interplay of seemingly independent factors does not sound like my idea of fun.

Climate prediction is hard. Trying to predict how adding more elements to that model will change things on a regional scale with any sort of reliability is extremely hard. Making policy/political decisions based on such models is Russian roulette.