icegreentea2

If you choose to define intensity as the ability/willingness to turn other knobs to 11 (which is what the author does), then its not unexpected to see correlation of "intensity" and "success".

As long as the other knobs show a generally positive relationship between input and output, then obviously turning the knobs up will generally result in higher output.

The questions are:

* What are the downsides of turning up the knob? Both in terms of the specific knobs you're turning, as well as "going to 11" in a more general sense.

* Why do people and organizations find it difficult to turn the knob to 11?

My take is that intensity is painful. This brings two things that have to be overcome:

You must somehow build a pain tolerant organization. You can do this by selecting for pain tolerant people, by inoculating a mission/message that positively improves pain tolerance (make people believe that it's worth it), by creating organizational structures that attenuates the pain feedback loop (ie, somehow insulate decision makers from the pain, while finding ways to mitigate or work around the pain where it is felt... ie, probably just accepting the churn) or other means.

The other thing to overcome is that pain is supposed to be instructive, and provide useful negative feedback. As you build up your pain tolerance, you ideally are still able to extract real information from the pain signals. If you achieve pain tolerance through blocking off or ignoring all pain signals, then you are probably at higher risk of just... doing stupid things.

Possibly yes.

The device works through line of sight, so blocking line of sight from the emitter to your open eyes (for example, by looking away and shielding with your arms) may be helpful.

Testing indicates that test subjects reached their pain threshold in ~5 seconds (typically reacting within 3). Proper application of this device in a riot situation likely involves pulsed application, at sufficient standoff range (between targets and a barrier or your riot police/troops), precisely to reduce the risk of operators feeling that they need to dwell, with the standoff range providing enough buffer to allow operators to feel like they can illuminate, wait for initial reaction, shut off, and then read the full reaction.

In your general scenario, you can replace this weapon with any other riot control tool, and get basically the same shitty situation. Once the government/police/whatever have decided that you are in a riot/mob, then you're not going to be treated as an individual, you're going to be treated as an element of a threat. This is true of dudes with shields and batons, beanbags, water cannons, tear gas, horses, whatever.

The system in question is basically just a directed microwave emitter. It is designed to heat up the first ~0.5mm of your skin.

It's safety is basically completely a function of the operator. Since the beam will keep depositing energy (ie heating), if the beam is held on a target, it will incur more and more heating (and potentially harm).

In proper usage, safety is ensured through the combination of operator training, selection of proper settings, and induced compliance. If you have a shitty operator, risk of over exposure increases. The nature of this device means that it's not a barrier, it's a beam.

During earlier testing, they were able to induce second degree burns on a test subject due to incorrect power and duration settings.

NHL brought in the salary cap system following the 2004-05 lockout, because the league wanted to implement salary cap following the expiration of the previous agreement.

The fact that it was a lockout, and not a strike, that the lockout lasted a whole season, and that the players ended up voting like 90% in favour tells you which side the leverage is on.

The players might bring the majority of the value, but the current CBA sets the salary cap to basically a 50/50 split between players and owners.

It truly is cartel-like behavior, but I don't think the union can do much as long as hockey players want to make a lot of money playing hockey in North America.

NORAD is unique - it is a joint command. The NORAD agreement requires the commander and deputy to from different countries (practically, it's always been a American commander and Canadian deputy). The agreement also requires integrated and binational staff. NORAD itself is responsible for aerospace warning, and aerospace control. It exercises aerospace control by having operational control (though not ownership) of national units.

When the article talks about Canadian officers serving as deputy corps commanders, that's referring to Canadian participants in exchange programs. The US military has exchange programs which do 1:1 exchanges with allied forces. For example, a Canadian might end up as as a US deputy division or corps officer, and an American might end up as a Canadian brigade staff officer or deputy commander. The exchange programs are part of a broader American program to build military-military ties, increase interoperability, and maybe grant unique perspectives.

NORAD spots must be filled, and will be filled. It just means that you're probably not getting the best or most motivated candidates anymore. The exchange slots will probably whittle away.

This assessment works because in the Cold War, the goal isn't to intercept enemy missiles, it's to prevent your cities and civilization from being destroyed or being overly coerced - which is something that you could achieve much cheaper via mutual deterrence.

Once you can no longer achieve mutual deterrence (perhaps because you are a nation who has a streak/role of engaging in interventionist wars of choice, or maybe you are planning for the case when deterrence fails, and you are now under attack), you have to decide how to protect your assets, if even in a limited way.

An airbase which gets overwhelmed and lost after 5 days of bombardment is an airbase that hopefully was able to contribute 5 days of value to your effort. It's true that the costs will not always work out in your favor.

The Barracuda (which I assume is what you're referencing to) is not nearly as performant as the Tomahawk. The largest Barracuda has a range of ~500nm, and carries a 100lb warhead, and is air launched (there claims to be a ground launched version, but it might result in reduced range). The Tomahawk has a range of like ~900nm carries like a 700lb warhead and can be ship/land launched (so it needs extra booster).

The Barracuda would be really really useful a lot (probably most) of targets and missions, but we can't pretend like there's no tradeoff in performance and additional limitations. Very roughly a Tomahawk has twice the range, and 7 times the payload.

Technically, RTX is currently the parent company for Raytheon. The two other major business units are Pratt & Whitney (jet engines) and Collins Aerospace.

I don't think that would have fit as strongly thematically. Thematically, vampires being ancient, human hunting predators, who are basically the answer to "what happened if you tried creating maximally anti-social humans", and who "accidentally" got wiped out is just another another round in Watt's repeated hammering home the idea that self-awareness/consciousness is not a pinnacle.

The idea that human kind would in its moments of fear and panic reach back and put an anti-social predator in charge is also thematic. In traditional conceptions of hierarchy of "thinking", we would perhaps imagine the self/meta conscious self as being "the top layer", with the layer represented by vampires perhaps being a lower layer (we would imagine it being above "the reptile brain" though). Yet here, humanity (or human command) has chosen to invert the order. The self-awareness layer is capable and does "let go", because while it loves to take the credit for what the mind actually does, it does in fact understand self preservation (generally), and does understand that sometimes, it just needs to... not really be in control.

Final spoilers - and then there's the extra twist which is that the vampire captain was apparently being puppeted by a computer AI system (also implied to be not self aware) the whole time anyways.

So really, we have a pair of non-self aware intelligent systems probing each other. One deploying scramblers, the other deploying the human crew as end effectors.

The book makes pains to draw a line between consciousness (or meta consciousness) and intelligence. I don't think he really argued that intelligence is maladaptive, but does argue that meta consciousness might be.

It's not just a question of belief, it's also a question of their information environment. The polarization in the electorate isn't just a question of what people believe, but what information their fed. Unfortunately, information environment -> belief -> environment is forms a strong sustaining feedback loop.

It is also worth pointing out that that 83% of republicans (vs 90% of independents) still believe that the government is widely corrupt. Like given the ~20% "crazy threshold" in basically any type of political polling, 80% of republicans is effectively "every single republican you could ever convince".

I would not lose sleep over polarization in this context.