Exactly what part of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine indicates that:
Russia is going to win?
Russia is going to capture Moldova?
Russia is going to war with a NATO-member?
NATO isn’t going to back up its member states?
It’s possible that Ukraine falls but we’ve seen Russia try to accomplish that for two years without success so I don’t think we can draw the conclusion that Russia is achieving that goal by looking at the past two years.
Russia got into (apparently) unexpectedly hot water over their invasion of Ukraine, so for them to go after Moldova seems like a big risk. Capturing Ukraine was presumably to seize their areable land and natural gas but Moldova has only areable land so it doesn’t seem particularly enticing even if Ukraine falls under Russian control.
Now, these two points are up for debate. The status of Ukraine and Moldova isn’t written in stone and Russia is no stranger to making decision that are really, really harmful to Russia. But going to war with a NATO country seems like it’s even beyond the poor choices made by Russia. Let’s consider that they haven’t established air superiority, that they rely on unencrypted radio, that they have had to field T62 tanks because they have lost thousands of armoured vehicles and don’t have as many T72’s as they thought, that we haven’t seen a single T14 tank, that they have lost several naval vessels to a navy that exist mostly in theory and that they thought that occupying Ukraine would be viable when occupying Afghanistan failed massively during the days of the Soviet Union. They also seem to have suffered casualties in the 100 000-range.
So what exactly would Russia stand to gain when going up against NATO and its 1000 F35 jets? Sweden donated rocket-propelled grenades to Ukraine and told them NOT to use them against tanks because said RPG’s were only designed to destroy lightly armoured vehicles. Ukraine ignored that and used the RPG’s against Russian tanks to great effect(and to some surprise in Sweden). Russian military hardware is doing very, very poorly against western weapons and have nothing with which to counter western aircraft.
Russia is quite capable of churning out ammunition and manpower to further its war-aims but the past two years have demonstrated how that doesn’t equate to success. They have had their asses handed to them for two years by a country with a lower GDP than Sweden. If Ukraine poses a formidable challenge to Russia, how well would they do against all of NATO?
Now, I agree that Russia is most likely going to use non-obvious measures against NATO countries, making any Russian groupings in the Baltic states into armed insurgents, jamming GPS, attacking pipelines and other infrastructure in international waters, flyovers with aircraft and so on. Countries bordering on Russia are prepared for that and already dealing with it. Nothing about it invites Russia to proceed.
And that ties in to the willingness of NATO to back up it’s members. Let’s consider the hundreds of billions of dollars provided by NATO and EU states to Ukraine over the last two years, to which none of these countries owes anything. The EU’s mutual defence clause was interpreted as sort of vague before(and it is vaguely written) but the EU gives more support to a non-EU member than people thought EU countries would give each other in case of war. Similarly NATO has moved troops into the Baltic states and Eastern Europe and it has expanded to include Finland and Sweden. Where can we find any indication that Russian aggression against the Baltic states will be met with indifference?
I will agree that the US can’t be relied upon as a NATO member. It’s not so much that Trump seems quite opposed to NATO, because the US arms industry would take a nose-dive if the US gave an indication that it wasn’t supporting NATO. So Trump has less room to maneuver in the regard than he might think. No, the reason European NATO countries can’t rely on the US is more a matter of whether or not the US will be functioning entity in the coming decades, which isn’t a certainty. From the many failures of the legislative assemblies, to the chaos on their southern border(the current administration could have at least kept the southern border secure and orderly to rob the Trump-campaign of using that as a rallying-cry), to the opioid epidemic to their ballooning government debt Europe can’t rely too much on the US.
There is more and more reasons for European countries to get nuclear weapons than was the case before but to be honest we’re not quite there yet. I would argue that making nuclear weapons would be entirely sensible for a country that wishes to defend itself against Russia if it isn’t part of a NATO alliance which entails a nuclear deterrent and if Russia seems like a prominent threat. That last part is where I think we find a stop today. If all nuclear-capable nations leave NATO and Russia seems like a viable threat then countries like Sweden should develop nuclear weapons, but Russia has spent the past two years convincing everyone that nuclear weapons aren’t necessary to fight off Russia. I’m sure that wasn’t Russia’s intent but none the less, here we are.
I’m a big fan of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. I tried Fallout 4 during a free weekend but it wasn’t for me. I’ve thought a lot about where New Vegas might be headed and my perspective is one of continuing on from where we left off at the outbreak of the third world war. There’s no need to continue with the administrations that lead to the war, but from a technical standpoint we want to go back to the most advanced stuff we know. I think New Vegas is well placed to do that.
Lots of metal working stuff
We see that they have some industrial stuff left around New Vegas. H&H Tools factory, REPCONN headquarters, REPCONN test site, and the Sunset Sarsparilla headquarters for instance. We also see lots of industrial locations in the Capital Wasteland. Starting with these things provides a good way to get our own industry off the ground.
So let’s call pre-war tech Generation 0. Let’s use Generation 0 stuff to make our Generation 1 equipment; lathes, grinders, shapers, presses, mills, drills, surface plates, calipers and micrometers. We make as few of these as needed so we can start making equipment using our Generation 1 stuff. Then we make the best equipment we can using our own components, which we call Generation 2. We’re still interested in lathes, grinders, shapers, presses, mills, drills, surface plates, calipers and micrometers.
We’re going to want plenty of equipment for railroads, quarries, chemical plants, electronics, weapons manufacturing. They should all be made with Generation 2 equipment. So in theory we only need pre-war equipment to make our very first equipment. All our subsequent lathes and drills and stuff we make using our own equipment in a “circular” fashion. We put very little wear on pre-war equipment.
In reality we’re bound to look at our Generation 2 stuff and the parts made from them and say “Well, this isn’t quite right, we forgot to XYZ” and need to go back to our pre-war stuff to make new lathes and drills and so on based on which things we realized we had screwed up. Still, we put as little wear as possible on pre-war equipment, only reverting to it when we have to. Hopefully we can soon make do without pre-war equipment and correct our mistakes within our Generation 1 and Generation 2 stuff.
Pakistan provides an interesting example of how of they making the base for a lathe in with only casting using a crude mold and a shaper. Pakistan is generally a notable source of how one might bootstrap industry but not quite as useful in how to achieve very high precision. A more complete example exists using some store-bought things and using a more full-featured home setup. We can see This Old Tony make just a back plate for a lathe as well.
We need various cutting tools and high speed steel is very attractive and it’s useful to understand why rake and relief-angles are needed. Today we see carbide used quite extensively but it’s not necessary and it’s something that can be introduced as some later stage. Access to Tungsten is needed but to make them into useful tools high heat seems like the biggest requirement.
Speaking of which, we need furnaces obviously to smelt metal but that’s not particularly hard. Doing things with the right atmosphere is harder but doable.
Equipment
Measuring is Alpha and Omega. If we can’t measure the radius, length, width and so on we can make things really well but we wouldn’t know that. Conversely we might have issues in tolerances but if we have a good way of measurement we can try and try again until we get things right. We can measure within a fraction of a millimeter using standard micrometers(with Vernier scales), completely based on mechanics. No electrical or electronic stuff necessary.
Indicators tend to be very useful and I have no idea how they are built(unlike micrometers and calipers that are more obvious in how they work) but I think we can probably think something out. Similarly surfaceplates are important, as they give us a stable reference on which to take measurements using indicators.
Something quite useful has been the gauge block which are pieces of metal with a known dimension and these as used to check and trim measuring instruments like micrometers. Over time they wear so we need our own method of making these things but we probably need to use pre-war gauge blocks for a longer period of time than pre-war drills and grinders. I think the stuff that gives us the highest resolution would be optical flats and monochromatic light-sources. They don’t necessarily give us measurements in clear numbers but are great for measuring flatness on reflective parts. So surface plates made of granite can’t really benefit but if they are made from steel? That could work. And gauge blocks are almost always made of metal so optical flats can measure their flatness really well. I have no clue how to make optical flats though so there’s no telling how long New Vegas would need to start making them. The optical flat-thing is about interference and interferometry is about comparing things in how they cause electromagnetic waves interfere with one another. Laser light is pretty good for this but white light has some benefits in visibility even though the interference patterns aren’t as clear.
Welding is best done with either inert gases or some flux that vaporizes when you do the welding, otherwise the hot metal oxidizes very quickly which is bad so giving weld just a few second to cool off before coming into contact with oxygen is worth a lot. MIG and TIG use inert gases and stick-welding has flux around the metal used as a welding material. I argue that the electrical aspect is easy enough but the chemistry needed is more difficult. I think a flux for stick-welding is a good place to start and inert gases might be put into use some time later. Back in the olden days they used oxy-acetylene and no inert gas which probably works but I hope that stage of development can be skipped.
On the same track we will need rust-proofing for things, like rails for railroads or anything else that we think might be exposed to the elements. For this reason a chemical plant is quite necessary just to get metal-working to work well. We’re obviously going to need it later on anyway for pharmaceuticals so chemical plants are a good investment even if you just have flux and rust-proofing in mind for starters.
Train
A lot of railroad seems to be intact in the Fallout world. Indeed it doesn’t make a lot of sense to target rails with nuclear warheads and they are very robust unless hit with a nuclear warhead directly. So there should be quite a lot of railroad around for New Vegas to use. Some might be stolen, some might be buried under sand or vegetation, some might have passed through a town that got a direct hit from nukes but most should be there.
I argue that New Vegas should make a train with a crane on the front that can lift things up if they have been buried under something or can lift entirely new rails into place when that’s necessary. I strongly recommend having the ability to move the crane between cars to fetch components. You probably can’t have these kinds of tracks between the cars most of the time(or they will be crushed or pulled apart) so they will have to be installed on straight sections, things lifted by the crane and moved back to the driver’s cab, the connections between the cars removed and then the train is driven back to wherever we need the crane to put things into place.
Power is produced by a nuclear reactor as many such are found in the Fallout world. In the long run I think coal is a better fuel but for starters a nuclear reactor providing electricity will work fine. As the image shows, cars are connected with a thick cable that carries electricity from the nuclear reactor. Since reactors tend to irradiate things pretty bad it is placed as far away from the driver’s cab as possible. I imagine there being a lot of lead shielding and the concept of small-ish nuclear reactors isn’t new.
We would need a hot-shop for performing maintenance on the nuclear car. It’s all good when we fuel a new engine compartment but after it has been used things will be neutron-activated and consequently radioactive and the fuel would contain fission products that are super-radioactive. This isn’t a new problem.
The train should have feelers in the front to check rails ahead of it for correctness so that the train doesn’t derail first and then determine that the rails are out of spec(the UK has something called the “new measurement train” which uses lasers and stuff to measure the train tracks with very high precision). This requires the train to move pretty slowly but I don’t really see the rush… It probably takes quite a bit of time to repair the broken stuff too so travelling a few kilometres per hour seems fine.
Radio
I think an important thing for the train to have is a radio. If it should happen to be overrun by raiders at some point at least they can inform New Vegas of where the problem was located. The next party sent there will be big enough to deal with any threat. A train should carry maybe a few armed soldiers and be well reinforced to deal with hostile fauna so most raiders probably can’t be a big threat. Carrying an artillery cannon on a car would make it very effective against targets found some ways away.
Radio can be very important for other reasons. It could be very useful to provide radio transmissions across California, Arizona and Utah as a service. New Vegas needs to be useful to the NCR as a free agent. If the NCR thinks more benefit can be gained by taking over New Vegas and turning it into yet another part of the NCR, then New Vegas is in trouble and it’s not going to develop any further than the NCR has done in its entire existence.
So New Vegas running hubs throughout California, Arizona and Utah where people can send and receive messages for some reasonable cost makes it’s less convenient to just take over. Of course a radio hub can’t be so constructed as to be useful for someone who takes it over or we’re back to a situation where the NCR can just take it. For this reason I argue that the radio hubs should be made sort of like FPGAs. Lots of different components but by themselves they do nothing, it is only some electronic signal that determines how they are interconnected that they actually do something.
This would mean that a radio hub contains lots of wires, amplifiers, encoders and so on but connections are determined based on an electronic signal. Basically amplifier X is connected to 10 different things and it’s a set of electronic signals that control relays that determine which thing amplifier X actually interacts with. This means that if a radio hub loses power then it won’t work when the power is restored again. All electronic signals went away. Only when New Vegas consults its drawings do they know how things work(realistically they already have the needed configuration) and move the correct configuration under guard to a radio hub where it is installed. But it’s still something that is dependent on power. Even as the configuration is moved from New Vegas down through the NCR for instance there needs to be a battery that keeps the ephemeral data in storage. If the shipment is under attack they just power down the configuration-device.
Another important part of this is to have contact with Pittsburgh. We saw in the Fallout 3 DLC The Pitt how they have become a huge producer of steel which will be very useful to New Vegas. With modern equipment this range isn’t too difficult to achieve but I think New Vegas will need pretty big tranceivers to make that communication work. But this needs only be spark-gap technology and it was in the early 20th century that this technology was used across the Atlantic.
For this kind of communication secrecy and authentication seems necessary, unlike the services provided to ordinary citizens as a commercial service. Today we have fancy asymmetric cryptography but I think New Vegas is going to have to rely on maybe a polyalphabetical substitution cipher or more realistically a One-Time-Pad system. Whereas polyalphabetical ciphers aren’t trivial to crack One-Time-Pad is the only thing proven to be secure. The drawback is of course that you have to physically transport the pad to the other party but I argue that New Vegas needs to be able to reach Pittburgh by train anyway so creating a huge tome of random numbers that can be used to encrypt radio traffic seems like a problem that isn’t too hard to solve.
Each message should be of the format PAGE LINE LENGTH MSG So it would be like 0025 08 0020 XALIJHWFGLAIGWLYUWCO The last page of each book should be an emergency page and denoted as XXXX(message decoded for demonstration’s sake) XXXX 01 0068 LAST TRANSMISSION NOT DECODABLE. START OVER AT BOOK 0004 PAGE 0050. Spaces are encoded as well, otherwise it would be easier to do statistical analysis.
For this application it’s possible for people to send and receive these messages, not having any idea what they’re about. The One-Time-Pad would be locked up somewhere and whoever is in charge would take a message its encrypted form, sit down and apply the needed offsets according to the pad, marking which numbers have already been used. This would take some time but for communication from one side of the country to the other? I think a few minutes is doable.
Semiconductors
Real semiconductors seem like a big challenge and in our timeline we had relay-based logic in some railroad applications until the early 2000’s so New Vegas can probably get by using relays for a long time. It doesn’t seem like it would be that difficult to automate radio-sending and -receiving.
Long term viability
Radio is one way in which New Vegas can make itself indispensible to the NCR. Simiarly it’s chemical plants should try to get into fertilisers and pharmaceuticals as soon as possible to increase the importance of New Vegas as a separate entity. New Vegas isn’t a democracy so it would be just fine for the NCR to make everything seem like anything that happens is a big win for them. They get radio, chemicals, fertilisers and machine tools because they have this great little place at the outskirts that comes up with great stuff. Even if behind the scenes it may be that the NCR leadership is gnashing their teeth at New Vegas not being annexed by the NCR, this need not be presented outwards.
In the longer run high-tech seems like a good route forward for New Vegas. It shouldn’t take people that long to get New Vegas machine tools(for a price of course) and make their own machine tools from them, making it less necessary for them to buy those things from New Vegas. But pharmaceuticals and high precision parts and tools need to stay the preserve of New Vegas for as long as possible. People can probably get down to 0.01 millimeters with the use of micrometers, indicators and gauge blocks but interferometry and cleanrooms should be kept under lock and key as much as possible. Bearings is an interesting example of something very necessary but also quite difficult to make with high precision, so New Vegas could supply this initially and it will take some time for other players to catch up.
Similarly New Vegas can be a source of information, science and engineering. Some knowledge is kept local but a lot of useful stuff can be taught to people from all around the area, making New Vegas more important as an independent component.
It can be important why an argument is put forward. I might put forward an argument because A is true and not because B is true. B might still be true but in this case it is not the basis for my argument. Example: https://deref.se/2024/04/gamification/#phrase In that case it wasn’t so much that A and B was true in and of themselves and more about me arguing that A is true and that even though B is also true, that is at most a corollary.
“That is in line with projections” is a favorite turn of phrase because I don’t like the connotations that we attach to “expect”. If I say “that is in line with expectations” it gives people the impression that I want whatever we’re talking about. That need not necessarily be true, I frequently need to indicate that something is in line with earlier projections but are not actually wanted. The crisis at the southern border the US was entirely in line with projections(have you seen countries like El Salvador or Haiti?) but in no way desirable.
Even when outcomes are wanted, that need not be central to why things were projected to be as they are, so “in line with projections” is a helpful way to express this occurrence.
Corollaries are useful sometimes. Not to be confused for Correlated: that things develop in some way that indicates that they are related. An important thing is to remember that Correlation does not indicate Causation. Which is similar to the warning we get in latin from post hoc ergo propter hoc, which says that just because A happens, then B happens, doesn’t mean that A causes B (the latin phrase actually means “after, therefore because of” which is patently untrue).
A corollary is some adjunct theory which need not necessarily be proven again in the text you’re reading, usually because it’s generally accepted to be true. Another use is to say that that something is a corollary to something. I have a document saved that is dubbed a corollary to the place where I work, as it is related to that employer but sometimes diverges from it where some other technology might seem preferable.
Exacerbated is not the same as exasperated. To exacerbate something is to make a situation worse. To be exasperated is to be frustrated to the point of giving up. They sound pretty similar and it is possible for something to exacerbate a problem, thus making someone exasperated, but they’re not the same thing.
Failsafe doesn’t mean that something is safe from failure, but rather that when it fails, it does so safely. Hardly anything is safe from failure so the best we can hope for is for a component to fail safely. Consider brakes in some trains where there are permanent heavy springs forcing brake-pads onto the wheels of each car, effectively forcing each car to a standstill. Only by using compressed air in a pneumatic system can you lift the brake-pads off each wheel pair. If the fancy-shmancy pneumatic system fails then nothing can push the brake-pads off the wheels and the train comes to a stop. That is perhaps annoying but it is safe, thus making it failsafe.
This isn’t always possible. Modern aircraft are fly-by-wire so the pilot flies the computer and the computer flies the plane. There is no “safe state” like for a train, the plane has to keep moving forward and the pilot needs to have power over the flight control surfaces. These systems therefore have backups to backups to backups because there is no safe alternative.
Subsistence farming is different from sustenance farming. Perhaps this is more commonly uttered as “they live at the sustenance level” when what they mean is “the live at the subsistence level”. Note that people who live at the subsistence level or engage is subsistence farming basically rely on the sustenance that they grow, so the word “sustenance” isn’t entirely foreign to the situation. But “subsistence” and “sustenance” are different things and are used differently.
Provisional is something temporary while provincial refers to things that have to do with a province(or are generally sort of rural). So a “provisional government” is a government in place until some future event and a “provincial government” would be the government of a province. The most common reference to a provisional government would be the post-tsar government which the bolcheviks then overthrew but there has probably been a lot more provisional governments throughout history.
On my daily walks I pass a construction site where they are currently driving down piles and making concrete foundations. Piles don’t necessarily have to make contact with bedrock by the way, the friction between them and soil can be sufficient. They use cranes made of steel. I have no clue how one would calculate whether a building would sink into the soil or if some steel would snap when used in a crane. I have acquaintances who do precisely that but I only have some basic knowledge on how one would calculate forces, not how different materials respond.
I think we should implement this kind of stuff into education in the form of simplified models so that people can learn in a sort of hands-on way how this stuff works. And not just buildings and cranes obviously, this should be done with electrical stuff, maybe even chemistry. I don’t put this forward because I think computers are pretty great(I do think computers are pretty great but that’s not the reason for me putting forward this idea) but because we need more understanding of underlying physics and mathematics. I learnt a lot from trying to make controls for things in GMod/Wiremod. I studied control theory much later and came to understand why my Wiremod stuff didn’t work as I had though. So my control system for Kerbal Space Program worked much better.
Computers today are powerful enough to run these sorts of simulations quite easily. Note that I am suggesting we do this in game form, i.e. we don’t try to do full simulation using FEA(Finite Element Analysis) because that is unnecessarily expensive and might infringe on the work done by professional in this space. I think we’d be OK with 80% or 90% accuracy, even if that wouldn’t cut it for real world use. I could also be interesting for people to be told what makes their software different from the real deal.
I consider my own education to be woefully inept and think it would have been a lot better by demonstrating things in some “real” context. I can praddle on about trigonometry all day but you won’t see any use in it until I start showing electrical circuits where current is expressed as K*cos(wj). The meaning of p=m*v and E=m*v²/2 are also not in any way intuitive so leẗ́’s show people how this stuff works. Let them tinker with it. They don’t have to have physical circuits or actual weights governed by the forces of mechanics, a computer simulation would do just as well and be cheaper and more efficient.
Will I make these demonstrations or games? No, I can get fantastic things set up in Minecraft/Tekkit, Factorio and Wiremod but I don’t think I have the skills to make the implementations. As noted at the beginning, I hardly know how any of this works. I can set up computer-related examples and I’m doing that but I doubt it will be in a school near your any time soon. Partly because I deal in sort of ephemeral stuff that only lasts a few years(whereas schools mostly teach fundamentals that stay the same for much longer) and also because education seems not entirely flexible. But I think the West needs to acknowledge that this view of education isn’t working out all that well.
Not too many months ago an elevator at a construction site in Stockholm crashed to the ground, killing five people. It turns out big parts of what was supposed to keep the elevator together were missing and the company doing to the inspections(who had cleared the elevator) were not allowed to make other inspections for that company.
This brings up an interesting point, that humans are prone to identify things that stay the same. This happens when people get hit by a train, they passed the railroad a millions times before and there was no train so they started assuming that there was never a train on the railroad. Until there was a train and they got hit by it. There was a scandal here in Gothenburg a few years ago where the local hospital had cleared peoples’ tissue samples as being non-cancerous and it turned out that it was cancer.
So whether you never have to recognize the issue(in the case of the train) or just rarely have to recognize the issue it’s easy to not do a proper inspection. I therefore argue that you should introduce known errors for inspectors to catch to keep them on their toes and to normalize that issues are reported. This doesn’t always work, for instance the FIU bridge collapse probably would still have happened as everyone was wholly set on everyone being on track so many issues were simply disregarded. Similarly Chernobyl could have been prevented by even the most basic willingness to learn from the many warnings that preceeded it.
But it’s still an improvement that deals with the inherent weakness of our tendency to assume that “it hasn’t happened yet” means “it’s never going to happen” and our tendency not to check or report things properly. For the likes of elevators you can introduce non-dangerous faults before inspection but this make inspectors only pay attention to aspects that are formally required but not actually dangerous. I think it’s more appropriate to inform everyone on-site that the elevator is not usably since it has not been inspected, that the elevator is clearly marked as “not in use”, which (possibly dangerous) errors will be introduced and when inspection will happen.
This is of course slightly dangerous itself, we can’t rule out someone using an elevator clearly marked as “not in use” and injuring themselves. But this way all inspections ought to be much more robust so even if we people do end up getting injured once in a great while we should have improved safety quite a lot. This is harder for some areas, we can even stay in the construction industry. How do you introduce serious errors in the concrete construction of a floor in a building? You’re pretty much going to have to rebuild things afterwards, which is very expensive. For most sectors however we should be able to find suitable tests to improve the quality and rigor of inspections.
In the case of the tissue samples at our main hospital I think known good and known bad samples should be part of the sum total samples everyone goes through. If any sample is given a conclusion that differs from that which has been recorded it should trigger a warning and the pathologist needs to explain his methodology to the other pathologists. Perhaps the sample was incorrectly labelled from the beginning! Either way people stay on their toes and thinks “how would I explain my conclusion in this case”.
Safety culture
An interesting subject is an organization’s dedication to safety. DuPont has been a trail-blazer in this regard(not without exception) and I think BP is on the other side of that scale. Only an organization that actually wants to achieve high safety even if it costs some money(possibly saving some as well) is going to be helped by introducing errors for inspectors to find. I mentioned Chernobyl before as an example where people could easily find problems but no one wanted to find any so it was only when disaster struck and the entire world noticed that errors became widely known. Trying to solve safety issues stemming from a disinterest is safety by adding more bureaucracy is a fool’s errand. We see this in cases like Williams Olefins’ issues and the aforementioned BP explosion at Texas City refinery, where people check boxes and skip things that are trying to stop them from doing something dangerous. Even the most basic steps towards finding errors are skipped so why would they change how inspections are done to find more errors in the first place?
For this reason accidents like Chernobyl, the FIU bridge collapse and two trains colliding are very useful to us. You can easily create an organization geared towards group-think, ignoring issues and warning signs and using safety overrides to improve efficiency but accidents show us the reality of what we’re dealing with. In the case of an organization that has a safety culture these accidents show us what we’re missing and in other cases it demonstrates the lack of safety culture.
Cost
I really like watching USCSB videos about their investigations but they are entirely focused on safety and they don’t seem to balance that with costs. If all organizations in the US that is in some way involved in processing really had a safety culture and really implemented Process Safety Management, Management of Change and Process Hazard Analysis, how much process industry would they have? If the answer is 90% then I think we should go with what the USCSB is saying. If it’s 50% then maybe not. I don’t see any indication that the USCSB ask these questions and I doubt these questions are within their remit.
But they are necessary for people to ask. We don’t actually improve safety by imposing PSM on US companies that then outsource all that stuff to South East Asia where safety isn’t even attempted. That moves the problem – admittedly – but it actually makes the problem worse. When an organization ignores safety – more or less – we really need to ask ourselves if maybe they know something we don’t. That’s not always going to be true but we can’t always assume that PSM and Safety Culture is some blanket solution that can be applied everywhere to get rid of accidents. Sometimes you just move the accidents.
This is a hard argument to make so I assume BP used to write something like “Safety is of the utmost importance in everything we do” but let every facility work that out themselves. At no point was process safety something that BP demanded of facilities but budget cuts were something they followed up closely. So we can’t take some random statement at face value, even those who are disinterested in safety will claim to be all about safety. We have to look at what they actually do and then we need to understand why. If they are ignoring process safety to make a profit of 5% become a profit of 8% then that’s a great situation to nail people to the wall. If they ignore safety because otherwise their work is done by people in Indonesia instead, then we might want to let things be.
Either way, this is a decision that a democracy needs to make. We can’t afford saying “Safety first” like it’s dogmatic because we can actually makes things less safe in our pursuit of making things more safe. We can’t afford to lose some industry and we shouldn’t pretend like that isn’t on the table. These are the big issues that politicians aren’t inclined to touch because it’s basically a set of bad choices we have. “More safety to save money” is a subset of all safety and not the totality of it. For most examples safety is about making hard choices.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk argues that Europe must prepare for war with Russia. Well, we do need to match Russia in terms of production of ammunition, artillery shells and anti-tank rounds and all NATO countries should meet or exceed the 2% of GDP target for defence spending.
So far so good. But Russia has shown itself horribly incompetent, failing to defeat a country with a smaller GDP than Sweden. It has lost enormous numbers of tanks to the point where they have even deployed T-62’s when everyone assumed they had a bunch more T-72’s left in their stockpile. Their famed T-14 Armata has not been deployed in Ukraine at all and by all accounts they have only produced a few dozen of them. Since tests of the T-14 in China have demonstrated that it is not capable of doing what is advertised to do it is probably wise not to deploy the few T-14’s they do have.
Their air force leaves something to be desired to put it gently. Their Su-75(amusingly nick-named by Russia as ‘Checkmate’) is dependent on western imports and seems to be going nowhere while there are several hundred F-35’s in operation across NATO. They have also lost several naval vessels in the ongoing war(even though Ukraine is fielding no navy on the Black Sea), which isn’t entirely surprising when maintenance and readiness reports on ships have demonstrated that things are barely working at the best of times. In the case of the Moskva their radar interfered with their radio so they usually kept their radar turned off.
So Europe needs to furnish defence contractors to improve it’s production of certain things like ammunition. But Europe would be wise to not furnish defence contractors with more money just to make better weapons, they’re more than adequate as is. Russia has proven the remarkable weakness of its various weapons systems for two years now.
Sean Munger argues that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman killing John F Kennedy and there was no conspiracy. It argues well for Oswald being a gunman but stumbles somewhat in convincing the viewer that there was no conspiracy.
We agree on some points:
Oswald was seemingly a complete screwup who couldn’t do anything right
The idea that he succeeded in killing John F Kennedy seems like an unfortunate accident to mr Munger but it can also cast doubt on Oswald being a complete screwup. I would have liked a more thorough investigation into his history. How come he left the Marine Corps? How come he was so warmly received on his defection to the Soviet Union? How come he married the daughter of a Soviet military officer? How come he defected back to the US and was interviewed for 90 minutes before being let go? How come Oswald’s wife was allowed to join him in the US?
Oswald was a gunman directly involved in the assassination of John F Kennedy
Yes, that seems pretty well established. Even if we disregard his fingerprints and palmprints on the gun the fact that he wasn’t seen by anyone else at the time of the murder is a big red flag. If he truly wasn’t involved in the shooting, how was he kept in the right location(away from witnesses) at the right time?
The Secret Service didn’t do it
Well, obviously not… They could have made it look like a heart attack that killed him in his sleep. Why the hell would they jump through hoops to shoot him? I like the theory that they shot him by accident as it reduces things to slapstick and is clearly disproven by the Zapruder film.
We disagree on some points:
It’s important that Oswald’s gun can be shot three times in the allotted time
I argue that the proper question is if a shooter of his skill can shoot a moving target the size of a head twice in the allotted time.
Handwriting analysis is presented as reliable
I argue that it is not. I don’t doubt that Oswald’s signature in any of the presented evidence is the work of Oswald himself, but handwriting analysis is still very hit-and-miss.
Oswald’s refusal to indicate any co-conspirators while in police custody shows the absence of such co-conspirators
I argue that the Dallas Police showed themselves incompetent in how they interrogated him, how they paraded him in front of cameras for two days and how he was killed while in their custody. One should not rely on any written document from them. We have no audio-recording of Oswald nor did he make any statements with a lawyer present. What Oswald did or did not say between his arrest and his untimely demise is unknown.
The Warren commission is exhaustive
They relied heavily on existing investigations, some of them from the Dallas Police Department, the FBI and the CIA. They weren’t expected to find anything. It would be madness to set up a commission that started rummaging through US agencies, even if they didn’t find anything.
John F Kennedy was not opposed to the Vietnam war
His brother asked the Rand corporation to figure out how to win the Vietnam war. They went to Vietnam and on their return said effectively “The proper question is ‘CAN we win the Vietnam war’ and the answer is that we can’t”. JFK accepted this conclusion and was intending to wind down US involvement in Vietnam. As a side-note: this was the right decision, the US had no hope of winning the Vietnam war. Other countries in that part of the world could stop the steam-roller of communism but not Vietnam.
Some stuff that I can’t disprove due to a lack of evidence:
The CIA didn’t do it
Entirely possible. No one put any effort into investigating that(for good reason) so the absence of evidence isn’t exactly evidence of absence.
The FBI didn’t do it
Entirely possible. No one put any effort into investigating that(for good reason) so the absence of evidence isn’t exactly evidence of absence.
The military didn’t do it
Entirely possible. No one put any effort into investigating that(for good reason) so the absence of evidence isn’t exactly evidence of absence.
The mafia didn’t do it
They probably didn’t. It’s difficult to see how they would stand to gain anything from that or how they would pull strings necessary to stitch things together. Still, I doubt the FBI would have been keen to stand up after the assassination and say “Oh, the mob did it. We have them on tape. Should we have told someone?” So the argument “the FBI says no” isn’t very convincing here. It’s more convincing that the mob made money from gambling and drugs and risked complete annhilation if they were caught doing this.
Conclusions
Mr Munger relies heavily on the facts established by the US government. But when people argue that there was a conspiracy behind the assassination they typically go on to hypothesize that the parts of the US government were involved in the conspiracy, which makes the statements of the US government along the lines of “there was no conspiracy” less weight.
I don’t think any branch of the US government was involved in this crime. But independently of that it would have been hugely disruptive for different branches of the US government investigating one another for involvement in Kennedy’s murder.
And you can’t investigate a conspiracy and a priori exclude all branches of the government yet still have the investigation taken seriously. So you have to conclude at the earliest opportunity that there was no conspiracy. How fortunate *cough-cough* then that the gunman made only a few independently verifiable statements before being shot dead while in police custody.
Apparently Wendy’s is trying to do this and I’ve heard of stores here in Sweden being on the same wavelength. I see the merits of surge-pricing for grocery stores, fast food restaurants and taxi-like(apparently Über has been doing this for some time) but why would you use AI?
I think you – as a matter of practice – need to be able to explain why your prices are what they are. Saying “It’s arbitrary” isn’t going to cut it and saying “The AI says so” is pretty much equivalent. I don’t think surge-pricing is hard to do. You know when you have peaks in load over the day and you can set prices accordingly. “The price of milk is $3 because between 16:00 and 19:00 we see the majority of people in the store which necessitates the highest staffing.” <- That seems like a reasonable rationale.
I’m curious though, what happens when you put a carton of milk in your cart at 15:58 when the listed price is $2 and go to the checkout at 16:02 and get charged $3? That’s not great legally and even from a PR-perspective it won’t go over well. You could say that prices change ever whole hour which might be reasonable with respect to PR but that still leaves the law and I’m not so sure we pass that hurdle this way.
You also need to avoid maximizing algorithms even if they are deterministic. They are better than AI because you can follow the rationale but it’s not going to look great to charge old people more because they are slow(for instance). Just because it yields more money doesn’t mean it’s going to work in the long run or… be legal.
AI is fine for generating images or text where a human can say “Yeah, that’s fine” but prices for stores? No, not a good idea. Similarly I’m quite perplexed by the use of machine learning in self-driving cars. Surely when people are injured because the car drove itself into a wall or a crowd you will want to establish why. But that’s no something you can get from machine learning. It’s an opaque process that yields something that provides opaque solutions. Why would you want that somewhere safety-critical? Even if it turns out machine learning yields results that are five times better than any human driver, the question why is still going to pop up when mistakes are made.
People use the term “literally” to mean “to a great extent” even if it is meant metaphorically. What then is the term for saying that something is literal? We need to be able to distinguish between something being metaphorical and being literal. If “literal” is not reserved for things that are literal, what replaces it with another term that truly does indicate that?
2
Two people who orchestrated shady schemes were arrested after they collapsed: Alex Mashinsky after Celsius collapsed and Sam Bankman-Fried after FTX collapsed. A long time passed between the respective collapses and the arrests. My question is this: why didn’t these individuals flee to a country that does not extradite people to the US?
I think it is relevant that Celsius and FTX didn’t just incidentally violate the law a little bit. In the first case it was a Ponzi-scheme where new depositors’ money went to pay old depositors’ rewards. Numerous public statements were evidently false. In the second case depositors’ money were used by an independent but related entity(Alameda Research) to make various crypto-investments that largely failed. These two cases involve massive violations of law.
So again: why didn’t these individuals flee to a country that does not extradite people to the US? Surely they saw that their actions were illegal? Just losing investors billions of dollars doesn’t go down well even if law hadn’t been violated. So why stay in the US and the Bahamas respectively? I’m not arguing that they didn’t break the law, ample evidence proves otherwise. I am genuinely asking why they didn’t go to Belarus or Cape Verde or something.
Note that INSAG-1 and INSAG-7 are considered authoritative investigations but the information comes primarily from USSR authorities and the deputy chief engineer who are quite intent on blaming each other for the accident. The conclusion I think has to be that the reactor was very poorly designed, documentation intentionally incomplete and previous accidents covered up in addition to the deputy chief engineer violating prudent reactor operations. ECCS turned off for 11 hours in anticipation of the test? Sure. The reactor grinds to a halt? Withdraw more control rods! Run the test at 200MW(thermal) instead of 700MW(thermal)? That’ll be fine. Explain the testing protocol to people running the reactor? No need for that. Before the test event began the reactor was in such a bad state that they basically had no chance of avoiding the whole thing blowing up even if they decided to call it a day.
It should also be noted that you can’t claim to uphold rules regarding anything if you only bust people for breaking the rules and bad things happening. The Soviet authorities smiled upon violating any set of rules to get things done and only busted people for breaking rules when things went wrong. We have seen this in many places since and it is clear to deduce that breaking rules is expected in these organizations.
Anyway, I think the Chernobyl accident could have been avoided if people running the damn things were actually told what they were running. Telling someone that a loaded gun is not loaded is begging for someone to end up getting shot. It never occurred to anyone else to actively lie to nuclear reactors engineers about what they were running because that’s an absolutely idiotic idea. If someone had suggested this when rolling out some nuclear power plant in the US they would probably have been sent for psychiatric diagnosis because no sane person thinks that might be on the table. In the Soviet Union not only was no one sent for a psych-exam, but the idea actually became policy. In their defense I don’t think the decision actually boiled down to one person weighing “tell operators what they are working on” and “don’t tell operators what they are working on” against one another. It was probably a decision made by a variety of people over time and at no point did it seem like a very dangerous idea. But I argue that it would have been a simple matter to tell engineers what they needed to know and make sure they kept their mouths shut.
All operational staff at Chernobyl Unit 4 is asked to attend a meeting in a large onsite hall before going on-stream.
All right. Everyone here? … Anyone know if anyone’s missing? … No? Good. Uhm, you there! The guy who closed to the door. Lock the doors! … Locked? Good. Okey, I’m Davidoff and I’m with… the Security Services. Does anyone know what happens if someone talks about state secrets outside of approved situations? Like if someone tells his wife that our air-to-air missiles don’t work or something like that. … I don’t know anything about our fighter capacity but it’s the kind of thing that you really shouldn’t tell your wife. You there!
Davidoff points to a random engineer in the audience.
What happens if you blab about state secrets?
You… get sent to a prison camp?
Yes, or you get executed. That has also happened. So I don’t think I need to tell you that state secrets are not to be shared with people who are not “in the know”. Fair enough?
There are no objections from the audience.
Good! Now, you may not understand this introduction but I will share with you things that are considered state secrets. They are considered essential for you to know when running these reactors but you are not to talk about this with people who aren’t directly involved with running these reactors. Let’s start from the beginning.
Davidoff shows an overhead projection of his first point.
Item 1. We tell the general public that RBMK reactors are entirely safe. Otherwise they might cause trouble when we build them all over the place. Even people in charge of entire nuclear power plants say that these reactors are so safe you could put one in Red Square. This is not true. RBMK reactors have a set of dangerous properties that are to be presented here today. It is entirely ruled out that RBMK reactors be put in Red Square or any densely populated area. This entire nuclear power plant was initially meant to be built closer to Kyiv but… Well… Obviously that didn’t happen.
Item 2. RBMK reactors are unstable at low power levels. This is not a secret really but it’s worth considering. If you try to run these reactors at low power levels they might shut themselves down – this is relatively good outcome – or they might unexpectedly power UP – this is not a good outcome. So don’t try to run these reactors at low power levels. If all that happens is that the reactors power down unexpectedly you are in luck, it could be considerably worse.
Item 3. RBMK reactors have a huge positive void coefficient. For those of you in the audience who is not a nuclear engineer that means that steam in the reactor contributes to the reactor’s reactivity. You actually want that to be a negative feedback loop for stability. So water boiling to steam to a greater extent than anticipated makes the reactor split more atoms generating more heat and that boils more water to steam and makes even more atoms split producing even more steam and so on. You probably get the gist… Now, if we use water as a moderator – to slow down neutrons to where they actually split atoms – and as a coolant we are typically in the clear. Our VVER reactors operate on this principle. Since water is a moderator, boiling it to steam makes the reactor power down. But in RBMK’s we use graphite as a moderator and water is only there as a coolant. Water actually steals neutrons from the chain reaction so boiling it to steam gives us more free neutrons and therefore we have to huge positive void coefficient. This void coefficient is not balanced out by the temperature coefficient at all power levels, as in the Canadian CANDU reactor. Specifically at low power the temperature coefficient does not compensate for the large void coefficient. As a sidenote: the Americans have a reactor which produces both plutonium and electricity at Hanford which is channel-based, uses graphite as a moderator and light water for cooling. It has a positive void coefficient but not as big as we have with the RBMK. So we have to be very careful with RBMK’s because they’re less stable than what the Americans have in one of they military facilities.
Oh, by the way! The Americans think we are using RBMK’s to produce plutonium. That was the idea back in the day but the design would have been even more dangerous in that configuration so it’s been reduced to just producing electricity. The Americans still think RBMK’s are producing plutonium though and we haven’t been able to convince them that RBMK’s are only about producing electricity.
Item 4. The control rods have graphite displacers under them. This is for efficiency as the control rods are mostly drawn out of the core during operation and normally neutron-absorbing water would take their place. But with graphite displacing the water we lose fewer neutrons. Thus the difference between control rods being inserted and being extracted is greater and we get better efficiency during normal operations. However… This means that pulling out most control rods and them jamming them back in can actually create a boost to the reactor’s power, not the anticipated decrease. The decrease would eventually be present but you have to be careful or inserting a bunch of control rods creates such a spike in power that you never get to that stage because the fuel channels break and jam the rods. They had this happen at Ignalina and narrowly averted disaster.
A man in the audience carefully raises his hand.
Yes, you have a question?
Yes… We never heard anything about an accident at Ignalina.
Uhm… No. The whole thing was classified as a state secret. Why would you be told about that incident?
Oh… Uhm. I see. Never mind then…
The man sits down again.
Item 5: Sensors are not great… Under normal operating conditions sensors will be fairly helpful but during startup and shutdown they are insufficient. You will need to guess the state of certain parts of the reactor which isn’t ideal. No plan exists to put more sensors into the reactor. So… Be careful.
So in summary: RBMK reactors are unstable and way more dangerous than the general public knows. There are a variety of properties than make these reactors so dangerous and the manual – without mentioning those dangers – has to be followed to the letter! When it says “don’t run the reactor at less than 700 MW” it does not say “because otherwise bad things can happen” but now you know that bad things can happen if you do that. Do not pull out all the control rods and then jam them back in because very bad things can happen. The reactivity margin for these reactors must be respected to steer clear of dangers. Follow the manual exactly and you should be fine. Any questions?
A man in the audience raises his hand.
Yes?
Why do we build RBMK reactors if they are dangerous?
A sensible question! I assume that you consider VVER to be the main competitor to RBMK. Well, imagine if you will that you are a politician. You can choose to roll out just a handful of VVER reactors because most of the Soviet Union’s capacity for producing such reactors is taken up by the navy. Or you can choose to roll out RBMK’s which can be built by ordinary craftsmen. In the first case you take the heat because you have locked the Soviet Union into using a technology which can’t meet the needs of its growing industry, but the people running those reactors basically can’t screw things up no matter how hard they try. In the second case you don’t catch any flak for your decision but the operators of reactors will sweat bullets every minute they are working at the controls of an RBMK. Which do you choose? … That’s rhetorical, you’re not expected to provide an answer. Of course we have to tell the general public that RBMK’s are safe but it’s not like they have a keen understanding of how nuclear reactors work so it’s not all that difficult.
Something I don’t understand: Power plant blackouts. This could happen due to a war or something simple like a lighting strike disconnecting the plant from the grid. It takes more time to get the backup generators up to 100% power than the reactor can really handle so the thought was that power would be produced by a “rundown unit”(one of the generators) during this gap. This had not been tested on unit 4 before it was put into production and this shutdown presented an opportunity to do that test. But I don’t understand why you would need electricity to keep the reactor safe in the gap between blackout and the generators reaching maximum output. The emergency core cooling system(ECCS) was pressurized with nitrogen gas, so shouldn’t that be sufficient to cool the reactor before the generators are working at full power? Insag-7 mentions that the ECCS had three sub-systems and that one of them required electricty(DBA = Design Basic Accident):
“According to the design requirements for total loss of power in the event of
a DBA, electric power supply to the feedwater pumps of the third subsystem of the
emergency core cooling system (ECCS) had to be provided by the mechanical energy
of the rundown mode of the turbogenerator.”
So it might have been this aspect that they were thinking of. And making the ECCS robust seems sensible.
Addendum
There is an attempt to rehabilitate Anatoly Dyatlov and painting him as the scapegoat on whom the Soviet authorities blamed everything. Well, the Soviet authorities did try to blame him and the control room staff for things going wrong and this sometimes involved them inventing rules after the fact that did not apply at the time of the accident. I find this somewhat beside the point from an external perspective because the whole system relied on people breaking whatever rules were in place. Everyone knew that rules were hypothetical, just like quotas and deadlines. So the Soviet authorities trying to blame “the rule-breakers” is quite disingenuous but that seems like an internal matter of diverting blame. The Soviet system handled nuclear power incredibly poorly generally, so if the higher-ups try to blame the control room staff, does that make them seem innocent? No, that isn’t viable for us on the outside. I’m sure it was quite effective internally to blame the staff and draw attention to them breaking rules(existing ones and made up ones) as if though rules weren’t routinely violated everywhere as a matter of course. But an outside observer isn’t convinced by this poor attempt at subterfuge.
I think at it’s core we have to acknowledge that mr Dyatlov was a terrible boss. The word “terrible” in this context doesn’t equate to “very mean”. I’m sure he was, but I’m saying that he was very bad at being a boss. He discouraged reports of mistakes, was uninclined to inform people of ongoing plans and trusted no one else to know their job. In pretty much any other country he would at most be asked to clean the floors at a nuclear power plant. But he was almost the perfect boss from a Soviet perspective. He was entirely in line with the Stalin-approach of shouting at people until they agreed to whatever he said and had people sent off to Siberia if they didn’t. He got things done which meant that any rules that may have to be broken were mere suggestions.
So did he cause the accident? Sort of, yes. But the hierarchy above him bears the responsibility. They put a bad boss in charge precisely because he broke rules and shouted at people. So Dyatlov was an important part of the chain that caused the accident but he can’t really be blamed for the consequences when he did what was expected of him. Should we then rehabilitate him in the eyes of the world? Well, I think it’s fair to say that he wasn’t to blame for the accident. But we still have to recognize that his way of running things would be entirely unacceptable selling shoes to random people on the street and the fact that he had any say whatsoever about a nuclear power plant is the root of the problem, not what decisions he made along the way.
