AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
Interesting that you clicked on this...I hope your day is going well and you're at least finding our conversation stimulating, if you're not finding it pleasant. Looking to reinforce your beliefs about about me? Dig up some dirt? Have at it! Only cowards and scam artists make their profile private.
User ID: 2897
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
6d ago
Lol now TheMotte is getting into trump assassination territory....Should I stop coming here and start watching fox news?
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
2mo ago
In the Culture Series by the sadly departed Iain M. Banks (not to be confused with his more mundane doppelganger Iain Banks) humans can decide to change sex entirely and actually become the opposite sex in a very real sense, they are exactly like someone born that sex including womb or sperm etc... Often couples that want 2 kids will take turns doing the gestating.
If humans go on long enough a perfect sex change will indeed be possible at a genetic level. Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?
I say this as someone that thinks it is ridiculous that a man can DECLARE FEMALE Michael Scott BANKRUPTCY style and crush swimming records and smackdown college girls in basketball.
Well that is a pretty uncharitable way to put things. I'm to the right of most of my social circle but I'm to the left of whatever this place is turning into. People just get sick of getting downvoted and unable to post in real time, eventually they say something rude and get banned or they say "fuck it" and leave.
When the conversation turns to being worried about trump picking his VP based on possible assassination, putting guns in holes as a generational family gun stash in your back yard, "powers that be" conspiring to eliminate people like you, heavily downvoting someone pointing out having sex with blackout drunk people is probably wrong, being afraid to leave your red state for fear of being locked up for defending yourself, practicing religion harder being the only answer to societal ills, women only being truly happy barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen....I mean the parody starts to write itself at some point.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
2mo ago
Yes, I bring this up because I am getting a bit peeved at the dozens of posts on here each day that are basically proselytizing. Extolling the virtues of Faith and poo pooing anyone who pushes back by telling them to be humble and that they need provide no proof of anything, and that you sir, would understand if you just had FAITH! It is madness.
All that said, you'll see in just a few years here that consciousness is not a mystery at all and that with enough recursive compute and long enough context window you'll see software becoming self aware. It may already be happening.
The world is warming and the climate is shifting. Not catastrophically, so far. They just bumped up all the growing season maps for the USA, farmers don't make shit like this up with money on the line. Here in Maine winters are becoming warm and wet, the bays don't freeze up in the winter anymore. Lobsters have all but disappeared from the NE States south of us and NY state and are slowly moving into slightly cooler Canadian waters. We've had more 100 year floods in the last few years than in the last 100. It IS changing, very rapidly on a geological time scale, it doesn't really matter if it is human caused or not; we should stop it.
I'm a big proponent of climate engineering or "geoengineering" . Our whole world is already shaped by humanity and our impact on it, I see no reason why altering the climate on purpose instead of on accident is so much worse. We should start with sulfur now, because it is cheap, we know it works, and how it works and that is is safe. Move on to space based shields later if it is still required. As many of you may have noted if you were in the path of the eclipse, no one would ever notice a 1% drop in sunlight.
Basically, climate change is a solved problem. If it ever gets bad enough we'll do something about it, I hope we do it sooner, I want my winters back.
Can't get away from ol' Lewis on this forum. I prefer Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg "Never be ashamed of who you are". Walk out of that porn store with your pocket pussy held high. It is the act of acting shameful that brings the scorn. Walk out to your Ferrari in a nice suit and people will even try to copy your bold pocket pussy purchase.
C.S. Lewis would probably agree as he was probably a bisexual if not gay
Absolutely banging analysis and write up! My only nit is that you're not correct about the crypto (not a crypto fan here btw as I think really the only value add use case for it is crime and money laundering). It is extremely easy to trade a thumb drive or a wallet number and pass key for cash/gold/land, or oh hey I bought a hard drive on ebay with an old wallet on it so I put it in my coinbase account...the options are endless, as long as you pay your taxes. If you really are a spy you don't even need to go that far, just use someone else's accounts.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
2mo ago
Yes yes we've all read blindsight. But this is just a clever metaphor you have here. If you make a thinking system complex enough consciousness is an emergent property. All it needs to do is to be able to reflect on itself. Not a tall order really.
Just drink bro. Everything good that has happened to me has been a result of drinking. The only thing that really helps is if you want to take charcoal pills. But that just makes it so you can drink more without a hangover. 85% of the people on this forum are interesting high IQ shut-ins that wouldn't know what to do with a vodka shot if it spat in their face.
It makes TV and movies 10x better. It makes conversation 3x easier. It is all around a huge life enhancer. After about 1.5 to 3 drinks you'll be in the "Ballmer peak" where you are actually smarter, more coordinated and much more charming than you are with zero alcohol.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
2mo ago
What is the contrary evidence? Humans are thinking machines that are self aware and they exist. So clearly it is something that can be constructed. Shouldn't it logically follow that more thinking self aware machines can be made? If it exists, which it does, it can be created by us given enough resources.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
17d ago
Thoughts on Trudeau actually being Castro's Son? I've done more research on this than I care to admit just because I love the meme. It is technically possible with the timeline of his mother's honeymoon in the Caribbean approx. 9 months before his birth. I'm thinking of doing an effort post and making a fun conspiracy website here in the USA where the Canadian authorities can't shut it down.
The "I can't be trusted alone in a room with a woman that isn't my wife" mike pence?
During an interview in 2002, Pence told a reporter that he would not have dinner alone with a woman other than his wife.
The "I want to force people to have funerals for their miscarriages" mike pence?
The "retarded children should be forced to full term" mike pence?
In March 2016, as Indiana governor, Pence signed into law H.B. 1337, a bill that both banned certain abortion procedures and placed new restrictions on abortion providers. The bill banned abortion if the reason for the procedure given by the woman was the fetus' race or gender or a fetal abnormality. In addition, the bill required that all fetal remains from abortions or miscarriages at any stage of pregnancy be buried or cremated, which according to the Guttmacher Institute was not required in any other state.[155][156][157] The law was described as "exceptional for its breadth"; if implemented, it would have made Indiana "the first state to have a blanket ban on abortions based solely on race, sex or suspected disabilities, including evidence of Down syndrome".[156]
"Coal is the future" mike pence?
Pence has been an outspoken supporter of the coal industry, declaring in his 2015 State of the State address that "Indiana is a pro-coal state," expressing support for an "all-of-the-above energy strategy", and stating: "we must continue to oppose the overreaching schemes of the EPA until we bring their war on coal to an end.
He is your hero?!
Updated with the appropriate context.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
1mo ago
And....this is the kind of comment that gets 18 upvotes here...turning into a bit of an echo chamber eh? Do I need to start right coding all of my comments to stop being rate limited by downvotes?
We make new humans every single day. So yes they can be constructed. Just with DNA right now instead of machine code. It is all still code.
Well...The first mistake you're making is that you believe "free will" is something that exists. You were always going to make the choices you did based on the state of the world before you made them. You can imagine making different ones which gives you the false impression that something different could have happened. But it never could have. Even if you think that there is some random quantum fluctuation that turned on 1000 neurons that made you turn right instead of left then it is just random chance not "free will". No human has made a choice anymore than a rock rolling down a hill "decides" to keep rolling. It is impossible.
Ask yourself this, how are you making your choices? You are always going to pick what you pick. If you could do otherwise you would have done so, and that was always going to be the case. If it isn't the case then it is just random, and that isn't a choice either.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
26d ago
Kind of seems like you believe in some shadowy cabal keeping you down because that helps you make sense of your life circumstances and gives you someone to blame. There is no actual conspiracy against you, it is just the banality of the human culture machine that grinds on with or without you. The world isn't zero sum, we've proven that by elevating humanity to heretofore unimaginable heights. There is no conspiracy against you.
NPR just reported on a new study out that the CDC has been overcounting maternal mortality claiming it to be over 300% of actual deaths.
It seems there is a box on a form that you check if the person is pregnant, and they have been counting every single death of a pregnant person as a maternal death. Shoot, they included a lot of men in those stats too apparently. Even if the death didn't have anything to do with being pregnant or delivering a baby.
The article is an absolutely wild ride of excuses, doublespeak and backpedaling while still playing a hard game of oppression Olympics. They are trying to work some facts in, but it is just so against the narrative, they basically can't do it. Even when they address the fact that it isn't actual race but bad health going into pregnancy that is the issue, they can't quite ever just leave it at that.
Certainly reinforces my already staggering lack of faith in the CDC due to their bungling and lying about covid.
Guess the Euros will have to take this US bashing fact out of their quiver.
Article
The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics' most recent report put the U.S. maternal mortality rate at a whopping 32.9 deaths per 100,000 births. That number garnered a great deal of attention, including being covered by NPR and other news outlets.
A new study suggests the national U.S. maternal mortality rate is actually much lower than that: 10.4 deaths per 100,000 births.
The widely reported issue of racial disparities in U.S. maternal mortality persists, even with the lower overall rate. Black pregnant patients are still three times more likely to die than white patients, according to data in the study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology on Wednesday.
"We have to prevent these deaths," says K.S. Joseph, a physician and epidemiologist in the OB-GYN department of the University of British Columbia. Joseph is the lead author of the peer-reviewed paper. "Even if we say that the rate is 10 per 100,000 and not 30 per 100,000, it does not mean that we have to stop trying."
The fact that the rate of maternal mortality in the U.S. seems to have been significantly inflated may be disconcerting. Experts NPR spoke with about the data explain that measuring maternal deaths is complex, and that CDC was not intentionally misleading the public. They also emphasize that most maternal deaths are preventable.
Health department medical detectives find 84% of U.S. maternal deaths are preventable The trouble with the data started about 20 years ago, when the national death certificate was updated to include a pregnancy checkbox that the person certifying someone's death could tick. This checkbox created problems, which CDC analysts have acknowledged in their own papers, and changes were made in 2018 to CDC's methods for calculating maternal deaths. But Joseph and other researchers suspected the data was still not reliable.
"We felt that the pregnancy checkbox was misclassifying a lot of such deaths and adding them to maternal deaths," he explains.
In the new paper, Joseph and colleagues redid the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics analysis of data from 1999-2002 and 2018-2021, skipping over years when the data was in flux. Then they disregarded the deaths with only the pregnancy checkbox ticked. "We would only consider deaths to be a maternal death if there was a pregnancy-related cause mentioned by the physician who was certifying the death," he explains. "There are several lines in the certificate where a pregnancy-related cause can be mentioned, and if any of those lines mentioned a pregnancy-related cause, we would call it that."
That approach yielded a rate of 10.4 per 100,000. It also showed that the rate did not change much between 1999 and 2021. That rate is much closer to those reported in other wealthy countries, although Joseph warns that every country uses a different process and so international comparisons are unreliable.
"I think it's a very important study – I was happy to see it," says Steven L. Clark, an OB-GYN at Baylor College of Medicine who was not involved in the research. "It confirms statistically what most of us who actually deal with critically ill pregnant women on a regular basis thought for years. We are bombarded with these statistics saying how horrible maternal care is in the United States, and yet we just don't see it."
Clark does not blame the CDC for putting the maternal mortality rate so high. "They can only analyze the data that they're provided with, and that data starts at the individual hospitals and individual places in the United States," Clark says. "CDC gets these numbers, and I think they probably do a great job – I don't think there's any conspiracy here to hide anything from the public."
Joseph agrees. "The point I would like to make is that, yes, the [National Vital Statistics System] is overestimating rates and that's because of the pregnancy checkbox," Joseph says. "But this issue of assessing the actual maternal mortality rate is not a simple issue."
Deciding what time frame to consider, which conditions to include, and more, makes the task challenging. Joseph's study does not count suicides in the post-partum period, for instance.
The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics declined NPR's initial request for comment on the study. After publication, a spokesperson for the agency emailed a written statement. "CDC disagrees with the findings," the statement reads, and goes on to assert that the methods used by the researchers "are known to produce a substantial undercount of maternal mortality." The CDC declined to provide anyone for an interview.
Dr. Veronica Gillispie-Bell is an OB-GYN and the medical director of Louisiana's maternal mortality review committee. She also was not involved in the study. She says the findings do not surprise her – her committee finds checkbox errors all the time. "When we're validating the cases, it's very common that a 70 year old man – somebody checked the pregnancy checkbox and it will appear that that was a pregnancy-associated death when it was more of a clerical error."
She says in committees like hers in states all over the country – supported and funded by CDC – experts are looking closely at each of these maternal deaths and validating them. "We don't just look at the numbers," she says. "We review cases to determine, first of all, was this death pregnancy-related or not? Was this death preventable? And if so, what could we have done to prevent the death?"
She worries this new study will encourage some to dismiss the issue. "Anybody that was doubting is going to be like, 'I knew it wasn't that bad of a problem.'" She thinks the study should instead be a "call to action" to support state review committees like hers that validate the data and investigate each death.
Dr. Louise King, an OB-GYN and bioethicist at Harvard Medical School, agrees. "It's really important to dig down into this," she says. "Maternal deaths may be related to poor health coming into pregnancy, but that's still on us."
King notes that maternal mortality rates are still too high in the U.S., and the disproportionate effect on Black patients "is just plain scary," she says.
Joseph agrees that the racial disparities in the data make clear that there's a long way to go before the problem of maternal mortality is addressed. He adds, "this study does not mean that you can take your eye off the ball."
Study
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
2mo ago
What determines what you will or what action you chose? Unless you're flipping a coin you're always going to chose it based on who you are genetically and your interaction with the universe up to this point. That is it. Those are the only inputs. There isn't any other option. There is no such thing as free will because there literally can't be.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
16d ago
This whole thing is getting crazy enough that it is even leaking into NPR on my commute and I've heard several stories about it from major news outlets. They of course are spinning it as the eventual chickens coming home to roost from having men that do zero child rearing and housework and also having the women work outside the home too (which is what they wanted!). But regardless of how they got there, they have a solid point. No one is going to willingly sign up for a life of wage slavery + all domestic tasks, that is fucking crazy town. You or I wouldn't do that!!! It is no wonder women are mad and opting out. It is the only rational option.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
1mo ago
I am 100% sure @ArjinFerman has "interpreted" that post to the point where they don't want to point you to the original.
"leftoids", come on man. Great comment, and then you just throw that in there to make sure we know what side you're on. I own some property and when I get with other landlords the most pejorative term for lease holders is "rentoids" for the real bad ones. Dehumanizing to the max. Dial it back before the Rwandan machetes come out eh?
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
1mo ago
But what caused those personal choices? If you were them, you would have made the same ones.
"All direct evidence available to me indicates that I determine what actions I choose, through an exercise of non-deterministic free will."
What does this mean? How can you exercise "non-deterministic free will"? Are you just flipping coins all day? Even those would be predetermined to land a certain way.
The laws of the universe are deterministic at the scale humans operate on. If by some weird twist of fate they aren't. It is random, in which case you're not making any choices either.
There is no scenario in which "free will" could ever even be a thing.
It is a physical and even metaphysical impossibility. What would be the weird thing floating outside of you making the decisions? Why would it make them the way it did? If it makes them based on any rules or information or past history then it isn't free will anymore. "Free will" isn't a thing.
The ancients were 100% correct. It is all fate.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
1mo ago
I agree. The thing is, Kulak craves a collapse, he yearns for it. I've seen this before 100 times on /r/collapse and many other places on the right and the left. They couch it in concerned terms but what they really want is total collapse quickly so they can step out of their boring lives and into whatever post apocalyptic power fantasy YA literature has lead them to believe.
All roads lead to collapse in Kulaks eyes, because that is what he wants to happen. Zerohedge and Michael Burry and Silverbear, peak oil, clathrate gun, rapture, global warming, hard core preppers -on and on and on; they all suffer from the same sickness.
Sometimes it is because they build their brand and their income on it, sometimes it is just a wish for a different more exciting life free of the normal drudgery, sometimes it is because, "My ideology will arise triumphant from the ashes of the old world". It never happens like they predict, even when things get shitty in this world, it happens slowly in a larger area or quickly in an isolated location like a war or natural disaster.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
30d ago
By that logic, how do you trust anyone to do anything? Stuff still needs to get done, even if the incentives aren't perfect. The world turns.
I'll probably be censured for this, because for some reason--- religion, despite ZERO proof, needs to be respected on this forum. This is pure fantasy and shouldn't even be brought up as a serious topic. It is like watching Harry Potter fans argue over what fanfic should be cannon. It is made up out of whole cloth and shouldn't be in a rational adjacent forum.
More options
Context Copy link