Glassnoser
5d ago
Phone apps are getting really aggressive lately about constantly sending useless notifications. They make it extremely difficult to figure out how to turn them off if they even let you. Threads is especially bad about this. Is there a guide somewhere on how to disable notifications?
The more general problem I've been having lately is that settings menus are now totally unintuitive. I used to be able to find something by just looking through the menu, but now, no matter what aim looking for, I almost always have to Google it, and half the time the instructions will be wrong because the app developers seem to reorganize their menus at least once a year.
Why do they do this? I get far more utility out of the layout of an app staying the same than I do out of any design changes, usually.
Glassnoser
8mo ago
There is a plentiful supply of dense urban cores in America with lower population than they had a century ago, and yet all the demand is for building more suburbs. The population has spoken, and they don't want to live in cities, they want to live in suburbs, New York City, and nothing in between.
Of course fewer people want to live in places where you don't need cars than they did when cars were unaffordable to most people. That is hardly saying anything, and it doesn't mean more people wouldn't want to live in those areas if the government didn't prevent them from existing.
The people have not spoken. There is no free market. Various taxes and regulations artificially reduce the supply of dense neighbourhoods. That's not to deny that many people like the suburbs. It's just to say that many don't and only do so because of government distortion of the market.
Glassnoser
1yr ago
Doesn't quantum immortality mean that we're likely to spend eternity in pain on our death beds, seemingly close to death but miraculously surviving? If AGI tries to wipe us out, aren't we likely to suffer in pain forever from a miraculously survived murder attempt, maybe lying as a blind and deaf quadriplegic with third degree burns buried in a garbage dump?
Glassnoser
3mo ago
We, the West, shouldn't be standing behind the Israeli military, supplying the bombs and shells they're using, bankrolling their operation, threatening anyone who attacks them.
Why not? If Israel is in the right, it only makes sense to help them.
I really don't get why it shouldn't be allowed. This isn't even illegal in many places and in many places where the age of consent is 16, it was 14 not long ago. Is having the age of consent two years lower really such a massive mistake that was causing more than $10 million worth of harm every time a 14 year old had sex? That's more than we're willing to spend to prevent someone from dying.
I don't think he's trolling. I think he's showing how irrational people about sexual morality. It's an excellent poll that reveals the absurdity of most people's black and white thinking on this issue. A lot of people talk as though if it's bad, it should be stopped at all costs, even though no one actually acts like they really believe that.
Glassnoser
11d ago
A sales tax is a tax on consumption. A capital gains tax is a tax on capital. Taxing capital is taxing savings. It is not really taxing wealth, because an equally rich person who spends his money right away avoids it. It is actually easier to just tax consumption with a sales tax and then you can tax extreme wealth but in a way that is fair and doesn't discourage saving and investing.
The capital gains tax is especially absurd (compared to other taxes on capital) because it not only penalizes saving but also penalizes frequently selling assets, and the tax is on the nominal returns, not the real returns. If you invest in government bonds, your real tax after-tax return will be negative.
Scott Sumner is excellent on this subject and has written many blog posts on it. It's hard to pick the best one, but you should read a few. Here are some:
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/a-consumption-tax-is-a-wealth-tax/
https://www.econlib.org/capital-gains-nonsense/
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/income-a-meaningless-misleading-and-pernicious-concept/
Why don't Palestinians just convert to Judaism? Most of their ancestors used to be Jews and it would gain them the right to return to Israel, where they could live much better lives. If the answer is that they are devout Muslims and Christians, then do we need to save them from their own irrationality by either somehow getting them to convert anyway or by forcing Israel to give in to their demands so that they don't suffer the consequences of their bad choices?
If this happened at a mass scale, would Israel not allow it? I suppose they would doubt their sincerity and make it more difficult to just convert so that you can move to Israel.
Is this just hard to coordinate on a mass scale? Invidual Palestinians may not want to convert and immigrate and leave their communities. But that still leaves open the question of how bad things must really be if they don't do it anyway. Israel may be an ethno-state, but I think it's the only country in the world that anyone can immigrate to if they're sufficiently motivated to convert to a belief system.
Glassnoser
9mo ago
The Cancel-Culture Troll with a Neo-Nazi Past. This is an exposé on the RationalWiki editor behind several cancellations of intelligence researchers including Bo Winegard and Noah Carl.
He used to be a white nationalist on Stormfront before flipping to the other extreme and attacking the reputations and destroying the careers of academics by writing defamatory articles under multiple pseudonyms.
He was later banned from RationalWiki for, among other things, writing articles about and doxxing other editors. Although he was easily able to ban evade and continued to use RationalWiki to attack academics.
This overall situation has created a climate of fear among intelligence researchers. Two prominent and tenured academics, who had not previously been attacked by Smith, initially offered to write this article; both later reneged out of concern over what Smith might do to their careers in retaliation. I ultimately agreed to write it because as someone outside academia, my career is less vulnerable than theirs to these types of attacks.
Glassnoser
1yr ago
How am I to make sense of the fact that the castes in India have been highly endogamous for the past two thousand years and that the pre-industrial world was Malthusian? Shouldn't that have resulted in the gradual replacement of the lower castes with the upper castes, or did the upper castes not actually receive any material benefit as a result of their higher status?
Gregory Clark has argued that in England, the upper classes did replace the lower classes as a result of their material advantage. But they did not form distinct endogamous castes, so most of the descendants of the upper classes fell into the lower classes and there was some limited mixing between the classes. But India, my understanding is that the Brahmins didn't become Shudras, so why didn't the Shudras go extinct?
Glassnoser
1yr ago
If everything is within a 15 minute walking distance, the average person is only going to be a 7.5 minute walk from each thing.
Glassnoser
1yr ago
Why would they need to fool us?
Glassnoser
3mo ago
I thought it was shown that they don't do much, especially outside. And they mostly protect others from you. They don't prevent you from getting infected.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
Growing up, the only thing we ever did for Christmas Eve was to go to church in the evening. It was only time of year we would normally go. It's been years since we've done that. Lately, my siblings, sister-in-law, and I go to my parents' place for supper and put our gifts under the tree to be opened in the morning.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
Why is it a bad thing that asset prices are high? That seems like a good thing to me.
any business that depends on SVB and has a > $125K bimonthly payroll will have to do furloughs or layoffs.
I don't think your math is right. That's $650,000 to $870,000 per person per year. EDIT: Never mind.
Also, you're assuming that SVB doesn't have enough to pay any of the deposits. They probably can pay most if not all of them.
You're also assuming these companies won't be able to borrow more money. There's also the possibility that the depositors will be bailed out. Failing that, why wouldn't their investors reinvest the same amount? If these companies were good investments last week, they mostly still will be next week.
I'm going to register a prediction now with 80% confidence that there will not be a large number of layoffs because of this. Let's say under 1,000.
Glassnoser
1yr ago
Are you saying you think it will be made illegal to have physical books?
Glassnoser
1yr ago
On November 13th, a prediction market was created on Manifold Markets asking if former Chinese president Jiang Zemin would die by the end of November.
He died today (November 30th). What could the explanation for this be?
First of all, those are very different situations. It's not true that if Israel is justified in attacking Palestine that those other causes are justifiable, nor is it necessarily wise for the US to get involved. Secondly, it's not true that if the US helps one country it has to help them all.
I hate it with a burning passion. (This is, unironically, what a website should look like: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) I guess they want things to look nice and clean, but for practical reasons, I want as much information to fit on the screen at one time as possible. I can understand limiting clutter, but they have gone way too far. I don't like clicking through menus, especially if I don't know where to find what I'm looking for, and I really really don't like scrolling.
For the same reason, I abhor the trend of making things too big. I really don't like that if I open YouTube on my 27" monitor, I can only see 8 videos at a time (or just 1 or 2 on my Pixel 6 XL). My bank used to have a nice website that they ruined by replacing with the design from their app. I have five accounts and only two fit on the screen because they're using 24 point font with huge chunks of white space between them. They can't fit 5 numbers on a 312 square inch screen! I'm seriously considering switching banks over it and I only hesitate because the others will probably do the same.
I have to resist going on a rant about this, so I'll just conclude by saying I also dislike the trend of replacing text with symbols that I have to decode, and by saying that if God is just, there is a special place in hell for whoever is responsible for pushing this.
Glassnoser
3mo ago
How do you explain Canada then, where the issue wasn't politicized at all and yet lots of people are still wearing masks?
Glassnoser
4mo ago
Developing property is also productive activity.
Why did the US end up with this system? In Canada, there is no equivalent to the SAT. To apply to university, you usually just submit a high school transcript.
If you want a full scholarship, that's another story, but you will usually get something just for having good grades and the tuition is less than half what it would be at a state school in the US.
We also don't have anything like the Ivy league. Our top universities have huge student bodies, and the gap between them and the lower ranked universities is not as big. The university of Toronto has 76,000 undergraduate students. Nor do we have the same problem with grade inflation. U of T notoriously grades its undergrads in a curve, which is not popular for students who all excelled academically in high school. Other schools, such as my alma mater don't do this, but it's common for courses to have C averages (which are stated on the transcript). Does it have something to do with the US having private universities?
The result is that, unlike the US, the UK, China, and probably many other countries, it's not so difficult to get into a good university, but it's hard to do well once you're in, and depending on the program, hard to even pass. But in these other countries where it's really hard to get into the top universities, once you're in, you don't have to work very hard from what I've heard.
Glassnoser
5mo ago
Why is it inherently bad?
How would that work? Mid six-figures is $500,000. Assuming a real growth rate of 4% (it could be higher, but I think this is reasonable given how low real interest rates have been lately), and assuming 45 years of growth, that gives you $2.9 million.
Each generation, you'll pay capital gains tax, which in Canada (I don't know how it works in the US) would be about 25%. In the US and many other countries, you also have inheritance tax. That's equivalent to about 1% a year. Is there a way to avoid this with a trust?
Then you have to pay half in income tax, which leaves you with 1.5% to live off of each year. That's just $44,000 year to be split between you and your siblings, spouse, and children.
but even conservatives have got to recognize there is a problem.
I don't see why it's a problem.
Just to be clear, are you suggesting - with very little to support it - that food allergies are either fake or psychosomatic?
More options
Context Copy link