JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
2hr ago
This ruling upends the freight trucking industry and could push many smaller motor carriers and freight brokers out of business and many drivers out of trucking.
I heard that the influx of cheap "no-questions-asked" carriers already did it with many existing businesses. So maybe if those carriers are forced out, the previous ones would come back? This indeed could cause some raise of the prices, but the question is would it be a panic raise or "going back to the level of 10 years ago" raise?
JarJarJedi
2hr ago
If you were to suddenly go comatose with only your dog around, how long do you think before it starts eating your face and gnawing on your ribs?
Various very unfortunate experiments show to us humans frequently resort to cannibalism once starved enough. Including consuming their own offspring, for example. As I said, if you step on this stairway and walk on it consistently, with open eyes and cold logic, it won't lead you to a happy place.
JarJarJedi
2hr ago
Do they play with us because they enjoy it or because we programmed them to obsessively need it
Same question can be asked about humans. p-zombies and all that. Do other people really like you, or only pretend to like you to get on your good side (and eventually betray and hurt you, of course). It's a long stairway down to hell this way. I'd rather stay up here out of it, and pet the dog.
We've stripped away so much of their basic instincts they don't even realize it's not the best idea to eat their own shit
You need to do a bit of reading. Eating shit has very little to do with stupidity and lack of instincts and very much to do with nutrition. Of course, modern house dog rarely needs it as a proper owner already provides them necessary nutrients in much better form, but this is not depravity, and measuring different species by standards of modern Western hygiene is only a step away from "my dog/cat is a vegan" (those kinds of people need to be isolated on a barren island where there's nothing to eat but each other).
If you go for a ragebait, at least make it not an ignorant one maybe?
JarJarJedi
2hr ago
It's not about food though. I mean sure, dogs need to eat, but beyond basic needs the level of food motivation varies very widely among dogs. What is much more common is a need for connection and socialization. So in dogs you get someone who is always glad to socialize with you, and in cats you get somebody who occasionally tolerates you socializing with them. If they're in the mood.
JarJarJedi
3hr ago
I don't think it's an accurate comparison though. Orban, with all his faults, was the leader of his campaign and his domain. Harris was an obvious (and quite ridiculous) figurehead to allow The Machine to operate in the same way it already operated under Biden, where nobody is responsible for anything and things just happen. I am not sure which one is worse - authoritarian rule by an energetic kleptocrat or a by an amorphous anonymous blob - but I don't think they are the same thing.
JarJarJedi
6hr ago
perception of an abnormally high number of engineers and scientists in ISIS
It only looks abnormal to people who are ignorant of history and suffer from a delusion that knowledge by itself automatically improves people. It is not so, and if you look at other destructive movements, often you find very educated and high-IQ people at the head of it. Communists, while proclaiming to be the leaders of the proletariat, have been all high-middle-class or above since late 19th century. Top terrorist leaders regularly turn out to be well-educated heirs of at least solid high-middle-class background if not above (e.g. Bin Laden). Arafat had a university degree. Khaled Mashal has a university degree. It's absolutely normal and routine. The idea that these movements are moved by ignorance and desperation alone and educating them (without specifically pointing out how) and giving them "alternatives" would dissuade them is a dangerous and ignorant delusion, which nevertheless remains popular contrary to all the facts.
I usually use the cash drawer for more routine emergencies like "omg, I am late to my hairdresser appointment and I forgot to get the cash! - No worries, my dear, just take it from the cash drawer!" or "The gardener says he wants cash, have you got any cash?" The drawer has enough to cover any such inconvenience and gets replenished within a week.
For losing the wallet (or getting the walled chewed up by a puppy, ask me how I know) I have a bunch of cards that I usually use once a twice a year but they can serve as replacement for my regular ones for a while, and if I need to identify myself to the bank (like, to replace the stolen ATM card while the ID is stolen too) I can use my passport. Theoretically it'd be prudent to store a couple of copies off-site in a secure storage too, but in practice I'm too lazy to do that. Maybe I should.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
Literally paper cash? Usually $500 to $1000 (some in the wallet, other in desk drawer). I have an ATM within 10 minutes reach, haven't ever felt I need more.
How can someone so successful and smart be so shallow at politics
I can get two answers here:
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Politics is not his main calling. It's like saying "how can he be so smart and yet playing cello so badly?!" or "how can he be so smart and be unable to make two three-point basket shots in a row?!". He's not a political pundit, that's just not what he does. I don't see why there should be a skill transfer to public policy. In fact, the public policy culture is horrendously bad about it right now - we're listening to actors, musicians, beauty queens, random teenagers with PR-obsessed parents, TV clowns, and so on, and regularly elect people with absolutely no transferrable skills at all to guide our policies. Sometimes it comes to complete idiocy, as requiring certain genetic makeup and genital set as the only requirement (can't be even called a "skill"!) for a public policy position. In this environment, I'd say Musk is way above the average on the quality of his skills.
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Maybe what you value as "effective skills" really isn't? I mean, sure, he never wrote a policy essay or a book. But why should we accept that the skills in writing an essay or a book (or, alternatively, skill in paying someone for writing it, which you readily accept) is something important for either Musk or the society to benefit from the genius of Musk? There are millions of books and probably hundreds of millions of college-level essays. What's the use of having one more, really?
Also, having considered the question of "what's the problem", I invite you to consider the question of "how would you fix it?", outlined here: https://www.themotte.org/post/183/alignment-problem
JarJarJedi
4d ago
Sure, but there's formal membership and there's an active and enthusiastic participation. I'm sure you could survive even in Nazi Germany without being a commander of Einsatzgruppe. And morality has a connection to it - if high IQ does not prevent you from being the worst kind of bad that everybody brings up when they need the obvious example of bad, why would it prevent you from lesser bad things?
JarJarJedi
5d ago
But if Elon was better at articulating his opinions or if he put more thought into what he says, he would be even more effective
I mean more effective than being the richest person on the planet, owning one of the most popular social media platforms, having literally run US Government department, soon to have launched more stuff in space then the rest of humanity combined, having the ear of US President (even if they disagree sometimes), and plausibly soon leading the Mars landing project? How much more effective do you want him to be? Is he to gain prescience, merge with sand-trouts and become a Divine God-Emperor of the Universe, setting the humanity on the Golden Path?
JarJarJedi
5d ago
I'm not sure how "I am going to post this vile thing and I know people are going to be repulsed and hate me for it, but fuck them" is any better than "I am going to post this thing and hopefully everybody would agree with me".
JarJarJedi
5d ago
I'd also like to present you with this quote:
The darkest days in my life after the war, after the war, was when I discovered that the … most of the members and commanders of the Einsatz group that were doing the killings, not even in gas chambers, but killing with machine guns, had college degrees from German universities and PhD’s and MD’s. Couldn’t believe it. What do you mean? I thought that culture and education are the shield. An educated person cannot do certain things and, and be educated, you cannot, and there they were, killing children day after day and what happened to them?
Interview with Elie Wiesel, December 10, 2004. Interviewer is Professor Georg Klein.
I think if these high-IQ people could fail the test of "don't participate in the actual Holocaust", some other high-IQ people failing the test of "don't post dump shit online" would be much less surprising.
That's an example of one of the most common fallacies in my experience. Not skillful - compared to whom? An ideal spherical genius in vacuum? Sure, you can imagine any genius you like, no real person can compare to that. Compared to other real people, yes, you have a lot of dumb opinions among billionaires. And also quite a lot of dumb opinions in academia (oh, so many!), Nobel prize laureates, celebrities (almost 100% coverage there), politicians (don't get me started), celebrated book authors, religious leaders, ..., anybody really. Having dumb opinions seems to be a baseline human condition, not a special disqualifying mark of a billionaire. Maybe, just maybe, they are skillful in something else than "never having a dumb opinion" and actually "never having a dumb opinion" has nothing to do with being successful in anything and is not required for anything?
they must, indeed, be generally dumb
I don't know about all millionaires but I have head from enough people working with persons like Musk or Zuckerberg to be pretty sure "generally dumb" is not something applicable to them. I mean if it makes you feel better, sure, find solace in that, but realistically it's not true. They are probably not only smart, but somewhere in the top of the distributions, and likely also have other skills. And luck too, because there are much more smart people than billionaires. But not only luck.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
hasn't really had nearly as much success implanting an idea or meme of similar popularity.
I mean, DOGE? That's pretty popular (not the crypto thing), at least among the right crowd, but even the wrong crowd knows what it is (and they loathed and feared it). That's not nothing.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
the smartest people are less susceptible to bad opinions
I'm not sure that's actually true. I mean, there are a lot of very smart people that hold outrageously bad opinions. Chomsky would probably be a towering example, but taking a wider look at the academia, you probably can toss a stone in a random direction on any academic campus and hit a high-IQ individual with a completely bonkers opinion. In fact, if you stick to campuses, you probably would have tough chance of finding a high-IQ individual who doesn't hold some bonkers opinions, and that rare individual is probably commonly known by his peers as a "square".
JarJarJedi
7d ago
A lot of people have bad opinions online. It's just I never hear about most of them, and never want to. If Sam Wilkinson from Sticks, Iowa says something dumb online, I'd never know about it. If a famous billionaire says something dumb online, I'll likely hear about it because a millions people will repeat it. Even the smartest people are prone to occasionally saying (or doing) dumb things. The most wise don't do it online, so nobody but a very narrow circle of their friends and relatives know it. But that number is becoming smaller every day.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
I won't be profitable (in interest and fees) for them
I have never paid interest or fees in my life (except for annual fees of course) and I have a couple of dozens of cards, and never been rejected or heard about anybody rejected for this reason. Of course, you can never know, but I think there's another reason. Recently having and cancelling similar card from the same provider, or having too many new cards recently could be it. I am sure credit card vendors are well aware of churning and they are largely ok with it, of course they'd prefer to make more money but I haven't ever heard of a policy to reject well-qualified applicants because they're not going to pay interest.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
I feel like playing with stoplosses and other advanced tools requires a lot of understanding, otherwise you'll implement the "buy high, sell low" strategy. For a person that doesn't know much about how it works, probably wide index hold would work better long term. If you get nervous and sell while down, and then when it goes up you're unsure it's really up until it's clearly very much up and then you get FOMO and buy - then you get sub-market returns.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
Invest - yes. Simplest investment is a savings account (not sure how they are called in Europe?) - you give your money to the bank, the bank pays you money for that. If you're not going to touch the money for a while, it's a no-brainer. But, of course, the profit you can gain this way is not large - in the US, for a short-term account (where you can take the money out anytime) it's about 3.5% per year, for longer terms may be more but not much. E.g. US Treasure I bonds now pay 4.26% but you have to keep the money there for a while (minimum 2 years). Certificates of deposit are offered by most banks and have varied terms and interests, but the idea is the same. If you limit yourself to respectable large banks, the risk is pretty much zero here.
The next step is stocks - here you can make more, on average 8% per year, and the simplest way would be to invest in a market-wide index fund. You should look for low-expense funds. With 8%, you'll more than double your money in 10 years. Of course, the risk is that stock market is volatile, so while on average it goes up, there could be long period - even years - when it's down. And unlike bank deposits, nobody guarantees you safe investment.
So, overall, yes, there is a point to invest money you're not using. How depends on your risk tolerance and time horizon. I'd avoid complex strategies until you understand them well, but even if you don't want to go into the weeds, it makes sense to invest at least in simplest ways. You would not make the maximum profit, but you would make some profit, which is better than just leaving the money to collect dust and earn nothing.
That kidnapping thing is not a good example - I am about 95% certain it was done by the law enforcement with the explicit goal of destroying the right-wing groups, in which they had a lot of success, by the way - groups like Proud Boys or Oath Keepers were mercilessly squashed, and the only serious protest from the right (you know which one) led to everybody even in the vicinity of it ground into dust with an overwhelming force. I don't see it as "the Right threatened to kidnap a governor and the Machine run away in fear", I see it as "the Machine absolutely crushed anybody on the Right that could pose any threat of resistance, before they were able to pose even minuscule threat, and successfully used fake plots like kidnapping a governor to give it legitimacy in the eyes of the normies".
JarJarJedi
7d ago
There were curfews in London during WW2 to protect civilians from bombings, do you view those as tyranny as well?
Yes. But certain limitations of freedoms is expected in the middle of a war, with the understanding that as soon as the war ends, those will be gone, and everybody tries to make it shorter. Something that is clearly driven by enemy action - if there are bombings, there is curfew, if there's no bombing, no curfew anymore. And yes, the war can very much be a roadway for tyranny - just look at Russia, for example. With the war though, sometimes you have no choice - if a person is outside and a bomb falls, that person has a very high chance to die, and it's not a very controversial statement. But if the government says we must jail everybody who says anything critical about the Generalissimo because there are bombings - that's clearly tyrannical.
are all standard, reasonable responses to a pandemic and aren’t some new form of tyranny
Oh, it's definitely not new - there's little tyranny-wise that can be really new, people tried to take power over other people for millennia, there's not a lot of new you can invent there. Well, maybe making people wear aquariums on their heads wasn't tried much before, but otherwise a lot of stuff is not new at all. "Reasonable" though is quite different beast - is it reasonable to arrest people for walking alone on the beach, while encouraging mass riots? Is it reasonable to impose night curfew to fight a viral infection? Is it reasonable to impose random restrictions not based on any empirical data because they look like the government is doing something? Is it reasonable to lie in order to get the citizens to behave in the way the government thinks they need to behave? Is it reasonable to suppress criticism of government policies because the government thinks allowing criticism will lead to less compliance? Ultimately, that's the essence of the problem - the freedom encroachments become bigger and bigger, and it's very standard and natural - if the government wants to do something, it's clearly easier if nobody would disagree and everybody would shut up and do exactly what they are told to do, but we also know where this road is leading, and it's not a good place. There must be a stop somewhere, and the recent events showed that we can go quite far on this road, much farther than we thought before, with little resistance on the way. That makes one question - is there a stop at all? How far is it?
JarJarJedi
7d ago
Yes, gun rights. Of course. I mean, I'm all for it. I have guns myself. One of the (many, many) reasons I moved out of California was how inconvenient California tried to make having guns and regularly practicing with them (no comparison to Europe, of course, but I never considered moving to Europe). But: when do gun rights come into play? I mean, I hope to never find out, really, but I also think, if they could lock up the whole country for months (while cruelly mocking it by allowing mass riots to roll unconstrained, just to make it clear how much of a power play it is), destroy the livelihoods of thousands of people, permanently hamper the education for millions, to say nothing of the long list of lesser indignities and humiliations, and the gun rights didn't come into play, I can not help but wonder how much farther they can go yet. Again, I don't want to actually find it out empirically, but the skeptic in me also asks - what if the premise that the gun rights are a barrier to tyranny is just a myth and we're actually soft and lazy enough to be salami-ed into anything?
JarJarJedi
8d ago
I've just started to read an historical book, which was written in 2014 and updated in 2021. And the book, understandably, starts with a preface by the author. In which the author chose to give an insufferable sermon about how much we should worry about the climate change (of course, nobody is going to print a book without a quote from Lenin sermon on climate change) and, since it was 2021, about profound and civilization-changing consequences of COVID (the topic of the book itself has absolutely nothing to with either, btw).
Now it is 2026, so I find myself compelled to ask - were there any civilization-changing consequences to COVID? If so, which ones? To kick it off, I can give a list of what it changed for me personally:
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I have lost significant dose of respect and hope for institutional knowledge. It's not that I doubt The Science (C) (TM) (R) knows a lot of things - I do not doubt that. What I doubt is a) that all those things are true, and b) that the institution as such really cares about as many of them being true as possible. I am now certain that institutionally there are no mechanisms that would preclude institutionally inconvenient truth from being hidden and institutionally inconvenient falsity from being accepted (and enforced) as true - at least on the timeframes comparable with my lifetime. I also am convinced the role of the press in the equation is significantly negative.
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I no longer think that the US - as a society, as a culture and as people - have immunity to tyranny of any sort. It has somewhat better resistance than some other cultures, maybe, but the barrier after which all the lofty ideals of freedom are going to be gleefully trashed is awfully low and very easy to overcome, and can be overcome on literally days' notice by the government, with no significant resistance. We are all walking on a very thin ice, freedom-wise.
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Personally, COVID events also gave me the necessary kick in the butt to finally get out of California. While it felt uncomfortable for a while before COVID, I could be succumbing to inertia for a long time yet, but COVID overthrew all my routines anyway, so the change came much easier.
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On the personal level, I also realized I may not have as much time as I thought I have, with regard not only to my personal health and well-being, but also for all the framework that I enjoy as a member of Western civilization. Any part of it could disappear for reasons I can't predict, so if I want to do things, I better start doing things I want and not delay them to some vague future when I have more time and energy.
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Job market drastically opened to remote work (in my area, of course) - what used to be a weird ask, became a standard offering. While there's RTO pushback now, remote work is a standard option and asking for it is no longer a niche request but a solid, respectable preference, that has its own ample market to work with. If anything, in-office work now begins to be seen as an add-on instead of the default.
None of that is civilization-changing though. Maybe the last one is a little economy-changing but it existed very much pre-COVID too. Any civilization-changing consequences I did miss?
Yes. First of all, a lot of what you call "vomit" isn't, it's regurgitation. That can happen when the dog expels food that hadn't reached the stomach yet. That can happen from time to time, though if it happens frequently there might be some problem with the plumbing somewhere on the way. But could be just biting more than they could chew, or stomach, quite literally. Obviously, there's no reason to waste good food just because it's slightly wet. Second, regurgitating is a frequent way for a parent to make food more easily palatable to children, and a dog may occasionally return to this childish behavior. Third, dogs have a chemical analyzer that most of us can't even dream of, and with that, if they see something that has viable nutrients mixed together with iffy substances, they could separate one from the other and eat the good parts without eating the bad ones. Just like eating carryon, for example. You probably would be revolted at the thought, but for many species - including dogs - it's a perfectly good meal, if you know what you're doing. There's also an instinctive behavior to clean up after themselves (to hide one's smell, for example, which both protects the dog and does not let the prey know the dog is near) and since the dog doesn't exactly have pockets... It could also be that a particular dog is unwell, of course, or is unable to realize eating something that smells good is not necessarily good for them - same as happens to many people too, just visit any local McDonalds store. Generally, if the dog vomits or regurgitates a lot, then that's the actual health problem. If it happens once in a while, usually not a big deal, and tells no more of their degeneracy than having an occasional quarter-pounder with cheese tells about human's.
Again, I must remind you that dogs are not humans, and what is disgusting and maybe harmful for you, is not necessarily so for a dog. If you started trying to lick your own butt as a means to maintain hygiene, your relatives probably would have you committed, but for a dog it is normal (and for many other animals too).
Coprophagia happens a lot in herbivores, because plants are tough to digest (I think you can continue this line of thought). Eating their own feces in dogs is actually not that common, but happens from time to time - though other species' feces are usually more appealing to them, for reasons you pointed out (though for a well-fed domestic dog there's no serious nutritional reason, but again the dog might not know that). One of the reasons puppies might do it is microbiome transfer (the gut has a lot of beneficial microbes, and guess what's the most efficient way for a mother to transfer some to the child). On the other hand, the pups may not have good hygiene habits yet, and in the absence of Pampers... But this is not that common in adult dogs actually. Of all dogs I knew well (about a dozen), none had any interest to their own poop. Research I saw shows only about 1/4 of dogs engage in this behavior, and it could be caused by various causes - from bad nutrition to bad training to psychological problems (anxiety->drive to hide->drive to remove one's smell->you can guess). But this specific thing is not universal for dogs at all.
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