Lost_Geometer
No bio...
User ID: 1246
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
Contrary to what most people think, rich people work more.
"Facts" not in evidence. I suspect the only jobs where marginal productivity doesn't decline sharply with time worked are highly monitored, low intensity, repetitive ones, like warehouse worker or truck driver. Hence your inequality statement is backwards -- the people who get hurt most by shorter hours are already low paid.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Solar photovoltaic, for example, doesn't need international, state, or even regional stability to function, which nuclear does. Solar installations are trivial to build -- even the largest installation, Noor Abu Dhabi only took 23 months. Onshore wind is similar. Natural gas, AFAIK, has become very quick to construct, though the political coordination required extends across to the extraction area, as you say. The point isn't the precise details -- nothing's perfect -- but rather the huge difference in time and risk profiles with nuclear.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
OK, I'll bite. I'm not anti-nuclear, but hardly pro either. 20 years ago I was enthusiastic, but overall now I think that nuclear has only a modest role to play.
Nuclear never has never been particularly economically attractive -- successful programs have needed to be subsidized by states for national security reasons. The predictable costs are huge and mostly occurred before the plants even come online. The unpredictable costs of accidents, attacks, and proliferation are really hard to value, and require large states or as yet imperfect international control systems. The technologies needed for nuclear to be perform at its best (small safe thorium reactors and the associated reprocessing networks) aren't yet developed. Overall nuclear wins only if you want a to build a power source 15 years from now, to deliver stably priced energy in a stable environment for the next 70 years.
But that's not what we want. We want power sources that can be built in 1 year, that and are priced for a lifetime of 20. We need technologies that can be deployed at a local scale and are immune to political disruption.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
People have fears disproportionate to actual threats all the time. For example, some people won't go to the beach because they're convinced sharks will eat them. And when they're reported to fear for their life when a wave breaks over their feet, we acknowledge that, but with a footnote that the fear is irrational, and sharks aren't really a danger of much magnitude in that situation.
There is an urgent societal need to (as much as possible) ground such feelings in reality, in part because mortal danger justifies a lot of otherwise forbidden behavior. One's dog phobia, for example, does not justify shooting your neighbor's pet when it barks.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
"We were scared for our lives."
No. No reasonable person would be in that situation, and, "survivor" or not, it cheapens our discourse to tolerate such statements with not even gentle push-back.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
[ @The_Nybbler makes similar points ]
To clarify, can you answer 2 questions?
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How common are killings in similar circumstances -- a single, unarmed individual kills complete strangers on a modestly crowded bus/train after exhibiting unfocussed threatening behaviour?
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In light of your answer to (1), and the unfortunate common presence of disturbed individuals on public transit, how do you estimate the probability that any given passenger (other than Neely) would have died on that trip?
From this side of the screen:
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I was unable to find any examples in a brief search -- plenty of cases of group violence, armed killings, or direct person-to-person conflicts, but none resembling the facts at hand. Presumably it's happened -- just due to the huge numbers of encounters.
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Given that I can't find any examples, and that this type of thing must happen thousands of times a year, I'll put the individual death probability at < 0.01%.
If you can get a better handle on (1), then I'm happy to update.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
I'm pretty far left, but the author doesn't really give much of a reason to think much of anything. He opens with a weakman, demolishes it, and then proceeds to loosely related speculation. In particular, he doesn't do anything to establish that rape behaves differently than other violent interpersonal crimes. Pretty much everyone knows that blacks victimize whites at far higher rates than vice versa across the board, a fact that is much more reliably established using better reported, less heterogeneous types of crime.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Many renewables, and some fossil fuels if you ignore fuel supply, satisfy those requirements. Pretty much everything meets them better than nuclear.
Lost_Geometer
11d ago
As far as I've seen commercial storage targets shorter duration, less than a day, so I don't really have a source for how the duration scaling works. The limit is where the footprint is dictated by the storage of redox active material. Large tanks are a bit squat, but still contain enormous volumes reasonably compactly.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
Exactly. It should be a very powerful argument, because preservation of life is a central social value. Like any powerful tool, it must be guarded against abuse.
Even killing someone, ordinarily one of the most forbidden actions available, is often accepted under such circumstances. But we attempt to prevent abuse by some combination of conditions that the threat be, for example, immanent, articulable, and clear to a reasonable person.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
GBH is certainly relevant to the conversation, but the central point was limited to the statement "we were scared for our lives", so to that end focusing only on those killed is indeed appropriate. Danger of grievous bodily harm and danger of death ought to correlate very well though.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Piano, which I'm shit at. I don't get the opportunity to practice much, since I live with other people. When I can it's still fun to improvise over various music theory ideas.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
That the risk is small doesn't matter when there is no reason why anyone should tolerate being exposed to it in the first place
Agreed. My issue is with the casual use of "fearing for ones life", which cheapens and reduces our ability to del with what should be very serious issues. In the case at hand, it seems reasonable for the passengers to have restrained Neely, as some violence was arguably reasonably anticipated from him. Shooting him, for example, would not have been justified though, and we should, IMO, calibrate our language to maintain respect for human life.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
On a literal level, no -- the fossil record records things that have died in favorable circumstances, not things that have reproduced.
On the evolutionary level, 30_000_000_000_000_000 sterile social insects argue otherwise.
How is any of this relevant to the conversation?
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
For those that haven't seen it: Liam Neeson jumping a fence.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
I don't think this is true. Try talking to some normie lefties. They'll tell you that crime stats are biased and you're racist for even considering blacks might be more violent.
This, I think, is where the trail veers into the weeds of expressed belief vs reasonable knowledge vs patterns of action and so forth. I think I've encountered the view you reference, as a genuine belief in every sense, in the wild, but AFAICT it's uncommon in my neck of the woods. I have yet to see the extreme version @hydroacetylene (isn't that just ethane?) claims, but presumably it occurs. More often people will express that point for signalling purposes when advantageous, only when they are not in the business of making factual predictions about the world.
In reality it's hard to know for sure, though. If you start spouting racial crime stats at people then you look like a racist weirdo. People will fight you even when they know you're right.
Lost_Geometer
6mo ago
Damn, finally somewhere I belong.
Lost_Geometer
8mo ago
The alcohol example may be illuminating: note that the counterfactuals have different forms. In the alcohol case, the hypotheses apply to alcohol as a whole, whereas in the prostitution one they only apply to a specific worker. If I told you (a teetotaler) that my mate Paul drinks a fifth every day, has the liver of a man half his age, and actually drives better drunk, would that change your mind on the merits of drink? Now, I may well be imputing an argument that Murphy would not support and did not speak to. One can charitably assume that both speakers abbreviate the rigor of their arguments, and attempt to beat steelmen out of the plowshares (?) they provide.
Lost_Geometer
9mo ago
I'm had success with some relatively non-specific musculoskeletal stuff with targeted exercise and weekly rapamycin. I have strong inflammatory tendencies and family history, but no diagnosed disorder. Also psychotherapy helped my general improvement, so maybe that too.
Assuming your responses to LDN and keto weren't psychologically mediated (a big possibility -- many of these problems have a psychological component) then rapamycin could help you. It's not an unusually dangerous drug, but not 100% safe either, so ideally you would find an experienced doctor to prescribe and monitor treatment.
For autoimmune, some people respond to heat: get your core temperature to 102F for a few minutes every few days. This is supposedly safe-ish, though didn't work for me. Again, the standard of care involves medical guidance.
Lost_Geometer
10mo ago
Some adaptations come quickly -- the soreness in particular should improve over the next weeks. On the other hand, at 10 sessions a week even experienced folks can easily outstrip their recovery capacity. To push that kind of volume you need to keep most of the workouts easy and monitor for signs of injury or over training. Bad sleep is one of those. It's been a while since I was 23 but I'd suggest cutting your schedule in half and building up slowly as you learn to listen to your body.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Fair point. My hot take is that, of the spectrum of things called the EMH, the correct variations are obvious and the non-obvious variations are incorrect. I'm very happy to be educated to the contrary, however.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
As far as I can tell the semi-strong EMH (the only one worth using) says that insofar as markets are zero sum games, they have no winning strategy for average players. This is the type of insight only an economist could consider insightful. You can sometimes "beat" the market when
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You're playing a different game - for example certain risk profiles are much more valuable to you relative to others.
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You have privately acquired information (either by circumstance or hard work)
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You're lucky
The market does sometimes generate what seem like blunderous mis-valuations, but they're hard to mine in advance.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Ain't nothing wrong with Dummit and Foote, but as usual you pay through the nose. (I'm too cheap to own D+F, but it was the text in grad school. Ash is 1/4 the price, and has some cool algorithmic style stuff.)
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
15, though I have been watching "Occupied" on TV.
I'm not convinced the evidence for superiority of phonics over all other methods is as strong as you suggest it is. Even if that was the case, however, that fact by itself would not necessarily imply anything about how schools should operate.
Here's where I'm coming from. When I was young I transferred from a nontraditional school with relaxed reading expectations to a more normal one, so I ended up going to a remedial reading program for a few months. I don't recall anything phonics based, though this was a while ago. Either way, as far as I recall, I was reasonably literate within a year. As in I was rapidly able to read anything I wanted, though of course subtle literary senses took longer. What I do remember quite vividly is hating English class for the next two years, because as often as not it was just hours of identifying sounds in words I could already read just fine, followed by homework of more of the same, all while I would rather just be reading a book.
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