Lost_Geometer
No bio...
User ID: 1246
Lost_Geometer
8mo ago
Quotes like this put the Onion out of business:
“You were the happiest and biggest goofball in the platoon. We realized this for the first time when you set a house on fire without approval in order to boost morale,” said one of his fellow soldiers in a subsequent eulogy at the funeral.
Lost_Geometer
2mo ago
Yep. Have you seen the videos of chimpanzees doing similar tasks? They're super good, so I guess it's plausible for it not to covary with the other abilities. On the other hand, it's easy to come up with hypotheses as to why one might do idiosyncratically well or poorly on any given test. I assume that clinical grade measures have more parts to try and average this out.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Support for Palestine maps cleanly into opposition against western govts/institutions that clearly do not support the palestinian cause, mainly because the Palestinians themselves keep saying they want Hamas.
We don't see the same people being against the Western-institution-led Ukraine war, for example. If anything, Ukraine skepticism is male coded.
Also, as a minor point, Hamas was allegedly unpopular even in Gaza before October 7. Presumably they remain so today, except in an enemy-of-my-enemy way. On the other hand, support for killing Jews is widespread, though how much sounds hard to measure. For a while it was a common sophistry on NPR, that because Gazans don't much like Hamas they condemn O7. But there are a lot of folks who oppose Hamas, and think attacking Israel was the best thing they ever did. I don't know when or why this story became less popular.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
I hardly ever have the resources to participate here, so one can rightly criticize for lack of standing. That said, as a regular lurker I'm pleased overall with the moderation -- it's the best I've seen.
On the topic of bans for longstanding posters, though, I agree that long duration (> 2d) bans should be reserved for those who act primarily in bad faith. I don't mind @HlynkaCG being sent to the kennel for a day, but I'd be sad to see him forced out.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
The court took it upon itself to write a much broader opinion than was necessary to decide the case, and it's this opinion that the people object to. I don't care to defend the FEC's original position, but I don't think it's as obviously wrong as you suggest -- the movie was allegedly long-form campaign ad, and that is a fact that could be tried by a jury if needed.
You ask:
If you are so worried about for-profit corporations buying elections, why not pass a law that is narrowly-tailored to prevent just that, without going after someone who creates a kickstarter for their latest documentary "Trump: the Orange Menace"?
This is exactly the type of thing that the decision prevents. In fact, the kickstarter would have been strongly protected already as private speech. Corporations, as creatures of the state, should be able to have their speech limited by the state, which was the law prior to CU v. FEC.
Lost_Geometer
2yr ago
I think folks should recognize that a crowd trying to restrain someone will end badly a certain percentage of the time, regardless of whether neck restraints are used. Violence is random like that -- people don't die when they should, others die when they shouldn't. Some just drop dead from the stress. Add the extreme exhaustion of fighting for ones life, a person who would otherwise survive might not be able adjust their position to breathe adequately. Like with drowning, the death process and mechanism might not be obvious to observers.
Lost_Geometer
2yr 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
2yr 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
11mo ago
You're claiming that the traders mentioned in the previous post were giving away money? If so, could you elaborate on what you think the cause of error was, since I rather like it when non-me people distribute free cash.
Lost_Geometer
2yr 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
1yr ago
athletic / athleisure brands no longer use scenes of competitive dominance in their marketing.
Neat observation. I see there's a preponderance of ads not showing competition. Did they ever market victory though? For essentially their entire market, competitive dominance is kayfabe. Sure, you might have a collection of medals or team victories, but that's only because of the competition structure that allows you to compare yourself to a pool of people that are similarly mediocre. If the elite show up you'd quickly see that you barely play the same sport. Worse, for things like long distance running in a populous area, actually winning any event is a 1 in 1000 thing. At best, you're fighting to beat the fucker 10 feet in front of you.
Lost_Geometer
2yr ago
I guess this is part of why I hated teaching. My viewpoint would have been that (ethically) maximizing the students' chances of passing the test should be heavily prioritized. Even if the fun stuff is better for their psyches, they're paying for a leg up on the competition.
So the worry is that -- if one prioritizes passing the test at all -- the bare facts being tested militate strongly towards certain ideas, and that ethical use of class time does not allow room to introduce complementary material. This is compounded by the fact that so much of the test seems to be free response, and teachers need to be convinced that these would be rubric-ed tightly enough so as to not be graded on ideological parroting. Professionally, I've only seen how the AP grades calculus, so maybe you can tell if such a thing is even possible? My own high school experience was that one wants to approximate ChatGPT's response as well as possible, which is what we'd like to avoid here.
Finally, I found the sample questions to be interesting and challenging (IANA historian). Students would presumably find the course valuable, but (IMO) Florida would be right to claim that the Black experience is better understood with every bell hooks reading replaced by Tupac Shakur.
Lost_Geometer
2yr 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
There is a motte and bailey between real past and possible future vote fraud. A common reading of "Go after voter fraud" would be that such fraud actually is happening in sufficient quantity to merit pursuit.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Given a choice between the story and the film, though, the story wins.
Lost_Geometer
2yr ago
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.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Half of the year with the surpluses we could split corundum into al and oxidize, in the winter burn it as thermite.
Not having run the numbers I rather like this solution. We need aluminum anyway, so surplus production isn't as big an issue. Moreover Al is about as ideal a long term energy storage medium as exists -- it's abundant, extraordinarily energy dense by both weight and volume, and safe-ish to handle. Getting power out can likely use existing thermal technology on a large scale, and possibly electrochemical means on a small scale.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Methane from hydrogen is actually medium efficient -- apparently up to 80% if you use archea. Hydrogen from water is another 75% though, so together it's far worse than, say, flow cells. But in a world where power assumed to be cheap, but long term storage and transport expensive, it becomes very viable.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Could you share some details? From where I sit it's hard to estimate the land requirements for electrochemical storage because there is so little market for multi-day systems. In particular, long term storage should depend on available volume, not area.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
I do Python (and could use of job, if you want to get your forum-nepotism on). Python comes with a bunch of footguns, in that you can make the language behave unexpected ways by, for instance, executing arbitrary code at places like member or index accesses, have completely divergent function behavior depending on argument count and type, or change the behavior of existing objects (almost) arbitrarily at runtime. The art of Python programming is to use these features, with documentation, when appropriate but no more. These issues probably play out a bit differently depending on team and codebase size.
All the usual advice about factoring code into small pieces through narrow interfaces stands in any language.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
Yes, to retain the spirit of freedom of speech there needs to be some sort of balancing. As you suggest, giving full government control to corporate speech seems wrong, but so does treating, say, Exxon-Mobil as if they were a biological citizen in that regard. I don't think the law is written here -- at the time of founding corporations were rare and presumably the framers would likely have little issue with restricting their rights. In that case history and tradition reasoning sends the issue to the legislature, though other types of interpretation leave roles for the courts.
Lost_Geometer
2yr ago
If you're taking a poll mark me down as unconvinced.
Lost_Geometer
2yr ago
When someone says they "feared for their life" I expect there to have been a reasonable chance that they would die. Now I'm at best a middle-of-the-road martial artist, but I'm not a malnourished psychotic either. Compared to Neely I'm a force of nature. In a train car with a dozen people I doubt I could do enough damage to kill someone before being stopped. Maybe? Call it under 10%, fixating on one person with the sole goal of killing.
Now one might contort the phrase to mean "needed to do something to reliably avoid a lethal threat". That might well be the case here, but it's a dangerous equivocation: after all, by that standard one "fears for their life" constantly while driving a car.
Lost_Geometer
2yr ago
For those that haven't seen it: Liam Neeson jumping a fence.
The gizmo says I'm comparatively stupid in an isolated way.
Memory 109 Verbal 138 Spatial 149
Mostly got dinged on the first memory sub-test. This is possibly more interesting than the high-score all around or low-score all-around options.
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