MollieTheMare
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User ID: 875
MollieTheMare
1d ago
the Aubrey/Maturin novels (which I wholeheartedly recommend)
comprehensive youtube video
This video does a pretty comprehensive job, probably 80%+ of the stuff that's not covered in the standard editions' front matter. Probably not AI, given the year, audio cuts, and the fact the guy shows the workflow in other videos. IMO not strictly necessary if you want to just jump in. You can just read the novels like the nautical stuff is Trek technobabble until the sailors explain the terms to Maturin through exposition.
Have you talked before about why some sort of sport rather than structured exercise doesn't work for you? I imagine the socialization is also good for us, even if it's not quite as structured in terms of full range of motion and progressive overload. Something dynamic. Maybe a racket sport, volleyball, ice hockey, etc?
MollieTheMare
5d ago
Interesting, they must have used a funny extrapolation. If you look at the functional form of Wathan’s methodology, it should produce a result strictly greater than the 100-rep result. Roughly 92 pounds in your example. But they do say it’s not very predictive beyond 10 reps, and @Forty-Bot is right: it seems much more predictive at 5 reps. My guess is that the relationship between 2–6 reps, inclusive, is tighter than for a true 1RM or anything beyond that.
MollieTheMare
5d ago
high-powered bow
Cries in Australian.
Otherwise fair enough. I'd still be more worried about distribution than production. I assume global energy markets will go nuts in a global scale war.
I have no particular love for gold as an investment. I think there is some evidence that people tend to find a default currency when faced with extensive barter. Have no idea what it would be in your scenario though.
And yes, I don't consider basic emergency preparedness irrational. Maybe not stocking three years worth of toilet paper, but like a few weeks worth of non-perishable food.
MollieTheMare
6d ago
I'm with you. At one point I suggested:
Very roughly, about 50% of a 1RM is a weight you can do indefinitely.
Where indefinitely is defined as rest-pause until form breakdown is so bad the rep is no longer recognizable as coordinated movement. I'm not sure how many people understood I was being serious there. For sure, I agree that serious willpower is involved above 10 reps.
MollieTheMare
6d ago
Maybe it's my lack of imagination, but I'm struggling to understand how the electronic banking system goes down for weeks without taking out a bunch of other services with it, either from the same source of failure or in a cascade. For example, parts of the power and utility sectors, along with the exchanges and settlement mechanisms they rely on. I guess various executives could suspend trading for a while.
My expectation is that, by week two, we'd be talking about WROL/TEOTWAWKI-type scenarios, in which case I suspect your standard prepper goods (physical gold, booze, dried food, etc.) would be more useful than cash. Why would faith in the U.S. dollar be strong after its banking system had just failed?
Too lazy to go look up the methodology, but for what it's worth, normally your deadlift one-rep max is beyond what those internet calculators estimate it to be. They tend to be more accurate for squat and bench. Be prepared to not be able to move the next day, though, if you do a true one-rep max on deadlift. Bonus points if your nose starts bleeding and you pass out cold.
Edit: Well, my curiosity overcame my laziness. I'm pretty sure that this is the paper, for anyone interested. Assuming you use the Symmetric Strength Wathan calculator.
MollieTheMare
7d ago
No. My argument states that there must be some meaningful limiting principle if you want to argue affirmatively for non-voluntary euthanasia. No, I do not claim that you should abolish courts or wars under that theory. My claim, under that framework, is that those would be illegitimate without significant procedural safeguards.
MollieTheMare
7d ago
Yes, I find it quite plausible that a deontological defense, particularly one grounded explicitly in Christian moral premises, could be more robust than the secular-humanist sketch I provided here.
MollieTheMare
7d ago
Your argument makes a plausible case for suicide and euthanasia in general, but I think it fails to make a strong affirmative case for "non-voluntary" euthanasia. Nor does it really show that the initial secular-humanist sketch is inherently contradictory or wrong. Perhaps the most dangerous feature of your argument is that it risks introducing a post hoc intuition about what level of suffering is acceptable, relying on the benevolence and judgment of the individual decision-maker rather than establishing a stable social rule.
It also does not really explain why palliative care and the potential for future developments in medical care do not themselves weigh in favor of preserving life in the absence of an affirmative wish to die. Take, for example, spinal muscular atrophy in infants. Historically, this could involve extreme suffering, progressive loss of muscle function, and frequently death. But the arrival of onasemnogene abeparvovec produced a step change in our ability to treat the disease. Reasonable people might previously have concluded that such a condition was progressive, incurable, and perhaps rendered life not worth living. We now know that prognosis can be radically altered by treatment. Yet there remains an enormous social and financial cost to supplying such treatment. There would therefore be an obvious institutional incentive not to deploy a two-million-dollar-per-dose drug if we had already normalized euthanizing people with the disease.
It was perhaps a weakness in my initial sketch to use the term "net-positive moral utility," but once you invoke a Rawlsian-style transposition of positions, we can admit analysis from behind a veil of ignorance. It is not contradictory to emerge from that analysis with a framework that is liberal in nature and secular-humanist in outlook, but treats the relevant rights as ordered rather than fully commensurable. For example, you might conclude that the right to life has lexical or ordinal priority over the right to pursue the good life because revoking the right to life is irreversible, whereas suffering may be temporary and a person may later acquire greater opportunities to pursue the good life through developments in technology or medical care.
The key weakness in proposing that "fine-tuning" is the obvious method for resolving the tension in cases involving euthanasia of an incapacitated person is that the proposal still lacks an administrable surrogate-decision rule. It contains a projection problem, in which the preferences of a person with one set of capabilities are projected onto someone with another; it has not defined a stable limiting principle; it does not explain what evidentiary threshold should apply in cases of disagreement; and it does not explain the source or limits of the proxy's authority.
More generally, in this case, we have drawn lines around both incapacity and the age of the person to be euthanized. If I understand you correctly, you have already conceded that the infant is a person. If we allow rights to depend upon further distinctions within the category of persons, then we need some mechanism for protecting against institutional abuse and category expansion.
For an intentionally extreme example, consider the following. I do not endorse this view, and I am not claiming that your framework necessarily leads to it. I offer it as the sort of risk case from which we would presumably want a theory to protect us. A person seeks transition surgery from male to female. A central part of their conception of being female is the possibility of motherhood, but medical science cannot make that possible. The doctor understands this and believes that the patient will experience enormous and indefinite suffering even after surgery. While under anesthesia, the patient is incapacitated and unable to express a present preference for life. We would not therefore allow the doctor to substitute their own judgment about whether the patient's life is worth living for the judgment of the patient. Even if the doctor correctly predicts that the patient will suffer indefinitely, the doctor does not acquire the authority to conclude that the life is not worth living and then kill the patient.
The example is deliberately extreme, but analogous cases can be constructed around any number of classifications, a sort of general Lebensunwertes Leben. Once rights protection depends upon classifications and judgments of worth evaluated by third parties, the theory owes an account of which classifications are legitimate, who is entitled to make them, and why. The point of the coarse definition of personhood and the broad presumptions, such as a presumption in favor of continued life, in the original framework is precisely to protect the institution of human rights against those problems. Invoking "fine-tuning" therefore does not answer the original argument. It requires defeating the reason for adopting the coarse rule in the first place, rather than simply asserting that finer-grained balancing is obviously preferable.
MollieTheMare
8d ago
Sure. I assume that most of the standard arguments against euthanasia, from whatever secular-humanist perspective I was sketching before, would still hold, though. For example, the state probably should not default to the presumption that someone would prefer euthanasia in the case of incapacitation. A strong presumption in favor of living seems embedded in any society that takes the right to life seriously. You also face a principal-agent problem when large medical expenses are involved, etc.
I think most of that framework is based on the idea that these norms are meant to preserve higher-order social functioning, rather than deriving solely from a single person's capacity or preference. Applying a sort of Rawlsian veil of ignorance to the question of what you would want if you were in that body seems plausible, but I'm not sure it's trivially demonstrable that, under the same veil, there wouldn't also be a preference for living in a society with an extremely high threshold for state-sanctioned killing. There may also be a similar veil-of-ignorance perspective in which you would not want to be placed in the position of deciding on, or carrying out, a state-sanctioned killing if you found yourself in the position of a parent or panel member.
MollieTheMare
8d ago
I don't think I quite fully appreciated what a house of horrors the Xu Bo case @georgioz posted there too was before, either.
I'd be curious to see some secular humanist or other arguments against them
I think the best version I can come up with is based on the following sketch. Humans form into self-integrated societies that have net-positive moral utility. Rights dependent on subjective or arbitrary thresholds have historically had enormous potential for abuse. For a functioning, high-performance society, we must have it be generally the case that people believe rights, including life, will generally be upheld. To form a stable equilibrium, we must therefore grant all humans basic rights and define the category of humans broadly so that "unpersoning" cannot become cover for abuse.
MollieTheMare
8d ago
Any experience with reinforced paper packing tape, like 3M 570? On one hand, it's like 3x the price of regular clear packaging tape. On the other, regular clear packaging tape seems designed to make your life miserable.
MollieTheMare
8d ago
The photo is one of the most disturbing things I've seen in a while. It makes Elon look downright K-selecting.
MollieTheMare
8d ago
AFAIK
intersect[ed] (or hover) the mouse cursor with the (vote count) hitbox
MollieTheMare
8d ago
Yes, I posted this case because it seemed to have quite a few culture war points, but there are for sure more generalized pitfalls.
I had some vague notion of that case you posted, but didn't recall the details. I guess Teslas are not the only thing the Chinese can copy and scale up production of heroically. That particular style of failure(?) mode is not unique, though. You have the Jonathan Jacob Meijer 550–600 children case and the Jan Karbaat swaperoo cases in a similar mode. It's not uniquely enabled by technology, though; supposedly, the Ed Houben 100+ case involves a significant "natural insemination" component.
MollieTheMare
8d ago
I think it must be something in my browser settings, maybe because I have JavaScript off on the site, but now it's not loading images. Seems like they might be actively messing with it.
MollieTheMare
9d ago
MollieTheMare
10d ago
One more for the road
I was surprised to find, after last month's extensive discussion initiated by a post by @ChickenOverlord of a Canadian surrogacy/abortion case, that no one had posted a substantially similar, though differing in key details, US version that has recently generated an application to the Supreme Court for a stay. The case is different enough that it seems like it might serve as a stress test for some of the claims and ethical intuitions made in the previous discussion.
To summarize the overlapping portion: in both cases the surrogate refused the "commissioning" party's request for abortion following detection of fetal abnormalities, gave birth, and was then involved in extensive litigation. The previous case had a significant same-sex surrogacy culture war nexus. This case features US federalism and jurisdictional questions, as well as the more significant but partially treatable hypoplastic left heart syndrome.
The very compressed summary is that McKenna West of Alaska was asked to abort, per their contract, by Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar of California. She subsequently fled to Texas, with ongoing litigation as to the ultimate parental rights and appropriate forum. The child is referred to as Gabriel and Rumi by the respective parties. Which probably leads into the stronger, though possibly less legalistic, metaphysical question in this case about what constitutes abdication of parental rights.
In some respects, the current case reverses the question of limiting principle. In this case, the pre-existing contract specifically called for the right of the commissioners to opt for abortion due to fetal abnormalities, and the abnormalities are arguably more incurable. There is some question as to whether that makes the arrangement more binding. It's not clear to me where you should draw the intuitive line at which the contract is entered into with so much foreknowledge, with so much consent, and with abnormalities so severe that we should feel compelled to enforce such a clause. In the previous case it was observed:
The other problem is the terms of the contract. — @gafpromise
That it's unclear whether the problem can really be resolved with sufficiently strong contractual terms. I'm slightly more inclined to accept the premise that surrogacy in general opens up a Pandora's box of ethical problems. Perhaps atomizing the individual biological connections of procreation has produced a system that makes ordinary moral intuition untenable. It was argued in the previous thread that either a full retvrn to nature, or extreme proceduralization and medicalization, might be more stable equilibria.
MollieTheMare
10d ago
Sorry, I thought you were speaking euphemistically and answered somewhat elliptically.
My point was that sometimes there may be some overlap between people using the term "engineer" and a more clinical ASD-type terminology. For example, consider the case of someone who:
- Has a preference for highly systematized thinking
- Has poor conversational reciprocity
- Experiences high cognitive load from focusing on specific social responses, leading to missed social context
- Has unusually specific interests
- Has a low tolerance for ambiguity
It might be socially acceptable to say, "That person is very engineer-brained." An alternate explanation might be: "I'm no psychologist, but I'm not ruling out level one ASD."
Epistemic status of the following: I'm no psychologist; illustrative only.
More generally, there's probably a group common in engineering that has some combination of high intelligence and ASD-like cognition. This combo would allow highly adaptive compensation, specifically through systematized, internalized social cues and intellectually derived rules. This might suppress clinically significant impairment, but might not constitute a separate type of cognitive cluster.
With respect to clustering, if you do a clustering analysis on what you might term natural kinds, for example from fMRI, genotype, or other biomarkers, or from clinical agreement on severity levels, you may actually find significantly better silhouetting within the "group," specifically on bimodal projections such as verbal versus non-verbal. If you extract the cluster from latent space that is most highly associated with ASD, I expect the most stable cluster is likely to contain both members who are clinically diagnosed with ASD and other people. That is, members who are not dysfunctional by clinical standards but have similar cognitive habits. The members who do have "dysfunction" may not be a pure representation of their natural kind in the state of nature, but rather an interaction between the environment and the natural kind. The non-pathological members of that group might be those with:
- Unusually high capacity for explicit system-building
- Learned social rules
- Selected into an occupation with explicit norms
- A peer group that is tolerant of unusual communication
- A profession that grants enough autonomy to structure their environment
And they would not appear dysfunctional, but may belong to the same latent cluster as ASD. So they are "level 0": no apparent support needs. But like the other support levels, this is a function of the current environment, not latent cognition.
MollieTheMare
10d ago
Ah yes, "engineers."
MollieTheMare
11d ago
For some time now, for the purposes of the progressive stack, Asians have become white. Though sometimes not white, or extra white, depending on the context.
MollieTheMare
11d ago
a small loan of one million dollars.
Almost $10MM now, using CPI adjustment.
people tend to dislike my house designs
Assuming you could solve the "small" problem of how capital-intensive this is, there's probably some class of people looking for custom houses where they have an off-the-shelf plan requiring modification / site-specific edits or something in mind and need someone to make plans and stamp them. I don't recall if you are/were a Civil PE, but I assume it would not be an automatic transfer to Gatorland SE anyway. Though I think their structural engineering recognition program is supposedly less onerous than some other states, excepting the hurricane/wind-loading note you already made. The prospective clients would presumably also be expecting you to handle most of the project management stuff too. But this is all starting to look like real work and not a retirement hobby at that point.
MollieTheMare
11d ago
good land sit overgrown
I assume since gramps hasn't been getting constant notices about the lawn being overgrown, they are not in an incorporated area?
lots are buildable
Like based off of minimum size and setbacks, or did you also check the hydrology? Selling someone an unseen ½-acre (20 Qb) parcel of Florida swamp is a tale as old as time.
I would just sell them
fun retirement hobby
Since you are retired and associated with New J⁎rsey, aren't you constitutionally required to snowbird, even if you hardly go outside of your climate-controlled shack?
I prefer the UK system, where the rules are made up and, on the basis of fairness, Wales gets an automatic city for each Jubilee. Unfortunately, they realized they also needed a more sensible taxonomy, which does ruin the fun a bit.
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