Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I understand as much as I understand that none of these scenarios involving population bombs ever happen. I'd be willing to bet any amount of money that there will be at least 1 million Han Chinese in 100 years, which is more than double the population of Amish at present, a population that's doing incredibly well by your metrics.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I guess next you'd also tell them that they can't take credit risk into account when issuing loans.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I don't know that bringing up one of the largest countries in the world is a great idea when talking about a "death sentence" for an ethnicity.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Not really. Most medical records I look at have too much information, not too little, and that appears to be a consequence of computer programs that make it really easy to generate a ton of data ever yfive minutes. Office notes are usually pretty good, but if the guy was in the hospital it seems like they provide daily updated medication lists and ongoing reports of vital signs. Plus the complete record includes all the discharge instruction for how to care for your wound, etc.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I look at a lot of medical records for work, and what was posted is the evidentiary equivalent of damning with faint praise; unless there's more that isn't shown here, it's evidence that there was no injury. First, the entire time from sign-in to discharge was about 90 minutes, which has to be some kind of record. In the US the average wait time is 2 1/2 hours, and that includes people who are seen immediately. Maybe the NHS is better about this than the hospitals where I live, but given their reputation and the fact that this was 8 pm on a Saturday... it seems a bit of a stretch. And there's no indication that this girl was treated or even examined. Just a note of head injury and that she was discharged home without followup. Again, I don't know, maybe the NHS just doesn't bother to document anything, but in the US I'd expect a brief narrative of how the injury happened plus physical exam findings plus a diagnosis and any instructions they were given at discharge. Here, even the stuff that looks like it should be filled in is left blank.
My own take, made with the full admission that I have no special knowledge of the situation and am not a doctor and with the caveat that the records I look that are the ones the hospital has and not necessarily the ones the patient would automatically be given upon discharge,is that they went to the ER and complained of a head injury to the triage nurse, got tired of waiting, and left. Maybe @self_made_human can shed some light on what standard practices are considering that he might be a doctor at the same hospital and would at least be familiar with Scottish medical records, but assuming they're substantially similar to American records, I'm not seeing much here.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I haven't seen any evidence that this guy is a Turk beyond speculation by people who aren't in a position to know. Last week people were insisting he was a Gypsy.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
It works well enough to get an idea of what kind of crimes are occurring and where, but without names it's useless for my purposes. It's also based on reports of crimes not arrests, so if a guy breaks into a building and is arrested a week later at home it's going to map to the building he broke into and not his house. Believe me, I checked that site on the off chance there was a report for the address, but I already suspected that wasn't the case since the other tenants didn't have any information. It's more likely that he was picked up on a warrant for something that happened elsewhere.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I picked up an eviction case over the summer, and I got a call from my client one morning telling me that the tenant had been arrested. He didn't know what for, just that he had heard about it from other tenants in the building. A couple weeks later, it happened again, and this time he had to fix the door from them breaking in. I told him I had no idea how to figure out why he was arrested (twice), for the simple reason that I didn't have any connections in the police department, and that even if I did they would only be useful if one of them happened to already know about the situation. The only way to figure out why the guy was arrested is to wait and see if he's charged in court, and to date the guy's only contact with the court system has been the suit I filed against him. The other possible way would be to check the police blotter. This is a reasonable course of action in small towns that report every traffic stop, but the Pittsburgh Police, with hundreds of encounters a day, only report on things serious enough to merit general public interest, and some middle aged guy getting arrested for something that's probably minor doesn't merit it. There's a Pittsburgh Police Scanner twitter account run by private citizens monitoring scanners, but, again, they only report on things interesting or (mostly) funny.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I don't think this is true because the population isn't evenly distributed as far as teams are concerned. Here in Western PA, if you're black and good at football you're likely playing on teams that are majority black all the way through high school, the same being true of white students. And at the high school level, the racial composition of teams isn't a factor in how competitive they are. If you're white and good at football you're not getting cut in middle school in favor of precocious black kid for the simple reason that there probably aren't enough black kids to make a difference.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
A few ideas I've had over the years:
- Operate a small machine shop that makes replacement parts for mining equipment
- Develop improved release agents, emulsifiers, and icing stabilizers used in the commercial baking industry
- Open a shop that does custom letterpress printing, which uses old-fashioned metal type. Every major city can support a few of these, most of the business coming from wedding invitations and the like.
- Get an M.D. and buy the kind of machine that's expensive enough and used infrequently enough that it makes more sense for doctors to have someone else come in than to do the work themselves. I neurologist I used to know made a nice living going to various offices to do EMG and nerve conduction tests, with the added bonus that he didn't have to deal with patients calling him or operating his own office.
- Find an application where a Wankel rotary engine makes the most sense, and corner the market on them
- Develop some kind of get-rich-quick scheme and sell books about how to implement it in late-night infomercials hosted by Richard Karn or some other washed-up B-celebrity.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
I'm not seeing where in the opinion it says he was president of the state association.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
This got a decent amount of play in the Pittsburgh news earlier this year. If you want to make the story come to life and meet some of the people involved, there's this video reporting on the guilty verdict, and this one covering the preliminary hearing.
I believe he was the president of the Allegheny County Funeral Director's Association, not the statewide association.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
I'd describe them as black but not African. You were the one who conceded they were white, so you tried to argue that they weren't European, which makes even less sense. I don't know why you're hell-bent on otherizing certain people.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
By that logic you'd have to concede that nobody but Indians are actually American, no?
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
Except they're Europeans. They've been in Europe for a thousand years and don't exist outside of Europe. Saying they have a "mixture of European and non-European ancestry" is about as useful as saying that English people have a "mixture of English and non-English" ancestry because of that dirty Norman blood.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
Sort of. UK law allows you to carry a folding knife with a non-locking blade up to 3 inches without reason or justification. Most Leathermans have locking blades, so they're out, but there may be older ones or similar tools from other companies that qualify. BUT, you are allowed to carry one if you have a good reason to carry one (other than defense), so if you're hiking or use it for work or something it technically wouldn't be a problem. I have no idea how strictly this is enforced.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
The modern-day equivalent would probably be those guys who carry a Leatherman around in a belt clip. It's not the kind of thing that would draw much attention at all, and if it did even the most anti-gun person would probably assume that the guy was an outdoorsman or often made a bunch of minor repairs, not that he was open-carrying a weapon.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
I knew something was up with this when the alleged assailant was the one who recorded the video. Putting aside why you would record your attempts to perv on a little girl, why would you post that online? The only other person who could have posted it would be the police, and there's no indication that the video was released by police. Why is a twelve-year-old girl hanging out in a place where she feels unsafe enough that she needs to carry weapons? Why do they keep slowly backing away instead of running? I know that when I was a kid if I had ever though someone was about to abduct me I'd get out of there as soon as possible. It's not like it wasn't a wide open public place with plenty of escape routes. And although it's not unheard of, it's certainly rare for attacks of the type that have been implied to be carried out by a man and a woman working together. I didn't comment earlier because I didn't want to speculate without more information, but the whole thing seemed fishy to me from the outset, because it conformed to a narrative certain people have. It's almost as if some of them want it to be true, and are hoping that it will turn out that these were nonwhite people there trying to rape children because it will validate the ideas they have about immigrants from certain parts of the world.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
He probably knows people, but why would they give him special treatment? Google owns YouTube, and his entire professional reputation is tied to being CEO of their biggest competitor. The other weird thing is that there's no conceivable reason for Ballmer to even need to buy promotions. If the guy likes to hear himself talk, and there's no other explanation for why he's doing this, then he could probably target channels with existing subscriber bases and offer to make guest appearances where he plugs his channel. He's a big enough name that I doubt many people would say no to having him on.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
I looked into the archeology of the channel, and the findings were interesting. The channel uploaded its first video on August 31, 2017 (a 2 minute clip of an interview with Kara Swisher), and the first "Just the Facts" video appeared that October. There have been over 120 videos posted in the past 8 years, yet only 12 of them cracked the million views threshold, and the first video to do this was a video about immigration posted on August 1, 2024. This was following a nine month hiatus, prior to which the previous video, about mammograms, only got about a thousand views.
The obvious explanation is that the videos are being heavily promoted. But I don't know if this is the case. It's my understanding that YouTubers generally don't pay for promotions, for the simple reason that it doesn't work. An alternative explanation is that the video times increased from under two minutes to about fifteen. By 2017, most YouTubers were making longer videos, and the algorithm had adapted accordingly. Making videos that short in 2017 indicated a channel that hadn't done basic research into the zeitgeist, as the kind of viewer looking for World Almanac type information isn't looking for a two minute video. That may have been true in 2006, when streaming video that worked was novel, but there was enough better content out there by 2017 that few people would bother. That being said, under 1000 views suggests no action on the algorithm and no promotion, just uploading and forgetting about it. If these videos had been promoted but failed to take off, I'd expect at least a few thousand views.
Part of the reason YoutUbers don't like promotions is that it gives a few extra views but doesn't do anything to promote the channel. Basically, it will show more people the video in their feed, but only a certain percentage will actually click, and only a certain percentage of those will watch for any appreciable amount of time, and only a certain percentage of those will actually subscribe or otherwise become a regular viewer. It also does nothing to boost numbers from sponsors, since sponsors look at other metrics like average view time and percentage who watched the whole thing when making decisions, and those numbers are harder to fake using bot farms. We don't have access to Balmer's number for that, but one number we do have is comments. Bots don't leave comments, and leaving a comment means you were invested enough to engage with the creator and other viewers. I'd imagine that comments are more valuable than views.
The trade and tariffs video got 12.5 million views and 688 comments. The DOE video got 11 million views and 232 comments. These numbers are pitiful. Looking at some of the channels that play to a smarter audience and looking at the numbers for videos that got around a million views:
- Adam Ragusea - Edible shelf fungus (chicken of the woods 'mushroom') - 1,182 comments
- Wendover Productions - The Logistics of Music Festivals - 1,122 comments
- Stewart Hicks - Inside the Station Nightclub Tradgedy - 1,715 comments
- Technology Connections - How Much Thrust Does a Ceiling Fan Produce? - 5,042 comments
- Practical Engineering - California’s Tallest Bridge Has Nothing Underneath - 943 comments
None of these videos are about anything that could be described as a hot-button topic that will stir engagement based on subject matter alone. So generally speaking, an established channel with an audience can expect around a thousand comments per million views. There may be some point of diminishing returns where we can't expect that to scale linearly, but I've looked at a pretty wide sampling of channels and this holds. Take a channel like Deb Armstrong's which has an incredibly limited audience that has natural constraints on its growth. Ms. Armstrong unexpectedly won gold in women's GS in the 1984 Olympics and currently works as a ski instructor and youth race coach in Steamboat, CO.
The audience for ski videos in general is small. Only around 3% of Americans skied in the past year, and most of them went skiing once. Ms. Armstrong, furthermore, does not make videos designed to entertain a wide audience, or teach tricks, or review resorts, or have bro hangouts. She makes technical videos from the perspective of a ski instructor that appeal to the kind of skier who is actually interested in improving their technique. Bode Miller, Franz Klammer, and Lindsey Vonn have made appearances on her channel. But only briefly, and not in a way that exploited her connections. Her most-watched video is titled "Use of the Inside Leg to Change Turn Radius", which got 711,000 views and 437 comments.
If you noticed, this comment ratio is below the 1,000 comments per million views average, which is interesting because most of her videos get fewer than 100,000 views but over 100 comments, in line with or a little above the average. My suspicion is that this is an artifact of a video that triggers the algorithm for no conceivable reason. I doubt there are 700,000 people worldwide with any serious interest in learning how to use their inside leg to lead turns. Hell, most skiers have zero idea what that even means. (For the layman, most carved turns are initiated with the outside leg, which comes naturally to most skiers. Pros, however, will use the inside leg as well, which takes a certain amount of practice and intentionality to get the feel for since it's not a natural movement). The video features an unusually self-aware 12-year old whom Ms. Armstrong engages in a Socratic dialogue about how use of the inside leg has improved his skiing, complete with videos of him making buttery smooth turns. I imagine that the kid caused something in the algorithm to trip, which in turn caused the video to show up in the feeds of people who wouldn't usually see it, some of whom watched a bit of it before moving on with their lives. So it got more engagement than her other videos by dint of higher viewer numbers, but not as many as one would expect if her actual audience had grown to the point where she was regularly getting those kind of numbers.
The upshot of this is that these videos aren't being viewed due to a natural audience developing for the channel. Usually when that happens it's similar to Glenn and Friends Cooking, whose 2019 video where he attempted an old Coke recipe got millions of views for a channel that hadn't broken a thousand in nearly 15 years of regular uploading. While the video certainly grew his audience, he wasn't consistently getting numbers like that video. It currently sits at 18 million views, while number two has just over a million. It should be mentioned that Glenn is very up-front about how he's not chasing sponsorships, optimizing for the algorithm, or making videos for anything other than his own personal edification, which means that his numbers are skewed by him regularly breaking all of the "rules".
So it's clear that there's something going on other than Ballmer's videos hitting the algorithm at the right time. But how does this square with promotion when most YouTubers say promotion doesn't work? I think the answer lies in the fact that most YouTubers looking to pay for promotion don't have the kind of budget Ballmer has. If the average guy looking for a boost pays $500 to get his channel going, at $0.10 per view that only buys 5,000 views, which is nothing. 20,000 views per video, which seems to be the minimum I see among people who are doing it for a living, would cost $2,000, and would be cost-prohibitive for anyone trying to jump-start a channel.
And it gets even worse. Since real channels with real audiences get a certain level of engagement, this engagement drives the algorithm as much as it drives advertisers. If you boost your video, and it's shown to people who don't like it and who don't comment, it's a black mark against your channel as far as the algorithm is concerned. So rather than jump-start a moribund channel, it can actually make things worse, since the algorithm is now less-inclined to show people the video on its own. The only way this could possibly work is to keep feeding money in until enough of your natural audience finds the channel that it can support itself (say, 100,000 average views). But you're now paying millions month in and month out to hopefully get a channel big enough to generate a middle class income.
So there you have it. Ballmer is almost certainly paying through the nose to get a synthetic YouTube audience, and I've just spent seveal paragraphs stating the obvious conclusion that OP reached in the original post. As to why he's doing this when he doesn't seem to be pushing any kind of agenda, I dunno, maybe he likes it? Maybe he wants a bigger audience and just figures that since he has the money he'll throw money at it? I don't know how billionaires think.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
I was supposed to be hearing a lot about arcologies in the near future since at least 1993. I don't know that there's much call for anything self-contained, since the megaprojects of the 1960s that promised housing, retail, and office space all without leaving the building mostly went out of business when they discovered that people like going outside from time to time.
This isn't a change in anything. There will always be a certain number of people on either side of the aisle who will celebrate violence against the other side, and the only thing that's different now than 15 years ago is that more of them are on the internet by virtue of fewer of them being too old to go on Reddit. I couldn't tell you the number of crabby old guys in bars who talked openly about the "ten cent solution" during the Obama presidency.
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