aaa
1mo ago
It's a little counter-intuitive how cars are far more likely to kill us, but we get more angry at cyclists.
Why is it counterintuitive? A car weights 175x the weight of a bicycle, of course it's more deadly.
aaa
8mo ago
TIL that religions removed by centuries and thousands of kilometers from christianity worshipped satan because some internet christian believes their mythology is actually real.
aaa
10mo ago
As western capitalism trends closer an closer to a command economy through mergers, acquisitions and consolidation you will have a harder and harder time arguing against communism.
About 5 companies make all beer. About 6 companies make all media. It's hard to really argue that single digit values of competition produce the level of innovation that a state run monopoly could never rather than simply producing collusion. It's hard to believe that internally the level of competence will not steadily trend towards that of the DMV.
aaa
10mo ago
I'm still convinced that the fertility problem is 100% economic in nature, it's just underestimated how serious it is. "But countries with lower GDP per capita have more children" you say. You are only measuring one variable, you forgot to consider the cost of children which in the west has skyrocketed.
For example, just in the past 50 years the cost of clothing a child has grown by a factor of 20.
Then factor in that the fertility window has become smaller, because everyone goes to college, that the period that children are dependent economically on their parents has grown, because child labor was made illegal and then everyone decided to go to college, that free childcare dried up, because women entered the workforce and people move away from their little village to seek jobs in the big city. Etcaetera, etcaetera. Childrearing is an externality, in an efficiently run country there's better ways to use anyones time than raising children.
None of this applies to Georgia in the mid-2000s of course and economic interventions don't work because they are not enough by orders of magnitude. It's too expensive, to the point that it's probably unfixable and everyone is coping about it. The left copes by thinking they can import slave labor from the third world and it will be just as good thanks to our magic soil. The right copes that if we push hard on religion we can scam everyone on making really bad economic moves.
aaa
6mo ago
Israel exists because the US pays for its existence, if support from the US wanes sooner or later Israel will be overwhelmed by its hostile neighbors.
aaa
7mo ago
Fahrenheit has more reasonable degrees within human comfort zones to accurately describe the temperature so I think it is superior to Celsius.
The human mind can in fact adapt to 40 as "very hot" and "0" as cold instead of 100 = very hot and 32 = cold.
Important clothing decisions might depend simply on whether the temp on the weather app shows up in red or blue.
The point where numbers become blue is in fact completely arbitrary.
aaa
3mo ago
Pilot suicides might be less bad than ramming attacks... but it's an open question about whether they are less common, or if the security doors enable more suicides-with-all-aboard than they do mitigate ramming attacks.
They are much more common but the right comparison would be between pilot suicides and ramming attacks if the latter was still possible. But the safety doors don't really matter for pilot suicides, they happened just as much before and logically you don't need a long time to crash a plane. You couldn't do it the way the germanwings guy did it but the SilkAir way would still work.
References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot#By_pilots_in_control_of_whole_flight
aaa
8mo ago
I disagree with this characterization. Nick Fuentes has always run a vibes based group, his main victory was telling Ben Shapiro he wasn't conservative enough. He's also been calling himself a Christian Nationalist for years. Milo used to be a politically incorrect technocrat back when Allum Bokhari was ghostwriting for him but after getting cancelled by the mainstream conservatives and joining Fuentes (and then leaving Fuentes) he's publicly renounced his gayness and can be seen walking around with a breviary.
Despite their faith being obviously fake and ignorant I would still consider them part of the religious conservatives, although distinct from the main religious conservatives on account of being younger, antisemitic instead of philosemitic and almost completely irrelevant.
aaa
8mo ago
satanic religions of old
There is no old satanic religion. Satanism was invented in the 60s by a topless bar manager.
aaa
7mo ago
And yet, 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon, 6 picas into an inch, 12 inches into a foot, 3 feet into a yard, 1760 yards into a mile and 3 miles into a league. But you will be pleased to know that you can, in fact, ask for half of a liter or a quarter of a liter if you like fractions (and many fraction lovers do just that).
aaa
3mo ago
The Waymo in California thing is such a small experiment and the upside of fudging with it is so high that if it turned out in 5 years that actually it was mostly indians in a warehouse doing the driving I wouldn't even be surprised
aaa
7mo ago
Also she does that stupid zoomer not using capital letters thing even though she's a millennial. Very annoying.
Not using capital letters is also an old internet thing. Jerry Yang, the old CEO of yahoo was famous for it.
aaa
10mo ago
There is a lot of sexual frustration, yes. However, while females committing mass shootings are rare, they are not unheard of. So you would need at least a few more datapoints.
aaa
2mo ago
I don't recall, good point! But if they were never going to use them as a carrot, I don't understand why they are still "frozen" – the "give the frozen assets to Ukraine" idea has been floating around for a bit but as far as I know hasn't even partially materialized
It's illegal, there's articles about this. Russia would sue and win and get the assets back. The current idea is to give profits from those assets to Ukraine but AFAIK that idea hasn't gone anywhere either (and it is also legally dubious).
aaa
4mo ago
There is something different going on with China, either it's much harder to translate or the output is just much worse
The chinese government was heavily censorious for a long time, maybe it still is. It doesn't necessarily have an effect on quality but in practice it does. Look at US cultural output, ever since the creative milieu has gone censorious, as a grass roots effort, the quality of its production has fallen off a cliff.
aaa
6mo ago
Did you mean day 9 part 2 where you wrote day 6 part 2? The code for day 9 part 2 was very slow because it did a loop with decreasing file ids, for each file id it scanned the array to find where the file id was, did a second scan to find an empty spot and then actually moved the file.
aaa
6mo ago
How good are these solutions? I find that they seem quite easy to solve (I have only looked at a few of the problems so far though!), but that memory and time-efficient solutions take a bit more thinking and coding
Aside from day 9, which was bad, I haven't noticed anything. I don't recall any problem this year, aside from day 9, which was solvable with a suboptimal solution. As far as microoptimization go: I asked it to write python, so they were all shit, couldn't be better.
Something which surprised me here is that the outputs weren't too long for chatGPT. I have never tried giving it the full input as I simply expected it to be too many tokens
I'm not sure what you mean that the outputs are too long. But I didn't give the full input to ChatGPT, I did give it to Claude as an attachment.
aaa
9mo ago
It's strange that people feel this way given that galenic temperaments and astrology were inextricably linked for centuries. They have the same origin (Aristotle making shit up, misunderstood by Galen which is misunderstood by arabs which are misunderstood by medieval translators) and the main purpose of astrology, for pretty much all its history save for the last 100 years, was to inform galenic physicians in how to fix humors.
aaa
8mo ago
I don't understand. You consider Milo Yiannapoulos and Nick Fuentes (I assume that's who you mean, I can't find any relevant David Fuentes) to be politically incorrect technocrats?
aaa
10mo ago
The 10th percentile Swede enjoys a style of life far more comfortable and luxurious than the 90th percentile Nigerian, but Nigeria's birth rate is way above replacement.
You are thinking about this the wrong way. The relevant variable is not how much money you have but how much does a child cost. Nigerian children are cheap but a Swedish couple doesn't want to raise their child like the average nigerian does (and they can not because it is illegal).
aaa
6mo ago
It was a late 1980s/early 1990s comic that touched on transsexuality
I wonder if someone's going to dig up that one issue of the sandman with the transexual to cancel him. I haven't read it in 15 years but if I recall correctly it had something along the lines of "moon magic won't work for you, YWNBAW".
Mongolia and Georgia are very different from the average western country. Both countries:
Additionally Georgia's population growth has been negative for the past 30 years, if you don't count the bump they got in the last two years from the war in Ukraine.
In my opinion the fertility crisis is 100% economic in origin, it would be interesting to see where the increase of fertility is happening in Georgia and Mongolia. If it's concentrated in rural/low density regions then all it's doing is convincing a few people that live in very-low-child-cost areas (in the case of mongolia possibly in negative-child-cost areas) to have more. If that is the case trying to do something similar in the west will yield no result at all.
What I wouldn't do is:
No child subsidies. We're never going to be willing to spend the kind of money needed to make them work. Plus they are dysgenic, to make them not be dysgenic you'd have to make a regressive social program (rich people get more) and those are taboo.
Taxing the childless. This is the exact same thing as 1 just framed as to appeal to conservatives. The only positive thing is that you can make this not be dysgenic.
Less schooling. Schooling is a big driver of child cost so reducing it seems to make sense. Ideally you wouldn't just get rid of college but bite into secondary education as well. Most people should be, by age 16, out of school and into a paid apprenticeship that offers a career path (so, not tomato-picker-forever type things). I think our world is too complex for this to be possible, we wouldn't be able to decide who's worth putting the apprenticeship training into.
Push religion onto people. Religion is positively correlated to fertility so we can trick people into taking an economically bad deal (having more children) by brainwashing them into believing god wants them to. I think the correlation of religion and fertility is a mirage, more religious people just tend to live in lower-cost-of-child areas (living within an extended family both provides free child care and also makes people opportunistically religious). This is too long to explain but I think religion by itself suppresses fertility.
I don't think the problem is actually tractable. It's intractability is likely the true reason behind the big push for immigration we've seen in the past 20 years.
My extremely long shot proposal is this: socially normalize and encourage women to have children while in college, out of wedlock and with no expectation that the relationship will last and then dump the child on their grandparents (of the woman). After the first 3-6 months she's not going to see the child at all outside of holidays and a few sundays. This places the economic burden of children on people that are better positioned economically to handle it, who can live in less dense areas of the country (because they don't have to be near a job), it mostly removes the negative impacts on career (because she's still doesn't have one) and child subsidies can be added to the pension system and thus be regressive, because the pension system is the only social security system that is allowed to be regressive (hopefully nobody notices that we are doing this).
There is a strong social stigma against having children before finishing school, that it will make you forever poor (because it currently does do just that), so this is extremely unlikely to work.
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