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alchemist


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 04 18:23:45 UTC

				

User ID: 61

alchemist


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 18:23:45 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 61

So now I'm feeling smug for seeing the first poorly written paragraph and then the monstrous wall of text and then skipping the post entirely.

Life is too short for shittily written monster posts.

Make your point clearly, and succinctly, meeting your readers where they are, and not clothing it in unnecessarily verbosity in an attempt to sound learned.

Or don't, but I'm not going to bother reading it otherwise, nor will most others.

[I know it's not your post, but I'm tired of poorly written posts]

Wow, thanks for sharing. I would love to see you post it on the Reddit adoration thread in /r/programming!

Interesting. I don't consider fare skipping as bad, as there is almost not cost to be made up by everyone else. The train would still run if I weren't on it. My taxes are significantly subsidizing it. I guess there might be a small increase in crowding. Prices (in terms of zones and such where I live) also feel a bit arbitrary. There are also fairly byzantine rules about what counts as one trip (e.g. transfers and such).

I assume you don't consider it fare-skipping if I have a monthly pass, but forget it at home? Or, a classic when when I used to commute -- I got a monthly pass each month, but would sometimes miss the start of the month. Is it fare skipping if I buy a monthly pass for the month, but only Nov 2, and I ride on Nov 1st? Is it fare skipping if I buy a daily pass from someone else? Is it fare skipping if I ask strangers if I can be on their group ticket (which covers up to five people)? Basically, I agree there is some harm, but it's considerably smaller than that caused by littering.

Anyway, I tend not to do it because (1) it makes me unpleasantly nervous on the ride and (2) if everyone did it we'd have a problem. But I don't see it as having a negative effect in the same way that littering does. Similarly, I see a difference between, e.g., leaving your McDonald's garbage in the train (or on the ground at the train station) vs throwing an orange into the woods beside a trail. The latter is mostly not seen, and will disappear in the not too distant future, so has almost no cost (but if everyone did it, and there were a lot of them, would also be something of a problem).

This feels like the right take to me. The recent cut of two internet cables, hundreds of miles apart, that resulted in the trains not running for hours in Germany seemed like another flex -- your infrastructure is vulnerable, stop supporting the Ukraine or things will get worse.

I'll admit, this aligns with my bias of the Putin as the bad guy, rather than the US. I do find the idea of the US taking pressure off the German politicians an interesting one. The gas shortfall is not getting as much news attention as I would have expected, yet fairly serious steps (e.g. all public pools and saunas being closed to save heating costs) are being taken, which does suggest a "this is serious, but don't cause a public panic" type approach.

What if you don't think Black people are inferior, but the particular person in front of you, who happens to be black, is inferior?

Ha! Well, I also consider theft clearly and considerably worse. But I thought it was being put in with fare-skipping and jaywalking, both of which I consider near non-issues. Maybe close to shoplifting, although that has a bit more clear victim.

Ha, you are not wrong! I tend to skip the multi-page treatises fairly aggressively. Perhaps that says something about my attention span (my last non-fiction book, The Secret of our Success, which despite being quite good, took me forever to finish!), but I'll just accept that. I think it says more about my patience and valuation of time though (which is a fine, but real, difference, IMO).

You might enjoy Câlisse moi là from Lisa LeBlanc.

I do, even though I don't understand more than about 1/3 of what she sings.

Well, I'll just say I missed that entirely. I'm not sure if that's Poe's law, or something else (my own shortcoming? forsooth!)

Why not?

They can get some points, but not big points, because most of the world manages it (especially, as you note, when you're under 30, and even slightly active). I also don't give big points out for brushing your teeth, combing your hair, or cleaning your ass after shitting. I don't think I'm setting that high a bar, although I recognize obesity does seem to be getting ever-harder to fight. (I also have some sympathy for people who's parents screwed them on the eating habits and metabolism front).

Is that a thing in the South of the US? I never saw it growing up fairly poor in Canada, nor did I see it in when I lived in California.

If you're talking Lost in Space (which fits), that daughter is actually adopted, and ends up meeting her father, who is black, so it works in-world quite well. It was weird at the beginning, I grant you.

RoP has no such excuses. I found it okay for the elf (in the army, people come from all over, and he was more elf-like than most of the community-theater-roman-senator elves anyway), but for the Harfoots it's very distracting and weird.

I'm glad to hear it works well, but in the stills I've seen, it looks so silly an obviously wiglike. (as do some of the white people's hair though).

It didn't feel cramped that way -- full of life and stuff. It didn't actually feel cramped at all, just that it was filmed on a stage (especially Numenor), which is not good for your sense of immersion.

FWIW, a good friend had a relative do this in Canada, and while painful, it seemed to be a comparatively "positive" experience. They were terminally ill with cancer, however. I still consider a good thing they didn't need to suffer longer than they chose to.

I use uBlock Origins, which is very good for websites, I think, but doesn't seem to do anything for YouTube. Any recommendations?

I always thought that was a great response to the women's soccer pay thing in the US. They're not playing the same sport, any more than the U15s are. The hard question would be "should the U15s be paid the same as the men?"

(Yes, I know that in the end they were actually getting paid more, AND they chose that model after rejecting the same contract as the men. Such a shit show of lies.)

While I'm not sure your exact proposal is the way, I do think inheritance taxes are both a good way to reduce inequality, and are also, honestly, democratic (even playing field). That said, they do go against human nature to give something to your kids, so I think you need to be careful. (Yes, I know trusts are a standard way to work around them; it seems like if this is known, a counter-play should be possible). I say this as someone intending to leave something (but not too much :D) to his kids.

Agreement on the expensive real estate. Also, especially anything more than a single home should be hit fairly hard, IMO.

For what it's worth, when I last saw this, the gap had grown immensely in the last 10 or 15 years. It was quite surprising, as I haven't really noticed it in German society (where I live, but I'm in a rich city).

Although I think I saw income inequality. The hope would be that it's somewhat reversible, as I think (too much) inequality is bad for a society. OTOH, I pay quite a lot in taxes already, so it's not too clear to me how thing will improve. Higher minimum wage / whatever Harz-4 is called now?

There are claims that men interrupt women more than vice versa. The only 'study' I know was a self-reported single write-up, and the person didn't control for power, e.g. that it's likely the boss interrupts the intern more than vice versa. Even though, in the study, the person who interrupted most was a female vice president.

Sorry, didn't check your Twitter, as I'm not on it, and don't like it (and don't like following links just to know what someone's talking about; I do like them for references).

I guess if you stated clearly what you think contributes to IQ scores then perhaps we'd mostly agree. As I think you say, accounting for 8% variance would be not too far from noise. That still seems quite a bit too high to me, and I don't really see how you clearly quantify 'effort' but would think to myself -- "whatever, if you want to believe that, go ahead it doesn't seem wrong enough to be worth fighting over". What I read from your initial post is that effort was more important than everything else, which seemed clearly wrong. You gave this impression by not specifying how much effect you thought that it had, and by saying people claiming it didn't have an effect "obviously massively contradicts common sense," which is a very strong formulation.

FWIW, I expect a very asymptotic-type curve, that rises extremely sharply from [answered questions at random without reading them] to [did test pretty normally], and then is pretty flat. It's like (but not quite as extreme) saying the kind of pen you use matters, because if yours is broken, or breaks half-way through, you'll get a lower score. So effort is not very interesting. But sure somehow accounting for 4% of the variance is plausible (sorry, to me 8% really seems too high, I'd think how well I slept, the questions I got, my mood, time of day, my pencil, and a bunch of other things would play a larger role than nebulous 'effort'). You seemed to be implying that means IQ tests are meaningless (and apologies if I misread it, again, please stately plainly your point so that doesn't happen as often), which that doesn't seem like a strong argument for. If that's not what you're implying, what is your point in bringing up effort?

My first thought was that I agree with you. The second thought was that you can have a confidence in your confidence. My third thought was that that should baked into your primal estimation, and that if you're saying 80% +/- 20%, you're really saying something like 70%. Does it really make sense to be saying, hey, there's a chance I'm 99% sure, but it's only 10%??

These things really only make sense with repeated results anyway. A single event happens or it doesn't.

If you felt a real need to give more details on your prediction, I think it would be more interesting to give buckets, e.g. I expect the housing market to

5%: shrink > 15%

30%: shrink 5 - 15%

60%: stay flat, changing [-5, +5]

12%: grow 5 - 15%

3% grow > 15%

OTOH, thinking about this more (which makes me think that someone smarter and with more statistics has thought more about this), this still doesn't capture the idea of confidence. What if I don't know what a house is, and you ask me this? Can I really make any meaningful statement? I think I could say 50/50 grows or shrinks, or 90% doesn't change more than 95% (because few things do), but it's hard to capture what it means to have little certainty.

Indonesian has that, and I always thought it was a super-useful concept.

I'm lappin' up these puns.

I liked the improvisational aspect of that, but it also highlights the core of the shows problem to me -- there isn't really a story, there is a sequence of things that happened. If elves are ninjas that can use chains and twigs, how did they get caught? Why do they run into close-quarters and get disembowelled by the Warg, rather than using the spear in their hands as a spear. Arondir sometimes seems a master warrior and other times not, and the other elves mainly seem to suck (except for that one brief moment).

And then Arondir 'loses', but gets set free anyway (Adar), where he gets in a fight, but they get free anyway (running in the forest with Theo), where the Orcs surround his town and attack him (pre Mt Doom) ... but they get free anyway. It made it hard to care, because nothing that happened in one scene (Arondir captured, Bronwyn hit by an arrow, Halbrand bedridden with a gut wound, Whatsishisname blowing up boats, Mt Doom exploding, The Numenoreans going to middle earth) has no effect on the later ones.

So you can't really set any expectations or feel for a story. You can watch the pretty pictures, but that's about it.