betascience
1yr ago
What do you think happens if that state suddenly exists? Is it a democracy? What do you think the Palestians elect to do to the Jews?
betascience
1yr ago
Everyone dies. Protecting people from having their death pulled forward six months is only mildly socially valuable. If the opportunity costs put on the rest of society are even mildly onerous, it’s almost certainly a net loss.
betascience
4mo ago
There is something deeply unsettling to me about the way that subcontinentals talk and think about the US. First of all, I want to do my best to empathize with them. Millennials entering the job market post 2008, racked with student loan debt often had a very tough time getting a foot hold in their careers, and I was one of those. There was a feeling among many that a promise had been that if you make it to a state school and get a bachelor's degree that companies will roll out the red carpet for you and you'll be on a glidepath to the upper middle class. Many of us did those thing and then languished in food service or retail for a period while struggling to make ends meet and coping with crushing student debt. The promise didn't pay off. And we resented the promiser.
For Indians, America is the promise. And you can sense that in this post. If you're going to work hard in India, get grades, pass tests all in the hopes that some richer country will let you in, then America is the destination of choice. You'll have friends and relatives who make it. If you get left behind, you'll see your cousin Rajesh posting a photo of his McMansion in Cincinnati. He'll be holding his little son, an American citizen, which means he'll have a hell of a time being deported even if his H1B falls through. He'll be with his beautiful wife, because families in your home village were eager to throw their daughters at him. And, if after 15 years he becomes an American citizen, he will be able to sponsor other relatives for green card consideration -- a huge boon to the family. And, he'll be making more money than he could anywhere else in the world even though he's working at a discount compared to every other American citizen.
Why is he working at a discount? Because the ability to offer him legal residency in the US and all of the status and opportunity that comes with that ESPECIALLY to his friends and neighbors back home and especially in terms of his children being American citizens is HUGELY valuable. The government giving his employer the opportunity to do that are subsidizing his wages to compete against American citizens. And in doing so, they've created a situation where the whole world in general, but subcontinentals in particular, think they are getting cheated if they can't come here.
Obviously, I'm not in favor of this arrangement. It is grossly unfair to Americans. H1Bs, insofar as they're needed, should come at a cost to the company that wants to issue them. They should be paying more than they would pay any American in that role, and they should be paying a tax on top of that to the government. A tariff on foreign labor if you will. Otherwise we are stuck in this gross situation that breeds resentment.
betascience
2yr ago
Slightly aside from this, is there even such a thing as a biologically defined mental illness? Is there a single mental illness that’s diagnosed with a blood test or some other empirical measurement that doesn’t involve a checklist of symptoms that the patient describes to the physician?
betascience
2yr ago
I can completely understand the distaste with which the forgiveness is seen by many people, and I'm not certain that it is ideal. However, the fact that we allow young people to take on debt that is not dischargeable by bankruptcy is unconscionable to me. This is abhorrent, and essentially every religion forbids it.
And this is the true crux of the issue. The entire problem of the student loan program is built on the twin perverse incentives of the loans being non-dischargeable and guaranteed by the government. This has allowed state schools to balloon beyond their original missions and expand into administrative behemoths. It's created an industry of for-profit universities whose customers pay nothing out of pocket but are burdened with non-dischargeable debt in the hopes of improving their lot in life. It's put a millstone around the necks of young people and become one more thing people need to do before having children -- finish college, get a job, pay off loans, buy a house. I also believe it has been the essential driver of wokeism. It's been used to create and fund environments where ideas are sheltered from contact with reality and need to produce no cash value beyond seeming like a good place for students to cash their government checks. It simply cannot continue like this.
betascience
2yr ago
If your child was drafted to a war and came back with his genitals blown off and a condition requiring life long medical treatment that results in a drastically shortened lifespan it isn't fair to say he's dead, but he's certainly well on his way. Whatever life you shared before is over and new vista of terrifying possibilities has opened its stead.
betascience
2yr ago
What are you trying to get into? Data Science in general is very gatekept by formal education and you'll be competing with PhDs for most positions. It doesn't help that the job title is seen as very hot so any opening gets flooded by resumes. That said, it's not very entry level friendly and if you know a particular domain really well and are good at design and communication you can get a leg up that way. Also stats nerds are really bad at programming, so you will likely have an advantage there.
betascience
2yr ago
To the question of an effective drug counting, I would say no. I’m more concerned that there is a physiological symptom from which the supposed mental condition is diagnosable.
I’m not sure that someone having a physiological withdrawal symptom from a substance to which they’re addicted would count either as someone who is not an addict will still experience those.
The sleep disorders seem a better candidate.
betascience
4mo ago
I don't want to throw them in a gulag. But the system that did it has to go away. You get that right? It's not punishment per se. I understand that they don't like it or it negatively affects them. But the institutions have to be destroyed. I don't want these guys in jail or anything. But they'll need to find someone who's not the American tax payer to fund their work. If they are as smart as they think they are, they will be wildly successful in business. If they're not, they will be wildly successful in food service.
In a perfect world I would a be an "I f*ing love science!" guy. I grew up watching Mr. Wizard and later Bill Nye, winning the science fair, and getting graduate degrees. I even get to do something that sometimes slightly resembles "research" in the corporate world doing data experiments at a big company. I do f'ing love science.
But I'm not convinced that government funded science can be anything but a patronage program with our present politics. What institutions put their neck on the line for Jay Bhattacharya during covid? What institutions pushed the government to back off from childhood covid vaccinations? What institutions stood strongly against strong-arming covid survivors into vaccinating.
This is a simple, but salient example. There is not a strong enough scientific apparatus to stand up against anti-scientific viewpoints from within the government. It's an entirely controlled program. I don't want to fund it anymore. Elon started Space X with $100M. I hope someone can peel off a few notes for you, but if they take it out of my pocket, we've got a problem.
betascience
1yr ago
I'm pro Israel as a matter of practicality. I don't believe there is some universal obligation of the world at large or of people of the present to somehow make right wrongs of the past. This is a thing that may be worked out between an individual injured party and and their injurer, but Palestinians have a lot of different opinions about what they are owed and the center of mass of those opinions is something like a complete right to return to familial properties and a single state. Israel of course never can grant that.
Palestinians are also completely incapable of governing themselves in a way that makes them an acceptable neighbor. You can argue that Hamas doesn't represent Palestine (despite being elected), and yet if your average 22-40 year old Palestinian wanted to enforce some order other than Hamas, they could band together and govern themselves and do so. They could organize, police, enforce order. Eventually keep things calm until Israeli hearts soften and a two-state solution is back on the table. This would all be achievable were it what they wanted. They do not want it or incapable of achieving.
And so you're left with a Israel having essentially ungoverned barbarians on their border that they have been prevented from dealing with due to intense international pressure for decades. This is not a stable state of affairs. It seems clear to me that the best thing for Israel to due is to scatter them to the wind, and the best thing for the world to do is to force Arab countries to take Palestinians in as refugees, each an accordance to what they can assimilate, and then quickly assimilate them. No ghettos. No extended families kept close together. And no weird second-class citizenships or eternal refugee status. Utter assimilation. End them as a people, as the old testament would command. Dragging this on has been good for no one.
betascience
1yr ago
I don’t fully understand what you’re proposing here. It doesn’t sound like a better situation for anyone involved. Is this actually two states occupying the same territory with international militaries policing it? How could this possibly be better than the present situation?
betascience
2yr ago
One thing to consider is the capture caused by network effects and interoperability. You need to use Microsoft PowerPoint because your interns know it, your clients expect it, all your old presentations are in .pptx format, etc. Sure, you may be willing to consider some alternative in theory, but someone would need to produce a competitor that is nearly 100% compatible with all of your other stuff and compete at price point that is incredibly compelling. Are you going to do it?
Another thing to consider is that there is such a thing as "value" to capture and companies are thinking about how to bring their core competencies to market while outsourcing everything else. They need an off-the-shelf product to do something that isn't their core competency and they will take the best one on the market at the time at whatever price they need to pay so long as it doesn't upset their price structure and bring their costs out of line with their strategy. An armchair philosopher can ponder for years where value and cost comes from, but if I can spend one dollar to make ten then I'm going to do it whether the thing I bought for a dollar is theoretically worth it or not.
betascience
2yr ago
I’m not seeing the “verb” version as a verb. Use it in a sentence.
betascience
2yr ago
Calling a series of factual statements a “gish gallop” is basically telling on yourself. There’s no argument here, but you’re admitting the conclusion you would draw is uncomfortable ergo assuming bad intentions.
betascience
2yr ago
Higher rates of underreporting of income is absolutely evidence of higher rates of intentional underreporting of income. It’s not proof, but it’s what you would expect to find in the case of intentional tax fraud.
betascience
4mo ago
We're not going to do unlimited gay race science funding. I'm sorry. Just pour so much money into the program that everything is funded is not the a realistic vision of the future. Forget practically reasonable, it's not politically reasonable. This will always devolve into patron-client politics.
betascience
1yr ago
There's a nigh infinite number of ways to approach this. I would recommend perhaps starting at the beginning of the fabulous Secret History of Western Esotericism podcast (https://shwep.net/). Christianity did not evolve in a vacuum. It's a part of western thought with roots dating back to pre-Socratic philosophy. It may benefit you to have a more complete picture of how it came to be and the issues that early Christian thinkers like Origen and Augustine wrestled with. There are as many different Christianities as there are Christians, and there is almost certainly a Christian path that is true for you.
betascience
1yr ago
Its a generational trap. The system places the burden of funding on kids that are not yet born, and couldn't have possibly voted to not have the system.
Is this not true of any store of value system? Ultimately the question of caring for the old is a question of how the resources of those that are young enough to work will be redistributed to those who are too old to work and what precisely counts as too old to work. If we allowed old people to save thing X in their productive years, protect thing X from being taken with force by those who are young enough and strong enough to do so, and thing X is then used a store of value to pay those who are young and strong for food, services, etc. then we are essentially back in the same place.
This isn't to argue for or against social security, but simply to point out that any system to care for the elderly is going to do so by using some element of coercive redistribution on the young because the scarce element is their productivity.
betascience
1yr ago
Godot's Gscript is pretty well documented and easy to learn. You'll probably find it preferable as it's what most of the community uses. Also Godot is incredibly lightweight and older machine friendly, so you'll probably find it a very good fit.
betascience
2yr ago
I’m just thinking it through out loud.
My family has a lot of mental illness of the OCD and bipolar type, and those family members insist this is a well understood science and then make claims that seem essentially religious. I’m feeling out the edges of where measurable physiological issue versus vague “chemical imbalance?” meet.
betascience
4mo ago
It's just silly. Trump can fire any government employee. DOGE can advise Trump. Elon can advise Trump. The janitor can advise Trump (and from what I've heard, probably does!) when he empties the waste paper basket in the oval office. The firings come from department heads who the President instructed to collaborate with DOGE. The department heads can fire the people under them, as can Trump, and Trump can fire the department heads.
That there's any confusion around this leaves me a bit flabbergasted.
betascience
1yr ago
I think the excessive fat storage is because your metabolism has been broken by industrialized food. If you were to repair it, your experience would be different.
betascience
1yr ago
This strikes me as incredibly emotionally stunted. You do know that people occasionally ask their children to make grandbabies? I think the FIL can probably handle drinking a beer and talking about "how bout them Cowboys?" without being driven to distraction that his married daughter is having sex.
I think that work sounds really cool. I hope a private company wants to continue it and you get hired.
But I mean come on "you have to give me and my friends money or your country will fail" is obviously not a compelling argument. If it don't make dollars it don't make sense.
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