betascience
1yr ago
I don't think one has to think car-centric sprawl is the peak of human existence to think it's a pleasant way to live that many people enjoy. People vote with their feet and their wallets and the outlying, sprawlier communities with more square feet and bigger lots do very well and if that means a half hour commute instead of biking 5 minutes to work, young families seem fine with that. I love my little suburb. I have generally everything I need within a 10 minute drive. I have a cute house in a quiet cul-de-sac that backs up to a wooded area. I have just down the street access to 20 mile trail along a beautiful stream. I have just down another street access to 10 acre dog park.
I can perfectly well understand that people can value different things and for some people access to walkable downtown neighborhoods with night life may be appealing. I'll take the weekly trip to the grocery store, the station wagon with heated seats, and the view of the woods from my back porch.
betascience
1yr 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
6mo 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.
betascience
1yr 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
1yr ago
I’m not seeing the “verb” version as a verb. Use it in a sentence.
betascience
10mo 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
1yr 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
7mo ago
he shot at jump kick man, but did not hit him, and jump kick man's identity was not known at the time of the trial.
betascience
4mo 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
I simply believe peoples are allowed to make war. It's the last argument of kings, and when rulers decide to make it, it's their right by God. Palestinians have consented to rule by Hamas, both by in democratic elections and by failing to remove them. Israelis have consented to rule by Likud, both by democratically electing them and failing to remove them. I have no desire to force some sort optimization where people with different religions, values, cultures, languages, and histories from me have to adopt my values and solve problems as I would prefer that they solve them. They have the right to their own way of life and that includes going to war with their neighbors and the resulting devastation that war my cause in the short term and a hopeful peace in the long term when one side extracts the necessary concessions from the other. Forcing people who hate each other to live as peaceful neighbors is cruel, humiliating, and dehumanizing. They will commit escalating aggressions against each that slowly escalate the hate they hold for each other, which is corrosive to their souls. If they have to settle the matter through war, well that may be painful, but at least their grandchildren may grow up in a world where the matter is resolved.
betascience
8mo ago
Most arguments in the US have some variant of this. The obese mother of 3 who is "choosing between eating and paying the electric bill"... To me she's suffering from hypermacronutrition. To the NYT? Food insecurity.
If the straightforward issue such as hunger or poverty isn't true they make up an alternative, meaningless term.
betascience
7mo ago
I admire L and his actions, because they demonstrate that he's high agency.
I despise our country's response to his actions, because it means we're not.
betascience
1yr ago
The whole question is pretty philosophically precarious. I don't know how I'd feel about trans people in a world where they were mentally healthy, lived normal life spans, and didn't tend to die young due to overmedicalization and the outcomes of their suicidality and other dangerous mental health issues. I live in the world where most "trans" people who make it to twenty without going on hormonal treatment just return "normalcy". My current biases say that the hypothetical you draw is statistically impossible, and I wouldn't trust the person offering the bargain.
betascience
1yr 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
10mo ago
Is "should" just a normative statement? Who decides what's fair and modest? Are you in a better decision to decide than the person who wants to purchase the software? Software needs to be cheap enough that the purchaser's are getting marginal value from it and the margin's must be low enough to keep a barrier to other entrants (your margin is my opportunity).
I think you have a moral sense that the cost of software is unfair, and I don't really know what to say about that. I'm not going to tell you that you don't or can't feel that way. But, you asked for some explanations for the cost of software and I provided some considerations as to why the current pricings are stable.
betascience
1yr ago
You've hit the nail on the head. The perverse incentives comes from the combination of the loan not being dischargeable by bankruptcy and the government guaranteeing it. Without those, lenders would have be diligent about to whom they loaned and how much. It wouldn't matter if the university wants to do away with the SAT or ACT because the lender would require it. How we would move to a system like this is nearly unimaginable to me at this point with all of the vested interests feeding off of the tit of the student loan program, but I feel we're at an inflection point where something must be done.
betascience
8mo ago
In my experience very good student athletics are slightly smarter than the average of their peer group. Most athletic performance benefits from intelligence, whether it's anticipating the path of a ball in flight or predicting an opponents' next move. Being stupid is at the very least limiting, and for some positions and games it's disqualifying.
I’ve thought about this a bit and my initial response was probably like everyone else’s. These would be things like:
- Don’t you care about diversity? We’re robbing our students by not having diverse classes.
But that is the legal argument and most of them don’t actually realize that.
- Some appeal to affirmative action as a correction of prior injustice.
Sure, I think this is closer to what they actually believe, but it’s not knee jerk enough for internet hate. They would want to say something nastier.
So my guess that it’s probably something both stupid and nasty. I’ll go with “something racist about Asians.”
Huge whiff
Most of them are either Asians expressing the unfairness of the current system or people saying that race-based programs should be replaced with socio-economic based programs.
betascience
4mo 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
Well we have no examples state educational interventions correcting IQs and test scores and have numerous examples of at least allowing a certain social contagion to convince (some small number of) people to cut off their genitals. But most trans-trenders don't bother with that.
But what you're saying is over-simplistic. There are plenty of easily conceivable models that could consider things like IQ, ambition, height, disagreeability, openness or a number of other traits including potentially the curiosity to want to toy with the idea of genital mutilation to be highly inherited and yet the expression of those to be highly regulated by environment. If every modern trans would have been trans-curious in other cultural environments but gone on to mostly grow out of it and live happy lives that doesn't mean that the modern environment where they're rushed onto puberty blockers is strictly better. In fact that proclivity may have had some advantage only in environments where it wouldn't be indulged.
Obviously if it is indulged it will likely breed itself out of existence.
betascience
1yr 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
1yr ago
Presumably for the same reasons you don’t currently commit tax fraud.
betascience
4mo 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
7mo ago
I got a medical exam before 1st grade tee-ball. I don't think anyone was doing bloodwork, but they probably took temperature, bp, and maybe some fellas had to turn their head to the side and cough.
Posting the video to the internet is acting maliciously. No reason to do it except to socially attack the victim.
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