confidentcrescent
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User ID: 423
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
The big deal to a scammer will be the trail of identification that comes with paying money. Twitter probably won't accept a payment directly from crypto so you need a bank account to pay from and you need to get your money into that account. Customer identification laws make both of these steps difficult to perform while keeping your identity secret.
Acquisitions usually have a higher turnover rate than usual, but a 100% 50% annual turnover rate is insane very high and I'm very doubtful that half your workforce immediately bounced from a job they were happy with just because they got some experience. Some people will absolutely do this the first chance they get, but having half a company made up of these guys would have to be the worst luck I've ever heard of.
In the end it's just the internet so I can't fact-check what you say, but training your employees only brings so much goodwill and I suspect that either the acquisition made their job a lot shittier or the job already had high turnover and you got suckered on the purchase.
The timelines are also very short here which to me also points to something more than just people getting poached with a better offer. People who already have a job usually take some time to find a good option when looking for a new one. That 50% who left within half a year either started looking immediately or wanted out badly enough they took the first thing that gave them an offer. For some of them, probably both.
To get back to the point about H1B workers, your post shows the problem with H1Bs very well. Your company is unable or unwilling to provide sufficient benefits to retain US workers, so you turn to cheap foreign labor instead. This is bad for local workers' pay and erodes the local talent pool as less locals can find jobs where they can gain experience.
Edit: Lewis2 below pointed out that the turnover was 50% over a year (I read the post as 50% over 6 months). Edited to strike a section and make a couple changes, but I still think the rate is high enough to be indicative of other problems pushing employees away rather than them just gaining new options.
I suspect the purpose of a tax on unhealthy food is not to defray the harm unhealthy food causes but instead to stop people consuming that food. I believe this because that's exactly what has happened with the similar cigarette taxes. They have escalated constantly and are now being replaced with bans on cigarettes in some countries.
I believe once the hard work of getting this tax in place has been done, it will be raised until it achieves the goal of reducing or eliminating consumption of unhealthy food.
I am against banning or restricting unhealthy food and your post does little to convince me that this is not the end point of the suggested tax. Until you have a concrete amount for these taxes and until you can signal credibly that the tax will remain at that level, I am against taxing unhealthy foods to pay for health costs.
confidentcrescent
5mo ago
I have trouble make an intellectual steelman of the people who are angry in the comments.
It seems obvious to me that they're angry because Scott just described them [opponents of PEPFAR] as being too callous to save a kid drowning in front of them.
"Do this thing you disagree with or you're a terrible person" is basically tailor-made to generate angry responses.
confidentcrescent
1yr ago
the GOP voted against it because…?
The moment Republicans vote for the bill it will be touted as a bipartisan solution/compromise to fix the border crisis. Giving approval to the bill puts their reputation on the line and having it then fail to sufficiently fix the problem would catch them in the fallout and relieve pressure on Biden.
In no particular order:
- I think maximizing lifespan is a bad idea that makes people unhappy.
A life lived well is measured by how filled it was with things you enjoy, not by the number of years you existed on earth. Banning unhealthy food is a step away from the former and towards the latter. Banning unhealthy food would make people's lives less worth living, to a degree not made up for by the extended lifespan they'd see.
- I think it's infantilizing and controlling to make such a decision for people.
These are adults and ostensibly ones we trust enough to vote on the direction of our country. A democratic state shouldn't be micromanaging their decisions about their own health.
Freedom is generally good and we should need a extremely strong reason and lack of alternative options to resort to having the state restrict it, especially to the degree that banning a category as wide as "unhealthy food" would entail.
- I don't trust the science around healthy vs unhealthy food
What diets are considered good and bad for you has changed immensely just in my living memory. Trying to mandate healthy eating on such a shaky foundation is foolishness and could easily make things worse. Imagine if we mandated high-carb diets based on the food pyramid. Would this have been a sensible decision or a disaster?
- I think restricting unhealthy food via ratcheting up a harm tax would be an extremely dishonest way to achieve that goal
In this particular case, I would also object to the dishonesty of arguing for a tax under grounds that it will be used to pay for the harm of unhealthy food if your goal is actually to use it as a slippery slope towards restricting or banning consumption.
confidentcrescent
1yr ago
Practically hosting your own email is basically impossible, from what I can tell, due to spam blocking mechanisms.
If you haven't already done so, look into paying for a domain name and email hosting. There's a bunch of companies which sell these services, and owning the domain lets you change which is providing your email while retaining the same address. It's not all the way to hosting your own email but it sounds like it could be close enough for the problems you're worried about.
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
then the deterrent factor is mainly because of the mere presence of the weapon and not its actual utility, because few perpetrators supposedly stick around long enough to get shot.
The problem is, that all those arguments assume that the gun is actually going to be fired, and since that's a statistically slim possibility, it's irrelevant.
If how effective the gun is doesn't matter, why not go all the way and require everyone to carry unloaded guns? Obviously this would not stop anything, showing that it is necessary for the weapon to be effective to deter criminals.
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
If the issue is the clarity, I think it it important to note that naraburns provided details on what he means by "groomer" a post before the one with the text you quoted. And he mentions in his post that he's using the definition from upthread.
All I did to make that sentence is take the comment you quoted from
Making such materials [books containing drawings of sex] available to children is textbook grooming. Do you honestly advocate for distributing such things to children? If so, you're a groomer, too, by every definition offered in the thread thus far.
But unpacked "groomer" using the definition in his previous comment that PmMeClassicMemes had just replied to.
By contrast, "grooming" describes the act of preparing a child to be abused or exploited, and some common known approaches to grooming are: asking children explicit questions about their sex and sexuality, exposing children to sexually explicit materials, and encouraging children to keep secrets or distance themselves from their parents.
Taken together, I think these clearly get to about the same place as what I wrote does.
confidentcrescent
6mo ago
Good catch. I got mixed up between his mention of half leaving and timeframe of "gone in six months" to get an annualized 100% turnover. I'll edit my post to note that.
50% annual is better and a year makes the timelines a lot more reasonable for someone leaving post-training, but those numbers are still concerningly high.
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
The idea that you work for 40 years and then stop and do nothing for the last 15-20, spending all your accumulated wealth (which in this case gets sucked out by the service economy and healthcare costs), or in perhaps more welfare minded countries, by the taxpayer, is a historical anomaly. At some point we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that people will have to keep working much longer (or maybe that they ought to want to work longer).
Is this behavior actually unsustainable, though? A large group of people retiring for a long time is historically unusual, but so are many other things about today. The amount of work required to produce many necessities is historically unusual. The amount of workers we have now in service roles or in roles doing intellectual labor is extremely historically unusual.
While I share your disdain for the current model of retirement, I don't see the current model becoming unsustainable any time soon. The vast majority of modern economies seems to go towards making luxuries or money pits like healthcare, not the necessities for life. In these areas it is far more possible for quality to drop without disrupting the status quo.
Where and how do you see the current model breaking down?
confidentcrescent
8mo ago
I suspect they are entirely jury-rigged to make the 1 look infinitely more prescient than the 25.
I think the format is just inherently rigged, and in the opposite direction you'd immediately think. The implication of a 1 vs 25 is that the 1 is in the worse position (as in a physical fight), but I think when you have the real-time debate format the inverse is true.
Consider what participating from the 25-person side looks like. Unless you have a very non-real-time debate, the 25 need to share time between themselves and also need to carry on each others' arguments. They need to defend positions another person raised and follow through on a path of attack another person started. And being real time removes the main benefit of having numbers, which is being able to workshop a response and pull out the best ideas from all 25. The result is an inevitable mess.
In practice I suspect the single guy only needs to be moderately consistent with his own statements, not get stumped for a response on anything, and do a passable job of poking holes in the jumbled political positions of 25 people combined in an ad-hoc manner. These aren't trivial tasks but they're well within reach for an experienced debater.
confidentcrescent
1yr ago
Do we know this is the case? Up until now I had assumed these tests got abandoned because much of the predictive power of the test was based on people not knowing how to approach this novel situation and having to figure it out on the fly. Once the secret got out and people learned a script for this type of question, answering got easier and more routine and the tests ceased to be such a good indicator.
I recall the timeline of the tests going away being shortly after everyone on the internet started talking about Google interview questions and specifically questions of this type, and I don't think that was a coincidence.
confidentcrescent
1yr ago
Most IoT devices are billed as, "You just plug it in, and it just works!" No one anywhere is standing at a store, looking at the baby monitors, seeing that one of the options lets them listen to it from their phone, and thinking, "Ya know, I really better not think about buying this and plugging it in unless I become an expert in network security."
Let's say you were in charge of fixing this from the advertising side of things. What warnings would you add to this device so that even tech-illiterate users understand the risks of e.g. connecting this baby monitor up to the internet? Simple stuff you can fit on a pop-up or side of the box, because the user isn't reading the 100-page manual that probably already warns about this.
A big part of why you can just hand a toaster to someone with no further explanation is that people actually do know a lot about electricity and household appliances and can avoid the biggest problems. Nobody's dumping a live toaster into the sink to clean it.
Manufacturers should probably take this lower level of knowledge into account, but it's not as easy as "just make the device idiot-proof, like toasters!"
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
The obvious explanation for sugar consumption being negatively correlated with happiness is that your causation is backward; people whose lives suck eat more sugary food because it's a cheap and easy way to be happier. Eating ice cream to feel better after a breakup is a trope for a reason.
Okay, maybe not entirely backward. It's clearly possible for sugar consumption to reduce your life satisfaction by making you fat. But given the myriad confounding factors it's a big leap to go from correlation to "sugar caused this!"
The comparison to heroin is weird, since the main issue with heroin is that it reduces your baseline happiness and leaves you needing more and more of it to get to normal. Most people keep a stable level of sugar consumption over long periods of time rather than spiraling out of control and eating increasing amounts of it, so sugar doesn't seem to have the same problem that leads to heroin ruining lives.
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
If healthcare doubles in price do people start working longer to afford healthcare in their old age? Or do they just consume less of it and accept sacrifices to the quality of it?
I think the latter, which is why I put healthcare with luxury goods as an item where a decline in quality won't kill retirement.
Healthcare in particular is also not a great example of hitting limits on what is possible. I'm informed that in many western countries a large part of the scarcity is from strict limitations on how many people can head into the profession rather than from a lack of people who could do the work (after necessary training).
If this is the case then the issue is not that a large retirement population is unsustainable, but that a gross mismanagement of resources is occurring in healthcare.
confidentcrescent
11d ago
I'd like the guy to go home to his guns after the medication works. This is a lesser violation of his rights than either option you have presented and no more complicated or expensive than the current system.
I can't speak for Nybbler but I read his comments as indicating he wants the same.
confidentcrescent
10mo ago
Not being able to persuade others to stop associating with a bad actor seems to be an overreach of a definition of cancel culture. Either you prohibit sharing anything negative or you end up trying to define what is a legitimate or illegitimate reason to call people out.
My opinion is that cancel culture operates at a level removed from the actual behavior you dislike and is more about interactions with third parties. To put forward my own definition: cancel culture is when you attempt to compel others who are not directly performing an objectionable behavior to disassociate from that objectionable behavior. Just trying to spread the reason you personally disengaged or persuade another party of the badness of a particular action is not cancel culture.
The type of behavior defined above is toxic because it puts people or organizations in the position of having to take sides in areas which may be completely unrelated to what they do. This is why many things are splitting towards either woke or anti-woke stances and neutral is becoming harder to find.
A real-world example of this is the idea that "if you have 10 people sitting at a table and one is a Nazi, you have a table of 10 Nazis." Cancel culture is the idea that some things are too awful to interact with in any way; not denouncing and disassociating from them is sufficient proof you hold objectionable ideas.
This definition doesn't require debates over sharing comments like "that reporter who you think is honest has published a bunch of lies" or "the leader of that animal welfare charity secretly kicks puppies" which I do not think any reasonable definition of cancel culture should prohibit.
As long as you can interact with someone who continues to read that reporter or support that charity despite what you consider bad behavior then you have a society where people with differing opinions can live and work productively together. While this does not prevent people from deciding as a group that they dislike a behavior, a world where people followed this rule would mitigate the worst effects where third parties are pressured into deplatforming while leaving the freedom for people to stop directly supporting things they find horrible.
From Scott's sets of examples, I think this definition would define as cancel culture A5 onwards (unsubscribing from content simply because it platformed actors you dislike), B1 (newspapers holding the university responsible for non-official behavior of an employee), and possibly C2 (holding Atlantic workers responsible could go either way for me depending on whether or not they're in an official capacity at the time). It also leaves me agreeing with P3.
confidentcrescent
1yr ago
e.g., regarding quotas, apparently MSP expected 100 stops per month per trooper. That's 5 per shift. Let me ask you something: how do you think police supervisors should deal with a trooper who, upon review of his shift, has been sitting under an overpass all day making zero stops and playing Angry Birds on his phone?
By disciplining him for not working during his shift, which has nothing to do with the number of stops and everything to do with him ditching work to play games on his phone.
You might object that measuring this is unreasonably hard and that measuring stops is a reasonable proxy to check for that. I disagree.
You can check electronic surveillance, which many police departments are already moving to for other reasons. Body cameras, car cameras, and car GPS systems are a lot more common and any one of these should make it trivial to check if a police officer is doing nothing all day.
If for whatever reason you don't think these tools are sufficient to identify police abandoning their jobs, there's another option that works for any job where workers have overlapping skill sets. You can switch up who does what work. Put the officer who think isn't working on a route where you know other officers regularly make many stops. Rotate a few officers who you know do good work to cover his route. If the pattern of few stops follows the officer who you're suspicious of, that's good evidence that he's not doing his job well enough.
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
GPT-4 can pass a bar exam
…after a bunch of lawyers rewrite the questions and have it repeat the test multiple times with different settings and questions.
That's what you'll find if you read the paper this claim is based on, and this significantly diminishes the impressiveness of the results. A model that only gets results when led around carefully by a skilled human is more like a fancy search engine than the rosy picture of an near-human independent operator that the press releases paint.
Having questions rewritten by another person is almost certainly not allowed in the bar exam - the idea that someone who can understand legal principles and jargon can't comprehend a three-part question is laughable. And taking multiple tries at the same exam to get a better score is definitely out.
In my opinion, a reasonable claim that GPT can pass a bar exam would require demonstration that their chosen parameters generalize to other bar exams and the model would need to be able to answer exams without needing questions to be re-formatted.
Right now this claim looks like false advertising.
P.S. Did you know that the bar exam results were marked by the study authors? Or that all four authors of the study work in one of two companies planning to deliver products applying GPT to law?
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
I had a similar reaction to the above poster. I suspect you expected the following answer to cover this view:
A) gender and sex are the same thing
The issue I had with this is that it is ignoring reality. I would prefer gender to mean the same thing as sex but some people are clearly using the word differently. Given I'm not a prescriptivist a definition that doesn't match the word's use is not a good definition.
At the same time I think the concept these people are trying to convey is mostly incoherent, poorly defined, and the general concept is pointing at something that doesn't exist. This means the rest of the answers don't work either. It's like asking if Blargle is related to sex - the only right answer is to say the whole question makes no sense.
confidentcrescent
1mo ago
Enormously more efficient for the store, maybe. As a customer my perspective is that they just moved the cashier's job to you and gave you a shittier and slower interface to do it with.
The local self-checkout I'm familiar with requires you to scan items one at a time, takes a second to check the change in weight after you put each item in your bag, and if anything goes slightly wrong in this process you need the cashier's manual intervention which takes at least a minute. I'll usually take waiting for a couple people in line over that awful experience.
This whole thing only looks more efficient because the store isn't having to pay the customers to do this.
confidentcrescent
2mo ago
How can you estimate the probability space on a thing which, as the wager argues, is fundamentally unknowable through reason? Shouldn't every possible God be equally probable in a situation of zero knowledge?
The wager only works because it smuggles in the assumption that it's Christianity or nothing, but this is an unproven assumption.
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
an extremely harsh login wall that even Elon Musk has maintained, so even scrolling down on someone’s Twitter forces an unblockable pop up demanding sign-in
Just an aside, but I think that has actually been removed now. I don't have a twitter account and I haven't seen the login wall in months.
As I recall, the way moderators here have handled inflammatory opinions in the past is to require them to use the minimum level of heat necessary to get their point across. So I think the first hurdle to be crossed in saying this comment was outside the normal standard of behavior here would be to describe how this could have been presented in a less inflammatory manner.
"Providing sexual material to children is preparing them for abuse, you're providing sexual material to children, therefore you are preparing children for abuse" is not a nice thing to say but I have trouble thinking of a way to make it nicer without eliding the opinion it is trying to express.
How do you think naraburns' comments could have been said in a nicer way?
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