dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
Protestors in general come off like cringe idiots to me. Willing to inconvenience you for their cause, that they believe is so obviously right that the only reason you won't join them is because you're either an irredeemable bad person or are incredibly ignorant and actually being educated by their protest.
dr_analog
razorboy
3d ago
Have you see Hamilton, the musical? I have. I really liked it. I did think it was odd that almost everyone was black (except for the King of England) but it was also pretty awesome and I didn't mind.
On the other hand, I find hamfisted movie/TV diversity silly. This character is historically male, but is portrayed female, but otherwise acts completely male? Black elves? Okay whatever.
I suppose the difference is with Hamilton it's the entire gimmick, so it's fine, whereas with a LotR series it's more like... shameless kowtowing?
dr_analog
razorboy
3d ago
These entities are almost certainly, if they do business in the US, required to abide by KYC and AML laws.
Wouldn't Pornhub (or whomever) and its affiliates be complying with AML rules if they did KYC on customers who pay via crypto? And therefore whatever crypto Pornhub uses to convert to fiat to pay its bills is clean? Or, at least, not their liability?
what chain best communicates SV e/acc techbro
like, with the same level of intensity of an Italian guido cross chain
Previous wondering aloud: from a game theory POV, if you have a huge advantage over the other party you should really hit them back 10x harder to discourage them from messing with you ever in the future. This works as long as your adversary is sane enough to respond to incentives.
Is this Israel striking back 10x harder? Not sure yet. Iran denies anything substantial happened, which could be a face saving measure since they're in no position to retaliate impressively.
Either way, Israel using Iran's drone attack as an excuse to wreck a ton of Iran's nuclear facilities would be very well played.
dr_analog
razorboy
7d ago
White House: look, we can't openly support you on this Iran thing but... do it anyway people have short attention spans
White House: also don't get butthurt if we have to criticize you later
?
I had originally posted this in the Friday fun thread but it turns out that it was killing the vibe in there. Not sure what I was thinking. Anyway...
Note: I will completely qualify Portugal Europe and Portland Oregon in this article because they're easy to mix up.
Is liberalism peaking in Oregon?
In 2020, the state of Oregon passed a referendum, ballot Measure 110, which decriminalized all drugs(!) with a vote of 58% in favor.
Voters in Oregon (such as myself) believed this was the path to enlightened drug policy, being informed by the revered Portugal Europe model. Tacked onto the referendum was a bit of social justice theory as well: the police would be required to document in detail the race of anyone they stopped from now on for any reason. To ensure the police weren't disproportionately harassing the 2.3% of the population that's black.
As an occasional drug enjoyer, I do find it a relief to wander the streets of Portland Oregon squirting ketamine up my nostrils like I'm a visionary tech CEO without fear of police. But in broad strokes it appears to be a disaster.
Indeed, the ensuing data was an almost perfect A/B test, the kind you'd run with no shame over which kind of font improved e-commerce site checkout conversions.
By 2023, Oregon's drug overdose rate was well outpacing the rest of the country, so much so that the police officers regularly Narcan with them and revive people splayed out in public parks. Sometimes the same person from week to week. It's true this coincides with the fentanyl epidemic, which could confound the data and have bumped up overdoses everywhere but that wouldn't explain alone why deaths have especially increased in Oregon. The timing fits M110.
https://www.axios.com/local/portland/2024/02/21/fentanyl-overdose-rate-oregon-spikes
Oregon's fatal fentanyl overdose rate spiked from 2019 to 2023, showing the highest rate of increase among U.S. states, according to The Oregonian's crunching of new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At some point someone decided to compare notes with Portugal Europe's system. Some stark differences!
https://gooddrugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PortugalvOregon1.pdf
Briefly, Portugal Europe uses a carrot and stick model with a lot of negative incentive, whereas Oregon just kinda writes a $100 ticket and suggests calling a hotline for your raging drug problem maybe.
In the first 15 months after Measure 110 took effect, state auditors found, only 119 people called the state’s 24-hour hotline. That meant the cost of operating the hotline amounted to roughly $7,000 per call. The total number of callers as of early December of last year had only amounted to 943.
The absence of stick appears to not be very effective in encouraging users to seek treatment.
Are the kids having fun at least? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/health/portland-oregon-drugs.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/fHxWk)
“Portland [Oregon] is a homeless drug addict’s slice of paradise,” said Noah Nethers, who was living with his girlfriend in a bright orange tent on the sidewalk against a fence of a church, where they shoot and smoke both fentanyl and meth.
That's the brightest part of the article. The rest is pretty depressing and sad and sickening and worrisome.
After a few years of this, the Oregon legislature yesterday finished voting to re-criminalize drugs.
The NYT again https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/us/oregon-drug-decriminalization-rollback-measure-110.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/3zksH)
Several prominent Democrats have expressed support for a rollback, including Mike Schmidt, a progressive prosecutor in the Portland area. After the decriminalization initiative passed in 2020, Mr. Schmidt implemented its provisions early, saying it was time to move past “failed practices” to “focus our limited law enforcement resources to target high-level, commercial drug offenses.”
But he has reassessed his position, he said in an interview this week. The proliferation of fentanyl requires a new approach that treats addiction as a health issue while holding people accountable, he said. The open drug use downtown and near parks and schools has made people feel unsafe, Mr. Schmidt said.
“We have been hearing from constituents for a while that this has been really detrimental to our community and to our streets,” he said. Mr. Schmidt said the new bill still prioritizes treatment and uses jail as a last resort. That, he said, could ultimately become the model Oregon offers to states around the country.
The governor has indicated that she would sign.
Critics are out in force, arguing that the legislature overrode the will of voters (remember it was passed by referendum) and that the state sabotaged the program by not efficiently distributing treatment resources to addicts. This poster believes the low uptake and missing negative incentives prove that drug harm reduction is not primarily about access to treatment, but about incentive not to use. I do sympathize that better public services and addiction resources that people actually trusted would help, but fentanyl complicates the situation substantially. People need to hit bottom before they seek help (or so goes the popular saying) but fentanyl is so potent and unpredictable that they're dying of an unexpected OD before they find themselves at bottom, ready to seek change.
Frankly, I'm surprised Oregon repealed this so quickly. Has liberalism peaked in Oregon?
As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.
I believe this shows Oregon is not quite as ideologically liberal as previously led to believe. Or, at least, not anymore.
According to this Twitter thing, race-IQ is the most taboo topic. It's more taboo than "are pedophiles harmful or not?"
In general, I find the outrage over this topic a lot more interesting than whether or not blacks have lower IQ than whites.
Speaking of which, what are the implications if blacks have lower IQ than whites? That doesn't tell you about the IQ of any individual standing in front of you. For that, you would just test them?
What's important about this finding? What policy would we change? Is this actually a proxy for acknowledging IQ exists and that improving society through education won't work in a meritocracy because some people will never be doctors no matter how hard we try?
Stated another way, I can't think of any policy we would change to address low IQ blacks that wouldn't also apply to low IQ whites. Race is almost irrelevant.
dr_analog
razorboy
30d ago
I keep coming back to the fact that Japan does actual fat shaming, on an institutional level even (employers fined if employee waist sizes are too big) and as a result doesn't suffer from high obesity.
This should put the disease model of obesity to bed, unless we believe the Japanese, who love 7-11s and convenience perhaps even more than Westerners do, are somehow genetically immune or their food is still so much more pure.
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
I suspect Rat Park has something to do with the modern view on addiction and these bleeding heart laws.
The moral framework is
- drug addicts exist
- but they wouldn't, if society wasn't failing them in some way (too much like rat cage, not enough like rat paradise)
- since it is society's fault, we should not be putting addicts in jail. that's just cruel
- so, lets not put them in jail
- instead, offer them high quality mental health services instead!
That is, someone who was happy and healthy and content with life would not be an addict. Lets fix, I dunno, global capitalism or something.
I guess the problem is we, by far, can't offer anything like rat paradise. Further, high quality mental health services don't work very well at curing addiction. Worse, what the state offers isn't high quality but rather what you'd expect. Worse still, addicts in the full depth of addiction often don't want treatment. And finally, making life more like rat paradise doesn't stop people from becoming addicts.
As per Scott's critique Against Rat Park, people that are totally content and have every reason not to want to be hopelessly addicted tent city fentanyl addicts end up there anyway. Drugs really do re-wire your brain.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
Let me see if I understand this
1: we must increase diversity of ATCs
2: let’s impose AA style quotas
1: no that would cause backlash
2: what about a final exam that’s actually a biographical questionnaire?
1: what, and only hire people with black-sounding upbringings? too blatant
2: but what if the right answers to the questionnaire are random but we separately and secretly tell the people we want to hire how to answer?
1: let’s do it!
Is that really it? Tell me I’m misunderstanding this!
So... has anything interesting happened in Magic: The Gathering the last 27 years?
I walked by a game store the other day and saw a new starter kit for sale. I used to play it when I was a kid, maybe a year when it first came out, and then forgot about it around 4th edition.
One thing I remember is going to Mtg nerd meetups and seeing nerd kids there with one or both parents. They were even playing with them, with their own personally designed decks even. My parents didn't do this stuff at all. I was jealous of kids with grown-up money being able to buy rare cards and kick my butt with them.
Back at the game store I decided I wanted to try introducing this cuteness in my own parenting life. The package on the starter kit says 13+ but I thought I'd give it a try with my 6 year old. He can read and do math so... should work?
And... It does! It's a hit. My kid's hooked and we play every day. I'm probably a little hooked too.
So. What else should I do? There's a score tracking app called Lotus that seems perfect. There's a lot more "tokens" involved in modern cards, wtf? Do most people use post-it notes?
I see there's lots of online Mtg options but I don't think I want to open that door since my kid is not at all addicted to screens yet.
Any tips here on what else to look out for? I've heard Commander sucks and I should skip it.
I'm pleasantly amused to have this generational experience of playing a game I loved as a kid with my own kid, 25 years later. Surprised it has held on so long. Also holy shit I'm old.
I'm not entirely sure what happened to my old cards. Hopefully we find a massive cache of them in Grandma's attic soon and have our minds blown.
dr_analog
razorboy
30d ago
Anyone have thoughts on the Huberman article run by NY Magazine? He apparently was dating 5+ women simultaneously, letting each of them believe he was only dating them, and therefore it would be safe to have unprotected sex.
My first reaction is: why did he need to lie about this? He lives in the polyamory capital of the world? Surely plenty of women would be down?
On further thought, I wonder if he didn't want to do the poly thing because you'd have to go through the process of electing a #1 girlfriend that you can swap fluids with, and then for girlfriends #2-5 you have to use condoms and that's no fun.
But on even more advanced thought, perhaps this is a signal that poly is actually pretty low status? If an adored sensitive smart hot famous-ish science-y guy can't even be honest about his sexual desires and find suitable partners, again, in the Bay Area (!), that suggests poly has a very, very long road to general acceptance.
The last 27 years? Isn't the game about that many years old?
In my kid brain, since it had such an outsize impact in my life, it felt like I was playing Mtg for my whole childhood. And also when I would read about prior editions, it made it feel like I was a second generation player. But when I look it up and do the math, it seems like the game came out 30 years ago, I started playing it a year or two after that, and I stopped playing it a year or two after that.[1]
Current day Mtg game mechanics seem familiar, but there's so many modifiers? Vigilance? Haste? Flash? Wut? And yeah the tokens. Wondering what else I missed. Fallen Empires had token "creatures" but they were a different thing.
Anyway, half wondering if I play against any current day players if my ways will seem old and cringe.
The place to start catching up would probably be checking out the beginnings of the Modern format.
Oh, that's good to know! Wouldn't want to spend time and money picking up old cards that aren't even allowed in friendly games anymore.
- Also in my mind, I felt like I was using the internet for a whole lifetime between when Amazon came out but before Google came out, but they were only 4 years apart. Kid time dilation is real.
dr_analog
razorboy
10d ago
I suppose this depends on being significantly stronger than the other party. Like, if you have nukes and the other does not.
But if you are a business owner considering opening a new branch and you need, to know, say if workers or buyers will do something complex or buyers attempt to steal from you,
Business owners already suspect this and want to act on this. We call this behavior racist. Why would the general acceptance of race-IQ change this dynamic?
That is, racism doesn't necessarily stop being racism just because some of the stereotypes are true.
dr_analog
razorboy
11d ago
From a game theory POV I would think you'd want to hit back much, much harder to discourage future retaliation in the first place?
I haven't much experience with scout and church leaders though I also was a teenage admirer of John Carmack. I realize I knew very little about him until I listened to his four hour Lex interview
What makes him a good young role model? Even in a space like video games he can make a mark and be successful
- deeply throwing himself into his work; stories about how Michael Abrash would leave him at the office on Friday and come back on Monday and see that John had been there the whole weekend hacking away trying to optimize Quake
- shamelessly learning from every source possible (he mentioned consuming programming magazines and even reading ads for educational value)
- was not credentialed but he didn't let that stop him
- was actually kind of a young cyber-criminal (black hat hacker) but that didn't define his future
- doesn't let his obsession with nerdiness have him eschew physical fitness: he's also a fit and in-shape BJJ practitioner
- still ate pizza his whole life, every day, from Domino's
- presumably still found a happy healthy relationship with a woman and is a father that provides for his family and also spends time with them?
- mentions stuff about taking vacations to hotel rooms next to an airport just so he can get away and concentrate on his work undisturbed
- oh also bought himself Ferraris to play with after he became wealthy why not
Okay he seems pretty awesome. Someone kids could look up to.
Does this stuff make him a conservative male role model though?
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
I believe Steven Pinker made the point that the death penalty has popular support in many Western nations and that the only reason the US hasn’t fully outlawed it is because (contrary to belief) it’s more democratic.
So, taken through this lens, the reason those other nations are so much less barbaric is because the civilized elites can successfully exert more of their political will.
We were talking here the other day about role models. Conservative role models are easy to come up with, but progressive ones are hard. But then it dawned on me that Anthony Bourdain is a hands down perfect progressive role model.
Let me copy paste it from here https://www.themotte.org/post/900/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/194107?context=8#context
Anthony Bourdain. Humble beginnings doing "real" work as a cook and a chef at a string of New York City restaurants. Has a passion for French cuisine. Then struck out as a writer who published Kitchen Confidential, sharing this quaint but authentic view of a working class life with the world. All of these honorable professions go far among progressives. They are relatable, humble, involve zero obvious exploitation. True honest work.
I've seen this quote of his pop up at various art festivals:
“Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”
So cool.
From humble beginnings, he was signed to do two travel shows, No Reservations and then Parts Unknown, glorfying open-minded exploration and celebration of other cultures: their food, their traditions, their people, etc. Super romantic while still keeping an edgy down-to-Earth quality. Alludes to having lived a life of mild depravity but in a cute way. Seems like he could come up with an amazing wine pairing with seared sea scallops but you can also have a beer with him and shoot the shit. The worst thing you could ever do is suggest going to McDonalds.
He cannot possibly be a better progressive role model. He even struggled from mental illness! Showing that even hard working, successful and productive people who seem happy on the outside can suffer from depression and bring themselves to suicide.
Mild tangent: I can't shake the feeling that his romanticism, attempts at authenticity, never losing his edgy side belied a somewhat destructive live fast die young ethos and may have all been a big cry for help but progressives I've discussed this with don't believe there's any connection between the two at all whatsoever. He just caught mental illness the way anyone can catch flu.
Drug dealers don't generally want to kill their customers as a general class. Some, specific customers, like ones that are extorting drugs from the dealer at knifepoint, sure, but as a general class no. Dead people don't buy more drugs, and drug dealers want to sell drugs.
No offense but have you met many drug dealers? Like everyone has their cool guy that hooks them up with the best LSD imaginable like it's some sacrament but that is not the norm at all. My Ayn Rand view of them was shattered when I bought drugs on the street a few times. They often don't know what they're selling, in the concentrations that they're selling. They don't particularly care about repeat business. They don't care if they kill you. They're also generally too dumb to even think about testing their stuff or weigh things. If they are smart enough to weight things they're probably not going to buy the $300 milligram scale when the whippet shop sells some that advertises milligram precision for $20. They may be addicts themselves. They are not rational economic actors.
Drug dealing doesn't primarily attract smart entrepreneurial people who to make a fortune. It attracts rather unsmart, not well people who have very few other options for making money.
dr_analog
razorboy
13d ago
Lol they actually went for it.
I'll just kind of treat this like the planes walkers are in a Rick and Morty multi-verse and stumbled on the DEI dimension and summoned a black elf and be amused.
shuts eyes
crosses fingers
trans paladin. trans paladin. trans paladin
dr_analog
razorboy
13d ago
More woke
How is this coming through in the game? Black elves? Trans paladins? Or do you mean that WotC woke corporate politics is a spectacle?
I'm currently working as a cybersecurity engineer and I'm a former Google SRE. So, I request you do not kneejerk dismiss me as some kind of technical ignoramus if you think that's what my argument hinges on.
Whenever privacy warriors complain about privacy I find myself rolling my eyes and thinking okay boomer. Even though more people than boomers say this and I do believe privacy is important. To be clear I mean privacy in the abstract. "I don't use Facebook because [privacy]". "I am looking to adopt a GrapheneOS based phone with no Google apps because [privacy]".
Privacy is obviously important. I don't want some rando, or worse, some personal enemy to rifle through my all of my digital data looking for ways to harm me. But the abstract privacy concern takes the form of a Motte and Bailey between the two. Google, Facebook and friends mostly act on your private data in the aggregate, but the privacy advocates generate worry that your intimate conversations or pictures are being personally viewed.
I also find privacy warrior claims rather, lets say, Joker-level anarchistic about rule of law. Everyone should have end-to-end encrypted messaging and the government should be locked out of private spaces no matter what. In no other domain do we accept a claim like "this dungeon in my house is off limits even to detectives with a court order because it is my private property" but apparently yes this digital cache of self-produced child pornography or evidence of a ticking time bomb terrorist plot[1] is something we can take to our graves regardless of any legitimate pursuit of justice. The level of hostility towards government here surpasses any of government's responsibility to protect its citizenry.
I'm not arguing against having digital security. It's very important for both organizations and individuals to have basic opsec lined up, especially because of how many automated and directed attacks there are trying to steal money and secrets. But in this battle companies like Google, who privacy advocates possibly fear only less than Facebook, are far closer to friend than foe because they provide a level of sophisticated and free security and direct privacy guarantee that almost nobody can achieve on their own.
The level of fear and worry privacy warriors generate rises to the level of conspiracy-adjacence. The word "qanon" pops into my head. Someone, Out There, is collecting all of your private information and you need to disconnect from the grid right now. Abandon all petty conveniences like being able to share photos with grandma, your life depends on it.
Ironically, the self-hosted Trust No One approach appears to make people even more vulnerable to attack. Even very technically sophisticated friends of mine who have hosted their own email have been hacked and their identities stolen (and used against them for extortion) in ways that would not have happened if they had stuck to GMail and used their FIDO2 two factor key for second factor.
I have another friend who decided to take his family's photos and files out of iCloud and Google Drive. He set up a home RAID array and was cruising along fine but neglected to monitor the drives. One failed and he didn't know, so when the second failed all of his data was gone. He didn't have backups, because why would you if you have RAID and snapshotting. He's not some noob either. He is also a sophisticated technology professional.
My argument against individual actions you can take on privacy are something like: you can do a few basic things to radically improve your personal opsec, and anything else is rapidly diminishing returns at increasingly greater inconvenience and, worse, may be a net increase in your vulnerability to attack or data loss.
My argument against regulatory action on this is, well: Europe leads the way on this. Does anyone think, say, GDPR has made Europeans much safer than Americans? At what regulatory and compliance cost? Mostly GDPR seems like a joke.
The fact that privacy fretting appears to primarily afflict men (with notable exceptions like Naomi Brockwell) suggests that there must be something autistic about it.
(Mostly, I can't shake the strange feeling that inside of all of this is a The Last Psychiatrist style phenomena (made with impeccable erudition that I could never live up to) that privacy worries are a proxy for dealing with some... thing(?) that people would never allow themselves to acknowledge consciously)
In the end, excessively fretting about privacy mostly is costly (in time), increases inconvenience and annoyance, increases the nanny/regulatory state, puts you at greater risk, and just makes the ads being served to you dumber.
- I'm aware this argument is cited derisively by other security professionals, but that doesn't make them correct. Ticking time bomb plots are a real thing.
Yes, agreed. In fact, you probably have less anonymity when you use crypto given all of the KYC intersected with blockchain analytics.
(Yes yes I'm aware of Monero)
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