dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
Russia conducts a nuclear attack on Urkainian forces in Ukraine with an ultimatum for a cease fire. Foreign policy and serious military types freak out. Ukraine howls, Europeans increase sanctions, but also schism. A nominal cease fire might be started, but Russian demands for recognition of their demands schisms Europe as people who actually care about stable nuclear game theory recognize this is precisely the sort of demand you can't accede to for a stable nash equilibrium.
I do not anticipate the world backing down at all if Russia conducts a nuclear attack against Ukraine. I imagine they would alienate both China and India at the minimum and see sanctions from that camp.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
I recall, during an FDA sucks thread, someone mentioned that one pharma company spent $2 billion trying to bring a drug to market and then the FDA denied approval with no comment as to why.
I can't find this story. Does this sound familiar?
Why can't the production studio be looking at the demographics of the customer base and decide that hey some %age of our customers are black, and so they may relate to the story better and spend money on it if we include more/any black characters?
I've barely read LOTR but unless whiteness was a critical part of the story it seems fine to change skin color. It's a movie about, like, whole different species of humanoids right? Different skin colors should be well within bounds?
I agree a lot of productions feel like they're bending over backwards to include more races and it comes off as cheap and woke fearing (see: children's books), but the more basic business case seems valid too.
EDIT: I've not seen the show nor have I read the books and I mostly watched the original movies with 'drinking game' style interest, so pardon my ignorance. I see from the responses that the sprinkling of racial diversity is done in a clearly cheap and ham-fisted way. Thank you to everyone who took my question seriously.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
Right, okay, that does sound annoying. I immediately thought this sounds like how American movies give "foreign" characters in a movie British accent instead of subtitling them. Except worse. Much worse than that.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
And when CPS knocks on your door?
... did I miss some news articles about CPS in blue enough cities paying parents a visit because they didn't immediately affirm their five year old's gender dysphoria?
Or is this hypothetical?
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
The AQI in my area is bad due to a nearby forest fire. I'm a running enthusiast and this has made me cancel outdoor runs 5 different times in the last two weeks. I tried running while wearing an N95 mask but that's really hard and I'm a little worried I'm suffocating myself.
Do they make masks/filters specifically for outdoor physical exertion?
(I realize I could find a gym and try to run on a treadmill but it's not the same and I don't totally trust the gym has good indoor air quality filtering in-place anyway)
EDIT: alternatively, am I taking that much a risk by running when it's over 150 AQI out?
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
The water at the site is allegedly less than 350 feet deep which would put the pipeline within reach of conventional civilian diving equipment.
What civilian diving equipment gets you to 350 feet? Do you mean non-military industrial/mining equipment?
However, just now Poland and supposedly also Bulgaria have asked all their citizens to leave Russia, so quite possibly it was done by Poles
I'm not sure I follow the (possible) innuendo here. Are you implying that asking their citizens to leave Russia is not a direct follow-on to Russia's doubling down on their war efforts with more conscription and staging a referendum in the occupied Ukraine?
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
The original question was why would it be risky for the US to blow it up? My opinion is Biden could basically call Scholz and say "I hope none of your folks are working on these pipelines of yours, because we're blowing them up tomorrow".
I prefer to live in an absurd timeline so it is my hope this is what happened and Germany is keeping it quiet because it would be too embarrassing to admit it. Thank you.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
And social progressivism seems to have had a relatively quiet year
To the extent that the word progressivism can be pinned down, student loan forgiveness seems like a huge boost in that direction. Not to the same scale as Obamacare, but not nothing either.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
350 feet as that is where nitrogen narcosis tends to set in
Alright here's where I'm going with this. I'm a lapsed divemaster so my expertise may be rusty, but IMO a dive to 350 feet is considered specialized technical diving even if normies manage to do it with recreational dive gear and not kill themselves. Lots of recreational divers are simply not cut out for that kind of dive with a task.
Adding a bomb payload to the task and bringing it to that depth and securing it stretches credibility for me a bit. Actually, they did this twice, to NS1 and NS2, yes? Yeah. Hard to fathom.
Not saying it's not possible, but the list of suspects would not be very long.
I would love to read their biography.
(If commercial divers that are used to surveying/mining the area did it, that's believable. In that case I was genuinely curious what that equipment is. I have no experience in that stuff.)
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
Donation-based stuff is weird because people get weird about money.
Tell me about it. I opened a GitHub feature request (on a totally unrelated project) once and offered a $100 bounty and I was told this was an insult. Apparently the thousands of feature requests with no bounty (e.g. a bounty of $0) are totally not insulting though.
Anyway, I hope my modest monthly contribution is not an insult!
On a similar theme, a few weeks back the New York Times ran a piece arguing that ‘maternal instinct is a myth that men created’. In the essay, published in the world’s most influential newspaper, it was stated that ‘The notion that the selflessness and tenderness babies require is uniquely ingrained in the biology of women, ready to go at the flip of a switch, is a relatively modern — and pernicious — one. It was constructed over decades by men selling an image of what a mother should be, diverting our attention from what she actually is and calling it science.’
I don't have data but I do have anecdotes. I have small kids and have been hanging out with lots of other small kids lately in multi-family campouts. One of my small kids is still a baby, and I get to see firsthand how other kids react. Here's how it goes: 100% of the other boys, of all ages, are completely indifferent to my baby, while almost all of the little girls look at the baby with glassy eyes and are clearly having their minds blown by adoration and maternal instinct. It's literally the centerpiece of their whole world on the campout. I'm surrounded by them the whole time I hold my kid. They look like they're on drugs.
Sorry, I just don't believe you can socialize this. It would be really convenient if it could be socialized, because my "potential babysitter?" options would double. Someone let me know if they figure out how to pull off this kind of deep brainstem reprogramming.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
I would post this in my town's subreddit but anything to the right of Bernie/AOC is down voted to oblivion.
During the election this fall, Oregonians will be presented with ballot measure 114.
A "yes" vote supports this ballot initiative to:
- require permits issued by local law enforcement to buy a firearm;
- require photo ID, fingerprints, safety training, criminal background check, and fee payment to apply for a permit; and
- prohibit manufacturing, importing, purchasing, selling, possessing, using, or transferring ammunition magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds and make violations a class A misdemeanor.
Signatures were collected for this immediately after the Uvalde shooting.
I find this measure rather offensively misguided. I don't own a gun, though if I needed one it would probably be because I'm feeling very threatened. The last thing I want to deal with in those circumstances is a hulking and dumb nanny state demanding that I prove competency to their standards and can impress upon local police that I deserve to have one.
This law is misguided because it actually would have failed to stop the Uvalde shooter from getting a gun unless it was so overly broad that the police had discretion to deny anyone for any reason.
I'm not sure how its proponents expect this to work, unless they would deny him simply on the basis of appearing obviously poor, Hispanic and not fitting in at school?
The people advancing this law almost certainly believe, e.g. that the police implement systemized racism but that black people should be allowed to own guns. What makes them think police won't blanket deny guns to all black people, then?
Additionally, I think people who support these laws are genuinely failing to understand that guns are the only thing that reliably prevent the rest of us from being at the mercy of the strongest and most dangerous people.
There has been a noticeable rise in home intrusions in this town lately where women awaken to deranged men in their houses. Usually they're homeless meth addicts who are distracted enough by the woman waking up and screaming at them that they leave. But there was a case recently where a woman had acid thrown on her, then again where she woke up to the same guy setting her on fire. The police treated her like she was crazy and making it up until the media elevated the story.
If my daughter lived alone I would 100% want her to have a loaded handgun by her bedside. It seems outrageous that she'd have to prove to the police that she's worthy of keeping this gun, when the people breaking into houses don't have to meet any such standards.
Again, I don't own a gun, but the last thing I want to do, in the society we live in, where police take 20 minutes to respond (they didn't used to, they stopped responding quickly after 2020 for some reason) is make it more difficult for law abiding people to arm themselves.
Is this too "boo outgroup"? I feel like these are strong racial justice and feminist arguments for not making it difficult to get and keep handguns.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
Could you (or someone) expand on this? Why would a quasi-dictator be likely to lose his position/life over a failed war?
More generally, a principle I believe in is: it's much harder to solve a problem when you're deliberately ignorant to the cause. We didn't solve anything in the '60s, I think we put off the problem, and we'll have to pay, with interest, but I'm not totally sure the form this will take.
I think this is right. Somewhere in the HBD debate is the idea that you can provide more humane welfare with the recognition of how groups vary. If some groups are just going to have a harder time with professional training, maybe we can stop torturing them with memes like "learn to code!" and accept that if we want them to have an $80k/year quality of life, we're going to need to give them $80k/year.
To be clear, my vibe is that the difference in IQ between racial groups is not very significant but it's hard to know for sure given that any serious researcher who talks about HBD commits career suicide.
Anyway, this acknowledgement that some groups can't learn to code their way out of poverty will be good practice for the near future, when machines have rendered all of us unable to do productive work and we are all completely dependent on the state.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
Psychology is, therefore, the science of producing solutions that work for people that need them.
I thought it psychology was specific to helping people solve problems by analyzing their individual thought processes and proposing and assisting them in implementing changes to their thought processes?
Still very broad, but I assume excludes crystal therapy even if there was evidence of its efficacy.
Would a different defendant have been treated differently? It's true if he was the host of Planet Money and he had an otherwise normal podcast but once in awhile he shared a deranged conspiracy theory about parents of victims of kids who died in school shootings, the damages might be lessened. But probably only because because people who show up for light hearted economics chat aren't hankering to fight a culture war and act on the defamatory information.
Running a hot culture war podcast has higher risks.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
My hair was thinning badly in my 20s so I just started shaving bald. Otherwise I lift and run and follow a diet and select form fitting clothes.
Not that worried about not having hair. A lot of Hollywood actors pull it off just fine.
I do feel that most of the men I know personally have let themselves go, though. Not sure what to make of that. I wouldn't say I'm doing the bare minimum but I do find the general succumbing to decrepitude and laziness mildly alarming.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
Russia's behavior was norm violating and did result in some sanctions (causing Russia to retaliate in various ways, including US election interference) but my read is that Crimea was mostly not in favor of the Ukrainian revolution. It's one thing to annex a place that hates you and is keeping you by force. Another entirely if the people welcome you.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
I'm generally astonished when I hang out with people who don't appear to be trying to improve themselves. Not continuously learning, not growing, not getting fit, not working on solving these big gigantic problems grinding away at their lives.
How do these people get up in the morning? I feel like a basic transition from childhood to adulthood is learning that base pleasure seeking is a fleeting distraction at best and that the purpose of life is to grow in as many dimensions as possible. Is this considered some kind of elite worldview. Maybe it is, but what do others replace it with? How do they wake up in the morning? Are they... happy? Are you one of the "they" I'm talking about? How do you see the world?
I don't mean to quibble with your otherwise fine post but this part is a bit confusing
Doesn't this study only show how popular beliefs about genes and racial differences are, rather than raw ability to understand them? I'd expect a lot more people to answer affirmatively if it wasn't thoughtcrime and was instead actually taught in respectable institutions.
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