dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
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!
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.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo 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.
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
1yr ago
I'm kind of unsettled by the fresh new wave of Twitter excitementspew that it doesn't matter if you have black cops, black chiefs of police, black prosecutors, black judges, black city councils, black mayors, black members of Congress, black Presidents: systemic white supremacy makes them all racist too. Just going to chuckle nervously and assume that all of these online people aren't real.
Hard not to wonder if 100 years from now, white people could be only 5% of the population of the US but every bad thing that's done is considered latent white supremacy.
So. I buried a beloved uncle this week and was asked to be a pallbearer in a Catholic mass. I said yes on the spot because it was unthinkable to say no to a grieving widow, someone I also love dearly.
I quickly Googled what was involved operationally (how much to lift, how many of us would carry, etc) but stopped there. I'd have carried it miles if asked so the details didn't matter.
I hadn't realized I would be bringing it into a Catholic church, with all mourners at the service watching, and be met by the priest near the entrance. I had begun crying while carrying it, and when we passed through the door the priest said something to the effect of "we receive in the name of the father, son and holy spirit"[1]. He had a mic on his lapel somewhere and the words echoed through the church. As we brought it to the alter there was a chant or song I can't really remember the words to, but it made me really tear up.
I found it both very painful and also very beautiful.
I know this is a fairly cookie cutter thing but it may as well have been a spiritual experience for me. Something about carrying the body of someone who had lost absolutely everything, like 100.00%, to their resting place, was a powerful symbol of mercy.
This act is clearly ceremonial and unnecessary. We could easily use machines to do this and spare the pallbearers the emotional gut punch of carrying their dead loved one. But the whole funeral is just as unnecessary by that logic. That's not the point.
I am as cynical an atheist as they come, but the comfort and beauty of this process was not lost on me. At all. Ideally when a loved one passes you would all get together and bespoke produce exactly the most beautiful, memorable and touching experience to honor them. But that's not something most people can do. It's even more challenging that the people who know best what the deceased would want are often too stricken with grief to plan anything. It's another form of practiced mercy to offer this.
The Catholic Church has a lot of problems but as far as traditions go, it's pretty good at this transition from life to death thing. This is to say, I found these quotes from Ratzinger very timely and as something to reflect on.
Thank you.
- I'm paraphrasing. If anyone knows exactly what he would have said please let me know. I was so shocked I'm drawing a blank.
Guns
This election we saw measure 114 in Oregon, which would require permitting for guns, which includes receiving consent from the local police department and mandatory firearms training. The measure passed by about 9000 votes.
I find this pretty outrageous; there has been both an uptick in crime in Oregon and also a reduction in police morale so there's this perfect storm of random deranged break-ins and confrontations and police who take 20+ minutes to respond.
I know movie plot threats / just so stories aren't a good way to do law, but I'm immediately reminded of this story: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/oregon/articles/2022-06-29/eugene-woman-attacked-with-acid-for-third-time-since-march
She appears to be a non-white woman going to university here in Oregon that is being targeted with some kind of honor violence (acid attacks seem honor violencey), though she doesn't know the perpetrator, she just describes him as white. The first two attacks were reported to the police who (my reading between the lines), did not take her seriously. She came to Reddit to ask for advice; by the time she was attacked the third time the intruder tried to set her on fire in her home. She had a gun by this point, and went for it, and the intruder fled before she could fire at him.
I'm trying to imagine in an alternate timeline telling her, after her second attack, that no she can't have a gun yet. She needs to be a good girl and ask the police (the same police who thought she was making this story up, mind you!) for permission to have a gun, and then go through firearms training. Then she can have one. Hopefully the psychopath who is targeting you doesn't murder you in the meantime! It's for safety!
I don't own a gun myself and I don't fetishize them, but I do think they're an important tool for protecting yourself in a dangerous society and my heart breaks that we would be so condescending to tell decent people, who are in the midst of personal security crises like this, that they're not trusted enough to get the tools they need to defend themselves immediately.
Stated another way, politicians are doing a great job at convincing us that society is safer, and it's tempting to believe them. It's even more tempting to believe this because nowadays worrying about crime is racist coded. I don't blame people for believing it. Yet finally, something happens that shatters the illusion: you're the victim of violence or are being credibly threatened and ... in this worst moment we add insult to injury and infantilize the victims further.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
If it were possible to create a completely new, convincing, and cohesive identity by way of adding it to cart and clicking checkout for a very affordable price, I imagine this would delete 95% of the controversy around transgenderism.
People don't care that the woman in front of them used to be a man so much as care that the man in front of them who has squeezed into a dress and is wearing a wig demands to be treated as a woman. Asking people to deny what they sense is the outrage. Asking us socialize the cost of $100k in surgery so an old man can look like an old man with scars in a dress is the outrage.
I'm not saying any of this is good necessarily just that I don't expect miracles on this kind of trans acceptance front. Indeed, the best thing for trans acceptance would be orders of magnitude improvement in body/behavior modification treatments.
Not posting in the Gaza/Israel thread since this is more generic, IMO.
In the most recent Sam Harris podcast, he elevates the problem with Hamas to the more general problem of jihadi terrorism. The episode is here and there's also a transcript here.
In this, he paints a picture of Hamas being a jihadi terrorist organization that's beyond reasoning with in terms of any reasoning we'd consider compatible with liberal western civilized order. He reads this quote from a member of a different jihadi group that had just finished slaughtering young children:
Human life only has value among you worldly materialist thinkers. For us, this human life is only a tiny, meaningless fragment of our existence. Our real destination is the Hereafter. We don’t just believe it exists, we know it does.
Death is not the end of life. It is the beginning of existence in a world much more beautiful than this. As you know, the [Urdu] word for death is “intiqaal.” It means “transfer,” not “end.”
Paradise is for those of pure hearts. All children have pure hearts. They have not sinned yet… They have not yet been corrupted by [their kafir parents]. We did not end their lives. We gave them new ones in Paradise, where they will be loved more than you can imagine.
They will be rewarded for their martyrdom. After all, we also martyr ourselves with them. The last words they heard were the slogan of Takbeer [“Allah u Akbar”].
Allah Almighty says Himself in Surhah Al-Imran [3:169-170] that they are not dead.
You will never understand this. If your faith is pure, you will not mourn them, but celebrate their birth into Paradise.
He makes the point that atheists have a lot of trouble understanding how utterly fanatical and unreasonable jihadis can be. People of Christian or Jewish faith know, because they know how powerful their own faith is in their lives. But atheists are eager to attribute this kind of proclivity towards sadism and murder as a reflection of terrible conditions that they must be living under. That people living in a utopia would never succumb to such depravity. Sam argues that Muslims of faith are just as destructive outside of Israel and disputed Israeli territories.
For more concrete stats, I found this from Google generative results
According to a French think tank, between 1979 and May 2021, there were 48,035 Islamist terrorist attacks worldwide, causing the deaths of at least 210,138 people. Of these attacks, 43,002 occurred in Muslim countries, resulting in 192,782 deaths. This represents 89.5% of Islamist terrorist attacks worldwide and 91.7% of deaths
The culmination of this episode is Sam practically condemning belief in Islam entirely. Almost bordering on saying that every Palestinian is a mope in the Muslim Matrix who could become inhabited by a jihadi Agent Smith at any time. He argues that unlike Jesus, or Buddha, the central most beloved figure in Islam is Muhammed, and he was not anything like a saint:
The problem that we have to grapple with—and by “we” I mean Muslims and non-Muslims alike—is that the doctrines that directly support jihadist violence are very easy to find in the Quran, and the hadith, and in the biography of Muhammad. For Muslims, Muhammad is the greatest person who has ever lived. Unfortunately, he did not behave like Jesus or Buddha—at all. It sort of matters that he tortured people and cut their heads off and took sex slaves, because his example is meant to inspire his followers for all time.
There are many, many verses in the Quran that urge Muslims to wage jihad—jihad as holy war against apostates and unbelievers—and the most violent of these are thought to supersede any that seem more benign. But the truth is, there isn’t much that is benign in the Quran—there is certainly no Jesus as we find him in Matthew urging people to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. All the decapitation we see being practiced by jihadists isn’t an accident—it’s in the Quran and in the larger record of the life of the Prophet.
What I hear from this is that there are no "good" Muslims, or if they are good it's an aberration, or that they're Muslim in name only.
How does one operationalize such a belief? Is Sam arguing that accepting Muslim refugees is a mistake, full stop, and that the only way to deal with jihadis is the grant them their wish: death, because there's nothing else in the world we could offer them? Is that even enough to cure the problem?
There are two billion Muslims in the world. If bringing them capitalism and the pleasures of modernity (everyone gets Starlink, Steam deck, dirt cheap halal KFC and Chil Fil-A, etc as a poster recently suggested for pacifying the Palestinians) does not innoculate against jihadi mind viruses, what would?
It took Europe about 1000 years for their culture to develop antibodies to dogmatic below-the-sanity-waterline Christian crusader ideology, and Christianity's deck was not nearly as stacked against it (its central figure was still practically a hippie). Will we have to wait this long for Islam to do the same? Sam sounds like he's advocating a form of genocide by another name.
dr_analog
razorboy
8mo ago
My town's local library had a Celebrate Banned Books! month sign up and I immediately thought "yeah right" and tried looking up some right wing thought crime books in the catalog and found they didn't stock any.
I don't actually want to read any myself, but how cynical do you have to be to put signs like that up when you know full well you specifically filter out books on ideological basis.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
I don't really understand why the response to the FBI wasn't "feel free to click 'report this tweet' if you think it violates our AUP".
The fact that they wanted an inside line but still couldn't produce any legal process compelling them to take tweets/accounts down doesn't look very good? If you were Twitter would you want to normalize this? Why would you want to be in a place where you're continuously negotiating with law enforcement about what you can and can't take down?
This seems like humoring computer illiterate people at the FBI slash keeping them from getting mad and asking for burdensome regulation.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
I'm trying to imagine how we'd behave if every Mexican was actually really angry about white settlement of the Americas. Lets say hostilities between Mexicans and the rest of the US never subsided, and Texas and California were disputed states with constant violent flare-ups. Life in Texas and California dragged behind quality of life in the rest of the US and Mexicans living in those territories were pretty miserable and Mexican terrorism and US heavy-handed response was a fact of life.
Peace proposals for Texas and Californian independence and full recognition are floated, but they keep getting derailed because of one core Mexican demand: they demand right of return for all Mexicans to anywhere in the US, because this was their ancestral homeland if you go far back enough. To put the numbers in Israel proportions, this would be up to 160 million Mexicans in the global diaspora potentially settling the entire US.
Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of how Texas and California were litigated, I don't see the US capitulating to terms like that. If Mexicans were engaging in cross-border terrorism against civilian targets I can see the chances going from vanishingly improbable to fucking never.
This seems to be the position Israel is in.
dr_analog
razorboy
11mo ago
This will probably get buried but it's outrageous that you can be bankrupted by medical debt if you get sick in the US! In Europe this doesn't happen.
EDIT: thanks for the gold kind stranger
I'm really exhausted by what seems to be this interminable stuck-at-superficial-memes discussion about health care in the US. I've lived in the US, spent a few years in the UK and experienced NHS, found it surprisingly shitty even though I was looking forward to rubbing Americans' faces in it, and then I ended up back in the US and actually on Medicaid (by near accident! a story for another time though) and found the quality significantly higher.
My new EA cause area for improving health care in the US is to arrange to have everyone live in Europe for a few years so they can get past using it as a cudgel for trying to advocate for their ideology that will fix everything.
I suspect it would backfire horribly and important lessons wouldn't be learned because the irony is too thick, but I dunno I'd really enjoy hearing "whaaaat? I need to wait 3 weeks for a blood draw because the one phlebotomist for my area is on vacation?"
To be clear I'm not saying the UK health care system is an order of magnitude worse (or better) than the US one, just that there are tradeoffs that can be hard to appreciate until you experience them.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
Lex is also a fucking moron throughout the whole conversation, he can barely even interact with Yud's thought experiments of imagining yourself being someone trapped in a box, trying to exert control over the world outside yourself, and he brings up essentially worthless viewpoints throughout the whole discussion. You can see Eliezer trying to diplomatically offer suggested discussion routes, but Lex just doesn't know enough about the topic to provide any intelligent pushback or guide the audience through the actual AI safety arguments.
Did you know Lex is affiliated with MIT and is himself an AI researcher and programmer? Shocking isn't it? There's such a huge disconnect between the questions I want asked (as a techbro myself) and what he ends up asking.
At any given time I have like 5 questions I want him to ask a guest and very often he asks none of those and instead says "what if the thing that's missing... is LOVE?!?"
To give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he could ask those questions but avoids them to try to keep it humanities focused. No less painful to listen to.
dr_analog
razorboy
29d 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
6mo ago
I’m not going to call modern combat the same thing as hunting, but a surprisingly large number of women post their big game hunting pics on Facebook groups. Yesterday one posted a picture of a cougar, and she had its dead bloody carcass slung over both shoulders. Another posted a pic of a deer she shot at 400 yards.
Women seem like they can be trained to kill with guns just fine. Are they as good as men? Perhaps not. But are they worse than not having them at all? Definitely not.
The trial of Sam Bankman-Fried begins tomorrow.
As a person that has worked in crypto quant trading[1], I have the tiniest slice of sympathy for him. He still seems like an unsympathetic freak overall, and has done some stuff that seems pretty unethical, and some of his actions are definitely criminal. He has given EA a bad name as well.
There are certainly a lot of process crimes he's guilty of. The fact that the US has pulled his international operations into US jurisdiction means he's in for a universe of pain and if they can't fight that he's going to jail for infinity years. I consider this legal theory a bit dubious but the US has taken the position that it can prosecute crimes that happen in the rest of the world if they even marginally involve US citizens[2]. Is everyone in the world really supposed to follow US laws? That strikes me as a bad precedent; on the other hand, I also do appreciate it sometimes that the US is an international law enforcer of last resort.
That's not really where my sympathy lies though. He knows he was playing a dangerous game. Pretty much everyone who works in quant finance occupies enough legal gray area to worry that they could all be shut down at any time and end up in court. This is even worse in the crypto era, as the position taken by the SEC and friends is shameful, giving very little guidance on new forms of financial technology and telling firms years later by indictment that they were frowning on their behavior all this time.
Many tradfi firms prostrate themselves before the SEC in the hopes of maintaining a good relationship. Even still, reputable firms who were attempting to operate outside of US jurisdiction have been caught with their pants down in the crypto era e.g. Trading Firm A, B and C in the recent Binance indictment: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-27/the-cftc-comes-for-binance (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/aMi5Q )
It's still not clear to me that SBF and FTX spent user funds as a matter of course, or if it effectively became spending user funds because so much of their other assets imploded. Though, again, that's not necessarily a crime if you operate outside of US jurisdiction, which is what their international arm believed it was doing. But, that's also sort of secondary.
The primary question I keep coming back to, and I come to this every time there's a large corporate fraud scandal, is: what is fraud, actually? Because it seems indistinguishable from "I thought our business was legit and every indication I had was that it was legit and then it failed and it failed really hard and lots of people lost money".
FTX was a successful business. It was a high quality crypto exchange among many exchanges where the standard at the time was "complete clown show". They were probably the last people I would have bet on imploding and disappearing user funds. The failure is shocking. It's so shocking it's hard to believe.
One thing that's common to these frauds is that people always seem to have a moment of reckoning where they know they're fucked and they can either pack up and go home and face the consequences, or they double down and hope it'll all work out. Indeed, there are some legendary stories from doubling down: FedEx for example where the CEO literally doubled down with their last remaining $5000 in Las Vegas to turn it into a much needed $27,000 to keep the business alive. In this timeline FedEx is legitimate, but if it hadn't worked out he could've possibly gone to jail.
As far as I can tell Uber was based on complete fraud. Its business plan from day one appeared to be: completely ignore taxi laws the world over and just push out a product that was so much better than calling taxis that before jurisdictions knew what was happening they would have tons of passionate users that would be furious if Uber was taken away. This seems to be a resounding success. But it was very much organized crime? If Uber had failed their founder would have definitely gone to jail. In fact he was involved in so much other generally shady stuff that he was forced out. Yet he definitely moved the needle.
Anyway, this isn't meant to be an impassioned defense of SBF, more like my continuing fascination and horror at this alien thing we call modern business. Poor fool tried to play the game of changing the world and got burned. And in this case the burning is fantastic public spectacle.
- To be clear I think crypto is not that world changing and its only redeeming quality for the foreseeable future is of the flavor "casinos are fun to build and play in".
- Arthur Hayes of Bitmex was busted for something similar, though he was "wink wink" keeping US citizens off of his exchange whereas FTX International was pretty serious https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1323316/download
EDIT: Matt Levine's newsletter today is about SBF's trial, which hit my inbox right after I submitted this comment. Amazing, as usual. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-02/sbf-s-defense-will-be-tough
EDIT2: As replies have pointed out, I am probably technically wrong for calling what Uber did fraud. Sorry to distract. I should've made my case that Uber was more like a plan to openly disregard and defy taxi regulations across many jurisdictions with the excuse that this isn't a taxi it's a "carpooling app" tee hee. I think this is an insane business plan and it depended on them delivering an amazingly useful app. And if they hadn't succeeded (by delivering an amazingly useful app) they would've all been busted for something rising to the level of organized crime.
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
My general impression on the ground, as it were, with two children and teaching 600 elementary children, is that there is not necessarily any One True Way that will work for every child.
Today our teenager’s school was put on lockdown. A few days ago someone claiming to be a student posted on Reddit, anonymously, a specific threat to shoot the school up. Then has been anonymously emailing every night threatening to do it the next day.
Everyone has been on edge.
While our kid was in class today, An announcement came on to enter lockdown, this is not a drill. The school procedure for this is that each classroom door should be locked, shades drawn, and students should huddle up in the part of the room with the least line of sight (fire?) to the outside.
They texted their families while huddled up, shaking from adrenaline but also trying to stay quiet.
It took 45 minutes for the school to give the all clear. It was a false alarm. A rando maintenance person that some staff didn’t recognize was on the grounds and then they lost sight of the guy and escalated.
So.
Home schooling sounds pretty good to me.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
Huh. The world's kind of scary when the US doesn't care about your conflict.
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.
It's pretty wild how much Americans are into guns.
I recently got into deer hunting. Game meat is really healthy, you know? Also it's more humane, I think? Anyway, It started with buying a bolt action rifle with a scope, my first firearm ever. Now that I have one, I need to go to the range to practice. This means I need glasses and also ear protection. Best to get the ear muffs that have loud noise cancellation so you can hear conversation. Oh, and there’s an aux input in case I hunt with other hunters and need a radio. Pretty cool. It even comes with two tone American flag velcro patch. Call of Duty vibe intensifies.
Obviously need a full assortment of camo to go with it. No no hunting camo, not like digital pattern camo don't be silly. Well, the military digital camo is cheaper actually, may as well.
Hey hunting deer is actually really challenging and the season is halfway over. Maybe I should branch out into wild turkey hunting. Oh, I need a shotgun for that? Well, why not. Should probably get slugs and buckshot, just for versatility.
While on some hunts I realized I was the only one without a sidearm. What’s the sidearm for? In case bears and cougars attack! Well shit, now I need to go shop for one of those. What will have enough stopping power? Let me head to the indoor range and rent a few and try them out. Hmm, yeah. I think the Glock 40 10mm should do, let me buy that.
Hey, since I have a handgun now, I may as well take a few extra steps to get it ready for home defense: add a silencer and light so I don't go blind and deaf shooting it indoors at night at an intruder.
Good good. Actually, why don’t I get a concealed carry license? May as well carry it with me just in case. It'd be super annoying to get mugged on the street when I have a perfectly good handgun at home. Probably I should take some classes on proper self defense though. Maybe also drill some tactics in case I end up in an active shooter situation. Again, it'd be pretty annoying to have a handgun with a concealed carry license but not know how to handle an active shooter...
Panoramic thermal/nightvision sounds like it'd be really handy for hunting, now that you mention it. Orienteering is probably a good skill to develop just in case I go too far off trails chasing wounded game...
I’m not sure how this gets to AR-15 ownership and drilling raids, but I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time.
Meal Team 6 is kinda wasting their time practicing with guns though. If you want to be ready for the war with the federal government you gotta be going all-in drone warfare.
Suppose you were a moderate leader of the Palestinians. What on Earth could you possibly do to end the suffering and negotiate a lasting peace?
Palestinians appear to feel very strongly about unrestricted right of return. In the failed Camp David talks, Arafat demanded 150,000 Palestinians in the diaspora be allowed to settle Israel per year while Israel pushed back and said 100,000 total, though they offered a $30 billion fund to help Palestinians abroad to attain permanent settlement abroad.
This is pretty far apart. Israel doesn’t want to be demographically obliterated but Palestinians that fled Israel consider it their ancestral home.
How do you reconcile this? Wouldn’t any Palestinian leader that negotiated a peace deal without this be considered illegitimate and probably marked for death?
On the other hand, would the hostilities even end if Israel somehow agreed to unrestricted ROR? There’s so much bad blood that even this is hard to imagine as being the thing that achieves lasting peace.
I’m not sure any concession short of Israel packs up and leaves forever would end the violence.
Is it wrong to demand that Israelis relocate to Florida? It’s not like they can’t move all of their holy buildings. Surely the terra itself isn’t sacred?
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
It's rather amazing that the entire world was ultra eager to believe an unvalidated report from a Palestinian spokesperson that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza and 500+ people died.
With priors like these, Israel's at a significant disadvantage in the information war here.
I would bet you a fairly large amount of money SBF will get at least ten years in prison but we're anon, unfortunately. We'll have to settle for fake internet points (which, in the spirit of FTX, I will add to my personal balance sheet as a $10,000 asset).
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.
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