faceh
18hr ago
Going to keep my comments short since this is a well-trod culture war battlefield.
But its truly annoying to have to listen to the standard anti-gun positions trotted out once again without grappling with any of the other factors at play.
When only a couple months ago an attempted mass shooting at a church was stopped by at least TWO armed staff... and a guy with a truck.
Yes, it turns out that 'good guy with a gun' can be an effective counter to these threats.
So when the Dems once again trot out the gun control agenda I can only assume they're acting in bad faith because the only other explanation is having the memory of a goldfish.
faceh
18hr ago
Its also entertaining to me, or else I wouldn't persist so much.
I actually get where they're coming from. I was taught a narrative for 20 years that women generally dislike being told what to do, that you should be nice and unthreatening when talking to them, and that "no" unequivocally means "no" every time, rather than "CONVINCE me."
You really have to internalize rules 1 and 2 (be attractive, don't be unattractive) and then notice how if you're attractive, you are already 80% of the way to winning, you just have to play the game correctly and overcome some token amount of reluctance and 'close the deal' (for whatever "the deal" is). This means being assertive and, frankly, treating them as if they don't know what they want, and you're just the man to give it to them.
One observation that really made it click for me was "if they really want you to stop, they'll leave/avoid you." If they aren't actively packing and heading for the door, you're still in play. For some people reading actions comes naturally. For the guys who have been taught their whole lives to take women at their word, they're left VERY confused as to why ignoring their words would work so well.
I'm calling it, this turned out to be an excellent Scissor Incident.
There is insufficient context to judge the situation or the participants, but taps into multiple underlying prejudices that audience has to impact the personal conclusions they reach. For some this is clearly a creepy brown migrant perving on vulnerable girls. For others, clearly a delinquent with illegal weapons harassing a relatively innocent bystander.
The arguing over whether carrying bladed weapons is 'normal', or at least understandable given the potential dangers, or actively a sign of a juvenile delinquent, the inability to truly ascertain the race of the guy filming, just going off the accent, the somewhat muddled story about what led to the incident. The various cultural cues that read different ways to different people.
The question that we definitely can't answer is what would have happened to this girl and her friends if she weren't armed, and the incident wasn't filmed. I personally doubt that this particular migrant was actually going to assault this particular girl, but yeah, the background information that girls like this have gotten raped by gangs of actual migrants sort of has to color this discussion.
Just, epistemic humility demands that you acknowledge the uncertainty and don't make bold statements of certainty when the reliable information is still very limited.
But even our generally rational forum has got people digging in on both sides, expressing high confidence in their assessment.
faceh
19hr ago
The thing about this type problem is you don't need many incidents for it be a major problem.
Doubly so if it simply was not a problem before and now its one on the increasing list of things that you have to worry about now.
Yep.
I'm critical of a good number of officer-involved shootings. I can remember that one that started shooting because an Acorn dropped on a car hood, for example.
But if there's ever a 'good shoot' its taking out someone who was literally in the act of trying to kill someone else.
Also, I train people in self-defense professionally... and knife attacks are the scariest and hardest to defend situations. Which is to say it is not reasonable to expect the officer to intervene and try to subdue the person with the blade, so shooting them really does end up as the best option, if you don't have a full-body stab-proof suit.
faceh
1d ago
LOL I was trying to find that specific one, but settled for one that was kind of close.
faceh
1d ago
Charles I was actually able to rally an army and fight a war for several years, though. I'm suggesting the current Charles doesn't even have the juice for getting a warband together in the first place.
I kind of doubt that's the main reason, actually.
I'd guess its the same reason why a lot of lower-class Americans walk around with a gun tucked in their waistband (and I do mean that, not holstered, just jammed in there). They're worried about self-defense, but mainly from each other.
We have young girls that like to knife fight too, after all.
I think it does demonstrate that people are starved for a heroic/mythic figure to rally around or organize under and to inspire them to collective action towards some (ideally) righteous goal.
We're really short on such people these days. No politicians really live up to their own hype. Trump's reality warping field is strong enough that people DO find him inspiring. But he is simply not a 'leader of men' in the sense that one can't imagine him at the front of a cavalry charge on a battlefield or marching into a conquered city to personally accept terms of surrender.
Unlike, say, George Washington or Ulysses S. Grant.
Made all the worse in the U.K. which has a literal king who has a literal sword and in theory has the ability to deploy the military inside and outside the kingdom.
But, and maybe some British Citizen can clarify, its also impossible to imagine the British military rallying under the king's declaration to purge the isles of the invading hordes or what-have-you. Just, wouldn't happen under the current structure of things and social expectations.
And so, the right is really groping around for ANY figure that could possibly rouse their tribe to war and actually hold the coalition together long enough to rout the hated enemy. And they grasp upon a 13-14 year old girl with behavioral issues as their long-awaited queen.
And hey, the U.S. does it too. Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny, Shiloh Hendrix... just 'normal' people who happened to pull off a 'win' in a very specific place and time, and weather the onslaught of publicity and scrutiny, and did something that lefties really didn't like.
They get elevated to the status of 'heroes' but man, they pretty much fade out once it is clear they don't have the chops for maintaining the spotlight, much less being the core of a movement. And who does? Who can you actually imagine being dynamic enough to challenge existing power structures, stable enough to not fall to personal scandal, and somehow also strategic enough to win meaningful, repeated victories when it counts.
AI is good for creating imagery from that slightly-more-idealized world you wish you lived in. I do it pretty often, to create a vision of the future that I find appealing and would like to live in/escape to. But I try not to very directly make alternate versions of the present, especially one that supposes people or individual persons are different than who they really are.
That is, I don't want my actual perception and memory of reality to be supplanted by a version that I prefer but that simply isn't correlated with the truth. Believing the true things even when you'd prefer the true things be something else means NOT believing the false things even when they are exactly what you would prefer be true.
No. A 14 year old girl is not going to rally a nation to war, no Trump is NOT a divine instrument of retributive justice who also has six pack abs and a ten inch penis (he does alright, regardless, mind), no Zelenskyy is not some genius defensive strategist who can beat back Russian invasion via sheer grit and guile (and billions of dollars of aid and western weapons), no Luigi Mangione is NOT an avenging Saint, so on and so forth.
But people do, really really do, want that idealized version to be real and true, which is probably why they're ready to accept the digital fictions so readily. Which spells very, very bad things for our shared epistemic environment.
faceh
3d ago
Too easy to game by making predictions about things that no one cares about, and are easier to gauge.
You know, this is a valid point. "my calibration is perfect when it comes to predicting coin flips, dice rolls, and card turns!"
That's the benefit to a somewhat adversarial system, you're forced to actually pick something that someone reasonably disagrees with you about and cares enough about to take on some risk. so it must be more meaningful.
but I think one can learn not to take it thay way.
I'm pretty close to that. I'm actually getting a little flippant about tossing out bets, even if I'm not too interested in the topic.
I actually made 50 bucks on Kalshi yesterday betting that Starship wouldn't launch, on the logic that if it didn't launch, I would be sad, and money would cheer me up some.
Even though it's super awkward, this is my favorite norm of the rationalist community, because you don't realize how reluctant people are to make specific, testable predictions until working out the terms of the bet forces them to.
Yep.
I think its less awkward when its actually a norm, but sometimes it does get used as a backhanded way to 'beat' someone by claiming "hah, you don't actually believe [thing] unless you put money on it!" Sometimes there's just too much uncertainty or the terms are inherently poorly-defined, even if the belief is tightly-held.
But that said, man, when you know there's some status hanging in the balance (i.e. if you 'lose' a few bets people might keep using that to undermine your arguments in the future), even if you're perfectly calibrated (i.e. you win your 50% bets 50% of the time) a couple losses in a row can make you feel like you're losing face.
Prediction markets offer a decent alternative because it makes the situation less directly adversarial. I would kill for there to be a way to publish your own positions in a way that others can verify and take positions 'against' yours, without it locking both of you into "one must win, the other must lose" proposition.
Gardening or light landscaping.
Raising chickens, if your zoning allows.
DIY home improvement projects that aren't structurally critical. Teach the kids how the permitting systems works (partially serious there).
If you have trees, you can install a small zipline.
Treehouse, or a similar small construction project that they can then manage and maintain. My friend had his kids build a small aquaponics system and they could grow whatever they wanted in it (aside from weed).
faceh
6d ago
This won't fully answer your question but will put you in the right rabbit hole:
faceh
6d ago
O’Neil cylinders would enable space farming, but again, we have the difficulty of sourcing the materials
Yeah, hence:
At current launch costs, you’d have to bring back a lot of minerals to break even.
Would be part of a two-pronged strategy. Get as many materials as you can that are already in orbit, and convert those to productive uses in orbit.
Transferring foodstuffs to the ground is a lot cheaper, once you've already grown them. Or to the nearest actual colony, if we get that far.
Fuel costs is probably the only truly unavoidable one, it is possible to be 'stuck' in space in a way that's not quite true in the ocean, if you have no more energy or no more materials that can be used to transfer momentum.
But there are options that are less reliant on bringing fuel with you (railguns/space cannons, solar sails, space elevators, to name a few). Massive engineering challenges for each, though.
faceh
6d ago
Hi, one of the 'actual lawyer' denizens speaking, you're doing great, please keep that up.
Being able to summarize legalese in human-readable terms is probably the most immediately useful part of being a lawyer.
faceh
7d ago
Kids can get T2D and athero, so merely having robust new cells wouldn't fix things completely.
This does sound like a problem that can be solved via pharmacueticals, some chemical that breaks up the plaques (without hurting other cells), and removing the plaque from the blood would probably involve filtering (possibly via an external device?) and reintroducing it.
It sounds more like an oil change type problem, rather than an engine swap type problem.
faceh
7d ago
Is this considered an actual symptom of 'aging' wherein its inevitable as one gets older? I mean, do we see old people without much plaque as often as we see them with it (Yes yes, accounting for the survival of such persons to old age).
And likewise, if there was a mechanism for preventing the buildup of plaque in the body, wouldn't that also be impacted by failed cellular replication?
Since there are certainly other animals that have cardiovascular systems that nonetheless live an extremely long time.
faceh
7d ago
There are a whole lot of factors in aging that by definition can't be cured by DNA repair because things in body that intentionally have no major maintenance mechanism after reaching adulthood keep deteriorating from plain physical stress and wear.
"intentionally" is a weird word to use there, what do you mean with that?
Likewise "after reaching adulthood." This implies that these maintenance mechanisms existed prior to adulthood. Which implies they could be re-activated.
faceh
7d ago
The thing is, the body has many built-in repair mechanisms, unlike your average engine, and in theory (i.e. we do observe this in nature) is able to keep repairing things 'indefinitely' if it is able to function at full capacity.
One of the major drivers of 'aging' appears to be the breakdown of the repair mechanisms. Including the repair mechanisms for DNA in the cells. But that, too, is downstream of damage to DNA. And eventually damage to the DNA accumulates and outpaces the ability of the repair mechanisms to repair.
Bolstering the natural repair mechanisms is likely to get us a lot of improvement on the longevity front.
There will almost certainly need to be other interventions for certain ailments, though. Big one would be accumulated damage to the brain, due to blunt force trauma or similar damage that is additive over time with no natural means of repair.
faceh
7d ago
Why does the heart/circulatory system break down, if not due to the failure of the cells to properly replicate over time, thanks to DNA damage?
Aging won't be cured by simply repairing damaged DNA
Uh, ackshully, that's approximately where the state-of-the-art on anti-aging is heading.
Sirtuins are involved in DNA repair, which allows cells to keep replicating accurately, which is what keeps you alive and minimizes the effects of 'age' as we understand it.
There's currently a LOT of research into Sirtuin activators for this reason.
This might be a part of the book that gets borne out really well in the end.
I'm a Malaysian who now lives in Sydney and no, the Malaysian food joints in Sydney are not the same. I have lived here for six years, and in that span of time I have only managed to find one authentic restaurant (which I only found last week. Yes it took me six years to find one). Not gonna lie, I nearly teared up when eating the food.
Tell me precisely what would stop you from producing food that is identical to back home, same ingredients, same process, in your current country, other than "I've got other things to do with my time."
Is there any intrinsic reason that "authentic" Malaysian food can only be made in Malaysia, if a person who knows the recipes is available?
The amount of variety your city offers may satisfy you, but no, it isn't a representative sample of what the world has to offer.
What possible ingredient(s) can not be shipped to any other given country, on ice or otherwise, so as to produce them the exact same way they are back home. We can overnight any package from any first or second world country if needed. There is no physical limitation on this factor under current tech.
And more to the point, what possible combination of ingredients can produce a truly unique sensation that isn't similar to some other dish that you're familiar with?
Humans have a finite capacity for taste. There's only so many combinations of salty, sweet, sour, spicy, bitter, umami one can produce. I'm familiar with the basic 'philosophy' of cooking, but also that flavorspace is pretty strictly bounded by what humans are capable of sensing.
You can vary the textures, the consistency, the 'mouthfeel,' the temperatures and acidity and crispness. Indeed, I get the sense this is precisely what the best chefs on the planet are doing to come up with 'new' dishes.
But these foods aren't breaking the laws of physics. They're utilizing mostly the same constituent parts, just in different configurations.
Is there any evidence that there's anything resembling a truly 'infinite' diversity of possible food experiences available?
Is there some food experience out there that I can LEGITIMATELY only experience if I take a trip to some other country?
Things are clean, and generally quite safe - safer than in many Western countries to be honest (look up the crime stats in a city like Beijing and compare that to say London. There's no comparison
It's really too bad, then, that East Asians are self destructing by failing to reproduce. I'd like these cultures to survive and persist as unique societies. But they don't seem to want to.
This is my larger point. We're going to lose so, so much in the short term because we just decided hedonism was preferable to exploration.
If the moon was full of gold nuggets which you just had to pick up, that would still not pay for the expense to bring them to Earth.
Rookie mistake, you can usually make better use of those by manufacturing things in space anyway. (there's an Isaac Arthur video for everything).
Just imagine the settlement of the Americas in a world where every plank of wood had to be shipped in from the old world for the first 100 years.
Yep. But when the boats got big enough, now we can import whole fucking bridges from China.
We're really just quibbling about scale here. If enough industrial capacity gets built in space (robots probably a necessary step here) it brings the cost of operating in space down rapidly.
The question is why would humans 'prefer' to edge out into space and expand horizons for everyone.
And my point is, as stated:
I look around and realize that the mindset of people who both appreciate why space is important AND have the chops to actually build the industries necessary to realize an outer space economy is incredibly rare, especially on a global scale. I'd guess a majority of humans are focused on/optimized for bare survival on the day-to-day, another huge chunk, especially in the West, are in a distracted hedonism loop, and of the remaining who might otherwise learn towards space exploration, many (half?) have been mindkilled by lefty politics, effective altruism, or some other nerd-sniping ideology or political orientation that diverts their focus.
So its simply a matter of lack of humanity's real will to do something, to sail beyond the horizon without any guarantees of what was out there, or if they'd survive or ever return.
But as stated, EVERYTHING ELSE is out there. Its pretty much self explanatory why someone would want to leave earth to check it out, unless they just felt too comfortable to be budged. But that only lasts as long as our sun does. So once again, we either get off this rock, or we die, never knowing the answers.
Yeah, but I'd accept "this girl heard the stories of migrant rape gangs and her response to the threat is to carry weapons around" as a feasible explanation.
Of course, if its an actual organized gang, the knife and axe won't ultimately protect her either.
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