Just to add my two cents into the whole disgusting affair - it reminded me of genre of movies and documentaries in my homeland of Slovakia with respect to Romani people, so I was somewhat inoculated. There is even a "thriving" boutique tourist segment where people are shown the worst gypsy slums either the urban ones such as Lunik IX or literal 3rd world villages we call "settlements" in Slovakia (here is aerial view of another one), where we have news pieces such as rats feasted on a body of little Roma boy, aged 18 months. Here is a video from that particular gypsy settlement related to another fatality due to fire.
Roma people live in Slovakia and elsewhere in Europe for centuries since they moved there probably from Punjab region of India. As far as I know, they faced incredible levels of racism with laws such as in Switzerland in 1510 where they were supposedly put to death on sight. The problem seems to be intractable, during communism gypsies were forcefully integrated with somewhat mixed results: while in some cities such as capital of Bratislava the effort was relatively successful - they literally put Romani families into blocks with soldiers and police officers. But elsewhere such as with Lunik IX it resulted in unbelievable slum. The sad thing is that while relatively substantial proportion of Romani people are assimilated and have decent life, there seems to be this permanent underclass of gypsies living in slums rife with alcoholism and cheap drugs such as toluene. You may integrate/save individuals but culture and population as a whole just propagates into the next generation.
Exactly. Germany itself has the same issue as they want to connect offshore wind in North Sea to industrial heartland in the the south. The cost of 700 miles long SuedLink with transmission capacity of only 4GW widely fluctuates between EUR 10 billion and EUR 24 billion and it is not even started as it is mired with thousands of municipalities waging lawfare against having high-voltage lines crisscrossing the countryside. Tell me again about political impossibility of nuclear power.
As the OP said, people vastly underestimate the numbers we are talking about when it comes to electricity storage. Germany consumes around 500 TWh of electricity a year. One pump-storage power plant like Goldistahl has capacity of 8.5 GWh built at the cost of EUR 600 million in late 90s and early 2000s. This capacity is consumed in around 10 minutes in Germany even without any consideration of actual potential output of the storage. If you want to have reserve for weeks of electricity generation at a time, we are talking about thousands of such pump-storage power plants with the cost of hundreds of billions of EUR - even if it is literally impossible to build more than couple of dozens in Germany due to required geological conditions, not to even talk about ecological and other problems these power plants represent. For the cost of 1,000 pump-storage power plants to cover the demand for 1 week if needed, you could literally build 54 newest Olkiluoto 3 style super expensive nuclear reactors and produce 648 TWh of stable base electricity a year - so 30% more than is needed.
georgioz
1yr ago
Yes, the OP mentioned the fact that even if we take the EA utilitarianism into account it is hard to calculate utility lost by killing untold number of moths and larvae compared to inconvenience of not crushing them when walking around the tiny apartment. Another interesting thing that jumped at me was that the EA poster decided that next time she has to kill the insect ASAP, informed by emotional response of seeing moths dying slowly. To me it is interesting to compare with how EA is so obsessed by saving future unborn people. I am very glad that this got posted, unlike your accusatory oneliner.
Maybe you are not aware of it but many countries - including USA since 2013 - declared obesity itself as a disease. The decision makers in American Medical Association openly admit, that they completely abandoned long-standing criteria for diseases such as disease having some symptoms as opposed to being symptom by itself. Imagine for instance declaring malnutrition itself as a disease, it makes no sense. Malnutrition can be simple lack of food and thus not caused by anything special, or it can be a symptom of some other metabolic or psychological disease. The same with obesity, we can create a "cure" that will work 100% of the time, just admit people into anti-obesity camp where they will have their food intake as well as exercise managed. As the saying goes, there were no obese victims in Gulags or other prison camps, the "cure" is easy.
Instead what AMA did was stick with "utilitarian" definition of a disease in order to "destigmatize" the condition as the word "disease" suggests, that people may not have a control over it such as with some pathogens. Additionally if we allow this definition we can now direct the whole infrastructure used to treat diseases into this new problem. I guess this it the precursor of the new trend such as when CDC declared racism as a public health threat, who knows maybe in the future racism will become an official disease that will treated institutionally or by some brain surgery or pills.
I think a lot of that can be viewed through immense impact that boomer generation had on culture. Sixties and seventies when boomers were young adults, it was all about celebrating teenage revolt, and drugs, rock n' roll and all that. Eighties and nineties when boomers were at their prime, it was all about making money, and celebrating being fit and healthy and being full of vigor, and above all else being sexy - it was time of masculine men shagging fit women like in Baywatch. Aughts and tens is when boomers are becoming old and it is time of moralization and experiencing their failing bodies and being aware of their mortality - so suddenly grey is gorgeous and of course sex is suddenly all about power relation of men over young women of young healthy women over old desiccated boomer hags; which means that healthy sexuality has to be suddenly forbidden.
It is all display of cultural power of objectively the most powerful and narcissistic generation of the last century imposing their self-centered worldview on broader culture.
georgioz
1yr ago
Link for research: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4RgSmkm5S-k&t=1m55s
georgioz
1yr ago
Gaza is already cut off even from neighboring Egypt. So what Israel should have done is basically no change - meaning that they should continue providing water, electricity and support the Gaza in the same way as in the past. Basically pretend that nothing changed, correct?
For many generations the natives of the Belgian Congo, for example, endured the most unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the Belgians, at the hands of Europe.
Those "many generations" were around two - between 1865 and 1908 when Congo was run as personal domain by king Leopold II with all the horrible atrocities, probably one of the worst if not the worst in whole colonial Africa. The whole situation ashamed Belgians and after they annexed the country from the king, they invested heavily into Congo making it one of the most developed countries in Africa be it infrastructure and industrialization, literacy or population health and growth.
georgioz
1yr ago
Just curious, what response do you think would go against what Hamas wanted Israel to do?
georgioz
1yr ago
Of course I do understand that what follows is a lot more complicated, but I think that in general medicine should always be driven by primum non nocere - first do no harm principle and I would be much more strict in enforcing this. So for instance transhumanist things like most forms of esthetic medicine such as breast implants, trans surgeries, contraception pills, sterilizations, euthanasia, abortion and other similar or procedures or drugs would be considered outside of core publicly funded medicine. It could still be provided but under different scope let's say akin to getting tattoo or going to nail saloon and thus it should be automatically clear to the customer that the primary goal is unrelated to certain standard of this no-harm principle and that he or she should accept the risks as well as costs associated with it.
As for the part where people do not follow the medical plan or even actively sabotage it, which then requires even more resources from the system, I think having a system of deductibles like let's say in Singapore can partially resolve the problem. So the principle is that state pays for your medical bills because it is a prosocial thing to do in order to have healthy population but only up to the point. A level up from that is to involve immediate family so for instance part of the costs will be coming from their savings so that the immediate family (children, spouse, parents) has incentive to pressure that person to do something about themselves or they will be at least partially held accountable.
georgioz
1yr ago
As far as I understand the $200 trillion is the difference between liabilities and tax income if taken from the perspective of government's infinite horizon intertemporal budget constraint. It takes into account the net present value of such liability and the number is 200 trillion. I actually like this calculation even for home budget as you can put on the same playing field different type of spending. Imagine that you want to compare value of drinking a $3 coffee every day compared to let's say once in a lifetime expenditure you are about to undertake such as let's say some medical procedure or even a voucher entitling you to one free coffee for the rest of your life, which for that $3 coffee is around $20,000 net present value with around 5% interest rate. You can use this method to discover ponzi schemes if somebody tries to do magic with cash flow - as the US government wants to do.
Similarly here, the solution can only be to increase taxes to increase income to finance those liabilities, or decrease payouts which means reneging on those liabilities or some combination of thereof. Also you are correct that Social Security is a transfer from young to the old but with implicit assumption that the young will receive similar from young if they themselves are old. Except there is a huge risk that by the time it should happen the boomer or even Gen X generation will be long dead and the Millenials and Zoomers will end up with no place to sit in this metaphorical musical chairs game.
georgioz
1yr ago
What exactly is the strawman in my argument? That progressives in general believe that there is a thing called privilege, that it manifests itself not necessarily in any particular situation or person (e.g. that somebody is sexist) but that it manifests itself in systemic ways? So yes, the fact the somebody has more privilege - e.g. they are white woman as opposed to black woman - it does not mean that no sexism or racism takes place. Maybe the thing about the revolution is a little bit too on the nose, but in the end it is closer to the truth: the fact that there are women in managerial position in our company is not the issue, the systemic sexism (AKA patriarchy) is the issue.
Or let me put it this way: do you think it is strawman to think, that "run of the mill progressive" believes that there is such a thing like systemic racism or systemic sexism (AKA white supremacy and patriarchy) respectively and that it is present and can be detected in mundane situations like workplace interactions? Does run of the mill progressive believe in privilege in context of gender or race? If not, what does run of the mill progressive believe in this area?
I consider it more of an "incompetence theory", which should always be at least somewhat plausible to anyone familiar with how often even experts screw up. The real conspiracy theories were in the vein of purposeful release scenarios, engineered bioweapons, etc.
This was the weakman that media put forward as the representation of range of lab leak theories to tar them all as wild insane conspiracies, so that all the "sane" people should accept zoonotic origin as the only truth. Accepting any potential lab leak - even "innocent" one - would torpedo the whole "believe the science" shtick. Careers of scientists were damaged, social media accounts were banned and people were canceled just for mentioning "lab leak", there was no space for nuance. So let's not pretend that we had anything approaching to reasonable debate on the matter. This is what I mean that "they pulled it off".
How does a run-of-the-mill progressive expect people with much more credible claims to oppression than middle-class women to talk themselves into striving when the highly privileged are so consistently talking themselves out of it? Anyone?
We do it by politically organizing our communities to vote our candidates into power, who will then abolish systemic structures and usher forth a better world, everybody knows this you dummy. We stand on the right side of history, oppression will be defeated and all the people liberated. In the meantime using critical thinking and calling out centers of power who benefit from their unjust privilege and who perpetuate injustice is us doing the work. Remember, the question is not: Did racism sexism take place? but rather How did racism sexism manifest in that situation?
You see, the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.
Sure, but it is still incredible that they pulled it off. According to this, there are around 40 thousand wet markets in China. What is the chance that the novel coronavirus will naturally emerge in the Huanan wet market that is just 10 miles from the only lab in China that is studying bat coronaviruses? This fact alone means that lab leak theory can never be considered a "conspiracy theory", especially among journalists who must be skeptical about this level of coincidence. If there is let's say a situation where a politician randomly wins in a lottery shortly after suspicious contract decision or that people working in nuclear power plant suffer radiation poisoning from source supposedly unrelated to the reactor they work on - journalists should immediately mark this as potentially very juicy story worth putting some effort into.
The prior is just too strong, which is exactly opposite to usual conspiracy theories which start with weak prior and try to conjure evidence to boost the likelihood of some unlikely event by presenting chain of circumstantial evidence boosting the prior into plausible posterior. Lab-leak is exactly the opposite situation, even in presence of strong counterevidence it can at best be marked as a paradox - something that seems obvious but is in fact completely different. And even in the case of zoonotic origin, I would for instance find it very likely that some corrupt lab employee or a janitor sold dead infected bats from lab on the wet market instead of incinerating them. It is at least as plausible as the alternative, that a bat not native to the region travelled hundreds of miles into Wuhan with some additional not observed complications like some undetected pangolin in the whole chain. So in the end, it could still plausibly be a leak due to insufficient security procedures in the Lab and thus definitely not conspiracy theory.
In fact this whole story has completely different effect on me by virtue of lowering my trust in the system - how many supposedly zoonotic origin novel diseases we know about from our past - that may in fact be result of careless or otherwise dangerous bioresearch? Whole COVID origin can be part of some other conspiracy theory as an indirect evidence, that blatant things like this happen and that we cannot trust governments or WHO etc.
Getting rid of Biden this late in the game is simply not a winning move.
Maybe not, but Biden winning may not necessarily be a winning move either. There are people - republicans and democrats alike - who genuinely think that having a president with dementia may be severe national security threat. Presumably politicians are supposed to win for a reason, not just for the sake of it.
georgioz
1yr ago
Eventually we're going to be killing off addicts faster than we are producing new ones, even if the overall rate of addicts doesn't change.
Why? If addicts reproduce faster than the rest of the population before they die due to OD, and if addiction is heritable, then we will in fact not be killing the addicts off faster than we are producing new ones. That is my argument: susceptibility to addiction is related to overall susceptibility to impulsive behavior including things like having unprotected sex, forgetting to take pills and other risky behavior related to fertility.
georgioz
1yr ago
Apocryphally the billionaire Bill Ackman who was recently also behind ousting of Claudine Gay from Harvard may have gotten redpilled by his own daughter who is apparently very into Western Marxism and overall Social Justice, at least according to what she - a History Teacher - follows on LinkedIn.
georgioz
1yr ago
and the final third feel dangerous addictive desires in addition to pain relief and are prone to addiction and all the resulting issues if other factors in their life line up right/wrong.
This may roughly correspond to estimates that 27% of Chinese males were addicted to opium as aftermath of opium wars and wide availability of the drug. To be honest, I do not get the whole idea of how decriminalization of drugs will be so fantastic with these and other natural experiments during 19th century. There was a reason why newly discovered drugs got banned in the first place.
georgioz
1yr ago
I would be not so sure. I listened to some podcast where they had good data which supported a dysgenic effect thesis which boiled down to the fact, that getting pregnant is in modern times just another one of larger cluster of female risky behaviors ranging from having many sexual partners, having unprotected sex, being more prone to substance abuse etc. Remember, all it takes for evolution is for people to reproduce. It is "perfectly okay" from evolutionary perspective to have mother of three overdosing in her early twenties only for her offspring taken care for by welfare state to likely face similar fate.
It was obvious for a long time that Culture War was not healthy for Scott's professional career as he continuously withdrew from touching it by longer and longer pole. TheMotte started as a thread under Slatestarcodex subreddit before getting separated after it drew some heat into its own subreddit and eventually moved over here. The overall thread is that Scott became more mellow and kept himself at distance from CW stuff - and not without reason.
As for Litany of Tarsky it cannot be taken that seriously as object of destruction can be anything: human life, some other value or even Truth itself. I take it more as just a stronger way of saying "be intellectually honest". It works if it is more inward looking - don't be afraid to be wrong in your intellectual pursuit and destroy your previous belief. It does not mean you have to be Pavlik Morozov and destroy your own family by "telling truth" to police about their misdeeds because they should be destroyed by the Truth. I don't think it is supposed to be an argument in favor of always telling the truth to Kant's inquiring murderer in the skin of NYT journalist - although the edgy style of writing and general disposition of rationalist community may actually lead many to exactly that conclusion.
Who cares? That which can be destroyed by the Truth should be, immediately.
This Litany of Tarsky shit is probably the most edgy remnants of Yudkowskian writing - and it is of course highly unworkable as it can be subverted by almost childish level of effort besides numerous other flaws. As other people said, it can be used in support of anarcho-tyranny. In this case, we can investigate all Tarskyists and once we inevitably find them guilty of something, we can just hand them the rope so they can voluntary and eagerly hang each other in the name of the Truth. So the rest of us can actually "enjoy" normal society and actually do something about dishonest mercenary journalism without all the noise of litany chants from ratsphere in the background.
To me it seems that Scott is now becoming more mature and maybe he sees things more on the meta level. He realizes that some of rationalist rules can long-term lead to global Truth minimum by being attracted into local Truth maximum. We should be more careful and think about Truth in more abstract level, maybe saying that we just want to be meta-rule utilitarians can work - you can suspend some utilitarian rule in favor of other rule on some occasions like when dishonest journalists target people on our side. I for one am very happy, step-by-step at least Scott's part of the movement becomes a little bit more sane. Who knows, maybe one day he will also admit that people living in weird sex polycules may not be the most "rational" way of organizing the society. One can always dream.
But then maybe you are even more meta level as in this case I'd that it is a ultimately a very good thing that Gay is gone. Good riddance. So in a way Scott trying to indirectly garner sympathy for ghouls like Gay by making them comparable to his very own situation can be actually a proof for Scott still remaining hopeless. So maybe I should really just stay away and let orthodox rationalists duke it out with Scott in this round. Also I think attacking Ackman's wife is probably one of the more stupid moves to make, if anything I saw Ackman leaning even more strongly into his "conversion of Saul" position - not everybody can be as easily neutered as Scott back in the day when he disavowed The Motte as a result of the journalistic attack.
I can't tell if this was the intention of the President's Office when they passed the rule, and how much will be left after everything settles (or if it won't settle, and everything will just sit in storage awaiting a change of zeitgeist).
I think anybody can tell that it was the intent, at least according to the link you provided regarding the NAGPRA Act itself:
These regulations provide systematic processes for returning Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony to lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian Organizations (NHOs). The revised regulations streamline requirements for museums and federal agencies to inventory and identify Native American human remains and cultural items in their collections.
Between funerary object, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony, I think anything goes since cultural patrimony is synonymous with cultural property. And I would emphasize the word cultural is by now long hijacked by the Left: as in cultural studies or cultural sensitivity or cultural racism or LGBT culture and others. The word cultural in this context is one of the archetypal examples of "we share your language but not your dictionary", similar to words like inclusion or diversity. So if you hear something like culturally relevant teaching you cant translate it as woke, probably explicitly as a vehicle to pose as a protector of oppressed native peoples to gain power.
So yeah, I guess the exhibition curators and museum directors are now scared shitless as they probably know what is coming their direction - if they do not immediately overdo at least by factor of 10 of any measure they think is reasonable.
Sabine Hossenfelder had a good video about economics of nuclear power here. She specifically investigates two claims: that it is slow and that it is expensive. Her counterarguments are as follows:
The overall building time varies from project to project and country to country. In Japan the median construction time is 4 years and 3 months with record being Kashiwazaki-Kariwa unit 6 built only in 39 months and finished in 1996. There is nothing intrinsic in nuclear power for it to be built slowly as is proven by very recent history.
As for price, using levelized cost of energy the nuclear supposedly pricier but only by factor of 2 or 3 compared to the cheapest gas power plants. The biggest disadvantage of nuclear is huge capital cost upfront with related cost of financing the capital. Here the construction time is very important as pouring billions of dollars that sit idle for years or decades ramps up the costs significantly, it may be around 30% of the cost for a project that takes 7 years to finish.
Nevertheless I looked into cost for electricity of two latest finished nuclear power plants. The Olkiluoto-3 power plant that provides Finland with 12TWh or around 15% of electricity a year caused significant drop of electricity cost in Finland to the level of around EUR 60 per MWh. The latest Mochovce 3 reactor also started in 2023 in Slovakia , which together with two older nuclear reactors provides 55% of electricity in the country will help local energy company to fulfill the promise of keeping the electricity price at the level of EUR 61 per MWh.
The biggest advantage of Nuclear is that you can build it where you need it and connect it to the old infrastructure providing good base load of energy. No new grids needed. You have to shell out onetime payment for construction and then you are fixed for decades to come. Which may also be a good thing as was shown during the peak of gas crisis where energy prices exceeded EUR 200 per MWh due to sky-high costs of gas. Additionally it is hard to undersell the benefit of energy independence from volatile countries such as Russia or Middleast even for backup gas plants. And another addition, to me the high upfront capital costs are actually a good feature in a sense - you can build the power plant and then have very low operating costs. But more importantly the revenue from the electricity goes into homegrown industry be it construction companies and other high-tech industry while operational costs also support high-skilled operators of this huge projects at home as opposed to buying solar panels from China or even worse sending money to Russia or terrible petroregimes in Arab world or Africa.
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