I guess this is a blind spot of mine, as I just cannot comprehend the desire to keep sending people to jail for smoking weed.
I might have voted no on marijuana legalization, depending on how the law was constructed. I hate all the tacky billboards and ubiquitous stores in my state promoting a vice (even if I indulge myself on rare occasion). Evidence suggests that marijuana use is increasing, and I believe the downsides are understated. Finally, no one is actually going to jail for smoking weed.
You know, Clinton got a lot of undeserved criticism for saying he wanted abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare". Honestly, it's a great formula for a lot of things including marijuana.
We went from legal prohibition to the current gross free-for-all.
In a perfect world, there would be some government owned drug store in a non-descript building, open at inconvenient hours that sold the products people would otherwise purchase from street dealers.
Perhaps start by sharing your own definition of propaganda so that your own position can be better understood.
jeroboam
1yr ago
I don't believe you have thought through your criticism.
There's a major difference between prohibiting things that are already legal and legalizing things that are currently prohibited. De novo, there are a lot of things we would change that don't make sense to change now. Most famously, if alcohol was invented today, it would rightfully be banned or heavily restricted.
Consistency is and ought to be sacrificed for pragmatism.
jeroboam
1yr ago
This reads to me like one of those Nigerian prince emails. It seems deliberately written to repel anyone with half of brain so the only ones left reading are uniquely gullible. With luck, we'll be rid of this charlatan soon. The Republicans have a star in DeSantis and I think he easily defeats Trump in the primary, and goes on to win the Presidency. The only question is if Trump would run as a spoiler.
jeroboam
1yr ago
Love it. I've played around with GPT-3 a little bit and it's pretty easy to get it to say anything you want by phrasing the questions in a certain way.
That said, I'm impressed with GPT-3's human-level ability to rationalize when caught in an obvious contradiction.
jeroboam
1yr ago
I thought you were going to say the Republicans hurt their chances because the "correct" take was to lean in hard to Covid panic and authoritarianism.
Had Trump gone all-in on Covid, the battle lines would have drawn up differently. Democrats, not Republicans, would be Covid skeptics. Early in the pandemic this was indeed the case, with the various cringey "hug an Asian" messaging being sent out by the Democrats. But then Trump chose his side, and the Democrats by necessity chose the other.
This was by far the largest mistake of Trump's career. Had he chosen Covid maximalism, he'd still be President. People still wouldn't like him - but they'd praise his Covid leadership. Most people were very panicked about Covid until early 2022. And even though this fear was largely unfounded, the politically savvy move would have been to play into the fear. Trump failed to read the room. And he lost the Presidency because of it.
jeroboam
1yr ago
Given that Sweden has the lowest post-2020 excess mortality of any OECD country, the Republicans might have a (very slight) advantage in the long term due to fewer lockdowns. Naturally, the death rates of Republicans are going to look worse than Democrats in general due to higher age, more obesity, and other cultural factors. But I really doubt Covid lockdown policy in red states made much of a dent, and may have actually increased the number of living Republicans as opposed to the counterfactual.
The bit about Covid being "just the flu" is not something that most Republicans supported. Trump famously encouraged his supporters to get vaccinated and even urged earlier adoption of the vaccines than the FDA was willing to grant him.
The bigger differences between the parties had to do with masking policy and lockdown policy, and I think you'd be hard pressed to show that these affected mortality rates in the direction you think they do.
If you look at the religious affiliation of any powerful group in the U.S., you're bound to do some noticing.
I think the explanation is pretty simple. If Ashkenazi Jews have an IQ about 1 standard deviation above the normal, that means they are 20 times more likely to produce a person with a +3 standard deviation IQ. So in the +3 group, the percentage of people that are Jewish is going to be very noticeable. Then, combine that with network effects. People who are Jewish are much more likely to be connected or even related to these +3 people. Nothing nefarious needs to happen. Just natural talent and connections, both of which Sam Bankman-Fried had in spades.
Why does it seems to be mostly black people who are doing the noticing lately? There's also a simple explanation for that. Post-2020, there has been a huge societal push to give black people extra privileges. Things that would easily get a white person canceled are fine and even encouraged from the black community. So black people feel they have the ability to freely express themselves in a way that white people do not. They are now learning the limits of that ability.
The only thing that feels weird or objectionable about this whole thing is that it's okay to attack non-Jewish white people, but Jewish people are given special protections despite on average being much wealthier and more powerful.
jeroboam
1yr ago
Tidiness is practically immutable beyond a certain age. Your roommates are messier that you are. This likely doesn't bother then. In fact, without you they would be living in filth and fine with it.
I don't think any system of chores and keeping track will do anything except to alienate your roommates. Maybe they will grudgingly do a few extra chores, but it won't solve the root issue: they are not tidy and you are. No system is going to fix this. Notice how everyone here is just spitballing solutions without giving examples of how it worked for them. It doesn't work and will worsen the relationship with your roommates.
So... while we're spitballing, here's my proposed solution. Fix the problem with money. Hire a housekeeper to come in once a week and clean.
Second best solution: Overcome your natural tidiness and just embrace the filth.
Buy down to 5%, but I think true odds are less than 1%. MySpace still exists. The base rate of a corporate failure of this size in less than 6 months is practically zero. The only way Twitter goes away in 6 months is if there is some massive financial fraud discovered like Enron or FTX. Even then, somebody will buy the IP and run it.
jeroboam
1yr ago
IMO nobody has satisfactorily explained why AI risk outweighs, say, the existential risk of an extinction event by anthropogenic (nuclear war or catastrophic ecological disaster) or other (asteroid, supervolcano, nearby supernova). I don't think we have good handles on the relative magnitudes of risk on these. At some point you're really just acting on your priors.
I feel like we actually DO have a pretty good handle on these existential risks. Definitely we can model the likelihood of extinction level asteroids and supernovas. The base rate here is very low, and we're improving our odds by tracking asteroids. Supervolcanoes are not extinction level events.
Nuclear war or ecological disaster seem unlikely to be extinction level events. Nuclear weapons are just not powerful enough, although they could potentially reduce the population by a lot. Global warming is centuries away from being an existential concern.
Rogue AI on the other hand has the potential to kill all humans. We can argue about whether the chances are 1% or 99%. And we can argue about whether it will happen in 10 years or 50 years. But if we're drafting talent in the NBA draft of extinction events, AI gets drafted #1, and it's not even close. It combines high likelihood in the near-term with the potential to kill ALL humans, not just 5% of them or whatever.
jeroboam
1yr ago
I almost put aliens in my comment. The threat from extraterrestrials is similar to AI in that it is difficult to quantify but at the same time the potential damage is 100% extinction. And since, in either case, we have no base rate we have to make assumptions of likelihood from first principles. This is what some people have difficultly accepting, probably the same type who weren't worried about nuclear weapons in the 1940s.
I also agree that there is not much that can be done. Although actively trying to get aliens to find us does seem uniquely stupid. I guess I just get frustrated when people conflate "minor" threats such as climate change or supervolcanoes with things that are much more serious.
jeroboam
1yr ago
When Instagram was acquired for $1 billion in 2012 it had 13 employees.
Twitter by this point has a lot of technical debt and cruft, so 50 does seems like too few. But less than 1000 seems very doable. One reason that so many people want this to fail is that they're afraid that Musk is right about these workers being worthless.
jeroboam
1yr ago
Remember all those companies boycotting Facebook? Me neither. Take a look at their latest revenue and you can see it didn't matter.
If Twitter advertising is effective, then there will be plenty of demand from people who like money. The boycott will only matter if it turns out that Twitter advertising didn't work and companies were throwing money at it anyway. Which I accept is possible.
jeroboam
1yr ago
And also a place for hate mobs to gather and cancel people who fell under their gaze. Unequal enforcement meant that progressive mobs were tolerated much more than conservative ones. This unequal enforcement seems unlikely to continue under Musk.
jeroboam
1yr ago
Social networks are sticky. People won’t want to give up their networks. So even if you lose half people are still going to maintain their other half on twitter for a while
Yeah, people are underestimating this. There's a lot more that goes on Twitter besides political shit-posting. Lots of people have built careers and small fortunes on the backs of their Twitter followings. I was just listening to a podcast about "threadbois" who did just that. Are they going to turn their backs on their 100k followers they've spent years building just because Elon isn't praying to the right gods?
jeroboam
1yr ago
4D chess move would be for the RNC to put up some wacko like Marjorie Taylor Greene to siphon off Trump votes. If they played it right, they could even get Democrats to donate to her campaign.
jeroboam
1yr ago
That's something the ancient Romans understood. People like to say things like "the Roman dudes were super gay and having gay sex all the time". But there was a clear distinction between tops and bottoms where one was acceptable and the other not. And it certainly wasn't acceptable to live a homosexual lifestyle with another man as a partner. And it would have been doubly unacceptable to be pegged by your wife. Being pegged by a woman is among the least straight things that can happen to a man.
jeroboam
1yr ago
I don't think anything's changed in that regard. The hierarchy still remains as ever:
-
high status men
-
high status women
-
low status women
-
low status men
The old spinster of former times had it easy compared to the conscript whose life was thrown away during some lord's war of conquest.
jeroboam
1yr ago
Presumably because this is just imported American culture war so the relevant oppressed group is U.S. blacks. Same for all the bizarre BLM protests in countries like Ireland.
jeroboam
1yr ago
One gunpoint robbery per 5 years makes the job incredibly unsafe and the drivers were right to complain.
The risk for Apple in banning Twitter would be massive. House Republicans would launch investigations and if a Republican President is elected in 2024, anti-trust actions would certainly follow. These actions would likely be politically popular as well. It would also place Democrats in the awkward position of defending a gigacorp whose entire business model is built on exploiting labor in China.
Apple has nothing to gain and everything to lose here, and Elon Musk knows it.
Edit: It looks like DeSantis is already all over this and is calling for a Congressional response should Twitter be taken off the App Store.
jeroboam
1yr ago
Presumably because taking an action exposes one to liability in a way that just maintaining the status quo does not.
Leverage. Let's say you drop an IQ 200 person into a small village in the Dark Ages. How much value would you get from their IQ? Not much. Now drop the same IQ 200 person into an aristocratic London family in the 1800s and you could be virtually assured of world changing discoveries.
The reason that New York Jews outperform Israeli Jews is that high IQ people in the United States can leverage a large unified economy with ample resources. Whereas high IQ people in Israel have fewer resources to leverage on average.
And as other commenters have mentioned, Israel still punches very much above its weight.
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