jkf
1mo ago
Now I hope the US starts addressing the scenario of "50 Chinese container ships loaded with drones" as a real thing not as Sci-Fi scenario like "what if Martians attack D.C."
Or "what if China sends unpowered high altitude floating platforms of indeterminate payload drifting over on the jetstream?" What kind of nutbar would worry about that?
jkf
1mo ago
I’m not sure NYC has ever been safe in the last 50 years.
That's my point though -- NYC is now way safer than it's been anytime in the last 50 years -- and yet in the 1980s kids/young teens were taking the subway by themselves and roaming around pretty unsupervised. My cousin in another big city was notorious for getting lost by taking the wrong bus at around age 9 -- it happened to me once when I was with him, we were home hours late, and people were like "lol, yeah -- you shouldn't trust his sense of direction, good thing you found your way home".
Something has changed, and it's not that cities have become unsafe.
jkf
1mo ago
Children can no longer enjoy the vibrant culture of cities like London, Paris and New York as they could even in the 1980s
...
When children have access to safe cities, they develop more independence, courage and can develop more maturity.
He's suggesting that NYC should be made safe again... like it was in the 1980s?
Cities are not fucking safe, yo -- navigating them despite that fact is what actually develops independence, courage and maturity.
(the country is not safe either, but in different ways)
jkf
1mo ago
Yeah, I don't think you can go to 19th century European literature for a read on this, because non-upper-class children didn't really have free time, they were supposed to be working. Even in Oliver Twist, it wasn't that the kids were wandering around getting into random mischief and menacing society -- that was their job!
Looking at Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn/Great Brain, non-farm kids in late 19th c. America seem to have much more like what we might think of as a free-range upbringing.
jkf
1mo ago
A heroin habit is also a fun thing to do, that imbues the junky with a sense of purpose and fulfillment -- I don't happen to agree that this should be illegal, but glorifying it is clearly not great for society. (or, objectively, the users)
jkf
1mo ago
Hunter (or his associate) made to make it seem like Joe was intimately involved when he actually wasn't.
How do you know this though? Sure it's possible, but I don't see any way to tell whether it (or the alternative) is the hallucination.
Certainly not:
Republicans went over Joe's financial records with a fine-toothed comb and repeatedly found nothing.
What would they find? That's the whole point of "holding it" for The Big Guy -- if he gave it to The Big Guy, combing his financials could turn up some evidence.
jkf
1mo ago
The Hunter Biden stuff was true in regards to Hunter being a dirtbag but critically lacked the link connecting to Joe
An associate involved in some of their dealings testified under oath that Joe was "the big guy" referred to as getting a cut -- maybe you don't believe him or whatever, but that doesn't seem like an hallucination to me?
jkf
1mo ago
"Just trust me, bro" would at least have some meat to talk about in that the user might be expected to back up his opinions-- "just trust this LLM output" is intensely weak.
jkf
1mo ago
I'm not so sure on "jabs" -- AFAIK this is good idiomatic British English, but much less so in North America. It feels like the sudden memetic adoption (particularly on the part of medical authorities, which I'd expect to use more formal language as a rule) of this word here in particular has something more behind it than brevity.
"Shots" of course I buy -- "getting the dog his shots" is a fine thing to say; "getting the dog jabbed" would be very weird (in North America). Doubly so if the speaker were my veterinarian.
jkf
1mo ago
It's a good point that "I don't know anyone who died of covid" is not the only part of their personal experience that people will use to form an opinion on its severity -- virtually everyone has had or been exposed to covid by now, and if their experience was that the disease itself was no big deal, it's hard to reconcile that with a large death toll.
Like -- I don't personally know anyone who's died of prostate cancer, but I do know lots of people who've died of other kinds of cancer, so I'm prepared to believe that prostate cancer is a serious problem. If my doctor had said to me five years ago "hey, you've got prostate cancer -- this is a big deal, you might die" and I just... ignored it and it went away with minimal symptoms, I'd be less inclined to think that prostate cancer is a serious thing.
jkf
1mo ago
The issue is that you are prioritizing problems that are arguably possible (well, one of them) but have never manifested in an even directionally similar way over one that just happened a few years ago, repercussions of which were quite severe and still being felt.
I resisted "millenarian cultist" analogies so as not to be uncharitable, but you didn't want to talk about Ford Pintos, so fuck it:
It's certainly possible that Jesus will descend and start casting the goats (that's you) into a lake of fire at any moment -- this is roughly the worst thing that could happen (for you); shouldn't you prioritize Christian worship more highly than (I assume) you do?
jkf
1mo ago
Fuckin Boomers man -- the "annual % change" on your link flips positive (slightly) in 2009, 15 years before 2024.
Fifteen years into the baby boom was 1960, by which time births were well off peak and on the decline:
jkf
1mo ago
Somebody on the Scott-post did cite a paper doing exactly that -- in fact they take it a step further and look exclusively at mortality among people involved with the hospital system (where testing was manditory) but without a positive covid test. (matched cohort, 2018 vs 2020)
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-025-21782-9
Your doubt appears misplaced:
Our results indicate that during the first pandemic wave and the ensuing months, the death rate of people who were free of COVID-19 in BC (i.e., always tested negative) more than tripled that of a matched pre-pandemic cohort. In absolute terms, the group with the largest increase consisted of those with cardiovascular disorders, but in relative terms, the largest increase occurred among people who were not only COVID-negative but also had no previously diagnosed NCD, signaling that some of them may represent incident cases that escalated to death before routine detection and treatment was provided. The spike in deaths among COVID-negative people seemed to coincide with the period of almost total health system shutdown for non-COVID-related complaints.
jkf
1mo ago
All of those sound bad, but also very speculative?
We have a recent worked example of what can happen with GoF (true regardless of the true origins of covid-19); shouldn't we prioritize making sure that doesn't happen again over "stop Skynet"/"Butlerian Jihad Now" type stuff?
It's like hearing that Ford Pintos can explode due to their fuel tank design and responding with "OMG, cars can explode! Terrorists might start planting car bombs, I should work on anti-terrorism!"
jkf
1mo ago
It's not a good idea to go off such n=1 anecdotes in general.
Certainly true -- I'd consider it n=2 now though! My lifestyle absolutely involves a lot less exposure to infectious diseases than yours, so I doubt that I'm like highly immune anymore -- but would expect severity to remain mild if I get it again.
How severe were your more recent infections?
Given Marohn's published views on stroad repair, I suspect he sees the Texas solution - use part of the right-of-way for a limited-access road and part for "frontage roads" (which are actually streets in Marohn's taxonomy) and only allow access between them every few miles
I wonder if Texas got this from Mexico? This is a common pattern in high-traffic areas down there, although IME the driving experience kind of sucks that may be more for Mexico reasons than a flaw with the concept.
The issue is mostly "how do you turn left (and/or cross over) without a bunch of traffic lights on the arterial"?
In Mexico they just... put a bunch of traffic lights on the arterial, with predictable impacts on congestion -- plus the added quirk that left turns are for some reason accomplished by pulling into the slip road to your right, waiting for a left-turn light, then turning left across both directional lanes on the arterial part (also the opposite slip road I guess).
It's kind of fun, but I don't really get it.
jkf
1mo ago
I'm still not 100% convinced that the antigenic imprinting thing didn't transpire with the vaccines -- I've had it exactly once, during the Omicron wave, and don't seem to get it anymore despite the odd known exposure. Which is stark contrast with my (largely rabid vaccine fan) coworkers, who seem to be down with it all winter and still complain about side effects from booster shots.
Granted it's not putting them in the hospital or anything, but they do seem to be uniformly pretty damn sick for several days everytime -- which is worse than my initial natural exposure. Unlikely to get a good study on it, but if anything it seems like kind of the opposite of herd immunity -- I always thought that this was one of the more plausible reasons not to take the vaccine, so I get a nice glow of smugness everytime somebody calls in saying "OMG I can't even move, see you next week".
jkf
1mo ago
reports that a vaccine "merely" health risks to the recipient by 90%
Unfortunately we don't even really have enough evidence to quantify conclusively what the 'severity' benefit really was -- the initial trials were underpowered for anything to do with severity/death, and of course were terminated once the companies got their approval. (in that the control arm got real shots)
So there's no RCT to quantify this benefit, and the population-level studies are hopelessly muddled by a mixture of hard to correct for demographic confounders and sheer politics/CW. Plus all the different strains -- it's hard to say for sure, but seems clear that Omicron was very not-severe as compared to earlier strains -- so when a person got Covid is probably even more important than his vaccination status, severity-wise.
jkf
1mo ago
Meanwhile the agent who did the shooting was hiding behind the barricade and probably not visible to most of the rioters.
The picture of the gun poking out from the doorway tells the tale of the discomfort with this shoot to me -- cops 'get away' with shooting people at times where there's at least a nominal case to be made for self-defence, and this is not that.
It just looks so chickenshit -- step out into the hallway, square up, present your weapon and say "stop or I'll shoot" and I don't think anyone's complaining if Babbit keeps trying to climb through the door (which she might have!) and gets the bullet.
Officer safety is a thing, but at least this much risk tolerance is expected of any beat cop confronting an aggressive individual -- however violent the riot may or may not have been, it was clearly not a warzone, and Byrd was not a soldier.
jkf
1mo ago
it just decides "it'd be nice to have this setting" and just invents it out of thin air
I mean this happens to me a lot too -- I guess if the machines were actually good at coding this could be pretty awesome!
-"Grok, you are hallucinating again!"
-"Sorry boss; let me fork that project and code something up -- BRB."
jkf
1mo ago
I don't think we have this kind of carp where I'm at, but there are lots of smaller ones around -- we fished for them as kids. (and were encouraged to bonk them on the head and throw them in the compost, so I guess they are also considered invasive?)
I don't recall them being bait sensitive in the least -- from what I recall the technique would be "chunk of hotdog on a treble hook, dangled just above bottom near some hiding place (usually a dock that we were standing on, but hey)".
The "hiding place" and "dangled just above bottom" bits might be trickier in a river -- I'd be surprised if casting a bobber set to whatever you figure the depth might be near/behind rocks/overhanging trees/snags didn't catch the odd fish though.
jkf
2mo ago
This would work if you are planning to force everybody to ride with the robots -- in reality the ones who are causing most of the crashes are the least likely to adopt self-driving cars anytime soon; criminals and poor people. So rolling out (hypothetical) "average driver" safety-level FSD cars on an optional basis would replace the safer drivers (rich, sane people) with something somewhat worse, while leaving the ones actually causing the accidents still out there tooling around.
tl;dr -- for me to be interested, they need to be better than me -- I don't care if they are better than the average driver. The average driver is pretty bad.
jkf
2mo ago
I'm saying that the truly "average driver" as reflected in accident statistics does not really exist -- the famous "paradox" about how 80% of people think they are better drivers than average is actually kind of true. There are a certain amount of really bad drivers out there, and quite a lot more who are pretty good -- and they would be scared shitless by driving with a robot who drove like them 80% of the time, but like a drunken maniac the other 20%. (which would be as safe as the "average driver", statistically)
IDK whether FSD is even that safe at the moment -- I don't think it's knowable right now due to lack of adoption and/or public testing. Seems worse to talk about than dancing angels to me, unless somebody wants to bring some stats -- but if you insist, wouldn't people be, like, using this in prod if that were the case?
As I recall Elon promised to FSD from San Francisco to NYC 5+ years ago -- why hasn't he done so by now?
It looks like a crappy scrubber to me, but if I were so inclined I could make a functionally equivalent thing from local materials in my basement (located in North America) for something like $2.00 USD BOM cost (zero to me since I'd have everything needed sitting around down there somewhere). Yes the chainmail links would take some time, but I don't think it would be a very hard 8 hour day? If I were on minimum wage this would be better than buying the thing from this guy!
So the problem is not "it's hard to make things in America", it's "it's hard to make stupid drop-ship style crap in America and sell at a profit without some kind of gimmick" -- like, IDK -- making annoying videos about how hard it is to make things in America.
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