rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
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User ID: 1473
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
The story of how and why they did this is long, and despite being matters of public record, not widely known, but that explains the difference.
Could you provide links to this story, or at least provide a hint where to start looking? It seems worth knowing more about, if only so other countries can avoid the American issues.
5 minutes is true for my experience of urban Europe and Asia. In both one can drive further to a big box store and do weekly shopping, but walkable grocery stores are near major walking commute routes and sell quantities of food that the single person can carry back to their home.
I usually buy fresh groceries daily 5 min from my house (but 10 seconds off my route) on my commute home and nonperishables 1.5 hours away by bus once a month.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
This is the opposite of how grocery stores actually work in true urban areas: in the walkable urban area, the grocery store (and its selection) scales to fit the space available, so that it can afford to rent out a profitable location. My neighborhood grocery is less than than 30 ft wide and 90 ft deep on the ground floor of an old 3-floor building, but that building is halfway between a residential area and the subway and right next to a bus stop, so the foot traffic on the sidewalk is on the order of 10 people per minute. (The walk from subway to residential area is 10 minutes, tops.) They do their best to lure in customers by placing fresh fruit and sale items literally on the sidewalk. (I hear this would not work in America, because all the food would grow legs and walk away.)
Before a recent move, this grocery store was in an adjacent building with even less floor space (which building was torn down to install a 20-floor monstrosity). A tradeoff is made to between selection and bulk: the "snacks" aisle only has one, maybe two display items of each product, and the average American grocery run (with a grocery cart) would buy them out of their standard inventory. (They don't have grocery carts, the aisles are too narrow for them.) Fruits and vegetables are available fresh and in bulk, but you get what is seasonal or standard for local cooking. You pay a lot more than at a big box store like Costco, but that's the price of convenience and for having a store halfway between the subway and the residential neighborhood.
But I don't think the store would possible in America. The only parking is the loading area in the back, the display which lures people in would be subject to too much theft for the sole proprietor to make a profit, the aisles are too narrow for wheelchairs, and the entryway has a few stairs up from the sidewalk, which would fail any ADA requirements.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
How do Chinese children learn to read, if their every word is an ideogram? Do they all have abysmal literacy rates, like these "balanced literacy" children from the US?
First of all, there are only ~3000 commonly used Chinese characters, and they contain patterns which make them easier to memorize once you memorize a few hundred. At one character per day, you can learn all the characters in 12 years of schooling. Realistically, the characters are introduced much faster than one character per day and used much more frequently.
One might compare this to the number of phonetic exceptions in English: I remember 5-10 new words for the spelling test every week, from 1st grade to 9th grade.
Note however that if you are going to memorize English words without learning them phonetically, there are many more English words than Chinese characters. A few orders of magnitude more.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Circumstantial evidence suggests that it was Spain:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/poland-mystery-divers-gdansk-port-energy-oil-gas-infrastructure/
Kidding, but something tells me that Poland has looked into these divers and as a result has a pretty good idea who blew up the pipeline.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Maybe affordable unit requirements mess with this? idk
"New residential development" in NIMBY cities (as opposed to rural America) usually means tearing down existing single-family homes on large lots and replacing them with high-density housing on small lots, which consists of multi-floor, multi-family apartments, at least 20% affordable or subsidized units, and no yards. While the developer makes a lot of money on these due to the high-density, the price paid per household is almost always lower than the area average, the area loses some of its greenery, and the average social class of the area falls.
I think getting rid of the affordable housing requirement would result in some developers focusing on large high-density, high-cost, high-quality condos near in-demand areas, but the affordable housing requirement puts a limit on unit sizes and quality overall, and makes NIMBY the equilibrium position of a neighborhood.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Five years ago (pre-LLM) the Chinese were already been working on AI for automating court judgement on the theory that it would be more efficient and fair. Lawyers and law are one of the major areas in which next-generation LLMs have the potential to be very profitable.
It's amusing how his reasoning is similar to @pointsandcorsi's (although much more careful and conservative, especially with forecasts) and thus passes for academic content, yet pointsandcorsi's output merits a permaban on an obscure forum.
Huh? @pointsandcorsi was banned for a comment in a thread about James Webb, and it was a week-long ban, not a permaban (as evidenced by their most recent top-level post which started this thread):
https://www.themotte.org/post/240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/44716?context=8#context
Is there some other event that @pointsandcorsi discussed that I missed?
Oh, I see. They were banned for this post.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
I'm annoyed at the reporting requirements too, but the mirror image of money laundering is tax evasion, and governments are very motivated to prevent tax evasion by any means possible, up to and including totalitarian monitoring of all money flows.
With respect to the specific requirements to report foreign accounts: the reporting requirement is clearly stated in tax instructions and up to a few years ago the IRS was remarkably lax about requiring people (with less than $50,000 in their accounts) to report on time. The form for reporting foreign accounts even included checkboxes where one could state one's "reason for reporting late": "I forgot" and "I didn't know I had to" were valid options.
Granted, I'm still a bit confused by the reporting requirements and process for large wire transfers.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
What's the point in forgiving someone who is dead? We're not going to forget mass murder, and we're not going to prosecute anyone for it either (now that they are all dead or prosecuted). So why forgive? What does it even mean to forgive someone you don't - and can't - know personally?
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
There is another aspect to this. If you allow the victims a say in the punishment it increases the probability of victim intimidation for certain crimes, especially if the legal punishment is weak. The victim of a house invasion for example has to worry that requesting a higher sentence will result in their house being invaded again as soon as the perpetrator is out of jail. In Korea this was recently an issue as a 12 year old rape victim decided not to pursue charges against her home invading rapist, who was looking at 2 years in prison.
But code is just math, math is just code, and protein folding is just the intersection of the two!
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
As a single point of data, a far-left millennial friend of mine (who probably thinks I'm a stealth conservative based on the conversations we used to have about feminism) blew up when I said I had started a diet and begun to lose weight: "Dieting doesn't work," "I've noticed you have some toxic ideas about weight," "I've heard you making insensitive comments before," etc. They then recommended I read a Health At Any Size activist's autobiography to engage with these ideas because she's "very eloquent."
The book was mostly personal and second-hand experiences of trauma due to people pointing out morbid obesity and its negative externalities. There was a whole chapter about doctors and the medical establishment being shaming and misguided. I scanned the bibliography for any academic papers (now on my reading list), but most of the references were to articles from the likes of Huffpost. Then I gave up on the book.
As regards the issue of obesity, I do think the problem is systemic: the US population has lost its ability to cook proper healthy food at home, has lost the last remnants of a culture which despised "gluttony," and has been brainwashed by Big Ag to think that eating more and more is normal, and that it's all genetic. Meanwhile Big Ag has hired flavor scientists to engineer hyperstimulus into food, hires lobbyists to keep politicians from addressing the problem in any meaningful way, and pays useful activist idiots to write books about Health At Any Size.
However, as an individual, I don't have many options other than to tune out the propaganda, establish my own system, and live my life of moderation. If that makes me "toxic" and "insensitive," ... fuck it. I'm not sacrificing my pursuit of excellence for some moral fashion.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
If you're actually raising a child, would you tell that child at some point in their life that you had had an abortion previously?
I am in the situation of being the baby that was supposed to be aborted, but contractions started and so I was born instead. It wasn't really a choice on my mother's part: she needed to undergo chemotherapy and they couldn't do it while she was pregnant.
I think I first understood the import of this story in late middle school, and it didn't have much of an effect on me: I was surprised, but my parents love me and our relationship didn't change. I probably went back to thinking about what teenage nerds think about. Now that I think back on that story it just makes me feel lucky. But I'm an outlier who leans toward stoicism, positivism, and "life is tough. Get over it". YMMV.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Ok. If you are specifically talking about the people who rule nations, I can agree with you that cost externalization is rampant on the basis of the many nations that have been financially ruined by their wealth-extracting elites.
However, there are whole categories of private proprietors whose business models are explicitly extractive. Notice how most of the pre-Covid profit of large corporations was due to "financialization," which translates to roughly "taking out low-interest loans on our assets, guaranteeing short-term profits." You may also notice how most private equity deals are structured to merely externalize long-term costs onto subsidiaries (and other investors) while extracting short-term profits, or how whole sectors of the economy will lobby for special protection. What is a farm/CHIPS subsidy, if not externalizing the cost of business?
I'm skeptical the Kursk was about national pride at all, although I would believe you if you told me it was corruption or officer-level CYA. Nuclear submarines, their limitations, their strengths, their uses, and their construction are highly prized national secrets, to it stands to reason that the Russian Navy would be reticent to welcome foreign aid, let alone rescue subs or divers from NATO navies, which would no doubt be beaming video direct to Langley.
To put it another way, from the perspective of Russian Naval command, the secrets of the Kursk are arguably worth more than the lives of the crew (even before accounting for corruption and CYA), as those secrets protect all the other submarine crews. But telling that to the public in so many words is a great way to ruin future crew recruiting efforts.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
It was bungled, but I'm skeptical face played any part in that calculation. Doesn't the rationalization "the lives of 10 sailors is worth our nuclear submarine secrets" have enough explanatory power?
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
But national sovereigns don't internalize the costs of their mistakes or reap the rewards of their enterprise like private proprietors do.
Really? I can think of more cases where sovereign nation-states do "internalize the costs of their mistakes or reap the rewards of their enterprise like private proprietors do" than I can think of cases where they don't, unless by "sovereigns" you are referring to tinpot dictators who "externalize" failures by blaming their failures on foreign actors. Poor social policy can f-- up demographics, which weakens the state. Poor farming policy leads to crop failure. Poor educational policy leads to low labor productivity. Failure to safeguard the borders leads to loss of territory. Failure to balance the books leads to national default, usually by way of hyperinflation (with a singular exception in the USD, which is supported by its use in international trade). Environmental pollution can be externalized, but it's much easier for an individual land proprietor to externalize pollution. Honestly, I'm failing to see how nations are different here.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
I actually agree with you that the cause of "excess deaths" is always worth looking into. In the context of the discussion about potentially long-term vaccine-associated mortality rates, however, it sounded like you were establishing a bailey: "There are a lot of excess deaths which have not been investigated, therefore vaccine effects are likely." My apologies if that was not your intent.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
The article you linked is from early January 2022. In 2021 (the Omicron wave!), excess deaths could attributed to Covid directly or to the general failures of the healthcare system as the system was dealing with Covid (including people hesitant to seek care due to Covid concerns).
Frankly, your link makes me more skeptical of you.
you better believe no respectable institution is even going to be looking at vaccine side effects, not with their grant money controlled by the NIH.
There are 25+ countries in the world with functional public health establishments. Surely one of them is actually doing follow-up studies on vaccinated vs. unvaccinated populations. I'm sympathetic to the idea that the vaccines were a population-level experiment with unknown 4+ year side effects, but ... it's been two years now. We should start seeing signals.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Unfortunately in the context I heard this Allie was not a known referent (to me), but a person who goes by they. I fear the experience made me a bit jaded.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
The most convincing argument for trans conversion therapies comes from outcomes. Trans activists will tell you that to not provide gender-affirming care to minors is encouraging kids to kill themselves.
So I looked at the literature. There has never been a randomly controlled study on gender-affirming care as currently practiced (according to trans activists, it would be unethical?!), and for the studies that remain, it seems like outcomes (suicide rates) are comparably improved for adults who undergo surgery and who undergo supportive social transition.
But hey, if you want to end your germ line, that's up to you.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
I'm a bit out of the loop. Are warrants required in the US, or is there absolutely no oversight?
Where this gets very interesting is when the database gets dense enough and DNA testing gets good enough to identify anyone, even people whose not at all in the database. "The state of Pennsylvania is looking for a male suspect age 20-25, height 5'10" to 6', with blue eyes, blond hair, sharp nose, and small ears, in the Amish community."
Also, give the population 10 years to acclimatize to this, and people will start asking why we don't do DNA testing for nonviolent crimes.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
They could as well just blockade the entire island until Taiwan gives in.
Blockades are an act of war, so they would earn some of the sanctions that are currently reserved for Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
More importantly, the US has a history of being dedicated to freedom of navigation in the Taiwan strait. So if CCP really wants to enforce that blockade they are going to have to start by attacking ships of the US Navy. Unlikely.
Wow. That is a crazy ruling. That's basically holding that society must provide some form of shelter to everyone, either directly or via land-grants at the location of their choice, and it must be situated within city limits. I thought declarations like that were usually constitutional amendments or acts of congress, not court decisions.
As a heartless pragmatist, I would like to point out that the local prison is shelter, and usually has plenty of capacity. There is also a ton of room for innovation in public shelters/public housing: public office space is not used at night which could double as shelters, public parking space could be requisitioned for the contruction of shipping container capsule hotels, and cheap homes could be bought up and partitioned.
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