roystgnr
22d ago
I think the key words here are "aimed" and "government agency". Amazon famously didn't make its first annual profit for nearly a decade, but investors were still expecting profit eventually, estimating the likelihood of net profit in the long run, and wouldn't have funded it indefinitely if that expectation ended. A government agency has no such aims and no such limitations, whether or not it does its own production, but at least if it has to procure from among competing third parties there's someone who has an incentive to keep costs down.
roystgnr
22d ago
If the murder rate stays constant, but “rate per potential exposure” gets worse, someone is getting exposed at a higher rate.
Just the opposite. murders / population = murders / exposures * exposures / population. If murder / population is constant while murder / exposures increases then exposures / population, the exposure rate, must be decreasing inversely.
Shouldn’t it be strictly easier to tell which neighborhoods have turned into death traps?
Is it? I know there are sites that give neighborhoods "walkability" scores, but at least the first one I pulled up is only giving a theoretical number based on the mass transit availability, distances to the nearest grocer/cafe/school, etc; I'd have no idea how to find an actual number of people who walk down a particular street (or who drive in a particular area - the only armed robberies I found out about first hand were at a stoplight and in a parking lot) on an average day.
roystgnr
23d ago
nation-building wasn't yet a dirty word
Even before 9/11, "nation building" was enough of a dirty word that popular opposition to that exact phrase helped give the Presidency to ... checks notes ... George W. Bush.
I think Bush did realize that 9/11 gave him ... not a blank check, but a ton of latitude ... but he also realized that he was cashing in that latitude just by reversing his campaign's attitude and launching major foreign wars, and so he was naturally (if mistakenly) reluctant to go all the way and admit that any such war wouldn't actually be worthwhile unless and until we built a non-hostile nation in place of the one the war knocked over. We instead just prayed that the Northern Alliance would step right into the power vacuum and develop such a nation for us, and so instead of sending in your 500,000 troops to rebuild we just sent in ... 5,500? Roughly one person for every 3,500 Afghan people? That sounds like such a tiny force that I'm tempted to look through the wiki history for vandalism, but in any case it was enough to handle the "knocked over" phase of the war admirably; it was only afterward that we should have either left entirely or gone in on rebuilding en masse rather than hoping to get away with the "advisory" gambit alone this time.
roystgnr
23d ago
Source: you made it up and it sounded too good to check.
A couple months ago Elon Musk reposted this tweet including: "Be very, very strict with SNAP, Section 8, and EBT. Force these do-nothings to get up and go to work." This might say questionable things about his thoughtspace or his priorities, but not his money. The net worth of the world's richest man increased by $200 billion last year.
roystgnr
24d ago
I think there's room to ask about whether, even as the crime rate-per-population has gone down dramatically, the rate-per-potential-exposure has been less changed or has gone up. As Scott says, "We’re a safetyist culture"; we avoid risks more than we used to. We also have more attractive alternatives to risks - where I would play sports in the street or at worst play video games in person with the neighborhood kids, my children go to the rock-climbing gym or play networked video games with their friends farther away. I grew up in a residential area where once I got old enough I could walk to a convenience store, perhaps past some sketchy houses; my kids are growing up in a giant suburb where it wouldn't matter if the houses were sketchy because there's nothing they could get to on foot regardless.
On the other hand, the answer might just be "no, the rate-per-potential-exposure has gone down too". Or it might be that this isn't a sufficiently well-defined metric, because in a big country there's always someplace where it's just too dangerous for an innocent person to go and someplace else where it's perfectly safe and there's no obvious way to decide how to weight those places when averaging.
roystgnr
24d ago
Eventually good times are replaced by hard times, and hegemons cease to be hegemons. Thus any prediction of the form "good times make X, X makes hard times" is likely to come true eventually - including the instant case where X is "weak men".
This isn't valid logic. We can infer (after adding an unstated but natural assumption or two) that at least one prediction of that form is (at least sometimes) true, but not that any prediction of that form is sometimes true.
Consider the counterexample: "good times make carnivorous bunny rabbits, carnivorous bunny rabbits make hard times". Not obviously forever false, but not likely (I think - what's Colossal Biosciences working on these days?) to become true, and definitely not entailed by the premises.
roystgnr
24d ago
Meeting new people from all around the world? Being surrounded with proof that you've achieved a goal towards which you've been working your whole life?
I was also going to guess something about beautiful architecture, under the presumption that cities would go all out to show off their artistic skills for these things... but, is it just me, or are most Olympic villages kind of ugly? De gustibus non est disputandum, I know, but the only thumbnail that really caught my eye turned out to be a building from 1881. Hosting the Olympics is famous for entailing economically crushing expenses, so maybe custom-built Olympic villages simply cut every corner they can to try to mitigate that ... but if you're going to take on decades of debt rather than just decline to host, would it be crazy to spring for some bricks and carved stone before the creditors cut you off? I guess constructions like the luge track spend more time on camera than the residences do, but at least nice residences can recoup extra expense as resale value; the luge track, not so much.
roystgnr
29d ago
What's the right age to start with? Something like 13ish?
That might be about right. My oldest started around then, and is still the biggest Star Trek fan among my kids. I thought TNG would be the smoothest introduction (and I may have been right - we've watched a bit of TOS and my daughters find Kirk annoying), but especially when he was around 10, my son thought that TNG was often too boring and sometimes (well, just the Borg episodes, as of Locutus) too scary to be enjoyable. But even my youngest daughter was picking Star Trek episodes for her turn at "movie night" back when she was only 8.
what episodes/movies should I "make" him watch?
We started with but skipped the vast majority of season 1 TNG (just skipping ahead to the best episodes), and honestly the exact watch list wasn't a big deal. Trek of that generation was mostly written to be episodic, with background knowledge helpful for adding nuance but with the most important exposition slipped (or sometimes crammed...) into each individual script. Occasionally an episode will be a 2-parter and you can't possibly skip the first part, occasionally an episode will be a "sequel" to a story like Moriarty or Picard's Flute (but of course in those cases you wouldn't want to skip the first part), but in general each episode stands alone well.
If you want to challenge yourself with some tricky choices, then you move on to Babylon 5. Also kind of a slow start in season 1, but in its case even the slower episodes more often than not packed in some characterization or backstory or foreshadowing or outright arcplot development that makes the later episodes much more enjoyable. We skipped the pilot and maybe half of the first season there, because I didn't want to waste too much of my kids' time if they decided they still didn't like the good parts of the show, and in hindsight (they all liked it) we skipped too much.
To introduce him to the sci-fi ideas that shaped the 1960s-1990s and that all our current generation of scientists grew up with.
Could I talk you into the 1950s and late 1940s? That was mostly a previous generation of scientists, but 8 is a great age for most of the Heinlein juveniles.
Most of the games my kids like fit your definition but don't really fit your examples. Listing them all anyway, in roughly increasing order of how much I like playing multiplayer games of them:
Of course the all-time great is one I haven't introduced my kids to, because it really needs closure and if you play it in 40 minute chunks you'll need like a hundred of them: Baldur's Gate 1+2.
If you're curious about any of those let me know and I'll elaborate.
One of my kids likes playing Peak with her friends, but the rest of us haven't tried it yet.
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