roystgnr
4mo ago
How about (3) - go back on giving all power to the federal government? If most issues are state or local issues, because the federal constitution's short allowlist is respected, you pretty much have to pay attention to non-federal candidates.
roystgnr
2mo ago
everything imaginable
When my father got cancer was the first time I discovered a very imaginable gap: long-term care. This turned out to be only a hypothetical problem in his case (there wasn't such a long interval between "brain damage sufficient to prevent living at home" and "brain damage sufficient to prevent living" after all...) but it's something to think about supplementary insurance for, despite how complete Medicare coverage is for so many other costs.
That's not to detract from the rest of your excellent point, though. His last several months of treatment had a price (at printed value; who knows what fraction of that was real cost vs weird provider-vs-insurer negotiation ploys) that would have bankrupted him out-of-pocket, but that was nearly free with Medicare plus a little supplementary insurance. Of course he still fought for every month, when it just took willpower rather than a life's savings otherwise aimed at his grandkids' college tuition, but if he'd had to weigh price vs benefits himself I wonder if he'd have turned it all down. (if he'd seen the future I'm sure he'd have just picked out cheap in-home hospice care instead, but the trouble with those "most medical care expense is in the last year of life" statistics is that you don't know it's going to be the last year without seeing the future)
roystgnr
7mo ago
constantly referring to Russians as “invaders” like some sort of marvel movie speech
Are you suggesting they're not invaders? "One who invades", and all that? Surely if an accurate description of actions makes them sound like Marvel villainy, the way to correct that is "don't take villainous actions", not "hope they won't be described accurately".
It’s a ridiculous, nationally suicidal vanity project
"Resist invasions by foreign armies" is almost definitional to being a nation. Don't do that and you're just prey.
by a former television actor
Do you really not understand that it's not inherently ridiculous for a former television actor to stand up to Russia? This is even more obviously reaching than your sartorial complaints.
roystgnr
1mo ago
The theory's not bunk, it's just obsolete. Even the upgrade from binary scores to continuum scores just isn't enough to catch up to something like OCEAN that generates bases for continuum scores via PCA rather than Jung+guessin.
roystgnr
2mo ago
It's okay to just ping @self_made_human; he's cool.
A brief search suggests that SSRIs are generally safe with alcohol (IANAMD; please update your will and assign medical power of attorney before mixing any drugs with alcohol based on my advice) but the combination can still "lead to more pronounced effects of drunkenness", which sounds like it could be enough all alone, especially to new users who think they know their limits. And with MAOIs (are these still used often?) interactions range from "you may become drowsy and dizzy" to "dangerous spikes in blood pressure that may require immediate medical attention".
roystgnr
2mo ago
That's exactly what I was looking for; thank you!
2x is still more than I'd have guessed based on subsequent inflation (or M2 data, which seems to be applies-to-apples) alone. I wonder to what extent that means the Fed was partly fighting a natural permanent fall in the velocity of money, vs to what extent it means we still have more future inflation "baked in", vs to what extent it means I don't understand macroeconomics. Probably around 3%/2%/95%...
roystgnr
2mo ago
Claude 3 (Sonnet, not Opus) gave a PhD-candidate-quality answer to a qualitative applied math question I asked it, so I tried a couple related quantitative questions. The easiest was basically Calc-3, and it made a sign error, and trying to get it to correct that error (it only even admitted it on my third try) made it go completely off the rails.
Formatting its math responses in LaTeX without being asked was pretty cool, though. And it was clearly ahead of GPT4 and Bard, which beat the snot out of GPT3.
roystgnr
3mo ago
some pro-sanctuary arguments
"sanctuary" is a basket of many different policies. Perhaps the easiest to support is that police who are interacting with illegal immigrants who witness and report crimes should be prohibited from assisting with those immigrants' deportation, because otherwise the incentive is for the witnesses to just not report the crimes, and thereby still not get deported, making it harder to catch criminals before they reoffend (including against citizens and legal residents).
some pro-illegal immigration arguments in general
I've long been amused by Milton Friedman's argument:
"...that Mexican immigration, over the border, is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country. But, it’s only good so long as its illegal.
That's an interesting paradox to think about. Make it legal and it’s no good. Why? Because as long as it’s illegal the people who come in do not qualify for welfare, they don’t qualify for social security, they don’t qualify for the other myriad of benefits that we pour out from our left pocket to our right pocket. So long as they don’t qualify they migrate to jobs. They take jobs that most residents of this country are unwilling to take. They provide employers with the kind of workers that they cannot get. They’re hard workers, they’re good workers, and they are clearly better off." - Milton Friedman, "What is America" lecture
Though bear in mind, this was the late 70s. Perhaps "do not qualify for ... benefits" was a reasonable blanket claim then, and crime wasn't even worth mentioning because who's going to risk deportation for stepping even slightly out of line? In the 2020s, when illegal immigrants can get free schooling (and then in-state university tuition rates, in dozens of states) for their kids, and sanctuary policies may explicitly prevent deporting many arrestees, the cost-benefit calculations may have more net losers.
roystgnr
1mo ago
what happened in Weimar.
Their obligations were denominated in gold marks and hard goods, and were impossible to inflate away with paper marks?
Screwing over our creditors and beneficiaries, and the middle class and the poor in the process (and the rich, too: capital "gains" taxes on purely-nominal gains still takes a bite out of people who can keep less of their savings cash-denominated, and the second-order effects are going to suck for everybody) ... obviously all that wouldn't be a good thing, but it would at least be an option.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Is sleep deprivation low-risk? There are major negative long-term mental and physical consequences of chronic sleep deprivation, and there are wild (like, 3-4 days in is when the hallucinations usually begin) consequences of acute sleep deprivation, so while I don't know if there are any studies showing long-term consequences of acute sleep deprivation it's definitely something I'd look into before trying out a multi-day stretch.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Assuming they can consent, no.
The assumption was "too drunk to say no", just the opposite.
roystgnr
7mo ago
I’m saying that constantly referring to them as “the invaders” instead of The Russians is performative.
No; it's precise. Most Russians, even considered by nationality, have not invaded Ukraine, and something like a third will admit to pollers that they don't even support the invasion. There's little reason, when concerned with the armies who have invaded Ukraine, to use a less precise term for them. When considering Russians by ethnicity the distinction becomes even more important: many have been among the victims of the invasion. It might be an understandable accident to lump them together with their killers when speaking imprecisely, but why would anyone ever want to do so on purpose?
their “resistance” to Russia’s invasion is going to lose them their nation, not keep it.
That's not how game theory works.
Do you think that, if they'd allowed their capital city to be taken by the columns of invading tanks, that would have allowed them to keep their nation? Don't you think that's quite gullible? Putin made no such promises, and it's not even safe to trust agreements he does make.
Zelensky’s adventure
This word choice is performative nonsense. Nobody thinks that shooting back at the people sending bombs and missiles and tanks and soldiers to try and conquer you is an "adventure".
It's weird that you assign so much agency to the Ukrainians here, and yet I haven't seen you assign any to the invaders. Since your concern for the Ukranian men isn't feigned, surely you agree that the choice to invade was an atrocity, right? Even the most ardent honest pacifists will agree that starting a war is more evil than fighting back instead of surrendering.
generation of lost men
Ukraine has had those before. If we assume for your sake that the low death estimates there are correct and the high death estimates of the current war are correct, the war has to get about 30 times more deadly before the death toll of opposing Russia exceeds the death toll of being controlled by Russia.
roystgnr
2mo ago
Chatbot Arena is awesome; what are the usage limits there?
I tried my applied math questions out on Claude 3 Opus; unlike Sonnet, it didn't make any sign errors on the easier of the two questions. It did miss an important part of the answer on the harder question ... but honestly, this is a question for which I'd pull out a reference rather than rederive the whole thing from scratch in my head, so I think my only complaint here is the overconfidence. It's not nearly as bad in that regard as Sonnet was (arguing with me for a prompt or two before admitting its sign error), but in cases where there's any grey area I'd still vastly prefer answers of the form "I think it's X, but I might be missing something" over "It's definitely X, no doubt about it!" where only 90% are actually correct.
In hindsight this should have been an obvious problem with training LLMs on published text, huh? "I dunno" and "I'm not sure but" and "I think maybe" are the domain of ephemeral chat logs; by the time you're ready to publish, even to a serious web page, you've hopefully figured out the right answer and you don't waste your audience's time with the missteps along the way ... which means that a language model trained on what you've published doesn't have nearly as much "experience" with what to do when there's a chance of a misstep.
roystgnr
5mo ago
Is the New York Times wrong?
Dismayingly frequently.
Not about this, I believe, but since the history of the NYT being bafflingly brazenly wrong about things extends from over 90 years ago to under 2 days ago, it still feels weird to cite them as an authoritative source.
roystgnr
1mo ago
What ages would you say it's appropriate for?
I'm still working through the best sci-fi from a decade ago, when reading on my own; my best opportunities for finding time to read newer stuff is to kill two birds with one stone and find things I can read with my kids.
roystgnr
5mo ago
Anybody have any experience getting kids who can read but aren't very good at it interested enough in a book that they are willing to learn on their own?
What level are they at?
Comic strip collections (my kids liked Baby Blues most, IIRC) let young readers who aren't 100% solid manage to grasp more context from the drawings.
Children's science encyclopedias are great; if the kids have some obsession (space, dinosaurs, animals, whatever) then get one focused on just that to start with.
At a higher level, Harry Potter is a classic for this. My eldest went from "slowly moving through 100 page books together because that's what mommy or daddy were pushing" to "finishing 500 page tomes by herself because nightly reading time with daddy wasn't long enough or frequent enough" astonishingly fast.
roystgnr
5mo ago
they made a lot of it up as they went along (ironically they didn't have a plan)
This is what kills the show for me. I do still recommend people watch the miniseries and maybe one season, but then at that point just stop and come up with your own headcanon about what's going on; whatever you imagine will probably be more enjoyable and more logical than what the writers put to paper.
To be fair, at least Ronald Moore had a good track record when he got his Mystery Box Show nonsense greenlit. I'd like to complain more about Disney being dumb enough to hire J. J. Abrams to kick off the Star Wars sequels ... except that their decision making hasn't started to backfire until many years and billions of dollars later, so can I really call it "dumb"? Instead I'll just kick myself for being dumb enough to go watch a Star Wars X Lost crossover in theaters while naively expecting it to be the start of a story with some consistency and payoffs and closure.
roystgnr
4mo ago
Mormon TFR is already dropping. Amish TFR is huge and seems more stable, but from such a low starting point it'll still be a couple centuries before they overtake the rest of the US even if outconversion is negligible and nothing changes.
roystgnr
2mo ago
My whole family caught some cough that's lasted months. One day had me bedridden because I'd coughed hard enough to strain a muscle. RSV, maybe? Covid testing negative and antibiotics did nothing. Not very contagious, but a disease that sticks around for 8 weeks (or more? I'm on the mend but not completely better...) can afford to take a couple of weeks to spread.
roystgnr
7mo ago
The Japanese weren't all initially able to do so. Tens of thousands of soldiers tried to kidnap their Emperor and assassinate their Prime Minister to stop the surrender, and that was after two nukes (plus a few tens of millions of incendiary bomblets) had already been dropped.
After that, though ... was the institution of the Japanese Emperor a blessing in disguise? Anti-terrorist tactics consider "decapitation strikes" killing enemy leaders to be high-value goals, but if there's nobody left at the top who's respected enough to order the foot soldiers to stand down then ipso facto the foot soldiers never stand down. From a moral standpoint it feels like assassinating a "mastermind" is greater justice than killing tons of poor grunts who merely got persuaded or coerced onto the front lines, but maybe the rules of war are more useful in the long run than the rules of anti-terrorism, if wars can come to an end but terrorism just goes on and on?
roystgnr
2mo ago
especially as the 14th amendment has made the states subordinate to that federal government.
The 14th has made the states subordinate to the Bill of Rights, but I wouldn't say that's the biggest step in state subordination. It was several decades earlier when the Supremacy Clause made states subordinate to the federal government in matters covered by the Constitution's short allowlist, and it wasn't until several decades later that cases like Wickard v. Filburn expanded federal powers from "short allowlist" to "do anything you feel like".
roystgnr
29d ago
Yeah, "assuming future research doesn't have any surprises" was a predicate here, not an actually-safe assumption. Sure would have been nice if we hadn't stopped the research a decade ago.
roystgnr
29d ago
On #1: try the second button from the top on the right of the gas pump's screen. It's almost never labeled as such, but it's usually set up as Mute. I've heard of one pump brand that uses top right instead, but never encountered it myself.
I'd like to see one that shows the pre-May-2020-definition and post-May-2020-definition versions of M1 as two separate lines. With this graph it's hard to tell how much growth is money printing, how much is savings pattern changes, and how much is just semantics. There's just a big gasp when you first see the big May 2020 jump, followed by a big meh when you read the "that part was all just semantics" fine print afterwards.
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