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sodiummuffin


				

				

				
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User ID: 420

sodiummuffin


				
				
				

				
2 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 03:26:09 UTC

					

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User ID: 420

I haven't been browsing it myself but I know of therpgsite.com.

You reversed it. First the text goes inside the square brackets, then the link goes inside the round brackets.

CNN on forensic analysis showing reports from 3 weapons

CBS news on the USSS saying their counter-snipers fired a single shot.

After shootings there's confusion about details like this all the time, including from official sources, it's very weak evidence of anything.

If there was an organized effort involving multiple assassins, let alone any sort of infiltration of the Secret Service, how is Trump alive? It's not that hard to kill people, Crooks came incredibly close, but we're to believe that another assassin who unlike Crooks apparently wasn't immediately shot couldn't manage it? This incident should if anything illustrate that no competent organized force is trying to kill him, because if they did he would be dead. The main thing that protects U.S. presidents and candidates isn't the Secret Service, it's that politicians in democracies are replaceable so neither foreign adversaries nor political opponents have sufficiently strong incentive to risk it.

It's makeup, and while more associated with old or non-western forms of makeup (often containing lead) a quick search finds some modern eyeliner using it as a label as well. It was one of the few I recognized on the female side when I first saw it (along with taffeta and jacquard) due to its use in fantasy fiction. I think more would recognize it from makeup or the history of makeup rather than from the name of the department store.

Yes

Why would morality track technological development in this way? You could already make an embryo survive by sticking it in a woman, that might even be cheaper than the hypothetical artificial womb even in the future where such technology exists, but for some reason its existence the moral relevancy of embryos?

No. No living organisms of the species homo sapiens were harmed

This is based entirely on the definition of "organism", why would such a distinction have any moral relevance? Both are equally unthinking/unfeeling and both are similarly capable of developing into a human if given extensive support. (And braindead humans are organisms too, are they included?)

species homo sapiens

Why is species what matters? An embryo with a dozen cells has moral relevance in a post-artificial-womb world but a sapient alien or a member of Homo Erectus pleading for his life wouldn't?

If baby-killing is based on whether it can be kept alive outside the mother using current technology, does this imply that the invention of full artificial wombs would turn disposal of embryos by IVF clinics into baby-killing? For that matter, would it turn the death of sperm or eggs into baby-killing, since theoretically each sperm can survive if you can stick it into an artificial womb with an egg and have it become a child? Is it baby-killing to shed skin cells if the latest technology can turn them into embryos and then develop them outside a human body?

Liveblog of the podcast with the details from someone skeptical about the allegations (she's only done the part with the first accuser so far):

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1808514093323587854.html

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1808604076650660238.html

The highlights would be the Whatsapp messages. Like this one after the day when Neil Gaiman allegedly sexually assaulted her on her first day as a nanny:

She sends Neil some what's-app messages about childcare and then adds, "Thank you for a lovely, lovely night. Wow. Kiss."

And this one a few days later after the weekend when he allegedly "anally penetrates her, she says, without asking and without using a condom and she says he uses butter as a lubricant.":

Hello darling. I've had a crazy weekend. To getting bitten by a spider, to ridiculously crazy and rough and kind of amazing sex.

Or these messages to Neil, also from shortly after the alleged anal rape:

Now they're telling us her What's App message the next day: "Do you feel like a rain bath? smiley emoji"

The next day: "I am consumed by thoughts of you, the things you will do to me, I'm so hungry. What a terrible creature you've turned me into. I think you need to give me a huge spanking very soon. I'm fucking desperate for my master." That's from Scarlett to Neil.

If I've got it right, they met on Friday, and she sent that to him on Monday. He says she was into "mild BDSM," I guess describing that kind of message. She says he groomed her (over a weekend?)

Or these after he messaged her about her supposedly telling people he raped her and she planned to MeToo him:

I feel like bawling my eyes out. I would never Me Too you. I don't where that came from, and I have told Amanda that even though it began questionably, eventually it was undoubtedly consensual and I enjoyed it. Heart is pounding too.

Or the general description of the year of messages following her meeting Neil, a relationship that supposedly started with him sexually assaulting her on the first day they met and anally raping her the second day:

The journalists say that the What's App message they have from Scarlett's phone cover her entire relationship with Neil Gaiman and go back and forth for an entire year afterwards. ?!?!!?!

"The messages are friendly, often affectionate or supportive."

Journalist: "It feels like a very different story, not so black and white, like we're viewing the offense from the other end of the telescope." They're presuming there is an offense to view.

Journalist: "It really throws me, because when I read the What's App, Scarlett comes over to me as besotted."

Other journalist: "Messages like these appear to be evidence of consent in black and white."

In summary:

The journalists ask experts "How can we reconcile her What's Apps to Neil Gaiman with her account to us of what happened?" That is not the right question to ask. The right question to ask is, "Is she telling the truth?"

They seem to be working from the assumption that her account is truthful and then trying to justify why the evidence doesn't fit it.

EDIT: Liveblog of episodes 3 and 4:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1808683675984302279.html

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1808707805915889918.html

They are talking to a woman in Atlanta, in the US. She's the second accuser, they call her K.

The first quote they have from her says "I never wanted any of the stuff he did to me, including the violent stuff, but I did consent to it."

Neil says they had a two-year consensual relationship and exchanged hundreds of emails for years afterwards, and none of the emails indicate a problem.

  1. ASML is Dutch, not Chinese. Though I guess if TSMC higher-ups were sufficiently dedicated to protecting the machinery in case of invasion (contrary to their public statements) they might decide to cut them off from the internet before ASML decides to trigger the remote killswitch.

  2. If a minority of people are capable of doing something, "generally" isn't good enough to ensure it doesn't happen. We're talking equipment so delicate that 1 TSMC employee with physical access could do hundreds of millions of dollars of damages in a matter of seconds, and many billions in a matter of minutes. If one or more employees flip out and the reason the others don't is because of "pragmatism", are they willing to get hit by a fire-extinguisher for the sake of limiting the damage? There's presumably also plenty of stuff they could do more covertly by messing with configurations.

  3. Even without anyone deciding to do it organically, given the known geopolitical importance the U.S. could easily be paying a couple TSMC employees in case of such an eventuality. Or some random guys who live in the area and have guns stashed away. I remember when the invasion of Ukraine started Russia had people planting devices that shot green lasers at the sky to help with targeting. It doesn't seem like a stretch that even if the U.S. was completely unwilling to confront China openly, it could easily destroy the fabs covertly and blame Taiwanese patriots deciding to do it on their own. The Nord Stream pipelines weren't even being used and they still got sabotaged.

  4. Even completely intact equipment is reliant on a complicated supply chain scattered across western countries that would be near-impossible to replicate in case of sanctions. The machines themselves and their spare parts from the Netherlands, ultra-pure quartz that is nearly all from Spruce Pine, North Carolina, etc.

Bloomberg: ASML and TSMC Can Disable Chip Machines If China Invades Taiwan

About the size of a city bus, an EUV requires regular servicing and updates. As part of that, the company can remotely force a shut-off which would act as a kill switch, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The Veldhoven-based company is the world’s only manufacturer of these machines, which sell for more than €200 million ($217 million) apiece.

It's unclear how irreversably they can remotely disable the machines, but they are by all accounts extremely delicate (as expected for something operating on a nanometer scale) so it's possible they would be difficult or impossible to repair. Spare parts for the machines, like the machines themselves, are only manufactured in the Netherlands.

EUVs require such frequent upkeep that without ASML’s spare parts they quickly stop working, the people said. On-site maintenance of the EUVs poses a challenge because they’re housed in clean rooms that require engineers to wear special suits to avoid contamination.

ASML offers certain customers joint service contracts where they do some of the routine maintenance themselves, allowing clients like TSMC to access their own machines’ system. ASML says it can’t access its customers’ proprietary data.

TSMC Chairman Mark Liu hinted in a September interview with CNN that any invader of Taiwan would find his company’s chipmaking machines out of order.

“Nobody can control TSMC by force,” Liu said. “If there is a military invasion you will render TSMC factory non-operable.”

They would also be trivial to destroy for those on-site of course - I saw a suggestion that spraying them with a powder fire-extinguisher would do it, as would a bit of smashing stuff with a heavy object. Even if Taiwan gives up without a fight, and TSMC doesn't decide to destroy them, and ASML in the Netherlands can't or won't do it remotely, and the U.S. decides not to do it openly, and none of the TSMC employees decide to do it on their own, U.S. intelligence might have at least one TSMC employee ready with a plan on how best to destroy them before fleeing. And even undamaged they require the expertise of TSMC employees who might flee the country, and a whole supply chain reliant on various western countries.

Network effects leading to strong winner-take-all dynamics, same as every other social media site. If you want people to see your video you upload it to Youtube because that's where people are looking, and if you want to watch a video chances are it's on Youtube because that's where people upload videos.

Compare to Amazon Web Services - sure AWS is expensive to run and benefits from economies of scale and so on, but there's still plenty of alternatives, especially if you're just planning to host a website. That's because of the far lesser network effects, users don't need to use a new browser or even a new URL if you switch hosting providers. At no point are they having to choose between the Amazon internet and the DigitalOcean internet, HTTP works the same regardless. In a world where discovering and watching videos was site-agnostic it wouldn't matter (perhaps where the dominant way to watch internet videos was a third-party application or a search engine which searched and suggested videos in the same way that Youtube does via some standardized protocol), but in the real world the network effects for a video site are strong. That's why all the big social media sites offer different things, overcoming network effects requires strong differentiation otherwise you're just like the biggest site in your niche but worse because of less content and less audience. Even on the rare occasion where an incumbent is overcome by a newcomer in the same niche (which was probably easier when the sheer number of users was less) they don't evenly divide the market between them, rather the newcomer reaches a tipping point where it benefits from the network effect instead and takes over, like Reddit and Digg or Facebook and MySpace.

It's impossible not to Notice that the battlelines between HBD and race denial in the 20th century largely broke between Protestant Darwinists (Madison Grant, E.O Wilson, Charles Murray, Samuel Morton, James Watson, etc.) and Immigrant Jews (Franz Boas, Stephen Jay Gould, Jared Diamond, Eric Turkeimer, etc.).

Steve Sailer literally invented and popularized the term "human biodiversity" in 1999. He wasn't the first to independently invent the term, Jonathan Marks did in 1995 and wrote a book with it in the title, but the current meaning associated with HBD is from Sailer. If you're going to claim he's secretly jewish, that's at least one name for you to add to the pro-HBD side.

Last week, after some token Holocaust worship and virtue signaling against anti-semitism on Twitter

Why doesn't this part contain a link? Is it because it actually refers to Nick Fuentes trying to start some sort of internet slapfight with Steve Sailer and his fans compiling tweets from years ago where he does stuff like mentioning Ashkenazi jews having a higher IQ or incidentally refers to the Holocaust being bad? But you didn't want to talk about your post in the context of the campaign by the Fuentes "groypers", and "isn't it shocking that if you search through Steve Sailer's tweets it turns out he's anti-Hitler" would be a weird thing to post, so you try to present it as if he recently started tweeting about anti-semitism apropos of nothing? This sort of thing, where people summarizing something carefully elide most of the story to fit a pre-selected narrative, is pretty annoying.

I haven't verified it myself, but looking through the Reddit threads apparently it was the classic loaded survey technique of offering a range of responses and coding all of them except one extreme the same way.

https://old.reddit.com/r/askgaybros/comments/1d47y07/less_than_half_of_amsterdam_youth_accept/

I took the questionnaire from the GGD Amsterdam that was used for this research. Of the 122 questions, exactly one is about this topic. The question is, “What do you think if two girls/females or two boys/men are in love with each other?” The answers are:

  • Normal
  • A bit weird
  • Very weird
  • Wrong

They interpreted every single answer that was not "Normal" as a lack of acceptance. Many people chose options 2 and 3, with a minority actually picking "wrong".

It also has whatever ambiguities accompany the words for "normal" and "weird" in Dutch. Now, that doesn't explain the rapid shift on its own but it might help. Maybe young people have recently had less exposure to discourse regarding homosexuality so they don't know that in this case the "correct" answer is that a rare condition is completely normal?

The steelman of the Greenpeace argument would be that allowing patent-encumbered GMOs will be a foot in the door for pushing more GMOs on rural farmers which will eventually result with Monsanto owning the small farmers. The situation for GMOs is not unlike the situation for software: expensive to develop, but cheap to copy. As a free-software advocate, I very much would prefer outcomes where the companies who develop the software/GMOs do not end up with a stranglehold on the end users due to copyright or (even worse) patent laws.

GMOs cannot be copyrighted in the U.S. or anywhere else I know of. They can be patented, but the length of a patent term in most countries is 20 years. Golden Rice 2 was developed in 2005, so unless there's a newer version that Wikipedia doesn't mention, any possible patents will expire next year at the latest. Also, if a country considered patents a big concern it seems like the solution would be to not respect GMO patents or to specifically ban patented GMOs, rather than not allowing GMOs in general, which would reduce the incentive for companies to develop GMOs but still allow you to free-ride and to use GMOs with expired patents like golden rice will soon be.

Yes, I've heard about examples like that as well where the characters aren't even underage and there isn't even any real justification for calling them underage, and obviously they are a particularly telling example of the censor's mindset. (I'm reminded of how Patreon will periodically go after anime-style porn, like this pornographic animation of Hex Maniac, based on criteria that would include anything in an anime art style.) But I wouldn't call those cases the vast majority, a lot of censored visual novels are high-school romances and the like. It's just that standard is unjustifiable as well.

Maybe you're thinking of some particular subset that I'm not, but not that I've seen? Anime loves high-school, so a lot of characters are 16-18, and a fair number are 13-15 too. Reddit famously once (temporarily) banned subreddit mod holofan4life for posting a picture of Kaguya from the romantic-comedy Kaguya-sama in a bikini. (Presumably for "sexualizing minors" either because she's 16 at the beginning of the show or because her breasts aren't big enough.) Outside the school settings ages still tend to be pretty young and often feel like they were chosen at random, Yoko Littner is canonically 14, though it's not mentioned in the show. I'm less familiar with videogames but I think a lot of visual novels have school settings, and the characters in the aforementioned Atelier Totori range from 13-17.

Of course, the same is true for whole swaths of western media, like the teen sex comedy genre of movies, or teen dramas, both of which can have outright sex-scenes without anyone of note screaming about how that makes them "child porn". Some media from SJW-adjacent people will engage in the ridiculous business of deliberately writing characters to be 18+ because they believe it would otherwise be immoral to depict them sexually, but it's still not a mainstream taboo. Now, I think SJWs would probably go after those if they could get away with it (and probably have something to do with there being less teen sex comedies nowadays, though mostly for other reasons), but they're too obviously mainstream to act like they're doing something weird. Anime-style media is an easier target because any free-floating feeling of weirdness can be converted into talk about how something feels "creepy" for "sexualizing minors", without consciously thinking about how the same standards would apply to western media that doesn't feel "creepy".

None of those are his job though. And while his job as a blogger is connected to that, his job as a psychiatrist is not, and is much more likely to be used by him as his model for what a normal job looks like. You could argue that his membership and status in the rationalist community leaves him out of touch with how many people are largely socially isolated outside of work, but I don't see how this is such an obvious point as to imply dishonesty. Though I do think it would be good if he delved into it in more detail - does he think it's more realistic to reverse the trend of social isolation through non-work communities?

I would develop unusual meats: lab-grown shark fin, panda bear, lion steaks, elephant.

Primeval Foods is currently working on exotic cultured meat including lion, zebra, giraffe, and tiger. (On a semi-related note, Because Animals is working on cat food based on cultured mouse meat.) But most companies are focusing on the meats that currently sell in very large quantities, for the obvious reason that they expect those will continue to be the most popular choices even if people have more exotic options for the same price.

The posters on HackerNews, ever blinkered, theorize that this is some sort of effort to farm karma in order to promote products. That theory is almost certainly not true. There is minimal commercial value to Reddit accounts.

I've repeatedly encountered sophisticated repost bots making non-political posts, though never an entire thread like that. For example, I've seen bots that will post on /r/videos copying the top comment on the linked Youtube video, to get upvoted posts that are harder for Reddit to recognize as copies. In one case people noticed the comment was strange because it mentioned the year, which wasn't the same year the Reddit comment was made. That does not seem like something you would go to the bother of programming if there was no value in it. Reddit's spam filters treat accounts differently if they have an organic-seeming history of upvoted comments, so people who sell Reddit accounts want a way to create those at scale. Reddit might also treat real-seeming accounts differently when it comes up voting, so upvote-buying services might benefit from such accounts as well.

These weren't no-names or non-scientists but they were seriously and embarrassingly wrong. Imagine if we actually listened to these people, speedily cut fossil fuels out of the world economy accepting the energy rationing, economic mobilization and famines that would likely happen... only for it to be a nothingburger.

No they weren't, The Guardian just made that up. It's not a prediction, it's a brief outline of a hypothetical written by two non-scientists (both self-professed futurists working for the consulting firm Global Business Network) who specifically state that it is extreme and unlikely. The point is not that they think it is likely to happen, but that they think such unlikely but extreme scenarios should be considered and prepared for by the Pentagon.

An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security

We have created a climate change scenario that although not the most likely, is plausible, and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately.

These are the steps they propose be taken:

  • Improve predictive climate models to allow investigation of a wider range of scenarios and to anticipate how and where changes could occur
  • Assemble comprehensive predictive models of the potential impacts of abrupt climate change to improve projections of how climate could influence food, water, and energy
  • Create vulnerability metrics to anticipate which countries are most vulnerable to climate change and therefore, could contribute materially to an increasingly disorderly and potentially violent world.
  • Identify no-regrets strategies such as enhancing capabilities for water management
  • Rehearse adaptive responses
  • Explore local implications
  • Explore geo-engineering options that control the climate.

Notice that reducing CO2 emisssions isn't even mentioned because their scenario is so abrupt that it would be too late, rather they are talking about preparing ways to mitigate the damage and/or do emergency geo-engineering, in case an unlikely scenario like that happens.

This report suggests that, because of the potentially dire consequences, the risk of abrupt climate change, although uncertain and quite possibly small, should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern.

On the other hand, people who get more sun live years longer.

Observational studies without clear mechanisms of action are almost completely worthless. Reading the study it's just the classic thing where they controlled for a handful of factors that they thought of and then declared whatever was left over the effect of the thing they're studying. Rather than it being any of the countless variations across the population that aren't included in the arbitrary list of controls. (I think Scott has a post somewhere where he mentioned how little he trusts studies like this.) For instance this is how they controlled for comorbidity:

As a measure of comorbid illness at the start of the study, we created a dummy variable termed ‘comorbidity’ to identify women who had been treated with antidiabetic or anticoagulant drugs or medication for CVD for more than 1 month.

I wonder if any illnesses not prescribed those drugs might both increase mortality and decrease sunbathing? Or general variation in health below the level of actual illness?

This is in contrast to the skin cancer risk where the mechanism of action is very straightforward. It seems like a serious failure of both science and science communication that this sort of largely-meaningless observational study gets put on the same level.

Not all randomized control trials are blinded randomized control trials. All you need for a randomized control trial is to randomly assign a group of patients that gets the treatment and a group that doesn't. As far as I know, no long-term randomized control study of gender transition has ever been conducted, in either children or adults.

Non-RCT's are if anything even worse than euphemisms like "moderate-quality" make them seem, reading something like Scott's ivermectin post might help give a sense for it. That's why fields like nutrition, where long-term randomized control trials are impractical, are so terrible despite far more quantity and quality of research than a small field like gender dysphoria.

As a result of the GRADE approach, we read things like this in the report:

There was one high quality study, 25 moderate quality studies and 24 low quality studies. The low quality studies were excluded from the synthesis of results.

No, it's way worse than that, the high/moderate/low quality ratings were based on the cited meta-study and seem if anything too lenient. Reading the meta-study, many of the studies only looked at physical outcomes like "is puberty suppressed", they made no attempt to measure psychological outcomes to determine whether suppressing puberty actually provided any benefit. This is the supposed single "high-quality" study. It isn't a randomized control study, it compares patients who have been given puberty blockers to ones who just started the assessment process. (It also compares to a "cisgender comparison group", such comparisons tend to be even more worthless.) Among other potential problems, this means the results are very plausibly just regression to the mean or benefits from the other mental-health care provided. If you think the parents of children with worse self-reported "internalizing, suicidality, and peer relations" are more likely to seek treatment than the parents of children who are currently doing fine, which the study itself shows, then improvement over time is the expected result even if you don't do anything. And then here are the detailed explanations of why they considered the other studies to be even worse.

It's only unchangeable if we allow the combination of the eugenics taboo and a lack of long-term planning to deny us the use of current technologies like embryo-selection and potential future technologies like polygenetic genetic-engineering. (To say nothing of the possible individual enhancements opened up if we manage to achieve brain emulation.) Remember the general population of whites and asians is also less intelligent than intellectuals tend to assume, because they associate with a highly selected subset. A large fraction of the population struggles with tasks like "interpreting a simple bar graph". It's also getting worse, with current dysgenic trends. Just achieving and maintaining the sort of humanity that many people already assume exists requires transhumanism, for every race.

Afterwards we can look back on the statistics about stuff like intelligence and crime and obesity and depression the same way we currently look back on 50% infant mortality rates and widespread stunting from malnutrition. Though of course the biggest leap would be curing aging, if we ever achieve that I expect a lot of the other improvements would seem like a sideshow by comparison.

You can argue that consistently using "anti-X" to refer to any restriction on X, even if the restriction is the lack of a special privilege and is something the speaker thinks is justified, would be a more objective way to use language. But it is not the standard way to use language, guesswho isn't out there talking about people arrested for dangerous driving as being "arrested under an anti-white law", so it seems understandable for Folamh3 to interpret guesswho as making a bolder and less semantic claim.

I don't think it would really be a better way to use language either, because it's so impractical to do consistently that nobody would do it. Nobody is going to use it for every hypothetical special privilege that could exist, at best it would be influenced by status-quo bias based on what laws already exist, and realistically personal bias would creep in immediately. It would just create a natural motte and bailey where people would use "anti-X" in some cases based on their biases, and then retreat to "it's a restriction on X so it's anti-X" when challenged.

I think you're missing the point of her analogy. A law that restricts trans behavior is an "anti-lgbt law" regardless of the truth value of the underlying premise and how good the law is.

Is "white people aren't allowed to run red lights" an "anti-white law"? Would it become an anti-white law if it was overruling a lower level of government, like if some municipalities were allowing white people to run red lights and the state government passed a law saying they couldn't make racial exceptions? Yes white people are more restricted than if they got an exemption from traffic law, but nobody describes the lack of such an exemption as anti-white, not even white supremacists. But this means that describing a law that restricts X group as "objectively an anti-X law" is just a way to smuggle in assumptions about what laws are reasonable. I think Folamh3 assumed the implicit argument was that those laws were unreasonable, not that they were anti-transgender in the same way that "Chinese-Americans need to pay income tax" is anti-Chinese, because otherwise the argument doesn't make sense.

Notice that guesswho didn't describe segregation of sports by sex as anti-male, despite men and boys being the overwhelming majority of those restricted, likely due to believing that the segregation is reasonable except for when it applies to people who identify as transgender.

There isn't a great explanation that I'm aware of, but my working hypothesis is that it just really does turn out that the Blue Tribers are correct about built environment massively influencing how people interface with the world.

Isn't selection bias the most obvious explanation? Like how it tends to be the explanation for everything in education, and looking for "successful educational practices" without carefully controlling for it just tells you the educational fads in the most-selective schools.

Being normal weight correlates with traits, like intelligence and conscientiousness, that are also useful for succeeding in the educational system and getting high-status jobs. (Not always high-paying jobs, but that's because so many people want those jobs that there's competition driving down wages.) People move to the areas where those jobs are available, and they have children who inherit those traits. Left-wing ideology is popular among the educated/upper-class, so those areas are also left-wing.

This also tangentially relates to the recent blog posts about conservatism's human-capital problem, TracingWoodgrain's The Republican Party is Doomed and Hanania's Coping with Low Human Capital.