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tikimixologist


				

				

				
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tikimixologist


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 23:09:57 UTC

					

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User ID: 257

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  • 17 seats reserved for members of Chile’s two million strong Indigenous population

  • enforces Indigenous representation at all levels of government, as well as gender parity in government and in both public and public-private enterprises

  • parallel justice system for indigenous groups

https://www.vox.com/2022/9/4/23336809/chile-new-constitution-boric

I'm confused. If I make HTTP requests to server A, why am I obligated to make other requests to server B and render the content it returns?

See the decline of the newspaper for what content creation looks like without advertising dollars: fewer writers making a decent living, higher prices for less content, increasingly desperate catering to a tiny demographic target.

Those writers are now free to do something more valuable with their time - e.g., drive for Uber or install heat pumps in homes (thereby reducing carbon emissions). Why is this bad?

Can anyone offer me an argument in favor of ad-blockers that doesn't amount to some kind of misanthropic "The system, man, it's broken; so whatever I do against the system is a-ok"?

This is not an argument. It's merely a statement of intent to reject any arguments, regardless of validity, in a certain category.

Using AdBlock isn't opting out of the service, it's opting out of paying for it. I see no way to justify adblock that wouldn't also easily justify, say, turnstile jumping ("I should be able to move about the city without paying so much, the corrupt mta system shouldn't make me pay") or looting/shoplifting ("capitalism demands too much of 'people's attention, time, ability to focus, and overall mental state [, which] is a valuable commodity' be devoted to work, so I'm opting out of capitalism and just taking this TV"].

You seem to be arguing by analogy. Can you unpack the analogy?

Specifically, what arguments do you make against turnstile jumping and/or looting/shoplifting? And how do those arguments actually apply to making an HTTP request to server A but not to server B?

People don't typically use the term "anti-bias" to reference fixing bias in the statistical sense. It nearly always means preventing an AI from making correct hate-fact predictions or generating disparate outcomes based on accurate data.

Examples:

  • Lending algos/scores (e.g. FICO) are usually statistically biased in favor of blacks and against Asians - as in, a black person with a FICO of X is a worse credit risk than an Asian person with the same FICO. This is treated as "biased" against blacks because blacks tend to have lower FICO scores.

  • COMPAS, a recidivism prediction algo, correctly predicted that "guy with 3 violent and 2-nonviolent priors is a high recidivism risk, girl who shoplifted once isn't". That's "biased" because blacks disproportionately have a lot more violent priors. (There's also a mild statistical bias in favor of blacks, similar to the previous example.)

  • Language models which correctly predict the % of women in a given profession (specifically, "carpenter" has high male implied gender, "nurse" high female implied gender, and this accurately predicts % of women in these fields as per BLS data) are considered "biased" because of that accurate prediction.

(Can provide citations when I'm not on my phone.)

All of the examples you describe are simply examples of "making more accurate predictions", and that is totally not what the AI bias field is about.

Let me start of doing a spot check of the facts he presents:

If you’re a minimum wage worker and you have a kid...

Minimum wage workers make up 1.5% of hourly workers. Hourly workers are a bit over half of all workers. A little googling suggests 28% of low wage workers (not quite the same as minimum wage workers) have children.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2020/home.htm https://www.americanprogress.org/article/raising-minimum-wage-key-supporting-breadwinning-mothers-drive-economy/

So he's already narrowed his scenario down to 50% x 1.5% x 28% = 0.2% of workers. But does his conclusion even apply to such workers?

If you’re a minimum wage worker and you have a kid who rolls badly on the genetic lottery table during character creation, tough luck - you can easily expect to kiss goodbye to a quarter of your paycheck purely due to the medical bills.

Full time min wage is about $14k/year. Is there any state where this 0.2% of workers don't get medicaid? In TX you get medicaid up to $36k, $24k in NY, CA and FL. That's 40% of America already and I'm too lazy to spot check 46 other states. We're now down to at most 40% of 0.2% of workers.

A small software team could easily design replacements for a lot of high-budget software and drive the bloated inefficient corporations out of business. This isn’t rocket science: I’ve been in the IT field for decades and even managed a couple of automation projects.

Apparently he thinks...software and non-generic drugs are driving the cost of medical care? Hmm, let me check the financials of a randomly chosen publicly traded hospital company:

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HCA/financials?p=HCA

Operating expenses are $40B. $27.8B is salaries and wages.

Another one?

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/UHS/financials?p=UHS

Salaries/wages are $6.7B out of 10.5B.

If you want to cut medical costs in the US in a meaningful way, you need to cut wages, salaries and benefits for doctors/nurses/other employees. The end.

This is terrible. Why is it here?

Fair point. But either way, the point is that there's no significant pile of "free money" in health care. All the money is going to hard working, nice, and generally sympathetic workers. Your choices are to either pay them less or fire some of them.

My impression is that a large component of cost disease is an oversized beurocracy: receptionists, lawyers, and people who deal with piles and piles and piles of paperwork and insurance companies.

This surely exists, but it's mostly actual health care workers: https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/forefront.20180502.984593/full/

And even out of the non-health care workers, quite a few - janitors and MRI repair guys - aren't the pile of free money that everyone wishes existed.

Stuff that isn't directly providing value to customers, didn't exist a hundred years ago,

Quite a bit of it goes to stuff that didn't exist a hundred years ago but is providing tremendous value to customers. An example from the article:

"I receive regular treatments for chronic allergies (I’m allergic to almost everything on the planet, and have been receiving recurring allergy treatments for several years in order to minimize my unpleasant allergic reactions)."

A hundred years ago he'd just suffer.

Well to be fair I do think there is a cost disease in medicine and a pile of money. It's just that the pile of money consists of payment for actual medical treatments given to non-fraudulent people.

There's no shortage of evidence that marginal medical consumption doesn't improve health at all up to and including 3 RCTs (RAND, Oregon and Karnataka) and one national medical system designed to reduce this waste (Singapore). The basic idea is that if medicine has a low marginal cost, people consume more of it even if they don't need it. It makes them feel better but doesn't improve health.

In contrast, if you make them pay 70-90% of the cost (up to a high cap), they don't spend money unless they really need it.

Do they want it? Clearly they were crazy about Black Panther. Black Panther is, aside from being a better-than-average and more imaginative capeshit title, a coherent movie inherently valorizing black people.

I will strongly dispute the idea that Black Panther is coherent. Various pieces from the movie: (spoiler warning!)

  • As we have seen in real life, being a semi-hereditary monarchy on top of natural resources leads to a nation skilled in science and technology.

  • Villain: "Ok Mohammed Bin Salman, you've defeated me in this battle to rule our Kingdom and I'm about to die. Here's a historical reference to stuff that happened in Brazil 150 years ago."

  • The central conflict of the movie is about Trumpian isolationism vs Clintonian internationalism. Black Panther starts the movie rescuing some Congolese women from child soldiers wishing to (presumably sexually) enslave them. But he's unmoved and still wants to build the wall. Then he changes his mind after hearing what life was like in Oakland 1992 (not, you know, Rwanda 1994, one country over from Wakanda) and becomes an interventionist.

It purports to be take place in a foreign country, but the entire country is nothing but vague ideas that American writers saw on the History Channel. For example, it's Africa and they watched a documentary about the Maasai in 1850, so modern soldiers should look like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_(film)#/media/File:Dora_Milaje_in_film.jpg Also they watched Animal planet, thought Rhinos were cool and noticed they live in Kenya, so unobtanium doesn't just power technologies like clean energy and lasers but also improved animal husbandry.

This is not a coherent movie. It purports to tell a story about Wakanda, but every single plot line is driven by characters caring more about Americans of the same race as them than their own corner of the world. (And by "same race", I mean US Govt defined race as opposed to Bantu/Nilotic/Pygmy/etc. )

I've barely read LOTR but unless whiteness was a critical part of the story it seems fine to change skin color. It's a movie about, like, whole different species of humanoids right?

The problem is that most people understand both a) how different phenotypes happen (non-interbreeding populations subject to different sexual and evolutionary selection) and b) what happens when different phenotypes live together (mixing). To have things like the dwarf dude with his unremarked on black dwarf girlfriend, your world needs to have a bunch of historical migration from far away that was either very recent, or else post-migration there were (and perhaps still are) social barriers to intermarriage.

In the former case, it's interesting and notable - dwarf dude with a distant foreigner wife. In the latter case it's also interesting and notable - why were there social barriers to intermarriage? Do they still exist, or is dwarf dude defying convention? Whatever this backstory is, it's not Tolkien. It's not even any flavor of British that existed while Tolkien was alive.

Different skin colors should be well within bounds?

Yes. There are black people in Tolkien. They come from far away, ride oliphants and their nation allied with Sauron in LOTR. They did not migrate to Gondor en masse several hundred years ago.

Probably a few of them did visit on occasion. But when foreigners visit in medieval times it's not a "ok it's a black guy, so what?" kind of event. The backstory of the world influences things. Consider the travelogues of Ahmad ibn Fadlan or Ahmad Ibn Rustah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_ibn_Fadlan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_ibn_Rustah

A visit to the Volga Bulgars results in much complaining about how they pray incorrectly (most of ibn Fadlan's book). A visit to the Rus involves all kinds of remarks on their poor hygiene and what perfect physical specimens these tall blonde people are. This is quite literally a vital part of LOTR. The hobbit characters, coming from a region coded as the English countryside, witness how big and strange the rest of the world is and have reactions quite similar to Fadlan or Rustah.

Imagine that instead of globohomo - which is likely familiar to you - we actually had a very different flavor of cultural imperialism. Suppose at some point, with no real explanation, Elrond and Galadriel start praying the Salah. Then on some journey perhaps some hobbit characters are starving but still refuse to eat pork offered by the dwarves, protesting that it is not halal. Then Celebrian starts explaining Islam to the dwarves, being generally awesome, and the first season ends with the dwarves saying "La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammad rasoolu Allah."

That would be...weird, right? It would probably be for people to complain that whatever this is, it's some very strange bastardization of Tolkien that's about nothing more than spreading Islam.

And your criticisms are really wild for a popular movie; they're, uh, not supposed to have worldbuilding, at best some cool imagery and a plotline that's not fully schizophrenic, and in this case, pandering to a racial group with things they know and care about.

You can make a Marvel movie that happens in a foreign country but is reasonably coherent.

I know this for certain because this movie exists. In this movie the Canadian lead gets into fights with a particular flavor of local gangsters who - importantly - look quite different from 1850's gangsters because the culture of this country has not stood still since 1850. Among other things it had three separate political regimes since then and has developed all kinds of new things and contributed significantly to (and borrowed from) global culture.

Even when motifs from the 1850's are borrowed - as in this scene involving a guy using literal 1850's military gear - it's inescapable that time didn't stop for this country.

Much like in Black Panther, the Canadian gets involved in a succession dispute. He interacts with foreign country's high levels of technology and cultural artifacts, which - critically - are not just random images from documentaries rendered in unobtanium. Foreign country has a this kind of place which isn't just a geisha house but modernized. Foreign country also has this kind of organization which isn't just this kind but with robots. The architecture isn't 1850's functional buildings (e.g thatched huts) used as ornamental motifs on top of modern "green" design.

Finally, the characters in this movie are not motivated by random things that happened years ago in America. The villain had some negative interactions in 1945 with America, positive interactions with the Canadian, but that shit was 80 years ago and he lived a pretty full life since then. He has conversations and battles with the Canadian about things he wants out of life, these interact with the Canadian's personal motivations, and none of them have any reason to talk about the Chinese Exclusion Act or other injustices perpetrated on Americans with the same (American) racial category as him.

After the villain's death, his successor becomes Chairman of the board of directors of a modern corporation. She does not appear to have any interest in starting a foundation for the descendants of indigenous Canadians who survived residential schools.

If the last three years have taught me anything, it's that this is a realistic thought process for a well-meaning politician.

It's a realistic thought process for an American politician. Do you think Narendra Modi thinks this way?

Then the side of Wakanda that favored imperialism supported a coup and was totally discredited, so the only remaining voice pushing for intervening was the humanitarian one, and that voice also happened to be in the King's bed. Guess what happened.

I think this interpretation - Black Panther as Prince Harry - definitely qualifies as revisionism (of a form I'm sympathetic to). But it's also quite different from the story the movie wants to tell, I think, which is Black Panther being influenced by Killmonger talking about random historical events in America.

None of the comics, taken as a whole, are coherent. The comics eventually tried to retcon this by having a bunch of parallel universes and the MCU is doing the same.

If you read my comment again, you'll notice that I take very explicit issue with the narrative and themes, specifically the theme that the most important thing to a bunch of isolated foreigners is American culture and politics.

followed by... the Dixie Chick controversy?

Just a reminder that no one called for the Dixie Chicks to be censored, and they weren't. Here's George Bush on the topic: "The Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind...That's the great thing about America."

In your view, how does McCarthyism differ from the present?

The famous blacklist was put together and enforced by the same people (California elites) who enforce cancel culture today. Private companies would also hire consultants who would enforce the official ideology in order to protect their reputation, much like they do today. Government bodies have ideology tests today. And we have our own HUAC.

Their tour continued, their CDs continued to be sold (though many customers stopped buying) and plenty of radio stations did continue playing them. Their record label also published their next CD which was "Not Ready to Make Nice". When they decided they wanted to speak up about what happened, they were given this platform. Not that bigtech was a gatekeeper at the time, but iTunes kept carrying their music.

Deplatforming isn't when you make your customers mad, but elites still love you and help you get your message out.

There are many places one can disagree with you on empirics. The most notable is here:

Diminishing marginal utility. At a certain point, another yacht for the ultrawealthy rich guy is not going to make him significantly happier.

The marginal alternate use case for the resources is investment in future production, not yachts. The question whether resources should be devoted to providing an x-box for poor people or to building electric cars/installing heat pumps/building homes/etc.

Moreover, this argument just sort of assumes resources are available and their quantity isn't affected by our choices. But in reality, the poor people are both consumers of utility and producers of it. The actual choice we need to make is between:

  1. A person refusing to work, being given resources anyway, and a marginal house is not inhabitable because no one is available to install drywall.

  2. A person installing drywall in return for a similar quantity of resources, but now we have an extra house that someone can live in.

It is far from clear that (2) is worse than (1).

Being afraid of falling into poverty is also bad for people's wellbeing -- it is a major source of worry and concern because everyone knows that being impoverished sucks and is painful. So the existence of poverty is a cause of pain for a much larger group than those actually impoverished. Fear of poverty also leads people to refuse to take risks to avoid the pain of poverty, which leads to less pleasure.

This is interesting. Possibly we should more widely publicize exactly what it means to live in poverty in the US? I.e. make sure everyone knows that "poverty" by US standards means lots of leisure time (most poor people don't work and aren't in the labor force), no danger of hunger, free medical care, a bigger house than the average Parisian or Londoner, 1-2 cars, etc.

From what I can tell, the only thing that's particularly bad about being poor in the US is that you spend time around other poor people.

Of course, knowing these facts does take a lot of wind out of the sails of the typical leftist who wants moar wealth transfers.

The question is whether it's worth threatening people with poverty to get them to drywall houses for less money.

Yes, and this is entirely a quantitative question. You just sort of assume it away and don't engage with it.

A lot of poor people do work and are still poor,

What percentage of poor people do you believe work full time (or look for full time work) 50-52 weeks/year and are still poor?

they can easily end up with huge bills for seeking medical care so they avoid it as much as possible

Who cares? The medical care they avoid wouldn't make them healthier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Medicaid_health_experiment

"poverty isn't actually that bad" is a coherent response to my argument, I just think it's blatantly inaccurate.

Ok. Why do you think poverty is bad?

What specific goods or services do you believe poor Americans lack? And in what proportions? E.g. "25% of poor Americans lack a car" or "15% of poor Americans have less living space than the average computer programmer working for google."

See, what I'm giving you are just standard conservative talking points. Heritage and similar economically minded right wing outfits have been blogspamming BLS and Census stats about how good American poor people have it for decades. Romney repeated these talking points on his presidential campaign, and Newt Gingrich (maybe before your time) also did. Paul Krugman (the economist, not the angry guy in the NYT) did too, and he was talking about the 1980's.

Why not include and address the decades old standard argument under your "obvious objections"?

I don't know the percentage,

Let me suggest that if you want to make a utilitarian case for something, not knowing even the most basic numbers regarding things you are concerned about kind of undermines your seriousness.

In any case, I do know the percentage. It's 11%.

The number one problem is insecurity -- having to constantly worry about stuff other people take for granted. Another problem is stigma/low social status.

Do you believe their "insecurity" is a rational or irrational response to subsisting mostly on wealth transfers? How do you expect more wealth transfers to fix this?

The low status of the poor comes from their poor behavior (refusing to work, having children out of wedlock, doing drugs, etc). How do you expect more wealth transfers to fix this?

As for the specific goods and services you imagine the poor need, I'm guessing you don't know the percentage. I'm not going to cite numbers because I don't know how you define "decent" housing, but you can easily educate yourself: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs.html

Anyway, consider the possibility that conservatives don't support your purported utilitarian proposals because they have an accurate picture of what poverty is actually like, and are not just basing their theories off journalistic narratives that have been false since the 80's.

According to Wikipedia Martha's Vineyard has the infra to handle 85,000 visitors (the difference between MV's year round population of 16k and their summer population of 100k). Quickly browsing travelocity suggests there are easily places for 50 people to stay in their beach front guest houses. The first few results were "beach house, sleeps 6", "resort condo, sleeps 4", etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha's_Vineyard

I do not recall anyone calling the National Guard when Obama brought in in 400 celebrities and 200 servants: https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-08-04/barack-obama-scales-back-60th-birthday-party-amid-delta-variant-spread

If you believe that the normal MV guests require different "infrastructure" than summer vacationers and that you can't just drop these guys into some beach houses, maybe you can be specific about what infra they need and why you can't?

I guess deporting people on the theory that maybe they are carrying scary exotic diseases is only racist when non-wealthy people do it.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure MV has the resources to hire...1 spanish speaking Texas doctor for 4 days (assuming 30 minutes/exam x 8 hour days x 4 days = 64 exams > 50 people).

Anyhow, if MV has to import professionals from TX

I see no evidence they do need to do this because the idea that all 50 of them needed a Spanish language medical exam for exotic foreign diseases is laughable.

But surely you are willing to admit that maybe, just maybe, sending the migrants to MV was not in their best interests?

I defer to the migrants in question, all of whom made a choice to get on the plane to MV.

Note how carefully most news articles hint - but don't explicitly state - that they were forced to. Meanwhile DeSantis quite explicitly states that it was voluntary, they had a packet which explained everything and had a map of MV. (I see no reason to trust their vague hints now given how frequently the media has mislead people about DeSantis in the past.)

So the steelman is that the MV residents want the immigrants deported ASAP due to lack of a Spanish language priest and teacher (the other services you mentioned), and also that the migrants are too dumb to make good choices for themselves. That's definitely less racist than thinking they are all carriers of scary foreign diseases.

Anyway, you are free to believe that this time the media isn't misleading you. You are also free to believe that every single migrant refused to show the info packet to reporters and reporters for some reason didn't think this was worth mentioning. But some of us actually know how to spot when they are very carefully not saying something.

The steelman is exactly what I said it is: That migrants need services that are more readily available to them in border areas than in Martha's Vinyard.

Weakman: "lack of a Spanish language priest and teacher"

Steelman: "local Spanish-language religious services"..."educational, etc, staff who are fluent in Spanish"

I, of course, said neither of those things.

Weakman: "too dumb to make good choices for themselves"

Steelman: "...as for what they thought was in their best interest, that is irrelevant: the OP was about MV residents, and their views. If they are correct that the migrants best interests were not served by being sent there..."

I think you are conflating "weakman" with "different mood affiliation".

Our only point of actual disagreement is that I consider your steelman to be as transparently racist as he thinks the typical MAGA voter is.

I'm a reasonably good looking guy and I've told assorted leftist chicks my views pretty early. They seemed confused (I don't drive a pickup truck or anything they associated with bad trump voters) but it didn't stop most of them from banging me.

The trick is to not act like Ben Shapiro. The most I ever did was troll them for entertainment, e.g. "we should build a wall and make Brooklyn great again, keep the migrants seeking a better life out" in response to a comment about keeping out gentrifiers.

When I was an immigrant, I spent time in regions where such folks were not really available. I guess someone should have called the local version of the national guard on me?