wlxd
6mo ago
By “residual value after controlling for other predictors”, I meant something like, if you have two pathologists, one of them being black tells you something additional on top of the fact of him being a pathologist, eg. that they are likely to be less competent at their job than their white counterpart.
wlxd
7mo ago
Peace was never offered to Ukraine. Their choice was subjugation and cultural genocide at a minimum or war.
Peace with concessions is still peace, regardless of how much you insist it is not. As it is, they chose cultural and literal genocide in place of a risk of just cultural genocide. The Ukrainians are being killed by tens, likely even hundreds of thousands. With so many emigres, it is highly likely that even after cessation of hostilities, whatever remains of Ukraine will be permanently demographically crippled. It is ridiculous to argue that Ukraine being completely subjugated by Russia would mean more demographic damage than the war has caused: nothing of the sort happened to other nations subjugated by Russians (in fact, Russian nationalists today routinely complain about how often the Russian Federation acts more in the interest of the minority ethnicities than ethnic Russians).
wlxd
7mo ago
The person I replied to suggested that Ukraine should take western weapons and win the war, and gave Poland as an example of this as a successful strategy. I pointed out that Poland achieved success by peaceful diplomatic means. If the West pushed weapons into Polish hands at that time, that would have been clear warmongering, because history proved that peaceful solution was possible. I did not refer to the recent events in Ukraine as western warmongering, only the hypothetical scenario where west pushes citizens of Polish People’s Republic to war with Soviet Union.
Now, let me explicitly say here that the current western strategy of funding Ukrainian military with the explicit, openly repeated goal of weakening Russian state and military, under the assumption of good ROI in terms of monetary spend/materiel relative to achieved damage to Russia, and with zero concern for Ukrainian blood being spilled to achieve these goals, and disregard for ultimate likelihood of Ukrainian victory, very much is warmongering.
Without the western “support”, the (stupid and evil) Russian invasion would be over with by now, and much less blood would have been spilled, and wealth and livelihoods destroyed, for pretty much the same ultimate geopolitical outcome. However, the West has clearly chosen strategy of slow trickle of support to pull in and attrit Russians as much as possible.
wlxd
7mo ago
I specifically mentioned the Russian puppet state of Belarus to point out that you can do much better than Ukraine while remaining in Russian orbit. My point was that if Ukraine experienced decades of stagnation while in Russian orbit while Belarus grew, why expect much different outcomes in western orbit?
Poland well the breakup of the USSR made it not possible for them to do war so they had an easier route.
Poland left the Communist Bloc years before USSR broke up. They managed that through diplomacy and negotiations, not western warmongering. Ukraine should try the same.
wlxd
8mo ago
Soviet Union had reintroduced free market economy in early 20s, because of a total carnage of the actual communism as practiced in the early years during of the Russian Civil War and after it. Before that, the commies would seize the food from peasants, who as a result stopped bothering to grow much. The shortage of food in early 20s was extremely severe.
By the end of NEP in 1928, the agricultural production has recovered to pre WWI levels, though the Soviet Union food exports throughout its history have never been even close to the Imperial Russia exports in 1913.
wlxd
8mo ago
WD-40 is not even a lubricant, and I wish people stopped calling it that, because some people will take it to mean that it can be used to lubricate moving parts, when in fact the opposite is true: what it will do is that it will strip any lubricant that might have lingers there, and then evaporate, leaving dry surfaces behind.
wlxd
8mo ago
Yes, only majority of homeless have on-demand internet access wherever they go, it is no longer overwhelming. That’s why many of them hang out around free wi-fi, yes. But so what? What does it have to do with the argument you were making? Here, let me helpfully quote you:
who obviously will not have regular access to Internet or cellular connection, due to lack of affordability of a mobile plan, let alone a mobile phone.
Observe that the quote from the study you just gave clearly and explicitly contradicts what you said earlier, and supports what I replied to you with.
As a bonus point, observe that out of the homeless who are interested in using internet at all (66%, I assume that the third which didn’t use internet at all within past 3 months simply does not want to do it), more than three quarters do have it on their phone on demand.
wlxd
6mo ago
I think you can make arguments in favor of using it in the absence of better knowledge, but once more direct signals have been acquired the race no longer serves a useful purpose.
This is true in principle, but in practice, you will never get enough of more direct signals to completely discount the priors coming from the race, and this is if you even get a chance to collect more direct signal at all: collecting signal itself is not free, you cannot run background checks on every passerby on the street.
The race is a sort of highly universal prior, and it carries immense amount of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors.
wlxd
7mo ago
What videos from Ukraine are you referring to? I have seen a lot of videos with brutal combat footage or savage treatment of POWs, but I have not seen any comparable videos featuring civilians — worst ones are just civilians getting blown up by munitions hitting civilian areas, nothing comparable to Hamas.
wlxd
8mo ago
Strange for you to, in response to /u/the_nybbler predicting that the Feds will use overwhelming force to roll over any state resistance, bring up Waco siege as an example of Feds having trouble with serving warrants. Yeah, next time they have troubles, they do another Waco, why not?
wlxd
4mo ago
most are targeting DeSantis rather than Trump, which seems like they aren't actually serious about winning.
The only way either of them has a chance is if Trump actually gets removed from the ballot. No amount of attack ads on Trump are going to convince enough voters against him. Thus, attacking Trump is a waste of money, and it makes more sense to preemptively attack DeSantis.
wlxd
6mo ago
These two words represent the same thing, the “dictator” one just carries negative connotation.
wlxd
7mo ago
Thiel did not get a “sweetheart deals on private company stock and bought small amounts”. He created this stock by founding a company, and made it a lot more valuable through his efforts.
wlxd
11mo ago
I may be weak-manning it though.
Yes, you missed the argument I make, though to be fair, I did not put it at the front and center:
I will find you ten people who should have been put to death for their crimes, but haven’t, and killed more people after being released.
It's not that I'm fine with "innocent people dying". What I said is that I am "fine with innocent people occasionally being killed by justice system", because the alternative is that we let people who are know are bad go out and commit more crimes. I am not arguing for knowingly killing innocent people for some sort of utilitarian purposes. What I am arguing is that, occasionally, mistakes will be made despite adequate efforts, and this should not prevent us from achieving greater good, which is protecting totally innocent people from becoming victims of crime. Think of it like, say, doctors making a treatment decision, following all the appropriate procedures and standard, but which nevertheless is incorrect in the particular patient's case, leading to his death. Should we prevent doctors from practicing medicine, just because some people will die from wrong, but reasonable decisions? No.
wlxd
11mo ago
Yet it doesn’t stop people from joining and working for the companies which espouse views they consider false. When I worked at FAANG, I knew plenty of people who were quite based in private, and ridiculed the letter religion. Obviously they considered it false, but nevertheless they stuck with their job and didn’t rock the boat. Sure, you can say they were in there just for the money, but so what? You can join the Mormons just for the wife, that’s not any different. This is exactly what I would have done myself if I needed.
wlxd
5mo ago
Think back to the microcomputer revolution of the 80s, with IBM PCs, Commodores, Amigas, and Apples coming into mass market. These devices were very extremely basic toys by today’s standards, barely useful for any practical purpose at all. And yet, people who embraced and played with them first, and then remained in the field, have later been part of making an enormous change and creation of value, and have been handsomely compensated in the process.
wlxd
5mo ago
Indeed, STDs are mostly transmitted by drug users and MSM, not the average encounter for the types of people most likely to conform to what the teachers say.
This is true about GRID (also known as AIDS), but not true about other STDs. Syphilis and herpes spread quite quickly among users of heterosexual casual sex. This is because HIV has relatively low likelihood of transmission in penile-vaginal intercourse, in contrast to e.g. syphilis, which spread like wildfire around the world in 16th century in a matter of a couple of decades after the initial contact was made, despite much lower population mixing coefficient at the time.
wlxd
7mo ago
Why are Hindus so touchy about this? Brita, for example, do not care much that they are a result of a number of wholesale population replacements.
wlxd
8mo ago
First punishing recividism more seems silly. Because a lot of people do age out of crime.
That’s only more reason to punish recidivists harshly: if you identify someone as a recidivist type, you want to hold them in jail until they age out of crime. Third criminal conviction at 24, we keep you in jail until 40 (of course, for three felonies we keep the life sentence).
wlxd
9mo ago
One can quite easily tell that you’re responding to a woman by the writing style.
wlxd
10mo ago
The physics we know doesn’t support the idea of ships fast enough to make interstellar travel plausible without generation ships.
For big, wet sacks of thinking meat, maybe, but you can posit many theories of interstellar travel that are congruent with physics.
wlxd
5mo ago
What kind of negative effects does the excess of women produce? Excess of men is thought to cause violence and unrest, but this mechanism doesn’t work with women, because they are not nearly as aggressive as men are.
wlxd
6mo ago
It is enough, you can look up their financial reports. They spend more money on donation processing than on actually hosting the website, true story.
wlxd
7mo ago
Internet actually brought enormous amount of consumer surplus, which simply is not reflected in GDP. If you tried to value the stuff that we today get for effectively free, like ability to stream any movie you want for peanuts, or free long-distance video calls, or free mailing, or play sophisticated video games etc according to how much these costed in, say, 1970, you’d observe that we consume thousands of dollars worth of services for free.
It did not, you are wrong, and the OP is correct.
More options
Context Copy link