wlxd
1mo ago
My experience with cities, apartments, and dorms is the physical proximity creates emotional distance.
This is greatly put, and matches my experience perfectly. Have people talking about how suburbs are isolating ever lived in a mid rise apartment building? Nobody ever talks to anyone else, people move every 1-2 years, your neighbors are entirely unknown.
On the other hand, when you live in a SFH neighborhood, just looking at people’s houses and yards and cars makes you wonder about the kind of people who live there. When you go out on a walk, you meet people who are your neighbors, and not random passersby, like you do in dense, busy areas. Because of lower density, you see the same people over and over, which facilitates remembering. When you ask them where they leave, they tell you something like “a green house with an American flag”, instead of “uhh in 1201”, which you’ll immediately forget.
There is nothing more alienating than living in a dense, vibrant city.
wlxd
9mo ago
all this while ignoring the context of the 1% having stolen all the economic growth of the last 40+ years for themselves
This is a popular claim, but I don’t think it is true at all. People today are more prosperous than similar people 40 years ago, comparing like for like, ie. comparing non-divorced, employed, married people 40 years ago to similar people in same age range today.
See this, for example: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A794RX0Q048SBEA Top 1% of population is physically unable to consume so much.
wlxd
1yr ago
I am not sure what it would mean to affect my perception of someone's grasp of a reality of a group of people.
Please excuse my poor grammar. What I was trying to convey is the following: you said that "[you are] modeling her as »one of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles, who has bought very deeply into the transhumanist philosophy of that community, (...)«", which implies that you consider her highly competent on the basis of her deep association with a highly regarded group. Thus, if she turns out to be not so competent after all, this will cast doubt on whether we should continue regarding that group as competent.
Do you anticipate that she would have philosophical objections to surrogacy?
No, but that's beyond the point. Professional ethicists are not any more ethical than regular people, and progressive liberals somehow keep buying houses in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, after consulting with their peers as to where the "good schools" are. She will almost certainly not express any philosophical objections to surrogacy, and she probably will not even verbalize any explicit objections to it in her head. She will, however, feel deeply repulsed by the idea that she will need to give up such a fundamental human female experience, and hire a random person to do the job. This is very natural, so natural in fact that it probably hasn't even occurred to her that this might be her own fate when she was freezing these eggs in the first place.
wlxd
1yr ago
Sure, I don’t dispute that places like that exist, but if the argument is “some far exurbs are too remote for kids to even bike to the store”, then it is much different than claiming that this is a typical suburban experience, that it is hell for kids, and we need to change zoning rules across the board to fix it.
wlxd
1yr ago
Rural South has a lot more shootings and murders than rural Washington, Vermont, or Idaho. There are indeed pockets of extreme crime, but it is by all means false that all “crime problem” is concentrated there.
wlxd
1yr ago
Thanks for the answer. Yes, I’d carry bear spray anyway, to save the bear’s life and myself a lot of hassle if possible. With respect to the firearm then, would you say that the difference between say 9mm and 10mm in terms of stopping power is less important than your familiarity and capability with the firearm? I imagine that if you try using something like .22, that would only tickle a bear, so is 9 mm already viable, or should I get myself a new higher caliber handgun for this purpose?
wlxd
1yr ago
I am thinking about moving to Alaska. I do lots of outdoors stuff, and given how much wildlife there is in Alaska, safety from it, bears in particular, is a concern much larger than it is for me in lower 48.
Here is the question: do firearms offer higher degree of safety from bears than just bear spray in practice? If yes, which firearms would be an appropriate balance of effectiveness and practicality (size, weight, operational concerns etc)?
wlxd
1yr ago
Great post, I didn’t learn much new stuff, but it was a very enjoyable read. You have a very good point about high potential for grid instability on very cold days. I have a natural gas cooking range that can do something like 30-40k BTU combined, should be good enough for emergency situations, assuming regular air changes to avoid annoying high CO2 build up.
wlxd
1yr ago
China and Russia would love to pay for SpaceX launches at market rates, and would spend a lot on technology too.
wlxd
1yr ago
Typically, the relevant public works department has X projects it would like to do, Y dollars of annual budget, and Y is way, way too short to cover all of projects in X. The decision is made by relevant government officers which projects are actually going to be built, and the cost most definitely plays a role in the considerations.
Now, of course, government decision making about projects and spending has multitude of problems. The point is, however, that the suggestion that nobody thinks or cares about the cost is ludicrous. They do care. Typically they don’t care enough, or don’t care properly, I’ll give you that, but these sort of projects don’t just randomly pop up as work orders for the construction crews, there definitely is a lot of planning and analysis involved beforehand. Often in fact too much, or of the wrong kind, but total lack of consideration is definitely not an issue here.
wlxd
1yr ago
Sorry, but who is “we”? I certainly don’t really spend much time thinking whether the cost of some particular rural road is justified, but so what? Someone does. I really lost the plot here in this discussion: what’s the argument here? That, uh, infrastructure costs are high because random Joe doesn’t think a lot about costs of random rural roads somewhere?
And I'm not trying to be dismissive. It doesn't have to be your own analysis - do you have a pundit who can do better? An organization? A MIT professor?
Cochrane, whom I linked, has been predicting inflation way back in 2020 and early 2021, purely as a result of massive fiscal stimulus. Lawrence Summers did the same at the time, and was widely ridiculed. I mean, shit, I did it myself, and I benefited from this prediction.
The problem here is that if I point to people who predicted inflation at this time and turned out to be correct, you'll say "yes, but they predicted 8 out of last 2 inflation spurts", and, indeed, you'll be correct. Nevertheless, this attitude:
The question is not "is this prediction correct", the question is "can you do better".
is just terrible. Just because I can't do better doesn't mean that I somehow logically have to accept shit predictions.
Just as Nate Silver can predict elections "wrongly", the market can get predictions "wrong" - but that doesn't mean I have a better source of future predictions or that a better source even exists.
Of course, but you know what's the lesson here? Just ignore Nate Silver. I cannot predict who will win the Super Bowl any better than my crazy uncle, but that doesn't mean that I have to listen to my crazy uncle, if he has terrible track record.
wlxd
1yr ago
Yes, I did not mean to imply that the current doctrine is incoherent or is standing on the shaky basis (as did, for example, Roe v Wade decision, or still does most of the federal regulatory apparatus based on the unintended interpretation of interstate commerce clause). My point was simply that separation of church and state, contrary to what many people seem to believe, has not been one of the founding principle of this country, and in many states, quite the contrary.
wlxd
1yr ago
wlxd
1yr ago
I haven’t actually watched The Expanse, but I read it, and I wouldn’t mind reworking some plots and characters in later novels: they just weren’t all that good in the first place. Same with the last books of Witcher series (though I read these close to two decades ago, so maybe they were actually better than I remember them).
The real issue is not so much lack of fidelity, but rather changing things in order to make some kind of political or cultural point, especially if they change good parts to be bad. But, I don’t watch any of the new moving pictures anyway, so I’m probably not the person to talk to about it.
wlxd
1yr ago
With experience, you can easily guess what the real problem will be, based on input and the warm up part, but in any case, he does say what the problem is in another comment.
wlxd
1yr ago
The West has not even started to massively expand its production capacity, and our peace time production capacity is order of magnitude too low to keep up. By the time we get on that, it might be all over.
The West is no longer the place where things are built, where factories pop up, where you can find tens of millions of people who know how to operate a bridgeport, lathe, or a rivet gun. It’s no longer in our DNA. We outsource that shit to China.
I think many westerners look at the achievements of their grandparents and great grandparents, and believe that we could do the same. We can’t. We would need to change our entire culture, and we won’t do that in a matter of months. My hope is that the current predicament at least causes our society to get on that path and start to grow serious. Might be the only way to recover from current degeneracy.
wlxd
1yr ago
Russia has just mobilized twice as many people as entire Polish army + reserve. This is even before the utter hardware disparity. In terms of competence and experience, I’m sorry to say that I have no reason to believe that they are any better than Russians: no smart Pole has enlisted in Polish military in 30 years, there was too much opportunity elsewhere. There might be good amount of morale and bravery, or there might not, same as in Russia.
In short, if you want to win this, you’d need to send your friends from Joint Base Fort Whatever en masse, instead of expecting that more Slavs will grind each other to dust.
wlxd
4mo ago
It’s not “what if”, as this is clearly true. The question is, rather, so what?
you want me to not acknowledge at all the hypothesis that their opinion might have something to do with the fact that it disgusts them.
No, feel free to acknowledge it, but so what? People are free to form their opinions based on disgust, and this is not considered to be any sort of demerit to their position, except in a couple of progressive hobby horses. For example, most gun control advocates are disgusted by guns. Should we discount their opinions based on that?
but do you really think that pointing out this pattern of behaviour over time is not acceptable?
I don’t understand the point you are trying to make in this paragraph.
Why would he do it, though? What’s the gain? If someone were to buy an apartment from him, he’d notice that it’s a third of its advertised size, so no buyer would ever be defrauded. Similarly, higher valuation means higher property taxes, so overstating value of his apartment is a loss for him. Seriously, why would he do that? What for?
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