wlxd
18d ago
The point is to make the childless bear the burden. Basically, tax childlessness heavily. It can be structured as heavy child tax credits to make it more politically palatable. It would immediately give childless incentive to join the other group: unaffordability makes for a weak argument when it is childlessness that makes you poor.
wlxd
29d ago
EVs share a lot of the parts with ICE cars. Structure, doors, windows, seats, trim, suspension, wheels. If you consider hybrid ICEs, which most car manufactures already have a lot of experience with, this grows even more: batteries, electric engines, regen breaking. Moving to EV only does not require starting anew: you just ditch the drivetrain, and replace it with beefed up version of what you already do for hybrids. None of this is easy, but it’s not $51B of assets going down the drain.
wlxd
3mo ago
The AI companies are working very hard on robotics as well. It's not just LLMs.
wlxd
3mo 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.
wlxd
3mo ago
What you are trying to do here is to use “racist” as a thought-terminating cliche, which eradicates the need to address the arguments being made on their merits. It is not surprising that you do it, as this strategy has worked amazingly well for last 60 years. The problem is that this only works if all sides of conversation share the same assumptions, that being racist is the worst thing ever, and it automatically entails you are wrong. Overusing this strategy has led to many people rejecting this assumption, and being much less impressed by the “racist” card.
Yes, BAP is racist, but the real question is, is he right or wrong?
wlxd
3mo 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
3mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo ago
These two words represent the same thing, the “dictator” one just carries negative connotation.
wlxd
5mo ago
Yeah, I don’t really want to argue for high likelihood of this scenario in Palestinian context, just that it doesn’t seem at all impossible considering the plentiful historical examples.
wlxd
5mo ago
Do you imagine that a lasting peace is going to be achieved by killing thousands of innocents to get rid of Hamas?
It’s pretty easy to imagine when you look at some historical examples, eg. pacification of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan in WWII, which in fact resulted in not only lasting peace, but in fact strong alliance with the former adversary who killed hundreds of thousands of innocents using the same tactics used by Israel today.
wlxd
5mo ago
Egan’s “Closer” (1992) story also focuses on sex change. Strongly recommended, goes in pretty hard.
wlxd
5mo 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
5mo ago
All priors collapse towards each other in the face of increasing amounts of evidence.
Yes, but this does not address my argument that in practice you don’t get to have enough evidence to ignore this prior, because evidence is not free.
Given that genes have no almost direct causal impact on behavior except indirectly through other means such as IQ, personality, and cultural upbringing, it seems pointless to consider them when those things can be observed directly.
It’s the other way around. When you use race as evidence, you don’t do it by sequencing the DNA of the subject. No, what you do in practice is precisely using a socially constructed race as a proxy to make predictions IQ, personality, and cultural upbringing. You can’t cheaply get a lot of specific evidence about the latter, but you can use race stereotypes (which are pretty accurate) to infer these quite cheaply.
The direct predictors are what we actually care about, and race is only useful in-so-far as it might be a faster way to guess at them if you don't already have them and don't want to spend the time and effort to acquire them properly.
Which is exactly the case in majority of the situations. Indeed, you apparently agree:
Which sounds reasonable for strangers, but less so for people you actually know.
So where is the disagreement, exactly?
wlxd
5mo ago
There is little substance in your comment other than repeatedly claiming that racism is bad because it’s immoral, and it’s immoral because it’s evil, and it’s evil, because it’s problematic. If taking race into account when making consequential decisions about reality is considered racist, even if we only do it to the statistically justified extent, then I simply don’t agree about it being gravely immoral, because we do the exact same thing with hundreds of other characteristics all the time without an ounce of queasiness, eg. cultural origin, or education history, or density of facial tattoos, or clothing worn.
Your best argument here is where you claim that it’s too easy to assign more weight to this piece of evidence than it is actually warranted. This is true, but this is also true about other characteristics, discriminating based on such does not get such a privileged treatment, so why should I care much?
wlxd
5mo 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
5mo 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
6mo ago
A good rule of thumb is that if US signs some treaty about avoiding given type of weapons, it means it’s ineffective, but if it doesn’t, it is useful and practical. Compare, for example, chemical weapons, which US agreed to not use, with land mines or cluster munitions, which very much are a part of US arsenal, despite existence of treaties banning these: US is just not a signatory to these.
Even more cynically, the treaties that US is not a signatory to, simply are not worth much in the first place: the signatories to these simply don’t expect to fight a serious war that would require using these, so commitment to not use them is not worth much, because they will likely disregard their obligations soon as they do find themselves in one. See, for example, Ukraine, which happily uses these, despite being a signatory to Ottawa treaty.
wlxd
6mo ago
I know about these, but I can hardly believe that these static photos of the aftermath made the original poster “wince”, compared to the videos of Hamas attack. I assumed that he referred to something else.
wlxd
6mo 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
6mo 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.
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.
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