wlxd
1yr ago
And this was for a drug possession crime that US citizens are locked up in US jails for right now.
Actually, how many people in US actually are jailed for a possession of a less than a gram of weed? Does it actually happen in practice?
wlxd
1yr ago
I’m pretty conflicted here. On the one hand, I think people should have right to commit suicide: prohibiting people from doing that, keeping them prisoner in this world, is rather ghastly. At the same time, I don’t think that anyone should actively assist in the process, except in cases where the person is literally unable to actually proceed at the task, and only to the extent of their actual physical inability. For example, quadriplegics who can still move their heads get a setup where they get a button that they can press that will inject them with lethal drugs, people who have enough motor control to inject themselves could have the drug delivered to their beds, so that they can pull it into syringe and inject themselves, and people who are “just” depressed, but otherwise physically fine, get no help whatsoever.
I find the idea of euthanizing a healthy young person rather morally revolting. If they want to kill themselves, they should just do it, and if they can’t bring themselves to do it, this strongly suggests that the person is not actually fully into this. The person in question has, allegedly, two prior suicide attempts. Normally, most suicide attempts from young women are just performative attempts at getting attention, so they are not meant to succeed, but here it is more likely to have just been ineptness at getting things done, given that you do not sign on a professional to do the job done if it’s just performative. Still, I would be more fine with the setup of 1) getting a professional advice on an appropriate method, 2) creating some kind of DNR statement, so that if you fail at killing yourself quickly, nobody will try to rescue you, and 3) doing it in some place and time where and when you are unlikely to be get interrupted in the process, so that nobody is actually put into position of having to decide what to do about your not quite yet dead body.
This way, while healthy young people killing themselves will still be a tragedy, at least nobody will be complicit in this. Euthanizing healthy young people due to “mental health trauma” seems akin to me to deciding that giving heroin addicts as much heroin as they want is actually a perfectly good solution to the problem of heroin addiction, or, at even more basic level, giving a child a candy any time they ask for one. Indulging someone else’s wishes is not always good for them, and killing a healthy young person is definitely a central example. We should inculcate virtues, instead of maximizing expressed utility functions.
wlxd
1yr ago
While I agree that there is some strangeness about the entire story, I think the “gay escort” theory is highly unlikely, for the very simple reason: people like Pelosis can afford and procure services of higher quality providers than crazy hobos.
Where are those smooth 2 lane roads in rural areas? This certainly has not been my experience in Washington state. Most of the roads that are yellow on Google Maps, except actual interstate freeways and certain non interstate freeways in urban areas (like 520 or 169) are single lane. Overwhelming majority of US 101 highway over the Olympic Peninsula, for example, is single lane. Almost all US 2 is single lane. All major highways in northeastern Washington are single lane. One counter example I can come up with is highway 97, which has passing lanes for most of its course, but beyond that, it’s mostly single lane roads except in busiest urban areas and actual Interstates. These are some of the most important roadways in the entire state, the most important ones in their region. Is it any different in other states? Where exactly rural roads are made to be two lane?
edit: found another counter example, highway 395 is double roadway (so two lanes each direction), and given where it’s at, I can’t imagine it getting a lot of traffic, but overall, very few of rural roads in Washington are double lane.
wlxd
1yr ago
What I find interesting is how much easier your actual (ie. not the warmup one) problem is, relative to the problems I was given when I interviewed at the exact same company a decade ago. Then, when I worked there, the problems I was giving people during interviews were easier than the ones I was given, but harder than the one you are giving.
I think that this was ultimately unavoidable, given the number of people the company wanted and did hire over this time period. It did result in the transformation of the image of the company within the industry though, from the coolest place that everyone wanted to work at, through a place that everyone wanted to have on their resume, to another Microsoft: a steady job paying well, but not particularly exciting or hard to come by.
wlxd
1yr ago
You didn’t pay attention to this stuff back in 2020? We discussed it extensively at the motte.
Pfizer execs didn’t have to “acknowledge” that they didn’t test for transmission reduction, it was quite obvious from the get go, based on the actual design of the clinical studies. This was never seen as a requirement for approval.
It sure would have been nice if vaccines stopped transmission, and many (including me) believed at the time that the vaccines will in fact do so. This turning out not to be the case was initially a big disappointment, and then, when they started doing forceful vaccination mandates when we already knew they don’t do shit for stopping transmission, was pushing me into white rage every time I thought about it. Nevertheless, the actual studies never tested that.
The reason was twofold: first, the higher priority was to figure out if there actually is reduction in symptoms and negative outcomes — this is what was meant by “efficacy”. Initial studies used for approval showed pretty huge risk reductions, on the order of 90% reduction in having observable Covid symptoms with positive tests. I don’t believe that anyone believes that the vaccines have this good efficacy at blocking symptoms today. I am not sure what is the reason for this discrepancy. Maybe it’s because the vaccines were targeting original variant, and the virus evolved to be much better at spreading. Maybe the elevated response from vaccine lasts for very short time, couple of months at most. I don’t know, stopped paying attention at Covid science altogether somewhere in the middle of 2021, when I realized that the science and the truth were mostly irrelevant for the policies and narratives.
Second, it is actually pretty hard to design a study that measures efficacy at stopping transmission with any good degree of confidence that would be approved by IRB, a notoriously NIMLY (Not In My LaboratorY) bodies. Useful studies are “””unethical””” to run, so we’ll let the virus spread to billions and kill millions without trying to understand how it does so through direct experiment, instead we collectively decided to just watch its shadows on the cave’s wall.
Yes, I agree with you that most of the covid restriction have made very little sense at best, and starting from somewhere in 2021, they were basically a lunacy. But, dude, Covid is so last year, we already litigated this here to death, there is probably nothing new you can say here on this topic that hasn’t been already said last year by others. At this point, I’m so over it that I’m actually puzzled when someone around me even brings up Covid unironically. I will never trust the “””experts””” on this, or any other topic that actually matters to the society ever again, but, again, I already said it last year as well. It’s over, current thing is different now.
wlxd
1yr ago
I am very interested in hearing how much it is going to cost you. My 15 year old heat pump broke last winter, and I was considering replacing it instead of fixing, but the quotes were in $16-20k range, compared to $1000 to repair, so I decided to punt it. This is in expensive liberal coastal city.
wlxd
6mo ago
What weapons the west gave to Poland that allowed it to beat Soviet military and throw their shackles? What military strategy was used?
(4) provides the option to have a large successful family. The EV is much much higher.
Why wasn’t Ukraine on this path before the war? Poland started off around where Ukraine was in early 1990s. It failed to thrive, to put it mildly, and the pre-war trajectory was not optimistic. The neighboring puppet state of Russia, Belarus, has done much better for itself.
If the plan is to build stronger ties with the West, join EU etc similarly to what Poland did, isn’t better strategy to cut the losses, stop the bleed, and negotiate peace with Russia, where you cede some territories in exchange for Russia acceding to your western strategy in future?
wlxd
1yr ago
But so what if it is due to people treating you phenotypically? This is still genetic causation. It might indeed be interesting to some to figure out exactly through what mechanisms differences in genes result differences in income, but how exactly is this relevant for our ability to predict real world outcome of our policies? Can you show one example where “naive” (according to you) HBD would get some real world application seriously wrong, compared to approach informed by your phenotypic casual pathway correction?
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
6mo 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
11mo ago
shrinking populations are bad, but producing vastly more welfare recipients is perhaps even worse
Shrinking population produce a lot of welfare recipients. These are typically called “retirees”. Unlike the young welfare recipients, the retirees cannot be made to work very effectively.
wlxd
4mo 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
1yr ago
I have lived in Seattle metro for a couple of years, and I am yet to encounter a location within it which is more than 15 minutes bicycle ride from a normal grocery store. I just tried to find one using Google Maps, and only places I can find are at the very edges of farthest exurbs.
My experience with suburbs is exactly the same as /u/TIRM . Ability to form social relationship with your neighbors, and for your kids to play outside with other kids is one of the things that’s attracting people to suburbs, not repelling them!
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)?
The new arrivals are, indeed, refugees, but even before the war, Poland was actually swamped by “temporary” workers from Ukraine. But that’s not the point: the difference between Ukrainians in Poland vs Africans in Germany or Sweden is not so much based on legal status, but rather cultural similarity. If US today got mass immigration from English Canadians, who just happened to speak as incomprehensibly as rural Scottsmen, but quickly learn local dialect, it wouldn’t be seen as that big of a deal, compared to mass immigration from Latin America. This is closer to the today’s relationship between Poles and Ukrainians, despite recent history of genocide of Poles perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists (unlike with Blacks in US, in Europe grudges are not so persistently held, especially if they happen to become very inconvenient due to changing political realities).
wlxd
1yr ago
You are missing the point. Sure, you can certainly make the case that Jacob Chansley’s actions were criminal if you look only at the bare letter of the law, and ignore context. The argument is, however, that there have been thousands of other people, hundreds in the specific example of Kavanaugh hearings, that also broke the bare letter of the law in roughly the same degree of egregiousness as Chansley, but none of whom even faced anything close to criminal trial, much less years in prison. The argument here is about malicious prosecution which is completely outside historical norms for the behavior.
Imagine, for example, that federal government found that some of these protesters are not US citizens, but permanent residents, and found that they are not carrying their green card, as required by law, and charged them with misdemeanor and put them for 30 days in jail. The letter of the law clearly allows that, but it would be completely outrageous, as this law is never enforced in any other circumstance, so it would be hard to see it as anything other than malicious political targeting.
wlxd
1yr ago
They don’t get to just stop funding everything. Assume that pursuing the war is in US/NATO interest. Suppose they make a decision, and Zelensky (or whoever is also taking part on Ukrainian side) disagrees. They cannot just withdraw their funds and their support: this would damage Ukrainian’s strategic position, and reduce the chances of successful military outcomes. It would be cutting their noses to spite their faces.
This does not mean that they have no say in what Ukraine does. They do, but so do the Ukrainian rulers.
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
To my understanding this represents an escalation of the war, wherein NATO forces commanded by Nato leadership are directly involved in a major offensive for the first time.
Which NATO forces? What country of origin, which unit?
Among soldiers in the offensive there certainly are some who served in NATO militaries before, but this does not make the offensive force NATO. It’s makes as much sense as saying that it’s the Soviets who invaded Ukraine, because some soldiers in Russian force served in Soviet Union.
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
1yr ago
The market expectations for inflation might expect it to go down, but they also didn’t expect the inflation to happen in the first place. These have been consistently wrong for past year, why should we believe these are correct now?
See for example the nice graph in this blog post.
wlxd
1yr ago
That’s what I am conflicted about. Sure, there is no fundamental reasons why the west/US couldn’t mine and extract its own lithium, so that it’s not dependent on China. But, would it actually be able to do it in practice? Would the overcome the political, NIMBY, environmental, ecological etc opposition? Can they actually get necessary know how and workforce to build what is needed?
Consider the current energy crisis in Europe. Seems like the obvious answer would be to just go all in on nuclear fission. Is this what is happening? No, European countries seem like to be more into trying to survive winter, expanding LNG terminals, and hoping that there is enough LNG capacity in future. Will there be? Can they depend on their US ally providing all of it? No, US is still not pushing hard into expanding fossils, instead we still go all in on ESG.
Seems to me that even if it is clear what needs to be done, the ability to actually pull it off is no longer there, there is no leader to pull the Realpolitik off and align everyone towards the goal. Instead, we get the standard multitude of interest groups that just makes everything impossible to build, as usual.
Indeed, this is extremely implausible a priori, and so people repeating this must have crimestop in their mind preventing them from doing any thinking on the subject at all.
The image I have in my mind is this: we have someone who is taking “puberty blocker” from age 10 to age forty 50. He never went through puberty as a teenager (or at least, I am led to believe this is the outcome of taking these drugs). Because of this, he now looks and behaves as… well, definitely not a middle aged male. Am I really expected to believe that once he stops taking these drugs, he goes through normal puberty at 50, and his body ends up the same as if he never took these drugs, and went through puberty around 15? This is simply ludicrous on its face.
Or, even better, consider a woman in post menopausal age, who finally gets off puberty blockers. Will she now finally begin menstruating, and be able to bear normal children? Highly unlikely.
I would expect the typical retort to this from pro sex modification side to be “but you are not supposed to take this drugs for so long”, which is a tacit admission that the effects of these drugs are only reversible for so long, until they aren’t. This much makes sense, but then repeating the mantra that they are reversible without saying loudly that this is true only if you stop taking them until they are no longer reversible (which might very well only be a couple of doses!) is criminally deceptive.
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