wlxd
24d 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
7mo ago
The Spider-Man one is particularly egregious, because the modder just combined the textures from the Saudi Arabian release of the game with English text. As it turns out, the game makers are totally happy to make and profit from LGBT-free version of the game, as long as it’s not Americans who enjoy it.
wlxd
1mo 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
24d 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
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
8mo ago
As much as I sympathize with your individual plight, I don’t think it counts into the “homeless problem” in the society’s view. Shelters or non-profits or churches might be interested in helping you, but people like me (normal, well-off, employed people with families and mortgages) do not care about you much. Indeed, there are a lot of poor and struggling people on this planet, and I can’t spare too much energy or emotion on you.
Instead, what I see as an actual problem is crazy, unpredictable, aggressive hobos taking over the commons, and making the city dangerous and unlivable for normal people, while collectively consuming more government resources per capita than the poorest working people actually subsist on. This is the problem for me, because it actually affects me in a substantial and negative way.
My point here is that you are or were not like them, and it is unlikely that any solution that applies to one group will also apply to the other. The hidden homeless are overlooked on purpose, because they are only a problem to themselves, not to anyone else.
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
8mo ago
“Grifter looking for cushy consulting and lobbying gigs” is pretty ridiculous accusation, considering that his career before running for president has been much superior than what you suggest he’s after. You might as well accuse Trump of only running because he wanted to make a bit of money by selling his memoir afterwards.
wlxd
11mo ago
You know the joke about the communist dissident arrested by secret police for handing out blank sheets of papers in public?
Thank you for asking this question, it forced me to compile the sources for easy future reference, but, more importantly, also caused me to learn a new fact about the history of Hamilton's involvement in the project, which fundamentally changed, for the second time, my understanding of her role (stay tuned until the end).
In any case, I cannot answer it as stated, because there is too little easily accessible data to say accurately what was her "actual" contribution, and in any case I'm not so interested in this topic to spend months digging through primary sources. From the more easily accessible ones you can, however, glean some of her actual contribution. These were certainly not trivial, given that you can find some sources from way before the recent craze that refer to her by her name. For example this report published in 1982, on the history of AGC by David Hoag, who was the head of the entire thing, names Hamilton as the lead of "a team of specialists", which has written "much of the detailed code of these programs". This seems to imply that she did led the software team, but other evidence makes it rather clear that while it is true that she did, in fact, lead that team, she did not lead it as it was actually writing the detailed code of these programs.
In short, I thus very much stand behind the statement in my quoted comment. I think the clearest evidence is coming from the horse's mouth:
I was a young kid, and I was hired by Dan Lickly over here (pointing to Dan).
(...)
Then, because I was still a beginner, I was assigned responsibility for what was thought to be the least important software to be developed for the next mission. I was the most of the beginners; I mean, I was the first junior person, on this next unmanned mission.
(...)
And I learned an awful lot from Dan [Lickly], who was a real guru in all of these areas. I was trying very hard to learn from him all of the things that he knew that I needed to use in order to be more successful at doing my job.
(...)
We began to grow, and eventually Dan [Lickly] put me in charge of the command module software. He had the courage to put me over that whole area, and I got very interested in management of software; again, integrating all of the glue. And when Dan [Lickly] left, Fred [Martin] then even had more courage and gave me the responsibility for the LM too, in addition to the command module flight software and now I was in charge of all of the on board flight software.
She was put in charge of the command module software after Apollo 8, which flew in December 1968, just six months before the moon landing. I'm not sure exactly when she was put in charge of LM, whether it was before or after moon landing. In any case, I think it is safe to assume that between December 1968 and March 1969, which is when Hamilton submitted the final Apollo 11 software, no new software has been written for either CSM or LM.
To me, the above paints rather clear picture: the actual software lead was the aforementioned Dan Lickly, who, when the project was complete, moved on, and gave up the position to his mentee, whose growth he guided, from the most junior team member to a senior lead. Indeed, Dan Lickly is described in these proceeding of the conference on the history of the Apollo Guidance Computer exactly as someone who "was in charge of a larger group of programmers that did programming for the AGC on the CSM and LEM". The whole program was led by Frederick Martin, whom Hamilton also mentions as the person making the decision to promote her. It is he whom Hoag describes, in the article linked above, among "the notable names", as the lead of COLOSSUS (CSM) software program.
Now, here comes the best part, which I only now realized as I was redoing this research, trying to find again the sources that originally prompted my comment you linked: Hamilton married Dan Lickly in 1969 before Apollo 11 (which flew in July). Think about it: Lickly literally promoted his own fiancee to the position he was leaving behind, and half a century later, not only we never hear about Dan Lickly (say his name to not forget), but we get fed the story of the leader of the team that wrote the software that sent the man to the moon, without ever hearing that she only received this position when the whole thing was already done from the guy she was sleeping with.
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
11mo ago
Prison doesn't work if all that happens is you scoop someone up, dump them in there, do nothing about reform, then let them back out to resume their interrupted career once the sentence is served.
This is not so. Men achieve peak of their criminal career between 16 and 30, after that they naturally become more placid. If you keep the worst offenders in prison during that time, you physically prevent majority of the crime they’d ever commit, even if you do absolutely nothing to rehabilitate them. In short, they do not exactly resume their career.
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
7mo ago
I am pretty certain that you will be unable to provide even a single example where the activists, before accusing someone of victim blaming, check if the person alleged to do so, does nothing else to address the problem.
wlxd
11mo ago
Sorry, the comment search functions both here and on Reddit are terrible, such that it would be too much work for me to track down that comment thread.
A few weeks ago, in order to get some hands on experience with this whole AI thing, I build a search engine that finds Motte comments by content. It works moderately well, e.g. for the above one, I put your name and "being assaulted on subway" as search query, and it was the top result (neither "assault" nor "subway" actually occur in this comment). When I put the same query and my name, it finds this one. I really need to polish it and publish, it's pretty useful.
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
7mo ago
Further, it's very easy to lose contact with the homeless, 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.
This is super wrong. Overwhelming majority of the homeless have mobile phones, with surveys ranging between 80% and 95% penetration. This is because the Feds, local municipalities and charities have special programs to equip them with phones.
Given the above, why would I put any stock in your critique of the critique of scientific paper?
wlxd
8mo ago
Indeed, when I lived in an apartment, I have not known a single person living in the same building. I asked my friends about, and this has been everyone else’s experience as well. Now, I know all the people on my SFH suburban street, and regularly hang out with some of them.
When people say things like suburbia being atomizing, I’m really dumbfounded — compared to what? Just because there are a lot of people walking down the street doesn’t mean that it’s easier to socialize, in fact it is the opposite. Humans enter different behavioral modes in different settings. When there are a lot of people around, we naturally tend to detach ourselves mentally, and treat everyone as an irrelevant blob. If, on the other hand, we get bunched together with only a couple of people at a time, it feels more natural to strike the conversation (in fact, sometimes it’s awkward not to). Go to a mass rock concert, and try to make new friends, and then go to a jam session in a hole-in-the-wall bar and try the same. Which is easier?
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
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
1yr ago
I guess bigger culture war issue is if he was just trying to get his dick sucked and the media said that was false and it was a right wing terrorist then basically confirms a lot of peoples view that they are lying to us. (Nothing wrong with trying to get your dick sucked).
The "male prostitute" hypothesis is simply ludicrous, as I've already noted the previous time, but if you want even more evidence against it, then well, they released surveillance video where the DePape uses the hammer to break into the back door of Pelosi's house. This is not how you typically invite male prostitutes into your house, I believe. At this point, the only way I can steelman this stupid theory is that Pelosi asked him to "smash up his rear entrance" and DePape took it literally.
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?
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