domain:streamable.com
aldomilyar
just now
Why not? It's prettymuch the largest confounder in human history in terms of widespread behavior modification.
There's enough countries/regions in the world on various points of the infection virulence/lockdown severity scale you should be able to work out a metastudy
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9m ago
I’ve long since come to the conclusion that modern psychology and psychiatry are not just dead ends, but actually more harmful than anything else we could have come up with. It actually seems to make whatever problems that existed beforehand and makes them worse.
On the social level, the idea of “you don’t know what I’ve been though” has destroyed the mechanism of social shame that once stood as a bulwark against bad behavior. I might well be having a terrible time at home, but why must I treat other people who have nothing to do with that situation poorly? Furthermore, why does modern society insist that those other people are wrong to object? I work in retail. I’ve apparently signed up to be an emotional tampon and am expected to accept that not only does the customer have the perfect right to treat me like crap, im not even allowed to object because “they might be having a bad day” or trouble at home or work or the moon is in the wrong astrological house. This not only doesn’t help them (honestly, bad behavior tends to make people want to avoid you), but simply spreads all of this around as other people are stuck trying to cope with being treated poorly and use their social permissions to act like jerks in public.
Personally I think it also encourages narcissism as it never seems to get to the point of saying that what’s happening to me is not the most important thing in the world. Im not the center of the story here, and other people deal with is just as important as your problems, in fact they honestly don’t see you or your feelings as nearly as important as you do. Main character syndrome is rampant though and generally the advice of pushing for boundaries and getting what you deserve, and paying special attention to how everything makes me feel has created and maintains that problem. That’s not to say you never think about yourself or stand up for yourself, but I think psychology has pushed this far beyond the bounds of reasonable that many people raised in the modern mindset have no practice in thinking about other people as people.
The worst is in personal development. Because modern psychology encourages a feelings first model, people tend to overthink those feelings and put more emphasis on how you feel. This tends to make those feelings last longer and become deeper as you turn a bad day into a bad week and on to full on depression.
roystgnr
10m ago
so might as well worry about what I can control.
It feels like a triage problem, doesn't it?
When your emergency center has too many victims to work on them all right away, you quickly assess them all and mark each person with one of 3 (in the original "tri"-age) tags: one group is going to live without your help, one is going to die regardless of your help, and one is borderline enough that they'll die without your help but live with it. You don't help the victims who need the most help, you help the victims where your help does the most good.
There's a bunch of wild possible futures where humanity dies out regardless of what I do, and there's a bunch of wild possible futures where humanity becomes so rich that we all end up fine no matter what I do. I might as well continue to focus on the more mundane possible futures that fall in between those extremes, even as the in-between category (which once felt nearly certain) becomes less and less likely, because the in-between futures are the only ones where my actions would have made a difference.
Tree
12m ago
I also support taxing churches. They are very similar. We give them these exemptions and the worst partisans use the surplus to fight a propaganda war against each other at great cost to the rest of us. It's like a polarization subsidy.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22m ago
Isn’t this a solved problem in a more local sense? You just put a housing development off the main road with deliberately curved and winding streets which has the natural effect of slowing down car speeds and limiting through traffic as long as the entry points were sensibly chosen. No need to be a mid sized town, this can be dropped into bigger city outskirts.
ChickenOverlord
23m ago
At least in the US, colloquially they aren't called influenza vaccines, they're called "flu shots." Not sure on the origin of not calling them vaccines but my assumption has always been that it's because they don't reliably immunize against or prevent the flu.
JarJarJedi
24m ago
Interestingly enough, in the movie they also felt the decision processes are not specified at all so they felt it's necessary to introduce a scene where Dr. Mensah essentially tells everybody what to do and then they stand in a circle, hold hands and hum (literally). Given that the show makers can be assumed to be extremely woke by default, it's interesting how they decided to present this. First, they obviously see the need to make decisions, and they go for the natural authoritarian approach (not even a vote!) but then they insert some kind of obscure ritual to woke-wash it and resolve the natural question of "how other people who have no decision power tolerate it?". Simply - they hum.
DirtyWaterHotDog
26m ago
No more than there is a genocide going on against minorities in Muslim nations. There is strong pressure for displacement. But, I won't call it genocide. We need to reserve that word for the real deal. Can't be diluting definitions for war crimes. (Might be a lost cause)
America has low standards for granting refuge. Indian Sikhs have a 50%+ refugee approval rate despite facing no violence since 1990 and being quite rich by Indian standards. Hell, I'd argue Indian Sikhs are treated a lot better than Hindus in India. (legally and otherwise). White people have a reason to feel unsafe in South Africa. They should leave. They should likely receive refuge by the current standards for refugees in the US.
ChickenOverlord
27m ago
Biggest impact from COVID on me was a positive one, my job became 100% remote and I was able to wear pajamas for weeks at a time.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
28m ago
If my (extremely amateur) experiences with images is any guide, then it’s extremely bad at permanecense (google tells me this is not a word but I feel like it is).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
38m ago
There would be a deep irony if the money making professors all bailed for China, thus having the opposite effect Trump intended
DirtyWaterHotDog
39m ago
When has policy ever been about the numbers ? It's about sex appeal.
Utilitarians can be surprisingly blind at times. Covid wasn't sexy. No spectacle, no myth building, no clear narrative. Deaths were slow, honorable & blameless. Ofc people don't care in proportion to the numbers.
No movie or even harrowing video to speak of. Hell, there wasn't even an iconic photo. Statistically, I know the Bengal famine killed a lot of people. But viscerally, my emotions are tied to the photos of piled up bodies, literally (not figuratively) looming vultures and 1st hand stories of families prostituting themselves for food. There is a villain (Churchill). There is intrigue ( what if they hadn't diverted reserves to Australia). There is a story.
Plane crashes are sexier than car accidents, which causes disproportional worry. Tuberculosis, a 'CURABLE DISEASE' !! kills 1.25 million every year. No one cares. Malaria kills 600k every year. Yet, the most visceral image of it is Bill Gates releasing non-viral mosquitoes to a room of white people. Covid is no exception.
The Ukraine war went from being sexy urban warfare 'Hordes of migrants, tanks built up in front of Kyiv, hot women crying and destroyed cities' to more conventional unsexy warfare in the woods. No one cares anymore. Israel and Palestine keep producing visceral imagery at an unheard-of rate, and it stays sexy.
Tragedy has pretty privilege. It's all that matters.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
41m ago
Not all the endowments can be taken at face value. It’s kind of like a university’s 401K, while it’s counted in net worth it’s not immediately accessible. Also the stock market being unusually good the last 20 years has caused some of them to grow more than expected, but that’s not something you can bank on indefinitely. Thus, the 15 billion being unable to entirely sustain current spending. Even Harvard it’s something similar.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
42m ago
Don't try to engage with this, it's the right wing version of the periodic calls to end tax exemptions for churches. Neither is going to do much of anything.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
43m ago
I think another sign that something was seriously wrong at Columbia is that they run the Columbia Teacher’s College, the premier destination for teacher training — that is best known in recent years for being the exact ones who were flagrantly wrong on the Science of Reading stuff, ironically mistraining teachers. Great write up.
how amazing the feminist environmentalist communist etc. preservation alliance is
For me it looked very light on details on how exactly amazing it is - like, how their economy actually works? I get it, everything is free and there's no money, but how does it work? Is it just a huge hippie commune? BTW, how huge - how many people actually live there - it is 100 people, a thousand, a million? Never discussed. Who's in charge and what being in charge actually means? How the governance works - who decides what to do and where the external money - which they use - come from, and who decides how much of that money is spent on what? There are some officers - like chief of police - but who appoints them and how? Pretty much none of that is covered except as a third-hand mention in passing by Murderbot who barely understands what it means and really can't even contextualize it, so it just accepts it as "it's how it is with those weird humans but it's my humans so whatever they do must be a good thing". Again, this looks very much like indoctrination process of a college freshman who's not great in critical thinking because it has been successfully educated out of him. This vagueness is a double edged sword and the Murderbot is explicitly an extremely unreliable narrator in all matters human.
the author herself is openly very far left and has in interviews quite clearly talked about the anti-capitalist messages in the murderbot series
That's why I usually avoid authors' interviews (and same for actors, producers, etc.) as much as I can. Usually nothing good comes from it but spoiling a good work of art.
jkf
46m ago
Given Marohn's published views on stroad repair, I suspect he sees the Texas solution - use part of the right-of-way for a limited-access road and part for "frontage roads" (which are actually streets in Marohn's taxonomy) and only allow access between them every few miles
I wonder if Texas got this from Mexico? This is a common pattern in high-traffic areas down there, although IME the driving experience kind of sucks that may be more for Mexico reasons than a flaw with the concept.
The issue is mostly "how do you turn left (and/or cross over) without a bunch of traffic lights on the arterial"? In Mexico they just... put a bunch of traffic lights on the arterial, with predictable impacts on congestion -- plus the added quirk that left turns are for some reason accomplished by pulling into the slip road to your right, waiting for a left-turn light, then turning left across both directional lanes on the arterial part (also the opposite slip road I guess). It's kind of fun, but I don't really get it.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
47m ago
I don't know what more you'd want.
He told you: an acknowledgment that lab leak was the likely origin of COVID according to various western governments' own assesments. We're not talking about virologist speculations in the early stages of the pandemic. The passage you quoted is a perfect example of Scott doing exactly of what he's being accused of.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
50m ago
If you're talking about a wealth tax or just seizing the money, almost no first-world country does that sort of thing for very good reasons.
If you're talking about subjecting the money to a similar tax rate that normal capital gains have, that's a lot less unreasonable, but universities have historically been granted exemptions since they fund a lot of basic science -- stuff that all of society benefits from, and almost nobody else wants to do. There's really not that much money in endowments relative to, say, what Medicare or Social Security churn through on an annual basis, and the sum long-term contribution to investing in science is much, much higher than it is to funding welfare for old people.
Jiro
51m ago
My proposed gnarglebargles don't pretend that it's a coincidence that transition makes them outwardly resemble the other sex in some ways.
If they are doing it for reasons related to wanting attributes of the other sex, and admit it, then they are trying to be a woman after all, they are just trying to be one partially, and they aren't labelling it as "I want to be a woman". But the original objection applies: conservatives will know they are saying "I want to have these traits, and these traits are associated with being female, and that's not a coincidence", correctly read that as "I am partially trying to be a woman", and object on those grounds.
They would just give up on the semantic debate, and admit that their lifestyle still leaves them closer to very committed crossdressers than to the sex they emulate.
The same people who object to people trying to change sex also object to crossdressing, for similar reasons, so this doesn't materially change the scenario.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
53m ago
Ok, sure. And when they do, they can see that God's acts can only be consistent with his nature.
yofuckreddit
53m ago
I've been feeling this vibe lately. Humanoid Robots, Starship, and LLMs are the three things that make this feel more like the future than it ever has.
We are SO CLOSE. To being multiplanetary, interacting with computers that pass the turing test for 95% of the population, and finally being able to own a golden retriever without having to sweep every single day.
But it all seems to be hanging on the edge of a knife. Our governments are so obscenely powerful, people are so scared and stupid, weapons continue to become so much more lethal.
At the end of the day I'm just in wait and see mode. Whatever happens happens. I didn't grow powerful enough to meaningfully affect the outcome in time I don't think, so might as well worry about what I can control.
It's unfortunate that this is rarely stated clearly, but I figure the crux is that COVID was a watershed moment for governments, with the backing of a technocratic expert caste, imposing novel restrictions on personal and social freedoms. The narrative the globalist-technocratic complex and its supporters want to prevail is that this was good and necessary - the freedoms are a relic of a more innocent age, somewhere in the class of letting gentlemen scientists enrich uranium in their bedrooms, and in our age of global networks and megacities it is important to endow experts and elected representatives with emergency powers to restrict them according to their superior judgement to protect the people from danger.
This narrative is a lot more compelling if COVID was a natural catastrophe and the official response at least constituted a reasonable attempt to minimise the risk of bad outcomes, than if COVID was a result of irresponsible actions by the same technocrat clique that wants to arrogate itself emergency powers to immamentize its "superior judgement". (See: the old pattern of creating a problem and selling the solution)
Underlying this all is a quiet disagreement about what was even the "problem" - one group of people sees a dangerous disease that society was worryingly incompetent in containing and wonders why it even matters where exactly it came from, while the other sees "free" societies happily going on the North Korea spectrum overnight over a cold and wonders why it even matters how bad the cold was.
faceh
57m ago
Hah, that'd be a hell of a reversal. I bet they'd keep a physical person 'on staff' who can make in-person appearances pretending to be the actual actor, but in reality they're not getting paid like an actual celebrity.
The Job of 'actor' still entails acting, but now you're just become a body double for the digital version, you make a lot less money but all you have to do is not generate any really bad press and uphold the charade and you'll be comfortable for life.
I've also felt using it against other historical diseases is outlandish since it's not like somebody was sitting by every single dead body in the Spanish Flu outbreak and doing a genomic test to prove whether or not they'd ever expressed anything
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