domain:reddit.com
The investment value of BTC is either an underlying "BTC will become so convenient to transact with that everyone will want to keep balances in it" (which looks less likely to happen the longer it goes without happening) or a meta "you can sell your BTC to someone who'll pay even more for it for some reason" (which happens, but can't happen forever without a non-circular reason).
The Bitcoin Maxi case at this point is that it is digital gold. More fungible and easier to store, and readily convertible to whatever currency you need. I don't buy it all myself, but Bitcoins ongoing survival is proof of something.
And if you think a dollar collapse is pending, then BTC is probably where people flee to in at least the short term.
Personally, I just wish I knew what to advise my kids.
I think I can make a case for NOT following certain paths, but as for actionable "Do this to prosper in the future" advice I am at a loss. Its not like you can just say "Plastics" and nudge them off in the direction of the next big technological gold rush.
10-15 years ago "learn to code" would have been SOLID advice. No longer. I'm increasingly reading that AI models are really good at various parts of the practice of medicine... and SUPPOSEDLY robot surgery is here. So the Med school investment looks a bit questionable.
And as for college funds... why should colleges even be a thing, at least with their current business model, when AIs are generally capable of teaching at the level of even the best professors, across any subject?
Yeah, for Gen Alpha, there is probably NO career advice that previous generations can offer them based on experience other than "wait and see."
Being able to personally push the boundaries of knowledge into previously uncharted territory used to be what you needed to do to get a PhD, not what you needed to do on a regular basis just to remain economically viable.
I can imagine a world where the AI is doing all the knowledge work but keeps giving humans various tasks that it needs to complete in order to push the boundaries of knowledge forward. Tasks that will seem completely nonsensical to the individual performing them but in the aggregate allow the AI to improve things, iteration after iteration, and thereby keep most humans 'employed' and paying them in some currency they can spend with other humans and thus the 'economy' chugs along but in effect everyone on earth is a 'gig worker' who gets tasks assigned to them as needed, and gets rewarded for performance.
A scarier version is that the AI requires you to be Neuralinked up to it so it can inject arbitrary commands into your brain as needed, but also rewards you handsomely for helping out.
roystgnr
11m ago
They kept track of death rates among the unvaccinated vs vaccinated (vs boosted, etc.), and it definitely looked like you wanted to be in the group whose first exposure to Covid spikes was of the artificial, non-exponentially-reproducing variety. Vaccine effectivity dropped off with time fast enough that there was no way to stop the disease from spreading, but at least we might have somewhat reduced the fatality rate from more of those first virgin exposures.
The obvious problem with those numbers is that this was anything but a Randomized Controlled Trial, and who knows what other differences those population groups had. IIRC I could find the data age-adjusted, but not controlled for anything else. There's a paradox where, if you tell everybody that e.g. square dancers live longer, you may soon find that square dancers really do live longer, not because it's better than other forms of exercise or whatever, but because now all the people who are doing a lot of other things to take care of their health have started square dancing too. Perhaps people who resisted taking a Covid vaccine are more oppositional toward other sorts of public health recommendations too, either with regard to Covid (letting themselves be exposed more easily) or to other contributing factors (obesity, smoking, "toughing out" serious infections, whatever).
The more subtle problem is that it's hard to tell how Covid-19 would have evolved in the presence of a more universally vaccinated population. Death rates fell way off with the Omicron variant, but would the virus inevitably have evolved in the same way at the same speed?
All I get is, "Of course they worked, it's obvious. You're stupid."
Ask if they think the FDA should have allowed the vaccine to be freely distributed and/or sold after it was first invented, in March 2020, without spending the next several months waiting on slow-but-legally-mandated testing methods and FDA approval before they could ramp up production. It's a little hard to get up on a "not trusting the system and taking the vaccine makes you a stupid anti-vaxxer" high horse when nearly half of the US deaths came during a time period when the system would have jailed anyone who gave you the vaccine.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
14m ago
It is crazy to me that most people alive today will be around to see how this - this journey of civilization, this grand process of technological development - ends, or at least moves far, far beyond us.
Maybe you're right, but there are plenty of times in history where people have felt this way before, and most of those examples I can think of are from long before I was born. Most recently, the Atomic Scientists would have you believe we've been on a knife-edge of nuclear armageddon -- maybe they're right, but never materialized during the Cold War. Or you could go back and look at any number of doomsday cults, even including early Christians anxiously awaiting Christ's return in their lifetimes.
The pattern has held long enough that I'd personally discourage making any huge life changes assuming it won't matter.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
21m ago
Why don’t universities simply put out fake studies with made up data that flatters the current administration’s priorities in order to get money? That’s just not how universities think.
Given the general direction of the replication crisis in the the social sciences, retracted questionable applications of statistics, and the number of high-profile plagiarism accusations against university leadership in the humanities, are you sure they don't? I don't think anyone is doing it out loud, but it's at least happening in practice through some combination of only studying problems that could have the flattering solution, or just hiding the report when you don't like its results.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
22m ago
This was why deadlift was my favorite lift initially, prior to inevitably injuring my back...
Quantumfreakonomics
31m ago
The people involved don’t see themselves as autocrats empowered to run the university however they see fit in order to ensure the maximization of grant-winning. The idea, “Jews have lots of political power, so we need to expel anyone who speaks out against Israel in order to stay in the good graces of the powers that be,” didn’t even occur to them in October 2023.
Why don’t universities simply put out fake studies with made up data that flatters the current administration’s priorities in order to get money? That’s just not how universities think. Even if there are incentive gradients that push in that direction, no university has a department of data fabrication.
roystgnr
36m ago
grateful to my past self for diligently squirreling away U.S. Dollars (rather than betting on BTC, for example)
These both sound terrifying to me.
The investment value of BTC is either an underlying "BTC will become so convenient to transact with that everyone will want to keep balances in it" (which looks less likely to happen the longer it goes without happening) or a meta "you can sell your BTC to someone who'll pay even more for it for some reason" (which happens, but can't happen forever without a non-circular reason). The investment value of USD has an underlying "everyone in the US needs some to pay their taxes instead of going to jail", and that's great, but at some point either we're going to get the federal debt under control or we're going to monetize it and dilute your USD to nothing, and I'm not betting on "get the federal debt under control".
an index fund
This is less terrifying. Sure, if the ASI kills everyone and/or mandates a Socialist Utopia then you're wasting a sweet camping-with-the-dog opportunity, but if property rights retain any respect then it'll be good to have equity in a wide enough array of investments to definitely include some companies who'll manage to surf the tidal wave rather than be crushed by it. A crashing dollar is going to hurt stocks but not as badly as it's going to hurt dollars.
Personally, I just wish I knew what to advise my kids. My index funds are at the "can pay for college if they don't go to med school" level, not the "idle rich" level. Even if AI progress levels off below superhuman, it looks like it will level off at somewhere around "can interpolate within the manifold of all existing human knowledge", and how much economic room is there for the vast majority of human knowledge workers in a world like that? Being able to personally push the boundaries of knowledge into previously uncharted territory used to be what you needed to do to get a PhD, not what you needed to do on a regular basis just to remain economically viable.
To be merciful is to exceed justice, to give someone something more than they deserve. To be less merciful would not indicate moral deficiency on God's part.
I think we have different assumptions here. To me mercy and justness simply seem like different virtues, which a maximally moral individual would all exhibit. They don't trade off against each other or make up for each other - exceeding justice isn't unjust; mercy alone is not justice however plentiful. They're simply different axes.
Now, certainly, where there is justice, mercy is supererogatory in the context of treating morality as a yes-or-no question - a man who acts justly but without mercy is not behaving immorally. But I feel comfortable saying that a man who is both just and merciful is morally superior to one who is only ever just. And I could "judge the merciless man negatively" on moral grounds, though that judgement would not be the same thing as a condemnation.
That being said, my chief point here is that if mercy is indeed moral quality, then you are "judging" God if your praise of His merciful treatment of mankind constitutes a positive claim that it is present; if you can imagine a world where God was less, or was not, merciful, and in which consequently you would not be moved to compliment Him in this particular way. This seems to hold even if you think no negative judgement would be warranted in the absence of that mercy.
I also notice that the latter idea only works with "merciful", not "just". Justice is not supererogatory however you look at it. The absence of justice would be injustice. Therefore, under my model of praise, to praise God for being just ought to imply a counterfactual where you could, in principle, criticize Him for being unjust.
Ok, here. Dolphins are good. They also rape and murder other sea creatures. Explain to me in your example the significant difference between Orcus and Dolphins so I can understand what you think I would object to.
The difference is that Orcus, as a pseudo-Devil (though not a fallen angel), would be a scriptural figure and thus one priests had cause to talk about, whereas dolphins - to my knowledge - rarely come up at mass one way or the other.
My claim is that, if Orcus was a thing and came up in scripture, no one wearing a cassock would ever organically, spontaneously talk about Orcus's goodness the way they talk about God's goodness, any more than they'd speak about Satan's goodness, even though they would acknowledge that Orcus technically counts as "good" in the same sense as dolphins and scorpions should they be specifically asked. I believe this demonstrates that God's goodness gets brought up for other, specific reasons than that God satisfies the criteria for this technical sense of "goodness".
So in this prong of our discussion I've not been arguing about theology qua theology so much as accusing the Church of rampant muddling-of-the-waters on this issue, which might be regarded either as doublethink-like epistemological confusion on the apologists' part, or deliberate deception of the common-folk for the "greater good" of fostering naive faith.
(In both cases, I am working under the assumption that people are more inclined to worship God and follow His commandments if they vaguely believe that he's good in the sense of being a good person; and therefore that, if the Catholic God is officially, theologically not "good" in that sense, apologists have an interest in obscuring this point, at least until they've got prospected converts fully "hooked" and can roll out the spikier doctrines. The apologist and convert can literally be different people, or a single man who's wrestling with doubt and winds up engaging in a bit of self-deception by mentally equivocating between the two senses of "good".)
It is, I admit, a somewhat aggressive line of argument, and not a fault of which I'm accusing you personally, which is why I'd sort of left it behind upthread as we got lost in the weeds of the specific Orcus hypothetical.
Lizzardspawn
40m ago
And with Hamas in control, October 7 will inevitably repeat as soon as the IDF is out.
Wasn't Oct 7 mostly IDF incompetence, and not hamas prowess?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
53m ago
I, of course, agree that God is love and spend more time rejoicing in His love than getting into philosophical debates. I didn't pick the topic of conversation.
I am 100% correct to contest the word Omnibenevolence as it is not the Theist claim.
To say God is Love is to say God wills the good of all. What is that good? It depends on the nature. The God of philosophy is the Triune God.
As Catherine of Sienna reports God said to her, "I am He who is, and you are she who is not." When she wrote this, was she expressing how far away she was from God or expressing a closeness unfathomable?
I'm not writing about infused prayer over here. I'm picking a fight over a specific word.
My hedge is that I'm saying its >50%, so not a certainty, but I want to be clear that IF it happens I wasn't caught off-guard and if it doesn't happen (or indeed never happens) I did stick my neck out and will accept the derision.
Because obsessive auteurs (or autists) with time on their hands and the proper tools CAN in fact create amazing works in relatively short time frames. It took Michelangelo 4 years to paint the Sistine Chapel. Would we agree that with modern tools and a few decent assistants, in the current era he could easily knock it out in less than 1?
Bo Burnham produced an acclaimed 87 minute-long special all by his lonesome in just over a year.
A small and dedicated team that animated an 84-minute long film over 5 1/2 years using free tools totaled about 40-50 people working on it but was mostly down to just two guys doing the critical work.
(Incidentally, "Flow" is also what Google is calling their AI video workspace)
So if the AI is sufficiently good to 10x the productivity of the creators, a team of about 5 could probably get something that's Netflix-Worthy (derogatory way to put it, granted) done inside of a year, if they share a vision and have maniacal but competent leadership.
Men are more private about their envy, they redirect it, channel it in different and sometimes more subtle ways; they are more embarrassed of it, more shameful of it.
Men buy sex, women sell sex. (This is just the way incentives work, not a moral judgment.)
The buyer dynamic is that being openly envious of people who have more money than you (and can afford better than you) is a signal you're poor. It is embarrassing and shameful to be poor. As an extension of that, if that man fucks your girlfriend or wife, he is walking proof that he is (and perhaps always will be) richer than you.
The same is not true of sellers; being envious of people who can command a higher price than you is not a signal you're poor in the same way. It is shameful to be outright undesired, but having to mark your body down to get the buyer's money is not quite the same thing.
I will refrain from further judgment, given the demographics of this forum
Rather humorously, the last time I made this point it was a woman complaining about it... yet that only served to prove my point further.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
It's cheap to take a one-lane-bidirectional road that has a bunch of existing development on it, expand it out to 2, maybe put a center turning lane in it, and you have what is effectively a highway.
This is only the case in the situation where the development isn't actually on the road or the lanes are super wide.
Same with the 4-way stop and the traffic light; it doesn't require a few million dollars per intersection like roundabouts do (it's the cheaper, more technologically-advanced option, though it of course does make other sacrifices).
I'm not sure what your claim is, exactly. Are you saying that stop signs are technologically advanced? Or that you can have stop signs on a road where the speed limit is 50 (based on your next paragraph)? I certainly haven't seen that before.
Yes, it'll cost you more lives and property damage because someone didn't look both ways and got (them or their car) hit by another car going 50 mph, but human safety and human dignity (in this case, the dignity of not living in a million-dollar shoebox and it only taking 10 minutes to get to your destination rather than 60) are always two sides of the same coin.
Wide, high speed roads are a nuisance to live near (ask me how I know), so I don't know that it's a big increase in dignity to make every road a 45MPH arterial.
I'm not sure what you are getting at with your 10 minute vs 60 minute journey hypothetical. The places where it takes 10 minutes to make a trip and the places where it takes 60 minutes to drive an equivalent distance are not the same, and this goes back to the land usage in the first part. You can't expand the roads endlessly, because there's stuff on the side of the road, and to make things worse, that stuff on the side of the road is why people travel in the first place, and with wider roads those places are forced further apart except in totally rural areas.
You can't take e.g. San Francisco and replace every two lane road with a six lane road to fix the traffic without running out of land or building double decker freeways in the middle of the city.
In general, my preferred mode of living is a medium town with quiet, shaded streets in town so that people can walk and bike around and kids can play in the street without getting oneshotted by a driver scroooolling tiktoks at 50 MPH. This is incompatible with wide roads with high speed limits, aka, stroads.
For everything else, there's the interstate.
faceh
1hr ago
It’s hard not to care, because for now the problems still exist. It will take solving them to end those concerns.
Add on that there's so many people I care about who are just living life without much awareness of what appears to be on the horizon... and it feels literally impossible to explain to them why they should perhaps care a bit about what we're seeing. There's so many disparate chapters of lore I'd have to catch them up on so they can see the whole picture like I do, I'd look like the crazed conspiracy theorist with red thread until they finally got up to speed and it clicked for them too... if it ever does.
Bit lonely being unable to bridge the gap on a topic that I find important. Hence why I'm here.
There are things I want to do and experience, but most are regular life milestones. Going full hedonist and spending all the money / becoming a drug / sex / gambling / food addict doesn’t seem to make the people who do it happy, end of the world or not.
There's wisdom in that, but I can think of certain things I could be indulging in that would ABSOLUTELY make me happier, and I would do more of them if my time preference where about 5-10% higher.
One thought that springs forth recently: If I quit my job and sold my house and everything in it, I could afford to buy a decent camper van and then take a year, maybe two to drive around the Country with my dog. And why not? It won't hurt anybody, and I'll rack up a pretty fulfilling experience that will take my mind off the pending event. And that's without touching my own (modest) retirement savings. Which reminds me: What the FUCK am I supposed to with with a 401(k) as someone who is under 40?
Seriously, although I understand the benefit of having a money stash that you can't easily touch, the idea that I will want to keep adding to this pile of money that I will be unable to draw from until I'm in my 60's feels farcical under current expectations. Like, I just do not believe that the future is one where I diligently tap away at a series of steady jobs, watch my savings grow over a couple decades, and then have to draw on that money in old age for a peaceful retirement.
Can someone lay out the path to 2050 where the most likely outcome is that the market grows about 5-7% every year on average, we don't have a debt crisis, or catastrophic event, OR an AI-fueled industrial revolution that pushes things parabolic for a bit, and I, when I hit 67, will be SUPER grateful to my past self for diligently squirreling away U.S. Dollars (rather than betting on BTC, for example) over that whole period.
I will grant, if I cash in all my chips now and the "NOTHING EVER HAPPENS" brigade is right, I'd look very stupid later. And the Gods of Copybook headings have been undefeated for centuries.
But even if 'NOTHING EVER HAPPENS,' there are still enough small happenings that keep piling up that it really seems like the standard assumptions that go into the ol' "Put aside 15% of your pretax income in an index fund and never touch it" advice are not going to hold over the future. I don't think there's a reason to give up on saving entirely, but it suggests one should be taking wilder risks and being much less concerned with historic returns as a guideline for future probable outcomes.
JarJarJedi
1hr ago
Israel policy on it is a bit schizophrenic. Officially, there are two goals - destroying Hamas and freeing the hostages. Unfortunately, the IDF seems to be unable to find the hostages by itself, at least within the boundaries that are set now by the government. And Hamas does not want to make any agreement that does not involve, basically, restoring the situation to pre-October 7, with Hamas in power in Gaza, IDF fully outside Gaza, and basically resetting the board to the situation where Hamas can recover and resume what they were doing and prepare for the next round to come soon.
Obviously, this is not acceptable to Israel. On the other hand, Israel does not want to administer Gaza - day to day control over Gaza means persistent deployment of armed forces into densely populated hostile areas, which will inevitably lead to great increase of casualties on both sides, and is usually horrible for morale. On yet other hand, there's no viable alternative which is acceptable to Israel - all the ideas of "somebody" taking over from Hamas are crushed by the facts that a) nobody wants to do it and b) Hamas is still alive so "somebody" will have to fight them and really nobody wants to do it. I mean, the offer is to fight a guerilla war against motivated, well supplied and entrenched opponent, with broad support among local population, and the prize is a control of one of the shittiest places on earth with no noticeable resources, warlike population and no possibility of making any profit from it ever. Who'd buy that? And with Hamas in control, October 7 will inevitably repeat as soon as the IDF is out.
So, what Israel is doing is increasing its control over Gaza territory, while specifically not declaring the full takeover. The goal of it is twofold: a) more control over the territory means more chance to eliminate Hamas resources and somehow get lucky in the hostage area, though absent a miracle the chances of that are small, but we're talking about Jews here, miracles happen all the time; and b) more pressure on Hamas means more place for piecemeal agreements where at least some hostages could be released in exchange for temporary relieving the pressure. The pressure of course includes control over resources - the last ceasefire let enough resources to come in Gaza to physically last several months, maybe more, but who controls those resources and how is much more complicated. A lot of them are controlled by Hamas, but people of Gaza, even with their deep hatred for Israel, know that too and know Hamas has much more than it gives out. So that is another way to put pressure on Hamas and force them to both dole out some of their hoards and erode their stance with the local population. Of course, Hamas aren't stupid either, and the less hostages they have, the more reluctant they are to part with them. Currently, 23 hostages are believed to be alive, and Hamas does not want to give up more without some permanent gains.
Obviously, this situation is not sustainable, however Israel currently doesn't seem to have a solution that is both feasible and acceptable. So the strategy is to continue pressuring Hamas as much as the local and international politics allows, in hope either of softening them enough to amend their negotiation position (by either convincing some people or killing enough of them that somebody more reasonable comes to lead) or something external happening that improves the situation. Maybe US signing up to population evacuation plan, maybe some Arab sheiks going crazy and agreeing to take responsibility for Gaza, maybe Hamas making some spectacular blunder that would temporarily shut up the wokes in Europe and allow Israel to drastically increase the pressure, or there's a revolution in Iran and Hamas is left without a sponsor. Who knows. Or maybe Israeli government suddenly finds its cojones and declares that it's ready to take over Gaza now, at which point we're back to 2005. It could also be resolved the other way - the right-leaning government is toppled, the left comes to power in the next election, and agrees to Hamas deal described above, at which point we're back to October 6.
So the near term goal is to erode and weaken Hamas as an organization. Official long-term goals are described above, but they are more of an aspirational nature, as nobody knows how it's possible to actually achieve them in reality, at least in the near term.
What a silly shitshow. Thanks for writing it out, that was a fun read.
Thank ye. That was the goal.
My question is why doesn't the board or president or whoever just launch a crackdown on pro-Palestinian protestors? Students have almost no political power in universities -- they're customers, not constituents. Most of them have political views that are only thinly-held, so just start issuing expulsions for some of the ringleaders and the rest will likely get over the whole thing.
My impression is it's not just the students, but the teachers. Part of the article goes into Columbia's self-perceived vulnerability of losing teachers not only the other Ivy Leagues, but foreign universities.
They are (not quite implicitly) concerned that if they go hard on the protestors, the protesting-supporting teachers will go abroad as well. Part of this could be because of 'fascistic' concerns that could be a 'push' factor-
Bearman said, “She also pointed out that the security guards were unpleasant, kind of fascistic, and that she was going to make it a rule that they said ‘Good morning’ and ‘Thank you.’ And you know what? They did.”
-and other parts are the 'pull' factor of other higher education employers. From paras not raised-
After another embittered class has its commencement on May 21, Columbia will lurch into a summer of ugly possibilities. Students are still attempting major disruptions on campus, and the school has laid off 180 employees whose pay relied on federal funding. Scientists are hoarding supplies. “Everything is pretty much being held together with Scotch tape,” the director of a research institute at Columbia said. “The only thing that’s saving us from a wholesale exodus is they’re not funding any new grants at Harvard either, but we’re very worried about the flight of our most outstanding people. The Europeans and Chinese are both circling like mad.”
A lot of the article reflects a subtext / basis of comparison with the other Ivy Leagues, especially Harvard.
Columbia’s feebleness this spring has dismayed the many students, faculty, and alumni who wish it would wage a more principled fight against Trump — as Harvard has done by suing his administration in federal court. But even Trump’s allies failed to predict how much of a pushover it has been. “I was surprised by how quickly and how completely the university folded,” Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who helped develop the strategy to crush Columbia, told me.
Early on, Shafik had been lucky to dodge a congressional hearing at which the presidents of Harvard and Penn addressed reports of antisemitism in lawyerly terms and later resigned. But it meant that when the House Committee on Education and the Workforce returned to the issue, it held a hearing focused exclusively on Columbia. Shafik, Shipman, and Shipman’s board co-chair, David Greenwald, went to Washington to testify. On the morning of April 17, 2024, before they arrived on Capitol Hill, they learned that pro-Palestinian students had taken over the university’s South Lawn.
In the 30 hours that ensued, Shafik’s presidency was lost and Columbia plunged into true crisis, never to recover. During the hearing, Shafik struck a far different pose from Harvard’s Claudine Gay.
In the meantime, the Columbia community is waiting to see whether Shipman can reverse some of the university’s reputational loss. Harvard is basking in the glory of fighting Trump in court, and Princeton’s president, Chris Eisgruber, gave a humiliating interview to the Times offering his fellow Ivy notes on character. “I understand why Columbia might feel that they had to make concessions under the circumstances,” he said. “You have careers at stake. You have jobs at stake. You have the ability to educate your students at stake. And you may say, ‘Look, I wish I could take a stand on principle, but given what’s at stake, I can’t.’ But then you need to say that.” Cogburn, the social-work professor, suggested that the people running the school are too compromised to be credible: “I don’t know what their intentions are, whether they actually want to dismantle the senate or whether they earnestly want to consider the best way to govern, but they are consistently underestimating how much they’ve damaged their reputations and trust.”
And during that final Board-student meeting, I skipped a paragraph (for character limit constraints).
Early on, a student asked, “Why are you not taking action against the government — ” leading to several overlapping calls of “Like Harvard!” “Harvard!” “Harvard!” and “We want you to fight!” Goggin pointed out that Harvard had received more invasive demands from Trump than Columbia had. “If we can do something that we were going to do anyway without having to litigate, and restore the things that we care about here, that is in our opinion — or in my opinion — our best path,” he said. “That is where we are today. It doesn’t mean we’ll be there tomorrow.”
So- in a sense- pride. Or ego.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
1hr ago
Foiled again. ;P
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
I find this unlikely. It might happen in a few years if current progress continues but this year is too early. If I arbitrarily set the threshold of a "film" at >75 minutes long, and set some baseline quality standard of say >50 on Metacritic, and stipulate that principle photography must be done entirely through AI (humans doing minor touch-ups would be fine), I think people would be very hard pressed to do that in the very short term. The scaffolding and pipelines don't really exist yet to make that feasible.
In fact, I'm writing this one down in my list of predictions that won't happen to keep track of.
TheFooder
1hr ago
The thing that gets me--and I will admit my loss of facts over the years-- is there's no counterfactual for how effective the vaccines were. I presume the peak numbers would have come down a little, but vs. what? Overall, it doesn't seem to me there's much evidence that the vaccines did anything as the course of the covid outbreak followed every other pandemic just at a different scale. All I get is, "Of course they worked, it's obvious. You're stupid."
hanikrummihundursvin
1hr ago
If I had rested any of my arguments on the fact that Caplan is not serious then I'd whole heartedly agree. But I didn't. Much less so considering I am talking to you on a rather heterodox platform. To that end I do not understand what relevance the opinion of 'most people' has to do with anything. Much less so considering most people would say that advocating for an open borders policy is a sign of someone not being serious.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
What a silly shitshow. Thanks for writing it out, that was a fun read.
My question is why doesn't the board or president or whoever just launch a crackdown on pro-Palestinian protestors? Students have almost no political power in universities -- they're customers, not constituents. Most of them have political views that are only thinly-held, so just start issuing expulsions for some of the ringleaders and the rest will likely get over the whole thing. If they don't, keep issuing expulsions. Columbia has enough prestige that it won't realistically run out of students willing to go there. Faculty might be a trickier matter and some might protest out of principle, but if the students aren't protesting then that would probably take the wind out of their sails.
MollieTheMare
1hr ago
Congratulations, savor this period of rapid progress.
very little way to cheat form-wise
Just make sure you're being honest with yourself on this one. It's easy to get carried away as progress slows. Make sure you're keeping you elbows tucked to protect your shoulders, especially as the weights start approaching the 200# mark. Try not to cut ROM on the bottom, only count reps where you touch your chest as PBs. It's probably better if you keep your butt on the bench too, though I have to admit I've counted reps in training where my butt came off.
Don't do anything stupid, like going to failure alone in the gym. Bench is the only lift that regularly kills people.
On that front, deadlifts are probably the hardest to cheat. My deadlift comparatively sucks to my bench though, fortunately "how much ya' bench" is a much more common question than "how much ya' dead."
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
1hr ago
Really, the reason they exist is cost. It's cheap to take a one-lane-bidirectional road that has a bunch of existing development on it, expand it out to 2, maybe put a center turning lane in it, and you have what is effectively a highway.
Strong Towns and the other anti-car people get extremely butthurt about "but muh suburban financial sustainability", but this is why this kind of construction exists in the first place. Same with the 4-way stop and the traffic light; it doesn't require a few million dollars per intersection like roundabouts do (it's the cheaper, more technologically-advanced option, though it of course does make other sacrifices).
Yes, it'll cost you more lives and property damage because someone didn't look both ways and got (them or their car) hit by another car going 50 mph, but human safety and human dignity (in this case, the dignity of not living in a million-dollar shoebox and it only taking 10 minutes to get to your destination rather than 60) are always two sides of the same coin.
TIRM
1hr ago
Article I, Section 6, Clause 1:
The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.
Yeah, legislative representatives should be immune to legal punishment for their speech. Imagine if a legislator gave a fiery speech and then was sued for slander or censured and stripped of voting power. That's not a well functioning government.
It is obvious that they worked. This is how normal people understand things. Didn't we vaccinate everyone? And didn't the pandemic end soon after?
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