domain:city-journal.org
Throwaway05
18hr ago
I mean I worry that I get to say this because I have a high degree of financial security and that we shouldn't asking others to make the same mental commitment.
But it should be talked about.
Instead we see a lot of people with no skin in the game cheering and negatively impacted people struggling to admit to themselves that it wasn't what they wanted or not worth it.
NYTReader
18hr ago
My impression is that almost everyone on the Grok and OpenAI teams are either the children of immigrants or people who came to the US as the children. This seems to be the case for almost all of our very highly successful first and second generation immigrants.
If they leave their country for a better life once, they can do it again if the situation changes.
Lots of these people are second or third generation immigrants by now. They're Americans.
In my opinion, US immigration seems to be broadly work. If Arctotherium had made these predictions 30 years ago, he would have been proven wrong. Sure, we can reduce immigration, but what we do re Chinese and Indian immigrants seems to be working very well.
quiet_NaN
18hr ago
In lighter news, the FDA has taken it upon themselves to improve shrimp welfare by calling on Americans not to eat certain shrimps.
The level of Cs-137 detected in the detained shipment was approximately 68 Bq/kg, which is below FDA’s Derived Intervention Level for Cs-137 of 1200 Bq/kg. At this level, the product would not pose an acute hazard to consumers.
Then why recall them?
Avoiding products like the shipment FDA tested with similar levels of Cs-137 is a measure intended to reduce exposure to low-level radiation that could have health impacts with continued exposure over a long period of time.
This is a weird statement. If you are concerned about radioactivity below 1.2kBq/kg, then why not have a lower threshold?
At the bottom of the page they state:
Consumers who have symptoms should contact their health care provider to report their symptoms and receive care.
Comedy gold. They should mention that the relevant health care provider for symptoms from a couple of 100 Bq of Cs-137 is your psychiatrist.
The steelman, from what I can tell, is that this is concerning not because of the dose but because it is unclear where the Cs-137 is coming from:
FDA determined that product from PT. Bahari Makmur Sejati violates the Federal Food, Drug, & Cosmetic Act in that it appears to have been prepared, packed, or held under insanitary conditions whereby it may have become contaminated with Cs-137 and may pose a safety concern.
Cs-137 is a classic mid-lifetime (T1/2=30a) fission product. Whenever you have an atmospheric nuclear weapon test or a reactor disaster, it will be one of the relevant radioisotopes.
In its decay, it also emit 660keV gamma rays, which together with its half-life make it a widely used gamma ray source.
Without knowing what exactly is going on, I see two main possibilities. One would be that the shrimps were fed contaminated food, e.g. freshwater fish from some lakes in Scandinavia. Per the FDA release, they do not believe that this is what is going on.
The other plausible explanation I can think of is contamination with Cs-137 used for food irradiation. WP:
Conversely, caesium-137 is water-soluble and poses a risk of environmental contamination. Insufficient quantities are available for large-scale commercial use as the vast majority of Caesium-137 produced in nuclear reactors is not extracted from spent nuclear fuel. An incident where water-soluble caesium-137 leaked into the source storage pool requiring NRC intervention has led to near elimination of this radioisotope.
Food irradiation is safe for the food if you take great care to not get your radioisotopes into your food. This is typically easy because you can encase your source in a few millimeters of stainless steel, and plenty of gamma rays will still make it through. If you get any radioactivity into your food during irradiation, then something has gone terribly wrong. Given the ungodly amounts of activity involved with food irradiation, this is a major concern.
I admit that my knee-jerk reaction to the FDA warning was to think that an agency which warned about a dose which was a whopping 6% of its threshold had probably not been DOGEd sufficiently. On further reflection, I think that it is more like faintly smelling smoke suddenly. Not itself very concerning, but if you did not expect to smell smoke then it might be indicative that there is a worrisome problem somewhere.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
18hr ago
Oh, he wasn't totally cooperative today? He had an understandable reaction to being disappointed or anxious about something?
We're divorced because he couldn't reign in his emotions.
Many such cases. My advice stands, he must learn to stuff his emotions.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
18hr ago
It appears that enough people have already reported your comments here that they’ve ended up in the report queue, which is very unfortunate. Those are clearly ideologically motivated reports; nothing you’ve said here is in violation of the rules.
Your presence here is highly valued, so I do hope that you feel encouraged to post here more often. You’re not the only Trump-critical poster here, so your arguments would find some support.
erwgv3g34
18hr ago
Mushguffler
18hr ago
I see tons of ‘black fatigue’ and explicitly white nationalist people in my feed
Your feed is your own problem. Both the comments about black fatigue and the white supremacist remarks are mostly bots designed to grab your attention, and even the ones that are real are chosen by bot to grab your attention. Make better choices.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
18hr ago
If we grant that the cultural right is "winning" right now
They’re not. All you’re seeing is a “10 steps forward, 2 steps back” kind of situation.
Soteriologian
18hr ago
A more "gloves-off" approach to online speech is a win for free expression, but its most visible result has been the normalization of unapologetic racism.
For me, as much as I've been infuriated with progressive activism the past decade, the censorship rollback has revealed that the leftists were, in fact, right about many of the rightoids. Many actually are racist -- not in the "oh, there may be group differences" sense, but in the "I hate colored people and I want them out of the country" sense.
Why we can't have a single group that has stable, high-IQ people in charge advocating for basic civic decency, responsibility, and functional society is beyond me. Yes, we can and should imprison colored people for committing violent crime. No, this is not racist. No, that does not mean we ship all the colored people away at gunpoint. As Bukele has so clearly demonstrated, even in a country quite literally full of brown people with a globally chart-topping murder rate, all you have to do is put the violent criminals in prison and the crime magically drops to levels of western Europe. It is, in fact, that simple.
Alas, this is all clearly too much to ask of the Americans.
zeke5123a
18hr ago
Perhaps racism evolved because it is useful? I’m not suggesting there are t terrible failure modes but if multiculturalism actually is bad, then maybe some soft racism is actually good?
5434a
18hr ago
The motto is Peace, Love, Unity, Respect (PLUR)
At best this is an aspiration. It's like BDSM heads talk about safe sane and consensual. Look at what you actually see. In a rave it's synthetic drugs and electronic drums, in BDSM it's sex and violence. Too cynical? Take raves and remove the drugs and drums but leave the PLUR. Does the result still look like raves?
Don't get me wrong, I like raves. I'm just tired of people using trite slogans to morally launder their deviancy and hedonism.
I don't know how to dance with other people, especially how to dance up to a girl to get her attention. Any advice here? I often find myself dancing faster than everyone else.
Raves are not partner dances. Raves can be a place for being expressive, playful and a bit childish, so you can try something like miming. I once saw a guy miming out a full shopping trip to a supermarket. You could try something interactive like bouncing an imaginary basketball and passing it to the people who catch on, then build up the interaction from there - celebrate scoring a half court three pointer, draw them up on a foul/travelling, send them to time out, then if it's a cute girl you could joke about their team's uniform and rib them for not having showered after the match. Just make stuff up. Drugs help. Even if it's not for the women it's a fun change from trying to be all serious. But if you're looking to dance with a partner you should go to partner dances.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
19hr ago
What else would even be the point?
To destroy enemy centers of power.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19hr ago
Almost all asteroids are worse sources of metals
Yeah but some of them are much better source of minerals than any mine on earth. Iridium is hard to acquire here for one thing.
Apparently this one is pretty rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(6178)_1986_DA
The asteroid achieved its most notable recognition when scientists revealed that it contained over "10,000 tons of gold and 100,000 tons of platinum", or an approximate value at the time of its discovery of "$90 billion for the gold and a cool trillion dollars for the platinum, plus loose change for the asteroid's 10 billion tons of iron and a billion tons of nickel."[10] In 2024 the estimated value of 100,000 tons of platinum was worth approximately 3.4 trillion US dollars. The delta-v for a spacecraft rendezvous with this asteroid from low Earth orbit is 7.1 km/s.[11]
Even Australian production of iron ore is barely a billion tonnes per year, that's a lot of iron. Iron is at least digestible by the world economy whereas there'd be a glut of gold and platinum.
I have no problem with waiting. Personally I think that leaving Earth's orbit pre-fusion propulsion is silly. But with fusion propulsion lots of opportunities are opened up, one scarcely needs to worry about delta-v within the solar system.
I mean this is just ridiculous:
On 28 February 2020, NASA awarded SpaceX a US$117 million contract to launch the Psyche spacecraft, and two smallsat secondary missions, on a Falcon Heavy rocket.[48] The spacecraft was successfully launched on 13 October 2023, at 14:19 UTC,[49] with an expected arrival in 2029.
6 years! And by the time you get there nothing can be done, chemical rockets are the astronomical cuck chair. You just get to watch the asteroid tumble on.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
19hr ago
someone working in the upper echelons of the Israeli government and reporting directly to Benjamin Netanyahu
You seem to have knee-jerked a reply without actually paying attention to the details under discussion.
We're talking about the AG of Nevada. Not an Israeli government official.
And assuming all Jews are Zionists is SS's position, not mine.
thejdizzler
19hr ago
Ahh I see. It is a lot better than what I'm used to, which is just idle theorizing usually. At least couzens tries to support his ideas with "something". But you're right, it's not very rigorous. Thanks for the explanation.
thejdizzler
19hr ago
My understanding is there is a large metabolic and structural component. Heart disease is still the #1 killer and this is almost entirely due to a break down in how the circulatory system functions. There is a genetic component but ti's not like fixing people's DNA will really help
JTarrou
19hr ago
I too am terrified that if we deport more Guatemalans not enough Indians will come here and do the jobs Americans just won't do (for less than minimum wage).
There's one major factory company left in mid-Michigan, but they hire their engineering and technical staff entirely from the subcontinent. Now, because I've seen the unemployment numbers and because this used to be a manufacturing hub, I don't think this is because there aren't enough locals to do the job. It just costs more when you can't ship them back after their visa is up. Every hotel in fifty miles smells like curry, but at least Dow doesn't hire Americans for jobs outside the warehouse.
It would be a real tragedy if those indians were so enraged by anti-black racism they see on the internet that they no longer wanted to come here. Why, companies might have to pay real wages and benefits, and not be able to hold a work visa over their recruits' heads, and that would be bad. Our economy cannot survive without a constant stream of immigrants, because we have laws that force employers to meet certain minimum criteria when hiring Americans, and that's bad.
I quite liked KSR as a kid but Aurora completely ruined him for me, it's fractally bad.
In particular the nonsense about insular dwarfism which crops up very early and makes it obvious that he does not understand the first thing about biology. He repeatedly states that the ship's genetic screening/controlled breeding system is working fine and there is no inbreeding or loss of genetic diversity, then insists that this is pointless and they are doomed because they didn't take the zoo/island effect into account. There's no attempt to find a mechanism by which that might operate despite the genetic diversity being fine, and I don't think KSR realised he needed one.
The morality is even more confused: it builds its anti-space argument around the deep immorality of generation ships, with endless discussion of the inhuman cruelty of condemning future generations to live and die in a ship for your ambition, climaxing with the protagonist attacking would-be space explorers on earth, denouncing them for a crime which none of them have or plan to commit and which she already has. Literally Freya is the only character in the entire book who we see launch a generation ship, and she uses the immorality of her own actions to condemn space exploration as a whole. KSR brushes off this hypocricy, yet he's obviously aware of it because he uses the cryosleep deux ex machina to let Freya give the speech directly instead of dictating it to the grandchildren she condemned to die in space.
Also it's a much pettier issue but I couldn't get over the fact that the ship's closed-loop ecosystem is not only divided into a bunch of different ecoregions with non-overlapping fauna but that most of them have predators including miniature bears and wolves. I half-wish the Snakes on a Plane people would option it for a sequel.
EilonwyPrydain
19hr ago
AuDHD. Interesting you mention the father thing because he's exactly like his dad, which is what scares me sometimes. We're divorced because he couldn't reign in his emotions. They both get extremely frustrated when there's a task they're having trouble with.
Society doesn't seem to have the right model for it. "Oh, he's an abusive husband because he yells and throws things, he's using his emotions to control you." I don't think it was that calculated (and for the record, he never laid a hand on me). I would describe his outbursts as panic attacks - just really accelerated breathing and heart rate and this kind of spiral of escalation that he seemed unable to break out of.
Anyway with the teen, we're trying to figure out the right mix of medication and talk therapy approaches. His school has a 504 with him and we're working on an IEP. Overall they've really tried to work with us. I just have some discomfort around the idea that we're pathologizing what to him is a normal emotional reaction, and making him feel somehow broken. But it does need to be addressed because living with his dad was volatile and unstable. I hope Junior can find a better way to manage it all.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
20hr ago
Well certainly avoid physical confrontation or violence of any kind, though perhaps that's the idea--you'd like to be violent but the repercussions would be unavoidable.
Hard to answer without much more specific descriptions, unless you're casting about for permission to use manipulation and subterfuge to undermine this person. I'd personally avoid that route as well, though such strategies tend to get results. I'd argue the cost is one's soul but I tend toward dramatic statements, especially when sitting in a hospital waiting room for hours, as I'm doing now. (I'm not sick.)
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
20hr ago
Well normally I'd suggest a gin and tonic at this time of year, but the other comments are probably going to give a peace of mind with a more robust shelf life.
pbmonster
20hr ago
there are many competing ideologies and it isn’t clear to me which KSR thinks are the right ones.
To me it seemed that he design the gift economy some of the Martians end up with to be pretty utopian. But yes, he does't dwell on it, or even elaborate very much.
thrownaway24e89172
Death is the inevitable and only true freedom
20hr ago
How do you define a "principled liberal"? Liberals typically have principles beyond "freedom of speech" and recognize that important principles sometimes conflict. Does being "principled" require a naive "Rank principles in order of importance and act based on that ranking." method of conflict resolution?
Since these people seem to make it an axiom that they should never have their funding cut, despite there very obviously being many serious issues with their whole enterprise (which they regularly lament), I am disinclined to weigh their opinions very heavily, shiny medals notwithstanding. Perhaps I'd rather the administration use a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer, but a scalpel isn't really an option, so sledgehammer it is.
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