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coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2hr ago
Very awesome quote. “What would CS Lewis think of Disney” now makes me wonder what all the other greats thought of Disney
cjet79
2hr ago
He also just released The Evidence That A Million Americans Died Of COVID.
I went and looked into the death rate a little more. Found this graph of the trend. Here is a fun game: spot when covid starts.
There has been a year over year increase in the death rate by about 1% starting in 2014 and hasn't started shrinking much until 2024. What the hell is going on?
I have a suspicion that old people have just been getting older. And that those old people are dying more during flu season. And that the excess death chart from 2018-2019 would line up pretty well with an excess death chart from 2020-2021. But that would probably take a lot of effort to figure out. I dont even know where to get month to month death numbers, tried asking some AI to help me find it, but sounds like its not publicly available.
Skulldrinker
2hr ago
This isn't on an app.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2hr ago
Olive beat me to it! Here's the full quote, from a letter Lewis wrote to a friend in 1939:
What did you think of Snowwhite and the VII Dwarfs? I saw it at Malvern last week. . . . Leaving out the tiresome question of whether it is suitable for children (which I don’t know and don’t care) I thought it almost inconceivably good and bad—I mean, I didn’t know one human being could be so good and bad. The worst thing of all was the vulgarity of the winking dove at the beginning, and the next worst the faces of the dwarfs. Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music. But all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. What might not have come of it if this man had been educated—or even brought up in a decent society?
EvanTh
2hr ago
But by that reasoning, wouldn't the drawing of state legislative districts also be a purely internal act? Because the states are sovereign, and if a state want one district to be ten times the size of another, that's its sovereign right?
You've got a strong argument, but it flies in the face of decades-old Supreme Court precedent which I haven't heard anyone arguing to overturn.
jkf
2hr ago
It's not a good idea to go off such n=1 anecdotes in general.
Certainly true -- I'd consider it n=2 now though! My lifestyle absolutely involves a lot less exposure to infectious diseases than yours, so I doubt that I'm like highly immune anymore -- but would expect severity to remain mild if I get it again.
How severe were your more recent infections?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2hr ago
There's yet to be an example I can think of where he made a promise then got beaten by a competitor to delivering on it.
Tesla robotaxi comes to mind. Waymo has been serving customers and steadily increasing its coverage for years now. Musk has been promising autonomous robotaxis since 2019 (initial timeline: 2020) and Waymo launched its Phoenix pilot in 2022.
faceh
2hr ago
Agreed. Hence I generally support the Rationalist project, hopeless as it seems.
faceh
2hr ago
Yep.
But it starts to drive you (well, ME) a tiny bit insane to have to act 'normal' while you have an acute awareness of the impending moment.
I literally cannot believe that I'm sitting at my desk, at work, while some other dude, in a lab or office somewhere else, is engineering an AI that is going to replace my job or possibly kill me in a few years.
Its like if humanity discovered the massive Egg that Godzilla was about to hatch from. And scientists on analysis estimate that "This thing is going to hatch within 2-10 years, and there's not much we can do about it."
But I have to go back to work and ignore the Godzilla egg and do spreadsheets and contracts and all the stuff that keeps society moving, knowing that unless the hatching fails entirely, none of this will make a damn spit of difference.
faceh
2hr ago
If I may AKSHULLY for a moment.
He overpromises and never delivers on schedule...
And then STILL delivers an end result closer to the hype than any of his rivals.
That's been the secret. Hype something up and then deliver (eventually) a product that doesn't live up to the hype but is still better than anything else in its class.
There's yet to be an example I can think of where he made a promise then got beaten by a competitor to delivering on it.
So failing to deliver isn't fatal if nobody else can beat you to delivering.
Blueberry
2hr ago
Lab leak has a few things going for it, but these are always presented in isolation and no pushback. It is worth to read through Scotts Lab-Leak-Megapost, which is itself only a summary/review of the 15 hours of Lab-Leak-debate videos. I wouldn't rule out Lab-Leak completely, but I downgraded its probability.
lagrangian
2hr ago
maybe "continuity" is the word you're looking for?
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
China seems unlikely, but the EU, on the other hand…
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
You can’t, in a nation of laws, just go around seizing people’s shit.
TowardsPanna
2hr ago
Should I abandon my main reddit account?
It's got hundreds of thousands of karma but has been in use for 14 years and was once compromised by a paypal deal where my real name was revealed to one redditor...
Blueberry
2hr ago
Yet, the most visceral image of it is Bill Gates releasing non-viral mosquitoes to a room of white people:
Ha, didn't know that. It is quickly over though, more dorky thing in a longer nerdy presentation by Gates, than a flashy publicity stunt.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Columbia is an influential non-state institution, but it isn’t sovereign. Really us moderns tend to think of sovereignty as so tied in with statehood that the whole idea of institutional rights and prerogatives is undermined. The USFG won’t send in the 101st airborne every time; there are institutions right now who just accept minor sanctions to do thing the government doesn’t like very much. Relevantly for the topic, hillsdale and Bob jones universities. These have a limited sovereignty, not the full non-state sovereignty of, say, the order of Malta, but if the 101st airborne showed up at Hillsdale, well, Andorra wouldn’t exactly fair any better.
Tree
2hr ago
It would be a good start to remove their tax exempt status, sure. Seizing the money sounds bad, but this is not money that rightfully belongs to an individual proscribed by a capricious state, it’s from a heavily-subsidized institution that in theory performs government-like functions. It could be seen as just correcting some accounting mistake in the financing of government goals, or as making them pay some tax arrears, or inheritance tax.
You’re a reasonable guy, Ben. Maybe you can tell me what the obvious, very good reasons against a 1%/y wealth tax is. All I ever hear is that taxes are bad, which okay fair enough, but that’s not specific, and liquidity problems, which I don’t find convincing. If you can’t cough up 1%, you’re either incompetent or bankrupt, and you shouldn’t be holding assets.
stuff that all of society benefits from, and almost nobody else wants to do.
That’s an argument from laziness, tainted with status quo bias. You want to fund science, fund it. There's no reason to delegate this power to universities, when it's clear their goals can very much diverge from the societally beneficial one. It's spelled out in the OP: they almost used the money society granted them to fight a titanic legal battle against the government for partisan reasons.
Your other argument is that since any one person or institution cannot fund all of USG, they shouldn’t be taxed.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Yes, and the flu shot has very similar but quieter opposition as the Covid vaccine- working class conspiracy theories that it spreads illness, shortens lifespans to save social security, doesn’t work at all but big pharma bribes employers to push it, etc are a dime a dozen.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
My white, tradcath, smoking and drinking are what you do, Covid measures are the mark of the beast circles did very well.
Face it- the virus just doesn’t affect people who don’t give a shit.
I did have an uncle whose annual hospital stay was due to Covid. But, like, his annual hospital stay.
zoink
2hr ago
The neurotic shot takers I know do seem to be sick a lot, but they also seemed to be sick a lot before covid. Possibly too much observation bias for me to draw a strong conclusion.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
Exactly. The entire trans-sports debate needs to be reframed in those terms: the debate isn't really whether MTFs can be allowed to compete, it's whether they be allowed to win.
Which is what's so frustrating about the dishonesty of the debate. Athletics are great, I'm a big advocate for them, but formal competitions aren't a necessary component. There are plenty of hobbyists across many sports who never compete, will never compete, and still get a lot out of it. Most rock climbers never compete. Most golfers never enter a tournament. Most Yogi aren't even aware of the idea of a tournament!
Most of the people at my BJJ gym will never enter a formal comp, and while the girls tend to stick together at need the rolls are co-ed. If a trans girl joined the gym, she'd have every opportunity to advance at the gym, and if I had to roll with her (though I'd probably avoid it if I could) I'd treat her like anyone else weaker than me, and she'd be expected to treat other women the same way. It's only once you start talking about a comp that there's any possibility of real trouble, and most people never enter comps. Hell, my good friend is a black belt, entered one tournament in his life, broke his collarbone, and immediately said "never doing that again."
Trans advocates, taking them in good faith, are giving trans girls terrible advice when they send them to join the track team, where they'll be constantly hounded. If a trans girl has interest in athletics, she should just pick up hobbyist athletics without the expectation of winning medals in anything.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
The implication of calling it ‘Kung flu’ ‘chink virus’ ‘Chinese cringe aids’ etc was, in the minds of those actually calling it that ‘it’s a flu. It’s way overblown.’
No one actually turns up for dates, though. They always mysteriously get sick or suffer personal life disasters like epilepsy or dead grandmothers and have to cancel. Or just unmatch the day of the date.
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