domain:streamable.com
ABigGuy4U
3hr ago
Two Israeli embassy staff were shot dead late yesterday night as they were walking just outside the Capitol Jewish Museum. The Capitol Police have identified the suspect as one Elias Rodriguez of Chicago. Reportedly, Rodriguez shouted “Free Palestine” as he executed the couple, who were engaged to be married.
I have been meaning to write a “Civil War vibe-check” top-level post. My intuition was that the danger of such a nightmare scenario was receding, having peaked twice, with the mass-shooting at the Congressional baseball team practice game, and the George Floyd Riot/January Sixth Riot forming a stockbroker’s double blow-off top before a consistent decline in risk.
Recently multiple events have made me question this. The Zizian cult killings, the suicide bombing in Palm Springs over the weekend, and now this, make me feel like something is perhaps coming. Maybe not a full Syrian Civil War, but at least another Days of Rage similar to the period in the 1970s after the great wave broke and began to recede. I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
3hr ago
I'm young(ish) and in otherwise good health, so they were never that bad. My first and last confirmed bouts were the worst, being somewhat worse than the average cold. The others were indistinguishable from the same. Just a few days moping around in bed waiting for the worst of it to pass, barely even a fever. It's possible I caught it more than 4 times, but I stopped bothering to get tested a long time ago.
SkoomaDentist
3hr ago
In related news Trump administration just revoked Harvard's ability to enroll international students by terminating the Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification. Apparently this will also force their current exchange students to transfer to other schools or lose their legal status.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
4hr ago
Stop there, go no further, turn back now. That is the antilife equation.
ABigGuy4U
4hr ago
@FiveHourMarathon The tax exemption also makes many churches incredibly cowardly, as they have to refrain from doing or preaching anything that could harm the precious tax exemption.
ABigGuy4U
4hr ago
Untouched by you, I mean. Thin men and thick women pay themselves sinecures from the ill-gotten treasure. Worse, these janitors conspire to turn it against the state.
I’m not sure I agree with this reasoning. If these people receive payment, then definitionally, they cannot be janitors.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4hr ago
They stopped naming COVID variants after Greek letters right when they got to 'Xi'.
roystgnr
4hr ago
I think it helps me to be old enough to have become aware of the seriousness of the Cold War before the end of the Cold War. I still remember the library shelves where little-me found a book explaining Mutually Assured Destruction, warhead and missile counts, warhead blast radii, etc. We didn't know about all the actual close calls yet, but there was enough there to make it quite clear that at any moment I could be 45 minutes away from incineration, with so little I could do about it that there wasn't even any point to anxiety.
In an objective sense this is much worse than that, because even an all-out nuclear exchange would have left us (well, humanity, anyway; everyone I knew personally would also have been incinerated) with billions of survivors and a viable (at least in some countries) civilization to rebuild from, whereas if Superintelligence actually turns out to be obtainable while Friendliness remains distant and Corrigibility remains intractable then that's the end of that. But for my subjective well-being I think it's good that my reaction to a bit of creeping existential dread is "Hey, I remember you. Long time no see."
lagrangian
4hr ago
There's a data quality issue in here, and I'm not sure on which side. Scott's "annual deaths" graph shows a sharp uptick for Covid. Yours does not.
There's also the "harvesting" effect - many people who died from Covid did not have long left. I am most interested in what effect Covid has on the 10 year moving average of total deaths.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4hr ago
I don’t see feelings as bad, I see a hyper-focused fixation of the modern world on getting their feelings right first, of making decisions based on feelings, to not only be a dead end, but often make building a good life impossible because building a good life doesn’t always match up to doing what feels good. It might feel good to cut out everything that makes you unhappy in the moment often means cutting yourself off from other people (who are imperfect) opportunities (that often have trade-offs or require hard work to realize), experiences (that might be uncomfortable in the moment, but lead to better things). It just seems to be a way to end up stuck, bitter, alone, and wallowing in bad feelings. Properly dealing with your feelings does matter, but I don’t think focusing on how you feel above duty, above growth, or above being a good person is a good thing.
I’ll agree that apart from God and Godly advice it ends mostly in bad places. I think a lot of terrible things have been done because a person had become bitter about people or situations, let it fester, and turned on others.
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
‘White south Africans shouldn’t be granted refugee status’ is an argument that took a significant blow when the South African government published a statement saying that they were attempting to escape justice by fleeing. What the South African government itself says about its treatment of whites is, well, suspect in that light.
But Trump also clearly cares about this for some reason.
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
Several possible reasons- skin color and public prominence come to mind.
2rafa
4hr ago
I’m very flawed, in that I’m often arrogant, prone to making things up, dismissive. But I like to think that when the evidence is there, I can adapt, change my view. The evidence is here - even a simpleton can extrapolate. It’s easy to be scared but, when I am, I think of all the scientists and philosophers and inventors who one day imagined a moment like this, but who never got to see it. That is also a privilege, even if the outcome is a poor one.
jkf
5hr ago
I'm not so sure on "jabs" -- AFAIK this is good idiomatic British English, but much less so in North America. It feels like the sudden memetic adoption (particularly on the part of medical authorities, which I'd expect to use more formal language as a rule) of this word here in particular has something more behind it than brevity.
"Shots" of course I buy -- "getting the dog his shots" is a fine thing to say; "getting the dog jabbed" would be very weird (in North America). Doubly so if the speaker were my veterinarian.
jkf
5hr ago
It's a good point that "I don't know anyone who died of covid" is not the only part of their personal experience that people will use to form an opinion on its severity -- virtually everyone has had or been exposed to covid by now, and if their experience was that the disease itself was no big deal, it's hard to reconcile that with a large death toll.
Like -- I don't personally know anyone who's died of prostate cancer, but I do know lots of people who've died of other kinds of cancer, so I'm prepared to believe that prostate cancer is a serious problem. If my doctor had said to me five years ago "hey, you've got prostate cancer -- this is a big deal, you might die" and I just... ignored it and it went away with minimal symptoms, I'd be less inclined to think that prostate cancer is a serious thing.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
5hr ago
My question is why doesn't the board or president or whoever just launch a crackdown on pro-Palestinian protestors?
Because the administrators and people in charge agree with the protestors. I honestly think it's (mostly) that simple.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5hr ago
As a side note: why are you bullish on LEV? It's my understanding as a complete medical layman that we've pretty much made zero progress on life extension. We're much better at keeping the very young, mothers in childbirth, the unlucky (genetic diseases, trauma, infection, disease etc) and the ill-and-probably-should-be-dead elderly alive, but modern technology hasn't really meaningfully moved the quality-adjusted lifespan of the average healthy person afaik.
As a medical professional:
This is an accurate statement. Or close enough to not need any hairs split.
That being said, I still expect LEV because:
1)ASI.
- Even in the absence of ASI, we're finally making good progress on things like cybernetics, replacement organs and the like. The only organ we can't currently replace, in any meaningful sense, is the brain. For obvious reasons, a transplant wouldn't work. But we are at/close to the point of being able to replace other organs. We've also made progress in applied genetherapy, even if rudimentary. More importantly, enough real money (i.e billions of dollars) is being invested in SENS or regenerative medicine that we can hope to see a difference.
I weakly expect us to achieve LEV in my nominal life expectancy, and probably yours, without ASI. With ASI, that becomes a far stronger expectation, only balanced by the risk of it killing us all.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5hr ago
People calling them "shots" or "jabs" (like for Covid) instead of vaccines probably has less to do with anything like that and more with it being shorter to say words with one syllable instead of two.
Rex
5hr ago
I have not had covid as far as I know. I did get antibody tests early on which were all negative. My wife had it twice and i slept in the same room with her. No issues.
I also know no one that died from COVID, other than a coworker who's very old mother allegedly died from it. This person is known for his tall tales so I cant know for certain.
I find this to be a reasonable heuristic for how much I should worry about something. I know many people who passed from cancer. Many from heart attacks. More than one from getting hit by a car when cycling. I reckon most people have a similar experience.
Its impossible for me to believe that 1.2 million people died from covid in 3-4 years and reconcile that with my experience.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5hr ago
I have deep emotions seeing you go from an AI-skeptic a few years back to well, this. I'm not quite sure what those emotions are, but they're there.
zeke5123a
5hr ago
Well, I would say the more you had separate groups with apparent intelligence that was buried (eg Germans), the more you look foolish for saying they did solely prophylactically.
jkf
5hr ago
The issue is that you are prioritizing problems that are arguably possible (well, one of them) but have never manifested in an even directionally similar way over one that just happened a few years ago, repercussions of which were quite severe and still being felt.
I resisted "millenarian cultist" analogies so as not to be uncharitable, but you didn't want to talk about Ford Pintos, so fuck it:
It's certainly possible that Jesus will descend and start casting the goats (that's you) into a lake of fire at any moment -- this is roughly the worst thing that could happen (for you); shouldn't you prioritize Christian worship more highly than (I assume) you do?
sohois
5hr ago
Covid was exceptionally deadly when compared to the common flu
I don't want to get into a debate about what "exceptionally deadly" means, but I don't think this is true. Spanish Flu was exceptionally deadly, COVID was largely on par with the Hong Kong and Asian Flu epidemics of the 60s, but in a much more globalised world.
I'm not really sure what prompted this article from Scott, but it does kind of follow the path the lockdown skeptical have been saying, that of the Iraq war. You start with enthusiastic support from all sides. Later you get "with the evidence at the time, support made sense" ( we are here). Then it's "I didn't support it, but I understand those who did". And finally you get to "No I never supported it and all those who did were clearly in the wrong/outright evil".
jkf
5hr ago
Fuckin Boomers man -- the "annual % change" on your link flips positive (slightly) in 2009, 15 years before 2024.
Fifteen years into the baby boom was 1960, by which time births were well off peak and on the decline:
We'll have one actor who is the leading man type, every time you see an AI playing Brad Pitt or Keanu Reeves you will know he's a leading man, every time you see Jason Statham or John Cena you know he's going to fight some people, every time you see Nicole Kidman you know she's going to be sexy and vulnerable and a little bit evil - regression to the 20th century. But we won't stop there - through cultural osmosis we'll start referring to those characters by the actor names - oh King Arthur is the Brad Pitt of the story and Guinevere is the Nicole Kidman. Then we'll go even further and use them to represent archetypes - 'ooh that dude is giving real Keanu vibes' and different ais will have different pantheons until we end up right back at 'Brad Pitt, of course, was sick of Nicole Kidman's nagging, so he turned into a sexy swan and seduced Leda.'
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