domain:streamable.com
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr 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
2hr 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
2hr 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
2hr 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
2hr 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
2hr 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
2hr ago
Ok, sure. And when they do, they can see that God's acts can only be consistent with his nature.
yofuckreddit
2hr 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.
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've 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.
Jiro
3hr ago
I'm not sure I would agree that God has principles. He has a nature,
Then rephrase it. People can come up with conclusions about whether God's acts are consistent with his supposed nature. In that sense, yes, they can hold God accountable, even if they aren't able to punish God.
jkf
3hr ago
I'm still not 100% convinced that the antigenic imprinting thing didn't transpire with the vaccines -- I've had it exactly once, during the Omicron wave, and don't seem to get it anymore despite the odd known exposure. Which is stark contrast with my (largely rabid vaccine fan) coworkers, who seem to be down with it all winter and still complain about side effects from booster shots.
Granted it's not putting them in the hospital or anything, but they do seem to be uniformly pretty damn sick for several days everytime -- which is worse than my initial natural exposure. Unlikely to get a good study on it, but if anything it seems like kind of the opposite of herd immunity -- I always thought that this was one of the more plausible reasons not to take the vaccine, so I get a nice glow of smugness everytime somebody calls in saying "OMG I can't even move, see you next week".
LateMechanic
3hr ago
There's a clear different memetic impact depending on whether people mentally bucketed covid as 'a new potentially-deadly virus' or 'a new strain of the flu', so that was always an important territory to fight over.
AvocadoPanic
3hr ago
The execution of the Duc d’Enghien was used to further the proximate goal of deterring royalist opposition and consolidating Napoleon’s power, much like COVID data obfuscation was used to justify policies by amplifying risk-severity. Both achieved short-term goals—suppressing dissent or driving compliance.
Both are 'mistakes' that appear to have met their indended near-term goals? Nearly all current year politics eschews the long term.
While you quote an enduring witicism I have difficulty finding an error or fault resulting from defective judgment, deficient knowledge, or carelessness, a misconception or misunderstanding, in either. Traditional markers of mistakes.
That trust in institutions may now be diminished, is only a result of the 'mistake' if the trust had been warrented or well-placed before. The 'mistake' is that the public trusted them to begin with.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
3hr ago
Ugh, I saw a girl in the gym doing deadlifts and she was shaped like a question mark when pulling. What's worse, her personal trainer was right next to her and didn't give a damn.
JarJarJedi
3hr ago
Well, if you target the cultural elites, the narrative "racists tried to ethnically cleanse my people" gets you lots of sympathy, but the narrative "commies murdered 5 millions of my people while trying to establish the worker's paradise" gets you shrugs and "well, you can't build worker's paradise without breaking some eggs...". So it's hard to fault them for playing with the deck they've been dealt.
desolation
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
3hr ago
…and it does follow that we should probably treat gain-of-function research as if it had caused COVID, because "we can't ever know for certain if it caused COVID, but the two hypotheses are neck-to-neck" is bad enough if we're talking about future caution.
That's a fair conclusion, but not really Scott's conclusion, and I have to wonder what the underlying motivation is to be so committed that lab leak is wrong when there's more interesting topics to discuss around COVID.
desolation
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
3hr ago
Flu is almost always symptomatically indistinguishable from COVID
My theory is that it was much more widespread in the US than anyone admitted because testing was constrained early on, and a lot of first-wave cases got called flu with no further diagnostics.
Botond173
3hr ago
Americans are very focused on ethnic dimensions of the conflict due to their history but that was more of a class/power conflict than the ethnic one.
True. But it weren't Americans who invented the ethnicist narrative that has been mainstreamed in the West, it was Ukrainian nationalist immigrant activists in America, Canada, the UK etc.
ThenElection
3hr ago
LLMs generate gossip and tabloid drama about real celebrities; they wouldn't have any issues doing the same about AI-generated celebrities.
It will be a gradual process: first generating all the extras; then improving the real performances of real actors; then generated performances of dead actors; then licensed generated performances of live main actors; and then entirely generated main actors. And it won't be admitted at first. But having a reliable actor who always turns up sober and on time, looks like and does what exactly you want them to, has no time constraints, and doesn't take a substantial cut of the profits is a massive pull.
And if audiences insist on being sold a real life backstory about the actors to form parasocial relationships with them, well, Hollywood will be happy to generate and sell that to them too.
Rov_Scam
3hr ago
I remember reading an article at the time that said much of the confusion was due to the process used to investigate COVID deaths. Since all COVID cases were being reported to the health department at the time, any death with COVID was reported as a suspected COVID death, keeping in mind that all the health department knew initially was that a. The person had COVID and b. The person died. Since it takes a couple weeks for a death certificate to be issued, stories would come out of someone dying in a car crash who was on the COVID death list. But once the health department had the death certificate, they would then exclude anyone for whom COVID wasn't a contributing factor in their death.
It should be mentioned that the opposite happened, as well. There was a guy out by Philadelphia who crashed his car, was taken to the hospital, and died. He tested positive in the hospital, and was listed as having died from COVID, which cased a minor outrage for being so obviously the "guy who dies in a car accident tests positive and gets counted as a COVID death". Except in this case, they were right, but for the wrong reasons. The guy was sick with COVID, and the accident was actually caused because he lost control of his car after getting into a coughing fit. His injuries from the accident weren't life threatening, and he died of COVID at the hospital. In other words, he died with car accident.
faceh
4hr ago
Or the immortality of said celebs.
If they can keep casting well-liked actors in films via AI, even after they'd dead or retired, they're going to do it.
I do wonder, as with AI-Generated music, which is ACTUALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE these days, if one major reason people will still prefer 'real' artists is simply because they want to personally meet them or be able to experience them live, so they'll eventually shun the AI stuff not specifically because they know it is AI, but because there's no personal life/gossip/tabloid drama to follow, and they want to physically touch the person at some point.
faceh
4hr ago
Its not that 'absolutely nothing' has happened, but more that every advance has been marginal, so even if you follow ALL the best advice, you're getting an extra 10-15% of extra lifespan at best.
If you want to see the absolute extreme limit of human longevity science, follow Bryan Johnson.
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.
More options
Context Copy link