domain:mattlakeman.org
hydroacetylene
11m ago
To note- when mildly overhydrated, I'm still a hard stick, and my blood donation attempts result in short draws that can't be used. Is there some way to fix this?
Thoroughlygruntled
14m ago
Why? If I buy a junker of a car in order to scrap it for parts, who has a right to complain? The CEO works for the shareholders, not the employees, and the shareholders are under no obligation to lose money on a failing company as some act of charity to the workers.
If a company isn't worth the sum of its parts, and there doesn't appear to be much low-hanging fruit to pick in an effort to turn things around, hiring a CEO for the express purpose of liquidating its assets in a way that protects the interests of the shareholders is 100% the right call. When someone dies, you don't blame the executor of their will.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
14m ago
I literally can't imagine how bad the coffee would be from a company using pure temps.
hydroacetylene
19m ago
Indeed, the unions exclude lots of people for arbitrary reasons to generate an artificial shortage. In my industry they exclude hacks pretty well so using union labor might be worth it for some people, despite its high costs- hospitals will pay any amount to just not have problems, for example(I'm pretty happy to let someone else deal with that). I don't think they're any more racist than regular HVAC(which is... not politically correct). But there's definitely lots of guys with stories about the union not letting them in, good commercial techs.
zeke5123a
20m ago
I regularly take the train (NYC metro area). I could easily afford to drive. But train is a lot easier and I can work etc.
Most of the people on the commuter train are not poor or college kids. Maybe ant one point they are jurors but I imagine that was a typo.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
21m ago
Germany and Japan both feel like they would qualify.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
27m ago
barriers to entry which effectively exclude the lowest-quality providers(and lots of others, it needs to be acknowledged
The extent to which 20th century unions were also racial/ethnic spoils systems is, IMO, underappreciated for political reasons. Not saying it always worked that way, but there isn't a shortage of "and then they hired/imported (across state or sometimes country borders) minority scabs workers to break the strike" tales. But it's inconvenient to observe this because "union labor" and minority workers are supposed to be part of the same big tent.
Maybe people will start noticing more if union labor keeps swinging right.
Thoroughlygruntled
29m ago
That may not seem like a lot, but even as a relatively comfortable middle class office worker, 5X more expensive airfare would have a massive effect on my wellbeing. Going from being able to visit friends and family spread around the country three or four times a year to being able to swing a single family reunion every two or three years. Entire years at a time not being able to see my parents. I would have been an adult before getting on my first plane, because there's no way in hell my parents could have swung $6000 on airfare for a family vacation. As much as I grumble about 17-inch-wide seats, I'll take that over forced isolation any day.
Quantumfreakonomics
30m ago
What is this supposed to prove exactly? The Italian locations look pretty, but the Californian infrastructure is more useful.
Throwaway05
30m ago
Who can actually draw blood with some skill is pretty variable, usually a hospital will have a formal or informal plan for how to do this ("call the ultrasound guided IV team" or "get Agnes") and hospital blood draw quality has worsened in recent years because of various healthcare problems. Most hospital staff also don't like working with police and will probably not put in an effort to be independent about fixing the issue in a case like this.
Of note one of the biggest factors impacting ease of blood draw is hydration - someone who used meth and passed out in a car is probably dehydrated and going to a hard stick.
yestrusocialist
31m ago
For my stocks, at the moment they vest (a taxable event) a fraction of them are sold and the proceeds are given to the IRS as tax withholding. This is pretty common in the US.
No extra forms. It goes on my W2.
hydroacetylene
32m ago
But part of the US bargain is we celebrate random black women for repeating the achievements of more capable people. Bessie Coleman seems like an unobjectionable example- using a different non-activist mildly notable black woman doesn't make much difference.
hydroacetylene
36m ago
I'm not really sure how much it matters how well your aircraft is "built" when it's hit by a missile, but I am given to understand that Russian aircraft are actually designed pretty well
I think the critique is that Russia's industrial output isn't capable of building that many planes. But they don't seem notably worse in that regard than other major powers- as you correctly note, throughput limits on aircraft manufacture are very very real.
erwgv3g34
43m ago
Our instincts are a lot more adapted to the vastly longer time we were hunter-gatherers than to the measly 6,000 years we spent as farmers.
hydroacetylene
45m ago
The lower blue collar labor market has also gotten a lot tighter- there's been a greying of the population, lots of people got addicted to welfare during covid and aren't willing to work anymore, illegals don't work at starbucks but labor has a certain amount of fungibility, etc. Conditions/benefits/pay at starbucks-type jobs have just genuinely improved everywhere, it's harder to stand out. I've seen the desperate competition for workers.
hooser
48m ago
Personally, I don't believe it's possible for one person to produce 1000x the value of another.
Here are some examples:
-
X enters data from PDFs into a database manually. Y writes a script for it.
-
X creates a homebrew game that only he and his best mates like to play. Y creates a similar game, then finds niche markets for it, selling a few thousand copies.
-
X sells Girl Scout cookies by offering them to her family and neighbors. Y sets up a Girl Scout Cookie stand outside of a popular pot shop.
hydroacetylene
53m ago
The median ancestral human was a peasant farmer, and, inasmuch as we know the attitudes of the historical peasantry, they loved the nobles with 1000X their fair share. What they seem to have hated have been middlemen, merchants, etc.
hydroacetylene
59m ago
Union construction labor does not come with the same issues as say, the UAW. It is simply more expensive by using barriers to entry which effectively exclude the lowest-quality providers(and lots of others, it needs to be acknowledged. A 100% unionization rate would not be a good thing). This is a perfectly reasonable trade for some customers, and mass transit systems may well be one. Exempting counties also makes sense; presumably this stuff isn't really needed in certain inland counties. I can't really defend below-market set asides but ferries and high frequency bus routes might just not be what this is aimed at.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Uh, Italy and France use more public transit than the US does, but that's because America is richer(much richer when you account for the greater cost of gasoline in those countries). I mean, what country can you point to where lots of citizens choose public transportation over automobiles for non-economic reasons?
And that's leaving aside that most transit systems in America don't even really try to attract middle class ridership, they're aimed at the poor, jurors, and college kids. This is because most people prefer to be in a private space even when that means you have to drive, and the middle class in america by definition has no difficulty affording cars.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
1hr ago
A lot of people would be objectively happier being upper middle class in 1925 than lower middle class in 2025 despite the latter being materially a lot better off
And therein lies the tragedy of humanity. As La Rochefoucald said: The truest mark of being born with great qualities is to be born without envy. I was not so fortunate but have over the years tried to kill the envy in me because in the end it's just destructive. Perhaps we should have compulsory lessons on this in school for everyone to make the average man content with his average life instead of trying to pull down his betters.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1hr ago
This is more or less my sticking point. It's almost unimaginable that Microsoft products could get so terrible, companies change their entire workflow to avoid them.
But only almost. Like, surely if it were regularly eating their data, or causing massive lawsuits against them, they'd change infrastructure, right?
Or does Microsoft start bringing other companies down with them? And only after that do new companies just avoid them from the start to fill the gaps? Does the next trillion dollar company that hasn't been founded yet avoid Microsoft and all their products entirely?
And I mean, if that's the case we're looking at what, a 40 year timeline? I might be dead by then?
A recipe for an existence spent in the lobby of life, constantly waiting for something big to happen. Even if you agree with Yud that extinction is probably inevitable, there is nothing for it but to live as if it isn't. (Speaking of that kind of 'lie' to the self…)
I want to push back on this characterization, because I think it misunderstands both my beliefs and their practical implications.
I have been quite vocal about the fact that I don't agree with Yudkowsky's >99% p(doom). At that level of confidence, the rational move is to take out high-interest short-term loans, blow up data centers, or just do a lot of drugs. My estimate is closer to 20%, high enough to take seriously, low enough that planning for normal futures makes sense.
What does a 20% p(doom) actually look like in practice? I hedge against short-term unemployment risk. I should invest in index funds that will go brrt if nothing happens. I should worry slightly less about dementia and type-2 diabetes than I otherwise would. That's... pretty much it? My day-to-day life is not particularly different from the me who didn't care about AI x-risk at all.
(Also - and this is important - I think good outcomes from AGI are quite likely too, though I'm genuinely uncertain how they stack up against the 20% doom scenario. There's even a 10-30% chance that progress stalls well short of ASI within my lifetime.)
The Yudkowsky principle you're invoking - "live as if extinction isn't inevitable even if you think it is" - is about allocating agency and resources to timelines where they matter most. It would really suck to have no retirement fund if Nothing Happens, whereas I'm completely out of luck if I get paperclipped. This isn't a lie. It's just expected value calculations weighted by subjective probability.
I'm not sitting in the lobby of life. I'm living pretty normally while maintaining slightly different priors about the future than most people. If that's "waiting for something big to happen," then so is having any belief about anything that might occur later.
If the answer to all of the above was 'yes', then sure, you're just talking about a magic, better version of me. This is just a 'brain upload', something you yourself have expressed interest in.
I think we're talking past each other on the parasite analogy. That's mostly my fault, I could have been more precise. Let me try again.
I meant something like: a sophisticated impersonator takes over your body and does a good-enough job fooling your friends and family. It's better at your job, takes better care of your health, makes you more successful by every external metric. But it's not a high-fidelity emulation preserving continuity of consciousness - it's more like a skilled actor who studied you for a while and does a convincing impression. The underlying substrate of "you" - whatever makes you you is gone.
If it were a perfect upload that preserved everything about your cognition, memory, and sense of self? Sure, I'd take that deal. That's not the scenario I was gesturing at.
The parallel to religious conversion: from the outside, Hoff joining the LDS church and becoming a better, happier, more successful version of himself looks great. From the inside, at least from where I'm standing - it looks like he's agreeing to gradually replace the parts of himself that care about certain kinds of truth with parts that care about different things. Maybe that's a good trade! But it's a real trade, not just a costume change.
You are not adopting it, you are suspending disbelief, no differently to when you watch a movie or play a video game and don't obsess over plot holes. As others noted, we do this thousands of times a day, tell ourselves, friends and family thousands of little lies, just so stories. It is only your sentimental attachment to this specific narrative about religion and God that makes it harder for you to understand the same applies.
I don't think the movie comparison or typical suspension of disbelief as applied to the consumption of fiction works.
When you watch a movie, you don't actually believe it's real.
I will caveat this by stating that the unconscious parts of your brain do believe it's all real but they're dumb and always do that, I'm more concerned about higher order functions that pay attention to fact checking.
The neuroscience here is genuinely interesting (and fucking complex): your theory-of-mind networks engage with fictional characters, your prediction-simulation systems model what might happen next, but your anterior and lateral prefrontal systems - the parts that handle "identifying reality" - are turned down, not off. Very few people have the phenomenological experience of believing a movie is literally happening in front of them, even while emotionally engaged.
This is why a punch thrown at your face makes you flinch even when you know your friend is joking, why walking on heights in VR makes you feel sick despite knowing you're on your bedroom floor. Different cognitive systems operating simultaneously at different levels of awareness, with different relationships to "truth."
But religious practice asks for something categorically different. It's not just engaging your simulation systems while keeping your reality-testing active. It's more like... deliberately training your reality-testing systems to mark certain propositions as true, or at least to stop flagging them as questionable. To move them from "entertaining possibility" to "thing I orient my life around."
You can attend a church service while maintaining private doubts, sure. Lots of people do. But the full program usually requires something more than just showing up and enjoying the vibes. At minimum it requires acting as if you believe, which means routing your major life decisions through a framework you privately think is false. At maximum it requires actually believing, or at least successfully forgetting that you don't. I don't think Hoff is psycho/sociopathic enough to do all of that without truly coming to believe.
On the "thousands of little lies" point: I think you're equivocating between different categories of things that aren't really comparable.
White lies to spare feelings ("No honey, your ass looks great in those jeans") are not the same as lying to yourself. I can tell my girlfriend something without believing it myself. The cognitive operations are completely different.
Social conventions and politeness rituals ("How are you?" "Fine, thanks!") are not the same as adopting a comprehensive metaphysical framework.
Suspension of disbelief in entertainment is not the same as restructuring your entire life around propositions you privately consider false.
The scope and stakes matter here. Joining a church isn't like doing a Renaissance faire LARP on weekends. It's signing up for a package deal that includes: how you spend 10% of your income, who you can marry, how you raise your children, what you can consume, how you spend your Sundays, what you teach your kids about the nature of reality. The stakes involved and rigor required are rather different.
I want to be clear: I'm genuinely not arguing that Hoff made the wrong choice for him. Maybe he has successfully threaded the needle of "get all the benefits while maintaining enough epistemic flexibility to avoid the worst failure modes." Maybe the Mormon community really is good enough that it's worth the tradeoffs. Maybe his particular brain is constituted such that he can hold contradictory beliefs in separate magisteria without it bothering him. Some people seem to be able to do this! I am not those people. I find such contortions somewhere between impossible and insane (and no, I'm not autistic).
But I don't think I can, and I'm not convinced it's just "sentimental attachment" that makes me think the tradeoffs are real and substantial rather than trivial. The Mormons have built something impressive, I genuinely agree with you on that. But "it works" and "you should do it" are different claims, and the gap between them is exactly the space where individual values, personality, and epistemic commitments live.
You seem to think I'm being precious about a distinction that doesn't matter. I think the distinction is load-bearing, and that treating it as precious is actually the correct response. We might just have different values here, which is fine - but let's not pretend it's obviously irrational to weight epistemic integrity heavily in this calculation.
Browser
2hr ago
I mean the white elephant thing depends on vehicle. If you're fortunate enough to work for a large liquid traded firm it's easy enough to redeem but for a lot of other people it's nebulous startup equity options kinda stuff or privately held firms where it's a mess
2rafa
2hr ago
The personal automobile (and even consequence of it, including the specifically American suburb) papers over the cracks of an unusually violent and dangerous first-world society, and has since the 1950s and 1960s.
America can transit, but that would require confronting the actual problem.
Very good points, but the small absolute volumes of REEs required means that effective transshipping will be very hard to stamp out unless all exports anywhere are curtailed, which would draw the ire of most of the regional trading partners that the CCP actually wants to continue to keep onside.
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