I also had experiences with using violence to stand up to nonviolent bullies and having teachers come down on me and not the bully. My own parents did the same thing, and I have never forgiven them for this.
I disagree that violence is ever the right response to non-violent bullying, and I was never popular in school to put it mildly. Of course, the fault is ultimately on the society which forces you to endure interactions with assholes, but I always seen it as ultimate victory for the assholes if they ever managed to force me to escalate first.
That sounds like a nice sentiment in theory, but in practice makes it hard for many low-status people (who may be less smart or more socially awkward) to retaliate despite being entirely justified to do so.
I also take issue with the notion that violence is always an "escalation" to nonviolent acts of aggression; there's the saying that "the pen is mightier than the sword" for a reason; and even in cliché bullying stories à la "high-status bully insults mother of low-status target", I don't see why responding with violence would necessarily be an escalation.
I imagine this same perspective is also a problem in cases of domestic abuse where one partner perpetrates psychological abuse, and the other one eventually responds with violence, only for the courts to presumably usually side with the former.
>in practice makes it hard for many low-status people (who may be less smart or more socially awkward) to retaliate despite being entirely justified to do so.
Well, it sucks to be low-status in general, and being socially awkward in particular usually means that you aren't a good judge of what kind of retaliation would be beneficial to you on balance.
>I don't see why responding with violence would necessarily be an escalation.
Because violence is a useful Schelling point, which makes it a prominent feature of the legal system for example, like you mention. While words can and do hurt, sticks and stones transform an interaction to that of a different kind, not degree. To be clear, I'd consider the example that Argentus made to clearly feature a violent assault, where the retaliation was totally justified.
Because in a class of barely-socialised, self-centred small children the key thing is to ensure they do not think using violence is acceptable, or you're going to get a lot of damage (minor in the main, but still). This might mean an injustice has to be committed.
Note that the same dynamic should not exist in the later years of schooling where the imperative is to eliminate behaviours uncondusive to learning (a cynical view might note the decline in the acceptance of bullying might correlate with the increased importance of school results and more external inspection).
Which would be a killer point to make, if it wasn't for the fact that job #1 of a schol is to turn their students from "barely-socialized" to "well socialized." If you haven't done that by the time the students can truely injure their classmates (~grade 3), you've failed as a school.
"Isn't enforcement of non-bullying notoriously imprecise and drags a lot of kids who did nothing wrong up in the net?"
Yes, very much so. Teachers seem to have absolutely no grasp of the concepts of self-defense or provocation, which is grotesque and unfair. I often saw the same sort of thing happen as a schoolchild, even to the extent of one kid defending himself successfully against *two* other kids who physically attacked *him* – because he won the fight he was automatically the one at fault to the cretins somehow allowed to be in charge of children, and got in trouble for hurting his assailants. Completely perverse, and totally in line with the school's typical responses. This left a lasting impression on me, to say the least.
Anecdotally the whole thing seems to have been much less of a problem in our parents' and grandparents' generations, when a larger proportion of teachers were men. I genuinely believe this is a sex difference: women think violence is inherently bad and want to punish anyone who uses it, men understand that it's a tool that can be used well or ill like all the others.
Regarding #20 on public awareness campaigns: I feel like the obvious answer is that awareness campaigns work when they're crusading against things that people actually dislike (bullying, drunk driving) and not when they're crusading against things that people do like (sex, drugs).
I don't have any numbers to back it up, but I think that a successful awareness campaign was the campaign to cut up six-pack rings. Not sure how this fits into your framework. https://www.seasandstraws.com/six-pack-rings.html
Maybe a more nuanced take is that awareness campaigns don't work well against things people like (sex, drugs), but if people don't really care (six packs) or they actually don't like the things (bullying, drunk driving), the campaigns work? Like no one is particularly in favor of six-pack rings or keeping them in tact, it was just an accident of history that that industrial design solution should be the standard.
I strongly suspect that the efforts re: sex and drugs failed because they told obvious lies. Cannabis is addictive, abstinence is the only alternative. That sort of thing.
One genre of awareness campaign that works frighteningly well is asking people to incur a trivial inconvenience to address some problem. The trivial inconvenience (cutting up six-pack rings, paper straws, etc.) makes them feel like they earned credit, but it's not enough of an imposition to actually matter, so it's an easy ask.
Naturally, a lot of these fail to actually fix their targeted issue, due to the fact that most issues worth fixing are too complex to be fixed simply by tweeting #Kony2012 a lot. But if you have one of the rare issues where trivialities actually help, or where you're trying to set off a preference cascade/slippery slope, it can be a rational tactic.
I was viewing it on a victim axis. The more damage to an external victim the more people feel justified in imposing restrictions and being coercive. The more you're just hurting yourself, the more likely people will just give you information and then wash their hands of it. I think that's true of the war on smoking. Information only went so far in reducing smoking, then when they "discovered" the harms of second hand smoke, they got more support for imposing a lot more restrictions that really drove down the number of smokers by making it so inconvenient.
I was thinking the same thing - another example is littering, where the Don't Mess With Texas campaign (for example) resulted in a 72% reduction in littering over just three years, by casting the action as antisocial.
OTOH, Click It or Ticket does seem to have been fairly effective, but the person who suffers if you don't buckle up is pretty much just you, barring extremely unlikely occurrences. It's a very, very small cost to you, though, whereas not doing drugs or having premarital sex inflicts a quite significant cost, but that feels like it may just be special pleading.
I hope it's not too pedantic to say that I don't think the right summary of the anti-littering campaign is "it's antisocial." Another example of a campaign Texas might have tried casting littering as anti-social: Only Rebels and Outlaws Liter!
I think that obviously would have backfired.
I think the real key was tapping into the native Texan honor culture / tough guy thing: being "messed with" requires retribution, and therefore messing with others is taboo unless it's for honorable cause.
Oh of course, it's definitely also a pun on littering. I think it's a very clever slogan that worked on multiple levels (including the level of its intended purpose, to reduce littering).
Especially relevant to our current times, drug culture and anti-vaxxer culture are basically mirror images of each other (same denial of effects on the self, same denial of effects on others) but each side insists that it's in the absolute right about its pet issue while the other side is in the absolute wrong about an isomorphically equivalent issue.
I suspect it's less about the sorts of details being proposed than whether an issue grabs the fancy of the credentialed class, which means it gets not just PSA visibility but also after school specials, appearance as an issue in movies, etc.
If you want to know which such appeals work, figure out whether they do (or don't) resonate with those who control our public culture. And I suspect that's mostly contingent, not principled -- a stand is taken as a tactic to buttress some more important issue, but that stand then takes on a life of its own.
That's certainly how covid appears to have played out in the US based on, as I say, extremely contingent choice by Trump that could easily have gone the other way. (Germophobe Trump insists on immediate massive federal lockdown, and Democrats fight for years afterwards that this is a totally unjustified overreaction, its mostly unscientific, that it sets a terrible precedent going forward, and that it's patriotic and American to fight it with every fiber of one's being.)
You have no idea about drug culture if you're making that comparison. Consider said "effects on self" of different substances, then _especially_ consider the scale of "effect on others". I don't recall the UN siding with anti-vaxxers (https://drugpolicy.org/blog/united-nations-and-world-health-organization-call-drug-decriminalization). The supposed isomorphism appears from a position of ignorance and middle-class pearl clutching.
Agreed. "Drug culture" is also incredily vague. Which "drug" culture are we talking about? Heroin culture? Meth culture? Marijuana culture? You can't paint this all with a broad brush.
I really don't think these issues are equivalent at all, especially insofar as it's a question of fact (e.g., do vaccines actually prevent transmission of disease? do they actually harm the individual? / did nations or areas that decriminalized personal drug use actually see harm to non-drug-users increase? are drugs able to be used without harming anyone?).
I worry that bullying and drunk driving aren't actually comparable situations. DD awareness was also coupled with lowering definition of what counted as DD with fairly intensive enforcement (also driven by the war on drugs and erosion of the 4A, etc).
Where as bullying is measured by...self-reporting by administrators that have a stake in claiming victory?
You've never dealt with people who run to the boss to badmouth you every chance they get? I don't know of any administrative system that's especially just, and Narks Rule is at least as bad as Bullies Rule.
If someone runs up behind you and punches you in the back of the head,are you a "narc" if you report it to the police?
Should we hold children to a different standard or expect them to just take the punches?
I've never had problems with anyone running to my boss to complain about how I treated them.
The problem seems to be concentrated, like how the vast majority of public complaints about police behaviour are about a tiny tiny minority of cops with a huge number of complaints about their behaviour while most have none or just a very small number.
The "narc" label is relative to the culture and context. In the realm of high school, the "code of the school yard" facilitated bullying.
In other arenas, say the punk scene, the rule makes sense, as involving the police in internal incidents will almost surely be detrimental to the community as a whole, not just the offender. In a world where the police were perfectly fair and just this wouldn't be an issue. But in a case where large members of a community are technically breaking some law, the police can not be relied upon to distinguish between violent law breakers and the rest of the community. There is also a general sense that things can be handled internally. There are exceptions for extreme situations like murder.
One force working against bullying prevention sometimes - not all the time - is increased awareness of personal struggle in the bully’s family. That happened in late elementary w/ my kids; there was a kid with learning issues, trauma and impulse control deficits who caused a lot of problems and it took nearly 2 years for him to get a behavior aide, during which time no quasi-pretend discipline slowed him down for long. Because his situation was rugged and the school had limited options, they were not interested in hearing about the kids he was hurting. Not sure the delay, May have been his parents.
So yes I agree there is greater awareness but bullying is far from gone.
Actually Columbine May have had a lot to do with it; if kids who are bullied turn into school shooters, that’s a big incentive to end bullying.
Appears to evidence on both sides re Columbine/bullying connection. But people thought it existed for a while and took action against bullying based on that perception.
If memory serves, teacher bullying was a thing then and is still somewhat a thing. Early 1990s kids curled up in a ball with headphones on blasting Pink Floyd “we don’t need no thought control…”
I think your right about Columbine. But it is not always the case that bullies necessarily come from traumatic homes. I recall reading a study about this, and though i can't vouch for the study or its methods not recalling the specifics, its conclusion was that the majority of "high school" bullies were actuall well liked and popular.
Thinking about my own personal experience, there were "bullies" both from troubled backgrounds and extremely priviliged backgrounds.
I think the whole "he's just taking out his pain on everyone else narrative" is one of those things that sounded good, but hasnt been strongly supported by research.
On the other hand, we have to assume that the people doing the bullying enjoying doing it and it's really their decision as to whether bullying occurs or not. I think the real difference is more that public awareness campaigns have to be very careful not to normalize the behavior that they're trying to prevent. DARE, famously, made it seem like drug taking was a lot more common that it really was and I think that that's the main reason why it tended to increase drug use among kids.
I was skeptical about how much the drunk driving campaigns worked. In my experience, the fact that most bars are required by law to have parking lots, and the fact that it's very rare for me to encounter anyone in a bar who isn't drinking, suggests that drunk driving is still going on all the time (with maybe some quibbling about whether someone who had two drinks an hour ago is "drunk driving" or not).
The statistics I found suggest, however, that there was in fact a significant drop in the number of "alcohol-impaired crash fatalities" in the United States between 1990 and 1995, and another drop of similar magnitude between 2005 and 2010, but no other notable changes over the past 40 years. (However, the one from 2005 to 2010 coincided with an equally large drop of all crash fatalities, so it might just be something like better crosswalks that cut all fatalities by the same amount.)
Early 90s really was the heydey of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (half of the ties in stores were microscope views of various cocktails to raise awareness!) and Students Against Drunk Driving (we all had to drive in the drunk driving simulator in drivers' ed). So I think it's at least plausible that it was the cause of the effect then.
Plus there's a preference cascade effect. When smokers were 40% of the population, non-smokers had to put up with them, but now they're a rarity they face more social shaming from non-smokers who don't want to put up with their smell.
Yes, I think it's way more effective to make something very inconvenient than educate people on how bad long-term consequences of something are. Humans aren't very well programmed to account for long-term consequences but are very influenced by immediate inconvenience.
Pretty sure people realize that heroin isn't good for you either, though... I'm thinking that since smoking stands out uniquely, it's likely to have something to do with the fact that it's legal and public, and hence subjected to pressures that don't apply to other drugs.
Also I think it makes a difference if you arr wanting to change tolerance of a particular individuals behavior, or people's own choices. With both drunk driving and bullying the change was people condemning the people who did them, while the majority of people weren't bullies or drunk drivers, that changing social norm impacted the ones who are. Vs something like drugs or safe sex where its about getting a lot of people to all change their individual behavior
The negative educational impacts on premature babies is a go-to example for me when discussing the fact that there can be educational variables which are not heritable but which are nonetheless not (necessarily) mutable, which in turn connects to some of the tortured discussions I have to have about the very topic of genetic parentage and educational ability.
I think it's likely a combination of a pile of environmental factors interacting with genetics. Some people likely have variants that make them almost guaranteed to be premature others may be resistant to all sorts of environmental effects.
In general though: don't smoke, don't drink, don't ingest lead, don't get obese, don't get diabetic, and don't live near a coal power plant/industrial center/highway/big farm. Viruses and bacterial infections can also cause problems that result in preterm births and susceptibility there is it's own tangle of genetic vs environmental effects.
Definitely there's an environmental component: premature births dropped dramatically during lockdown, when R0 was dropping for lots of diseases other than COVID.
When I was pregnant and reading up I remember most prematurity was due to births being induced because of various health concerns. So prematurity would be appearing as a secondary rather than primary factor and it might be necessary to trap that confounder to really predict anything. It could be that the equation of risk for the induction decisions looks different in pandemic times.
Someone brought that up in the linked post. Here is a response from "Pregnant Rando":
"I thought that as well, but look closer at the data. The most significant decrease they’re seeing is among very preterm births, not later term ones. I could easily buy that there are fewer women being induced at 35 weeks, but the data shows there’s fewer women having babies at 26 weeks, across the world. Something else has to be at play here."
About somebody's just-sew-up-her-cervix brainstorm: You know what, buddy, here's a related brainstorm: If you sew people's fingers together they can't type ideas like your into internet forums.
Well, there are two possibilities. One is that I'm responding to Scott's Item 15: "From the subreddit: children born pre-term have notably worse health and lower IQ than those born after a full pregnancy. There are lots of ways to prevent pre-term birth, including progesterone therapy and literally just sewing the cervix shut. So why don’t we do these more often, asks a writer who realistically probably does not himself have a cervix." The other possibility is that, as the irritable tone of your little post implies, I am a random idiot.
It seems to come up on some forums where people aren't used to threaded discussion where people will just hit a random reply button which can lead to some.... strange replies to comments.
How does it relate to Freddie deBoer's comment, the one you replied to? I was staring at it for ten minutes without seeing any obvious connection, and I'm still baffled. Is it a reply to what he said, or does it only relate to link #15?
"If any commenters here would describe themselves as in this group, I’m interested to hear your reasoning." I'm not in that group but I am a professional pollster. Asking people this sort of question is usually misleading and the reason is just time discounting. People do not have a capacity in my experience to reason reliably about how they would change their mind about some measure in the future. I would read these results more as expressions of concern about Covid-19. Which is still interesting - a large amount of the population is still highly concerned and worried about the disease.
Yes, this. A significant minority of the population cannot or will not engage with counterfactuals - if you were to, for example, run a poll asking "If it was proven that (favoured politician) ate babies for breakfast", a substantial number of people would say yes, and their reasoning would be "I know X doesn't eat babies, so I would vote for them anyway."
Interestingly, in Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong notes this tendency in pre-literate societies - counterfactual reasoning appears to be largely the domain of highly literate groups.
I think it's also important to know that 'stay in lockdown' vs. 'open up' is a very polarised, salient political issue in July 2021, as people in the UK debated ending all restrictions as planned vs. extending lockdown despite increasing case numbers. I think this debate would colour people's responses to these questions, since most people don't seem to be comfortable or able to 'decouple' and deal in hypotheticals.
I don't think the cartoon is that far off from how the rest of the world sees the US - like a bunch of Yosemite Sams firing off in all directions. I know a right-winger from Australia who thinks the US is batshit crazy on guns.
I grew up in a hunting household. We respected guns as a very dangerous tool. We didn't fetishize them like so many people seem to do today.
You are right about there being an element of nuttiness folks that always feel compelled to CapsLock the "shall not be abridged" part of the 2nd Amendment and consider the case close, no further thought required either.
I grew up with firearms around me too and don't understand the NRA vehemence any more than anyone else.
I think the New York Times version would have the gun toter looking just as cretinous, but the two "normal businessman" looking guys would be less handsome.
If your tools are under constant assault, you'd have to have some pushback - including developing an uncompromising attitudes in the question under attack. If you know there's a political movement whose goal is to destroy the gun ownership, then "fetishizing" is an expected cultural and political response.
Please name any actual reasons to believe there is a political movement whose goal is to destroy gun ownership other than finding someone spouting toothless rhetoric somewhere on the internet. The NRA is on a three decade winning streak at the federal level and counting. The federal government didn't make a single change after Sandy Hook. Red states have done nothing but loosen gun laws to the point where there are no gun laws. You can still get guns pretty easily in blue states. The "constant assault" is in the minds of the gun fetishizers only imo.
> Please name any actual reasons to believe there is a political movement whose goal is to destroy gun ownership other than finding someone spouting toothless rhetoric somewhere on the internet.
Back in the 90s there were serious attempts to ban all handguns, and they did in fact ban all good rifles. ("Assault weapon" is a silly constructed category, but the feature list that defines it subsumes basically every feature you would want in a rifle, if you were designing one from scratch.) That was the high-water mark for political success of gun control, but it's not like that movement is gone; it's the same entities and in many cases the same people pushing the same thing today. And they're pushing a generalized anti-gun agenda through other areas as well, with more success; witness services like Paypal banning the sale of guns using their payment infrastructure, Youtube banning gunsmithing videos, and so on. These things didn't just happen; they're the result of lobbying by "a political movement whose goal is to destroy gun ownership".
Oh yes, forgot to mention that too. Citibank has banned all clients that deal with firearms sales, some years ago. Other, smaller platforms ban gun advertisements constantly. At one point, Google hilariously banned any goods containing "gun" (including Burgundy wines) from its shopping site. They relented after widespread ridicule, but less idiotic bans still stand on many other platforms.
Are you reading any news at all? Just this week a certain Joe Biden, who happens to be occupying an unimportant position of US President, declared that he aims to ban any handguns that could potentially accommodate a magazine holding 10 9mm bullets. But of course, this could be some "toothless retoric" of a barely conscious figurehead, who nobody takes seriously...
Let's look, for example, at California record. In California, a gun owner is beset with a myriad of limitations and prohibitions, aimed squarely at making legal and law abiding gun ownership as bothersome and unpleasant as possible. A myriad of byzantine rules apply to which guns you can and can not buy - with zero functional difference between them, they all go pew-pew in the same way - but you need to seek out a "California legal" model or a specifically maimed one to fit a myriad of random feature bans. Additionally, you need to ask government's permission each time you buy a box of ammo (and as befits a government system, the permission system is grotesquely buggy), and can't do it by mail, as citizens of normal states do.
Additionally, the city of San Jose recently introduced a punitive tax on gun owners (which they call "insurance" but let's not delude ourselves) which would allow them to confiscate your firearms if something in the tax paperwork is not right.
And, of course, the concealed carry licensing in Bay Area counties is a complete travesty, it's the most corrupt political operation outside Chicago and Hunter Biden's art gallery.
"Red flag" laws, allowing anyone to strip person from their rights by mere claiming they're dangerous, is another example.
But it's not just California. Gannett newspapers launched in spring of 2021 campaign of cloned articles with titles like "Mass shootings surge in INSERT STATE NAME as nation faces record high" - I've counted 31 states, though some had titles "Mass shootings fall in INSERT STATE NAME, but nation faces record high". All part of long-waged Gannett campaign (with the leading attacks performed by USA Today of course, but sometimes local support is enlisted too) to attack and restrict firearm ownership. I don't think a campaign waged by largest media company in the nation is something that can safely be ignored.
I could probably add dozens more reasons, but I think it's enough for now. Ask me if you need a dozen more though, I could allocate some time.
> The NRA is on a three decade winning streak at the federal level and counting.
Good if so. I wish them many many more, until people's rights are properly respected. However, the fact that the good guys got some wins does not preclude the existance of the bad guys or their willingness to attack people's rights as soon as they get a chance - which they get plenty and do plently, as soon as the power is in their hands. The evidence is plentiful in any place the left has complete control over the law.
> to the point where there are no gun laws
This is, of course, false, unless you treat absence of arbitrary punitive restrictions aimed at discouraging legal ownership as "no laws". There are still laws concerning firearms, they just don't limit people's rights - at least to the measure California or even worse states do - which is how it supposed to be, and your indignance on those ignoramuses not even limiting people's rights as all proper governments do shows how warped our legal culture - both towards guns and otherwise - has become.
So, I know a lot of people for whom gun ownership is a hot button politicial issue, who in principle are amenable to common sense gun control measures, but won't support them in practice because they believe that they're really intended as a wedge in order to ultimately criminalize all gun ownership.
I've discussed this issue a number of times with my mother, who's one of a small number of people I've talked about the subject with enough to know that... she definitely does believe that we should use common sense gun control legislation as a wedge to ultimately criminalize all gun ownership. I don't know how common her viewpoint is in the grand scheme of things, but she's a well-educated and more intelligent than average Democratic voter who seems to be under the impression that this is simply common sense.
Your first paragraph describes pretty much every gun owner I've ever spoke with on the topic. Nobody I know denies there should be some attention paid to the danger which guns as a tool present - e.g. not a lot of people are upset that dangerous criminals may have their gun rights restricted (after all, we restrict their other rights - we put them in jails!). And nobody trusts the gun control politicians to honestly figure out what measures are indeed necessary and do a bona fide effort of introducing just these measures, instead of just using it as a salami tactics in furtherance of the ultimate goal of eliminating private gun ownership.
And given how many people openly advocate for the latter - it would be crazy to give up even an inch to them.
Here is my litmus test for a gun owner (I am a veteran and have owned guns my entire life). Do you favor biometric (or other) technology that prevents a gun from firing unless being handled by its appropriate owner? If so, I am on your side. If not, then you need to describe how that negatively affects your right to own a gun.
The phrase "common sense" gun control is in and of itself nonsense. Furthermore, when pressed, people tend to come up things that are already federal law.
Just to avoid some obvious miscommunication here, when we talk about "guns" in the context of gun control, we mean guns in the sense of light antipersonnel weapons meant for killing people, threatening to kill people, and training to kill people. That's what the political debate is about. Almost everybody this side of PETA believes that the sort of sporting equipment that happens to fire bullets should be allowed to the sort of sportsman who is actually going to use it for that purpose, possibly with "appropriate" safeguards to make sure nobody buys a light antipersonnel weapon by pretending they want to hunt deer.
If that were all there was to it, we'd have settled this long ago in the way that most of Europe has. But there are a hundred million or so Americans who are pretty serious about wanting to have access to their own light antipersonnel weapons, as such, and probably some others who are hedging their bets on that.
So basically everyone who says anything like "AR-15s aren't for deer hunting; I support sensible gun ownership like bolt-action rifles for hunters, but...", is proposing to "destroy gun ownership" for the purpose of this debate.
You seem to be pretending "guns" that kill people and "guns" that make holes in paper targets, and "guns" that make holes in animals, therefore killing them, are completely different mechanisms. This, of course, is nonsense - it's exactly the same mechanism. Of course, the government can ban all weapons that aren't specifically modified to be useable only against paper targets - but that's not what people understand under "guns" in America.
And, of course, guns may kill people. Calling civilian guns anti-personnel is a misnomer though - the only chance for a civilian gun owner to use it against troops is if there's either a revolution or Canada finally decides they tolerated this silliness on the south long enough and decides to invade. Outside of those scenarios, the people that a civilian gun owner is likely to control are violent criminals. So it is a light anti-criminal weapon, yes.
> is proposing to "destroy gun ownership" for the purpose of this debate
Yes. It's not about hunting deer - though, of course, hunting deer would eventually be banned too, if hoplophobes gain power, or more likely - will be restricted to rich, powerful and connected, like concealed carry licenses in certain parts of California. Those people would have armed guards, and those people would be able to hunt. Not the plebes though, too dangerous.
Yeah, let's allow bolt action rifles but not semi-automatic rifles. After all, the 35th President of the United States was famously killed by a man wielding a semi-automatic rifle. Oh wait...
It's stuff like this that I worry about when it comes to the gun debate. People who honestly think that, eg, bolt action rifles are somehow less dangerous to shooting victims than a semi-automatic. At that level of not knowing a thing about firearms, I'd be extremely hesitant to grant any weight to anything you say on the topic.
Well, thinking about it - it's a machine that is made to bring down a 150-200-pound animal that is very good at hiding and running away, and would not let a human close if it can help it. What this machine could do to another human, from much closer range and without possibility of efficiently hiding?
"Please name any actual reasons to believe there is a political movement whose goal is to destroy gun ownership other than finding someone spouting toothless rhetoric somewhere on the internet. The NRA is on a three decade winning streak at the federal level and counting."
You could have applied this exact logic equally well to gay rights in the 1970s. Do you see how that isn't in any way evidence that there were no gay rights activists in the 1970s and anti-gay campaigners were just ludicrously mistaken in worrying that their political enemies would seize on any opportunity or weakness?
As a supporter of gay rights, this still remains a good point, exploring the ‘anti-gay rights’ perspective.
It also works the other way around; no advocate of gay rights would say ‘we’re currently winning the legal and culture war on this issue so just don’t worry about people who want to take our rights away again.’
I'm not sure why you'd think I'm *not* a supporter of gay rights (or perhaps I'm the one misunderstanding *you*?). In any case, I certainly am; and the point I'm trying to make is indeed orthogonal to the rightness of the cause per se.
Your remark about gay rights advocates is indeed bang on target. Abortion is another great example; huge winning streak on the federal level and counting, but I doubt any pro-choicer would be happy to sit back, relax and disregard all politics around the matter, as being good and settled.
The NRA almost never has successful litigation and is effectively a boomer convention hosting organization. Almost all of those legislative wins are done by much smaller gun-rights orgs.
German, lived in several European countries: I'd agree this cartoon fits reasonably well with how (at least Western) Europeans, on average (including right-wingers), see the US when it comes to guns.
It's a big country. You can find a few outspoken individuals for anything, no matter how crazy. That doesn't mean that the majority of supporters for a particular opinion base that support on fetishism, and claiming that they do is the sort of mindless dismissal of other opinions that is the opposite of what this site is supposed to be.
The people wearing pro-2A shirts and celebrating AR-15s are not the same people as the inner-city organized criminals who are legally barred from obtaining firearms anyhow conducting poorly executed drive by shootings against their business adversaries.
China imitates the NYT for two possible reasons: Chinese propagandists are really dumb and take the most readily available criticisms of the US they can find, or they're really smart and know only the criticisms of the U.S. approved by the NYT will make them bulletproof while causing the heads in the State Dept. to seethe. I don't know which reason is correct.
Why would the Chinese government care whether the NYT approves of their cartoons? Nobody's going to punish them for any cartoon. And doesn't the State Department have bigger things to worry about?
Maybe I misunderstood your previous comment. It looked like you were saying that the State Department doesn't like China publishing anti-American cartoons, and will actually do something about it unless the NYT approves the message. I believe that the State Department won't do anything about it regardless; it doesn't matter what the NYT thinks.
I think that the point was that aligning with the NYT gets rid of a bunch of attack vectors. For example, claiming that it is foreign criticism not based on knowledge, can be countered by pointing to American elites making the same claim. Claiming that it is anti-American, can also be countered by pointing to the NYT, because then the person would have to claim that the NYT is anti-American as well. Etc.
Regarding the poll in link 2. See this financial times article (archive link to bypass paywall) https://archive.is/wzPtR which has a similar poll with very different results based on changes to the wording.
Well, yes, but I think they (and everyone else) have been avoiding crypto so far because of regulatory issues. If they had solved the regulatory issues (or decided to ignore them), that would have really profound effects on a lot of things.
If Amazon accepts crypto, you can stop worrying about "crypto offramps", ie the ability to convert crypto into fiat money that you can spend on things you actually want. Most of the things you actually want will be available in crypto directly. I'm a little confused by this, because governments put a lot of work into controlling crypto offramps, and it would be surprising to me if Amazon put the same amount of work into monitoring its customers. If they didn't, that would mean the opportunities for nontraditional financial users (including criminals but also the unbanked poor and other sympathetic groups) to use money would be much higher, and the ability of governments to control money much lower. But even if they subjected everyone who uses crypto on Amazon to KYC laws, it probably would still have that effect - lots of legitimate users (the majority of the population) would be about as happy to get crypto as they would be to get fiat money (since they can spend their crypto on Amazon which is where they would spend their fiat anyway), and so criminals/the unbanked/whoever would have lots of opportunities to trade their crypto with random people and basically be able to integrate into the rest of the financial system anyway.
Somebody who knows stuff tell me if I'm wrong here.
small amounts don't have much of a legal risk. and Amazon has your address/identity (almost) and can have limits etc. you wouldn't be able to launder that easily with purchasing for personal use.
purchasing for others (lots of details here) wouldn't be operationally easy, etc.
front matter: I work for Amazon. I'm on the internal blockchain discussion mailing lists. I consulted for and helped do the work for some of the first customer facing services for blockchain services. Blockchain is not the center of my current responsibilities at the company. I am NOT writing officially on behalf of the company.
You need to understand that Amazon takes "world's most customer centric company" thing seriously. One of the ways this cashes out is when we notice that a lot of customers are running a lot of a particular kind of workload, especially when large customers start telling their technical account manager (TAM) they are running those kind of workloads, and when they start start asking their support assistants (SAs) to help them configure and run those kind of workloads, we notice, and then we start exploring "servicizing" that workload, turning it into a new AWS service. Because we can usually build the -as-a-service so it's cheaper for the customers to use that than to just built it "raw" on the compute and database services.
That's what happened here. There were enough customers and enough internal interest in "whats the very best way to configure a highly available well connected cluster of etherium nodes with the correct sort of connections to the database services, queue services, HSM services, backup services, fin reg devops regulations, etc etc". We started with some textual guides and possible-best-practice checklists, then we started bundling reference implementations into turn key containers for Docker, and now we run a full on "AWS Blockchain -as-a-service", for customers who want to run Fabric or Etherium for their own businesses, but dont want or need to staff up an entire devops and crypto data fintech compliance team.
The two key things here are "for customers", and "this is business as usual for Amazon.
For customers: Amazon does not take BTC or ETH as a payment type, and if there are any plans to start doing so I am not personally aware of them.
Business As Usual: if I tried to off the top of my head start listing all the times that we have done this (take a common customer workload and -as-a-service it), I would miss most of them, there are so many.
Is the "Payments Acceptance & Experience team" part of AWS or Amazon retail? This really does sound different than existing AWS blockchain as a service offerings.
In spite of what Mark Atwood said, that posting really did make it sound like the product lead is going to be in charge of an effort to begin accepting crypto as a form of payment when purchasing from Amazon, not just creating blockchain as a service as an AWS components for other parties that want to accept crypto as a form of payment.
So I'm curious which it really is. I'm not sure it would have quite the impacts you seem to be anticipating, though. With respect to the non-sympathetic user groups, the thing we're trying to prevent criminals from doing is buying and selling illegal goods, which Amazon as a marketplace can do by just not allowing you to list drugs and kidnapped child sex slaves or whatever it is organized criminals are normally using crypto and unmarked bills to buy and sell. What exchange medium they use isn't going to help or hinder as much as regulating the listings.
With respect to the unbanked poor, it's not exactly clear to me how someone too poor to open a bank account is supposed to be getting cryptocurrency or even Internet access in the first place to suddenly be empowered to join the rest of the financial world now that banks aren't stopping them.
I would think the small-timers who benefit from this aren't so much the unbanked poor as small businesses that don't need to pay the tithe to traditional payment processors if their money never needs to exit the blockchain.
Although, I'd note the fact that this is true, at least for Bitcoin, relies on the present day reality that the owners of blockchain nodes doing the transaction processing are doing it for free to the blockchain users because they're compensated by winning the race to become the canonical node of record and receiving Bitcoin in the process. When the period of rapid appreciation stops or even just when the supply starts reaching its asymptotic limit, this will eventually not be economical and node owners will need to start charging, just like Visa does today. Enjoy the free ride while it lasts, but it won't last forever.
> If any commenters here would describe themselves as in this group, I’m interested to hear your reasoning.
My group house just had a cold sweep through it (more than half of people showing symptoms, about a week of lost work all told). A bunch of people took COVID tests and they were all negative, so we're pretty sure it wasn't COVID.
But also... it was really nice to have a year where this basically never happened, and I think the steady state rate of it happening (when we were open) was probably like once a quarter. (Definitely when I was going to CFAR workshops, I would have something cold-like about once a month, tho it rarely bothered me much, but sometimes spread out in a way that did seem bad). And so I sort of want to go back to being a hermit because it pays for itself? Or, like, adopt the Quarian lifestyle, and the thing where everyone wears masks in shops forever seems maybe worth the annoyance.
I feel the benefits of permanent mask wearing (referring specifically to the totally painless surgical masks specifically here) in circumstances where it is convenient (Public transit, public buildings like hospitals, etc.) outweigh the downsides (having to have a mask on you.).
It's such a small ask, and I enjoy breathing less of peoples gross moist used lung air in line at costco.
I don't think it's actually them you're making the ask of. If it's just normalized, the way that wearing sunglasses when it's bright out is, or covering your face when you cough or sneeze, but not mandated or enforced in any way, we already all get a lot of the benefits.
I don't think I follow your reasoning. If there are people for whom they've never had to do this in the past before covid, and they never want to have to do it again (except for a global pandemic, let's say) for whatever reason, then it is them you're making the ask of. You're asking them to take part in a new "normal" that they don't actually want.
Well, there might be people like that, but in general, no that's not what I meant. I meant people who don't want to wear masks themselves, and also don't want to feel socially pressured to wear masks.
Or the way saying the Pledge of Allegiance before school, etc, used to be. And you can say "promotes social cohesion and unity; benefits far outweigh the trifling inconvenience" all you want, you're going to need to make a truly compelling and well-supported case for that if you don't want heavy pushback to any sort of heavy-handed "normalization". Simply asserting the benefit is not enough.
(Part of the reason why I wear a helmet when cycling is to normalize it -- maybe some day some one who has been considering wearing one but decided not to because it'd look weird will see me and change their mind.)
'Normalized' is just a euphemism for social pressure. I think you understand it better if you get rid of the euphemism and recognize that people may not want to be pressured.
My understanding was that it was still pretty unknown why the flu is so dormant. Of course it could be distancing and masks. I've also read that viral interference could play a role (one virus actively suppresses another), or merely competition for host resources (only so many lungs available to infect). Is that not the latest thinking?
As someone who doesn't mind masks all that much but also is looking forward to finally not having to wear them any more: I honestly wouldn't mind that much wearing masks in supermarkets forever. In other shops, especially clothing stores (where you need to see your face) or shops where you browse and spend time, it sounds quite annoying. And if it's supermarkets only, I probably wouldn't carry a mask all the time and lose out on going to the supermarket spontaneously, which again sucks.
Do you however expect shops to be significant locations for infection? Sounds a bit far-fetched to me, I'd expect public transport to dwarf shops in that regard. (And that's one of the worst locations for wearing a mask, from perspective of comfort. The horrors of multi-hour train rides without maskless breaks, compared to the pleasant experience otherwise.)
I sure hope one thing we are getting out of the pandemic is stats on infection hotspots and how to mitigate those risks.
"I sure hope one thing we are getting out of the pandemic is stats on infection hotspots and how to mitigate those risks."
I was so optimistic about this in April 2020, but I have seen zero public discussion of any of the results - not even whether bars or restaurants are more of a locus of transmission.
Public transport has been conspicuously lacking in the list of known superspreader events; even airline travel (where it should be pretty easy to figure out who was on what flight) doesn't show up very often. My best guess is that p(COVID) scales as population density * population loudness, and places where people mostly sit quietly aren't a big problem even if there are a lot of people.
But as Kenny notes, it's a year past the time we should have had solid data on things like the bars vs restaurants question, and we don't. Lots of people have taken this as an opportunity to "Believe in Science!", rather few have taken the opportunity to do any of it.
In that case shops should be out together with public transport. Which is good, but also makes countermeasures less tractable – we're not going to permanently not have festivals or private parties, and having them masked rather defeats the point.
Not sure I understand your second paragraph: If we don't have data on it, where do you see the opportunity to "believe" in it? Are you saying they should default to the null hypothesis?
"Believe in Science!" is now a catchphrase in American politics that has little to do with the actual scientific method and requires only one data point: that one of your side's politicians or journalists has found a card-carrying Scientist to say that Policy X will surely work and that not-X will result in blood in the streets. Basically the equivalent of a celebrity endorsement, but with a Ph.D. rather than an SAG award.
Yes, I understood that part. I was surprised by the second part, "rather few have taken the opportunity to do any of it" – in the absence of any real evidence, people default to their priors and end up shouting at each other that the other side is making everything worse. That's not ideal, but understandable given the importance of the decision. I was wondering which opportunity you saw for them to do better.
Well, if you're even a state-level government health agency, you can start gathering data via contact tracing and interviews with hospitalized COVID patients and whatnot, and give that data to scientists. For best results, ask your scientists what sort of data would be most useful to them.
If you're anyone else, you can start scouring the internet, news media, etc, for any bits of data that would allow you to do some low-grade but potentially useful statistical analysis. A *very* few nerds on the internet (and at universities) have been doing this, but not many. Or you can use your tweeting thumb to tell your elected officials, "Hey, I Believe In Science and I actually want to see some of the real thing; maybe you all could get started on that!", which is similarly rare.
I've been on crowded city busses where everyone was talking and laughing, and everyone was loud in order to be heard over everyone else. Maybe it's not showing up in superspreader data because it's hard to figure out after the fact who was on the same bus?
As a person with social anxiety I have been absolutely thrilled with everyone covering their face-meats the way they cover their much less distressing crotch-meats, am a bit sad that this norm has evaporated so quickly, and now feel obliged to unmask myself to avoid calling attention to myself. Quarian Future seems good? But that is not the way that people are going, alas; never generalize from one's own preferences.
I can't believe just about any number of people seem okay with wearing masks or potentially having lockdowns forever. Sure, I liked not getting sick too. But I'd easily take the occasional cold compared to social isolation and the complete changing of every facet of our society. The idea that being a hermit "pays for itself" is so foreign to me. Not getting sick barely makes a dent in the price of being a hermit.
Well, I don't know if I'd say evil, but I certainly think that those who really want to do it and force a culture change to impose this on others are probably somewhat detached from the idea of how others may feel, how others want to live their lives. It could either be not understanding or not caring.
But we know that's not the case. They grew up under the same previous normal conditions as the rest of us. The latest conditions are new to all of us, including them. So we all know that this is a change, and the new conditions are not normal to anyone.
They were an insane, useless imposition by pointless parasitic managers and real-estate companies that need me to suffer in order to extract value while producing nothing of worth.
As my spouse and friends who also read this blog often remind me, we’re pretty odd around here. Reading comments like this on ACX doesn’t really surprise me. But the idea that a sizable bloc within society feels like social interaction and generally seeing others’ faces can be dispensed with forever is way more odd to me.
We had to put our kid in preschool. Like, we *had* to- she’s spent half her life with just a few adults for company. We waited until all of those adults were vaccinated, but she needs to encounter her actual peers at some point. Of course, we all immediately got colds (we were tested- it’s just the common cold.) She also made a friend. I don’t know if you have kids but I would be willing to suffer quite a bit physiologically if it meant my kid could have IRL friends. Hopefully, I may not even have to.
We’re trying to pay attention, monitor risk levels and navigate the practical and moral issues around social gatherings. But we can’t go on living like the Lykov family in perfect Siberian isolation for the next 42 years.
Hah, I see what you mean, yes, we are odd around here. But I kind of see it opposite. I've always looked to the SlateStarCodex community as a beacon of, well, rationality, and especially understanding. It seems totally irrational to think that everyone would be better off in lockdown forever, and everyone would be okay with that. Meanwhile, I'm in a very very progressive area with very very progressive friends, so I hear a lot of these talking points from the "rest of the world at large" (meaning my bubble) all the time about unreasonable things like wanting to stay in lockdown, etc. That's why I'm kind of surprised to see people here okay with it. I usually feel like this community is more reasonable and down to earth (in a different way than your average Joe is) than my bubble.
"I've always looked to the SlateStarCodex community as a beacon of, well, rationality, and especially understanding."
There's no extremely nice way to put this: that's very unwise. *Scott* is a beacon of rationality; many of us hangers-on are unfortunately just awkward.
But it is also different in other ways. In particular, people seem much more ~"autism-spectrum" and introverted that your average person.
Most normal people tend to really highly value full-on social interactions. Masks make those interactions worse. But since people here don't value socializing as much, or in some cases even want to avoid socializing they are much more fine reducing the quality of social interactions. Especially random social interactions. So there are less downsides for people that outweigh the benefits of permanent mask wearing.
Depends what you mean by social interaction. I wasn't exactly starting lively conversations with people on the L train before covid. So there's no real cost there. Bars and restaurants, or social gatherings, are different because there you actually want to talk to people
From my perspective it's quite common to have a conversation with people on long-distance travel. And even for local transport, you may want to have a conversation with the group you're travelling with.
"Wearing masks" and "lockdowns forever" are massively different in terms of their impact on people's wellbeing, and trying to conflate them is misleading. Masks are mildly annoying for me, I understand some people find them more unpleasant, but prettty much everyone agrees lockdown is awful
'Lockdown' is a catch-all term that covers a huge spectrum, so I don't see how you can draw many conclusions about that, other than the most basic conclusions.
I think it's worth pointing out that while hand washing seems to be pretty much useless against Covid it does make a big difference for most flu, most common colds, etc. It's probably a matter of primarily targeting the upper or lower tract since h5n1 also mostly targets the lungs and doesn't seem to spread via surfaces either.
A good test case is cruise ships, after the massive norovirus incidents they instituted lots of measures to encourage people to wash their hands and teach tehm how to do it better. (E.g. in the initial welcome meeting you get 5 minutes on proper hand technique, along with a song about it, as well as evacuation procedures etc.) And the cases have basically disappeared. If we could do that on a wider scale it would be great
Yeah, the amount that we have tolerated massive flu epidemics etc seems crazy in retrospect. If making masks mandatory on long distance public transport like planes and trains makes those less common it seems a fine trade off.
Ever since my 6th grader started school, I've been really struck about how much they do anti-bullying stuff.
Everything from normal classroom stuff to special things where the kids all leave the classroom and go to some other room wherein the school counselor talks about bullying being bad to take home handouts about anti-bullying stuff.
It certainly seems like everyone in the school has really bought in to the whole dealio...
I work for Wolfram|Alpha, though not on the parser. Natural language is hard to interpret, yo. We try to improve, bit by bit. "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
I took a Computaional Linguistics course in the mid 1980's and the current thinking was we hadn't yet reached the level of Artificial Stupidity. We would have been floored to learn that Google Translate was on the horizon.
#26: I assume Amazon is trying to see if there is a feasible way for them to accept cryptocurrency payment on Amazon. This would be a pretty big leap, since as far as I nkow they don't even accept things like Paypal (at least not directly). I'm curious to see how well this works out for them.
I'm surprised the 10 pm Curfew didn't poll better, since that seems like it would be especially appealing to people that hate fun. Anyone that's lived in a city and has had trouble sleeping due to the noise must have at least considered it!
"Kelly" still contributes cartoons to the Onion. Although the creator likes to make Kelly more distinctive than just being a conservative. For example, he's pro-abortion because he hates that he has to pay his ex-wife child support.
Regarding #2, I could get behind the masks (two reasons, a) I have always hated seein people on public transport, b) I am immune-suppressed and barely had a cold for the year until June this year) and the vaccination for travel (well, anything to get vaccination rates up is good in my book).
> I wondered if pushing land distribution might be an effective altruist intervention.
I'm a gray tribe techie who left the Boston area 8 years ago and moved to rural land where I raise vegetables and livestock (in addition to doing remote work at startups). TLDR: living on the land and doing farm stuff is HARD and COMPLICATED (to the point where I recently wrote ~ 1,400 pages on the topic, to give a brief introduction to all that's involved https://www.amazon.com/Escape-City-1-Travis-Corcoran/dp/B093BC3K1T ).
Making good use of the land is hard and requires a ton of knowledge ( this ties into seeing like a state issues: you know who ELSE doesn't know how to farm? People who've spent a generation or more off the farm! ).
I'm skeptical of land reform even though politically I like it (for right wing reasons, not left wing reasons like many: I like the idea of more people being self-reliant and being less cancellable, which I think encourages little-r republican virtues).
I think this is being pushed entirely for developing countries where almost everyone is a farmer anyway. The idea isn't to make non-farmers into farmers, it's to make serf/sharecropper-type farmers into independent farmers.
I agree, Scott, that it's a policy that is advocating in developing countries ... but even there, urban intensification has been going on for decades and decades. Nigeria's population, for example, was 20% urban around 1970, and is 52% urban today. ...and that suggests that among those who are of an age where they might farm, very few are rural, or have ever been rural.
"I'm rather stunned that you didn't realize this".
Take your condescension and snark somewhere else, please.
Scott said "developing countries".
Nigeria is a developing country. This is common usage / understanding, but if you want something somewhat official, look at the UN report on developing countries. Nigeria is listed in table C on page 166.
> We're talking about countries where people make something like 1/10th to 1/5th as much, per capita
Please don't ally yourself with Scott and lecture me on what "we" (you and he) are talking about. If Scott had something particular in mind, he can clarify, but you were not in this thread; neither "you" (singular) nor "you" (plural) were saying anything.
Scott was saying something, and I was responding to him.
> You misunderstood what a poor country is.
Scott didn't use the word "poor" or the phrase "poor country".
Also, there aren't many countries 5 or 10 times poorer than Nigeria. Looking at 2019 per capita GDP data, there are 5 countries more than 5 times poorer in nominal terms, and 2 countries in PPP terms; no country is 10 times poorer.
"I think this is being pushed entirely for developing countries where almost everyone is a farmer anyway." Note that at this point this only describes the poorest countries.
The good news, John, is that it's organized like The Hacker's Dictionary or Wikipedia, with tons of cross links. You can skim it recreationaly, without making a commitment to sitting down and reading it cover to cover.
I'm right there with you, man, despite being a pretty bog-standard social democrat. I have aunts & uncles on both sides who homestead and they are some of my favorite people. They think for themselves. They have to. There's a part of me which would like to buy the land of one couple to keep it in the family, but even if I had the money I wouldn't know what to do with it.
Scialabba wrote about this recently, trying to think through the cultivation of republican virtue in the face of massive economic transformations that have given us incredible material wealth at the cost of increasing complexity & dependency.
Awesome. I've always gotten along well with Vermont-style-lefty-homesteaders, even though I'm a Heinlein-style-righty-homesteader.
This is the thing about small-r republican virtues: they result in the API between people being tidy and decent and libertarian-ish. The lefty vegetarian homesteaders with the 30 year old "Free Tibet" sign in their yard agree with me on all sorts of public policy points. We differ on stuff that mostly doesn't affect each other. I like Latin Masses, they like - I dunno - whatever they like.
I was using it with that meaning, yes, but in a generalized sense that is pretty common in my group (apologies; thought it was semi universal), meaning "a public interface between disjoint groups"
Remember if you have to kill intruders that plan to rape your wife and kill you, it’s okay if you and your wife are turned on by it, but don’t let it get to be a habit or anything.
This is an under-appreciated point about farming knowledge. One of the worst impacts of collective farming in the USSR was how it destroyed countless generations of knowledge about farming in the local environment. The planners always thought they could brute force improvements with technology like tractors or fertilizer but there were huge problems with this. Stalin and WWII erased a lot of non tangible agricultural heritage.
Something similar happened with the Lost Generation in England after WWI- the young men died, the farm couldn’t be sustained, and the old wisdom about working the land vanished.
To me it seems that problem was not the loss of the farming knowledge but simply lack of incentives and organizational problems. In Soviet Latvia people were still allowed to do some private farming, mostly in smaller fields that were deemed not practical for mechanized farming. People managed to extract a lot of value from those fields mostly by manual work and even sell the surplus to the state. I heard that in some places half of milk came from those private farmers. It was no secret that often resources (grains, etc) were stolen from collective farms and somehow it was tolerated if kept within low limits.
The point is that the same people worked at the collective farm and on their own much smaller plots of land but the outcomes were very different. Incentives matter even though some things introduced by global programs were actually quite good. One was providing all country houses with electricity lines for free. Nowadays, it is very expensive to provide electricity from a global grid to a new house in the country.
Being able to efficiently farm is part of the knowledge though. That you can get great yields if you give exceptional care, doesn't mean that you have the knowledge for large-scale farming.
It's somewhat similar to how many advances (like new battery technology) only works in a laboratory with immense effort, but either can't be produced at a yield & cost that is reasonable.
True but it didn't seem that Soviet collective farms were particularly clueless. They employed agronomists who were educated and trained. When Khruschov visited the US, he was impressed by large corn fields, so he mandated growing corn in the USSR. In Latvia corn does not mature and our fields are smaller, so it may not be the best crop here. Anyway, it wasn't a failure by itself, green mass was used for feeding cows and milk production increased. The problem was really lack of incentives.
No worker was really interested in good results as the salaries were capped, and even if you managed to earn money, the shops had no goods to buy apart from basic things. Most people were required to have an official job where they tried to spend as little time as possible and then go home and work on their own small plots of land.
I'm aware of it as some old MSFT or similar clip-art ; perhaps that came first and Home of the Underdogs came later? I use it because the science fiction novels I wrote have uplifted / intelligent dogs [ in space, of course ].
That was a great website. My first computer growing up was an Apple II, so I've thankfully got other sources available. archive.org has an emulator that runs in the browser so you don't even have to download a client.
I've been farming-adjacent my whole life, my first paying jobs were picking coffee in a cafetal in costa-rica and shoveling chicken shit, which instilled in me my burning hate of the owning class (Around 1.25 USD worth of collenes for 6 hours of work picking coffee by hand and carrying 50 lb baskets up a hill. Workers of the world Unite!)
Since then, I've always had a decent sized plot/ orchard (enough green stuff for me and my circle)
It justified itself totally absent any spiritual fulfilment, but I think having some understanding of the level of attention and expertise required to produce the food we need to not die would benefit anybody.
I bought your books, tho I bought only 5 acres, and am cultivating only about 2000 square feet of it. Potatoes and kale are utterly magic at turning dirt into tasty calories without a lot of hard labor.
Your book(s) looks interesting, thanks. I wonder if you have read any of the Foxfire books from the '70's? They were more concerned with preserving old time arts and crafts.
Dang, (it's fun to turn people on to good books.) I suppose you have "Your Cabin in the Woods" by C. Meinecke? (If not buy it!)
Hey How is the Kindle version of your book? I use to hate e-books because it was hard to flip around in them... reading citations and such. But the latest one a read did it right and you could click on the references and then click back and go back to where you were reading. (I guess I can just spend the ~$10 and see for myself.)
Regarding 24, the counterexample I like is climbing Everest. First done in 1953, and that involved a nation-state project (from a poorer nation than the US, ie the UK, and not on the NASA scale, but still big and expensive) and was being done by rich people within 20 years. But it's still dangerous and expensive after another 50 years.
Could space end up being different? Sure. But it could also be a $100k joyride to suborbital and a few million to orbit for decades to come.
I think the implication is that the product will become more commodified and easy-to-consume with time. Going to space can surely become easier with time for the average person, as opposed to climbing mountains, in which the whole point is "I did something super hard"
Hmm, not sure that's true of mountains, I certainly go up them for the view and am entirely content to get a train or be driven.
The point I was waving in the general direction of is that some things that were nation-state projects are still really hard, and others are now routine, and I'm not sure you'd predict correctly from 1960.
If we loosen the criteria to the broader consumer good of "being at the top of high mountains" - climbing the Jungfrau in Switzerland was first accomplished in 1811, and by only a few dozen professional mountaineers in the following years, with frequent deaths. Today, about 500,000 people reach the top per year (including me a few years ago), usually paying about $50 for the hour-long train to the top.
Why isn't there an equally quick route to the top of Everest? My guess is partly because the bottom of Everest is so inaccessible, partly political/regulatory reasons (if you tried to dynamite a gentler path onto the mountain, someone would get mad), partly because it's not that fun to be on the top of Everest if you can't brag about your mountaineering prowess, and then only partly for engineering reasons.
Hmmmm. What examples are there of things that were hard/expensive and haven't got much easier/cheaper other than the two categories that we know can't?
[Those being other people's time, since the number of people per person is fixed at 1 and land, where the total amount of land is fixed]
Junfraujoch is only at 3,463 meters altitude. The Everest is at 8,848 meters. So if the Everest had an equivalent train ride, you wouldn't even be halfway towards the top.
At the Everest altitudes, things get a lot more complicated, due to lack of oxygen.
I'm dubious space will be quick to reach common daily use; space travel today is something like 4-15x cheaper than it was 50 years ago (SpaceX is ~25% as expensive as original ISS, Chang'e is ~1/15th as costly per kilo as the Surveyor program). Given that currently it costs $55 million to go to the ISS via Crew Dragon, using a 1/7th/50 years geometric mean, combined with 2% per annum GDP per capita growth (as it's been since the industrial revolution began, basically), this would put it as the equivalent of a $6000 expense today circa 2175.
It's possible that there will be some sudden downward spikes in cost, but given that we're looking at a timespan of decades and taking the geometric mean that incorporates Things Humans Aren't Actually On (which have gotten cheaper, faster), I feel like the cause is more that there are just more obscenely rich people nowadays, rather than that space is getting that much cheaper that much faster. Space travel is also much less tractable to technical developments than, say, computers or washing machines, which aren't nearly so bound by physics as "launch an object at obscene speeds upward without killing everybody inside it somehow" is.
Starship is intended to be a sudden downward spike in launch costs: at Musk's announced aspirational cost per launch ($2M, a little less than half of which would be fuel) and the low end of the projected payload capacity to LEO (100 tonnes), it would reduce launch costs to $20/kilo. Or passengers to LEO (at Musk's public guesstimate of a capacity for 100 passengers) at $10k per person.
That said, I'll believe the $2M/launch cost when I see it. I expect they'll eventually get it working and that it'll represent a substantial decrease in launch costs relative to a Falcon 9 or a Falcon Heavy, but full reusability with minimal turnaround costs for hundreds of launches (which is what you'd need to get non-fuel costs including amortized construction cost anywhere near $1M per launch) is a very ambitious engineering problem which I very much doubt will be completely solved in the medium term.
If Starship can get folks to (and from) low Earth orbit of $50K/person in a decade, then if you could stay in a private Bigelow orbital habitat for $50K/week, we'd be looking at $100K for a one week stay in orbit.
Double the costs and we are still "only" looking at $200K for a one week stay in orbit.
This seems possible, if not likely. But we are also talking of 2030 rather than 2175.
The suggestion that the cost of energy to get to 11km/sec will drop just because the cost of a refrigerator did 100 years earlier is just silly. As you have to rely on the rocket equation as well, it looks even worse.
After all, it used to be that only heavily armed nuclear weapons states had nuclear weapons. It still is, but it used to be, too.
My understanding is that the rocket is the expensive part, much more so than the energy. That's why most organizations for the past 40+ years trying to get cheaper launch costs have been chasing reusability, with most of the rest looking at ways to cheaply mass-produce disposable rockets.
"The suggestion that the cost of energy to get to 11km/sec will drop just because the cost of a refrigerator did 100 years earlier is just silly. As you have to rely on the rocket equation as well, it looks even worse."
Isn't the suggestion that being able to re-use the refrigerator after cooling that first gallon of milk should result in substantial cost savings?
For a Delta-IV the VAST bulk of the launch cost is in the single use rocket. Starship is intended to improve this a lot.
If you actually *do* the rocket equation, you find that the cost of energy to get to 11 km/s is an insignificant part of the current problem. With a three-stage LOX/Kerosene rocket, the energy to deliver one ton of payload to escape velocity takes the form of $200,000 worth of kerosene (the oxygen is a rounding error). The energy cost of sending a full Apollo stack to the Moon, and back, is under ten million dollars. If you're just headed to Low Earth orbit, maybe $30,000 per ton. We can probably do better than.
The present cost of space travel is the cost of the engineering, fabrication, testing, and other necessary support work when you are doing it to a business model where every flight is a bespoke Event(tm). Some people are working on that.
The energy it takes to accelerate my mass to that speed is about 5 GJ which costs around $10 at today's prices. I'd agree that that is a binding limit but not the reason for current prices.
I mean, planes and trains are still quite expensive; it's just that we (the consumers) generally don't pay the up front cost since (at least in the US) it's heavily subsidized by the government. I think that space travel will still be unaffordable to most people no matter what until there's some *actual* reason to go into space (like idk asteroid mining); at which point it will get subsidized into affordability.
We first got a man in space in 1961. Space has not become as reachable in the sixty years since as the Everest did. The whole "sometimes things are toys for nation-states or the super-rich and then become commonly available" thing is true about a lot of things, but I think it's been long enough to tell that it's not going to happen with space.
This isn't an area that I'm knowledgeable about, but aren't there literally many thousands of satellites in orbit? And an continuously-manned international space station that has existed for over 20 years? Plus a bunch of other things like probes and mars rovers? I admit that I can't just fly to space this weekend if I want to, but it sure seems better than "We did the thing in 1961, and then nothing happened."
Hm. I agree I shouldn't be overconfident here, but I still think that while costs have come down it's been gradual and some barriers (both technical and economic - there's not much incentive to go to space aside from communication satellites -) seem fundamentally intractable. So I don't think there has been (or will be) a Moore's law exponential improvement in space travel curve.
The other side of this is that space travel difficulty rises exponentially with the goal - getting to Mars is exponentially harder than getting to orbit, and interstellar travel is much harder than getting to Mars. So a linear improvement in costs might be enough to eventually make reaching orbit available to the slightly-less-rich but would still probably never be enough to get us to, say, a Mars colony - and even an improvement rate that could get us to a Mars colony in, say, a century would probably take at least thousands of years to get us to interstellar travel (and that's without assuming deminishing returns).
I feel like there's a pretty significant difference between leaving a bike sitting out with a small lock, vs saying "hey, suspected thief, the bike over there is unlocked". I'm not sure where the point of entrapment is, but I'd say a honeypot bike is more analogous to a governor that posts their schedule while saying that their security is taking the week off.
There's also the moral risk of deliberately exposing others to temptation. Maybe the honeypot bike scheme will catch hardened bike thieves - or maybe it catches the guy who wouldn't ordinarily do it, but this one day he gave in because "c'mon, it's right there, it's so easy, and you need to get where you want to go faster than walking" and now somebody has an interaction with the cops and maybe a criminal record.
It's like having a drink in front of an alcoholic, commenting "oh wow, that really hits the spot!", then leaving the open bottle and a glass in front of them as you walk away. The answer to "there are a ton of bike thieves and the cops don't take it seriously" is not "let's entrap anyone who is silly enough to take a chance on taking this bike" but "get onto the local politicians who have told the cops not to prosecute petty crimes like this".
I feel like we should hold people to different standards on different kinds of temptation though. Like, your argument of "come on, it's right there" would apply equally if cops entrapped people by leaving honeypot cars with the key dropped next to the driverside door. Maybe they'll catch someone who wouldn't smash a window and hotwire a car as a matter of course, but someone who takes that opportunity to take someone else's car because they needed to get somewhere is clearly violating both the law and social norms enough to be worth prosecuting.
I know, bikes aren't as valuable as cars, but as you're depriving someone of their (primary) mode of transportation, the fact that people think it's acceptable (as in, you shouldn't be arrested for it) to steal a bike as long as it's *really easy* and you *really need to*, rubs me entirely the wrong way. I don't know if opportunistic thieves being arrested for stealing honeypot bikes would tip the balance of social mores in favor of "stealing bikes is wrong" but it certainly can't hurt.
"I don't know if opportunistic thieves being arrested for stealing honeypot bikes would tip the balance of social mores in favor of "stealing bikes is wrong" but it certainly can't hurt."
Did arrests for possession of marijuana tip the balance of social mores in favour of "quite right too!" or "come off it, this isn't even a crime, weed should be legal"?
"In just the past six months, every cannabis-related ballot measure put to voters last November passed — including those in conservative Mississippi, Montana, and South Dakota — and state legislatures in New York, New Mexico, and Virginia have approved bills to legalize cannabis for recreational use. That’s a lot of action. So much so, in fact, that there are now fewer states that have not legalized THC for either medicinal or recreational purposes (12), than there are that have given their residents a green light to smoke up at their leisure (18)."
I am all in favour of "crime, even petty crime, should be prosecuted" but I am not in favour of schemes that will ultimately end in "c'mon bro, decriminalise it!" which arresting "Jon Snowe, 19, STEM student at Really Fancy U who hopes to go into researching a cure for cancer and needed to get to his sick mother's bedside faster than walking would take him after he received an emergency phone call and borrowed a bike he saw unlocked" type of cases will do.
"Oregon became the first state in the United States to decriminalize the possession of all drugs on Nov. 3, 2020.
Measure 110, a ballot initiative funded by the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group backed in part by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, passed with more than 58% of the vote. Possessing heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs for personal use is no longer a criminal offense in Oregon.
Those drugs are still against the law, as is selling them. But possession is now a civil – not criminal – violation that may result in a fine or court-ordered therapy, not jail. Marijuana, which Oregon legalized in 2014, remains fully legal."
Bay Area people who are having their bikes stolen as fast as they buy replacement bikes will welcome crackdowns and harsher enforcement and prosecution, but wider public sentiment with sympathetic cases like Jon and pushing the racial angle (re: legalising weed, that "Rolling Stone" story mentions Alabama thusly: "An ACLU study found that in 2018 black people were over four times more likely to be arrested for possession than white people") - if the honeypot arrests turn out to be majority BIPOC then guess who will call for bike theft to be decriminalised? Media stories about wasting police time and enforcing the "school to prison pipeline" and the like?
Why would cracking down on theft be in any way similar to cracking down on marijuana possession? Even the most well-intentioned bike thief is orders of magnitudes less sympathetic than a pothead whose only crime is that they want to get high and chill out on their couch. People may object to normalizing drug use on moral grounds, but ultimately it's a victimless crime in the overwhelming majority of cases. By contrast, no one likes getting stolen from, and even the most convoluted case of a 'justified theft' doesn't imply that theft should just be legal all the time.
If there's an undercover policeman saying "you're a pansy girly-man if you don't steal that bike, look, I'll even give you my bike-lock master key", maybe a bit higher. And that sort of is the FBI's approach in too many of these arrests.
I'm very much for stamping out petty crime, but there are people who would think of it as "borrowing" not "stealing" - 'I really need to get to the train station to make my train and I'll leave the bike there so whoever owns it really isn't at a loss, it'll be found!' and do that.
Depends how easy you make the honeypot bike, and if it's *intended* to be stolen/entice a theft attempt, then the interest of the police is to make it as easy as possible to steal. Unlocked bikes may indeed be what they decide upon, if they think they won't haul in enough bike thieves if the potential thief has to dismantle a lock or cut through a chain.
There's a difference between "I locked my bike and it was stolen, why don't the police follow up on such theft?" (the usual answer is the crime is too small, the work is disproportionate - trying to chase down an unidentified person who took the bike and then prove they stole it if it's not in their possession, if they even have a chance of finding the guy who did steal it) and "the angry citizens who made a fuss about stolen bikes got the local media on the story, who then annoyed the mayor, who told the chief to Do Something, so we're having one day of Fake Crime where there can be a ton of arrests and the chief can issue a press release about Crackdown On Bike Crime, then everyone we arrested is let go because it's not worth the prosecutor's time and the real bike thieves just keep on thieving merrily".
Wait, who thinks of it as borrowing and not stealing? Do you actually know some of these people?
I mean, I've blurred the lines between borrowing and stealing. I got a ride home drunk in a recycling bin once, trusting the recycling bin would be picked up and put back into the system and the original owner would get a new recycling bin. But recycling bins belong to the city and no sober person uses them to get around. It's harder to see how someone could blur the lines with bikes.
Do these bicycle borrowers just use them to get across a university campus, trusting the bikes will stay on campus and likely be found?
I climbed into it and my friend pushed. It was a trashcan-sized bin with wheels and a handle for pushing it around. I was pretty wasted and my high heels were destroying my feet.
We did check to see that it only contained cardboard and nothing icky.
My car was stolen and put back a couple of blocks away. I don't remember how long the time gap was-- a couple of weeks seems likely. There was an element of luck that I noticed it.
The question is, 'what is the ratio of bikes stolen by repeat professional thieves vs bikes stolen by people that just gave in to temptation'? If most of the people we catch with bait operations are professional thieves, then it's likely easier to solve the problem of people caught giving in to temptation during the punishment phase. For example, someone caught by a bait sting without an arrest record could have the crime reduced to a misdemeanor, pay a fine or do community service on the weekends, and listen to the lecture about not doing this again from the judge. This changes the risk/reward ratio for giving in to temptation again, hopefully ensuring that this won't happen again.
Society has a need to distinguish between people for whom criminal anti-social behavior is an occasional temptation they can be easily deterred out of versus those for whom criminal anti-social behavior is a habit they will return to even in the face of punishment. The problem is that this is very hard to do and there's no good answer. Any system is going to have examples of people that slipped through the system one way or the other. I don't think Americans can rely on the justice system to try to distinguish this, as problems with prosecutional discretion are also a known serious issue with no easy answers.
Also, maybe a libertarian-ish person can have the opinion that it's ok, because personal responsibility. But, it's hard to square that opinion coming from people that also think that Trump is to blame for the attack. Putting the responsibility in Trump's words but not on whatever those FBI people might have said and done and facilitated feels weird. But, responsibility is a weird concept, so, who knows.
If you commit a crime because it appears to be easy to commit - you’re still committing a crime. A mugging isn’t less of a crime just because the victim looks rich and frail. So putting out targets and monitoring them is totally fine by me.
The sting equivalent in my mind would be advertising your services as a hitman, and arresting those that bite. You’re not entrapping anyone who’s not already out looking for crime.
The governor case sounds more like dropping a ready made plot into the laps of some unwitting knuckleheads and egging them on until they committed. Sort of like handing a guy an already stolen bike and telling him to ride off on it, unless he’s some kind of sissy.
I'm reminded of Julian Assange's citation of Osama bin Laden's strategy as an inspiration for his own. He thought the paranoid reaction of the US government would ultimately make it dysfunctional. Fed-instigated terror plots serve to make aspiring terrorists paranoid of cooperating with anyone else, thus leaving mostly less-effective lone wolves.
That's almost analogous just to the lack of security in the Capitol, no even riot gear, even when it was obvious to anyone weeks in advance that there might be tensions.
I don't think you know much about how easy it is to steal the vast majority of bikes. U-locks famously can be picked with a lighter and a bic pen. A lot of cable locks succumb to a simple attack by bolt cutters. Cops don't have to leave a bike out unlocked. They can just put a cheap lock on and expensive bike and monitor it.
Here in San Francisco, there's interstate organized crime rings that export bikes across state lines to defeat local registrations as well as an effect where cheaper stolen bikes are one of the basic forms of economic liquidity in homeless encampments. There was even a big expose showing some used bike shops working directly and flagrantly with criminals after a shipping container was searched in their parking lot that was full of freshly stolen bikes being "cooled off". The issue is that even if you catch someone red handed, there's no punishment for stealing a bicycle. The police have no interest in assisting you in retrieving your stolen property if you're able to track it down. Your best bet if you find your stolen bike on craigslist is to pretend to meet to buy it, ask to "try it out" and then ride it home.
You can watch videos of people sitting down with a hacksaw in broad daylight on a busy street and spending 15 minutes sawing through a bike lock without anyone even bothering to stop or call them out. Stealing a bike is pretty much like jaywalking. It's technically illegal and if you do it egregiously enough you might get a slap on the wrist or a stern talking to, but no one's going to give you any real consequence about it.
The interventions that work: that which aim to stop activities that violate the consent of others. For instance, drunk driving may kill other non-consenting people and bullying harms other non-consenting persons.
Interventions that don't work: that which restrict the freedom of individuals to do what they like without harming others. Drugs, alcohol etc are surely examples of this.
What exactly does that mean? Will an intervention to stop theft work, and get rid of all the theft?
I also feel like talking about the consent of others is a lot more vague than people act like it is. Does abortion violate the consent of others? Depends on if you count a fetus as "others". Does animal abuse violate the consent of others? Depends on if you count animals as "others". Does drug abuse violate the consent of others? Depends on if you count your future self who doesn't want to do drugs but has no choice because of an addiction as "others".
Well not all drunk driving has stopped yet. Not everyone has stopped bullying. Hence, by your standards, these are failed policies too.
My point is that drunk driving and bullying, much like theft, have been criminalized. That has reduced its frequency appreciably in places with law enforcement. If these three things were not criminalized, all of them would be much more prevalent almost everywhere in the world.
Abortion, animal rights etc are currently stuck in a murky moral battle. However, in so far as animals and fetuses can be defined to be "other sentient individuals", their prevalence is indeed decreasing. Hence, this adds to my point about liberal policies largely succeeding and spreading with time. Everyone who wants to eat animals and abort fetuses argues that these cannot be thought of as "others"
Sex and Drugs produce Dopamine no matter what. Bullying does for the bully, but likely only for bystanders if enjoy watching somebody be bullied, which is exactly what a PR campaign can fix.
Drunk Driving doesn't seem particularly dopaministic, so a PR campaign would similarly have less resistance
Drunk driving is drugs *plus* driving. The dopamine comes from the drugs; no one says "Wow, I really want to go driving while I'm drunk." If no one positively wants to do it and the alternatives are easy enough (staying at the bar/party longer, having a designated driver) then no one will do it.
Both of the alternatives you mention involve someone intentionally abstaining from drugs while in a drug den.
In a world where driving is how you get everywhere, drunk driving is just the consequence of drinking when you're at drinking places. In a world where people have good options for how to get from one place to another, I would agree that it's more than just choosing to drink when in the place for drinking. (And I would guess that Lyft/Uber have helped on this.)
There's a pretty big difference between total abstinence forever and agreeing to rotate as a designated driver in a group of five, so you're not allowed to drink once every five times you go to a bar. The latter is clearly a lot more palatable even if you love alcohol. Plus, it's not all that uncommon that at least one person in a friend group doesn't love alcohol, or is pregnant or in training or otherwise abstaining for one reason or another already. The campaign to be a designated driver normalized going to a bar anyway even if you have no intention to drink, opening up the possibility for people who can't, won't, or don't want to drink to hang out with all their drunk friends anyway, and even perform a positive public duty while doing so.
Hitting on drunk people when sober is sometimes more successful than hitting on drunk people when drunk or hitting on sober people when sober. Whether that is a good reason to hang out with drunk people while sober is left as an exercise for the reader.
Regarding #12, I'm very disappointed that the map ignores exclaves. Most significantly, it ignores how the Old and New Worlds are joined at French Guinea, which is a full part of France. Also, Spain borders Morocco, and the Netherlands borders France (in the Caribbean). These points would hugely change the diagram.
I'm still disappointed that he has exclaves as bubbles rather than forcing them to connect to their main country. If you're going to run with topology, go all the way!
Re #13. I think there is a huge and fatal flaw in Matt Shapiro's lockdown analysis.
> In the end, there are two kinds of people when it comes to COVID restrictions:
> The people who are going to do what they think is appropriate regardless of government mandates
> The people who wanted to be less careful than they were being, but were coerced by government rules into being more careful
> I think group 2 is a really small group.
However this ignores two vital parts of lockdown (I'm typing from a UK perspective).
The first is that lockdown was very very effective to get businesses to change their behaviour. Even if you wanted to be less careful, and were willing to break government rules, you can't go to the pub if the pubs were shut. I think the number of people who stayed home because there was nothing to go out for is large enough to have an impact on epidemic spread.
The second is the furlough scheme and other forms of government support. I think a very large group of people would want to be more cautious than their financial situation allows them to be. When the government steps in with a support package their behaviour shifts to the amount of caution they want.
Another effect was allowing people to not go into work whose boss would have made them otherwise. If I work at a restaurant and my boss tells me that I have to go in or I'm fired, then I'm either forced to be less careful or I'm out of a job. This was obviously more impactful at the very beginning when more restaurants and stores were closed, but it's still having a large effect with office jobs.
This also has an effect on safety precautions like mask-wearing. If the government doesn't say everyone has to wear a mask, then some bosses will say that you can't wear a mask, especially in customer facing positions. If the government does say that you have to wear a mask, then the boss has to allow people to be cautious.
Yeah. On a moral level I really really don't like the idea of the ability to sheltering from a pandemic being a luxury only people with the right kind of job can take.
It might be possible to come up with some voluntary furlough scheme where the people could optionally work or furlough. But that would be really really hard. You could imagine the owner of a restaurant saying "if I have to go to all the trouble of training up another chef, I may as well keep the one who won't get scared and vanish". Creative dismissal is hard to police at the best of times.
>20: This Twitter thread on delegitimation of the high school...
I'm a long way from high school but hope this is really true. It would be up there with the widespread acceptance of gay rights with things I wanted but never expected to see in my lifetime.
27. "So when he got to the gospels, he assumed that they actually happened sequentially: that Jesus was in a sort of Groundhog Day time loop in which he experienced slightly different versions of the same set of events four different times, dying at the end of each version. (I guess it would make sense that final loop was John, which is significantly different from the other three.)"
This is really wonderful. When I was a devout Catholic teenager, I got very into the theological niche of literary analysis of the Gospels, trying to trace back the hypothetical common sources that Matthew, Mark & Luke drew from based on which events in the life of Jesus which they do & do not have in common. Experiencing those synchronicities & recurrences from a naive reader's point of view in a _Rashomon_-like way, particularly once you get to the very different account of John, would be enormous fun.
Yeah, this story doesn't quite make sense though. Did they think all the people in Chronicles were reincarnated, too? Did they think the Jews left Israel a bunch of times in the psalms? Wandered through the Wilderness once in each book of the Pentateuch?
You are underestimating the importance of the phrase "That's above my pay grade". You & I might feel compelled to investigate contradictions in a holy text, and indeed I've always had sympathy for religious traditions which have a commitment to argument & debate about the meaning of God's word, like Rabbinic Judaism, but traditions like these are more the exception than the rule.
The last time I was in an evangelical church was for the baptism of one of my cousins. One of the readings was Genesis 3. Now I'm not a believer anymore, but I remembered enough of my Bible to recognize that the person reading skipped one of the most interesting verses in the entire book, Genesis 3:22.
And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”
That immediately calls into question the idea that there's a fundamental difference in kind between humans & divine beings. My favorite cousin and I beelined for the bookshop after the end of the service to make sure we had remembered correctly and that the leader had just plain ignored such an inconvenient statement. There were no Bibles in the pews, which I found particularly funny because it was a Lutheran church.
Once you have already accepted that there was a day in the history of the Earth where the sun stopped in the middle of the sky because Joshua commanded it, so that the Israelites would have enough daylight to beat the Amorites, then everything else is small potatoes. You can talk yourself into anything at that point.
I disagree... Sort of the same rules as science fiction: if something "impossible" happens and everyone in the narrative acknowledge it as impossible / a miracle it has a very different texture than if something impossible happens and no one seems to notice or care.
Right, but the thing about contemporary Christians is that their narrative either has to convince you that miracles are still happening, e.g. Our Lady of Medugorje, or has to explain why miracles stopped happening. I have had an idea for a short story about this for a while now but I need to read more Emmanuel Swedenborg before I'm ready to write it.
I mean, if you want to ignore the plain meaning of the phrase that pretty much anyone would understand from it, sure. And if we ignore that they had no idea what death was. Or why it would be bad. Or why it would be bad to disobey. Or....
It is indeed a fascinating verse. What is the tree of life even doing there? It is mentioned at 2:9 but otherwise plays no role in the story. 2:16 implies that the humans were free to eat of it earlier, but in 3:23 they have to be expelled from Eden to avoid the possibility. If they hadn't eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, would they have died or not?
Also, who is this "us" that man has now become like? (In Christian tradition possibly the Trinity, but certainly not so understood in the original context.)
At one level the answer is that the story has been borrowed from Babylonian mythology, which was polytheistic, and the tree of life is presumably analogous to the apples of Iðunn or the Hesperides, but that raises more questions. Why has J done such a poor job at editing the story? Why didn't J just do as the lector at your service and omit 3:22?
For that matter, why did J need to borrow a Babylonian story? Did the Israelites not have their own creation myth? Perhaps they did (cf Psalms 74:12-17, 89:5-14?) but it was somehow unsuitable for J's purpose?
There are only three examples of God speaking in the plural in the Hebrew bible, all in Genesis, at 1:26, 3:22 and 11:7. Some people think that Genesis 1-11 originated as a separate 'block' (although that idea seems to be less popular than it used to be), in which case it could possibly be an idiosyncratic usage of the original author, but the more parsimonious explanation seems to me to be that the references suppose a council of gods. There is a suggestion due to R E Friedman that there was a council of gods until the Babel incident, but these other gods later died as recorded in Psalm 82, but as with many of that authors suggestions it relies on a strange selectivity of skepticism.
Here's the story as it appears in the Jonathan Rose book. The part after the paragraph break is indented, indicating Rose is quoting Carter himself.
-------------
The notion that there can be different versions of the same story – suggesting that no version is absolutely true – is again an acquired literary convention. Growing up in Colchester with access to few books besides an illustrated Bible and some children's chapbooks, laborer's son Thomas Carter (b. 1792) had no opportunity to learn that. Therefore he not only read Revelations [sic] literally: he assumed that the books of Kings and Chronicles were
"unconnected narratives of two distinct series of events; and also, that the four Gospels were consecutive portions of the history of Jesus Christ, so that I supposed there had been four crucifixions, four resurrections, and the like. I was, indeed, sometimes perplexed by the apparently repeated occurrence of events so nearly resembling each other; nor could I perceive the exact design or bearing of these events; but I knew no one of whom I could ask for the needed explanation."
I'm afraid I don't believe it. Multiple versions of the same story are commonplace in pre-literate cultures. The very fact that one of the few books his family possessed was an illustrated Bible shows that were people around with at least some familiarity with Christianity, who would have been able to explain that the crucifixion and resurrection only occurred once.
Having read the whole book, the point surrounding this anecdote is that new (to the audience) media are confusing because people don't understand the conventions around them. There are similar anecdotes of people not understanding theater, e.g., thinking someone being stabbed on stage was really being murdered.
I can believe that the same person who understood this concept in general could be confused by the Bible.
I had very little exposure to religion until I was sent to a private Christian school in 8th grade for academic reasons (they had an adjoining high school where I could take geometry). There was a mandatory Bible studies class, and I was similarly confused by the gospels.
re #15 - even if the cost-benefit ratio isn't quite right for current preterm-birth prevention strategies, maybe this research topic should be of much greater interest to the rationalist community? Premature births are associated with a 12-point IQ drop and a host of other behavioral problem. There is a ton of excitement (not to mention venture capital funding) devoted to polygenic screening (maximum IQ benefit estimated at 3 points), where are the start-ups seeking to develop safe interventions to prevent preterm birth? Are there rationalists studying this topic?
I suppose Greg Cochran & Paul Ewald aren't "rationalists", but they pointed out lots of what they think of as low-hanging fruit decades ago, and which the former at least is now pointing to as the cause of pre-term births. There was an article in The Atlantic on their ideas, and Nobelist Barry Marshall has voiced similar ideas, but not much follow-up since.
>one of the proposals is to plant honeypot bikes in easily-watchable areas and arrest the people who steal them until maybe eventually San Franciscans get the message that bike-stealing can have negative consequences
Another unfortunate consequence of the reaction to George Floyds killing, along with the arson and theft:
There were a spate of carjackings in the months that followed. Black teenagers were grabbing peoples car keys and wallets and phones and going for joyrides. Usually whacking the victim with a pistol and occasionally saying "Black live matter" to victims as they drove off.
Hey kids, being a knuckle head is not going to help matters.
It got bad enough for the Minneapolis police to use honeypot cars and drones to catch the culprits.
This crap seems to have died down but it was one more element in the hit parade of misfortunes of 2020. Pandemic, lockdown, rioting and then this.
> Black teenagers were grabbing peoples car keys and wallets and phones and going for joyrides. Usually whacking the victim with a pistol and occasionally saying "Black live matter" to victims as they drove off.
I suspect that this is hyperbole, but I'm interested in being proven wrong. I remember there was one notable article that featured someone being carjacked at gunpoint and reflecting that calling the cops was racist (after he did, indeed, call the cops). Can you provide evidence that tblack teenager theives were *usually* pistol-whipping, et c?
Let me say at the outset that watching George Floyd die under the knee of Derek Chauvin was an agonizing gut punch for me too. I live across the Mississippi in Saint Paul.
I felt the same anger as the thousands that were demonstrating in protest. I might have joined them if not for COVID.
During the demonstrations we watched the events unfold in real time on local television channels. The protest degenerated into arson and theft. The governor of Minnesota came on television and suggested that people in our area pack a go bag. It was a chilling experience.
The carjackings were going on in Minneapolis and Saint Paul for several months. It had the trappings of a rather perverse juvenile fad.
I almost certain of the "Black Lives Matter" taunt on exit. A final FY to the victim. Reading it in what we still call the Saint Paul Pioneer Press - its name has change in some print media merger - was a low point in the 2020 nightmare.
I am going off my awful memories from months ago so I'm not sure a majority of victims were hit with the gun, many of the victims may have given up their wallet and gun at the sight of a pistol. Let me do a little Googling of local media outlets to see what I can come up.
I do remember reading that story and thinking "okay, you don't want the kid to get a criminal record and all the rest that comes with being picked up by the cops, but do you really think letting a teenager run around with a gun on the streets is a good idea? Because he's going to shoot someone or get shot himself, with all the other teens running around with guns on the street. In that case isn't it better that you call the cops so at least he's hauled in and has the gun taken away?"
It's "ruined life because arrested" versus "ruined life because dead because running with a gang".
I have this fantasy that substack's lack of comment editing somehow extends to posts, due to some californian tech sector-style private philosophical theory that the ceo doesn't want to admit is wrong. Please don't make that fantasy untenable :D
Private philosophical theory makes sense! It's all about authenticity, you see, and giving us plebs an editing button would only mean we self-censor and prune the natural genuine stream-of-consciousness take in order to curate it by artificial standards of what is acceptable discourse.
The creator of the map also has blogpost explaining it. Includes version of the map without names as a little challenge for people (to fill in the names) https://tafc.space/qna/the-topologists-world-map/
I'm not sure I'm on board with Balajis' tweet on space, space travel is not an electrical appliance. There are some good reasons to believe that we could see widely available commercial space access in the coming decades, but 'space travel is like a dishwasher' isn't one of them.
I agree, there are lots of really good examples of comparable expensive/challenging/energy intensive things becoming more commonplace. I was amused to see that tweet not bothering with any of the more comparable stuff.
23. As a liberal, you'd may think identifying "types of people" that may commit crimes, even though they didn't actually commit any crimes and their typing is done by the government - who is never mistaken in segregating people into types and figuring out which type is evil - and then spending the whole power of federal government into ensnaring them into some situation that could be presented as setting up for a crime - as a liberal, you may think this completely abhorrent. Or maybe not, "liberal" means so many things nowdays... Sometimes it means "types of people that government says are evil should definitely be jailed by any means necessary".
I'm pretty sure they do. The police do drug arrests this way all the time - i.e. they get some narco and tell him they let him go if he makes five of his friends to buy drugs from an undercover cop. Of course this costs them nothing since they'd catch the same narco at the same place trying to score drugs anyway.
There are also prominent examples of FBI trying to frame innocent people - like the botched antrax mailings investigation or the case where they tried to frame a Chinese professor. So no reason to assume black gangs would be excepted, if the feds needed it. Of course, it also depends on what higher-ups want to see - one wouldn't concoct a scenario that wouldn't make higher-ups happy, so if higher-ups didn't ask for gang arrests, then there's no reason to harvest them.
Obviously, they do? There's obvious historical examples at the federal level like infiltration of the Black Panthers and the assassination of Fred Hampton, and local things like the Rampart Scandal and MOVE incident. But even today, at the federal level, far and away the group most targeted by the FBI in its schemes to subtly encourage people sympathetic to terrorist causes to become actual terrorists so they can be arrested is American Muslims. Not exactly black, but closer to that than white.
The joke about the KKK is that half their membership is FBI plants.
The reason we've had so few KKK terrorist cells busted up is because the sting operations "worked", for that value of "worked": if you go to a KKK meeting and suggest some light terrorism, they'll assume that you are a Fed.
This is one of the reasons I tend to support sting operations in theory (even though I'd want serious reforms because how they happen in reality often causes lots of shit).
I find Scott's credulousness on this one a bit disturbing. How many not-smart people does he still know? I mean, lets just get this out of the way: He thinks these people were, more or less, duped by Trump into being Trump voters. Right? Well why wouldn't he believe they could be duped by a smart, charismatic, decently good looking, Iraq war vet (supposed to be their ingroup, but he's like the BEST of the ingroup) into becoming kidnappers?
Its not like these people even had any idea how to get the plot going without the informant and other agents. They had no plans, hadn't even done their "trainings" without him and his financial support and organization. It seems to me that, without all this prodding all you had was a particularly edgy fortnight chat group.
I feel like the situation is worse than that. We now know that this is exactly what happened - these people were essentially roped in by the FBI agents, which invented the plan, found the gullible dupes among the most stupid and vocal arguers online, organized and financed everything, and basically pushed their reluctant marks around until they got enough checkpoints to make the charges.
But Scott seems to be OK with all that because the people charged is "sort of people" that might do that kind of stuff - i.e. the extreme outgroup - so it's ok to do things like that to them, if they aren't guilty in this one, they'd be guilty in something else, or could be, or should be. The wrong kind of people needs to be gotten off the streets, by any means necessary, because, you know, they're the wrong kind of people.
I would expect, from an extremely smart and educated liberal in 2021, to know where such logic is leading to. And yet...
For sure. The real law enforcement priority is finding a person who is like the character their informant was pretending to be, but is actually real (if such a person exists). Because that person, if real, could radicalized a dozen of these groups and disappear into the night, or have them all execute a plan at once (Bin Laden) and be out of the FBI's reach. But that is, like, actual work, so better to just dupe the rubes of the outgroup and throw chum to the press I guess?
Put me in the permanent lockdown camp! I certainly don't need government enforcement to help me live my newfound joyously hermit lifestyle, but some social buy in certainly helps pull it off fairly effortlessly. Lockdowns have reminded me about how much I care about social wellbeing in the abstract, and how uninterested I am in interacting with my fellow social beings in the here and now. The emotional comfort masks give me are fairly similar to noise cancelling headphones, except without cutting out the environmental sensory cues that are important for moving around without getting bumped into by moving objects. I am not only in my own world, but I am a safe 6ft (really, I prefer a nice, spacious 20ft bubble) from any other stranger that I'd really just rather not interact with, pandemic or no.
On the one hand, I too am thriving under lockdown conditions. On the other hand, some people are so strange and weird that they actually *like* interacting with others, having friends, meeting people, going out to pubs and restaurants, and going on foreign holidays.
So it would be very mean to keep them locked up, the way I think it is very mean to keep pets like cats and dogs locked inside your house all day.
My dogs sleep until 2pm and shave months off their lives in uncontrolled anxiety anytime anyone rings the doorbell, so I think they're comfortable with permanent social distance too. I certainly am not interested in punishing others though. I also like hanging out with friends, particularly in my backyard, or theirs, or at a park meetup with kids and don't find the restrictions conflict with any of that. Since March 2020, I have yet to find a covid regulation that has actively prevented me from doing something I was otherwise compelled to do, even in LA County, where things have been "strict." My inner introvert just really blossomed into something I'd like to keep.
"My inner introvert just really blossomed into something I'd like to keep."
My workplace officially closed on 12th March 2020 and I've been working from home since and every time our government extends "yeah we're not going back to normal just yet, stay at home if you possibly can", I'm *delighted*.
My routine goes something like:
General day - Hey, I put my slippers on after I got up, that counts as getting dressed?
Awaiting delivery/post/someone coming to the door - Suppose I'd better put socks on with those slippers
Have to GET DRESSED ENTIRELY and GO OUTSIDE my house in to town: I HAVEN'T WORN SHOES SINCE OCTOBER. THE IMPOSITION!!!!
And what is your opinion of all the factory workers, farm workers, warehouse workers, logistics workers, and delivery workers who are dropping off packages and groceries on your doorstep? And the workmen who repair your dwelling. And who built it in the first place? And the people who maintain all the manufacturing and logistics that enable them to do so.
I'm not sure I understand your question. My opinion of them as people? Presumably it is ok to not know personally all of the individuals who I am tangentially connected to in our global supply chain world... My personal interactions with the folks who hold occupations you call out is generally limited, as it was pre-pandemic, so my opinion of them is not very robust, beyond general human welfare concerns and ideological concerns. I'm not sure if the point you are trying to get at is that my hermit life is supported by lots of people that have to interact with others and don't have my privilege, or that I am actually interacting with others but just not recognizing it for assumed class differences. Feel free to elaborate.
The later points. Your "hermitage" is supported by a lot of people who can't so you can. And efforts to mandate, enforce, or even socially nudge lockdown make their lifes much worse, for the sake of your blissfully smug hermitage.
Turn into a hermit if you want. I understand, it's my nature too. But being "pro lockdown" for the sake of "I like being alone" is breathtakingly stupid.
Not sure I see it that way, but I am not sure that you are persuadable, given your tone so I will leave it be, and continue my excessive tipping practices and creating the demand that employs folks you're apparently representing.
I think you're being a little facetious, but you're free to stay a hermit forever, but please don't provide any support for mandating this for the rest of us any longer than strictly necessary.
I think this is as good a place as any to leave this comment. Please correct me if not the case.
As a long time reader, I'm surprised to see how little Scott now posts outside an increasingly narrowing Overton window of what is acceptable. This has affected how much I read here. The content is still high quality, but it's less bold, interesting and novel because it's competing with the thousands of other smart people who are operating in the same window. Now especially there's opportunity if not need for people to fearlessly challenge and increasingly hegemonic orthodoxy. Unfortunately (from my perspective) Scott no longer seems to be interested in that challenge. Or perhaps (more charitably?) his own views have changed to situate him within the orthodoxy he once critiqued.
I'm implying that you should be more controversial, not necessarily anti (or anti woke). But be more willing to take on/up controversial topics that might get you in hot water with the NYT again. Easy for me to say I know. But let me pitch this proposal positively:
Your post I Can Tolerate Anything But the Outgroup was one of my favorites and most influential for me. I don't consider it to be anti anybody since it pointed out a phenomena across the political spectrum. It perhaps hit hardest for liberals because of their positive identity as tolerant. I found it fair without being anodyne. That to me was a unique gift with your blog for those kind of topics - you are able to not pull punches or get bogged down in boring superficial bothsidesism while also avoiding equally tedious partisanship. That, along with epistemological transparency, has earned you an increasingly unique non-tribal trust that I think you could leverage to take on controversial topics that rarely get good treatment these days.
For example, trying to navigate the most likely point of truth between climate alarmism and denial, accounting for the sometimes baffling confluence of science and advocacy. Or group differences. Or woke topics, including trying to steel men some of the claims. Or looking at what's going on with the seemingly growing enforcement of or trend towards conformity in science.
I understand you are well within your rights to tell me to f off and start my own blog.
I disagree with this request on the basis that those (and other "controversial" topics) are over-examined already. Scott did what you asked recently and tried to sort out a hot politicized question (whether COVID lockdowns worked). I found it mildly interesting, but nowhere near proportionally interesting to the effort it took him. In his postmortem on writing that post, Scott had the below to say about "pulling sideways" ideas. THAT stuff I am 100% here for. I can get "red good blue bad or blue good red bad?" elsewhere. Can't avoid getting it elsewhere, even.
>Over the past ~year, I've seen endless terrible arguments over whether we should have more or less lockdown. People asked me to write a post on it. It's something I personally was wondering about and wanted to write a post on. And the dynamics of media - where I get more clicks if I write about things more people are interested in - incentivize me to write a post about it.
>But the smartest people I talked to kept - is "derailing" the right word? - derailing onto more interesting and important pull-the-rope-sideways plans. . . I felt that some of the experts I talked to were trying really hard to get this across, and I was asking "Yes, that's all nice and well, but blue state good red state bad? Or red state good blue state bad?"
I don't know. To me we're slipping further and further into a world where only acceptable topics and opinions are allowed. This is increasingly enforced by censorship. I find it deeply disturbing. It should be just at these moments when we speak out more, not less. Unfortunately Scott has chosen less.
Scott was one of the people who opened my eyes to the fact that there's a reasonable world outside the Overton window back in around 2015 or so. That taboos aren't necessarily evil and inherited orthodoxies not always right. I wish for more of this counterculture intellectualism, not less. Anyway, I'm repeating myself so I'll stop having hopefully made my point abundantly clear.
I’m always mystified when I hear the worldview that there is less tolerance for heterodox opinions today, or more censorship.
Imagine going into a bar 50 years ago and saying that women are just as capable as men of being CEO or president. Or that two men should be able to marry. Or that there might be some silver linings to communism.
“Counterculture intellectualism” certainly existed then, but it was isolated to a few small geographic areas and not at all welcome to the mainstream even there.
And censorship! Remember when you had to find a publisher or broadcaster willing to affirmatively produce and distribute your opinions? The default state was being “censored” and you had to convince someone to spend money to distribute speech.
Certainly there are aspects of today’s world that are not as intellectually free as I would like, but it’s hard to see an argument that the US is less intellectually free today than 20/50/100 years ago.
I think we're thinking on different time scales. Are we more or less intellectually free than two years ago? To me the answer is incontrovertibly the latter.
You could take on age of consent and related issues. It is, in my view, one of the subjects our culture is crazy on. We've been having a thread touching on that in DSL.
I don't think you should be more "anti-woke", since "anti-woke" points of view are mostly just cheap and obvious.
What I really like to see is when you manage to take a three hundred thousand foot view of an issue which transcends the usual divides so that both the "woke" and "anti-woke" points of view recede into the distance and can be more clearly seen in a much broader context. Your best essays don't argue for one point of view versus another, nor attempt to adjudicate between two points of view, but instead take a step way back from the debate and ask "What's so special about these two points of view that cause them to be so heavily populated in this vast many-dimensional point-of-view space?"
I don't know how you can read the last couple of weeks of posts and think "Yep, there's someone hewing to a strict orthodoxy" unless what you actually mean is "he's not giving enough time to my particular hobby horses"
The "...it just felt too weird and transgressive to focus on something authorities weren't even talking about" bit in the second lockdown post was at least suggestive of this, and not in a my-particular-hobby-horse sort of way. But claims that Scott has completely stopped writing controversial posts is taking that way too far.
27. The real haymaker here is that these Brits didn't know fiction existed at all. "Ghost stories, highwayman stories, fairy tales, Paradise Lost, and Daniel Defoe were all equally credible. [...]'I had no idea at the time I read Robinson Crusoe that there were such things as novels, works of fiction, in existence.'" These quotes from The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 2nd Edition, page 96. Also mentioned is that they believed in a literal Pilgrim's Progress, Jack the Giant Killer, and Robin Hood, and "contrasted their probability with that of other wondrous things which I had read in books that 'it were a sin to disbelieve.'"
Sure, why wouldn't they? Stewart Lee's recent radio documentary, "Unreliable Narrator", goes into these questions, focusing on Geoffrey of Monmouth creating the myth of King Arthur out of whole cloth in the 12th century, for which he was criticized by contemporaries, none of whose names we now remember because they were much more boring than the guy who created King Arthur.
It's not the mainstream view, but there are serious historians who believe in King Arthur. They don't believe *most* of the stories, certainly not the magic swords, but there might have been a real British king named Arthur.
As a publishing historian of the relevant period (my publications not my age) I'd say the mainstream view is that Arthur was a real person, probably from what is now southern Scotland or northern England, but very few historians would argue he was actually a king rather than a warleader (his earliest title is the Latin Dux, which broadly translates that way). And beyond his existence we know nothing till the late-sixth century indicators that Arthur's legend was developing. Which to put it in context is still way more than we know of almost any other Briton of the period 410-560, excepting a few churchmen.
#2: I'm glad that there is some evidence that those survey results are ~nonsense, I've seen lots of people claiming it confirms our status as a nation of curtain-twitchers but it just doesn't seem plausible to me. Like sure, I can believe there are a significant number of boomers who hate fun and want a 10pm curfew. But that's the one with the lowest level of support! "Having a 10 day quarantine after returning from abroad" as a policy even post-covid seems obviously insupportable, and I think that's enough to conclude there must be something dodgy about all of them.
"Joe Kent, a Republican running for Washington’s 3rd congressional district, has said that “the government must open jobs to those with non-traditional educational backgrounds”
I am sceptical about this, and you know why? Because this says precisely nothing, it's pure politician for "we're already doing this but if I make a big splashy announcement I can sound like this is a new initiative driven by me".
The ideal candidate will be an accomplished office professional who has a proven track record of establishing new processes for an organization or new work environment within an organization. Someone who exercises sound judgement, able to problem solve, thinks critically, and overall possess excellent communication skills in their administrative wheelhouse.
Consideration: As this presents a “foot-in-the-door” type of opportunity to explore state employment, your excellent work performance may provide additional work opportunities as they become available.
Qualifications
REQUIRED:
High School diploma or GED
AND
Two (2) years of progressive clerical experience in the following competencies:
Proficient computer skills - including basic skills in Microsoft Outlook and Word.
Basic proficiency level with Adobe Acrobat Pro and Microsoft Excel.
Highly organized multi-tasker who work wells in a fast paced environment.
PREFERRED/DESIRED QUALICATIONS:
Six (6) months or more experience using copy machines and scanners.
Professional work experience using OnBase or a similar scanning/archiving system.
Professional level Intermediate proficiency with Adobe Acrobat Pro and Microsoft Excel.
Professional WA State experience archiving and destroying records utilizing the WA state records retention guidelines.
Professional work experience with SharePoint."
This is fairly basic requirements stuff that I've seen myself in similar civil/public service jobs in Ireland. There's no mention of a degree, because this is (as they say above) a 'foot in the door' position. What matters is experience in a similar role. And if they get a ton of applicants for this, then yeah, anyone with a degree or more experience or "worked in the civil service before" will be preferentially treated just for winnowing out purposes.
Now, a position like this will let you work your way up the scale to a certain point. But if you want to advance beyond that point, then yeah - you *will* need a degree.
Here's more basic, clerical level, "don't need a degree but you will need at least two years work experience in a similar role" for Washing State University: https://hrs.wsu.edu/clerical-series/
And all this is before even touching the civil service exams which are the next step between "submit application" and "get called for interview".
"Why is scoring high on WA State civil service exams so important? In most agencies in Washington State, only the top ten highest scorers are considered eligible for job vacancies; the other candidates who pass but fall beneath this ranking may be considered for future openings.
JobTestPrep’s team of experts has worked hard to ensure that our civil service practice tests will give you the tools, knowledge, and skills you need to successfully pass your exam."
Yeah, they're trying to sell a product, but this is standard procedure: you advertise a position, call people in to take the test, form a panel, and interview/recruit off that (I've done similar myself).
So the bould aspiring Representative is re-inventing the wheel, as it were. If he gets elected and if he gets a resolution passed, it will simply be one more piece of nuisance paper that the Department sent out, where the civil service reads it, says "yeah we're already doing that, Joe" and ignores it. What he is doing is the equivalent of "teach coal miners to code". I was on an upskilling training scheme a few years back and there was one guy on it who was an ex-butcher (repetitive strain injury in his hands meant he had to give that up). He'd been sent on a "computer skills" course for re-training and inclining him to a new job, and he had absolutely zero interest in office work or clerical work or computer work. He was just doing the course in order to comply with unemployment benefit rules until he could find work for himself that he wanted to do.
A lot of Representative Kent's good intentions are going to lead the same way: people who don't want to do office work being pointed in the direction in order to fill the requirement that "the government open jobs to those with non-traditional educational backgrounds". And as you can see, you may not need college degree but you do need to have stuck it out to high school graduation and picked up clerical computer skills as well.
"Further, I will set aside one third of the jobs on my congressional staff for those who do not have a traditional educational background, and one-third for those from the district. "
Sweet Heart of Jesus, Font of Love and Mercy, I hope he does *not* get this through. Have you any idea of the amount of nepotism, favouritism, and pull that will be involved if this is passed? 'Jobs for the boys' won't be in it! And then when the one-third *can't* be filled because the potential candidates do not have the necessary job skills (not the paper degree, the skills to do the job), then HR will fall back on the usual applicants and this is just one more hoop to jump through before filling the position.
Do I sound cynical? Yes, because I've *been* that minor minion (Grade III, Acting) who has seen the result of politicians making grand announcements like this and layering on an *additional* step on the ladder to add atop the pile of regulations already in place around hiring for government jobs.
I think that's probably to get around the applicants who are "well I did three weeks' work experience in transition year in an office and I was allowed - carefully supervised - to do some photocopying" and to make sure "you lasted at least six months in a previous job and didn't walk out/get fired" 😁
It's surprising how many derogatory terms originally meant someone living in the countryside. A heathen lives on a heath. A villain lives in a village. A pagan lives in the countryside (pagus).
Re. 20: I caught the shift in reactions to bullying after columbine (I was in middle school at the time), and it kinda checks out.
It used to be I would get the shit kicked out of me (on account of being lightly dusted with autism) every couple weeks, and learned to do the prison thing of always coming back twice as hard to stop it.
Thusly, By then end of elementary school it was such that I would respond immediately with violence if anyone touched me for any reason that I didn't like .
Highlights include getting knocked around by three guys in the locker-room, then finding one latter during recess and beating the shit out of him infront of everyone until he was crying on the ground,
choking a guy mostly unconscious in bus line after school after he jumped me in the library,
and (not my proudest moment) knocking a kid half-way out by smashing him into the railing on the stairs a couple times after he threw shit at me and said something about my momma in math class.
I want to emphasis: these are the highlights, but I was getting into at least one for real knock down drag out fistfight every month.
During all these, the worst punishment I ever received was a bunch of in-school suspension and some anger management classes after BASHING SOMONES HEAD AGAINST A METAL RAILING DIRECTLY INFRONT OF A TEACHER.
I probably got some brownie points with admin. because I wasn't a discipline problem other than getting fights all the time, but this was some serious life-time movie bullshit, and it wasn't just me. I was just the only kid autistic enough to not internalize the pecking order and just suck it up.
This changed real fast after 1999. Immediately after columbine went down, enforcement changed instantly. Part of it was that I had put on 60 pounds by then and went from tall and skinny to a 20" neck, but most of it was incredibly rigorous enforcement of existing rules.
If the teachers found anyone fighting for any reason, they would make your parents come in from work to pick both of you up, which is 20 time the punishment of any amount of suspensions; and repeat offenders actually started getting expelled or suspended for weeks/months.
I really think it's all down to a bunch of kids dying in school all at once on and then ending up in TV, instead of in onesies and twosies after school in private.
responders likely don't mean this very literally. they're trying to say keep the look down and don't cop out of it with excuses like "COVID is coming is under control and that's the numbers etc"
to illustrate look at Israel. 2 months ago they had practically zero cases, huge percentage of vaccinated. so the reasonable person would say you can open up, open the airport blah blah. this is exactly what these people tell you: do not open up no matter what. Indeed, now in Israel there is a fourth wave thousands of cases every day etc
#2: I misread the chart as "clubbing seals" instead of "sealing clubs" and assumed this was a piece about horrible Canadian seal hunting practices.
#20: I'm not sure if it's campaign, or change in zeitgeist but smoking. Oh boy, in the 2000s we used to smoke in the corridors of the university, in bars, pubs, cafes, restaurants. There were smoking and non-smoking inter-city bus services. I used to have an ashtray on my bedside. It was super normal to smoke inside, and even though being a very smell-sensitive person I was ok with that and even did myself.
8 years ago I quit smoking but even then it was a huge taboo for me to smoke inside. If somebody smoke inside like once a week ago, I'd smell it and hate it. Maybe it was the campaigns that turned me so much, or maybe me for some reason becoming kinda obsessed with cleaning but I see it wasn't only me. Indoor smoking bans from being something that everybody laughed at for being unrealistic to being something that's widely accepted in less than a decade is interesting. By the way the country is Turkey.
I said it about Missouri now I’ll say it about Turkeys. Good for you! BTW Mount Agri Dagi came up as a clue in an old crossword I’m working. I had to look it up. Sorry. :)
#20: one anecdote that surprised me, just today a 15 year old told me that he never really saw bullying in his life.
This surprised me as he's an introvert guy who likes math and programming; the kind I would expect to be picked on at least somewhat. He's gone to the same school (an expensive international school in São Paulo, Brazil) since he was little, it holds awareness campaigns every year which he seemed to feel were unnecessary (but maybe they were effective?).
Dominican Republic. Easy. Baseball. Dozens of Dominicans have come to the US and gotten very rich playing baseball. They may not return permanently, but they do do things like building fancy houses back on the Island that injects capital into the economic system.
Speaking of ἔθνος, I'd like to register my extreme displeasure with the etymology of Wales, Galois, Vlachs, Walloon and Rotwelsch.
Derived from the proto-germanic *Walhaz, possibly the name of a celtic tribe also known as the Volcae, it has been used to refer to all sorts of 'foreign' peoples, especially those who speak romance or celtic languages. Can the germanic peoples not think up a better exonym? It's a bit lazy simply calling everyone else the foreigners.
I had a Vlach woman for a server at a restaurant recently. I her accent sounded Eastern European but not Slavic. I asked what her mother tongue was. She misunderstood at first. “My mother?” staring daggers at me. Then she understood “Oh, my accent. It’s Roma”. She smiled and we got along okay for the rest of the meal. :)
It's probably revenge for all those times various Teutones, Chatti, Alamanni, Lombards, Norsemen, Deutschlanders and Afrikaans were just called Germani/Germanic peoples as if their language were the defining feature of their identity.
Entrapment is a really interesting field of law, and one in which (disclaimer) I am by no means an expert. It's basically the only aspect of criminal law that isn't Constituionalized. That is, almost everything that pertains to criminal procedure has an underlying constitutional right that almost necessarily will result in an effective remedy (such as dismissal of the case, overturn of conviction, release from prison, attachment of jeopardy such that re-prosecution is impossible, or any of them) if they are sufficiently proved up.
Entrapment is different. There's no Constitutional right not to be entrapped. The means it's basically a pure issue for the jury (or grand jury, or even possibly preliminary hearing, which is the equivalent of a grand jury in most states but presided over by a judge). If those governappers want to use that defense, they'll need to make it directly at trial, more or less.
As to whether this is good, I'm on the fence. Crimes vary in both their punishment and the procedure that is due. Misdemeanors are punishable by up to a year in jail, felonies by more than a year, and then there are special classes of felonies in many states with increased ranges/minimums of incarceration when there's violence, sexual violence, guns, drugs, etc. The more minor the offense, and the less punishment possible, reduces the amount of process. For example (and don't quote me on this I'm not a criminal lawyer) jury trials aren't required for misdemeanors punishable by less than 6 months in jail.
I don't see why this framework couldn't be applied to entrapment. As the punishment increases, the constitutionality of entrapment decreases. If it's for a misdemeanor DUI or theft (stealing bikes), sure go for it. If it's for a felony DUI or felony theft, maybe it would depend from case to case (that kind of vagueness could have other issues, both constitutional and in terms of police procedure; that is, would the possibility of having a minor felony conviction thrown out for entrapment make cops more or less likely do it? Because on the other hand, the judge might agree and they might have an easy conviction. I don't know, but I tend to suspect police will do institutionally whatever is maximally bad).
If you're entrapped into committing a violent felony, gun felony, sex felony, death penalty, life imprisonment, 25+ years, sex offender registry, forfeiture of functionally your entire worth, etc., then case dismissed.
On the comparison Scott made, I think a really big difference is that bikes do actually get stolen in San Francisco on a regular basis, whereas governor, or any political kidnapping happens, approximately never in America (any kidnapping at all, outside of domestic kidnapping where the non-custodial parent takes the kid is really rare).
Yes, I’m sure there are buffoons out there who would be ready to give it a try. But by actually (maybe) generating the plot for some to do so, the FBI was taking something that was not done, and was actually pretty close to unthinkable, and made it something in the news for everyone to think about.
"Wild exploited a strong public demand for action during a major London 18th-century crime wave in the absence of any effective police force. As a powerful gang-leader himself, he became a master manipulator of legal systems, collecting the rewards offered for valuables which he had stolen himself, bribing prison guards to release his colleagues, and blackmailing any who crossed him. He was consulted on crime by the government, due to his apparently remarkable prowess in locating stolen items and those who had stolen them."
Part of why I don't like these 'honey-pot' schemes is that the British Army/RUC/British intelligence services ran a lot of them in the North during the Troubles, and the results were not savoury. Take the Stakeknife case, where an alleged high-level informer for the British Army was a high-level IRA member in charge of interrogations and executions of informers. Allegations that murders were permitted to go ahead in order that their agent could continue in place and continue funnelling information to them eventually led to an investigation, the result of which was - nobody will be prosecuted:
"Four people, including two former MI5 officers, will not face charges in connection with an investigation into the agent codenamed Stakeknife.
The North’s Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Herron, said on Thursday that decisions not to prosecute had been issued in regard to four individuals who were reported to the Public Prosecution service (PPS) by the Operation Kenova investigation team."
They ran agents on both sides, so Loyalist murder gangs operated the same way.
And that's how you start off with "it's acceptable to get the bad guys off the streets" and end up "okay, they're going to kill two guys on Friday, let that happen so you can tell us about next week's operations".
"James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger Jr. (/ˈbʌldʒər/; September 3, 1929 – October 30, 2018) was an American organized crime boss and FBI informant who led the Winter Hill Gang in the Winter Hill neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts, a city directly northwest of Boston.[2][3] On December 23, 1994, Bulger fled the Boston area and went into hiding after his former FBI handler, John Connolly, tipped him off about a pending RICO indictment against him. Bulger remained at large for sixteen years. After his 2011 arrest, federal prosecutors tried Bulger for nineteen murders based on the grand jury testimony from Kevin Weeks and other former criminal associates."
With the Minneapolis carjacking honeypot I think they just put a good looking car with a vulnerable looking driver on the street. If someone tries to steal the car it’s hard me to construe that as entrapment. Not sure of these details though. Not sure how they would make it look more enticing.
Once a government sting gets started, the incentives are for the government operatives to push people towards starting criminal behavior. I really don't want a government tempting people to behave badly.
Chris Morris contends that since 9/11, the FBI has been one of, if not the most, active recruiters for terrorists in the US, with over 300 instances disclosed in court documents. It's much simpler to find a nut and induce them to try and buy a Stinger from another undercover agent than it is to hunt down an actual terrorist cell.
The best bit is at the end. "The FBI spent eighteen months winding up a schizophrenic in Boston to come up with a ludicrous plan to fly model planes into the dome of the Capitol. At the same time they said the Tsarnaev brothers were harmless."
One of the lines of argument in the video is that the FBI creates fake terrorists to convict in order to distract from their inability to identify real terrorists.
In theory I'm in favor of sting operations, but in reality too many are "let's see how far we can push the literally crazy person." And literally crazy people do not react to the normal incentives of our justice system.
Good sting operations make people seriously consider that this particular bike/wallet/car/bomb-plot could be a plant. We can't do that to literally crazy people. Their needles won't be moved.
I had my purse stolen many years ago, and I was very angry about that. Do I think a honey-pot scheme to entrap pickpockets is a good idea? No.
Yeah, you'll probably get a few professional thieves while you're at it. You'll also get opportunists, and before you all say "a-ha!", then imagine this:
You see a fifty (or other denomination that would be worth your while) currency note lying on the pavement. You pick it up. Do you:
(1) Say "Well this is a nice piece of luck, I'm now 50 smackeroos to the good" and put it in your pocket?
(2) Wave it in the air and call out "Has anyone dropped this?"
(3) Go to the nearest shop or police station (depending on what the custom is where you come from), hand it in, and explain that you found it outside and if anyone comes looking for lost money, here it is?
Because if you pick option (1), congratulations, you are a thief swept up in the "no pickpockets here" honeypot operation as the cops leap out of the bushes and arrest you and good luck explaining that no, you're a solid citizen. You put that money that did not belong to you into your pocket! There has been a wave of people losing money or wallets and having those kept by thieves here! We are stamping down on this behaviour, and after all, the kind of person who would keep money that maybe has been dropped by a poor widow with six kids to feed is precisely the kind of person that would pick someone's pocket!
And a half-awake defense solicitor would get charges dropped as there is no proof of a crime committed by someone picking up an item dropped and not declaring their intention. A honey trap has to show clear intent to commit a crime. Picking up a note for purposes unknown is unlikely to do that.
I suppose it depends partially on your view of what the point of criminal law actually is.
For me, the purpose of criminal law is to get criminals removed from society so that they don't bother us. From this point of view, if you can get the sort of person who _would_, under certain circumstances, steal a bike or kidnap a governor, to pop their head up, and then chuck them in prison, then that's much better than having to wait for them to actually commit the crime.
The only circumstances where I'd consider entrapment to be going too far is if you create a scenario so extreme that a normal person might be enticed into committing a crime too, e.g. "Please sir, you have to help me, I will die within three minutes if you don't shoplift an apple from that Vons!"
Reasonably sure the purpose of criminal law is to do justice, and indeed primarily to the accused. After all, it is their life, liberty, and property which is on the line, at least by the time it gets to court. Which is to say the only thing more important than punishing the guilty is doing it the right way.
I have to say, I find your vision somewhat disturbing and even repugnant. It's from views like this that the doctrine of the poisonous tree has been eviscerated at all levels of jurisprudence. This flatly creates incentives for illegal searches and seizures in hopes of turning up collateral evidence that will escape exclusion.
If your procedure fails to do justice, you get no conviction. When citizens then ask why the guilty go free, you blame the prosecutors. Always, always blame the prosecutors. They are a disease, cloaked with immense and unreviewable power that no free citizen would tolerate if they knew its extent.
The criminal law of this country is so broad that you are functionally always in violation of it. If a prosecutor wants, they can throw the book at you and (for example) coerce you into a plea by overcharging. Or, they can just give you a pass. This is prosecutorial discretion. It means, in effect, that the law and the rule of law exist at their whim and their whim alone. There is no way for a court to review the use of prosecutorial discretion because there is no record. Increasingly, this is being generalized to entire branches of government, mainly the executive, which has sometimes flatly declined to enforce parts of the law it doesn't like under this heading, or vice versa.
I was going to tell you to consider where your views may lead, but the sad truth is we're living a world governed by your view of criminal justice. It's a common and untutored view that encourages citizens to slavishness and government to totality. It's bleak.
>For me, the purpose of criminal law is to get criminals removed from society so that they don't bother us. From this point of view, if you can get the sort of person who _would_, under certain circumstances, steal a bike or kidnap a governor, to pop their head up, and then chuck them in prison, then that's much better than having to wait for them to actually commit the crime.
Hidden assumption: that there is a 100% chance of those "certain circumstances" ever actually arising.
What about if there's only a 90% chance? A 10% chance? A 0.01% chance? It's far from a guarantee in some cases that a "real" crime will ever actually happen.
(Also, I am reasonably certain that your proposed distinction between "normal people" and "criminals" is not a real thing; tendency to criminality varies along a continuum.)
Yeah, but now you're getting into "well you *might* commit a crime, and we need that whole pesky evidence and trial bit to chuck you in jail, so we're going to do our best to persuade/coerce you into it and then we have you!"
That would be lovely* if it only happened to Really Bad People who had handy forehead tattoos saying "I am a Really Bad Person". But it doesn't. It sweeps up the weak, the petty criminals, the easily-led, those who were struggling with trying to stay on the straight and narrow, and anyone else that can be included in the "the governor is going for re-election and is running on a 'tough on crime' platform, we need to bump up the arrest and conviction figures".
Eventually it will also come for *you*. How many people on here are pro-drugs legislation? How many people are using grey-area markets to get drugs, or flat-out illegal drugs? What would your position be on a honey-pot scheme where you *thought* you had found a new, secure website selling mushrooms etc. and after you'd made your purchase, the FBI were kicking in your door?
"But that's different, drugs harm no-one and are a victimless crime!" Sorry friends, so long as they're illegal it's a crime to buy them, and the FBI or local law enforcement can entrap you like they would a bike thief.
All very well-put. ‘Criminals’ aren’t a thing. The only area I agree is that isolation of habitually violent people, not rehabilitation or punishment, is a key feature of the criminal law.
>>"I don't see why this framework couldn't be applied to entrapment. As the punishment increases, the constitutionality of entrapment decreases."
Um, not to be obtuse about this, but isn't the limiting principle on what can be constitutionalized the existence of a corresponding constitutional provision? What's the textual hook here? What established constitutional doctrine would a right not to be entrapped sound in?
I think part of the issue here is a certain equivocation about whether the problem entrapment raises is procedural or substantive. It sort of sounds procedural, because it has to do with the government's way of interacting with you in light of your suspected criminality.
But really it seems more to go to the underlying culpability of the conduct charged. And the Bill of Rights has very little to say on the subject of substantive criminal law. In that sense, there's no more reason to expect entrapment to be constitutionalized than the insanity defense or Stand Your Ground.
I don't buy that there was a divergence. It just looks like a divergence because the data starts in 1960, and the handle on the hockey sticks always look small. But when you just look at Haiti vs DR GDP in the year 1960, DR has 3x Haiti's GDP.
3x GDP/cap is the difference between Mexico and Spain, and also life expectancy in Spain is 8 years greater than in Mexico. I think is going on is that DR's growth trajectory was to Haiti's in 1960 what Spain's growth trajectory is to Mexico's today. At this rate Spain will have 15x Mexico's GDP in 60 years too! Do you think people in 2080 will look back at Spain and Mexico today and call 2020 a divergence too? Because it's not; Spain has been richer than Mexico for centuries. So DR was probably richer than Haiti for centuries before 1960 as well.
However, it seems like they had already diverged in life expectancy and education long before that, so perhaps the question on should ask is why hadn't that translated into higher GDP for the DR before the 1960s.
#25 - I'd be interested to compare analysis of land reform in Asia with land reform in Africa. I have seen several opinion articles over the years that have argued the redistribution of large farms owned by white descendants-of-colonialists to small farm owned by black descendants-of-colonised-peoples has not worked and has led to falls in productivity. Zimbabwe is often cited as an example.
Sorry, I don't have references to cite and I don't know whether the arguments in either case (Africa or Asia) are valid, or what differences may exist between the two.
There was discussion of this in the comments to the How Asia Works review. The consensus is that it depends a lot on exactly whom is benefiting from the redistribution: the former tennant farmers who were already working that patch of land or the president's cronies.
#3: As a therapist who has to read a lot of therapy research, I agree with everything in that twitter thread. My favorite part:
"* the relationship between the patient and the therapist, and a host of NONSPECIFIC factors, make up the majority of psychotherapy value, but it has huge value!
* the guild wars within brand of therapy do not put the patient first and are embarrassing" (he has a cute GIF of a bunch of kangaroos punching each other in the face)
I found the guild wars over brands of therapy to be totally embarrassing within my first month in practice, particularly knowing how lame a lot of the research is. I'm glad to see someone say it out loud. I often struggle for words in how to convey this to patients for whom all the gobbledygook with acronyms is either entrancing or horrifying, when really it's just a huge distraction.
Regarding #3, Bruce Wampold does an excellent review of these critiques in The Great Psychotherapy Debate and provides a framework for his beliefs about what makes psychotherapy work (which he calls "The Contextual Model" and contrasts with "The Medical Model") and what research needs to be done to improve psychotherapy based on these beliefs. If these critiques and potential solutions to them are of interest to you, I highly recommend checking out The Great Psychotherapy Debate.
Anecdata: I was intensely, though in ways not super visible to teachers, bullied in high school (2007-2011). The bullies rarely caught any flac for it, and it was widespread - as opposed to just one or two kids and their posses, I was a general "punching bag" for the whole school (in quotes because it was never actually physically violent - the most physical it got was people throwing staples and wads of gum and various junk at the back of my head during class, trying to get it to stick in my long, thick, wavy hair because straight hair was the fashion and me not straightening mine was a faux pas in need of aggressive correction apparently)
Sadly, if you had physically fought back, you probably would have been treated even worse, possibly incarcerated or institutionalized, since you were already seen as the kid who ‘didn’t fight back.’
All I can say is I’m sincerely glad that time in your life is over.
#1 - Why wouldn't the obvious answer be that botox makes you look younger and prettier, which is precisely what people who are paying for botox wanted to achieve, which then makes them less depressed? People pay hundreds of dollars for botox because it improves their appearance. Improving one's appearance will make you feel better, compared to getting a placebo which does nothing to your appearance when you wanted to look better. Is that just too obvious for these researchers or what?
I found this amusing, because I get botox on other areas of my face, but I purposely do NOT get botox on my glabellar muscles because I want to preserve the ability to frown. I consider the ability to look bitchy and disapproving to be very important, and I don't want to lose that useful ability.
Regarding entrapment, recall that the FBI was using the same tactic a decade ago against Islamic terrorism, and that there was concern that this was racial profiling. I think pretty much all of the same arguments apply here.
Bullying and teen pregnancy are dependent on pretty different character flaws, but I suspect part of it is that bullying mostly needs to happen in public so putting pressure on authority figures gives easy results, whereas sex is much easier to hide until its too late.
The only thing I recall about Haiti/DR is that Haiti had 25% of the land and 75% of the people, and also there were some racial tensions going on between the two countries and that this went a long way in explaining the disparities. This was from AJ+, though, which has a pretty strong left-wing bias.
I agree with the spirit of your criticism of capitalism here, but it’s worth considering that (1) most capitalist societies have much less of a reserve army of labor (2) Haitian labor is much less valued than Mexican or Central American labor in the USA, and (3) alternatives to capitalism often have very high poverty, but Haiti’s poverty is higher than many fellow African-descended societies as well as most capitalist and anti-capitalist societies in recent history. I think these case doubt on that as an explanation in this case.
I've seen a fair amount about the reparations Haiti was paying to France for the France's loss of slaves and land, with an assumption that Haiti's poverty can be explained by the money being drained out.
"France, with warships at the ready, sailed to Haiti in 1825 and demanded Haiti to compensate France for its loss of slaves and its slave colony.[5][6] In exchange for French recognition of Haiti as a sovereign republic, France demanded payment of 150 million francs.[5] In addition to the payment, France required that Haiti provide a fifty percent discount on its exported goods to them, making repayment more difficult.[4] In 1838, France agreed to reduce the debt to 90 million francs to be paid over a period of 30 years to compensate former plantation owners who had lost their property; the 2004 equivalent of US$21 billion.[5][4][7] Historians have traced loan documents from the time of the 1825 Ordinance, through the various refinancing efforts, to the final remittance to National City Bank (now Citibank) in 1947.[2]"
Checking on this is the first I've seen about France requiring a 50% discount on what Haiti sold to them.
I'd be surprised if that debt and punitive trade policy didn't have a large bad effect on Haiti's poverty, though it's hard to tease out those effects from the effects of bad government.
"From 1957 to 1986 Haiti was ruled by the corrupt and oppressive Duvalier family. Loans incurred during this period alone were estimated to account for approximately 40% of Haiti's debt in 2000, before debt relief was granted. These funds were used to strengthen the Duvaliers' control over Haiti and for various fraudulent schemes. Large amounts were simply stolen by the Duvaliers."
I'm not clear how much Haiti was trading with countries other than France.
Anyway, there was also a recent period of sanctions.
"Haiti continues to suffer the consequences of the 1991 coup. The irresponsible economic and financial policies of de facto authorities greatly[citation needed] accelerated Haiti's economic decline. Following the coup, the United States adopted mandatory sanctions, and the OAS instituted voluntary sanctions aimed at restoring constitutional government. International sanctions culminated in the May 1994 United Nations embargo of all goods entering Haiti except humanitarian supplies, such as food and medicine. The assembly sector, heavily dependent on U.S. markets for its products, employed nearly 80,000 workers in the mid-1980s. During the embargo, employment fell from 33,000 workers in 1991 to 400 in October 1995. Private, domestic and foreign investment has been slow to return to Haiti. Since the return of constitutional rule, assembly sector employment has gradually recovered with over 20,000 now employed, but further growth has been stalled by investor concerns over safety and supply reliability."
I saw the bit about France, and wondered whether it had a effect big enough to last to the present day. Also that Haiti "entered into the world under international ostracism". On the other hand, DR seems to have had its own oppressive authoritarians, Trujillo and Balaguer (1930-1978/86-96), though I've no idea how he compares to the Duvaliers (1956-86). Also it was invaded by Haiti itself a couple of times. And both countries were occupied by the US between the World Wars.
A brief look over Wikipedia does sort of support the idea that the Duvaliers were worse both politically and economically, and the governments of both countries seem to really have it in for the Haitians. There's also something about how Haiti had an aristocratic plantation-owning white class that immediately fled after independence and took all their money with them, which didn't happen at all in DR.
What looks like the biggest thing though is environmental differences. (There are apparently lots of stereotypes about this, so I'll try to be considerate.) Haiti's ecology is doing much worse, possibly due to the French doing a lot of soil-eroding agriculture where the Spanish mostly did mining, or perhaps due to population density or some difference between dictators. I think I knew about this while volunteering a decade ago, but had completely forgotten.
"There's also something about how Haiti had an aristocratic plantation-owning white class that immediately fled after independence and took all their money with them, which didn't happen at all in DR."
If they were like their counterparts in the U.S., most of their wealth was land and slaves.
"possibly due to the French doing a lot of soil-eroding agriculture"
I read, in one of Jared Diamond's books I think, that the French clear-cut the forests and sent all the wood to France. This was a real problem because in hot, wet climates, most of the nutrients are in the living plants instead of the soil.
And that included Jews, whom he tried and entice to the country though few wanted to take him up on it until the Holocaust was going on and it was sadly too late.
I recall an Islamic terror case (but not enough of the details to google) where there was an FBI plant suggesting blowing things up, and it got serious enough that at least one person supposedly involved in the conspiracy called the police and say "this shit's fucked, yo."
And it didn't immediately end the whole operation. And it should have: if there were an IRB for sting operations, rule number one would be "as soon as anyone involved calls the cops, game over, stop immediately."
You can *maybe* prosecute some of the people involved, but certainly should take it no further.
I am generally in favor of sting operations, in theory, but there are a bunch of problems with them in the real world, and those problems could be reformed, so let's do that reform before any more sting operations.
Anecdote warning: one of my close family members got Botox as a treatment for depression. The number of injections, in a single session, in order to accomplish it was something astounding like 20-30. Ultimately it didn't really work - if it did, it was outshone by the conventional anti-depressants. At least their skin is smooth and free of wrinkles?
The author is a tiktok native; I wouldn't be shocked if they eventually posted it elsewhere (and I did point out this blog to them), but, no, to my knowledge they're not crossposting their content.
The PRC has systems attached to their part of the Internet backbone that can insert malicious code into Internet traffic. This has been dubbed the "Great Cannon of China" by analogy with the Great Firewall.
We know about this because they used it to redirect a tiny percentage of Baidu traffic into a DDoS pointed at GreatFire. It can also be used to insert malware.
The NSA has some similar capabilities, although TTBOMK somewhat less potent due to their lesser authority over private enterprise (i.e. Americans can refuse to put NSA backdoors into their servers, but Chinese trying that get disappeared). Also, the Anglosphere is the Five Eyes so it's impossible for anyone living here to avoid that section of the backbone; I can, however, try to avoid the PRC section.
Regarding #3, Issues with Psychotherapy research. There's more to say about it:
1. things like alpha control, "primary outcome" and "secondary outcome" only appeared in the last, say, 10 years. Before, p-hacking was the rule rather than the exception.
2. Proper handling of missing data and dropout is still an issue. Many studies now use "Multiple imputation" or some other method based on the missing-at-random assumption, stating that one can fill the gaps from e.g. dropout using the available data from that patient and other patients. Most often, the results of an MAR analysis do not differ from the analysis of the protocol population, so this is not more than a fig leaf.
3. Questionable use standardized effect sizes for reporting the results and meta-analysis. Standardized effect sizes have no unit. Really. Such numbers are meaningless for measurement.
For illustration, consider two outcomes, self-report (Beck depression inventory, BDI) with the Hamilton rating scale (HDRS). For illustration, BDI is kg, and HRDS is meter. Study 1 found 5 kg advantage for Therapy A, Study 2 found 6 m benefit for Therapy B. I guess, outside psychology, no one would try to average 5 kg and -6 m [it's not even clear why one would put a minus sign here]. Psychologists say, no problem, we'll just calculate Hedges g (= hide the unit) and then the problem magically goes away.
5. In the unlikely case that the therapists have been randomized and are, thus, able to deliver both therapies: Any ethically working therapist will always try to provide the "best" intervention in a given situation. In other words, we have a perfect null hypothesis.
#5: In Russian, heathen is translated as "язычник" (yazychnik), derived from "язык" (yazyk). In contemporary Russian язык means language, but in Old Russian that word meant "the people, ethnos", so "язычник" had indeed been borrowed from Greek ἐθνικός (related to [other] peoples)
The "lockdown" poll results don't particularly surprise me, as most of this falls into the category of things some people would want anyway. People mad about noise at nighttime might want a curfew indefinitely. People who are liking not getting sick might like masking indoors indefinitely. They might see post-travel quarantine as a way to prevent future pandemics, and think of it as low-cost if they don't travel much themselves. And so forth. The only one that really surprises me is contract tracing. Not sure what that's about.
"People who had recovered from COVID-19, including those no longer reporting symptoms, exhibited significant cognitive deficits versus controls when controlling for age, gender, education level, income, racial-ethnic group, pre-existing medical disorders, tiredness, depression and anxiety. The deficits were of substantial effect size for people who had been hospitalised (N = 192), but also for non-hospitalised cases who had biological confirmation of COVID-19 infection (N = 326). Analysing markers of premorbid intelligence did not support these differences being present prior to infection. Finer grained analysis of performance across sub-tests supported the hypothesis that COVID-19 has a multi-domain impact on human cognition."
"The scale of the observed deficit was not insubstantial; the 0.47 SD global composite score reduction for the hospitalized with ventilator sub-group was greater than the average 10-year decline in global performance between the ages of 20 to 70 within this dataset. It was larger than the mean deficit of 480 people who indicated they had previously suffered a stroke (−0.24SDs) and the 998 who reported learning disabilities (−0.38SDs). For comparison, in a classic intelligence test, 0.47 SDs equates to a 7-point difference in IQ."
I thought this would get more attention here because there are a lot of people who take IQ seriously. It could be that people are taking time to read the article and think about it, or they might think the method of checking IQ isn't good enough.
> Analysing markers of premorbid intelligence did not support these differences being present prior to infection.
>A common challenge in studies of COVID-19 is that differences between people who have vs. have not been ill could relate to premorbid differences. To address this issue, a linear model was trained on the broader independent GBIT dataset (N = 269,264) to predict general cognitive performance based on age (to the third order), sex, handedness, ethnicity, first language, country of residence, occupational status and earnings. Predicted and observed general performance correlated substantially r = 0.53), providing a proxy measure of premorbid intelligence of comparable performance to common explicit tests such as the National Adult Reading Test [[26]].
Well congratulations from me to Tom Chivers- been reading his stuff on Unherd for a while now, which I started reading as a bubble-breaking exercise to counter my heavy reading of The Guardian and The Economist.
I just hope he doesn't read too much into the comments on his articles on Covid, as there's a big freedom-at-all-costs-no-vaccines-for-us-its-a-massive-hoax contingent that comes out every time and ignores whatever he's written.
A little self-promotion: #14 (Shinigami Eyes) is like a plot point in my book "In My Memory Locked", but with the filtering based on attractiveness and not political leanings. Rather than highlighting people the user wished to avoid, neural implants would smudge-out the unattractive to beautify the world around them.
My memory is sometimes the control group gets "psychoeducation" in that the therapist person will offer some very benign information about the condition being treated -- anxiety or depression or OCD or whatever. It's not 100% placebo because psychoeducation is also a part of therapy, but it does allow comparison to some kind of more specific technique that would be used in CBT or IFS or mindfulness-based or psychodynamic or whatever. I think there are studies also that have a person do some low-key physical exercise or watch a self-help video.
Yep, feels too funny. But maybe the Ace Attorney format is surprisingly convenient for the AI. There is little text, it is mostly formulaic, if you get it right then it seems realistic, and if you get it wrong then it is funny. I get some GPT-3 vibes from the text, but maybe it was edited afterwards.
> What's your real name?
> Henry.
> How do you spell that name?
> H-e-n-r-y. With a 'C'.
...
> It was an anonymous caller, claiming to be a magician.
Re #20: my highschool had one of those "zero tolerance policies" where you would get suspended if you hit your bully back. If you're the kind of nerd that gets bullied (like I was), then this actually didn't just seem like an empty threat. And it always felt super unfair. The (school) awareness campaings weren't particularly good either. I find it hard to believe children are no longer bullied at school, but if it's true this is great. Given the glorification of bullying in popular media (see most US sitcoms, some specific examples: Jerry in Parks in Rec, Jerry in "Rick and Morty", Andy in the Office (for a while, at least)), I find it hard to believe that suddenly bullying has become uncool...
One of the most disturbing conversations I’ve ever had which cemented my skepticism of institutions was talking to my mom, who was a teacher at the time, about those zero-tolerance policies.
I remembered that malicious bullies always target kids who are different and disadvantaged - fat, awkward, disabled, racial or ethnic minority at that school, etc. I thought this was super obvious and I kept pointing out that it DOES matter who started the fight. She responded that who started it doesn’t matter because the kids who ‘get in fights,’ even if they are just being targeted by bullies, are typically ‘bad kids.’ This made it easier to believe that teachers used to see bullies as ‘pretty cool,’ as Scott said, quite believable.
[Epistemic status 75%] I usually like AliceFromQueens' takes on twitter, but I rather disagree with her staunch approval of the downfall of bullying. I was, like many people, once a nerdy kid who had confrontations with would-be bullies. My review of the institution is not totally negative. I found a way to adapt to people who exhibited a desire to want to bully me in a way that I feel led to personal growth that I may not have had otherwise. If you're trying to optimize for not getting bullied in the future, you have to think about the bully's incentives. What is the bully getting out of this interaction? What does he/she find gratifying in this experience? And can I deny that for them? (Obviously I think this only applies to non-physical bullying, no one ever tried to beat me up, and I think I agree that that kind of bullying probably has no silver lining. You can't really control how strong you are in middle school.)
This taught me a lot of practical empathy, and of modeling other people's perception of their social status and what they think they are supposed to do to elevate it. Stuff I would not have been remotely interested in paying attention to if not for bullies finding a way to make it my problem.
I would argue that the modern version of bullying just doesn't come from individuals. It has to come from groups. All that negative energy has just found new outlets, things like oblique shaming (e.g. "don't people who do X realize that they're hurting cause Y?"), sub-tweeting, etc. I strong doubt that childhood social interactions have become panaceas of friendship, camaraderie, and altruism now that bullies are uncool (but I don't know any children so maybe I am just wrong). At least old-school bullies had a narrow scope.
I'm 27 and I remember the anti-bullying campaigns from when I was in high school and I did not think they were moving in the right direction. The kids that were chosen by the faculty as the anti-bully ambassadors were just mean and cruel in novel ways, now officially sanctioned. I draw a straight line from this to the nerd-shaming that still goes on under the guise of "Big Tech Bad."
I think the definition of ‘bullying’ plays a big role here.
I knew jock-type guys who would be friendly to a certain type of nerd but ‘put him in his place’ when he would be excessively narcissistic, dominate conversations, or try to impose their highly preferred topics on all conversation partners in a way that was, frankly, antisocial. This helped them get along better with others (usually).
That’s VERY different from the stuff that, for example, that Japanese official who was cancelled for ‘bullying’ was doing to his disabled underclassmen (be warned, it’s very disturbing).
Absolutely. But that's just the problem with school's adopting things like a "zero tolerance policy for bullying." Of course, even saying that previous sentence puts me in the awkward position of effectively having to argue, "cmon, just a little bullying, please?" This is where, it seems to me, social cognition completely takes over. It's like having to argue against Covid Zeroism.
"I would argue that the modern version of bullying just doesn't come from individuals. It has to come from groups. All that negative energy has just found new outlets, things like oblique shaming (e.g. "don't people who do X realize that they're hurting cause Y?"), sub-tweeting, etc."
I agree. It strains credulity to claim bullying has decreased, the bullies are just a different subgroup now. They bully, now, not with implicit approval of the school admins, but often with explicit and enforce the norms of their group inside and outside of school. The tall and buff bully (so much as he existed outside of Hollywood movies) was, by what I can tell, much more virtuous than the modern bully who is a combination of Mean Girl and scold, and the principal is on his/her side.
I’d have to double check the statistics, but I’m pretty sure that public awareness campaigns regarding *gun safety* have been successful as well. I think people are trying to expand this into more general anti-gun awareness campaigns which are clearly not working (lots of previously anti-gun liberals became gun owners, indicating that a growing number don’t believe the ‘crime is increasing but you don’t need to protect yourself because the police, who are White supremacist mass murderers who kill innocent people all the time’ hype; imagine that).
This indicates that whether a large percentage of the public fundamentally believe the assumptions of the public awareness campaign makes a difference.
Perhaps a lot of it is the recognition that ‘I always thought {drunk driving / bullying / smoking with children in the room / shooting handguns into the air at weddings as a celebratory act} was wrong but I didn’t want to be rude, but now I know it’s not rude.’
First, bright line or zero tolerance rules seem naturally better for the less popular/athletic/cool kids, all the things that make a student a target for bullying also make it more likely that administrators and teachers and will side with the other student in any conflict.
Second, schools are operating with limited resources/time/expertise, they can't realistically investigate every conflict between students to any serious degree, listening to other students is naturally going to once again favor the popular/athletics/cool kids over the bullied, and everyone involved can be assumed to present a version of events that is favorable to themselves.
Third, zero tolerance policies are almost always the best policy in schools, the difference between zero tolerance quiet reading time and "sorry I had to borrow a pencil from the person next to me" quiet reading time, is that one is not actually quiet at all. Students will always have an excuse for any rule breaking and will attempt to litigate said rule breaking for as long as they possible can. Again resources and time are already limited trying to adjudicate cases is a massive burden (see, the courts).
Obviously a zero tolerance policy is not a perfect solution, and yes the policy will catch false positives, but literally any policy is going to have trade offs along this dimension, simply stating that the false positive trade off exists and dusting your hands off isn't enough.
> And I think about things like how many people get their bikes stolen in the Bay Area, and how police never do anything about it, and how one of the proposals is to plant honeypot bikes in easily-watchable areas and arrest the people who steal them until maybe eventually San Franciscans get the message that bike-stealing can have negative consequences - and this has a lot to recommend it over just letting bikes get stolen (or governors get kidnapped) every so often.
This seems like a bizarre argument. The bike theft crimes are actually happening and require no encouragement or funding or entrapment to get people to steal them. How exactly is that comparable to the governor's political kidnapping plot (a crime that never happens), likely wouldn't have even been thought of had the FBI informant not suggested and pushed it repeatedly, and almost certainly would never have even happened had the FBI not funded travel expenses, food, drink, lodgings and more.
Then consider the cost of such stings: in one case it's the cost of a bike with irrefutable video evidence securing a conviction, in the other, tens of thousands of dollars for the expenses to set up the arrest, and it will likely cost millions of dollars to try them, and a conviction is far from certain due to the questionable circumstances.
Finally, deterrence is clearly possibly by arresting bike thieves, but what deterrence do you expect for a crime that the FBI invented? If anything, this would encourage the FBI to create more terrorists (which they've been doing routinely since 9/11).
Honestly, I'm having trouble seeing how you can consider these circumstances even remotely similar so as to suggest any meaningful lessons of one might be transferrable to the other.
For a more relatable analogy, maybe consider the ethical difference between a psychiatrist that asks neutral questions to ascertain whether a vulnerable patient has some dysfunction, rather than a series of leading questions that results in a vulnerable patient developing a dysfunction.
I don't know how plausible it is, but the deterrence argument is that this makes future conspirators less willing to trust each other, since the fellow conspirator might be an FBI agent.
Indeed, I think that there is a scale that goes from simply creating an opportunity that also regularly exists without police intervention, to the police doing much or all of the preparations, while bullying those they target to do just enough to count as being complicit in the crime.
I have no problem with one end of the scale, but a huge problem with the other end.
20. I think a lot of this "bullying has gone down" stuff is a shift in how bullying happens. High school locker room style bullying might have declined but Twitter style bullying is definitely up. I think the other thing that shifted was I remember the old model being a maintain the keep-the-peace model (which favors the aggressor) and the new model is a punish the aggressor model (which favors the victim). This also means there's an incentive to play the victim which undoubtedly reflects a lot of out of school dynamics as well.
21. Analysis of Haiti gets marred a lot by racial politics. There's a strong desire to portray the Haitian revolutionaries and the only modern state founded by slave revolt as good. But they really weren't: they established an aristocratic military dictatorship. While they freed the slaves they also forced them to work on government run plantations to produce goods for export. The profits were assigned to noblemen who gained their nobility through fighting for the regime as officers. These officers formed aristocratic families that are still around. They massacred their political enemies. They tortured former slaves who didn't agree to work on the totally not plantations. They attempted to forcibly integrate the Dominican Republic against their will repeatedly. These attempts included cultural destruction like trying to drive the Spanish language off the island.
If I had to do a single factor analysis (and I don't think it's ever wise to do so) I'd say the military gets the lion's share of the credit or discredit on both sides. The Dominican military never tried to dominate the country the way the Haitian military did. While they sometimes subverted the republic in coups they never allowed the republic to actually end. It was always "temporary" and the republic's institutions always continued to exist. The Dominican military tells itself stories about how it tried to fight off the United States to protect Dominican self-determination despite it being a hopeless fight. The Haitain military doesn't exist because the country decided having one around was more dangerous than not having one. (The recent President trying to revive the military was seen as a clear sign of a move towards dictatorship.) The Haitian military supported establishment of personal rule by dictators and literal monarchies.
The Dominican military's story is national myth-making. But it points to the different cultures and willingness to rule directly. Trujillo was a military dictator but he had to deliver some degree of good governance and civil institutions. Papa and Baby Doc did not. In particular, you can look at their propaganda. Trujillo consistently portrayed himself as an incredibly hard working servant of the people. Duvalier portrayed himself as an almost divine being in quasi-monarchical style. As recently as literally right now, Moise's rule was personal and unconstitutional in a way that just isn't imaginable in the DR's political culture. It wasn't even possible during the mid-20th century at the highpoint of the Dominican dictatorship.
This has all sorts of downstream effects on things like rule of law. For example, the Dominican Republic's laws actually were pretty consistently enforced by a judiciary throughout the dictatorship. They weren't in Haiti. The most visible effect of this is environmental damage. The Dominican Republic has more forests than Haiti even controlling for land. When illegal logging started in DR the loggers were prosecuted under various commercial and environmental laws. When they failed to comply police were sent. Attempts to bribe either the dictator or local officials didn't work so they attacked the police instead. The regime saw this as a rebellion and sent in the military. And because it was a military dictatorship, the military dropped napalm on logging camps and massacred the survivors. In Haiti there was no expectation top to bottom the law actually mattered. Various bribes allowed logging companies to operate openly. Likewise, Dominican street gangs have much less free reign than Haitian ones. Even under Trujillo, a gang couldn't just be in favor with the ruling party and be immune to prosecution. This is still how it works in Haiti.
Another difference is that the bogeyman of Haitian politics are Haitians who aren't sufficiently racially pure. The bogeyman of Dominican politics are the Haitians. It's an internal vs external enemy. There were 20th century anti-Haitian riots in the DR. These get portrayed as racist by a lot of American analysts. And they were racist. But they weren't racist in the Black vs white sense. It was Dominicans vs Haitians. Black Dominicans participated as rioters against people who were part or fully Haitian. I'm not sure how different the effects of that actually are: both lead to racist xenophobia and internal attacks on minority populations. The equivalent attacks in Haiti were against people who (supposedly) had too much white ancestry. This was part of Duvalier's noiriste philosophy and an attack he leveled against his lighter skinned political rival.
22. I've seen people try to recreate this. It does work: in flickering light some basic cave painting techniques make things look like they're moving. Animals legs move, spears throw (not from the hand but back and forth), that kind of thing. If you put them in sequence you get an effect kind of like a moving comic book.
25. An easier angle of attack would be to help marketize land ownership. If you can make it easier to buy and sell land then you lower the barriers and land ownership will naturally flow to more productive uses. Some of this is legal interventions but some of it is just friction caused by archaic processes. It's also economically sustainable because you can charge for the service. Also, you can always look at providing capital goods into capital poor economies.
> I am constantly mystified by which awareness campaigns work extraordinarily well (eg drunk driving, maybe bullying?) vs. fail (eg premarital sex, drugs, etc)
Strikes me that the former example group has "real" moral weight, while the latter gives off "arbitrary adult rules" vibes.
#25 I wonder if the question of large farm yields vs small farm yields is really about the business models.
There is a current conversation in the US about how to run farms that feels relevant, though it doesn’t address the question of redistribution at all.
The conversation is about land management, and more specifically soil management. The pitch is that the best way to farm is to focus on healthy soil, which most places means actively making the soil healthier. There are two prongs to this conversation, and the one with the most headlines is climate change (the climate story is that healthy soil stores a lot of carbon, and if everyone worked on building healthy soil, it would pull enough carbon out of the air to get us to net zero and maybe wind back the damage of industrialization. These are interesting claims, but not germane). The second one seems relevant to the yield question though, which is: focusing on the soil leads to a better business model for the farmer.
There’s a farmer from North Dakota named Gabe Brown, who seems to be the primary articulator of this perspective. He tells a story about being forced into this model out of desperation: cash crops went bust four years in a row due to hail (uninsured, naturally), and he couldn’t afford to buy the fertilizer he needed for the next year. So then he goes searching for a way to make stuff grow without buying a lot of fertilizer, and lands on books about soil health. Through a series of serendipitous events, Gabe concludes that he should measure success by profit per acre. By contrast, other small farmers focus on raw yield as their metric (because they mostly grow subsidized products), and large corporate concerns focus on net profit.
There are a lot of details involved, but the shape of the story eventually boils down to this: big farms (in the US) focus on growing one cash crop at a time on land very intensively, which degrades the land; when doing things focused on soil health, lots of stuff needs to be grown simultaneously. This (can) increase net yield, but more importantly keeps yields stable because you don’t go broke when prices fall for a single crop, or get hurt as badly by floods/hail/wind/etc. This leads to a lot more direct-to-consumer activity, like farmer’s markets. In a business context, this means the smaller farm has diverse revenue streams, fewer expenses, and less exposure to catastrophic risks.
It occurs to me that in developing countries the same type of mechanism might obtain: small farms grow what they need and sell the surplus more locally; large farms use a lot of hired labor, focus on a few cash crops to simplify management, and can sell to regional/global markets. The yield differences in this view are sort of just the ecological consequences of the business model.
I do note that there is no reason at all that an arbitrarily large farm cannot deploy the exact same techniques. It just seems that they don’t; my guess would be for legibility reasons.
Where I heard this from:
- Kiss The Ground | Netflix | This is a moderately cheesy piece of advocacy for the climate change angle.
- The Biggest Little Farm | Netflix | This is a self-made documentary about a couple who started a farm with the goal of being sustainable and traditional, and wound up doing a bunch of the same stuff Gabe Brown did. Also cheesy.
- Dirt to Soil | Amazon (Book) | Written by Gabe Brown. Recommended for basically being repeated cycles of direct experimentation and following through on the results, even if agriculture isn’t your thing.
It 100% is legibility reasons - land is not fungible, but large farm operations tend to treat it like it is. Hell, the farms back home are all in more-or-less equivalent sized lots. As the son of a man who owns eighty acres that is at least 25% marsh, is massively hilly, and has several streams on it, I can assure you that it is not as agriculturally useful as many of the same lots nearby. Fortunately, dad is a dentist not a farmer.
Also, the overhead costs of diverse farming are a lot higher. You need multiple kinds of equipment in a way you don't when growing one or two kinds of crop.
Also also, one of the things that greatly hampered small farmers back home in recent decades is the dropping number of small farmers. In the old days, each would own one or two expensive items and they'd borrow from each other. Now, there's not enough people to do that.
A lot of other factors too, of course. Though modern agricultural pricing makes no sense. PEI potatoes cost significantly less in Toronto than in PEI. Incentives are not what they should be.
> Also, the overhead costs of diverse farming are a lot higher. You need multiple kinds of equipment in a way you don't when growing one or two kinds of crop.
This seems to be a big chunk of the way the regenerative agriculture scheme works, from a business perspective: fixing the soil increases rainwater retention, so you spend less on irrigation equipment; growing diverse crops minimizes pest explosions, so you spend less on pesticide and applicators; lose less soil to erosion, so you spend less on fertilizer and equipment.
These functions are mostly replaced by the selection of crops, and the management of animals (namely cattle). So it looks to me like they drop a bunch of specific costs, and then capitalize on a bunch of non-explicit value (like using cattle to fertilize and replace tilling).
But it always seems to be that small farms get into it because they need a way to continue at all when they can't afford the costs of fertilization or equipment anymore. The guy who wrote the book above sold all his equipment and bought one no-till drill to replace it when he couldn't afford fertilizer; just recently read the same story about a guy near me (central NC).
Haiti wasn't notably more dysfunctional and poor than other Caribbean and Latin American countries until fairly recently which seems to undermine the French indemnity argument (still a dick move on their part though). The most politically incorrect explanation for Haiti's lack of success vis a vis the Dominican Republic since the 1950s is Duvalier driving out the mulatto elite in Haiti while the Dominican Republic under Trujillo attracted many Jewish refugees in the 1930s since no one else was willing to take them.
(#21) "It’s still a minor mystery why DR has done so much better than the rest of Latin America" Has it? World Bank data has similar GDP per capita as Latin America+Caribbean (latter was higher as recently as 2015), DR has lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality, lower poverty, overall seems a wash. I thought this might be skewed by some high scores in tiny island countries, but no-- DR has lower life expectancy and infant mortality than all the big countries in the region, and slightly-above-average GDP as far as I can tell. FreedomHouse gives it a 67/100, "Partly Free", which seems on the low side for Latin America (much of which is fully free). So it seems to me the question is why Haiti is such a mind-boggling outlier for the region, while DR is just a foil for the regional average, no?
Re #2, I would say none of the options listed fits the description of "permanent lockdown", at least not as the term "lockdown" has mostly been used here in the UK.
Regarding the FBI’s role in the kidnapping effort, there’s a significant difference between placing a bicycle in public in San Francisco and arresting anyone who tries to steal it, versus using undercover informants or agents to affirmatively encourage people to commit crimes.
As to the former, “the fact that government agents ‘merely afford opportunities or facilities for the commission of the offense does not’ constitute entrapment.” Sherman v. United States, 356 U.S. 369, 372 (1958). https://www.leagle.com/decision/1958725356us3691677
As to the latter, “[e]ntrapment occurs only when the criminal conduct was "the product of the creative activity of law-enforcement officials. To determine whether entrapment has been established, a line must be drawn between the trap for the unwary innocent and the trap for the unwary criminal.” Id. In other words, entrapment happens “when the criminal design originates with the officials of the Government, and they implant in the mind of an innocent person the disposition to commit the alleged offense and induce its commission in order that they may prosecute.” Id.
I don’t think that this distinction works all the time. It leads to all kinds of conjecture regarding whether the defendant was already predisposed to commit the crime prior to inducement by the government, which invites a determination of guilt or innocence based on grasping speculation about what someone might have done in a different situation that’s not in evidence. I think that’s generally very hard to square with the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In addition, a lot of the time the evidence of independent predilection towards crime to overcome an entrapment defense consists of non-criminal (if distasteful) speech, such as anti-government statements or policy arguments that are protected by the First Amendment. Using constitutionally protected speech to argue someone would have committed a crime absent government encouragement can have uncomfortable implications, and seems inconsistent with recent assurances that “the FBI holds sacred the rights of individuals to peacefully exercise their First Amendment freedoms.” https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Wray%20Witness%20Testimony3.pdf
But however you want to slice the entrapment question, and where the line should be drawn in terms of what level of government inducement towards criminal activity should be tolerated in finding people to prosecute, I think there’s an easy and clear distinction between (1) watching a honeypot bike, which involves no affirmative inducement to commit crime beyond creating an occasion for someone to express their own disposition towards theft, and (2) using a leadership position within an organization to enmesh it in a criminal conspiracy.
Regarding the FBI’s role in the kidnapping effort, there’s a significant difference between placing a bicycle in public in San Francisco and arresting anyone who tries to steal it, versus using undercover informants or agents to affirmatively encourage people to commit crimes.
As to the former, “the fact that government agents ‘merely afford opportunities or facilities for the commission of the offense does not’ constitute entrapment.” Sherman v. United States, 356 U.S. 369, 372 (1958). https://www.leagle.com/decision/1958725356us3691677
As to the latter, “[e]ntrapment occurs only when the criminal conduct was "the product of the creative activity of law-enforcement officials. To determine whether entrapment has been established, a line must be drawn between the trap for the unwary innocent and the trap for the unwary criminal.” Id. In other words, entrapment happens “when the criminal design originates with the officials of the Government, and they implant in the mind of an innocent person the disposition to commit the alleged offense and induce its commission in order that they may prosecute.” Id.
I don’t think that this distinction works all the time. It leads to all kinds of conjecture regarding whether the defendant was already predisposed to commit the crime prior to inducement by the government, which invites a determination of guilt or innocence based on grasping speculation about what someone might have done in a different situation that’s not in evidence. I think that’s generally very hard to square with the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In addition, a lot of the time the evidence of independent predilection towards crime to overcome an entrapment defense consists of non-criminal (if distasteful) speech, such as anti-government statements or policy arguments that are protected by the First Amendment. Using constitutionally protected speech to argue someone would have committed a crime absent government encouragement can have uncomfortable implications, and seems inconsistent with recent assurances that “the FBI holds sacred the rights of individuals to peacefully exercise their First Amendment freedoms.” https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Wray%20Witness%20Testimony3.pdf
But however you want to slice the entrapment question, and where the line should be drawn in terms of what level of government inducement towards criminal activity should be tolerated in finding people to prosecute, I think there’s an easy and clear distinction between (1) watching a honeypot bike, which involves no affirmative inducement to commit crime beyond creating an occasion for someone to express their own disposition towards theft, and (2) using a leadership position within an organization to enmesh it in a criminal conspiracy.
Typo in that UK COVID survey - they don't want permanent lockdown by sealing clubs, but to be permanently clubbing seals. Their domestic champion, Sean Locke, can take four at a time - two hammers and a pair of hobnail boots. Some describe it as like a supermarket trolley-dash: https://youtu.be/0Q9IRpFGgPY?t=79
Claim: Haiti and the Dominican Republic were equal in 1960.
Not true. In 1960, Haiti's GDP per capita was $70 and the DR's GDP per capita was $204, a difference of 3x, per the world bank data that pops up when you google <country gdp per capita>.
The elephant in the room is that the Dominican republic is genetically 52% european, which is again slightly below average among Latin American countries.
Meanwhile Haiti is reported to be >95% African ancestry (after the slave revolt there was a genocide against white Haitians). Whether we use genetic or cultural explanations we should expect the more-European country to perform more like Europe and the more-African country to perform more like Africa.
I don't have good data on this, but I'd bet a lot of money that if representative samples were taken, they'd find a higher average IQ in DR than in Haiti and that explains some of the difference in speed of development.
Rather than only looking for environmental factors that might have held Haiti back post-1960, we should also look for environmental factors that might have held DR back pre-1960 to explain why the gap was only 3x then.
Regarding #17 on David Friedman on Noah Smith on Adam Smith: Friedman's response seems pedantic and fussy to me. Noah might be overstating Adam's progressive tendencies a little, but I disagree that he "would have to be deliberately dishonest" or not have read the book to write what he did. For one, he never even claims that Adam is "arguing for antitrust law". I could go on, but only at the risk of sounding even more pedantic and fussy.
At the end of the day, who cares what Adam Smith has to say? He was no more a prophet than Karl Marx. His ideas either happen to be right or they happen to be wrong. They are not right or wrong by virtue of being his ideas. And I saw the purpose of Noah's piece as being to undermine the (usually dogmatic) people who tend to cite him as an authority rather than actually evaluate how various economic ideas play out in the real world in the 21st century, where dogmatic ideas tend to be unworkable or insane.
#27 - Marvellous idea about the gospels. I await with interest the discovery of a fifth gospel containing the ‘good ending’, which Jesus was only able to get once he looked up the walkthrough.*
#18 - Lovecraft on Hayek - really good to have a quote from Lovecraft’s later letters, after he had stopped thinking of fascism as temptingly similar to his own ideas about civilisation and race. The impression I got was that Robert E Howard was a big part of arguing him out of this - their last letters are heated (not to mention long!) with Howard fiercely arguing that Nazism and Lovecraft’s own fondness for “civilisation” relied on a sanitised fantasy of history. Their letters are often interesting reading, actually, since they were both very smart, widely read, articulate and eccentric. Lovecraft was probably on the spectrum; I suspect (but have never seen it properly discussed) that Howard had ADHD. There is something very sweet about Howard breaking off from chatting about language groups and migrations to tell Lovecraft about his visit to a massive cave and saying ‘it was just like one of your stories, you would have loved it’.
#9 - Dominic Cummings’ blog / substack is v interesting. Even if you don’t agree with all his views, he is v civil, reasonable and interested in all sorts of interesting things. As you say, it is extremely unusual for someone that high up in government to, essentially, turn himself into an amiable poster. Although I wonder how many of them have alts!
#23 - FBI encouraging domestic terror plots: have you seen the Chris Morris film ‘The Day Will Come’ on this topic? It is a companion piece of sorts to his earlier ‘Four Lions’ - ‘Four Lions’ is about four UK men who are hopeless idiots, but genuinely want to commit a terrorist act; ‘The Day Will Come’ is about a probably schizophrenic black Muslim in America who really doesn’t want to be a terrorist and who is manipulated and manoeuvred by FBI agents because it will serve their careers to ‘stop’ a ‘terrorist plot’. Both are very funny and sad. In both, the interviews with Chris Morris are also interesting.
* weirdly, this idea is v similar to an extremely successful series of Japanese visual novels called Higurashi no nako koro ni (‘When the Cicadas Cry’) about a Japanese rural town with a lot of dark secrets, which seems to be locked in a time loop. It eventually becomes apparent (spoilers obvs) that this is all the result of a local deity and her priestess who would really quite like to find a sequence of events that doesn’t end with a horrible massacre in which she dies. Given the number of shady things going on, this is harder than it sounds.
I'm quite sure that someone already wrote that, but since the german word for heathen is "Heide" and that words means heather as well as heathen, I would be *very* surprised if the there is a correlation to "ethnic".
You should be much more concerned about the FBI issue., You're not understanding the risk. The FBI did this all the time in the COINTELPROL days. You're looking at as "people who were likely to commit crimes were baited" when its "potentially non-violent political activist groups are radicalized by undercover FBI agents who understand how to manipulate group psychology and then are baited into being accomplices to crimes those FBI agents planned as a means to suppress political activist groups because we cant just outright say "we dont like your view, you're under arrest"
Added "Shigami Eyes" and so far no one, including trans friends, is color coded, so some question how well this oarticular app actually works.
What on earth is placebo psychotherapy? When they ask you how that makes you feel, are they only pretending to have a degree? Are they only pretending to care? Are they lip-syncing to a recording of aaking you how that makes you feel? Are they secretly lizard-people hopped up on sugar?
W|A's answer is correct in the vigesimal numeric system, however it is trivial to convert into decimal by ignoring the distinction between fingers and toes (or, alternatively, right and left).
It sounds like you've experienced a lot of unfair situations where standing up for yourself was misunderstood and penalized, and that can be incredibly frustrating and hurtful. It’s especially tough when authority figures, including parents, don’t see the full picture or support you in those moments. These situations often leave a lasting impact, and it's completely valid to feel unresolved about it.
On a different note, if you’re interested in advancing your skills, practicing for exams like the <a href="https://btpracticeexam.com//">RBT practice exam </a> could be a good way to channel focus on something empowering for yourself. Working towards new goals can sometimes be a positive way to cope and even build resilience through adversity.
I also had experiences with using violence to stand up to nonviolent bullies and having teachers come down on me and not the bully. My own parents did the same thing, and I have never forgiven them for this.
I disagree that violence is ever the right response to non-violent bullying, and I was never popular in school to put it mildly. Of course, the fault is ultimately on the society which forces you to endure interactions with assholes, but I always seen it as ultimate victory for the assholes if they ever managed to force me to escalate first.
That may be but we also are referring to violence as a response to violence, to which schools see both the aggressor and victim as equally culpable.
That sounds like a nice sentiment in theory, but in practice makes it hard for many low-status people (who may be less smart or more socially awkward) to retaliate despite being entirely justified to do so.
I also take issue with the notion that violence is always an "escalation" to nonviolent acts of aggression; there's the saying that "the pen is mightier than the sword" for a reason; and even in cliché bullying stories à la "high-status bully insults mother of low-status target", I don't see why responding with violence would necessarily be an escalation.
I imagine this same perspective is also a problem in cases of domestic abuse where one partner perpetrates psychological abuse, and the other one eventually responds with violence, only for the courts to presumably usually side with the former.
>in practice makes it hard for many low-status people (who may be less smart or more socially awkward) to retaliate despite being entirely justified to do so.
Well, it sucks to be low-status in general, and being socially awkward in particular usually means that you aren't a good judge of what kind of retaliation would be beneficial to you on balance.
>I don't see why responding with violence would necessarily be an escalation.
Because violence is a useful Schelling point, which makes it a prominent feature of the legal system for example, like you mention. While words can and do hurt, sticks and stones transform an interaction to that of a different kind, not degree. To be clear, I'd consider the example that Argentus made to clearly feature a violent assault, where the retaliation was totally justified.
Because in a class of barely-socialised, self-centred small children the key thing is to ensure they do not think using violence is acceptable, or you're going to get a lot of damage (minor in the main, but still). This might mean an injustice has to be committed.
Note that the same dynamic should not exist in the later years of schooling where the imperative is to eliminate behaviours uncondusive to learning (a cynical view might note the decline in the acceptance of bullying might correlate with the increased importance of school results and more external inspection).
Which would be a killer point to make, if it wasn't for the fact that job #1 of a schol is to turn their students from "barely-socialized" to "well socialized." If you haven't done that by the time the students can truely injure their classmates (~grade 3), you've failed as a school.
"Isn't enforcement of non-bullying notoriously imprecise and drags a lot of kids who did nothing wrong up in the net?"
Yes, very much so. Teachers seem to have absolutely no grasp of the concepts of self-defense or provocation, which is grotesque and unfair. I often saw the same sort of thing happen as a schoolchild, even to the extent of one kid defending himself successfully against *two* other kids who physically attacked *him* – because he won the fight he was automatically the one at fault to the cretins somehow allowed to be in charge of children, and got in trouble for hurting his assailants. Completely perverse, and totally in line with the school's typical responses. This left a lasting impression on me, to say the least.
Anecdotally the whole thing seems to have been much less of a problem in our parents' and grandparents' generations, when a larger proportion of teachers were men. I genuinely believe this is a sex difference: women think violence is inherently bad and want to punish anyone who uses it, men understand that it's a tool that can be used well or ill like all the others.
I had a friend who got kicked in the balls without provocation, to which he responded by verbally threatening to kill the aggressing kid.
The attacker got in no serious trouble, my friend got sent to the school psychologist.
CYA all the way.
Don't make trouble for the person in charge.
If you handle it on your own, which could include just accepting it, you aren't making trouble.
Regarding #20 on public awareness campaigns: I feel like the obvious answer is that awareness campaigns work when they're crusading against things that people actually dislike (bullying, drunk driving) and not when they're crusading against things that people do like (sex, drugs).
I don't have any numbers to back it up, but I think that a successful awareness campaign was the campaign to cut up six-pack rings. Not sure how this fits into your framework. https://www.seasandstraws.com/six-pack-rings.html
Maybe a more nuanced take is that awareness campaigns don't work well against things people like (sex, drugs), but if people don't really care (six packs) or they actually don't like the things (bullying, drunk driving), the campaigns work? Like no one is particularly in favor of six-pack rings or keeping them in tact, it was just an accident of history that that industrial design solution should be the standard.
It's not as though awareness campaigns haven't been tried with other drugs, to no success whatsoever.
Probably it's that smoking is public and you can therefore shame people.
And plenty of nonsmokers hate the smell of smoke
I strongly suspect that the efforts re: sex and drugs failed because they told obvious lies. Cannabis is addictive, abstinence is the only alternative. That sort of thing.
One genre of awareness campaign that works frighteningly well is asking people to incur a trivial inconvenience to address some problem. The trivial inconvenience (cutting up six-pack rings, paper straws, etc.) makes them feel like they earned credit, but it's not enough of an imposition to actually matter, so it's an easy ask.
Naturally, a lot of these fail to actually fix their targeted issue, due to the fact that most issues worth fixing are too complex to be fixed simply by tweeting #Kony2012 a lot. But if you have one of the rare issues where trivialities actually help, or where you're trying to set off a preference cascade/slippery slope, it can be a rational tactic.
I was viewing it on a victim axis. The more damage to an external victim the more people feel justified in imposing restrictions and being coercive. The more you're just hurting yourself, the more likely people will just give you information and then wash their hands of it. I think that's true of the war on smoking. Information only went so far in reducing smoking, then when they "discovered" the harms of second hand smoke, they got more support for imposing a lot more restrictions that really drove down the number of smokers by making it so inconvenient.
I was thinking the same thing - another example is littering, where the Don't Mess With Texas campaign (for example) resulted in a 72% reduction in littering over just three years, by casting the action as antisocial.
OTOH, Click It or Ticket does seem to have been fairly effective, but the person who suffers if you don't buckle up is pretty much just you, barring extremely unlikely occurrences. It's a very, very small cost to you, though, whereas not doing drugs or having premarital sex inflicts a quite significant cost, but that feels like it may just be special pleading.
I hope it's not too pedantic to say that I don't think the right summary of the anti-littering campaign is "it's antisocial." Another example of a campaign Texas might have tried casting littering as anti-social: Only Rebels and Outlaws Liter!
I think that obviously would have backfired.
I think the real key was tapping into the native Texan honor culture / tough guy thing: being "messed with" requires retribution, and therefore messing with others is taboo unless it's for honorable cause.
I interpreted as a pun, because the meaning is completely different from the usual tough guy meaning.
Oh of course, it's definitely also a pun on littering. I think it's a very clever slogan that worked on multiple levels (including the level of its intended purpose, to reduce littering).
Harm to self vs others is in the eye of the beholder:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/
Especially relevant to our current times, drug culture and anti-vaxxer culture are basically mirror images of each other (same denial of effects on the self, same denial of effects on others) but each side insists that it's in the absolute right about its pet issue while the other side is in the absolute wrong about an isomorphically equivalent issue.
I suspect it's less about the sorts of details being proposed than whether an issue grabs the fancy of the credentialed class, which means it gets not just PSA visibility but also after school specials, appearance as an issue in movies, etc.
If you want to know which such appeals work, figure out whether they do (or don't) resonate with those who control our public culture. And I suspect that's mostly contingent, not principled -- a stand is taken as a tactic to buttress some more important issue, but that stand then takes on a life of its own.
That's certainly how covid appears to have played out in the US based on, as I say, extremely contingent choice by Trump that could easily have gone the other way. (Germophobe Trump insists on immediate massive federal lockdown, and Democrats fight for years afterwards that this is a totally unjustified overreaction, its mostly unscientific, that it sets a terrible precedent going forward, and that it's patriotic and American to fight it with every fiber of one's being.)
You have no idea about drug culture if you're making that comparison. Consider said "effects on self" of different substances, then _especially_ consider the scale of "effect on others". I don't recall the UN siding with anti-vaxxers (https://drugpolicy.org/blog/united-nations-and-world-health-organization-call-drug-decriminalization). The supposed isomorphism appears from a position of ignorance and middle-class pearl clutching.
And I don't even like drug culture.
Luria and the peasants.
ALWAYS boils down to Luria and the peasants...
(And we're going to use the Argument from Authority -- in a thread about covid???
Luria and the peasants.)
Thank you for sending me on a pleasant half hour learning about Luria. This is why I love this blog.
Agreed. "Drug culture" is also incredily vague. Which "drug" culture are we talking about? Heroin culture? Meth culture? Marijuana culture? You can't paint this all with a broad brush.
I really don't think these issues are equivalent at all, especially insofar as it's a question of fact (e.g., do vaccines actually prevent transmission of disease? do they actually harm the individual? / did nations or areas that decriminalized personal drug use actually see harm to non-drug-users increase? are drugs able to be used without harming anyone?).
I worry that bullying and drunk driving aren't actually comparable situations. DD awareness was also coupled with lowering definition of what counted as DD with fairly intensive enforcement (also driven by the war on drugs and erosion of the 4A, etc).
Where as bullying is measured by...self-reporting by administrators that have a stake in claiming victory?
What's the 4A? Google hits are dominated by the Google Pixel phone...
Sorry. 4th Amendment
The shift from administrators who think bullies are great guys to administrators who think narks are great guys is not progress.
In this context, what's wrong with narcs? If the law is just, the authorities should be aware of infractions.
You've never dealt with people who run to the boss to badmouth you every chance they get? I don't know of any administrative system that's especially just, and Narks Rule is at least as bad as Bullies Rule.
Interesting viewpoint.
If someone runs up behind you and punches you in the back of the head,are you a "narc" if you report it to the police?
Should we hold children to a different standard or expect them to just take the punches?
I've never had problems with anyone running to my boss to complain about how I treated them.
The problem seems to be concentrated, like how the vast majority of public complaints about police behaviour are about a tiny tiny minority of cops with a huge number of complaints about their behaviour while most have none or just a very small number.
Generally a bully is someone who is someone who is more willing to fight than you and extorts something from you for that.
A physical bully as you describe should certainly be reported to authority. Or run up behind him and punch.
An administrative bully, a nark who is always badmouthing you to the boss behind your back, more complex.
Not saying either is better. Had problems with both myself.
The "narc" label is relative to the culture and context. In the realm of high school, the "code of the school yard" facilitated bullying.
In other arenas, say the punk scene, the rule makes sense, as involving the police in internal incidents will almost surely be detrimental to the community as a whole, not just the offender. In a world where the police were perfectly fair and just this wouldn't be an issue. But in a case where large members of a community are technically breaking some law, the police can not be relied upon to distinguish between violent law breakers and the rest of the community. There is also a general sense that things can be handled internally. There are exceptions for extreme situations like murder.
One force working against bullying prevention sometimes - not all the time - is increased awareness of personal struggle in the bully’s family. That happened in late elementary w/ my kids; there was a kid with learning issues, trauma and impulse control deficits who caused a lot of problems and it took nearly 2 years for him to get a behavior aide, during which time no quasi-pretend discipline slowed him down for long. Because his situation was rugged and the school had limited options, they were not interested in hearing about the kids he was hurting. Not sure the delay, May have been his parents.
So yes I agree there is greater awareness but bullying is far from gone.
Actually Columbine May have had a lot to do with it; if kids who are bullied turn into school shooters, that’s a big incentive to end bullying.
Appears to evidence on both sides re Columbine/bullying connection. But people thought it existed for a while and took action against bullying based on that perception.
If memory serves, teacher bullying was a thing then and is still somewhat a thing. Early 1990s kids curled up in a ball with headphones on blasting Pink Floyd “we don’t need no thought control…”
I think your right about Columbine. But it is not always the case that bullies necessarily come from traumatic homes. I recall reading a study about this, and though i can't vouch for the study or its methods not recalling the specifics, its conclusion was that the majority of "high school" bullies were actuall well liked and popular.
Thinking about my own personal experience, there were "bullies" both from troubled backgrounds and extremely priviliged backgrounds.
I think the whole "he's just taking out his pain on everyone else narrative" is one of those things that sounded good, but hasnt been strongly supported by research.
On the other hand, we have to assume that the people doing the bullying enjoying doing it and it's really their decision as to whether bullying occurs or not. I think the real difference is more that public awareness campaigns have to be very careful not to normalize the behavior that they're trying to prevent. DARE, famously, made it seem like drug taking was a lot more common that it really was and I think that that's the main reason why it tended to increase drug use among kids.
I was skeptical about how much the drunk driving campaigns worked. In my experience, the fact that most bars are required by law to have parking lots, and the fact that it's very rare for me to encounter anyone in a bar who isn't drinking, suggests that drunk driving is still going on all the time (with maybe some quibbling about whether someone who had two drinks an hour ago is "drunk driving" or not).
The statistics I found suggest, however, that there was in fact a significant drop in the number of "alcohol-impaired crash fatalities" in the United States between 1990 and 1995, and another drop of similar magnitude between 2005 and 2010, but no other notable changes over the past 40 years. (However, the one from 2005 to 2010 coincided with an equally large drop of all crash fatalities, so it might just be something like better crosswalks that cut all fatalities by the same amount.)
https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-alcohol-impaired-driving
Early 90s really was the heydey of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (half of the ties in stores were microscope views of various cocktails to raise awareness!) and Students Against Drunk Driving (we all had to drive in the drunk driving simulator in drivers' ed). So I think it's at least plausible that it was the cause of the effect then.
Less fatalities could be more wide spread seat belt use and more air bags. I don't know if the time frames for those match up.
Cigarettes, though? That has got to be one of the weirdest successes ever.
You can point to policy changes though. Bans on indoor smoking and high taxes.
Plus there's a preference cascade effect. When smokers were 40% of the population, non-smokers had to put up with them, but now they're a rarity they face more social shaming from non-smokers who don't want to put up with their smell.
I think people stopped smoking because it became clear how dangerous it is.
I don't think the campaigns did much, though I'm not sure how you'd empirically conclude it either way.
There are a ton of studies showing anti-smoking policies are effective. From higher taxes to indoor bans to health insurance incentives.
Yes, I think it's way more effective to make something very inconvenient than educate people on how bad long-term consequences of something are. Humans aren't very well programmed to account for long-term consequences but are very influenced by immediate inconvenience.
Pretty sure people realize that heroin isn't good for you either, though... I'm thinking that since smoking stands out uniquely, it's likely to have something to do with the fact that it's legal and public, and hence subjected to pressures that don't apply to other drugs.
Yes, people understand heroin is dangerous. And very few people use it.
I think that supports my argument?
I don't think it's a good example. Heroin is both very inconvenient to use and has a much more rapid onset of negative consequences than tobacco.
Came here to say the same thing - the difference is straightforwardly one of consenting parties, no?
Also I think it makes a difference if you arr wanting to change tolerance of a particular individuals behavior, or people's own choices. With both drunk driving and bullying the change was people condemning the people who did them, while the majority of people weren't bullies or drunk drivers, that changing social norm impacted the ones who are. Vs something like drugs or safe sex where its about getting a lot of people to all change their individual behavior
The negative educational impacts on premature babies is a go-to example for me when discussing the fact that there can be educational variables which are not heritable but which are nonetheless not (necessarily) mutable, which in turn connects to some of the tortured discussions I have to have about the very topic of genetic parentage and educational ability.
I bet whether a baby is born premature has a massive genetic component. I have no evidence to back this up.
I think it's likely a combination of a pile of environmental factors interacting with genetics. Some people likely have variants that make them almost guaranteed to be premature others may be resistant to all sorts of environmental effects.
In general though: don't smoke, don't drink, don't ingest lead, don't get obese, don't get diabetic, and don't live near a coal power plant/industrial center/highway/big farm. Viruses and bacterial infections can also cause problems that result in preterm births and susceptibility there is it's own tangle of genetic vs environmental effects.
Definitely there's an environmental component: premature births dropped dramatically during lockdown, when R0 was dropping for lots of diseases other than COVID.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2020/07/26/premature-birth/
When I was pregnant and reading up I remember most prematurity was due to births being induced because of various health concerns. So prematurity would be appearing as a secondary rather than primary factor and it might be necessary to trap that confounder to really predict anything. It could be that the equation of risk for the induction decisions looks different in pandemic times.
Someone brought that up in the linked post. Here is a response from "Pregnant Rando":
"I thought that as well, but look closer at the data. The most significant decrease they’re seeing is among very preterm births, not later term ones. I could easily buy that there are fewer women being induced at 35 weeks, but the data shows there’s fewer women having babies at 26 weeks, across the world. Something else has to be at play here."
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2020/07/26/premature-birth/#comment-149464
Thank you, I had missed that.
About somebody's just-sew-up-her-cervix brainstorm: You know what, buddy, here's a related brainstorm: If you sew people's fingers together they can't type ideas like your into internet forums.
What are you talking about? There's no obvious connection to sewing up cervixes anywhere near your comment.
Link #15.
Well, there are two possibilities. One is that I'm responding to Scott's Item 15: "From the subreddit: children born pre-term have notably worse health and lower IQ than those born after a full pregnancy. There are lots of ways to prevent pre-term birth, including progesterone therapy and literally just sewing the cervix shut. So why don’t we do these more often, asks a writer who realistically probably does not himself have a cervix." The other possibility is that, as the irritable tone of your little post implies, I am a random idiot.
It seems to come up on some forums where people aren't used to threaded discussion where people will just hit a random reply button which can lead to some.... strange replies to comments.
How does it relate to Freddie deBoer's comment, the one you replied to? I was staring at it for ten minutes without seeing any obvious connection, and I'm still baffled. Is it a reply to what he said, or does it only relate to link #15?
"If any commenters here would describe themselves as in this group, I’m interested to hear your reasoning." I'm not in that group but I am a professional pollster. Asking people this sort of question is usually misleading and the reason is just time discounting. People do not have a capacity in my experience to reason reliably about how they would change their mind about some measure in the future. I would read these results more as expressions of concern about Covid-19. Which is still interesting - a large amount of the population is still highly concerned and worried about the disease.
Yes, this. A significant minority of the population cannot or will not engage with counterfactuals - if you were to, for example, run a poll asking "If it was proven that (favoured politician) ate babies for breakfast", a substantial number of people would say yes, and their reasoning would be "I know X doesn't eat babies, so I would vote for them anyway."
Interestingly, in Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong notes this tendency in pre-literate societies - counterfactual reasoning appears to be largely the domain of highly literate groups.
A lot of people would interpret that question as an accusation against the politician.
Yeah, given no other context I'd interpret that answer as "Hey buddy, I'm not stupid, I see what you're trying to do."
> Which is still interesting - a large amount of the population is still highly concerned and worried about the disease.
That's true in the UK -- a lot of people are worried about delta , and are voluntarily keeping to restrictions.
I think it's also important to know that 'stay in lockdown' vs. 'open up' is a very polarised, salient political issue in July 2021, as people in the UK debated ending all restrictions as planned vs. extending lockdown despite increasing case numbers. I think this debate would colour people's responses to these questions, since most people don't seem to be comfortable or able to 'decouple' and deal in hypotheticals.
>8: This month in Chinese propaganda
Wow. That's up there with Soviet era Pravda political cartoons in demonizing the US. Nobody is going to accuse them of a subtle cunning.
I now know two people personally who were killed by stray bullets: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/jeremy-black-stray-bullet-killing-14th-street-nw-logan-circle/2716252/ and https://www.kctv5.com/news/local_news/man-sentenced-in-fatal-shooting-of-erin-langhofer-at-first-friday-event-in-2019/article_2ec3c55c-e992-11eb-8be2-5779c9dfa621.html
I don't think the cartoon is that far off from how the rest of the world sees the US - like a bunch of Yosemite Sams firing off in all directions. I know a right-winger from Australia who thinks the US is batshit crazy on guns.
I grew up in a hunting household. We respected guns as a very dangerous tool. We didn't fetishize them like so many people seem to do today.
As the kids say, "He's out of line... but he's right."
Jebus.
You are right about there being an element of nuttiness folks that always feel compelled to CapsLock the "shall not be abridged" part of the 2nd Amendment and consider the case close, no further thought required either.
I grew up with firearms around me too and don't understand the NRA vehemence any more than anyone else.
You’ve got it
The original James Madison version includes the phrase “nor shall it be required”. It was truncated in the final draft.
Having thought a bit more, I can see the same cartoon in this country with perhaps a bit less cretinous looking gun toter.
Is the blue-suited guy supposed to be Trump, and thus (I guess) the other guy Biden? Or are they just two guys?
If I had to guess, I would say just two guys.
I think the New York Times version would have the gun toter looking just as cretinous, but the two "normal businessman" looking guys would be less handsome.
If your tools are under constant assault, you'd have to have some pushback - including developing an uncompromising attitudes in the question under attack. If you know there's a political movement whose goal is to destroy the gun ownership, then "fetishizing" is an expected cultural and political response.
Please name any actual reasons to believe there is a political movement whose goal is to destroy gun ownership other than finding someone spouting toothless rhetoric somewhere on the internet. The NRA is on a three decade winning streak at the federal level and counting. The federal government didn't make a single change after Sandy Hook. Red states have done nothing but loosen gun laws to the point where there are no gun laws. You can still get guns pretty easily in blue states. The "constant assault" is in the minds of the gun fetishizers only imo.
> Please name any actual reasons to believe there is a political movement whose goal is to destroy gun ownership other than finding someone spouting toothless rhetoric somewhere on the internet.
Back in the 90s there were serious attempts to ban all handguns, and they did in fact ban all good rifles. ("Assault weapon" is a silly constructed category, but the feature list that defines it subsumes basically every feature you would want in a rifle, if you were designing one from scratch.) That was the high-water mark for political success of gun control, but it's not like that movement is gone; it's the same entities and in many cases the same people pushing the same thing today. And they're pushing a generalized anti-gun agenda through other areas as well, with more success; witness services like Paypal banning the sale of guns using their payment infrastructure, Youtube banning gunsmithing videos, and so on. These things didn't just happen; they're the result of lobbying by "a political movement whose goal is to destroy gun ownership".
Oh yes, forgot to mention that too. Citibank has banned all clients that deal with firearms sales, some years ago. Other, smaller platforms ban gun advertisements constantly. At one point, Google hilariously banned any goods containing "gun" (including Burgundy wines) from its shopping site. They relented after widespread ridicule, but less idiotic bans still stand on many other platforms.
The glockenspiel ban was but a trifle.
There is most definitely a culture that would be happy with a ban on private gun ownership (I know because I'm part of it).
> Please name any actual reasons
Are you reading any news at all? Just this week a certain Joe Biden, who happens to be occupying an unimportant position of US President, declared that he aims to ban any handguns that could potentially accommodate a magazine holding 10 9mm bullets. But of course, this could be some "toothless retoric" of a barely conscious figurehead, who nobody takes seriously...
Let's look, for example, at California record. In California, a gun owner is beset with a myriad of limitations and prohibitions, aimed squarely at making legal and law abiding gun ownership as bothersome and unpleasant as possible. A myriad of byzantine rules apply to which guns you can and can not buy - with zero functional difference between them, they all go pew-pew in the same way - but you need to seek out a "California legal" model or a specifically maimed one to fit a myriad of random feature bans. Additionally, you need to ask government's permission each time you buy a box of ammo (and as befits a government system, the permission system is grotesquely buggy), and can't do it by mail, as citizens of normal states do.
Additionally, the city of San Jose recently introduced a punitive tax on gun owners (which they call "insurance" but let's not delude ourselves) which would allow them to confiscate your firearms if something in the tax paperwork is not right.
And, of course, the concealed carry licensing in Bay Area counties is a complete travesty, it's the most corrupt political operation outside Chicago and Hunter Biden's art gallery.
"Red flag" laws, allowing anyone to strip person from their rights by mere claiming they're dangerous, is another example.
But it's not just California. Gannett newspapers launched in spring of 2021 campaign of cloned articles with titles like "Mass shootings surge in INSERT STATE NAME as nation faces record high" - I've counted 31 states, though some had titles "Mass shootings fall in INSERT STATE NAME, but nation faces record high". All part of long-waged Gannett campaign (with the leading attacks performed by USA Today of course, but sometimes local support is enlisted too) to attack and restrict firearm ownership. I don't think a campaign waged by largest media company in the nation is something that can safely be ignored.
I could probably add dozens more reasons, but I think it's enough for now. Ask me if you need a dozen more though, I could allocate some time.
> The NRA is on a three decade winning streak at the federal level and counting.
Good if so. I wish them many many more, until people's rights are properly respected. However, the fact that the good guys got some wins does not preclude the existance of the bad guys or their willingness to attack people's rights as soon as they get a chance - which they get plenty and do plently, as soon as the power is in their hands. The evidence is plentiful in any place the left has complete control over the law.
> to the point where there are no gun laws
This is, of course, false, unless you treat absence of arbitrary punitive restrictions aimed at discouraging legal ownership as "no laws". There are still laws concerning firearms, they just don't limit people's rights - at least to the measure California or even worse states do - which is how it supposed to be, and your indignance on those ignoramuses not even limiting people's rights as all proper governments do shows how warped our legal culture - both towards guns and otherwise - has become.
So, I know a lot of people for whom gun ownership is a hot button politicial issue, who in principle are amenable to common sense gun control measures, but won't support them in practice because they believe that they're really intended as a wedge in order to ultimately criminalize all gun ownership.
I've discussed this issue a number of times with my mother, who's one of a small number of people I've talked about the subject with enough to know that... she definitely does believe that we should use common sense gun control legislation as a wedge to ultimately criminalize all gun ownership. I don't know how common her viewpoint is in the grand scheme of things, but she's a well-educated and more intelligent than average Democratic voter who seems to be under the impression that this is simply common sense.
Your first paragraph describes pretty much every gun owner I've ever spoke with on the topic. Nobody I know denies there should be some attention paid to the danger which guns as a tool present - e.g. not a lot of people are upset that dangerous criminals may have their gun rights restricted (after all, we restrict their other rights - we put them in jails!). And nobody trusts the gun control politicians to honestly figure out what measures are indeed necessary and do a bona fide effort of introducing just these measures, instead of just using it as a salami tactics in furtherance of the ultimate goal of eliminating private gun ownership.
And given how many people openly advocate for the latter - it would be crazy to give up even an inch to them.
Here is my litmus test for a gun owner (I am a veteran and have owned guns my entire life). Do you favor biometric (or other) technology that prevents a gun from firing unless being handled by its appropriate owner? If so, I am on your side. If not, then you need to describe how that negatively affects your right to own a gun.
The phrase "common sense" gun control is in and of itself nonsense. Furthermore, when pressed, people tend to come up things that are already federal law.
Just to avoid some obvious miscommunication here, when we talk about "guns" in the context of gun control, we mean guns in the sense of light antipersonnel weapons meant for killing people, threatening to kill people, and training to kill people. That's what the political debate is about. Almost everybody this side of PETA believes that the sort of sporting equipment that happens to fire bullets should be allowed to the sort of sportsman who is actually going to use it for that purpose, possibly with "appropriate" safeguards to make sure nobody buys a light antipersonnel weapon by pretending they want to hunt deer.
If that were all there was to it, we'd have settled this long ago in the way that most of Europe has. But there are a hundred million or so Americans who are pretty serious about wanting to have access to their own light antipersonnel weapons, as such, and probably some others who are hedging their bets on that.
So basically everyone who says anything like "AR-15s aren't for deer hunting; I support sensible gun ownership like bolt-action rifles for hunters, but...", is proposing to "destroy gun ownership" for the purpose of this debate.
You seem to be pretending "guns" that kill people and "guns" that make holes in paper targets, and "guns" that make holes in animals, therefore killing them, are completely different mechanisms. This, of course, is nonsense - it's exactly the same mechanism. Of course, the government can ban all weapons that aren't specifically modified to be useable only against paper targets - but that's not what people understand under "guns" in America.
And, of course, guns may kill people. Calling civilian guns anti-personnel is a misnomer though - the only chance for a civilian gun owner to use it against troops is if there's either a revolution or Canada finally decides they tolerated this silliness on the south long enough and decides to invade. Outside of those scenarios, the people that a civilian gun owner is likely to control are violent criminals. So it is a light anti-criminal weapon, yes.
> is proposing to "destroy gun ownership" for the purpose of this debate
Yes. It's not about hunting deer - though, of course, hunting deer would eventually be banned too, if hoplophobes gain power, or more likely - will be restricted to rich, powerful and connected, like concealed carry licenses in certain parts of California. Those people would have armed guards, and those people would be able to hunt. Not the plebes though, too dangerous.
The deer thing has always bothered me because no gun person ever has cared about that.
Even in countries with ownership effectively totally banned, with enough money well-connected people can still ‘go hunting.’
The purpose is self-defense.
Yeah, let's allow bolt action rifles but not semi-automatic rifles. After all, the 35th President of the United States was famously killed by a man wielding a semi-automatic rifle. Oh wait...
It's stuff like this that I worry about when it comes to the gun debate. People who honestly think that, eg, bolt action rifles are somehow less dangerous to shooting victims than a semi-automatic. At that level of not knowing a thing about firearms, I'd be extremely hesitant to grant any weight to anything you say on the topic.
The other irony is that if handgun CARRYING were universally banned, bolt-action rifles would be relatively MORE dangerous, not less.
The necessity to reload or manually cycle an action is a much bigger detriment to the defensive side in an engagement than the offensive.
Hunting rifles are really effective at killing people, the first modern mass shooting was perpetrated with one.
Well, thinking about it - it's a machine that is made to bring down a 150-200-pound animal that is very good at hiding and running away, and would not let a human close if it can help it. What this machine could do to another human, from much closer range and without possibility of efficiently hiding?
"Please name any actual reasons to believe there is a political movement whose goal is to destroy gun ownership other than finding someone spouting toothless rhetoric somewhere on the internet. The NRA is on a three decade winning streak at the federal level and counting."
You could have applied this exact logic equally well to gay rights in the 1970s. Do you see how that isn't in any way evidence that there were no gay rights activists in the 1970s and anti-gay campaigners were just ludicrously mistaken in worrying that their political enemies would seize on any opportunity or weakness?
As a supporter of gay rights, this still remains a good point, exploring the ‘anti-gay rights’ perspective.
It also works the other way around; no advocate of gay rights would say ‘we’re currently winning the legal and culture war on this issue so just don’t worry about people who want to take our rights away again.’
I'm not sure why you'd think I'm *not* a supporter of gay rights (or perhaps I'm the one misunderstanding *you*?). In any case, I certainly am; and the point I'm trying to make is indeed orthogonal to the rightness of the cause per se.
Your remark about gay rights advocates is indeed bang on target. Abortion is another great example; huge winning streak on the federal level and counting, but I doubt any pro-choicer would be happy to sit back, relax and disregard all politics around the matter, as being good and settled.
The NRA almost never has successful litigation and is effectively a boomer convention hosting organization. Almost all of those legislative wins are done by much smaller gun-rights orgs.
German, lived in several European countries: I'd agree this cartoon fits reasonably well with how (at least Western) Europeans, on average (including right-wingers), see the US when it comes to guns.
Yes, I was actually going to point out that even beyond those examples, Germany has more gun rights than a lot of people realize.
And, of course, you’d be wrong.
The man in the picture is clearly supposed to be a law-abiding handgun owner, not a criminal prohibited possessor.
"so many people"? How many people?
It's a big country. You can find a few outspoken individuals for anything, no matter how crazy. That doesn't mean that the majority of supporters for a particular opinion base that support on fetishism, and claiming that they do is the sort of mindless dismissal of other opinions that is the opposite of what this site is supposed to be.
> I don't think the cartoon is that far off from how the rest of the world sees the US
Don't shoot me, but as a german this seems about right (if a bit pointed).
The people wearing pro-2A shirts and celebrating AR-15s are not the same people as the inner-city organized criminals who are legally barred from obtaining firearms anyhow conducting poorly executed drive by shootings against their business adversaries.
You should see the propaganda political cartoons Americans make about China (arguably worse in portrayal). Everybody does this sort of thing.
Voice of America, Radio Free X etc are founded and primarily funded by the US government so I think you're splitting hairs here.
You seem to be quite short of arguments.
Can you point me to one example of a U.S. government entity publishing a propaganda political cartoon about China?
NPR, Voice of America, Radio Freedom X constantly publish things.
Here's an extensive archive - https://www.rfa.org/english/cartoons
Thanks
To be clear, NPR is in no way a U.S. government entity.
It's a state-affiliated and funded entity.
China imitates the NYT for two possible reasons: Chinese propagandists are really dumb and take the most readily available criticisms of the US they can find, or they're really smart and know only the criticisms of the U.S. approved by the NYT will make them bulletproof while causing the heads in the State Dept. to seethe. I don't know which reason is correct.
Why would the Chinese government care whether the NYT approves of their cartoons? Nobody's going to punish them for any cartoon. And doesn't the State Department have bigger things to worry about?
"Nobody's going to punish them for any cartoon."
The messaging doesn't really work if the U.S. can simply deny the charges.
Maybe I misunderstood your previous comment. It looked like you were saying that the State Department doesn't like China publishing anti-American cartoons, and will actually do something about it unless the NYT approves the message. I believe that the State Department won't do anything about it regardless; it doesn't matter what the NYT thinks.
I think that the point was that aligning with the NYT gets rid of a bunch of attack vectors. For example, claiming that it is foreign criticism not based on knowledge, can be countered by pointing to American elites making the same claim. Claiming that it is anti-American, can also be countered by pointing to the NYT, because then the person would have to claim that the NYT is anti-American as well. Etc.
Regarding the poll in link 2. See this financial times article (archive link to bypass paywall) https://archive.is/wzPtR which has a similar poll with very different results based on changes to the wording.
Thanks - I've added this in.
See also this clip, explaining why polls should be taken with a hefty handful of salt, which was posted the last time I saw people discuss this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
I was wondering how far i'd have to scroll to see this.
On 26: Amazon wants your money, and isn't too fussy about the format.
Well, yes, but I think they (and everyone else) have been avoiding crypto so far because of regulatory issues. If they had solved the regulatory issues (or decided to ignore them), that would have really profound effects on a lot of things.
If Amazon accepts crypto, you can stop worrying about "crypto offramps", ie the ability to convert crypto into fiat money that you can spend on things you actually want. Most of the things you actually want will be available in crypto directly. I'm a little confused by this, because governments put a lot of work into controlling crypto offramps, and it would be surprising to me if Amazon put the same amount of work into monitoring its customers. If they didn't, that would mean the opportunities for nontraditional financial users (including criminals but also the unbanked poor and other sympathetic groups) to use money would be much higher, and the ability of governments to control money much lower. But even if they subjected everyone who uses crypto on Amazon to KYC laws, it probably would still have that effect - lots of legitimate users (the majority of the population) would be about as happy to get crypto as they would be to get fiat money (since they can spend their crypto on Amazon which is where they would spend their fiat anyway), and so criminals/the unbanked/whoever would have lots of opportunities to trade their crypto with random people and basically be able to integrate into the rest of the financial system anyway.
Somebody who knows stuff tell me if I'm wrong here.
Cynical motive: launder all that crypto before the inevitable government crackdown
This seems like it could be very profitable for Amazon, because as soon as they started accepting a cryptocurrency, its price should immediately rise.
small amounts don't have much of a legal risk. and Amazon has your address/identity (almost) and can have limits etc. you wouldn't be able to launder that easily with purchasing for personal use.
purchasing for others (lots of details here) wouldn't be operationally easy, etc.
front matter: I work for Amazon. I'm on the internal blockchain discussion mailing lists. I consulted for and helped do the work for some of the first customer facing services for blockchain services. Blockchain is not the center of my current responsibilities at the company. I am NOT writing officially on behalf of the company.
You need to understand that Amazon takes "world's most customer centric company" thing seriously. One of the ways this cashes out is when we notice that a lot of customers are running a lot of a particular kind of workload, especially when large customers start telling their technical account manager (TAM) they are running those kind of workloads, and when they start start asking their support assistants (SAs) to help them configure and run those kind of workloads, we notice, and then we start exploring "servicizing" that workload, turning it into a new AWS service. Because we can usually build the -as-a-service so it's cheaper for the customers to use that than to just built it "raw" on the compute and database services.
That's what happened here. There were enough customers and enough internal interest in "whats the very best way to configure a highly available well connected cluster of etherium nodes with the correct sort of connections to the database services, queue services, HSM services, backup services, fin reg devops regulations, etc etc". We started with some textual guides and possible-best-practice checklists, then we started bundling reference implementations into turn key containers for Docker, and now we run a full on "AWS Blockchain -as-a-service", for customers who want to run Fabric or Etherium for their own businesses, but dont want or need to staff up an entire devops and crypto data fintech compliance team.
The two key things here are "for customers", and "this is business as usual for Amazon.
For customers: Amazon does not take BTC or ETH as a payment type, and if there are any plans to start doing so I am not personally aware of them.
Business As Usual: if I tried to off the top of my head start listing all the times that we have done this (take a common customer workload and -as-a-service it), I would miss most of them, there are so many.
Kudos.
Is the "Payments Acceptance & Experience team" part of AWS or Amazon retail? This really does sound different than existing AWS blockchain as a service offerings.
In spite of what Mark Atwood said, that posting really did make it sound like the product lead is going to be in charge of an effort to begin accepting crypto as a form of payment when purchasing from Amazon, not just creating blockchain as a service as an AWS components for other parties that want to accept crypto as a form of payment.
So I'm curious which it really is. I'm not sure it would have quite the impacts you seem to be anticipating, though. With respect to the non-sympathetic user groups, the thing we're trying to prevent criminals from doing is buying and selling illegal goods, which Amazon as a marketplace can do by just not allowing you to list drugs and kidnapped child sex slaves or whatever it is organized criminals are normally using crypto and unmarked bills to buy and sell. What exchange medium they use isn't going to help or hinder as much as regulating the listings.
With respect to the unbanked poor, it's not exactly clear to me how someone too poor to open a bank account is supposed to be getting cryptocurrency or even Internet access in the first place to suddenly be empowered to join the rest of the financial world now that banks aren't stopping them.
I would think the small-timers who benefit from this aren't so much the unbanked poor as small businesses that don't need to pay the tithe to traditional payment processors if their money never needs to exit the blockchain.
Although, I'd note the fact that this is true, at least for Bitcoin, relies on the present day reality that the owners of blockchain nodes doing the transaction processing are doing it for free to the blockchain users because they're compensated by winning the race to become the canonical node of record and receiving Bitcoin in the process. When the period of rapid appreciation stops or even just when the supply starts reaching its asymptotic limit, this will eventually not be economical and node owners will need to start charging, just like Visa does today. Enjoy the free ride while it lasts, but it won't last forever.
Bitcoin fees haven't been 0 for many years. It's true they're still heavily subsidized by the block reward though.
It is entirely possible that dayjob is staffing up a team to set up taking crypto as payment. I would not be surprised, I'm not not aware of it.
Also, all cool boys have crypto strategy. Consequently, Amazon has to have crypto strategy.
> If any commenters here would describe themselves as in this group, I’m interested to hear your reasoning.
My group house just had a cold sweep through it (more than half of people showing symptoms, about a week of lost work all told). A bunch of people took COVID tests and they were all negative, so we're pretty sure it wasn't COVID.
But also... it was really nice to have a year where this basically never happened, and I think the steady state rate of it happening (when we were open) was probably like once a quarter. (Definitely when I was going to CFAR workshops, I would have something cold-like about once a month, tho it rarely bothered me much, but sometimes spread out in a way that did seem bad). And so I sort of want to go back to being a hermit because it pays for itself? Or, like, adopt the Quarian lifestyle, and the thing where everyone wears masks in shops forever seems maybe worth the annoyance.
Agree re. Quarian lifestyle.
I feel the benefits of permanent mask wearing (referring specifically to the totally painless surgical masks specifically here) in circumstances where it is convenient (Public transit, public buildings like hospitals, etc.) outweigh the downsides (having to have a mask on you.).
It's such a small ask, and I enjoy breathing less of peoples gross moist used lung air in line at costco.
Many others may disagree with you as to how small an ask it is, and it's them you're making the ask of.
I don't think it's actually them you're making the ask of. If it's just normalized, the way that wearing sunglasses when it's bright out is, or covering your face when you cough or sneeze, but not mandated or enforced in any way, we already all get a lot of the benefits.
I don't think I follow your reasoning. If there are people for whom they've never had to do this in the past before covid, and they never want to have to do it again (except for a global pandemic, let's say) for whatever reason, then it is them you're making the ask of. You're asking them to take part in a new "normal" that they don't actually want.
Do you mean that "they" not only don't want to wear masks but aren't even okay with other people wearing them?
Well, there might be people like that, but in general, no that's not what I meant. I meant people who don't want to wear masks themselves, and also don't want to feel socially pressured to wear masks.
Or the way saying the Pledge of Allegiance before school, etc, used to be. And you can say "promotes social cohesion and unity; benefits far outweigh the trifling inconvenience" all you want, you're going to need to make a truly compelling and well-supported case for that if you don't want heavy pushback to any sort of heavy-handed "normalization". Simply asserting the benefit is not enough.
(Part of the reason why I wear a helmet when cycling is to normalize it -- maybe some day some one who has been considering wearing one but decided not to because it'd look weird will see me and change their mind.)
'Normalized' is just a euphemism for social pressure. I think you understand it better if you get rid of the euphemism and recognize that people may not want to be pressured.
I guess, but I think it's reasonable; it's on the level of covering your face when you cough, or not smelling bad in public.
I can't really think of an objection to wearing a mask for half an hour at the doctors office that doesn't make me think the objector is an asshole.
I know one person who was abused as a child in a way which included smothering. Wearing a mask at all is rough on her.
My understanding was that it was still pretty unknown why the flu is so dormant. Of course it could be distancing and masks. I've also read that viral interference could play a role (one virus actively suppresses another), or merely competition for host resources (only so many lungs available to infect). Is that not the latest thinking?
As someone who doesn't mind masks all that much but also is looking forward to finally not having to wear them any more: I honestly wouldn't mind that much wearing masks in supermarkets forever. In other shops, especially clothing stores (where you need to see your face) or shops where you browse and spend time, it sounds quite annoying. And if it's supermarkets only, I probably wouldn't carry a mask all the time and lose out on going to the supermarket spontaneously, which again sucks.
Do you however expect shops to be significant locations for infection? Sounds a bit far-fetched to me, I'd expect public transport to dwarf shops in that regard. (And that's one of the worst locations for wearing a mask, from perspective of comfort. The horrors of multi-hour train rides without maskless breaks, compared to the pleasant experience otherwise.)
I sure hope one thing we are getting out of the pandemic is stats on infection hotspots and how to mitigate those risks.
"I sure hope one thing we are getting out of the pandemic is stats on infection hotspots and how to mitigate those risks."
I was so optimistic about this in April 2020, but I have seen zero public discussion of any of the results - not even whether bars or restaurants are more of a locus of transmission.
Public transport has been conspicuously lacking in the list of known superspreader events; even airline travel (where it should be pretty easy to figure out who was on what flight) doesn't show up very often. My best guess is that p(COVID) scales as population density * population loudness, and places where people mostly sit quietly aren't a big problem even if there are a lot of people.
But as Kenny notes, it's a year past the time we should have had solid data on things like the bars vs restaurants question, and we don't. Lots of people have taken this as an opportunity to "Believe in Science!", rather few have taken the opportunity to do any of it.
In that case shops should be out together with public transport. Which is good, but also makes countermeasures less tractable – we're not going to permanently not have festivals or private parties, and having them masked rather defeats the point.
Not sure I understand your second paragraph: If we don't have data on it, where do you see the opportunity to "believe" in it? Are you saying they should default to the null hypothesis?
"Believe in Science!" is now a catchphrase in American politics that has little to do with the actual scientific method and requires only one data point: that one of your side's politicians or journalists has found a card-carrying Scientist to say that Policy X will surely work and that not-X will result in blood in the streets. Basically the equivalent of a celebrity endorsement, but with a Ph.D. rather than an SAG award.
Yes, I understood that part. I was surprised by the second part, "rather few have taken the opportunity to do any of it" – in the absence of any real evidence, people default to their priors and end up shouting at each other that the other side is making everything worse. That's not ideal, but understandable given the importance of the decision. I was wondering which opportunity you saw for them to do better.
Well, if you're even a state-level government health agency, you can start gathering data via contact tracing and interviews with hospitalized COVID patients and whatnot, and give that data to scientists. For best results, ask your scientists what sort of data would be most useful to them.
If you're anyone else, you can start scouring the internet, news media, etc, for any bits of data that would allow you to do some low-grade but potentially useful statistical analysis. A *very* few nerds on the internet (and at universities) have been doing this, but not many. Or you can use your tweeting thumb to tell your elected officials, "Hey, I Believe In Science and I actually want to see some of the real thing; maybe you all could get started on that!", which is similarly rare.
In the case of flights, that's mainly because passenger aircraft have hospital-grade HVAC.
I've been on crowded city busses where everyone was talking and laughing, and everyone was loud in order to be heard over everyone else. Maybe it's not showing up in superspreader data because it's hard to figure out after the fact who was on the same bus?
As a person with social anxiety I have been absolutely thrilled with everyone covering their face-meats the way they cover their much less distressing crotch-meats, am a bit sad that this norm has evaporated so quickly, and now feel obliged to unmask myself to avoid calling attention to myself. Quarian Future seems good? But that is not the way that people are going, alas; never generalize from one's own preferences.
I can't believe just about any number of people seem okay with wearing masks or potentially having lockdowns forever. Sure, I liked not getting sick too. But I'd easily take the occasional cold compared to social isolation and the complete changing of every facet of our society. The idea that being a hermit "pays for itself" is so foreign to me. Not getting sick barely makes a dent in the price of being a hermit.
Yeah, the people who want to keep mask mandates or lockdowns forever just seem insane and evil to me.
Well, I don't know if I'd say evil, but I certainly think that those who really want to do it and force a culture change to impose this on others are probably somewhat detached from the idea of how others may feel, how others want to live their lives. It could either be not understanding or not caring.
Contra:
Maybe they are people that previously had "Normal" Imposed on them, and now want to keep a way of living their lives that is more comfortable.
I would happily never show up to an office ever again, for one.
But we know that's not the case. They grew up under the same previous normal conditions as the rest of us. The latest conditions are new to all of us, including them. So we all know that this is a change, and the new conditions are not normal to anyone.
The previous conditions weren't normal to me.
They were an insane, useless imposition by pointless parasitic managers and real-estate companies that need me to suffer in order to extract value while producing nothing of worth.
As my spouse and friends who also read this blog often remind me, we’re pretty odd around here. Reading comments like this on ACX doesn’t really surprise me. But the idea that a sizable bloc within society feels like social interaction and generally seeing others’ faces can be dispensed with forever is way more odd to me.
We had to put our kid in preschool. Like, we *had* to- she’s spent half her life with just a few adults for company. We waited until all of those adults were vaccinated, but she needs to encounter her actual peers at some point. Of course, we all immediately got colds (we were tested- it’s just the common cold.) She also made a friend. I don’t know if you have kids but I would be willing to suffer quite a bit physiologically if it meant my kid could have IRL friends. Hopefully, I may not even have to.
We’re trying to pay attention, monitor risk levels and navigate the practical and moral issues around social gatherings. But we can’t go on living like the Lykov family in perfect Siberian isolation for the next 42 years.
Hah, I see what you mean, yes, we are odd around here. But I kind of see it opposite. I've always looked to the SlateStarCodex community as a beacon of, well, rationality, and especially understanding. It seems totally irrational to think that everyone would be better off in lockdown forever, and everyone would be okay with that. Meanwhile, I'm in a very very progressive area with very very progressive friends, so I hear a lot of these talking points from the "rest of the world at large" (meaning my bubble) all the time about unreasonable things like wanting to stay in lockdown, etc. That's why I'm kind of surprised to see people here okay with it. I usually feel like this community is more reasonable and down to earth (in a different way than your average Joe is) than my bubble.
"I've always looked to the SlateStarCodex community as a beacon of, well, rationality, and especially understanding."
There's no extremely nice way to put this: that's very unwise. *Scott* is a beacon of rationality; many of us hangers-on are unfortunately just awkward.
Well, the SSC community may be more rational.
But it is also different in other ways. In particular, people seem much more ~"autism-spectrum" and introverted that your average person.
Most normal people tend to really highly value full-on social interactions. Masks make those interactions worse. But since people here don't value socializing as much, or in some cases even want to avoid socializing they are much more fine reducing the quality of social interactions. Especially random social interactions. So there are less downsides for people that outweigh the benefits of permanent mask wearing.
Depends what you mean by social interaction. I wasn't exactly starting lively conversations with people on the L train before covid. So there's no real cost there. Bars and restaurants, or social gatherings, are different because there you actually want to talk to people
From my perspective it's quite common to have a conversation with people on long-distance travel. And even for local transport, you may want to have a conversation with the group you're travelling with.
"Wearing masks" and "lockdowns forever" are massively different in terms of their impact on people's wellbeing, and trying to conflate them is misleading. Masks are mildly annoying for me, I understand some people find them more unpleasant, but prettty much everyone agrees lockdown is awful
'Lockdown' is a catch-all term that covers a huge spectrum, so I don't see how you can draw many conclusions about that, other than the most basic conclusions.
I think it's worth pointing out that while hand washing seems to be pretty much useless against Covid it does make a big difference for most flu, most common colds, etc. It's probably a matter of primarily targeting the upper or lower tract since h5n1 also mostly targets the lungs and doesn't seem to spread via surfaces either.
A good test case is cruise ships, after the massive norovirus incidents they instituted lots of measures to encourage people to wash their hands and teach tehm how to do it better. (E.g. in the initial welcome meeting you get 5 minutes on proper hand technique, along with a song about it, as well as evacuation procedures etc.) And the cases have basically disappeared. If we could do that on a wider scale it would be great
Yeah, the amount that we have tolerated massive flu epidemics etc seems crazy in retrospect. If making masks mandatory on long distance public transport like planes and trains makes those less common it seems a fine trade off.
Ever since my 6th grader started school, I've been really struck about how much they do anti-bullying stuff.
Everything from normal classroom stuff to special things where the kids all leave the classroom and go to some other room wherein the school counselor talks about bullying being bad to take home handouts about anti-bullying stuff.
It certainly seems like everyone in the school has really bought in to the whole dealio...
Also, I live in rural Missouri.
Good for Missouri!
Regarding 16, Stephen wrote an blog post in 2012 about this phenomenon, which he named "artificial stupidity".
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/04/overcoming-artificial-stupidity/
I work for Wolfram|Alpha, though not on the parser. Natural language is hard to interpret, yo. We try to improve, bit by bit. "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
I took a Computaional Linguistics course in the mid 1980's and the current thinking was we hadn't yet reached the level of Artificial Stupidity. We would have been floored to learn that Google Translate was on the horizon.
I really can't fault WA for failing on so many natural language queries. But I can fault the marketing.
#26: I assume Amazon is trying to see if there is a feasible way for them to accept cryptocurrency payment on Amazon. This would be a pretty big leap, since as far as I nkow they don't even accept things like Paypal (at least not directly). I'm curious to see how well this works out for them.
I'm surprised the 10 pm Curfew didn't poll better, since that seems like it would be especially appealing to people that hate fun. Anyone that's lived in a city and has had trouble sleeping due to the noise must have at least considered it!
I suspect the curfew and the no clubbing thing were super popular among the old, and not at all among the young
#8 reminded me of how The Onion used to make fun of (at the time) conservative cartoons in the early 2000s. Hilarious
"Kelly" still contributes cartoons to the Onion. Although the creator likes to make Kelly more distinctive than just being a conservative. For example, he's pro-abortion because he hates that he has to pay his ex-wife child support.
Regarding #2, I could get behind the masks (two reasons, a) I have always hated seein people on public transport, b) I am immune-suppressed and barely had a cold for the year until June this year) and the vaccination for travel (well, anything to get vaccination rates up is good in my book).
That robot baby story made me laugh. Thanks for sharing that, Scott.
Re
> I wondered if pushing land distribution might be an effective altruist intervention.
I'm a gray tribe techie who left the Boston area 8 years ago and moved to rural land where I raise vegetables and livestock (in addition to doing remote work at startups). TLDR: living on the land and doing farm stuff is HARD and COMPLICATED (to the point where I recently wrote ~ 1,400 pages on the topic, to give a brief introduction to all that's involved https://www.amazon.com/Escape-City-1-Travis-Corcoran/dp/B093BC3K1T ).
Making good use of the land is hard and requires a ton of knowledge ( this ties into seeing like a state issues: you know who ELSE doesn't know how to farm? People who've spent a generation or more off the farm! ).
I'm skeptical of land reform even though politically I like it (for right wing reasons, not left wing reasons like many: I like the idea of more people being self-reliant and being less cancellable, which I think encourages little-r republican virtues).
I think this is being pushed entirely for developing countries where almost everyone is a farmer anyway. The idea isn't to make non-farmers into farmers, it's to make serf/sharecropper-type farmers into independent farmers.
I agree, Scott, that it's a policy that is advocating in developing countries ... but even there, urban intensification has been going on for decades and decades. Nigeria's population, for example, was 20% urban around 1970, and is 52% urban today. ...and that suggests that among those who are of an age where they might farm, very few are rural, or have ever been rural.
...Nigeria? The country with $5.2k per capita income?
You misunderstood what a poor country is. We're talking about countries where people make something like 1/10th to 1/5th as much, per capita.
Nigeria is a success story, for Africa. They don't need more help. I'm rather stunned that you didn't realize this.
"I'm rather stunned that you didn't realize this".
Take your condescension and snark somewhere else, please.
Scott said "developing countries".
Nigeria is a developing country. This is common usage / understanding, but if you want something somewhat official, look at the UN report on developing countries. Nigeria is listed in table C on page 166.
https://www.un.org/development/desa/dpad/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/WESP2020_Annex.pdf
Or look in Wikipedia, which bases its data on the IMF.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country
> We're talking about countries where people make something like 1/10th to 1/5th as much, per capita
Please don't ally yourself with Scott and lecture me on what "we" (you and he) are talking about. If Scott had something particular in mind, he can clarify, but you were not in this thread; neither "you" (singular) nor "you" (plural) were saying anything.
Scott was saying something, and I was responding to him.
> You misunderstood what a poor country is.
Scott didn't use the word "poor" or the phrase "poor country".
Also, there aren't many countries 5 or 10 times poorer than Nigeria. Looking at 2019 per capita GDP data, there are 5 countries more than 5 times poorer in nominal terms, and 2 countries in PPP terms; no country is 10 times poorer.
"I think this is being pushed entirely for developing countries where almost everyone is a farmer anyway." Note that at this point this only describes the poorest countries.
In fact it also describes why they are the poorest countries.
That's not how it was implemented in Zimbabwe. Pretty much the opposite in fact.
This is awesome! I'm curious about reading your book, although possibly incapable of trawling through 1400 pages
The good news, John, is that it's organized like The Hacker's Dictionary or Wikipedia, with tons of cross links. You can skim it recreationaly, without making a commitment to sitting down and reading it cover to cover.
Thanks! I just ordered a copy and look forward to reading it
TY!
I'm right there with you, man, despite being a pretty bog-standard social democrat. I have aunts & uncles on both sides who homestead and they are some of my favorite people. They think for themselves. They have to. There's a part of me which would like to buy the land of one couple to keep it in the family, but even if I had the money I wouldn't know what to do with it.
Scialabba wrote about this recently, trying to think through the cultivation of republican virtue in the face of massive economic transformations that have given us incredible material wealth at the cost of increasing complexity & dependency.
http://georgescialabba.net/mtgs/2021/04/last-men-and-women-1.html
Awesome. I've always gotten along well with Vermont-style-lefty-homesteaders, even though I'm a Heinlein-style-righty-homesteader.
This is the thing about small-r republican virtues: they result in the API between people being tidy and decent and libertarian-ish. The lefty vegetarian homesteaders with the 30 year old "Free Tibet" sign in their yard agree with me on all sorts of public policy points. We differ on stuff that mostly doesn't affect each other. I like Latin Masses, they like - I dunno - whatever they like.
Are you using "application programming interface" in a way that I'm not following or do you mean something else by "API"?
I was using it with that meaning, yes, but in a generalized sense that is pretty common in my group (apologies; thought it was semi universal), meaning "a public interface between disjoint groups"
I thought that might be what you meant but wasn't quite sure. Makes sense.
> I'm a Heinlein-style-righty-homesteader.
Citing “Time Enough for Love”
Remember if you have to kill intruders that plan to rape your wife and kill you, it’s okay if you and your wife are turned on by it, but don’t let it get to be a habit or anything.
This is an under-appreciated point about farming knowledge. One of the worst impacts of collective farming in the USSR was how it destroyed countless generations of knowledge about farming in the local environment. The planners always thought they could brute force improvements with technology like tractors or fertilizer but there were huge problems with this. Stalin and WWII erased a lot of non tangible agricultural heritage.
Something similar happened with the Lost Generation in England after WWI- the young men died, the farm couldn’t be sustained, and the old wisdom about working the land vanished.
To me it seems that problem was not the loss of the farming knowledge but simply lack of incentives and organizational problems. In Soviet Latvia people were still allowed to do some private farming, mostly in smaller fields that were deemed not practical for mechanized farming. People managed to extract a lot of value from those fields mostly by manual work and even sell the surplus to the state. I heard that in some places half of milk came from those private farmers. It was no secret that often resources (grains, etc) were stolen from collective farms and somehow it was tolerated if kept within low limits.
The point is that the same people worked at the collective farm and on their own much smaller plots of land but the outcomes were very different. Incentives matter even though some things introduced by global programs were actually quite good. One was providing all country houses with electricity lines for free. Nowadays, it is very expensive to provide electricity from a global grid to a new house in the country.
Being able to efficiently farm is part of the knowledge though. That you can get great yields if you give exceptional care, doesn't mean that you have the knowledge for large-scale farming.
It's somewhat similar to how many advances (like new battery technology) only works in a laboratory with immense effort, but either can't be produced at a yield & cost that is reasonable.
True but it didn't seem that Soviet collective farms were particularly clueless. They employed agronomists who were educated and trained. When Khruschov visited the US, he was impressed by large corn fields, so he mandated growing corn in the USSR. In Latvia corn does not mature and our fields are smaller, so it may not be the best crop here. Anyway, it wasn't a failure by itself, green mass was used for feeding cows and milk production increased. The problem was really lack of incentives.
No worker was really interested in good results as the salaries were capped, and even if you managed to earn money, the shops had no goods to buy apart from basic things. Most people were required to have an official job where they tried to spend as little time as possible and then go home and work on their own small plots of land.
Yeah, sure, that was generally the issue in the USSR.
I'm more concerned that people implement Zimbabwean solutions, where they give land to people without farming skills/
This is off topic, but Home of the Underdogs dog as an avatar! So much nostalgia for me in that website, and such a shame it didn't survive.
I'm aware of it as some old MSFT or similar clip-art ; perhaps that came first and Home of the Underdogs came later? I use it because the science fiction novels I wrote have uplifted / intelligent dogs [ in space, of course ].
That was a great website. My first computer growing up was an Apple II, so I've thankfully got other sources available. archive.org has an emulator that runs in the browser so you don't even have to download a client.
https://archive.org/details/TotalReplay
I'm left as FUCK BOIIIII and I am right with you.
I've been farming-adjacent my whole life, my first paying jobs were picking coffee in a cafetal in costa-rica and shoveling chicken shit, which instilled in me my burning hate of the owning class (Around 1.25 USD worth of collenes for 6 hours of work picking coffee by hand and carrying 50 lb baskets up a hill. Workers of the world Unite!)
Since then, I've always had a decent sized plot/ orchard (enough green stuff for me and my circle)
It justified itself totally absent any spiritual fulfilment, but I think having some understanding of the level of attention and expertise required to produce the food we need to not die would benefit anybody.
I bought your books, tho I bought only 5 acres, and am cultivating only about 2000 square feet of it. Potatoes and kale are utterly magic at turning dirt into tasty calories without a lot of hard labor.
Thank you!
Any other basic introductions to farming and agriculture you'd recommend?
Yes, there are dozens if not hundreds others that I recommend. I have book reviews of tons of other books in Escape the City.
Your book(s) looks interesting, thanks. I wonder if you have read any of the Foxfire books from the '70's? They were more concerned with preserving old time arts and crafts.
Yes, I've read them - they were what got me interested in this life path!
Dang, (it's fun to turn people on to good books.) I suppose you have "Your Cabin in the Woods" by C. Meinecke? (If not buy it!)
Hey How is the Kindle version of your book? I use to hate e-books because it was hard to flip around in them... reading citations and such. But the latest one a read did it right and you could click on the references and then click back and go back to where you were reading. (I guess I can just spend the ~$10 and see for myself.)
I'd honestly direct you towards the trade or hardcover version. Sorry to be the bearer of mediocre news!
Regarding 24, the counterexample I like is climbing Everest. First done in 1953, and that involved a nation-state project (from a poorer nation than the US, ie the UK, and not on the NASA scale, but still big and expensive) and was being done by rich people within 20 years. But it's still dangerous and expensive after another 50 years.
Could space end up being different? Sure. But it could also be a $100k joyride to suborbital and a few million to orbit for decades to come.
I think the implication is that the product will become more commodified and easy-to-consume with time. Going to space can surely become easier with time for the average person, as opposed to climbing mountains, in which the whole point is "I did something super hard"
Hmm, not sure that's true of mountains, I certainly go up them for the view and am entirely content to get a train or be driven.
The point I was waving in the general direction of is that some things that were nation-state projects are still really hard, and others are now routine, and I'm not sure you'd predict correctly from 1960.
I was going to write what Scott said above (although less eloquently)
If we loosen the criteria to the broader consumer good of "being at the top of high mountains" - climbing the Jungfrau in Switzerland was first accomplished in 1811, and by only a few dozen professional mountaineers in the following years, with frequent deaths. Today, about 500,000 people reach the top per year (including me a few years ago), usually paying about $50 for the hour-long train to the top.
Why isn't there an equally quick route to the top of Everest? My guess is partly because the bottom of Everest is so inaccessible, partly political/regulatory reasons (if you tried to dynamite a gentler path onto the mountain, someone would get mad), partly because it's not that fun to be on the top of Everest if you can't brag about your mountaineering prowess, and then only partly for engineering reasons.
Fair point.
Hmmmm. What examples are there of things that were hard/expensive and haven't got much easier/cheaper other than the two categories that we know can't?
[Those being other people's time, since the number of people per person is fixed at 1 and land, where the total amount of land is fixed]
The deep ocean comes to mind.
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/triton-unveils-66002-worlds-deepest-diving-personal-submarine
?
Junfraujoch is only at 3,463 meters altitude. The Everest is at 8,848 meters. So if the Everest had an equivalent train ride, you wouldn't even be halfway towards the top.
At the Everest altitudes, things get a lot more complicated, due to lack of oxygen.
I'm dubious space will be quick to reach common daily use; space travel today is something like 4-15x cheaper than it was 50 years ago (SpaceX is ~25% as expensive as original ISS, Chang'e is ~1/15th as costly per kilo as the Surveyor program). Given that currently it costs $55 million to go to the ISS via Crew Dragon, using a 1/7th/50 years geometric mean, combined with 2% per annum GDP per capita growth (as it's been since the industrial revolution began, basically), this would put it as the equivalent of a $6000 expense today circa 2175.
It's possible that there will be some sudden downward spikes in cost, but given that we're looking at a timespan of decades and taking the geometric mean that incorporates Things Humans Aren't Actually On (which have gotten cheaper, faster), I feel like the cause is more that there are just more obscenely rich people nowadays, rather than that space is getting that much cheaper that much faster. Space travel is also much less tractable to technical developments than, say, computers or washing machines, which aren't nearly so bound by physics as "launch an object at obscene speeds upward without killing everybody inside it somehow" is.
Starship is intended to be a sudden downward spike in launch costs: at Musk's announced aspirational cost per launch ($2M, a little less than half of which would be fuel) and the low end of the projected payload capacity to LEO (100 tonnes), it would reduce launch costs to $20/kilo. Or passengers to LEO (at Musk's public guesstimate of a capacity for 100 passengers) at $10k per person.
That said, I'll believe the $2M/launch cost when I see it. I expect they'll eventually get it working and that it'll represent a substantial decrease in launch costs relative to a Falcon 9 or a Falcon Heavy, but full reusability with minimal turnaround costs for hundreds of launches (which is what you'd need to get non-fuel costs including amortized construction cost anywhere near $1M per launch) is a very ambitious engineering problem which I very much doubt will be completely solved in the medium term.
If Starship can get folks to (and from) low Earth orbit of $50K/person in a decade, then if you could stay in a private Bigelow orbital habitat for $50K/week, we'd be looking at $100K for a one week stay in orbit.
Double the costs and we are still "only" looking at $200K for a one week stay in orbit.
This seems possible, if not likely. But we are also talking of 2030 rather than 2175.
The suggestion that the cost of energy to get to 11km/sec will drop just because the cost of a refrigerator did 100 years earlier is just silly. As you have to rely on the rocket equation as well, it looks even worse.
After all, it used to be that only heavily armed nuclear weapons states had nuclear weapons. It still is, but it used to be, too.
But these days that includes Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea, and not just the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus India.
My understanding is that the rocket is the expensive part, much more so than the energy. That's why most organizations for the past 40+ years trying to get cheaper launch costs have been chasing reusability, with most of the rest looking at ways to cheaply mass-produce disposable rockets.
"The suggestion that the cost of energy to get to 11km/sec will drop just because the cost of a refrigerator did 100 years earlier is just silly. As you have to rely on the rocket equation as well, it looks even worse."
Isn't the suggestion that being able to re-use the refrigerator after cooling that first gallon of milk should result in substantial cost savings?
For a Delta-IV the VAST bulk of the launch cost is in the single use rocket. Starship is intended to improve this a lot.
If you actually *do* the rocket equation, you find that the cost of energy to get to 11 km/s is an insignificant part of the current problem. With a three-stage LOX/Kerosene rocket, the energy to deliver one ton of payload to escape velocity takes the form of $200,000 worth of kerosene (the oxygen is a rounding error). The energy cost of sending a full Apollo stack to the Moon, and back, is under ten million dollars. If you're just headed to Low Earth orbit, maybe $30,000 per ton. We can probably do better than.
The present cost of space travel is the cost of the engineering, fabrication, testing, and other necessary support work when you are doing it to a business model where every flight is a bespoke Event(tm). Some people are working on that.
The energy it takes to accelerate my mass to that speed is about 5 GJ which costs around $10 at today's prices. I'd agree that that is a binding limit but not the reason for current prices.
I mean, planes and trains are still quite expensive; it's just that we (the consumers) generally don't pay the up front cost since (at least in the US) it's heavily subsidized by the government. I think that space travel will still be unaffordable to most people no matter what until there's some *actual* reason to go into space (like idk asteroid mining); at which point it will get subsidized into affordability.
We first got a man in space in 1961. Space has not become as reachable in the sixty years since as the Everest did. The whole "sometimes things are toys for nation-states or the super-rich and then become commonly available" thing is true about a lot of things, but I think it's been long enough to tell that it's not going to happen with space.
This isn't an area that I'm knowledgeable about, but aren't there literally many thousands of satellites in orbit? And an continuously-manned international space station that has existed for over 20 years? Plus a bunch of other things like probes and mars rovers? I admit that I can't just fly to space this weekend if I want to, but it sure seems better than "We did the thing in 1961, and then nothing happened."
Hm. I agree I shouldn't be overconfident here, but I still think that while costs have come down it's been gradual and some barriers (both technical and economic - there's not much incentive to go to space aside from communication satellites -) seem fundamentally intractable. So I don't think there has been (or will be) a Moore's law exponential improvement in space travel curve.
The other side of this is that space travel difficulty rises exponentially with the goal - getting to Mars is exponentially harder than getting to orbit, and interstellar travel is much harder than getting to Mars. So a linear improvement in costs might be enough to eventually make reaching orbit available to the slightly-less-rich but would still probably never be enough to get us to, say, a Mars colony - and even an improvement rate that could get us to a Mars colony in, say, a century would probably take at least thousands of years to get us to interstellar travel (and that's without assuming deminishing returns).
Regarding #14 - it reminds me of my favorite Black Mirror episode - White Christmas.
I feel like there's a pretty significant difference between leaving a bike sitting out with a small lock, vs saying "hey, suspected thief, the bike over there is unlocked". I'm not sure where the point of entrapment is, but I'd say a honeypot bike is more analogous to a governor that posts their schedule while saying that their security is taking the week off.
There's also the moral risk of deliberately exposing others to temptation. Maybe the honeypot bike scheme will catch hardened bike thieves - or maybe it catches the guy who wouldn't ordinarily do it, but this one day he gave in because "c'mon, it's right there, it's so easy, and you need to get where you want to go faster than walking" and now somebody has an interaction with the cops and maybe a criminal record.
It's like having a drink in front of an alcoholic, commenting "oh wow, that really hits the spot!", then leaving the open bottle and a glass in front of them as you walk away. The answer to "there are a ton of bike thieves and the cops don't take it seriously" is not "let's entrap anyone who is silly enough to take a chance on taking this bike" but "get onto the local politicians who have told the cops not to prosecute petty crimes like this".
I feel like we should hold people to different standards on different kinds of temptation though. Like, your argument of "come on, it's right there" would apply equally if cops entrapped people by leaving honeypot cars with the key dropped next to the driverside door. Maybe they'll catch someone who wouldn't smash a window and hotwire a car as a matter of course, but someone who takes that opportunity to take someone else's car because they needed to get somewhere is clearly violating both the law and social norms enough to be worth prosecuting.
I know, bikes aren't as valuable as cars, but as you're depriving someone of their (primary) mode of transportation, the fact that people think it's acceptable (as in, you shouldn't be arrested for it) to steal a bike as long as it's *really easy* and you *really need to*, rubs me entirely the wrong way. I don't know if opportunistic thieves being arrested for stealing honeypot bikes would tip the balance of social mores in favor of "stealing bikes is wrong" but it certainly can't hurt.
"I don't know if opportunistic thieves being arrested for stealing honeypot bikes would tip the balance of social mores in favor of "stealing bikes is wrong" but it certainly can't hurt."
Did arrests for possession of marijuana tip the balance of social mores in favour of "quite right too!" or "come off it, this isn't even a crime, weed should be legal"?
Even the fig-leaf of "for medical use only" is not putting a halt to that: https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/cannabis-legalization-states-map-831885/
"In just the past six months, every cannabis-related ballot measure put to voters last November passed — including those in conservative Mississippi, Montana, and South Dakota — and state legislatures in New York, New Mexico, and Virginia have approved bills to legalize cannabis for recreational use. That’s a lot of action. So much so, in fact, that there are now fewer states that have not legalized THC for either medicinal or recreational purposes (12), than there are that have given their residents a green light to smoke up at their leisure (18)."
I am all in favour of "crime, even petty crime, should be prosecuted" but I am not in favour of schemes that will ultimately end in "c'mon bro, decriminalise it!" which arresting "Jon Snowe, 19, STEM student at Really Fancy U who hopes to go into researching a cure for cancer and needed to get to his sick mother's bedside faster than walking would take him after he received an emergency phone call and borrowed a bike he saw unlocked" type of cases will do.
Oh, and Oregon is leading the way on all drugs, not just weed: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2020-12-10/oregon-just-decriminalized-all-drugs-heres-why-voters-passed-this-groundbreaking-reform
"Oregon became the first state in the United States to decriminalize the possession of all drugs on Nov. 3, 2020.
Measure 110, a ballot initiative funded by the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group backed in part by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, passed with more than 58% of the vote. Possessing heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs for personal use is no longer a criminal offense in Oregon.
Those drugs are still against the law, as is selling them. But possession is now a civil – not criminal – violation that may result in a fine or court-ordered therapy, not jail. Marijuana, which Oregon legalized in 2014, remains fully legal."
Bay Area people who are having their bikes stolen as fast as they buy replacement bikes will welcome crackdowns and harsher enforcement and prosecution, but wider public sentiment with sympathetic cases like Jon and pushing the racial angle (re: legalising weed, that "Rolling Stone" story mentions Alabama thusly: "An ACLU study found that in 2018 black people were over four times more likely to be arrested for possession than white people") - if the honeypot arrests turn out to be majority BIPOC then guess who will call for bike theft to be decriminalised? Media stories about wasting police time and enforcing the "school to prison pipeline" and the like?
Why would cracking down on theft be in any way similar to cracking down on marijuana possession? Even the most well-intentioned bike thief is orders of magnitudes less sympathetic than a pothead whose only crime is that they want to get high and chill out on their couch. People may object to normalizing drug use on moral grounds, but ultimately it's a victimless crime in the overwhelming majority of cases. By contrast, no one likes getting stolen from, and even the most convoluted case of a 'justified theft' doesn't imply that theft should just be legal all the time.
I agree that we shouldn't lure people into crime, but unless the honeypot bikes are completely unlocked, the chances for this are rather low.
If there's an undercover policeman saying "you're a pansy girly-man if you don't steal that bike, look, I'll even give you my bike-lock master key", maybe a bit higher. And that sort of is the FBI's approach in too many of these arrests.
Yeah, but the difference there is exactly what forthe404 is getting at.
I'm very much for stamping out petty crime, but there are people who would think of it as "borrowing" not "stealing" - 'I really need to get to the train station to make my train and I'll leave the bike there so whoever owns it really isn't at a loss, it'll be found!' and do that.
Depends how easy you make the honeypot bike, and if it's *intended* to be stolen/entice a theft attempt, then the interest of the police is to make it as easy as possible to steal. Unlocked bikes may indeed be what they decide upon, if they think they won't haul in enough bike thieves if the potential thief has to dismantle a lock or cut through a chain.
There's a difference between "I locked my bike and it was stolen, why don't the police follow up on such theft?" (the usual answer is the crime is too small, the work is disproportionate - trying to chase down an unidentified person who took the bike and then prove they stole it if it's not in their possession, if they even have a chance of finding the guy who did steal it) and "the angry citizens who made a fuss about stolen bikes got the local media on the story, who then annoyed the mayor, who told the chief to Do Something, so we're having one day of Fake Crime where there can be a ton of arrests and the chief can issue a press release about Crackdown On Bike Crime, then everyone we arrested is let go because it's not worth the prosecutor's time and the real bike thieves just keep on thieving merrily".
Wait, who thinks of it as borrowing and not stealing? Do you actually know some of these people?
I mean, I've blurred the lines between borrowing and stealing. I got a ride home drunk in a recycling bin once, trusting the recycling bin would be picked up and put back into the system and the original owner would get a new recycling bin. But recycling bins belong to the city and no sober person uses them to get around. It's harder to see how someone could blur the lines with bikes.
Do these bicycle borrowers just use them to get across a university campus, trusting the bikes will stay on campus and likely be found?
How did you ride in a recycling bin?
I climbed into it and my friend pushed. It was a trashcan-sized bin with wheels and a handle for pushing it around. I was pretty wasted and my high heels were destroying my feet.
We did check to see that it only contained cardboard and nothing icky.
It was probably one of these: https://images.uline.com/is/image//content/dam/images/H/H4500/H-4202G.jpg?$Mobile_SI$&iccEmbed=1&icc=AdobeRGB
My car was stolen and put back a couple of blocks away. I don't remember how long the time gap was-- a couple of weeks seems likely. There was an element of luck that I noticed it.
The question is, 'what is the ratio of bikes stolen by repeat professional thieves vs bikes stolen by people that just gave in to temptation'? If most of the people we catch with bait operations are professional thieves, then it's likely easier to solve the problem of people caught giving in to temptation during the punishment phase. For example, someone caught by a bait sting without an arrest record could have the crime reduced to a misdemeanor, pay a fine or do community service on the weekends, and listen to the lecture about not doing this again from the judge. This changes the risk/reward ratio for giving in to temptation again, hopefully ensuring that this won't happen again.
Society has a need to distinguish between people for whom criminal anti-social behavior is an occasional temptation they can be easily deterred out of versus those for whom criminal anti-social behavior is a habit they will return to even in the face of punishment. The problem is that this is very hard to do and there's no good answer. Any system is going to have examples of people that slipped through the system one way or the other. I don't think Americans can rely on the justice system to try to distinguish this, as problems with prosecutional discretion are also a known serious issue with no easy answers.
Also, maybe a libertarian-ish person can have the opinion that it's ok, because personal responsibility. But, it's hard to square that opinion coming from people that also think that Trump is to blame for the attack. Putting the responsibility in Trump's words but not on whatever those FBI people might have said and done and facilitated feels weird. But, responsibility is a weird concept, so, who knows.
If you commit a crime because it appears to be easy to commit - you’re still committing a crime. A mugging isn’t less of a crime just because the victim looks rich and frail. So putting out targets and monitoring them is totally fine by me.
The sting equivalent in my mind would be advertising your services as a hitman, and arresting those that bite. You’re not entrapping anyone who’s not already out looking for crime.
The governor case sounds more like dropping a ready made plot into the laps of some unwitting knuckleheads and egging them on until they committed. Sort of like handing a guy an already stolen bike and telling him to ride off on it, unless he’s some kind of sissy.
I'm reminded of Julian Assange's citation of Osama bin Laden's strategy as an inspiration for his own. He thought the paranoid reaction of the US government would ultimately make it dysfunctional. Fed-instigated terror plots serve to make aspiring terrorists paranoid of cooperating with anyone else, thus leaving mostly less-effective lone wolves.
That's almost analogous just to the lack of security in the Capitol, no even riot gear, even when it was obvious to anyone weeks in advance that there might be tensions.
I don't think you know much about how easy it is to steal the vast majority of bikes. U-locks famously can be picked with a lighter and a bic pen. A lot of cable locks succumb to a simple attack by bolt cutters. Cops don't have to leave a bike out unlocked. They can just put a cheap lock on and expensive bike and monitor it.
Here in San Francisco, there's interstate organized crime rings that export bikes across state lines to defeat local registrations as well as an effect where cheaper stolen bikes are one of the basic forms of economic liquidity in homeless encampments. There was even a big expose showing some used bike shops working directly and flagrantly with criminals after a shipping container was searched in their parking lot that was full of freshly stolen bikes being "cooled off". The issue is that even if you catch someone red handed, there's no punishment for stealing a bicycle. The police have no interest in assisting you in retrieving your stolen property if you're able to track it down. Your best bet if you find your stolen bike on craigslist is to pretend to meet to buy it, ask to "try it out" and then ride it home.
You can watch videos of people sitting down with a hacksaw in broad daylight on a busy street and spending 15 minutes sawing through a bike lock without anyone even bothering to stop or call them out. Stealing a bike is pretty much like jaywalking. It's technically illegal and if you do it egregiously enough you might get a slap on the wrist or a stern talking to, but no one's going to give you any real consequence about it.
The interventions that work: that which aim to stop activities that violate the consent of others. For instance, drunk driving may kill other non-consenting people and bullying harms other non-consenting persons.
Interventions that don't work: that which restrict the freedom of individuals to do what they like without harming others. Drugs, alcohol etc are surely examples of this.
What exactly does that mean? Will an intervention to stop theft work, and get rid of all the theft?
I also feel like talking about the consent of others is a lot more vague than people act like it is. Does abortion violate the consent of others? Depends on if you count a fetus as "others". Does animal abuse violate the consent of others? Depends on if you count animals as "others". Does drug abuse violate the consent of others? Depends on if you count your future self who doesn't want to do drugs but has no choice because of an addiction as "others".
Well not all drunk driving has stopped yet. Not everyone has stopped bullying. Hence, by your standards, these are failed policies too.
My point is that drunk driving and bullying, much like theft, have been criminalized. That has reduced its frequency appreciably in places with law enforcement. If these three things were not criminalized, all of them would be much more prevalent almost everywhere in the world.
Abortion, animal rights etc are currently stuck in a murky moral battle. However, in so far as animals and fetuses can be defined to be "other sentient individuals", their prevalence is indeed decreasing. Hence, this adds to my point about liberal policies largely succeeding and spreading with time. Everyone who wants to eat animals and abort fetuses argues that these cannot be thought of as "others"
> Will an intervention to stop theft work, and get rid of all the theft?
Arguably we already have that I imagine the level of theft would be much higher if it wasn't for universal moral disapproval
Bully and drunk driving are bad. Premarital sex is super cool. Drugs are pretty cool. The difference is clear.
No bias in asking people years after a PR campaign has taken place whether the successful ones were about cooler things than the unsuccessful ones?
Sex and Drugs produce Dopamine no matter what. Bullying does for the bully, but likely only for bystanders if enjoy watching somebody be bullied, which is exactly what a PR campaign can fix.
Drunk Driving doesn't seem particularly dopaministic, so a PR campaign would similarly have less resistance
I think it could be argued that bullying is part of community, group cohesion, and social norms.
Sure but that's still, to my knowledge, not as direct as a dopamine hit from sex or drugs
It seems plausible to me that there could’ve been a time when drunk driving was cool, since among teens both driving and being drunk seem to be “cool”
But drunk driving just *is* drugs.
Drunk driving is drugs *plus* driving. The dopamine comes from the drugs; no one says "Wow, I really want to go driving while I'm drunk." If no one positively wants to do it and the alternatives are easy enough (staying at the bar/party longer, having a designated driver) then no one will do it.
Both of the alternatives you mention involve someone intentionally abstaining from drugs while in a drug den.
In a world where driving is how you get everywhere, drunk driving is just the consequence of drinking when you're at drinking places. In a world where people have good options for how to get from one place to another, I would agree that it's more than just choosing to drink when in the place for drinking. (And I would guess that Lyft/Uber have helped on this.)
There's a pretty big difference between total abstinence forever and agreeing to rotate as a designated driver in a group of five, so you're not allowed to drink once every five times you go to a bar. The latter is clearly a lot more palatable even if you love alcohol. Plus, it's not all that uncommon that at least one person in a friend group doesn't love alcohol, or is pregnant or in training or otherwise abstaining for one reason or another already. The campaign to be a designated driver normalized going to a bar anyway even if you have no intention to drink, opening up the possibility for people who can't, won't, or don't want to drink to hang out with all their drunk friends anyway, and even perform a positive public duty while doing so.
There is a pretty strong dislike among normal people to be the odd one out. It goes against human nature.
And hanging out with drunk people while being sober tends to suck.
Hitting on drunk people when sober is sometimes more successful than hitting on drunk people when drunk or hitting on sober people when sober. Whether that is a good reason to hang out with drunk people while sober is left as an exercise for the reader.
Regarding #12, I'm very disappointed that the map ignores exclaves. Most significantly, it ignores how the Old and New Worlds are joined at French Guinea, which is a full part of France. Also, Spain borders Morocco, and the Netherlands borders France (in the Caribbean). These points would hugely change the diagram.
And how can a topological map ignore Königsberg?
The creator made an updated version with exclaves (as well as with a few mistakes fixed)! It's at the bottom of this: https://tafc.space/qna/the-topologists-world-map/
Direct image link: https://tafc.space/wp-content/uploads/qna/topologists-world-map/dark-labelled-2048x2048.png
* exclaves that introduce borders between countries that otherwise wouldn't have a border, at any rate.
Thanks for the link.
I'm still disappointed that he has exclaves as bubbles rather than forcing them to connect to their main country. If you're going to run with topology, go all the way!
It seems to be a fair solution, given that topologically, the exclaves are separated from each of the countries' main areas.
Re #13. I think there is a huge and fatal flaw in Matt Shapiro's lockdown analysis.
> In the end, there are two kinds of people when it comes to COVID restrictions:
> The people who are going to do what they think is appropriate regardless of government mandates
> The people who wanted to be less careful than they were being, but were coerced by government rules into being more careful
> I think group 2 is a really small group.
However this ignores two vital parts of lockdown (I'm typing from a UK perspective).
The first is that lockdown was very very effective to get businesses to change their behaviour. Even if you wanted to be less careful, and were willing to break government rules, you can't go to the pub if the pubs were shut. I think the number of people who stayed home because there was nothing to go out for is large enough to have an impact on epidemic spread.
The second is the furlough scheme and other forms of government support. I think a very large group of people would want to be more cautious than their financial situation allows them to be. When the government steps in with a support package their behaviour shifts to the amount of caution they want.
Another effect was allowing people to not go into work whose boss would have made them otherwise. If I work at a restaurant and my boss tells me that I have to go in or I'm fired, then I'm either forced to be less careful or I'm out of a job. This was obviously more impactful at the very beginning when more restaurants and stores were closed, but it's still having a large effect with office jobs.
This also has an effect on safety precautions like mask-wearing. If the government doesn't say everyone has to wear a mask, then some bosses will say that you can't wear a mask, especially in customer facing positions. If the government does say that you have to wear a mask, then the boss has to allow people to be cautious.
Yeah. On a moral level I really really don't like the idea of the ability to sheltering from a pandemic being a luxury only people with the right kind of job can take.
It might be possible to come up with some voluntary furlough scheme where the people could optionally work or furlough. But that would be really really hard. You could imagine the owner of a restaurant saying "if I have to go to all the trouble of training up another chef, I may as well keep the one who won't get scared and vanish". Creative dismissal is hard to police at the best of times.
>20: This Twitter thread on delegitimation of the high school...
I'm a long way from high school but hope this is really true. It would be up there with the widespread acceptance of gay rights with things I wanted but never expected to see in my lifetime.
27. "So when he got to the gospels, he assumed that they actually happened sequentially: that Jesus was in a sort of Groundhog Day time loop in which he experienced slightly different versions of the same set of events four different times, dying at the end of each version. (I guess it would make sense that final loop was John, which is significantly different from the other three.)"
This is really wonderful. When I was a devout Catholic teenager, I got very into the theological niche of literary analysis of the Gospels, trying to trace back the hypothetical common sources that Matthew, Mark & Luke drew from based on which events in the life of Jesus which they do & do not have in common. Experiencing those synchronicities & recurrences from a naive reader's point of view in a _Rashomon_-like way, particularly once you get to the very different account of John, would be enormous fun.
Sorry, meant to include a link.
https://www.thesciencefaith.com/sources-of-the-gospels/
Yeah, this story doesn't quite make sense though. Did they think all the people in Chronicles were reincarnated, too? Did they think the Jews left Israel a bunch of times in the psalms? Wandered through the Wilderness once in each book of the Pentateuch?
You are underestimating the importance of the phrase "That's above my pay grade". You & I might feel compelled to investigate contradictions in a holy text, and indeed I've always had sympathy for religious traditions which have a commitment to argument & debate about the meaning of God's word, like Rabbinic Judaism, but traditions like these are more the exception than the rule.
The last time I was in an evangelical church was for the baptism of one of my cousins. One of the readings was Genesis 3. Now I'm not a believer anymore, but I remembered enough of my Bible to recognize that the person reading skipped one of the most interesting verses in the entire book, Genesis 3:22.
And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”
That immediately calls into question the idea that there's a fundamental difference in kind between humans & divine beings. My favorite cousin and I beelined for the bookshop after the end of the service to make sure we had remembered correctly and that the leader had just plain ignored such an inconvenient statement. There were no Bibles in the pews, which I found particularly funny because it was a Lutheran church.
Once you have already accepted that there was a day in the history of the Earth where the sun stopped in the middle of the sky because Joshua commanded it, so that the Israelites would have enough daylight to beat the Amorites, then everything else is small potatoes. You can talk yourself into anything at that point.
https://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don_stewart/don_stewart_625.cfm
I disagree... Sort of the same rules as science fiction: if something "impossible" happens and everyone in the narrative acknowledge it as impossible / a miracle it has a very different texture than if something impossible happens and no one seems to notice or care.
Right, but the thing about contemporary Christians is that their narrative either has to convince you that miracles are still happening, e.g. Our Lady of Medugorje, or has to explain why miracles stopped happening. I have had an idea for a short story about this for a while now but I need to read more Emmanuel Swedenborg before I'm ready to write it.
Another reason that verse is interesting: It puts to bed the idea that the serpent lied at all.
The serpent said some true things. "You will not surely die" was still a lie, though.
I mean, if you want to ignore the plain meaning of the phrase that pretty much anyone would understand from it, sure. And if we ignore that they had no idea what death was. Or why it would be bad. Or why it would be bad to disobey. Or....
They hadn't ever died, but they surely had seen other things die.
It is indeed a fascinating verse. What is the tree of life even doing there? It is mentioned at 2:9 but otherwise plays no role in the story. 2:16 implies that the humans were free to eat of it earlier, but in 3:23 they have to be expelled from Eden to avoid the possibility. If they hadn't eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, would they have died or not?
Also, who is this "us" that man has now become like? (In Christian tradition possibly the Trinity, but certainly not so understood in the original context.)
At one level the answer is that the story has been borrowed from Babylonian mythology, which was polytheistic, and the tree of life is presumably analogous to the apples of Iðunn or the Hesperides, but that raises more questions. Why has J done such a poor job at editing the story? Why didn't J just do as the lector at your service and omit 3:22?
For that matter, why did J need to borrow a Babylonian story? Did the Israelites not have their own creation myth? Perhaps they did (cf Psalms 74:12-17, 89:5-14?) but it was somehow unsuitable for J's purpose?
"Also, who is this "us" that man has now become like?"
I've seen the polytheism explanation. I've also seen a claim that the Lord is referring to Himself in the plural, like an English-speaking king.
There are only three examples of God speaking in the plural in the Hebrew bible, all in Genesis, at 1:26, 3:22 and 11:7. Some people think that Genesis 1-11 originated as a separate 'block' (although that idea seems to be less popular than it used to be), in which case it could possibly be an idiosyncratic usage of the original author, but the more parsimonious explanation seems to me to be that the references suppose a council of gods. There is a suggestion due to R E Friedman that there was a council of gods until the Babel incident, but these other gods later died as recorded in Psalm 82, but as with many of that authors suggestions it relies on a strange selectivity of skepticism.
He was confused by other repetitions, yes.
Here's the story as it appears in the Jonathan Rose book. The part after the paragraph break is indented, indicating Rose is quoting Carter himself.
-------------
The notion that there can be different versions of the same story – suggesting that no version is absolutely true – is again an acquired literary convention. Growing up in Colchester with access to few books besides an illustrated Bible and some children's chapbooks, laborer's son Thomas Carter (b. 1792) had no opportunity to learn that. Therefore he not only read Revelations [sic] literally: he assumed that the books of Kings and Chronicles were
"unconnected narratives of two distinct series of events; and also, that the four Gospels were consecutive portions of the history of Jesus Christ, so that I supposed there had been four crucifixions, four resurrections, and the like. I was, indeed, sometimes perplexed by the apparently repeated occurrence of events so nearly resembling each other; nor could I perceive the exact design or bearing of these events; but I knew no one of whom I could ask for the needed explanation."
Was there no priest he could have asked?
I'm afraid I don't believe it. Multiple versions of the same story are commonplace in pre-literate cultures. The very fact that one of the few books his family possessed was an illustrated Bible shows that were people around with at least some familiarity with Christianity, who would have been able to explain that the crucifixion and resurrection only occurred once.
He may not have thought to ask, he might have just thought his understanding was correct.
Having read the whole book, the point surrounding this anecdote is that new (to the audience) media are confusing because people don't understand the conventions around them. There are similar anecdotes of people not understanding theater, e.g., thinking someone being stabbed on stage was really being murdered.
I can believe that the same person who understood this concept in general could be confused by the Bible.
I had very little exposure to religion until I was sent to a private Christian school in 8th grade for academic reasons (they had an adjoining high school where I could take geometry). There was a mandatory Bible studies class, and I was similarly confused by the gospels.
BlackMirror has an episode on #14. Which is terrifying, as most BM episodes are, of course.
re #15 - even if the cost-benefit ratio isn't quite right for current preterm-birth prevention strategies, maybe this research topic should be of much greater interest to the rationalist community? Premature births are associated with a 12-point IQ drop and a host of other behavioral problem. There is a ton of excitement (not to mention venture capital funding) devoted to polygenic screening (maximum IQ benefit estimated at 3 points), where are the start-ups seeking to develop safe interventions to prevent preterm birth? Are there rationalists studying this topic?
I suppose Greg Cochran & Paul Ewald aren't "rationalists", but they pointed out lots of what they think of as low-hanging fruit decades ago, and which the former at least is now pointing to as the cause of pre-term births. There was an article in The Atlantic on their ideas, and Nobelist Barry Marshall has voiced similar ideas, but not much follow-up since.
But polygenic screening ties in with a ton of other potential uses.
>one of the proposals is to plant honeypot bikes in easily-watchable areas and arrest the people who steal them until maybe eventually San Franciscans get the message that bike-stealing can have negative consequences
Another unfortunate consequence of the reaction to George Floyds killing, along with the arson and theft:
There were a spate of carjackings in the months that followed. Black teenagers were grabbing peoples car keys and wallets and phones and going for joyrides. Usually whacking the victim with a pistol and occasionally saying "Black live matter" to victims as they drove off.
Hey kids, being a knuckle head is not going to help matters.
It got bad enough for the Minneapolis police to use honeypot cars and drones to catch the culprits.
This crap seems to have died down but it was one more element in the hit parade of misfortunes of 2020. Pandemic, lockdown, rioting and then this.
A year I am very glad to leave behind.
The carjackings have not stopped, they are still pretty rampant.
I think people just walking into stores, taking a bunch of stuff, walking out and then selling it on the sidewalk is still pretty common.
> Black teenagers were grabbing peoples car keys and wallets and phones and going for joyrides. Usually whacking the victim with a pistol and occasionally saying "Black live matter" to victims as they drove off.
I suspect that this is hyperbole, but I'm interested in being proven wrong. I remember there was one notable article that featured someone being carjacked at gunpoint and reflecting that calling the cops was racist (after he did, indeed, call the cops). Can you provide evidence that tblack teenager theives were *usually* pistol-whipping, et c?
Let me say at the outset that watching George Floyd die under the knee of Derek Chauvin was an agonizing gut punch for me too. I live across the Mississippi in Saint Paul.
I felt the same anger as the thousands that were demonstrating in protest. I might have joined them if not for COVID.
During the demonstrations we watched the events unfold in real time on local television channels. The protest degenerated into arson and theft. The governor of Minnesota came on television and suggested that people in our area pack a go bag. It was a chilling experience.
The carjackings were going on in Minneapolis and Saint Paul for several months. It had the trappings of a rather perverse juvenile fad.
I almost certain of the "Black Lives Matter" taunt on exit. A final FY to the victim. Reading it in what we still call the Saint Paul Pioneer Press - its name has change in some print media merger - was a low point in the 2020 nightmare.
I am going off my awful memories from months ago so I'm not sure a majority of victims were hit with the gun, many of the victims may have given up their wallet and gun at the sight of a pistol. Let me do a little Googling of local media outlets to see what I can come up.
https://www.twincities.com/2021/02/17/carjackings-rising-in-number-violence-in-twin-cities-most-suspects-are-teens/
https://patch.com/minnesota/saintpaul/saint-paul-police-respond-back-back-carjackings-robberies
I do remember reading that story and thinking "okay, you don't want the kid to get a criminal record and all the rest that comes with being picked up by the cops, but do you really think letting a teenager run around with a gun on the streets is a good idea? Because he's going to shoot someone or get shot himself, with all the other teens running around with guns on the street. In that case isn't it better that you call the cops so at least he's hauled in and has the gun taken away?"
It's "ruined life because arrested" versus "ruined life because dead because running with a gang".
Source for #12 The Topologist's Map of the world
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/gxwn5r/oc_the_topologists_map_of_the_world_a_map_showing/
Thanks, added!
It doesn't seem to be added?
I don't know what's going on with Substack's editing function. Should be added now.
I have this fantasy that substack's lack of comment editing somehow extends to posts, due to some californian tech sector-style private philosophical theory that the ceo doesn't want to admit is wrong. Please don't make that fantasy untenable :D
Private philosophical theory makes sense! It's all about authenticity, you see, and giving us plebs an editing button would only mean we self-censor and prune the natural genuine stream-of-consciousness take in order to curate it by artificial standards of what is acceptable discourse.
Run wild, run free, comments on Substack! 🤣
Facebook meets that standard. You can edit your comments, but there's an edit history.
The creator of the map also has blogpost explaining it. Includes version of the map without names as a little challenge for people (to fill in the names) https://tafc.space/qna/the-topologists-world-map/
Regarding 23, Chris Morris' most recent film, _The Day Shall Come_, which I haven't yet seen, is on precisely this theme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_Shall_Come
I'm not sure I'm on board with Balajis' tweet on space, space travel is not an electrical appliance. There are some good reasons to believe that we could see widely available commercial space access in the coming decades, but 'space travel is like a dishwasher' isn't one of them.
Space travel is more like air travel.
Air travel used to be reserved for the brave, then for the rich and by now it's a reasonable option for the yearly vacation of a middle class family.
Space travel is now at the point where it switches from the brave to the rich.
I agree, there are lots of really good examples of comparable expensive/challenging/energy intensive things becoming more commonplace. I was amused to see that tweet not bothering with any of the more comparable stuff.
23. As a liberal, you'd may think identifying "types of people" that may commit crimes, even though they didn't actually commit any crimes and their typing is done by the government - who is never mistaken in segregating people into types and figuring out which type is evil - and then spending the whole power of federal government into ensnaring them into some situation that could be presented as setting up for a crime - as a liberal, you may think this completely abhorrent. Or maybe not, "liberal" means so many things nowdays... Sometimes it means "types of people that government says are evil should definitely be jailed by any means necessary".
I'm curious what the reaction would be if they were targeting black gang members with this kind of entrapment. Do they?
I'm pretty sure they do. The police do drug arrests this way all the time - i.e. they get some narco and tell him they let him go if he makes five of his friends to buy drugs from an undercover cop. Of course this costs them nothing since they'd catch the same narco at the same place trying to score drugs anyway.
There are also prominent examples of FBI trying to frame innocent people - like the botched antrax mailings investigation or the case where they tried to frame a Chinese professor. So no reason to assume black gangs would be excepted, if the feds needed it. Of course, it also depends on what higher-ups want to see - one wouldn't concoct a scenario that wouldn't make higher-ups happy, so if higher-ups didn't ask for gang arrests, then there's no reason to harvest them.
Oh and the reaction would be pretty obvious - "FBI is racist, as we always said!"
Obviously, they do? There's obvious historical examples at the federal level like infiltration of the Black Panthers and the assassination of Fred Hampton, and local things like the Rampart Scandal and MOVE incident. But even today, at the federal level, far and away the group most targeted by the FBI in its schemes to subtly encourage people sympathetic to terrorist causes to become actual terrorists so they can be arrested is American Muslims. Not exactly black, but closer to that than white.
The joke about the KKK is that half their membership is FBI plants.
The reason we've had so few KKK terrorist cells busted up is because the sting operations "worked", for that value of "worked": if you go to a KKK meeting and suggest some light terrorism, they'll assume that you are a Fed.
This is one of the reasons I tend to support sting operations in theory (even though I'd want serious reforms because how they happen in reality often causes lots of shit).
I find Scott's credulousness on this one a bit disturbing. How many not-smart people does he still know? I mean, lets just get this out of the way: He thinks these people were, more or less, duped by Trump into being Trump voters. Right? Well why wouldn't he believe they could be duped by a smart, charismatic, decently good looking, Iraq war vet (supposed to be their ingroup, but he's like the BEST of the ingroup) into becoming kidnappers?
Its not like these people even had any idea how to get the plot going without the informant and other agents. They had no plans, hadn't even done their "trainings" without him and his financial support and organization. It seems to me that, without all this prodding all you had was a particularly edgy fortnight chat group.
I feel like the situation is worse than that. We now know that this is exactly what happened - these people were essentially roped in by the FBI agents, which invented the plan, found the gullible dupes among the most stupid and vocal arguers online, organized and financed everything, and basically pushed their reluctant marks around until they got enough checkpoints to make the charges.
But Scott seems to be OK with all that because the people charged is "sort of people" that might do that kind of stuff - i.e. the extreme outgroup - so it's ok to do things like that to them, if they aren't guilty in this one, they'd be guilty in something else, or could be, or should be. The wrong kind of people needs to be gotten off the streets, by any means necessary, because, you know, they're the wrong kind of people.
I would expect, from an extremely smart and educated liberal in 2021, to know where such logic is leading to. And yet...
For sure. The real law enforcement priority is finding a person who is like the character their informant was pretending to be, but is actually real (if such a person exists). Because that person, if real, could radicalized a dozen of these groups and disappear into the night, or have them all execute a plan at once (Bin Laden) and be out of the FBI's reach. But that is, like, actual work, so better to just dupe the rubes of the outgroup and throw chum to the press I guess?
Put me in the permanent lockdown camp! I certainly don't need government enforcement to help me live my newfound joyously hermit lifestyle, but some social buy in certainly helps pull it off fairly effortlessly. Lockdowns have reminded me about how much I care about social wellbeing in the abstract, and how uninterested I am in interacting with my fellow social beings in the here and now. The emotional comfort masks give me are fairly similar to noise cancelling headphones, except without cutting out the environmental sensory cues that are important for moving around without getting bumped into by moving objects. I am not only in my own world, but I am a safe 6ft (really, I prefer a nice, spacious 20ft bubble) from any other stranger that I'd really just rather not interact with, pandemic or no.
On the one hand, I too am thriving under lockdown conditions. On the other hand, some people are so strange and weird that they actually *like* interacting with others, having friends, meeting people, going out to pubs and restaurants, and going on foreign holidays.
So it would be very mean to keep them locked up, the way I think it is very mean to keep pets like cats and dogs locked inside your house all day.
My dogs sleep until 2pm and shave months off their lives in uncontrolled anxiety anytime anyone rings the doorbell, so I think they're comfortable with permanent social distance too. I certainly am not interested in punishing others though. I also like hanging out with friends, particularly in my backyard, or theirs, or at a park meetup with kids and don't find the restrictions conflict with any of that. Since March 2020, I have yet to find a covid regulation that has actively prevented me from doing something I was otherwise compelled to do, even in LA County, where things have been "strict." My inner introvert just really blossomed into something I'd like to keep.
"My inner introvert just really blossomed into something I'd like to keep."
My workplace officially closed on 12th March 2020 and I've been working from home since and every time our government extends "yeah we're not going back to normal just yet, stay at home if you possibly can", I'm *delighted*.
My routine goes something like:
General day - Hey, I put my slippers on after I got up, that counts as getting dressed?
Awaiting delivery/post/someone coming to the door - Suppose I'd better put socks on with those slippers
Have to GET DRESSED ENTIRELY and GO OUTSIDE my house in to town: I HAVEN'T WORN SHOES SINCE OCTOBER. THE IMPOSITION!!!!
And what is your opinion of all the factory workers, farm workers, warehouse workers, logistics workers, and delivery workers who are dropping off packages and groceries on your doorstep? And the workmen who repair your dwelling. And who built it in the first place? And the people who maintain all the manufacturing and logistics that enable them to do so.
I await.
I'm not sure I understand your question. My opinion of them as people? Presumably it is ok to not know personally all of the individuals who I am tangentially connected to in our global supply chain world... My personal interactions with the folks who hold occupations you call out is generally limited, as it was pre-pandemic, so my opinion of them is not very robust, beyond general human welfare concerns and ideological concerns. I'm not sure if the point you are trying to get at is that my hermit life is supported by lots of people that have to interact with others and don't have my privilege, or that I am actually interacting with others but just not recognizing it for assumed class differences. Feel free to elaborate.
The later points. Your "hermitage" is supported by a lot of people who can't so you can. And efforts to mandate, enforce, or even socially nudge lockdown make their lifes much worse, for the sake of your blissfully smug hermitage.
Turn into a hermit if you want. I understand, it's my nature too. But being "pro lockdown" for the sake of "I like being alone" is breathtakingly stupid.
Not sure I see it that way, but I am not sure that you are persuadable, given your tone so I will leave it be, and continue my excessive tipping practices and creating the demand that employs folks you're apparently representing.
I think you're being a little facetious, but you're free to stay a hermit forever, but please don't provide any support for mandating this for the rest of us any longer than strictly necessary.
I think this is as good a place as any to leave this comment. Please correct me if not the case.
As a long time reader, I'm surprised to see how little Scott now posts outside an increasingly narrowing Overton window of what is acceptable. This has affected how much I read here. The content is still high quality, but it's less bold, interesting and novel because it's competing with the thousands of other smart people who are operating in the same window. Now especially there's opportunity if not need for people to fearlessly challenge and increasingly hegemonic orthodoxy. Unfortunately (from my perspective) Scott no longer seems to be interested in that challenge. Or perhaps (more charitably?) his own views have changed to situate him within the orthodoxy he once critiqued.
Is this implying I should be more anti-woke, or something else?
I'm implying that you should be more controversial, not necessarily anti (or anti woke). But be more willing to take on/up controversial topics that might get you in hot water with the NYT again. Easy for me to say I know. But let me pitch this proposal positively:
Your post I Can Tolerate Anything But the Outgroup was one of my favorites and most influential for me. I don't consider it to be anti anybody since it pointed out a phenomena across the political spectrum. It perhaps hit hardest for liberals because of their positive identity as tolerant. I found it fair without being anodyne. That to me was a unique gift with your blog for those kind of topics - you are able to not pull punches or get bogged down in boring superficial bothsidesism while also avoiding equally tedious partisanship. That, along with epistemological transparency, has earned you an increasingly unique non-tribal trust that I think you could leverage to take on controversial topics that rarely get good treatment these days.
For example, trying to navigate the most likely point of truth between climate alarmism and denial, accounting for the sometimes baffling confluence of science and advocacy. Or group differences. Or woke topics, including trying to steel men some of the claims. Or looking at what's going on with the seemingly growing enforcement of or trend towards conformity in science.
I understand you are well within your rights to tell me to f off and start my own blog.
I disagree with this request on the basis that those (and other "controversial" topics) are over-examined already. Scott did what you asked recently and tried to sort out a hot politicized question (whether COVID lockdowns worked). I found it mildly interesting, but nowhere near proportionally interesting to the effort it took him. In his postmortem on writing that post, Scott had the below to say about "pulling sideways" ideas. THAT stuff I am 100% here for. I can get "red good blue bad or blue good red bad?" elsewhere. Can't avoid getting it elsewhere, even.
>Over the past ~year, I've seen endless terrible arguments over whether we should have more or less lockdown. People asked me to write a post on it. It's something I personally was wondering about and wanted to write a post on. And the dynamics of media - where I get more clicks if I write about things more people are interested in - incentivize me to write a post about it.
>But the smartest people I talked to kept - is "derailing" the right word? - derailing onto more interesting and important pull-the-rope-sideways plans. . . I felt that some of the experts I talked to were trying really hard to get this across, and I was asking "Yes, that's all nice and well, but blue state good red state bad? Or red state good blue state bad?"
I don't know. To me we're slipping further and further into a world where only acceptable topics and opinions are allowed. This is increasingly enforced by censorship. I find it deeply disturbing. It should be just at these moments when we speak out more, not less. Unfortunately Scott has chosen less.
Scott was one of the people who opened my eyes to the fact that there's a reasonable world outside the Overton window back in around 2015 or so. That taboos aren't necessarily evil and inherited orthodoxies not always right. I wish for more of this counterculture intellectualism, not less. Anyway, I'm repeating myself so I'll stop having hopefully made my point abundantly clear.
I’m always mystified when I hear the worldview that there is less tolerance for heterodox opinions today, or more censorship.
Imagine going into a bar 50 years ago and saying that women are just as capable as men of being CEO or president. Or that two men should be able to marry. Or that there might be some silver linings to communism.
“Counterculture intellectualism” certainly existed then, but it was isolated to a few small geographic areas and not at all welcome to the mainstream even there.
And censorship! Remember when you had to find a publisher or broadcaster willing to affirmatively produce and distribute your opinions? The default state was being “censored” and you had to convince someone to spend money to distribute speech.
Certainly there are aspects of today’s world that are not as intellectually free as I would like, but it’s hard to see an argument that the US is less intellectually free today than 20/50/100 years ago.
I think we're thinking on different time scales. Are we more or less intellectually free than two years ago? To me the answer is incontrovertibly the latter.
You could take on age of consent and related issues. It is, in my view, one of the subjects our culture is crazy on. We've been having a thread touching on that in DSL.
That's a great controversial topic choice, have you written on it anywhere?
https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/search?q=%22age+of+consent%22
I discuss it a little, mostly in a historical context, at:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,4007.msg134764/topicseen.html#new
I don't think you should be more "anti-woke", since "anti-woke" points of view are mostly just cheap and obvious.
What I really like to see is when you manage to take a three hundred thousand foot view of an issue which transcends the usual divides so that both the "woke" and "anti-woke" points of view recede into the distance and can be more clearly seen in a much broader context. Your best essays don't argue for one point of view versus another, nor attempt to adjudicate between two points of view, but instead take a step way back from the debate and ask "What's so special about these two points of view that cause them to be so heavily populated in this vast many-dimensional point-of-view space?"
He doesn't post much here, period. As for controversial content, he stopped that more than six years ago.
I don't know how you can read the last couple of weeks of posts and think "Yep, there's someone hewing to a strict orthodoxy" unless what you actually mean is "he's not giving enough time to my particular hobby horses"
The "...it just felt too weird and transgressive to focus on something authorities weren't even talking about" bit in the second lockdown post was at least suggestive of this, and not in a my-particular-hobby-horse sort of way. But claims that Scott has completely stopped writing controversial posts is taking that way too far.
27. The real haymaker here is that these Brits didn't know fiction existed at all. "Ghost stories, highwayman stories, fairy tales, Paradise Lost, and Daniel Defoe were all equally credible. [...]'I had no idea at the time I read Robinson Crusoe that there were such things as novels, works of fiction, in existence.'" These quotes from The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 2nd Edition, page 96. Also mentioned is that they believed in a literal Pilgrim's Progress, Jack the Giant Killer, and Robin Hood, and "contrasted their probability with that of other wondrous things which I had read in books that 'it were a sin to disbelieve.'"
Sure, why wouldn't they? Stewart Lee's recent radio documentary, "Unreliable Narrator", goes into these questions, focusing on Geoffrey of Monmouth creating the myth of King Arthur out of whole cloth in the 12th century, for which he was criticized by contemporaries, none of whose names we now remember because they were much more boring than the guy who created King Arthur.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000wynk
I actually have a British in-law who, to my surprise, genuinely believed in King Arthur. I assumed he was uniquely misinformed, but maybe not.
In what sense?
I, too, believe there was a ruler named Arthur who fought the Saxons with unusual success until he died probably around the Battle of Camlann.
It's not the mainstream view, but there are serious historians who believe in King Arthur. They don't believe *most* of the stories, certainly not the magic swords, but there might have been a real British king named Arthur.
As a publishing historian of the relevant period (my publications not my age) I'd say the mainstream view is that Arthur was a real person, probably from what is now southern Scotland or northern England, but very few historians would argue he was actually a king rather than a warleader (his earliest title is the Latin Dux, which broadly translates that way). And beyond his existence we know nothing till the late-sixth century indicators that Arthur's legend was developing. Which to put it in context is still way more than we know of almost any other Briton of the period 410-560, excepting a few churchmen.
Novels really weren't that common prior to Robinson Crusoe (though other forms of fiction were).
The bullying link doesn't seem to work. It seems to just link to an individual tweet.
Same here, I only see a tweet and a single reply from the same author.
#2: I'm glad that there is some evidence that those survey results are ~nonsense, I've seen lots of people claiming it confirms our status as a nation of curtain-twitchers but it just doesn't seem plausible to me. Like sure, I can believe there are a significant number of boomers who hate fun and want a 10pm curfew. But that's the one with the lowest level of support! "Having a 10 day quarantine after returning from abroad" as a policy even post-covid seems obviously insupportable, and I think that's enough to conclude there must be something dodgy about all of them.
"Joe Kent, a Republican running for Washington’s 3rd congressional district, has said that “the government must open jobs to those with non-traditional educational backgrounds”
I am sceptical about this, and you know why? Because this says precisely nothing, it's pure politician for "we're already doing this but if I make a big splashy announcement I can sound like this is a new initiative driven by me".
Out of curiosity, I went looking for civil service jobs in Washington State. And here's a very typical entry level one (the Irish equivalent is Grade III): https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/washington?sort=PostingDate%7CDescending
"Office Assistant Three (OA3)
Full-Time, Non-Permanent
Cedar Creek Corrections Center (CCCC)
The ideal candidate will be an accomplished office professional who has a proven track record of establishing new processes for an organization or new work environment within an organization. Someone who exercises sound judgement, able to problem solve, thinks critically, and overall possess excellent communication skills in their administrative wheelhouse.
Consideration: As this presents a “foot-in-the-door” type of opportunity to explore state employment, your excellent work performance may provide additional work opportunities as they become available.
Qualifications
REQUIRED:
High School diploma or GED
AND
Two (2) years of progressive clerical experience in the following competencies:
Proficient computer skills - including basic skills in Microsoft Outlook and Word.
Basic proficiency level with Adobe Acrobat Pro and Microsoft Excel.
Highly organized multi-tasker who work wells in a fast paced environment.
PREFERRED/DESIRED QUALICATIONS:
Six (6) months or more experience using copy machines and scanners.
Professional work experience using OnBase or a similar scanning/archiving system.
Professional level Intermediate proficiency with Adobe Acrobat Pro and Microsoft Excel.
Professional WA State experience archiving and destroying records utilizing the WA state records retention guidelines.
Professional work experience with SharePoint."
This is fairly basic requirements stuff that I've seen myself in similar civil/public service jobs in Ireland. There's no mention of a degree, because this is (as they say above) a 'foot in the door' position. What matters is experience in a similar role. And if they get a ton of applicants for this, then yeah, anyone with a degree or more experience or "worked in the civil service before" will be preferentially treated just for winnowing out purposes.
Now, a position like this will let you work your way up the scale to a certain point. But if you want to advance beyond that point, then yeah - you *will* need a degree.
Here's more basic, clerical level, "don't need a degree but you will need at least two years work experience in a similar role" for Washing State University: https://hrs.wsu.edu/clerical-series/
And all this is before even touching the civil service exams which are the next step between "submit application" and "get called for interview".
Here's a company trying to flog test prep for civil service exams: https://www.jobtestprep.com/civil-service-exam-wa
"Why is scoring high on WA State civil service exams so important? In most agencies in Washington State, only the top ten highest scorers are considered eligible for job vacancies; the other candidates who pass but fall beneath this ranking may be considered for future openings.
JobTestPrep’s team of experts has worked hard to ensure that our civil service practice tests will give you the tools, knowledge, and skills you need to successfully pass your exam."
Yeah, they're trying to sell a product, but this is standard procedure: you advertise a position, call people in to take the test, form a panel, and interview/recruit off that (I've done similar myself).
So the bould aspiring Representative is re-inventing the wheel, as it were. If he gets elected and if he gets a resolution passed, it will simply be one more piece of nuisance paper that the Department sent out, where the civil service reads it, says "yeah we're already doing that, Joe" and ignores it. What he is doing is the equivalent of "teach coal miners to code". I was on an upskilling training scheme a few years back and there was one guy on it who was an ex-butcher (repetitive strain injury in his hands meant he had to give that up). He'd been sent on a "computer skills" course for re-training and inclining him to a new job, and he had absolutely zero interest in office work or clerical work or computer work. He was just doing the course in order to comply with unemployment benefit rules until he could find work for himself that he wanted to do.
A lot of Representative Kent's good intentions are going to lead the same way: people who don't want to do office work being pointed in the direction in order to fill the requirement that "the government open jobs to those with non-traditional educational backgrounds". And as you can see, you may not need college degree but you do need to have stuck it out to high school graduation and picked up clerical computer skills as well.
"Further, I will set aside one third of the jobs on my congressional staff for those who do not have a traditional educational background, and one-third for those from the district. "
Sweet Heart of Jesus, Font of Love and Mercy, I hope he does *not* get this through. Have you any idea of the amount of nepotism, favouritism, and pull that will be involved if this is passed? 'Jobs for the boys' won't be in it! And then when the one-third *can't* be filled because the potential candidates do not have the necessary job skills (not the paper degree, the skills to do the job), then HR will fall back on the usual applicants and this is just one more hoop to jump through before filling the position.
Do I sound cynical? Yes, because I've *been* that minor minion (Grade III, Acting) who has seen the result of politicians making grand announcements like this and layering on an *additional* step on the ladder to add atop the pile of regulations already in place around hiring for government jobs.
I like the bit about "six months' experience using copy machines and scanners". That's either far too much, or not nearly enough.
I think that's probably to get around the applicants who are "well I did three weeks' work experience in transition year in an office and I was allowed - carefully supervised - to do some photocopying" and to make sure "you lasted at least six months in a previous job and didn't walk out/get fired" 😁
It's surprising how many derogatory terms originally meant someone living in the countryside. A heathen lives on a heath. A villain lives in a village. A pagan lives in the countryside (pagus).
Whereas people who live in cities are urbane (urbs), civil (civis), and polite (polis). You can sure tell who wrote the dictionaries!
Polite comes from a Latin word meaning 'polished', not from Greek polis.
Also "boorish" originally meant like a peasant or farmer, as in the Dutch word "boer".
And funnily enough the ancient enmity still persists, with flyover country rednecks being ridiculed just as harshly by coastal elites.
Peasant
Re. 20: I caught the shift in reactions to bullying after columbine (I was in middle school at the time), and it kinda checks out.
It used to be I would get the shit kicked out of me (on account of being lightly dusted with autism) every couple weeks, and learned to do the prison thing of always coming back twice as hard to stop it.
Thusly, By then end of elementary school it was such that I would respond immediately with violence if anyone touched me for any reason that I didn't like .
Highlights include getting knocked around by three guys in the locker-room, then finding one latter during recess and beating the shit out of him infront of everyone until he was crying on the ground,
choking a guy mostly unconscious in bus line after school after he jumped me in the library,
and (not my proudest moment) knocking a kid half-way out by smashing him into the railing on the stairs a couple times after he threw shit at me and said something about my momma in math class.
I want to emphasis: these are the highlights, but I was getting into at least one for real knock down drag out fistfight every month.
During all these, the worst punishment I ever received was a bunch of in-school suspension and some anger management classes after BASHING SOMONES HEAD AGAINST A METAL RAILING DIRECTLY INFRONT OF A TEACHER.
I probably got some brownie points with admin. because I wasn't a discipline problem other than getting fights all the time, but this was some serious life-time movie bullshit, and it wasn't just me. I was just the only kid autistic enough to not internalize the pecking order and just suck it up.
This changed real fast after 1999. Immediately after columbine went down, enforcement changed instantly. Part of it was that I had put on 60 pounds by then and went from tall and skinny to a 20" neck, but most of it was incredibly rigorous enforcement of existing rules.
If the teachers found anyone fighting for any reason, they would make your parents come in from work to pick both of you up, which is 20 time the punishment of any amount of suspensions; and repeat offenders actually started getting expelled or suspended for weeks/months.
I really think it's all down to a bunch of kids dying in school all at once on and then ending up in TV, instead of in onesies and twosies after school in private.
I also don't think it had much to do with wokism. Or at most, both wokism and anti-bullying are boosted by a similar concerned over the weak.
#2 lockdown forever poll:
responders likely don't mean this very literally. they're trying to say keep the look down and don't cop out of it with excuses like "COVID is coming is under control and that's the numbers etc"
to illustrate look at Israel. 2 months ago they had practically zero cases, huge percentage of vaccinated. so the reasonable person would say you can open up, open the airport blah blah. this is exactly what these people tell you: do not open up no matter what. Indeed, now in Israel there is a fourth wave thousands of cases every day etc
Re: Botox. What does that say about the condition colloquially known as "resting bitch face"?
Always thought that was a weird term. How else are people's faces supposed to look at rest? A fixed grin would be more unsettling
#2: I misread the chart as "clubbing seals" instead of "sealing clubs" and assumed this was a piece about horrible Canadian seal hunting practices.
#20: I'm not sure if it's campaign, or change in zeitgeist but smoking. Oh boy, in the 2000s we used to smoke in the corridors of the university, in bars, pubs, cafes, restaurants. There were smoking and non-smoking inter-city bus services. I used to have an ashtray on my bedside. It was super normal to smoke inside, and even though being a very smell-sensitive person I was ok with that and even did myself.
8 years ago I quit smoking but even then it was a huge taboo for me to smoke inside. If somebody smoke inside like once a week ago, I'd smell it and hate it. Maybe it was the campaigns that turned me so much, or maybe me for some reason becoming kinda obsessed with cleaning but I see it wasn't only me. Indoor smoking bans from being something that everybody laughed at for being unrealistic to being something that's widely accepted in less than a decade is interesting. By the way the country is Turkey.
I said it about Missouri now I’ll say it about Turkeys. Good for you! BTW Mount Agri Dagi came up as a clue in an old crossword I’m working. I had to look it up. Sorry. :)
#20: one anecdote that surprised me, just today a 15 year old told me that he never really saw bullying in his life.
This surprised me as he's an introvert guy who likes math and programming; the kind I would expect to be picked on at least somewhat. He's gone to the same school (an expensive international school in São Paulo, Brazil) since he was little, it holds awareness campaigns every year which he seemed to feel were unnecessary (but maybe they were effective?).
I'm much older than that and also nerdy and autistic, etc. and I've never seen anything like the kind of bullying you see in fiction.
Also, "Domstack" gave me a great laugh.
Better than Cumstack ;)
Dominican Republic. Easy. Baseball. Dozens of Dominicans have come to the US and gotten very rich playing baseball. They may not return permanently, but they do do things like building fancy houses back on the Island that injects capital into the economic system.
#3 meditation also lack active control studies.
a few studies by Richard Davidson found no effect from meditation (music therapy was the active control) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Richard+davidson+meditation+active+control&btnG=
Speaking of ἔθνος, I'd like to register my extreme displeasure with the etymology of Wales, Galois, Vlachs, Walloon and Rotwelsch.
Derived from the proto-germanic *Walhaz, possibly the name of a celtic tribe also known as the Volcae, it has been used to refer to all sorts of 'foreign' peoples, especially those who speak romance or celtic languages. Can the germanic peoples not think up a better exonym? It's a bit lazy simply calling everyone else the foreigners.
Also Welsh onions, which are Chinese.
Interesting information. Thanks
I had a Vlach woman for a server at a restaurant recently. I her accent sounded Eastern European but not Slavic. I asked what her mother tongue was. She misunderstood at first. “My mother?” staring daggers at me. Then she understood “Oh, my accent. It’s Roma”. She smiled and we got along okay for the rest of the meal. :)
It's probably revenge for all those times various Teutones, Chatti, Alamanni, Lombards, Norsemen, Deutschlanders and Afrikaans were just called Germani/Germanic peoples as if their language were the defining feature of their identity.
Entrapment is a really interesting field of law, and one in which (disclaimer) I am by no means an expert. It's basically the only aspect of criminal law that isn't Constituionalized. That is, almost everything that pertains to criminal procedure has an underlying constitutional right that almost necessarily will result in an effective remedy (such as dismissal of the case, overturn of conviction, release from prison, attachment of jeopardy such that re-prosecution is impossible, or any of them) if they are sufficiently proved up.
Entrapment is different. There's no Constitutional right not to be entrapped. The means it's basically a pure issue for the jury (or grand jury, or even possibly preliminary hearing, which is the equivalent of a grand jury in most states but presided over by a judge). If those governappers want to use that defense, they'll need to make it directly at trial, more or less.
As to whether this is good, I'm on the fence. Crimes vary in both their punishment and the procedure that is due. Misdemeanors are punishable by up to a year in jail, felonies by more than a year, and then there are special classes of felonies in many states with increased ranges/minimums of incarceration when there's violence, sexual violence, guns, drugs, etc. The more minor the offense, and the less punishment possible, reduces the amount of process. For example (and don't quote me on this I'm not a criminal lawyer) jury trials aren't required for misdemeanors punishable by less than 6 months in jail.
I don't see why this framework couldn't be applied to entrapment. As the punishment increases, the constitutionality of entrapment decreases. If it's for a misdemeanor DUI or theft (stealing bikes), sure go for it. If it's for a felony DUI or felony theft, maybe it would depend from case to case (that kind of vagueness could have other issues, both constitutional and in terms of police procedure; that is, would the possibility of having a minor felony conviction thrown out for entrapment make cops more or less likely do it? Because on the other hand, the judge might agree and they might have an easy conviction. I don't know, but I tend to suspect police will do institutionally whatever is maximally bad).
If you're entrapped into committing a violent felony, gun felony, sex felony, death penalty, life imprisonment, 25+ years, sex offender registry, forfeiture of functionally your entire worth, etc., then case dismissed.
Thoughts?
On the comparison Scott made, I think a really big difference is that bikes do actually get stolen in San Francisco on a regular basis, whereas governor, or any political kidnapping happens, approximately never in America (any kidnapping at all, outside of domestic kidnapping where the non-custodial parent takes the kid is really rare).
Yes, I’m sure there are buffoons out there who would be ready to give it a try. But by actually (maybe) generating the plot for some to do so, the FBI was taking something that was not done, and was actually pretty close to unthinkable, and made it something in the news for everyone to think about.
It's a lot easier to solve crimes that you invented in the first place, after all. See Jonathan Wild: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Wild
"Wild exploited a strong public demand for action during a major London 18th-century crime wave in the absence of any effective police force. As a powerful gang-leader himself, he became a master manipulator of legal systems, collecting the rewards offered for valuables which he had stolen himself, bribing prison guards to release his colleagues, and blackmailing any who crossed him. He was consulted on crime by the government, due to his apparently remarkable prowess in locating stolen items and those who had stolen them."
Part of why I don't like these 'honey-pot' schemes is that the British Army/RUC/British intelligence services ran a lot of them in the North during the Troubles, and the results were not savoury. Take the Stakeknife case, where an alleged high-level informer for the British Army was a high-level IRA member in charge of interrogations and executions of informers. Allegations that murders were permitted to go ahead in order that their agent could continue in place and continue funnelling information to them eventually led to an investigation, the result of which was - nobody will be prosecuted:
"Four people, including two former MI5 officers, will not face charges in connection with an investigation into the agent codenamed Stakeknife.
The North’s Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Herron, said on Thursday that decisions not to prosecute had been issued in regard to four individuals who were reported to the Public Prosecution service (PPS) by the Operation Kenova investigation team."
GQ magazine has a lurid story on the whole affair: https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/politics/article/stakeknife-ira-mole
Wikipedia article on same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeknife
"The Guardian" newspaper article after Operation Kenova (the investigation) was completed: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/oct/29/stakeknife-scandal-freddie-scappaticci-not-face-perjury-charge-ira
They ran agents on both sides, so Loyalist murder gangs operated the same way.
And that's how you start off with "it's acceptable to get the bad guys off the streets" and end up "okay, they're going to kill two guys on Friday, let that happen so you can tell us about next week's operations".
Whitey Bulger is an American version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_Bulger
"James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger Jr. (/ˈbʌldʒər/; September 3, 1929 – October 30, 2018) was an American organized crime boss and FBI informant who led the Winter Hill Gang in the Winter Hill neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts, a city directly northwest of Boston.[2][3] On December 23, 1994, Bulger fled the Boston area and went into hiding after his former FBI handler, John Connolly, tipped him off about a pending RICO indictment against him. Bulger remained at large for sixteen years. After his 2011 arrest, federal prosecutors tried Bulger for nineteen murders based on the grand jury testimony from Kevin Weeks and other former criminal associates."
With the Minneapolis carjacking honeypot I think they just put a good looking car with a vulnerable looking driver on the street. If someone tries to steal the car it’s hard me to construe that as entrapment. Not sure of these details though. Not sure how they would make it look more enticing.
I should add that by vulnerable I mean someone who looks like they won’t argue with a pistol in their face. Like not Jason Bourne.
Once a government sting gets started, the incentives are for the government operatives to push people towards starting criminal behavior. I really don't want a government tempting people to behave badly.
Chris Morris contends that since 9/11, the FBI has been one of, if not the most, active recruiters for terrorists in the US, with over 300 instances disclosed in court documents. It's much simpler to find a nut and induce them to try and buy a Stinger from another undercover agent than it is to hunt down an actual terrorist cell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liV5wKAihh8
Thank you. That's a quite a link.
The best bit is at the end. "The FBI spent eighteen months winding up a schizophrenic in Boston to come up with a ludicrous plan to fly model planes into the dome of the Capitol. At the same time they said the Tsarnaev brothers were harmless."
One of the lines of argument in the video is that the FBI creates fake terrorists to convict in order to distract from their inability to identify real terrorists.
In theory I'm in favor of sting operations, but in reality too many are "let's see how far we can push the literally crazy person." And literally crazy people do not react to the normal incentives of our justice system.
Good sting operations make people seriously consider that this particular bike/wallet/car/bomb-plot could be a plant. We can't do that to literally crazy people. Their needles won't be moved.
I had my purse stolen many years ago, and I was very angry about that. Do I think a honey-pot scheme to entrap pickpockets is a good idea? No.
Yeah, you'll probably get a few professional thieves while you're at it. You'll also get opportunists, and before you all say "a-ha!", then imagine this:
You see a fifty (or other denomination that would be worth your while) currency note lying on the pavement. You pick it up. Do you:
(1) Say "Well this is a nice piece of luck, I'm now 50 smackeroos to the good" and put it in your pocket?
(2) Wave it in the air and call out "Has anyone dropped this?"
(3) Go to the nearest shop or police station (depending on what the custom is where you come from), hand it in, and explain that you found it outside and if anyone comes looking for lost money, here it is?
Because if you pick option (1), congratulations, you are a thief swept up in the "no pickpockets here" honeypot operation as the cops leap out of the bushes and arrest you and good luck explaining that no, you're a solid citizen. You put that money that did not belong to you into your pocket! There has been a wave of people losing money or wallets and having those kept by thieves here! We are stamping down on this behaviour, and after all, the kind of person who would keep money that maybe has been dropped by a poor widow with six kids to feed is precisely the kind of person that would pick someone's pocket!
To be fair, picking up money on the street isn't pickpocketing, though I suppose a dishonest government would do that sort of a program.
An honest way of trying to trap pickpockets would be to have agents wandering around, looking distracted, with money hanging out of their pockets.
And a half-awake defense solicitor would get charges dropped as there is no proof of a crime committed by someone picking up an item dropped and not declaring their intention. A honey trap has to show clear intent to commit a crime. Picking up a note for purposes unknown is unlikely to do that.
I suppose it depends partially on your view of what the point of criminal law actually is.
For me, the purpose of criminal law is to get criminals removed from society so that they don't bother us. From this point of view, if you can get the sort of person who _would_, under certain circumstances, steal a bike or kidnap a governor, to pop their head up, and then chuck them in prison, then that's much better than having to wait for them to actually commit the crime.
The only circumstances where I'd consider entrapment to be going too far is if you create a scenario so extreme that a normal person might be enticed into committing a crime too, e.g. "Please sir, you have to help me, I will die within three minutes if you don't shoplift an apple from that Vons!"
Reasonably sure the purpose of criminal law is to do justice, and indeed primarily to the accused. After all, it is their life, liberty, and property which is on the line, at least by the time it gets to court. Which is to say the only thing more important than punishing the guilty is doing it the right way.
I have to say, I find your vision somewhat disturbing and even repugnant. It's from views like this that the doctrine of the poisonous tree has been eviscerated at all levels of jurisprudence. This flatly creates incentives for illegal searches and seizures in hopes of turning up collateral evidence that will escape exclusion.
If your procedure fails to do justice, you get no conviction. When citizens then ask why the guilty go free, you blame the prosecutors. Always, always blame the prosecutors. They are a disease, cloaked with immense and unreviewable power that no free citizen would tolerate if they knew its extent.
The criminal law of this country is so broad that you are functionally always in violation of it. If a prosecutor wants, they can throw the book at you and (for example) coerce you into a plea by overcharging. Or, they can just give you a pass. This is prosecutorial discretion. It means, in effect, that the law and the rule of law exist at their whim and their whim alone. There is no way for a court to review the use of prosecutorial discretion because there is no record. Increasingly, this is being generalized to entire branches of government, mainly the executive, which has sometimes flatly declined to enforce parts of the law it doesn't like under this heading, or vice versa.
I was going to tell you to consider where your views may lead, but the sad truth is we're living a world governed by your view of criminal justice. It's a common and untutored view that encourages citizens to slavishness and government to totality. It's bleak.
>For me, the purpose of criminal law is to get criminals removed from society so that they don't bother us. From this point of view, if you can get the sort of person who _would_, under certain circumstances, steal a bike or kidnap a governor, to pop their head up, and then chuck them in prison, then that's much better than having to wait for them to actually commit the crime.
Hidden assumption: that there is a 100% chance of those "certain circumstances" ever actually arising.
What about if there's only a 90% chance? A 10% chance? A 0.01% chance? It's far from a guarantee in some cases that a "real" crime will ever actually happen.
(Also, I am reasonably certain that your proposed distinction between "normal people" and "criminals" is not a real thing; tendency to criminality varies along a continuum.)
Yeah, but now you're getting into "well you *might* commit a crime, and we need that whole pesky evidence and trial bit to chuck you in jail, so we're going to do our best to persuade/coerce you into it and then we have you!"
That would be lovely* if it only happened to Really Bad People who had handy forehead tattoos saying "I am a Really Bad Person". But it doesn't. It sweeps up the weak, the petty criminals, the easily-led, those who were struggling with trying to stay on the straight and narrow, and anyone else that can be included in the "the governor is going for re-election and is running on a 'tough on crime' platform, we need to bump up the arrest and conviction figures".
Eventually it will also come for *you*. How many people on here are pro-drugs legislation? How many people are using grey-area markets to get drugs, or flat-out illegal drugs? What would your position be on a honey-pot scheme where you *thought* you had found a new, secure website selling mushrooms etc. and after you'd made your purchase, the FBI were kicking in your door?
"But that's different, drugs harm no-one and are a victimless crime!" Sorry friends, so long as they're illegal it's a crime to buy them, and the FBI or local law enforcement can entrap you like they would a bike thief.
*No it wouldn't, even rotters have rights.
All very well-put. ‘Criminals’ aren’t a thing. The only area I agree is that isolation of habitually violent people, not rehabilitation or punishment, is a key feature of the criminal law.
>>"I don't see why this framework couldn't be applied to entrapment. As the punishment increases, the constitutionality of entrapment decreases."
Um, not to be obtuse about this, but isn't the limiting principle on what can be constitutionalized the existence of a corresponding constitutional provision? What's the textual hook here? What established constitutional doctrine would a right not to be entrapped sound in?
I think part of the issue here is a certain equivocation about whether the problem entrapment raises is procedural or substantive. It sort of sounds procedural, because it has to do with the government's way of interacting with you in light of your suspected criminality.
But really it seems more to go to the underlying culpability of the conduct charged. And the Bill of Rights has very little to say on the subject of substantive criminal law. In that sense, there's no more reason to expect entrapment to be constitutionalized than the insanity defense or Stand Your Ground.
21: Haiti vs DR divergence
I don't buy that there was a divergence. It just looks like a divergence because the data starts in 1960, and the handle on the hockey sticks always look small. But when you just look at Haiti vs DR GDP in the year 1960, DR has 3x Haiti's GDP.
Haiti vs DR GDP/cap from 1960 - 1970: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=1970&locations=DO-HT&start=1960
3x GDP/cap is the difference between Mexico and Spain, and also life expectancy in Spain is 8 years greater than in Mexico. I think is going on is that DR's growth trajectory was to Haiti's in 1960 what Spain's growth trajectory is to Mexico's today. At this rate Spain will have 15x Mexico's GDP in 60 years too! Do you think people in 2080 will look back at Spain and Mexico today and call 2020 a divergence too? Because it's not; Spain has been richer than Mexico for centuries. So DR was probably richer than Haiti for centuries before 1960 as well.
Sorry, meant to say 8x Mexico's GDP, not 15x
The numbers are different using "constant 2010 dollars": https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?end=1970&locations=DO-HT&start=1960
However, it seems like they had already diverged in life expectancy and education long before that, so perhaps the question on should ask is why hadn't that translated into higher GDP for the DR before the 1960s.
I don't get why current US and constant 2010 dollars show up differently?
I'm not sure how that works either. You'd think the ratio between the countries would be the same regardless what of currency you compared them in.
#14 reminds me of "CopSpace" from Charlie Stross's "Halting State", although democratised to non-cops too.
Based on past things I've seen like it I absolutely would not trust shinigami eyes.
It's useful for finding free-thinking people who don't conform to dogmas; they're shaded red.
#25 - I'd be interested to compare analysis of land reform in Asia with land reform in Africa. I have seen several opinion articles over the years that have argued the redistribution of large farms owned by white descendants-of-colonialists to small farm owned by black descendants-of-colonised-peoples has not worked and has led to falls in productivity. Zimbabwe is often cited as an example.
Sorry, I don't have references to cite and I don't know whether the arguments in either case (Africa or Asia) are valid, or what differences may exist between the two.
There was discussion of this in the comments to the How Asia Works review. The consensus is that it depends a lot on exactly whom is benefiting from the redistribution: the former tennant farmers who were already working that patch of land or the president's cronies.
i wonder the reaction would have been if it was a real baby?
https://theconversation.com/cyborg-soil-reveals-the-secret-microbial-metropolis-beneath-our-feet-164748
Studying soil without disturbing the microbial structures.
#3: As a therapist who has to read a lot of therapy research, I agree with everything in that twitter thread. My favorite part:
"* the relationship between the patient and the therapist, and a host of NONSPECIFIC factors, make up the majority of psychotherapy value, but it has huge value!
* the guild wars within brand of therapy do not put the patient first and are embarrassing" (he has a cute GIF of a bunch of kangaroos punching each other in the face)
I found the guild wars over brands of therapy to be totally embarrassing within my first month in practice, particularly knowing how lame a lot of the research is. I'm glad to see someone say it out loud. I often struggle for words in how to convey this to patients for whom all the gobbledygook with acronyms is either entrancing or horrifying, when really it's just a huge distraction.
Regarding #3, Bruce Wampold does an excellent review of these critiques in The Great Psychotherapy Debate and provides a framework for his beliefs about what makes psychotherapy work (which he calls "The Contextual Model" and contrasts with "The Medical Model") and what research needs to be done to improve psychotherapy based on these beliefs. If these critiques and potential solutions to them are of interest to you, I highly recommend checking out The Great Psychotherapy Debate.
Anecdata: I was intensely, though in ways not super visible to teachers, bullied in high school (2007-2011). The bullies rarely caught any flac for it, and it was widespread - as opposed to just one or two kids and their posses, I was a general "punching bag" for the whole school (in quotes because it was never actually physically violent - the most physical it got was people throwing staples and wads of gum and various junk at the back of my head during class, trying to get it to stick in my long, thick, wavy hair because straight hair was the fashion and me not straightening mine was a faux pas in need of aggressive correction apparently)
Sadly, if you had physically fought back, you probably would have been treated even worse, possibly incarcerated or institutionalized, since you were already seen as the kid who ‘didn’t fight back.’
All I can say is I’m sincerely glad that time in your life is over.
#1 - Why wouldn't the obvious answer be that botox makes you look younger and prettier, which is precisely what people who are paying for botox wanted to achieve, which then makes them less depressed? People pay hundreds of dollars for botox because it improves their appearance. Improving one's appearance will make you feel better, compared to getting a placebo which does nothing to your appearance when you wanted to look better. Is that just too obvious for these researchers or what?
I found this amusing, because I get botox on other areas of my face, but I purposely do NOT get botox on my glabellar muscles because I want to preserve the ability to frown. I consider the ability to look bitchy and disapproving to be very important, and I don't want to lose that useful ability.
Regarding entrapment, recall that the FBI was using the same tactic a decade ago against Islamic terrorism, and that there was concern that this was racial profiling. I think pretty much all of the same arguments apply here.
Bullying and teen pregnancy are dependent on pretty different character flaws, but I suspect part of it is that bullying mostly needs to happen in public so putting pressure on authority figures gives easy results, whereas sex is much easier to hide until its too late.
The only thing I recall about Haiti/DR is that Haiti had 25% of the land and 75% of the people, and also there were some racial tensions going on between the two countries and that this went a long way in explaining the disparities. This was from AJ+, though, which has a pretty strong left-wing bias.
This supports my pet theory that the main cause of poverty is poor people.
I agree with the spirit of your criticism of capitalism here, but it’s worth considering that (1) most capitalist societies have much less of a reserve army of labor (2) Haitian labor is much less valued than Mexican or Central American labor in the USA, and (3) alternatives to capitalism often have very high poverty, but Haiti’s poverty is higher than many fellow African-descended societies as well as most capitalist and anti-capitalist societies in recent history. I think these case doubt on that as an explanation in this case.
I in no way intended to imply this.
I've seen a fair amount about the reparations Haiti was paying to France for the France's loss of slaves and land, with an assumption that Haiti's poverty can be explained by the money being drained out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_debt_of_Haiti
"France, with warships at the ready, sailed to Haiti in 1825 and demanded Haiti to compensate France for its loss of slaves and its slave colony.[5][6] In exchange for French recognition of Haiti as a sovereign republic, France demanded payment of 150 million francs.[5] In addition to the payment, France required that Haiti provide a fifty percent discount on its exported goods to them, making repayment more difficult.[4] In 1838, France agreed to reduce the debt to 90 million francs to be paid over a period of 30 years to compensate former plantation owners who had lost their property; the 2004 equivalent of US$21 billion.[5][4][7] Historians have traced loan documents from the time of the 1825 Ordinance, through the various refinancing efforts, to the final remittance to National City Bank (now Citibank) in 1947.[2]"
Checking on this is the first I've seen about France requiring a 50% discount on what Haiti sold to them.
I'd be surprised if that debt and punitive trade policy didn't have a large bad effect on Haiti's poverty, though it's hard to tease out those effects from the effects of bad government.
"From 1957 to 1986 Haiti was ruled by the corrupt and oppressive Duvalier family. Loans incurred during this period alone were estimated to account for approximately 40% of Haiti's debt in 2000, before debt relief was granted. These funds were used to strengthen the Duvaliers' control over Haiti and for various fraudulent schemes. Large amounts were simply stolen by the Duvaliers."
I'm not clear how much Haiti was trading with countries other than France.
Anyway, there was also a recent period of sanctions.
"Haiti continues to suffer the consequences of the 1991 coup. The irresponsible economic and financial policies of de facto authorities greatly[citation needed] accelerated Haiti's economic decline. Following the coup, the United States adopted mandatory sanctions, and the OAS instituted voluntary sanctions aimed at restoring constitutional government. International sanctions culminated in the May 1994 United Nations embargo of all goods entering Haiti except humanitarian supplies, such as food and medicine. The assembly sector, heavily dependent on U.S. markets for its products, employed nearly 80,000 workers in the mid-1980s. During the embargo, employment fell from 33,000 workers in 1991 to 400 in October 1995. Private, domestic and foreign investment has been slow to return to Haiti. Since the return of constitutional rule, assembly sector employment has gradually recovered with over 20,000 now employed, but further growth has been stalled by investor concerns over safety and supply reliability."
I saw the bit about France, and wondered whether it had a effect big enough to last to the present day. Also that Haiti "entered into the world under international ostracism". On the other hand, DR seems to have had its own oppressive authoritarians, Trujillo and Balaguer (1930-1978/86-96), though I've no idea how he compares to the Duvaliers (1956-86). Also it was invaded by Haiti itself a couple of times. And both countries were occupied by the US between the World Wars.
A brief look over Wikipedia does sort of support the idea that the Duvaliers were worse both politically and economically, and the governments of both countries seem to really have it in for the Haitians. There's also something about how Haiti had an aristocratic plantation-owning white class that immediately fled after independence and took all their money with them, which didn't happen at all in DR.
What looks like the biggest thing though is environmental differences. (There are apparently lots of stereotypes about this, so I'll try to be considerate.) Haiti's ecology is doing much worse, possibly due to the French doing a lot of soil-eroding agriculture where the Spanish mostly did mining, or perhaps due to population density or some difference between dictators. I think I knew about this while volunteering a decade ago, but had completely forgotten.
There's a paywalled article about the nuances of that here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24265162
Good news-- you can register with jstor and get 100 free articles per month.
"There's also something about how Haiti had an aristocratic plantation-owning white class that immediately fled after independence and took all their money with them, which didn't happen at all in DR."
If they were like their counterparts in the U.S., most of their wealth was land and slaves.
"possibly due to the French doing a lot of soil-eroding agriculture"
I read, in one of Jared Diamond's books I think, that the French clear-cut the forests and sent all the wood to France. This was a real problem because in hot, wet climates, most of the nutrients are in the living plants instead of the soil.
IIRC Trujillo was a dictator but he was really big on:
(1) environmental preservation (at least compared to Haiti!)
(2) Eugenic ‘whitening’ of the population through favoring European immigration, making him, quite literally, a Black White supremacist.
And that included Jews, whom he tried and entice to the country though few wanted to take him up on it until the Holocaust was going on and it was sadly too late.
My understanding is that the Antebellum USA also took steps to weaken Haiti, out of a fear that they would encourage a slave rebellion in the South.
I recall an Islamic terror case (but not enough of the details to google) where there was an FBI plant suggesting blowing things up, and it got serious enough that at least one person supposedly involved in the conspiracy called the police and say "this shit's fucked, yo."
And it didn't immediately end the whole operation. And it should have: if there were an IRB for sting operations, rule number one would be "as soon as anyone involved calls the cops, game over, stop immediately."
You can *maybe* prosecute some of the people involved, but certainly should take it no further.
I am generally in favor of sting operations, in theory, but there are a bunch of problems with them in the real world, and those problems could be reformed, so let's do that reform before any more sting operations.
Anecdote warning: one of my close family members got Botox as a treatment for depression. The number of injections, in a single session, in order to accomplish it was something astounding like 20-30. Ultimately it didn't really work - if it did, it was outshone by the conventional anti-depressants. At least their skin is smooth and free of wrinkles?
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdnvb4sR/ on the uncanny-valley effect, vs autism
Is there a version not on TikTok? Your description is interesting, but AIUI TikTok's physical location makes it a potential Great Cannon vector.
The author is a tiktok native; I wouldn't be shocked if they eventually posted it elsewhere (and I did point out this blog to them), but, no, to my knowledge they're not crossposting their content.
What do you mean by "Great cannon vector"?
The PRC has systems attached to their part of the Internet backbone that can insert malicious code into Internet traffic. This has been dubbed the "Great Cannon of China" by analogy with the Great Firewall.
We know about this because they used it to redirect a tiny percentage of Baidu traffic into a DDoS pointed at GreatFire. It can also be used to insert malware.
The NSA has some similar capabilities, although TTBOMK somewhat less potent due to their lesser authority over private enterprise (i.e. Americans can refuse to put NSA backdoors into their servers, but Chinese trying that get disappeared). Also, the Anglosphere is the Five Eyes so it's impossible for anyone living here to avoid that section of the backbone; I can, however, try to avoid the PRC section.
...Shinigami Eyes? Really? Lit. "death god eyes", and the Death Note ones let you see someone's birth name and kill them more easily.
them meme is revealing info about someone that is hidden to most people. still cru ive to admit,
Regarding #3, Issues with Psychotherapy research. There's more to say about it:
1. things like alpha control, "primary outcome" and "secondary outcome" only appeared in the last, say, 10 years. Before, p-hacking was the rule rather than the exception.
2. Proper handling of missing data and dropout is still an issue. Many studies now use "Multiple imputation" or some other method based on the missing-at-random assumption, stating that one can fill the gaps from e.g. dropout using the available data from that patient and other patients. Most often, the results of an MAR analysis do not differ from the analysis of the protocol population, so this is not more than a fig leaf.
3. Questionable use standardized effect sizes for reporting the results and meta-analysis. Standardized effect sizes have no unit. Really. Such numbers are meaningless for measurement.
For illustration, consider two outcomes, self-report (Beck depression inventory, BDI) with the Hamilton rating scale (HDRS). For illustration, BDI is kg, and HRDS is meter. Study 1 found 5 kg advantage for Therapy A, Study 2 found 6 m benefit for Therapy B. I guess, outside psychology, no one would try to average 5 kg and -6 m [it's not even clear why one would put a minus sign here]. Psychologists say, no problem, we'll just calculate Hedges g (= hide the unit) and then the problem magically goes away.
(last one on #3)
5. In the unlikely case that the therapists have been randomized and are, thus, able to deliver both therapies: Any ethically working therapist will always try to provide the "best" intervention in a given situation. In other words, we have a perfect null hypothesis.
4. Most often, therapists aren't randomized, just the patients. So the "evidence" gathered is observational.
#5: In Russian, heathen is translated as "язычник" (yazychnik), derived from "язык" (yazyk). In contemporary Russian язык means language, but in Old Russian that word meant "the people, ethnos", so "язычник" had indeed been borrowed from Greek ἐθνικός (related to [other] peoples)
Reminds me of the Hebrew word "goy" (meaning "nation", or "nation other than Israel", or "non-Jew").
The "lockdown" poll results don't particularly surprise me, as most of this falls into the category of things some people would want anyway. People mad about noise at nighttime might want a curfew indefinitely. People who are liking not getting sick might like masking indoors indefinitely. They might see post-travel quarantine as a way to prevent future pandemics, and think of it as low-cost if they don't travel much themselves. And so forth. The only one that really surprises me is contract tracing. Not sure what that's about.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext#seccesectitle0013
"People who had recovered from COVID-19, including those no longer reporting symptoms, exhibited significant cognitive deficits versus controls when controlling for age, gender, education level, income, racial-ethnic group, pre-existing medical disorders, tiredness, depression and anxiety. The deficits were of substantial effect size for people who had been hospitalised (N = 192), but also for non-hospitalised cases who had biological confirmation of COVID-19 infection (N = 326). Analysing markers of premorbid intelligence did not support these differences being present prior to infection. Finer grained analysis of performance across sub-tests supported the hypothesis that COVID-19 has a multi-domain impact on human cognition."
"The scale of the observed deficit was not insubstantial; the 0.47 SD global composite score reduction for the hospitalized with ventilator sub-group was greater than the average 10-year decline in global performance between the ages of 20 to 70 within this dataset. It was larger than the mean deficit of 480 people who indicated they had previously suffered a stroke (−0.24SDs) and the 998 who reported learning disabilities (−0.38SDs). For comparison, in a classic intelligence test, 0.47 SDs equates to a 7-point difference in IQ."
Damn. Hope this turns out to be bunk.
I thought this would get more attention here because there are a lot of people who take IQ seriously. It could be that people are taking time to read the article and think about it, or they might think the method of checking IQ isn't good enough.
My money's on "commentless blocktexts tend to get lost in skimming"
> Analysing markers of premorbid intelligence did not support these differences being present prior to infection.
>A common challenge in studies of COVID-19 is that differences between people who have vs. have not been ill could relate to premorbid differences. To address this issue, a linear model was trained on the broader independent GBIT dataset (N = 269,264) to predict general cognitive performance based on age (to the third order), sex, handedness, ethnicity, first language, country of residence, occupational status and earnings. Predicted and observed general performance correlated substantially r = 0.53), providing a proxy measure of premorbid intelligence of comparable performance to common explicit tests such as the National Adult Reading Test [[26]].
Is that a good enough proxy?
Well congratulations from me to Tom Chivers- been reading his stuff on Unherd for a while now, which I started reading as a bubble-breaking exercise to counter my heavy reading of The Guardian and The Economist.
I just hope he doesn't read too much into the comments on his articles on Covid, as there's a big freedom-at-all-costs-no-vaccines-for-us-its-a-massive-hoax contingent that comes out every time and ignores whatever he's written.
Do you know of any movies showing cave art in firelight?
A little self-promotion: #14 (Shinigami Eyes) is like a plot point in my book "In My Memory Locked", but with the filtering based on attractiveness and not political leanings. Rather than highlighting people the user wished to avoid, neural implants would smudge-out the unattractive to beautify the world around them.
One way to give placebo psychotherapy would be to have earnest non therapist like me try to help the patient as best they can.
This should factor out the value of a therapist education.
My memory is sometimes the control group gets "psychoeducation" in that the therapist person will offer some very benign information about the condition being treated -- anxiety or depression or OCD or whatever. It's not 100% placebo because psychoeducation is also a part of therapy, but it does allow comparison to some kind of more specific technique that would be used in CBT or IFS or mindfulness-based or psychodynamic or whatever. I think there are studies also that have a person do some low-key physical exercise or watch a self-help video.
After watching the Ace Attorney video, it feels like a hoax. I just can't believe that was written by AI.
Yep, feels too funny. But maybe the Ace Attorney format is surprisingly convenient for the AI. There is little text, it is mostly formulaic, if you get it right then it seems realistic, and if you get it wrong then it is funny. I get some GPT-3 vibes from the text, but maybe it was edited afterwards.
> What's your real name?
> Henry.
> How do you spell that name?
> H-e-n-r-y. With a 'C'.
...
> It was an anonymous caller, claiming to be a magician.
> Did you get a good look at his face?
Maybe they used the Dumb Lawyer Quotes (all allegedly said in court in reality) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQkEGnV3Cwc
Re #20: my highschool had one of those "zero tolerance policies" where you would get suspended if you hit your bully back. If you're the kind of nerd that gets bullied (like I was), then this actually didn't just seem like an empty threat. And it always felt super unfair. The (school) awareness campaings weren't particularly good either. I find it hard to believe children are no longer bullied at school, but if it's true this is great. Given the glorification of bullying in popular media (see most US sitcoms, some specific examples: Jerry in Parks in Rec, Jerry in "Rick and Morty", Andy in the Office (for a while, at least)), I find it hard to believe that suddenly bullying has become uncool...
One of the most disturbing conversations I’ve ever had which cemented my skepticism of institutions was talking to my mom, who was a teacher at the time, about those zero-tolerance policies.
I remembered that malicious bullies always target kids who are different and disadvantaged - fat, awkward, disabled, racial or ethnic minority at that school, etc. I thought this was super obvious and I kept pointing out that it DOES matter who started the fight. She responded that who started it doesn’t matter because the kids who ‘get in fights,’ even if they are just being targeted by bullies, are typically ‘bad kids.’ This made it easier to believe that teachers used to see bullies as ‘pretty cool,’ as Scott said, quite believable.
[Epistemic status 75%] I usually like AliceFromQueens' takes on twitter, but I rather disagree with her staunch approval of the downfall of bullying. I was, like many people, once a nerdy kid who had confrontations with would-be bullies. My review of the institution is not totally negative. I found a way to adapt to people who exhibited a desire to want to bully me in a way that I feel led to personal growth that I may not have had otherwise. If you're trying to optimize for not getting bullied in the future, you have to think about the bully's incentives. What is the bully getting out of this interaction? What does he/she find gratifying in this experience? And can I deny that for them? (Obviously I think this only applies to non-physical bullying, no one ever tried to beat me up, and I think I agree that that kind of bullying probably has no silver lining. You can't really control how strong you are in middle school.)
This taught me a lot of practical empathy, and of modeling other people's perception of their social status and what they think they are supposed to do to elevate it. Stuff I would not have been remotely interested in paying attention to if not for bullies finding a way to make it my problem.
I would argue that the modern version of bullying just doesn't come from individuals. It has to come from groups. All that negative energy has just found new outlets, things like oblique shaming (e.g. "don't people who do X realize that they're hurting cause Y?"), sub-tweeting, etc. I strong doubt that childhood social interactions have become panaceas of friendship, camaraderie, and altruism now that bullies are uncool (but I don't know any children so maybe I am just wrong). At least old-school bullies had a narrow scope.
I'm 27 and I remember the anti-bullying campaigns from when I was in high school and I did not think they were moving in the right direction. The kids that were chosen by the faculty as the anti-bully ambassadors were just mean and cruel in novel ways, now officially sanctioned. I draw a straight line from this to the nerd-shaming that still goes on under the guise of "Big Tech Bad."
I think the definition of ‘bullying’ plays a big role here.
I knew jock-type guys who would be friendly to a certain type of nerd but ‘put him in his place’ when he would be excessively narcissistic, dominate conversations, or try to impose their highly preferred topics on all conversation partners in a way that was, frankly, antisocial. This helped them get along better with others (usually).
That’s VERY different from the stuff that, for example, that Japanese official who was cancelled for ‘bullying’ was doing to his disabled underclassmen (be warned, it’s very disturbing).
Sorry, Japanese Olympics official.
I think the bullying-disabled-kids guy was actually a composer of Olympic music or something, not technically an official. Not that it really matters.
Yes, composer.
Absolutely. But that's just the problem with school's adopting things like a "zero tolerance policy for bullying." Of course, even saying that previous sentence puts me in the awkward position of effectively having to argue, "cmon, just a little bullying, please?" This is where, it seems to me, social cognition completely takes over. It's like having to argue against Covid Zeroism.
"I would argue that the modern version of bullying just doesn't come from individuals. It has to come from groups. All that negative energy has just found new outlets, things like oblique shaming (e.g. "don't people who do X realize that they're hurting cause Y?"), sub-tweeting, etc."
I agree. It strains credulity to claim bullying has decreased, the bullies are just a different subgroup now. They bully, now, not with implicit approval of the school admins, but often with explicit and enforce the norms of their group inside and outside of school. The tall and buff bully (so much as he existed outside of Hollywood movies) was, by what I can tell, much more virtuous than the modern bully who is a combination of Mean Girl and scold, and the principal is on his/her side.
I’d have to double check the statistics, but I’m pretty sure that public awareness campaigns regarding *gun safety* have been successful as well. I think people are trying to expand this into more general anti-gun awareness campaigns which are clearly not working (lots of previously anti-gun liberals became gun owners, indicating that a growing number don’t believe the ‘crime is increasing but you don’t need to protect yourself because the police, who are White supremacist mass murderers who kill innocent people all the time’ hype; imagine that).
This indicates that whether a large percentage of the public fundamentally believe the assumptions of the public awareness campaign makes a difference.
Perhaps a lot of it is the recognition that ‘I always thought {drunk driving / bullying / smoking with children in the room / shooting handguns into the air at weddings as a celebratory act} was wrong but I didn’t want to be rude, but now I know it’s not rude.’
A lot of the push back on #20 is strange to me.
First, bright line or zero tolerance rules seem naturally better for the less popular/athletic/cool kids, all the things that make a student a target for bullying also make it more likely that administrators and teachers and will side with the other student in any conflict.
Second, schools are operating with limited resources/time/expertise, they can't realistically investigate every conflict between students to any serious degree, listening to other students is naturally going to once again favor the popular/athletics/cool kids over the bullied, and everyone involved can be assumed to present a version of events that is favorable to themselves.
Third, zero tolerance policies are almost always the best policy in schools, the difference between zero tolerance quiet reading time and "sorry I had to borrow a pencil from the person next to me" quiet reading time, is that one is not actually quiet at all. Students will always have an excuse for any rule breaking and will attempt to litigate said rule breaking for as long as they possible can. Again resources and time are already limited trying to adjudicate cases is a massive burden (see, the courts).
Obviously a zero tolerance policy is not a perfect solution, and yes the policy will catch false positives, but literally any policy is going to have trade offs along this dimension, simply stating that the false positive trade off exists and dusting your hands off isn't enough.
> And I think about things like how many people get their bikes stolen in the Bay Area, and how police never do anything about it, and how one of the proposals is to plant honeypot bikes in easily-watchable areas and arrest the people who steal them until maybe eventually San Franciscans get the message that bike-stealing can have negative consequences - and this has a lot to recommend it over just letting bikes get stolen (or governors get kidnapped) every so often.
This seems like a bizarre argument. The bike theft crimes are actually happening and require no encouragement or funding or entrapment to get people to steal them. How exactly is that comparable to the governor's political kidnapping plot (a crime that never happens), likely wouldn't have even been thought of had the FBI informant not suggested and pushed it repeatedly, and almost certainly would never have even happened had the FBI not funded travel expenses, food, drink, lodgings and more.
Then consider the cost of such stings: in one case it's the cost of a bike with irrefutable video evidence securing a conviction, in the other, tens of thousands of dollars for the expenses to set up the arrest, and it will likely cost millions of dollars to try them, and a conviction is far from certain due to the questionable circumstances.
Finally, deterrence is clearly possibly by arresting bike thieves, but what deterrence do you expect for a crime that the FBI invented? If anything, this would encourage the FBI to create more terrorists (which they've been doing routinely since 9/11).
Honestly, I'm having trouble seeing how you can consider these circumstances even remotely similar so as to suggest any meaningful lessons of one might be transferrable to the other.
For a more relatable analogy, maybe consider the ethical difference between a psychiatrist that asks neutral questions to ascertain whether a vulnerable patient has some dysfunction, rather than a series of leading questions that results in a vulnerable patient developing a dysfunction.
I don't know how plausible it is, but the deterrence argument is that this makes future conspirators less willing to trust each other, since the fellow conspirator might be an FBI agent.
I'm honestly having trouble seeing the utility in establishing a deterrent for crimes that never happen.
Indeed, I think that there is a scale that goes from simply creating an opportunity that also regularly exists without police intervention, to the police doing much or all of the preparations, while bullying those they target to do just enough to count as being complicit in the crime.
I have no problem with one end of the scale, but a huge problem with the other end.
20. I think a lot of this "bullying has gone down" stuff is a shift in how bullying happens. High school locker room style bullying might have declined but Twitter style bullying is definitely up. I think the other thing that shifted was I remember the old model being a maintain the keep-the-peace model (which favors the aggressor) and the new model is a punish the aggressor model (which favors the victim). This also means there's an incentive to play the victim which undoubtedly reflects a lot of out of school dynamics as well.
21. Analysis of Haiti gets marred a lot by racial politics. There's a strong desire to portray the Haitian revolutionaries and the only modern state founded by slave revolt as good. But they really weren't: they established an aristocratic military dictatorship. While they freed the slaves they also forced them to work on government run plantations to produce goods for export. The profits were assigned to noblemen who gained their nobility through fighting for the regime as officers. These officers formed aristocratic families that are still around. They massacred their political enemies. They tortured former slaves who didn't agree to work on the totally not plantations. They attempted to forcibly integrate the Dominican Republic against their will repeatedly. These attempts included cultural destruction like trying to drive the Spanish language off the island.
If I had to do a single factor analysis (and I don't think it's ever wise to do so) I'd say the military gets the lion's share of the credit or discredit on both sides. The Dominican military never tried to dominate the country the way the Haitian military did. While they sometimes subverted the republic in coups they never allowed the republic to actually end. It was always "temporary" and the republic's institutions always continued to exist. The Dominican military tells itself stories about how it tried to fight off the United States to protect Dominican self-determination despite it being a hopeless fight. The Haitain military doesn't exist because the country decided having one around was more dangerous than not having one. (The recent President trying to revive the military was seen as a clear sign of a move towards dictatorship.) The Haitian military supported establishment of personal rule by dictators and literal monarchies.
The Dominican military's story is national myth-making. But it points to the different cultures and willingness to rule directly. Trujillo was a military dictator but he had to deliver some degree of good governance and civil institutions. Papa and Baby Doc did not. In particular, you can look at their propaganda. Trujillo consistently portrayed himself as an incredibly hard working servant of the people. Duvalier portrayed himself as an almost divine being in quasi-monarchical style. As recently as literally right now, Moise's rule was personal and unconstitutional in a way that just isn't imaginable in the DR's political culture. It wasn't even possible during the mid-20th century at the highpoint of the Dominican dictatorship.
This has all sorts of downstream effects on things like rule of law. For example, the Dominican Republic's laws actually were pretty consistently enforced by a judiciary throughout the dictatorship. They weren't in Haiti. The most visible effect of this is environmental damage. The Dominican Republic has more forests than Haiti even controlling for land. When illegal logging started in DR the loggers were prosecuted under various commercial and environmental laws. When they failed to comply police were sent. Attempts to bribe either the dictator or local officials didn't work so they attacked the police instead. The regime saw this as a rebellion and sent in the military. And because it was a military dictatorship, the military dropped napalm on logging camps and massacred the survivors. In Haiti there was no expectation top to bottom the law actually mattered. Various bribes allowed logging companies to operate openly. Likewise, Dominican street gangs have much less free reign than Haitian ones. Even under Trujillo, a gang couldn't just be in favor with the ruling party and be immune to prosecution. This is still how it works in Haiti.
Another difference is that the bogeyman of Haitian politics are Haitians who aren't sufficiently racially pure. The bogeyman of Dominican politics are the Haitians. It's an internal vs external enemy. There were 20th century anti-Haitian riots in the DR. These get portrayed as racist by a lot of American analysts. And they were racist. But they weren't racist in the Black vs white sense. It was Dominicans vs Haitians. Black Dominicans participated as rioters against people who were part or fully Haitian. I'm not sure how different the effects of that actually are: both lead to racist xenophobia and internal attacks on minority populations. The equivalent attacks in Haiti were against people who (supposedly) had too much white ancestry. This was part of Duvalier's noiriste philosophy and an attack he leveled against his lighter skinned political rival.
22. I've seen people try to recreate this. It does work: in flickering light some basic cave painting techniques make things look like they're moving. Animals legs move, spears throw (not from the hand but back and forth), that kind of thing. If you put them in sequence you get an effect kind of like a moving comic book.
25. An easier angle of attack would be to help marketize land ownership. If you can make it easier to buy and sell land then you lower the barriers and land ownership will naturally flow to more productive uses. Some of this is legal interventions but some of it is just friction caused by archaic processes. It's also economically sustainable because you can charge for the service. Also, you can always look at providing capital goods into capital poor economies.
This capsule history of Haitian & Dominican politics is fascinating. Do you have an introductory book you'd recommend?
> I am constantly mystified by which awareness campaigns work extraordinarily well (eg drunk driving, maybe bullying?) vs. fail (eg premarital sex, drugs, etc)
Strikes me that the former example group has "real" moral weight, while the latter gives off "arbitrary adult rules" vibes.
#25 I wonder if the question of large farm yields vs small farm yields is really about the business models.
There is a current conversation in the US about how to run farms that feels relevant, though it doesn’t address the question of redistribution at all.
The conversation is about land management, and more specifically soil management. The pitch is that the best way to farm is to focus on healthy soil, which most places means actively making the soil healthier. There are two prongs to this conversation, and the one with the most headlines is climate change (the climate story is that healthy soil stores a lot of carbon, and if everyone worked on building healthy soil, it would pull enough carbon out of the air to get us to net zero and maybe wind back the damage of industrialization. These are interesting claims, but not germane). The second one seems relevant to the yield question though, which is: focusing on the soil leads to a better business model for the farmer.
There’s a farmer from North Dakota named Gabe Brown, who seems to be the primary articulator of this perspective. He tells a story about being forced into this model out of desperation: cash crops went bust four years in a row due to hail (uninsured, naturally), and he couldn’t afford to buy the fertilizer he needed for the next year. So then he goes searching for a way to make stuff grow without buying a lot of fertilizer, and lands on books about soil health. Through a series of serendipitous events, Gabe concludes that he should measure success by profit per acre. By contrast, other small farmers focus on raw yield as their metric (because they mostly grow subsidized products), and large corporate concerns focus on net profit.
There are a lot of details involved, but the shape of the story eventually boils down to this: big farms (in the US) focus on growing one cash crop at a time on land very intensively, which degrades the land; when doing things focused on soil health, lots of stuff needs to be grown simultaneously. This (can) increase net yield, but more importantly keeps yields stable because you don’t go broke when prices fall for a single crop, or get hurt as badly by floods/hail/wind/etc. This leads to a lot more direct-to-consumer activity, like farmer’s markets. In a business context, this means the smaller farm has diverse revenue streams, fewer expenses, and less exposure to catastrophic risks.
It occurs to me that in developing countries the same type of mechanism might obtain: small farms grow what they need and sell the surplus more locally; large farms use a lot of hired labor, focus on a few cash crops to simplify management, and can sell to regional/global markets. The yield differences in this view are sort of just the ecological consequences of the business model.
I do note that there is no reason at all that an arbitrarily large farm cannot deploy the exact same techniques. It just seems that they don’t; my guess would be for legibility reasons.
Where I heard this from:
- Kiss The Ground | Netflix | This is a moderately cheesy piece of advocacy for the climate change angle.
- The Biggest Little Farm | Netflix | This is a self-made documentary about a couple who started a farm with the goal of being sustainable and traditional, and wound up doing a bunch of the same stuff Gabe Brown did. Also cheesy.
- Dirt to Soil | Amazon (Book) | Written by Gabe Brown. Recommended for basically being repeated cycles of direct experimentation and following through on the results, even if agriculture isn’t your thing.
It 100% is legibility reasons - land is not fungible, but large farm operations tend to treat it like it is. Hell, the farms back home are all in more-or-less equivalent sized lots. As the son of a man who owns eighty acres that is at least 25% marsh, is massively hilly, and has several streams on it, I can assure you that it is not as agriculturally useful as many of the same lots nearby. Fortunately, dad is a dentist not a farmer.
Also, the overhead costs of diverse farming are a lot higher. You need multiple kinds of equipment in a way you don't when growing one or two kinds of crop.
Also also, one of the things that greatly hampered small farmers back home in recent decades is the dropping number of small farmers. In the old days, each would own one or two expensive items and they'd borrow from each other. Now, there's not enough people to do that.
A lot of other factors too, of course. Though modern agricultural pricing makes no sense. PEI potatoes cost significantly less in Toronto than in PEI. Incentives are not what they should be.
> Also, the overhead costs of diverse farming are a lot higher. You need multiple kinds of equipment in a way you don't when growing one or two kinds of crop.
This seems to be a big chunk of the way the regenerative agriculture scheme works, from a business perspective: fixing the soil increases rainwater retention, so you spend less on irrigation equipment; growing diverse crops minimizes pest explosions, so you spend less on pesticide and applicators; lose less soil to erosion, so you spend less on fertilizer and equipment.
These functions are mostly replaced by the selection of crops, and the management of animals (namely cattle). So it looks to me like they drop a bunch of specific costs, and then capitalize on a bunch of non-explicit value (like using cattle to fertilize and replace tilling).
But it always seems to be that small farms get into it because they need a way to continue at all when they can't afford the costs of fertilization or equipment anymore. The guy who wrote the book above sold all his equipment and bought one no-till drill to replace it when he couldn't afford fertilizer; just recently read the same story about a guy near me (central NC).
Bike theft is a regular problem, unlike kidnapping governors.
Haiti wasn't notably more dysfunctional and poor than other Caribbean and Latin American countries until fairly recently which seems to undermine the French indemnity argument (still a dick move on their part though). The most politically incorrect explanation for Haiti's lack of success vis a vis the Dominican Republic since the 1950s is Duvalier driving out the mulatto elite in Haiti while the Dominican Republic under Trujillo attracted many Jewish refugees in the 1930s since no one else was willing to take them.
(#21) "It’s still a minor mystery why DR has done so much better than the rest of Latin America" Has it? World Bank data has similar GDP per capita as Latin America+Caribbean (latter was higher as recently as 2015), DR has lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality, lower poverty, overall seems a wash. I thought this might be skewed by some high scores in tiny island countries, but no-- DR has lower life expectancy and infant mortality than all the big countries in the region, and slightly-above-average GDP as far as I can tell. FreedomHouse gives it a 67/100, "Partly Free", which seems on the low side for Latin America (much of which is fully free). So it seems to me the question is why Haiti is such a mind-boggling outlier for the region, while DR is just a foil for the regional average, no?
Re #2, I would say none of the options listed fits the description of "permanent lockdown", at least not as the term "lockdown" has mostly been used here in the UK.
Regarding the FBI’s role in the kidnapping effort, there’s a significant difference between placing a bicycle in public in San Francisco and arresting anyone who tries to steal it, versus using undercover informants or agents to affirmatively encourage people to commit crimes.
As to the former, “the fact that government agents ‘merely afford opportunities or facilities for the commission of the offense does not’ constitute entrapment.” Sherman v. United States, 356 U.S. 369, 372 (1958). https://www.leagle.com/decision/1958725356us3691677
As to the latter, “[e]ntrapment occurs only when the criminal conduct was "the product of the creative activity of law-enforcement officials. To determine whether entrapment has been established, a line must be drawn between the trap for the unwary innocent and the trap for the unwary criminal.” Id. In other words, entrapment happens “when the criminal design originates with the officials of the Government, and they implant in the mind of an innocent person the disposition to commit the alleged offense and induce its commission in order that they may prosecute.” Id.
I don’t think that this distinction works all the time. It leads to all kinds of conjecture regarding whether the defendant was already predisposed to commit the crime prior to inducement by the government, which invites a determination of guilt or innocence based on grasping speculation about what someone might have done in a different situation that’s not in evidence. I think that’s generally very hard to square with the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In addition, a lot of the time the evidence of independent predilection towards crime to overcome an entrapment defense consists of non-criminal (if distasteful) speech, such as anti-government statements or policy arguments that are protected by the First Amendment. Using constitutionally protected speech to argue someone would have committed a crime absent government encouragement can have uncomfortable implications, and seems inconsistent with recent assurances that “the FBI holds sacred the rights of individuals to peacefully exercise their First Amendment freedoms.” https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Wray%20Witness%20Testimony3.pdf
But however you want to slice the entrapment question, and where the line should be drawn in terms of what level of government inducement towards criminal activity should be tolerated in finding people to prosecute, I think there’s an easy and clear distinction between (1) watching a honeypot bike, which involves no affirmative inducement to commit crime beyond creating an occasion for someone to express their own disposition towards theft, and (2) using a leadership position within an organization to enmesh it in a criminal conspiracy.
Regarding the FBI’s role in the kidnapping effort, there’s a significant difference between placing a bicycle in public in San Francisco and arresting anyone who tries to steal it, versus using undercover informants or agents to affirmatively encourage people to commit crimes.
As to the former, “the fact that government agents ‘merely afford opportunities or facilities for the commission of the offense does not’ constitute entrapment.” Sherman v. United States, 356 U.S. 369, 372 (1958). https://www.leagle.com/decision/1958725356us3691677
As to the latter, “[e]ntrapment occurs only when the criminal conduct was "the product of the creative activity of law-enforcement officials. To determine whether entrapment has been established, a line must be drawn between the trap for the unwary innocent and the trap for the unwary criminal.” Id. In other words, entrapment happens “when the criminal design originates with the officials of the Government, and they implant in the mind of an innocent person the disposition to commit the alleged offense and induce its commission in order that they may prosecute.” Id.
I don’t think that this distinction works all the time. It leads to all kinds of conjecture regarding whether the defendant was already predisposed to commit the crime prior to inducement by the government, which invites a determination of guilt or innocence based on grasping speculation about what someone might have done in a different situation that’s not in evidence. I think that’s generally very hard to square with the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In addition, a lot of the time the evidence of independent predilection towards crime to overcome an entrapment defense consists of non-criminal (if distasteful) speech, such as anti-government statements or policy arguments that are protected by the First Amendment. Using constitutionally protected speech to argue someone would have committed a crime absent government encouragement can have uncomfortable implications, and seems inconsistent with recent assurances that “the FBI holds sacred the rights of individuals to peacefully exercise their First Amendment freedoms.” https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Wray%20Witness%20Testimony3.pdf
But however you want to slice the entrapment question, and where the line should be drawn in terms of what level of government inducement towards criminal activity should be tolerated in finding people to prosecute, I think there’s an easy and clear distinction between (1) watching a honeypot bike, which involves no affirmative inducement to commit crime beyond creating an occasion for someone to express their own disposition towards theft, and (2) using a leadership position within an organization to enmesh it in a criminal conspiracy.
Typo in that UK COVID survey - they don't want permanent lockdown by sealing clubs, but to be permanently clubbing seals. Their domestic champion, Sean Locke, can take four at a time - two hammers and a pair of hobnail boots. Some describe it as like a supermarket trolley-dash: https://youtu.be/0Q9IRpFGgPY?t=79
I'm travelling and don't have a lot of time to elaborate on this, but #21 was wrong:
Claim: The Dominican Republic is doing much better than the rest of Latin America
This is false. The Dominican Republic's current income per capita is $8282 which makes it #17 out of 32 countires in the region, slightly below average. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1066610/gross-national-income-per-capita-latin-america-caribbean/
Claim: Haiti and the Dominican Republic were equal in 1960.
Not true. In 1960, Haiti's GDP per capita was $70 and the DR's GDP per capita was $204, a difference of 3x, per the world bank data that pops up when you google <country gdp per capita>.
The elephant in the room is that the Dominican republic is genetically 52% european, which is again slightly below average among Latin American countries.
See figure 4 in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4374169/
Meanwhile Haiti is reported to be >95% African ancestry (after the slave revolt there was a genocide against white Haitians). Whether we use genetic or cultural explanations we should expect the more-European country to perform more like Europe and the more-African country to perform more like Africa.
I don't have good data on this, but I'd bet a lot of money that if representative samples were taken, they'd find a higher average IQ in DR than in Haiti and that explains some of the difference in speed of development.
Rather than only looking for environmental factors that might have held Haiti back post-1960, we should also look for environmental factors that might have held DR back pre-1960 to explain why the gap was only 3x then.
22: Wait, does this mean cave paintings are the first recorded instance of animated GIFs?
We can finally bust that patent!
That Chinese propaganda is cool and accurate.
Regarding #17 on David Friedman on Noah Smith on Adam Smith: Friedman's response seems pedantic and fussy to me. Noah might be overstating Adam's progressive tendencies a little, but I disagree that he "would have to be deliberately dishonest" or not have read the book to write what he did. For one, he never even claims that Adam is "arguing for antitrust law". I could go on, but only at the risk of sounding even more pedantic and fussy.
At the end of the day, who cares what Adam Smith has to say? He was no more a prophet than Karl Marx. His ideas either happen to be right or they happen to be wrong. They are not right or wrong by virtue of being his ideas. And I saw the purpose of Noah's piece as being to undermine the (usually dogmatic) people who tend to cite him as an authority rather than actually evaluate how various economic ideas play out in the real world in the 21st century, where dogmatic ideas tend to be unworkable or insane.
#27 - Marvellous idea about the gospels. I await with interest the discovery of a fifth gospel containing the ‘good ending’, which Jesus was only able to get once he looked up the walkthrough.*
#18 - Lovecraft on Hayek - really good to have a quote from Lovecraft’s later letters, after he had stopped thinking of fascism as temptingly similar to his own ideas about civilisation and race. The impression I got was that Robert E Howard was a big part of arguing him out of this - their last letters are heated (not to mention long!) with Howard fiercely arguing that Nazism and Lovecraft’s own fondness for “civilisation” relied on a sanitised fantasy of history. Their letters are often interesting reading, actually, since they were both very smart, widely read, articulate and eccentric. Lovecraft was probably on the spectrum; I suspect (but have never seen it properly discussed) that Howard had ADHD. There is something very sweet about Howard breaking off from chatting about language groups and migrations to tell Lovecraft about his visit to a massive cave and saying ‘it was just like one of your stories, you would have loved it’.
#9 - Dominic Cummings’ blog / substack is v interesting. Even if you don’t agree with all his views, he is v civil, reasonable and interested in all sorts of interesting things. As you say, it is extremely unusual for someone that high up in government to, essentially, turn himself into an amiable poster. Although I wonder how many of them have alts!
#23 - FBI encouraging domestic terror plots: have you seen the Chris Morris film ‘The Day Will Come’ on this topic? It is a companion piece of sorts to his earlier ‘Four Lions’ - ‘Four Lions’ is about four UK men who are hopeless idiots, but genuinely want to commit a terrorist act; ‘The Day Will Come’ is about a probably schizophrenic black Muslim in America who really doesn’t want to be a terrorist and who is manipulated and manoeuvred by FBI agents because it will serve their careers to ‘stop’ a ‘terrorist plot’. Both are very funny and sad. In both, the interviews with Chris Morris are also interesting.
* weirdly, this idea is v similar to an extremely successful series of Japanese visual novels called Higurashi no nako koro ni (‘When the Cicadas Cry’) about a Japanese rural town with a lot of dark secrets, which seems to be locked in a time loop. It eventually becomes apparent (spoilers obvs) that this is all the result of a local deity and her priestess who would really quite like to find a sequence of events that doesn’t end with a horrible massacre in which she dies. Given the number of shady things going on, this is harder than it sounds.
I'm quite sure that someone already wrote that, but since the german word for heathen is "Heide" and that words means heather as well as heathen, I would be *very* surprised if the there is a correlation to "ethnic".
You should be much more concerned about the FBI issue., You're not understanding the risk. The FBI did this all the time in the COINTELPROL days. You're looking at as "people who were likely to commit crimes were baited" when its "potentially non-violent political activist groups are radicalized by undercover FBI agents who understand how to manipulate group psychology and then are baited into being accomplices to crimes those FBI agents planned as a means to suppress political activist groups because we cant just outright say "we dont like your view, you're under arrest"
Added "Shigami Eyes" and so far no one, including trans friends, is color coded, so some question how well this oarticular app actually works.
What on earth is placebo psychotherapy? When they ask you how that makes you feel, are they only pretending to have a degree? Are they only pretending to care? Are they lip-syncing to a recording of aaking you how that makes you feel? Are they secretly lizard-people hopped up on sugar?
The original (I think) digits tweet:
https://twitter.com/excitedstate/status/892137581592403968
W|A's answer is correct in the vigesimal numeric system, however it is trivial to convert into decimal by ignoring the distinction between fingers and toes (or, alternatively, right and left).
It sounds like you've experienced a lot of unfair situations where standing up for yourself was misunderstood and penalized, and that can be incredibly frustrating and hurtful. It’s especially tough when authority figures, including parents, don’t see the full picture or support you in those moments. These situations often leave a lasting impact, and it's completely valid to feel unresolved about it.
On a different note, if you’re interested in advancing your skills, practicing for exams like the <a href="https://btpracticeexam.com//">RBT practice exam </a> could be a good way to channel focus on something empowering for yourself. Working towards new goals can sometimes be a positive way to cope and even build resilience through adversity.