FakeComments

Okay.

None of what you wrote is a response to what I said, beside “well, if it gets bad enough, society will adapt”.

You admit that in the current market, those companies are vastly important in a way that can’t change quickly and their acting as censors could turn so bad, it would force a change to the very way we communicate.

I think “hellish” is an apt description of “would reshape hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars of economic activity in response to the social disfunction it caused”.

Can you show any quality meta-studies which investigate the issue?

I’m unaware of any research into the effects of long term exposure to structured non-ionizing radiation.

A meta-analysis of situations in which people make arguments like yours shows that they’re often problematic: pesticides, plastics, pharmaceuticals, etc. All of these have understated first order effects which have been masked by questionable research and fallacious arguments, and ecologically devastating second order effects which weren’t accounted for until decades later.

I think it’s telling you made ad hominems, like implying I don’t know statistics, but didn’t bother to cite these meta-analysises that support your position and refute mine.

It doesn’t seem a settled issue, as you portray:

https://journals.lww.com/health-physics/Abstract/2013/12000/...

https://www.saferemr.com/2015/09/recent-research-on-wifi-eff...

Your vision for society is one in which private companies moderate civic discourse?

Sounds hellish — and very likely to be practiced disequitably, compounded with the power to silence critics of the system as extremists.

It’s strange to me you excuse groups of people from having the same obligations as a lone person.

The problem is that I haven’t seen safety studies, and the null hypothesis is that a technology is mildly unsafe: most of the neat science technologies have been.

The reasoning of “its not ionizing radiation so it can’t possibly impact biological systems at continuous low, structured doses!” wouldn’t pass in an advanced high school class — so it’s deeply concerning that’s what underlies the safety of a widespread technology.

Having a healthy society has always been a national security issue: there’s literally millennia of documents on how governments collapsed because outsiders funded dissidents.

These morality lessons we see aimed at societies aren’t mere moralizing — they’re an evolved code of conduct designed to keep a vibrant whole in the face of genuine adversarial conditions.

People have forgotten the value of a strong national identity in many Western nations, largely because of the activity of groups funded by outside nations.

Doesn’t this require the photon to be emitted differently depending on where it ends up, as it would experience different amounts of redshift depending on the length of flight?

That’s some serious retro-causality if a photon from 13B ly hits us instead of Andromeda.

Something a lot of people dont understand: US state governments aren’t part of the US federal government, in any capacity — they’re independent states in a union.

That’s why it’s strange here: ICE are agents of the federal government, who aren’t subject to state laws in the performance of their duty — Washington can’t stop ICE from doing their job, so instead they punish people who cooperate.

An analogy might be that mom and dad are fighting, and now punishing the kids who listen to the other parent.

That’s a nonsense reply.

Those calories are known to dissipate via motion, light, and heat.

By contrast, the energy lost to expansion is simply lost, not emitted by the traveling photon through some mechanism. There is no conservation of energy in such a system, so it’s completely unlike the case of burning calories.

Facial recognition is key to some of their projects — say, verifying who uses a security badge or (possibly) things like the Go store to match you with your account.

It’s also ignoring the generally silent shareholders who want Amazon to develop such technologies, who want them to have government contracts, etc. Or who view Amazon managing such a service in the open and where we can discuss it as superior to someone like Palantir doing the same, and don’t believe it’s possible to restrict all companies from developing that technology — particularly those less open to public pressure or oversight.

You’re assuming a vocal cohort of anti-American, uninformed activists represent the majority of Amazon shares — and I don’t think they do.

Frankly, if BlackRock drops weapons trade, I’ll drop my iShares: that would be them failing to represent me as my fiduciary.

To me, it is a perfectly coherent argument that the topic is insignificant to your business, but that the associated politicking at your meeting might be disruptive (particularly if you expect it to be based on inaccurate information).

We don’t know if Amazon is honestly arguing from that position, or being dishonest as you imply.

That decreasing the price causes elastic demand doesn’t indicate that raise the price decreases demand elastically: there can be a largely inelastic base load.

> Higher-paying workers are more likely to pay more, since people with price-inelastic demand for driving are more likely to be those who value their time more highly.

Again, this is only true absent coercive forces —

Higher paid workers (on average) also have more schedule flexibility and ability to use money to cover for their physical absence.

By contrast, lower paid workers have less flexible schedules and a greater need to utilize their time — eg, they have to perform childcare because their market rate per hour is below child care services.

This leads to a situation where high paid workers have more elastic price demand than low paid workers, and raising prices ends up charging low paid workers because if market distortions from other factors.

As an interesting aside, the n-th partial derivatives form an n-cube:

For m variables, there are m first orders, m^2 second orders, etc. and most proofs about, eg convexity, amount to a proof over that shape.

The reason that n-th order reasoning about an m-dimensional problem is difficult is that it requires reasoning using m^n objects.

If you figure we can remember about ten things intuitively, that’s just enough for three dimensions and two derivatives — enough to do motion analysis.

But it’s leagues away from being able to do the second order of a ten-dimensional problem intuitively.

I’m not sure I follow your argument on 2.

If people aren’t free to adjust their driving habits, congestion pricing merely raises the cost for them, because the time to commute doesn’t go down (appreciably) — everyone is still on the road at the same time.

It then effectively becomes a regressive tax: those least free to change their schedule are those in the lowest earning jobs, and hence those most coerced to pay the cost.

I’m not sure I believe that’s an effective way to raise money for government.

> Perhaps that's what you're getting at, the American identity is risk-taking, ie those that would willingly leave everything behind for the chance at a better life.

My point is that Hispanics or blacks in the 1960s-1980s weren’t any worse off than say, the Chinese during railroad construction or the Japanese during internment in material terms — whatever the historic record.

So it’s worth examining why some disadvantaged social groups integrated while others did not — or perhaps a better phrasing is “better integrated”.

Unless you’re racist, surely you must agree that the answer is cultural.

> Identitarian politics, such as the civil rights movement? Women's lib? All a Soviet plot to destroy America, obviously.

You’re being facetious.

Those movements had roots in genuine domestic issues, however, radical segments of each movement were supported by Soviets or their sympathizers — offering things like funding and advice on effective propaganda in order to sow civil dissent. These radical arms of the movements eventuall took over, and transformed genuine civil rights movements into regressive and harmful ones.

It’s similar to their actions in 2016, when they funded advertisements for radical positions on the issue of race, gender, immigration, etc.

That kind of psyop to destabilize a country by funding radicals within is older than the US, and has been practiced by the CIA as well.

None of that detracts from the fact that radical feminism, identitarian politics, and intersectionalism all emerged from Marxist philosophy partially sponsored by Soviets.

Researching the Soviet idea of “useful idiots” is interesting.

This assumes that either:

1. People can arbitrarily convert time into money, ie, there’s not a reason they’d prefer to pay some expenses in time.

2. People are free to change their travel times, and aren’t being coerced into traveling at a particular time. If travel time is a monopsony, then this is mere rent extraction because people can’t adjust behavior in response to economic pressures.

> Did Descartes really think?

For the purposes of his proof, yes:

Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum.

The witness of a doubt is the witness of a thought is the witness of a thing, hence a thing must exist.

Descartes at that point in his argument doesn’t make any assertion to the nature of reality, merely that each of us can be sure that something exists, even if our interpretation is completely wrong: the very act of doubting existence is witness to existence.

People project their own model of self into those terms, but it’s merely trying to make a broadening categorical argument and not a particular interpretation of what the objects normally represented by those terms are or how they behave (eg, times exists).

A static Descartes with the experience of currently doubting is sufficient witness for the proof, which Descartes would have himself experienced directly — the cogito is a witness to that experience of Descartes.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19575256

Historically, those groups melted into a shared American identity — that’s one of the things the US is historically famous for. Irish, Italians, and the “not white enough” Europeans; Chinese, Japanese, and Asian groups; recent African migrants, etc.

Every one of these groups integrated and thrived over time, without stalling out the process, because they joined a shared American culture focused on merit and cultural fusion via open debate.

Starting with identitarian politics in the 60s that process has stalled, to the point it’s become non-functional in modern times, with antipodal ideas like “cultural appropriation”.

This coincides with the infiltration of academia by Soviets, and the rise of many social movements using Soviet psyop mantras.

“It was always this way!” is lazy rhetoric, and afactual: there’s been a change in American cultural values over the past 20, 50, and 100 years — and we should talk about that, because they’re changes that impact our well-being.

So does “effective feature size” mean anything?

Besides that 5 < 7.

I disagree, and would say that was even less true in 2003 when this was written — but there’s a fair bit of variance in how the word is used, and it’s on a trend towards improved status now that, well, (some) geeks seized substantial assets and syncophants have to suck up to (some of) them now.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/geek

GSF1 appears among artists, hippies, and that sort of crowd in addition to geeks.

It’s a common response to social bullying, and not limited to geeks — though it tends to manifest in marginalized social groups, for obvious reasons.

All of these are common social fallacies, and associating them with “geeks” in particular seems like stereotyping, and seems to me to be reflecting the authors own poor experiences with a subset of geeks coupled with a lack of exposure to the same problematic elements in other social groups.

I believe the author meant well, and these are social fallacies, but attaching them to “geeks” seems more out of bias than fact.

Quoting the actual mistake is more useful, as that sentence doesn’t actually clarify the question — it’s what they’d say if it were for political reasons, as well.

> In the letter, Ecker wrote that she and her coauthors had "identified a problem with the script that was used for the prediction of biological sex in male and female individuals with ASD based on their respective neuroanatomy in our original sample."

> That meant that "the probabilities we assumed to be indicative of the default (male) category in the female individuals with ASD, as shown in Figure 1B of our article, were flipped and in fact reflect the probabilities for the category of biological female individuals."

I sometimes wonder if we’ll see a genuine men’s rights movement around the question of false paternity, now that it’s trivial to document.

There are many issues that disproportionately impact men — but that’s one that basically uniquely impacts men, and where women’s rights movements (such as feminism) have shown a distinct anti-male tendency.

Food for thought:

https://youtu.be/3WMuzhQXJoY

The US not only separates smart kids into different classes, eg AP and IB programs and early admission to community colleges, they separate the elites into whole other schools, eg private boarding schools, magnet schools, and technical schools.

This is ignoring the huge baseline variance in quality, due to funding and cultural variations.

In my experience as a math tutor, they’re untaught natural abilities via poorly constructed (and hence, understandably confusing) “math” lessons taught by humanities majors turned primary school teacher.

I often make the same point, and have occasionally found just rewriting it as “4 + [x] = 9” is enough to help span the conceptual bridge. Sticky notes in white board equations is another way to make this point.

The US has extreme outliers, but it’s mean and median are below other nations.

Glibly, metastasized leftists.

I think that’s the most natural model for a virtue-signaling economic sinkhole that can’t sustain a viable population, but is trying to spread its governance ideas anyway: it’s literally analogous to unhealthy cells using false signaling to sinkhole resources while replicating their damaged DNA — a cancer.

It’s not just SF: Seattle, NYC, and basically every major metro that subscribes to particular left-wing ideas.

For the perspective on Seattle: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw

When you try to understand math education, remember that it’s basically what would happen if foreign language classes were designed and taught by people who only spoke English and had no training in formal language theory.

Of course it’s largely a disaster: it’s taught by people who brag about hating the subject!

Algebra education can (and does) safely begin in first grade, with the introduction of workbooks: “4 + [ ] = 7” is a common exercise, and involves the implicit solving of a basic linear equation, where you solve for the value which goes in the box.

That you can teach algebra to first graders, but math education is so abysmal, only speaks to the complete disregard mathematics is given in education.

But what else would you expect when you leave it up to people who hate math?