tbf, it's not like the toil and sweat wasn't partly the toil and sweat of the slaves.
444 karma · joined September 14, 2023
Huh. No, in the scientific literature, this isn't obscure language. This is normal language there.
This... kinda comes across like going to France and objecting that everyone's speaking French.
Against an invading army, sure. Against the cartel and drug-running, ok, I can see some reasoning there, although I'm not sure we're ever going to win the War on Drugs. But with regards to immigration, I don't see a solid argument that we need strong border control in order to "keep Americans safe". Studies show that immigrants commit crime at a lower rate, right? So how would stronger border control keep us safe? Economically, immigration helps us, enriches us. Culturally, also.
People joke "yep, gotta protect us from that Mexican grandma selling tamales out of her car", and I didn't want to throw that at you. But I don't think it's entirely that far from the truth.
There is a long and storied history of humans being afraid of foreigners. "They speak different, they have different values, they worship a different god. How can I know they're safe?"
But we humans often have more in common than differences, and cultural differences usually soften after a few decades in this big Melting Pot.
There are people who have interest in selling fear and distrust, even if that fear and distrust ends up hurting us as a society. When I hang out with people from other countries, I don't see this fear justified. Usually, I just see other people, who want to work and live and create art and fall in love and have a family, just like the rest of us. And if you've got legitimate fears, please bring 'em.. just do try to be careful that the fear is solidly based in reality, not just something sold by Fox News.
...wow.
Is this a serious question?
> Your idea is borderline insane. ... someone on the left who lacks fundamental self preservation instincts ...
Huh. Well, checking, checking... I don't feel insane. I'm feeling pretty calm, rational, and evidence-driven.
The two big risks I see from large-scale immigration is this: - people who don't agree with liberal secular democracy. E.g., religious fanatics who want to enact a theocracy. That's all good; I'm fine with screening those out. - economic damage. But here, again, the economic data shows that immigration distinctly benefits the US, mostly through economies of scale, but also partly through higher-than-average rates of college attendance and entrepreneurship in 1st- and 2nd-generation immigrants, leading to higher earnings and innovation.
There definitely are also localized *negative* impacts from immigration, particularly for overwhelmed healthcare and education systems. These do not outweigh the national net benefits - meaning, the US still benefits as a whole - but I can understand that people living in those areas or culturally affiliated with them would be anti-immigration. But these are problems we could very much tackle if we wanted to: the federal government has more than enough resources to help these locales, while still getting the long-term and nation-wide benefits from increased immigration.
So: no, I flatly deny that I'm not concerned with self-preservation. Yes, I care about compassion and fairness, but it's quite reasonable to ask that fairness and compassion be balanced with self-preservation. And yet - even after considering self-preservation, we still benefit from increased immigration.
True, but again, scientists are saying that we're already putting massive strain on our ecological resources, and the strain is only increasing. Not just climate change, but ocean acidification, modification of biogeochemical balances, habitat destruction, etc.
We are at genuine risk of accidentally wrecking the ecosystems we depend on.
It makes sense to me to say that they do not fall under US laws and US jurisdiction, and their children likewise.
I think there would be a real problem with creating a class of people who live here their entire lives and aren't citizens. And then their children also live here and aren't citizens, and their grandchildren, etc.
It's not that birthright citizenship is ideal, but it prevents some other, bigger problems.
He got dang close. He's only one justice replacement away from making it doable.
Gods, we are not as far from ripping up the Constitution as we'd like to think.
Worth noting that the economic literature also shows that this is firmly in our best interests, and immigrants and their children more than pay their way in future taxes and future entrepreneurship.
The US didn't even have a particularly selective immigration process for the first century. It was only after a big influx of Chinese immigrants (and a corresponding backlash) that we enacted our first immigration controls, limiting how many immigrants could come from a given country each year. The aptly-named "Chinese Exclusion Act" of 1882.
I think this is good; insofar as women have children, it should be because they want to, not because they're pushed into it.
I'll say - it also wouldn't kill us to have slightly fewer people on the planet. We're already taxing much of our systems/ecosystems past their breaking points. Smarter people than me, entire groups of scientists, are saying that what we're doing now is badly unsustainable and we're heading for trouble.
Which is gods-damned crazy. We are that close to overturning major civil rights.
So: if you're running the models on your own machine, presumably you're not running them as often, and air cooling is sufficient. But, at the same time, this is less efficient in terms of hardware use; the data centers need water cooling specifically because they're getting more bang from their buck from their hardware, by running their hardware harder.
So that's the tradeoff: more hardware-use efficiency means more water usage.
Even if it's too expensive to run the models on your own personal hardware, open weights may still make it possible to take power back from the big private corporations.
Certainly the transistors/chip or transistors/$ or flops/$ have not been progressing at the same exponential rate as during 1970-2010. There is still progress, but it's rather slower.
Eh, I grew up conservative evangelical, and they were pretty much always going to have a problem with research in evolution and astronomy. Same goes for the fossil fuel industry w.r.t. climate science.
When the scientific evidence interferes with religious doctrine or industrial paycheck, then yeah, folks are still going to have a problem with hard science research.
Eh, I think the correct answer is: read it, then cite it.
You're not really supposed to cite something without reading it, as it might say something different than you think. But sure, citing it w/o reading it is better than not citing it at all.
But then, as you scale towards higher density (e.g., replacing parking lots with garages), you end up with less space for trees. Unless you put them on top of buildings, ofc.
Meaning, I think that ticket sales can a good job of capturing the costs and benefits of transportation - the benefits to the consumer and the costs to the producer. It’s worked well in other areas of transportation, like passenger boats and planes, and the market mostly works well in those areas.
So I’d have guessed that issue with subways, different from planes and ships, is that you have to buy the rights to large portions of underground land in order to build your lines in contiguous fashion. It’s hard for private developers to get the rights to these lands, if one landowner refuses to sell, it can block the construction of an entire line. This is why rail, dam, and highway projects tend to be coordinated by the state. They all suffer this problem, which doesn’t apply to transport by air or sea, as air and sea lack similar private property issues to trip over.
I'm not sure that that's possible. If someone is motivated by religion or finance to believe something that's simply not true, and your scientific evidence contradicts them, there's a fundamental misalignment. They won't support you, because the real-world evidence contradicts their beliefs, and you're bringing more real-world evidence.
On issues of climate change, evolution, age of the universe, etc., the hard science just straight up disagrees with conservatives. I don't see a way around that.
And, yes, this overlooks the times when conservative scientists like Richard Muller have come in to disprove the mainstream consensus and then come up with the exact same results, but... that's not considered important when they have so many other "examples" of "liberal science".
I know that ultimately, there isn't really any space for 'conservative science' in climate. Either they do bad science, so it's not really 'science', or they do good science and come up with the same 'liberal' answers. But I don't think conservatives have figured this out yet; they're still convinced that good science will prove them right.
If you cut funding for helpful science on the basis of ignorant claims, you're acting backwards. If you act backwards, you may get called backwards.
You should still change, become not-backwards, and fund science.