bloaf

The White Man's Burden is definitely a dangerous poem, it's bad to uncritically spread its message of simple cultural superiority.

But lets not pretend that it is some off-the-rails racist screed. We still do try to export our cultural values to developing nations (e.g. women's education to Afghanistan, or elimination of FGM in Africa) and are sometimes resented for it. We should be pushed to champion those kinds of causes, even if they are thankless.

Now those cultural values certainly aren't spread in a vacuum; they are usually accompanied by other less-benevolent forms of imperialism. Exploitation isn't what Kipling is calling for; he is certainly racist, but he is trying to be benevolent.

I don't think you've actually understood.

As we can see from the title, what matters is not the actual stats, but what people perceive. So if the system works silently and fails loudly, people are going to think it is more broken than it actually is.

That fact doesn't somehow make the author wrong. People don't check the rigorous studies of corruption to decide whether or not they should feel like a sucker.

The fundamental rule of conservatism is this:

>There must be an in-group that the law protects but does not bind, alongside an out-group that the law binds but does not protect.

That is why conservatives are so prickly about being regulated: to be bound by the rules is "proof" that they are no longer the in-group.

Your very assertion that the law can be applied fairly (to the point group membership is irrelevant) is a denial of the fundamental thesis of conservatism.

I agree that we should aspire to fairness and equality-before-the-rules, but there are too many people who do deeply believe that fundamental theorem to just deny and ignore.

Still getting errors in Houston

edit: some streams back up, chat still buggy as of 09:55 local time

edit2: appears to be back ~10:00 local time

You should always want to have the underlying code available. Without the exact procedures they used to process their data, the only kind of "using their conclusions" you can do is the superficial "take it at face value" kind. So many important details get hand-waved away in papers that say things like "we used the well known blahblahblah method to analyze the data."

If you do it right, the code should in no way interfere with your ability to read abstracts.

> the non-organic feed would be contaminated with pesticides/herbicides.

https://www.agdaily.com/technology/the-list-of-pesticides-ap...

Organic farming uses herbicides and pesticides too.

I have slowly collected a large (several million file) ebook library from open directories over the past few years. I am now trying to set up a search solution for it.

Recoll doesn't seem to work well headless, so I am taking a look at: https://github.com/ICIJ/datashare

which claims to be able to do some distributed indexing.

So?

Suppose you have two clocks that are synchronized to +-dt1, and sending messages takes some known amount of time +-dt2 and you want to make sure the sender is able to transmit within +dt3 of whatever event triggered the send event.

It seems to me that you'd be able to transmit at least dt3/(2*(dt1+dt2)) distinct values with the pretty naive approach of discretizing time into segments longer than the uncertainty between the message-and-clock error. I'd be willing to bet that a sophisticated approach could do much better.

The specific claim is that because the law does not prohibit something, it is therefore ok.

As Chesterton argues to the contrary "To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."

Stereotypes are often better predictors of human behavior than actual psychological research. [0] Would Damore been more justified in his memo if he simply cited common stereotypes rather than psychology research?

Throwing out psychology, as the author of the original piece wants to do, is a double edged sword. You may knock the legs out from under Damore's stool, but you have no evidence left to use to argue against him. Indeed, quite a few people's "gut feelings" are going to be aligned with his argument.

[0] https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/2016-jussim.pdf

This is dangerous reasoning; the google memo incident shows science walks a narrow path, and there are pitfalls all around.

Science is the best sword we have to separate truth from falsehood; to say that science is wrong and biased whenever it doesn't say what we like is to commit the exact same sin against scholarship as Damore. Damore didn't like what he was hearing from the diversity experts so he went and cherry picked the studies that supported his gut feeling. Cherry picking is still cherry picking even when you're doing it in defense of diversity.

I think one of the under-discussed aspects of the whole debacle was the is-ought problem [0], i.e. the gap between statements about "what is" and statements about what "ought to be."

Science works very well on "what is" questions. It can tell us that the earth is warming. It can tell us all the things that will happen as the earth warms, and all the things we could do that that would stop the earth from warming. But when it comes time to decide what temperature the earth "ought" to be, we can't ask science; we have to first decide what our goals are. If our goal is to maximize short term profit, we will get a different answer than if we want to maximize long term sustainability.

In the same way, science can't tell us what the gender ratio "should" be. Its on us to decide what our priorities are. If our goal is short term profit, we will undoubtedly prefer a different ratio than if we are trying to achieve a more egalitarian society in the long term.

So that is why the author's assertion "In fact, science has often made its living from encoding and justifying bias, and refusing to do anything about the fact that the data says something’s wrong." is a misrepresentation of science. Science tells us "the earth is warming", we are the ones who have to add "and that is wrong." Science tells us "there is bias", we are the ones who have to add "and that is wrong." That scientists in the past have failed to add that last bit (or even added "and that is good!") is not adequate justification for the author to simply dismiss science.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

I feel like now is the best time to make a 3rd party.

Non-loony-tunes republican voters held their noses and voted D against Trump. Progressive D are frustrated because they're not getting so much as a fig leaf after supporting the establishment candidate.

Basically: the Democratic party tent is currently busting at the seams. It seems possible that the corporate-centrist Dems and Republicans unite under the Dems flag, leaving all the non-Q populists without a sane party to represent them.

I don't think his chances are good, but the iron is as hot as it has ever been.

>What actually happened is that Sweden has significantly lower per-capita COVID mortality than the EU average.

Sweden is also significantly higher than all its immediate neighbors who have 1/3rd to 1/10th the mortality.

>These policies directly failed on their own terms, and no studies or inter-country comparisons are even needed to prove that.

...So we don't need to talk about Sweden after all?

>e.g. the differences between North and South Dakota (no outcome differences, very different policies).

North Dakota (with late lockdowns) beat South Dakota (no lockdowns) by about the same margin that Sweden beat the EU average (10~15%). Why is the difference "significant" for Sweden, but "nonexistent" for the Dakotas?

If, as shown in their energy diagram, all food converts to CO2 and H2O, then no foods can cause weight gain because all the carbon will be exhaled and water excreted.

I read this as an indication that numbers out of a calorimeter don't correspond precisely to the bio-available energy.

...You do know that Sweden implemented more "mainstream" anti-covid measures as 2020 went on, right? A decision in July 2020 gave Swedish local authorities the right to shut down bars/restaurants. By Dec. 2020, the government was shutting down public facilities, putting mask mandates on public transportation, encouraging remote education/work, and further limiting groups in bars/restaurants.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03003930.2021.1...

So if the goal is to compare "no restrictions" to "restrictions", only amateurs would think you could use "all" the data from Sweden.

Why was anyone talking about Sweden in the first place?

Because it was the only example of a developed nation whose health officials came out and said "given our circumstances, we think our country will be ok without anti-covid measures."

People who wanted (for a variety of reasons) to denounce anti-covid measures took those statements, stripped out the "given our circumstances" and said "see, Sweden thinks everyone will be ok without anti-covid measures."

The anti-covid groups, recognizing that nuance is doomed, did not respond by saying "Sweden might be ok, but we won't" and instead said "Sweden is wrong."

So why did people stop talking about it? Because the policy decisions have already been made. The political tool that is "Sweden says otherwise" isn't useful anymore.

Now obviously the academics and public policy experts have not stopped talking about Sweden (and the verdict is not even close to rendered), but since they are doing so out of the public eye it doesn't so much count.

So why should we have more public discussion about Sweden? It looks to me like this author believes it is evidence for the assertion "if the experts are struggling, the amateurs must be right." It is not. This kind of reasoning is virtually always the kind of justification someone comes up with when they need an explanation for why someone should trust a fringe conspiratorial theory of events over a mainstream expert-endorsed one.

See also: the whimsical "Fine Artist" program from Microsoft a year or two later

https://classicreload.com/win3x-fine-artist-by-microsoft-kid...

> What happens if you want to buy a condo in a competitive market that requires a 200k downpayment? Or have a medium-sized wedding? Or have two kids in day-care?

If you mean after you retire, you'd plan for those things within your 4% swr budget just like you would if you were making a salary.

If you mean before, then it depends on whether you're planning on getting married annually for the rest of your life, or if it is a one time expense. If it is a one time expense, I'm sure everyone here is capable of doing the math to figure out how much a large one-time expense will delay your retirement. (hint: it is one-time expense / earnings)

If it is recurring, then the math still applies.

At least since the civil war.

> Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union

> The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union...

> The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States.

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...

If you do a little algebra and make some simple assumptions, it turns out that "years of work required for retirement" is a function of your savings ratio only, that is savings/take-home pay.

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...

"Advertising solves satiation"

You're not thinking big enough. A star trek style holodeck (or matrix-style brain port) has the possibility to simulate literally any experience with roughly constant resource inputs.

Short of literal deception, advertising cannot offer someone with access to those technologies anything.

I don't think there needs to be a government owned internet media company.

Sometimes I wonder how weird and wild a government run social media company would be. Open to US citizens only, identity verification required? No rules other than actual speech laws? No anonymity?

Studies that looked at bias in the media found PBS to be the most centrist of the major news organizations. People on the extremes of the political spectrum see PBS as biased against them, as they would any centrist organization.

For art and music there are pretty clear and well defined skills that can be drilled.

Anyone have suggestions for writing drills?

From the report:

> Provisional mortality data found an overall decrease in the age-adjusted suicide rate from quarter 3 (July–September) of 2019 to quarter 3 of 2020. The suicide rate among young persons aged 15–24 years during this same period saw no significant change (9).

So in other words: what changed was the rate of emergency department admissions, not actual suicides. I would wonder if lockdowns meant that more suicide attempts were made near family, who would then notice the attempt and take the person to the ED.

I personally think a vector library that allowed some form of Einstein notation [1] would be a killer feature for a scientific computing environment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_notation

The data doesn't seem right, wasn't the opioid epidemic pretty well covered in the media, even in 2016? Or did that not meet some criteria?

Sure: people's lives don't linearly interpolate; 2019 was the first year to be better than 1999 for several age brackets.

Seems like you'd just look at the median wage among groups of similarly-aged people to get a "final answer." Like this:

https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2020/09/2...

Its not a stretch at all to say that median incomes have been stagnant since the late 90s.

Fun fact: Just like "Lord," the word "lady" is also etymologically related to dough via hlæfdige, or "one who kneads dough"

https://www.etymonline.com/word/lady