bm3719

Still learning about the tenets of this philosophy here, nor do I have a position on it yet, so might get this wrong... However, isn't there a more charitable argument you could make that looks something like this:

4. Unlike with cavemen and Socrates' time, we now have decisions to make that could lock us out of continued proliferation of human life in the future. As such, the longtermists are bringing attention to those, and trying to help us to make the right decisions, instead of focusing resources on short-term returns.

A good example they might support would be spending more money on space tech and less on food for Africa. Resources aren't limitless, and some aren't renewable at all, so we have to use those wisely to position our heirs such that they could take the next step.

They might also make the slightly more tenuous claim that since we know more about the nature of the universe, there could be some invariants that we'll certainly need to see through this vision (e.g., establishing self-sustaining life off the planet). Those will be true in the future, just as the caveman could have assumed we would still need food and shelter of some kind in present day.

On the contrary, I wish my criminal aggressors had precisely the amount of empathy I have for them. Such crimes would not have occurred were that the case, nor would they even be possible (as I would never violate another fellow human being in such a way).

Furthermore, you may have gotten off with a day of inconvenience, but consider those victims that have permanent scars from their encounters with those lacking empathy. Victims of sexual assault, those suffering permanent injury, and the relatives of prematurely deceased victims will never be the same. These are not hypotheticals (e.g., just the stats on sexual violence against women are appalling). All we can do as a society for such individuals is do our best to prevent some percentage of future similar acts. A better path for reformation may be part of that, but I'm not sure squeezing victims for more empathy gets us very far.

Most of us have been the victim of some kind of crime at some point in our lives. The many times it's happened to me, I also considered the notion of empathy: namely that the criminal lacked it for me, the victim.

Not saying the current system is in any way an optimal solution or even close to it, but one thing it does provide is a lot of time for those who have acted without empathy to reflect on their misdeeds.

Thanks! I guess the site broke my brain and I missed that.

I put my $10k in.

This site is indeed pretty awful and I couldn't find an answer to this question: When getting returns, are these going to auto-deposit into the account I linked to buy it, or should I make a note to log in once a year to withdrawal those funds?

Also a fan of mechanical watches, including doing mods/builds of them.

I don't mind winding mine up and setting the time, but if that bothers you, you can get a watch winder that will keep the spring topped off on automatics.

Regarding size, there seems to be a consensus that trends are slowly gravitating back towards more reasonable case diameters. Even Panerai (famous for its massive chonkers) released its first 38mm recently. You can also get into vintage watches. Over 40mm was very rare and mainly limited to dive watches some 30 years ago. Thinness was more of a priority back then too. As an adult male with a standard 7" wrist, 38mm diameter and under 12mm thickness is my preference for a comfortable all-day wearing experience.

Those who genuinely do love sporting a huge dinner plate on their wrist need not worry though, since I'm sure they'll always keep making plenty of the big ones. In the smart watch world, I suspect certain models will get bigger as users demand more battery life and functionality. For example, Garmin recently came out with the 51mm Fenix 7X.

Probably the only safe thing to say with these facts in mind is that we haven't found a solution to this problem that both reduces the crime output of those likely to commit it, and also treads carefully across our collective sensitivities surrounding the topic.

Maybe that's an impossible task given those requirements. If it were easy, we'd probably have found the solution by now. We're pretty sensitive about numbers like that after all, to the point that I'm generally reluctant to quote them.

Because the number of seconds to doomsday doesn't mean anything and it was at best an ill-conceived stunt to scare us into action?

We're not x seconds to doomsday. It should have always been a percentage.

While I agree with your general notions on automation, I think UBI isn't necessary.

Some other alternatives include expanding the service sector, legislating human roles in workflows, and/or simply producing less humans. Not saying any of these are good ideas, but when the alternative is creating a permanent underclass that represents 90% of society, we may have to choose between least-worst options.

Personally, I look outside and see plenty of work that needs doing though, so I don't think these kinds of trade-offs really need to be made. We have entire cities that humans could be rebuilding, natural environments to restore, and call centers to man (so I can get actual customer service when I call my bank). Let's watch less TV shows and do that instead.

> Do you think those are all morally wrong as well?

They could be, if one considers the negative morality of non-voluntary, force-backed extraction greater than the positive morality gained by its (partial) redistribution.

Another opinion one could have is that the first part being morally negative makes the whole affair morally wrong, regardless of any positive upside.

I hate what PayPal has become and want nothing to do with them.

But, what payment processor should I be using instead? Venmo is owned by PayPal. Zelle (and Venmo) use Plaid, which accesses your entire checking account history. What's left and viable?

For those thinking about going no-dryer: You can also get small, indoor, foldable clothes drying racks for around $20. I used one of these my entire adult life and pretty much never needed a dryer. Later on I got a house that came with a dryer, but only use it for large items like bed sheets.

Also the Pixel Watch is being announced today. It's got some interesting design compared to the other two main smartwatches on the market (Apple and Samsung).

Personally, it being circular with a curvy screen appeals to my watch aesthetic sense.

Isn't it true though that you can tell someone's race by their genome, skeletal structure, and other physical traits apart from skin color? Additionally, is it not also the case that race is generally agreed to result from geographic isolation, and that if that persisted long enough, speciation might occur?

Not stating this is reality. I'm genuinely curious what the science is on this.

That's true. I'll probably grab one once the official site works again, but I was weighing that, plus the inconvenience of having to manage funds in yet another location and keep the tax implications in mind (you only have to pay federal taxes on interest here).

I Bonds are 30 year bonds. Since the I Bond yield of 9.xx% is only guaranteed for the first 6 months, what's the consensus thinking here on a long term hold of them?

Some info I found says:

   I bonds cannot be cashed for one year after purchase. If a bond is cashed in
   year two through five after purchase, the prior three months of interest are
   forfeited.  There is no interest penalty for cashing in the bonds after five
   years.

Sounds like you'd have to hold them for at least 1.25 years then to get a year's worth of interest.

This conclusion is being drawn from weak premises, though I'd agree with the article that we were sold this faulty assertion by our leaders.

Is a free market even possible with an top-down, authoritarian, surveillance state like China? They even describe themselves as a "socialist market economy", which is pretty far from what economists would call a free market.

I'd argue that from the outside, the only agency we have is to give an authoritarian state more customers. That might be liberalizing, or it could just empower and entrench the status quo. A debate about this might be more relevant to current times.

Sprints are a container of fixed size to put work into. This container can be useful sometimes, but that depends on the nature of the work being done, the humans involved, the group social dynamics, and a myriad of external factors. There are combinations of those parameters where the sprint is almost always the wrong container. As an example, take pure or applied research. I've seen such work shoehorned into sprints to the detriment of productivity, to the point of killing it almost completely.

Related to this is that sprints and their associated concepts mechanize and formalize something that may or may not need such. Applying something like Scrum almost always has one engaged in motions that are disconnected or even counter-productive to the local environment. That said, it sure is a lot easier to pick a methodology off the shelf than it is to engage in sober, thoughtful, and rational assessment of your situation's organizational needs. There's also risk inherent in that too, but one effective counter to that is to incrementally add/subtract process as needed.

Given the above, I consider process-heavy management to be a signal for prospective employment -- on the very much negative side. It tells me a few things, mainly about the way management's group mind works and also about what my future role in such a group would be (i.e., more part of organizational machinery than a creative agent).

The last point I'll make is that I just find the experience needlessly draining. A job typically lasts years. It's more of a marathon than a sprint. If it was a marathon with a few necessary sprinting periods, that might be bearable. If you really are sprinting constantly (the next sprint starting immediately after one concludes), that's a good way to generate burnout.

My take on the current situation as someone who's watched the conflict since 2014 (both professionally and casually):

Russia's nuclear weapons arsenal is serving its intended purpose right now: Scaring Westerners. If you listen to Putin's speeches, he's been remarkably consistent. He cares about Russia's place in the world, addressing how it's not treated as an equal partner (by his and other Russians' measure), the desire for a multipolar world, and general nationalistic sentiments.

Nuclear threats raise the ambient level of seriousness with which the general Western public, and by extension its governments, must take Russia. Getting that benefit only costs vocalizing the occasional reminder. So, from a game theoretic perspective, it makes sense to do so. Those purposes aren't served by actually using nuclear weapons.

I feel the same about ATS. In fact, I wish it was even more boring, like real driving is. ATS has an unrealistic amount of curves and shortens the distances between cities that in real life would take many hours to travel between.

It also is devoid of any of the (often catastrophic) downsides of making a mistake in real life. Turns out driving can be relaxing and fun if you remove anxiety involving death, injury, and property damage. Perhaps the same applies to farming sims.

I wonder if we've been hitting a lot of peaks in recent times and will continue to do so in the near future. Peak-social media, peak-influencer, peak-outrage, etc. The result will be a more boring, but hopefully saner, set of spaces we point our eyeballs at.

At a high level, perhaps this was a necessary phase for human society to transition through in order to come to terms with these new technologies. Our relationship with them was always likely be chaotic at first, then settle into a more healthy and sustainable one. I'm personally looking forward to it. The past 10-15 years of this stuff has been tiring, to say the least.

> Shouldn't the folks who believe in markets as a force for good want wages to be set by markets?

They do, but what's that have to do with the Fed? The Federal Reserve is arguably one of the largest central planner entities in existence in the US (which as a mixed economy, not a free market one, has many).

This can be true (and I think it is for certain individuals) and one can still be a proponent of the right to have a choice whether to be a passive victim or take responsibility for one's own physical security. Personally, I'd rather do the latter.

There's also a case to be made that mathematically, you're likely to have a short career as a mugger if one out of every, say, 5 individuals you target is likely to be armed. After all, why don't muggers target police officers?

They're just misinformed. The US health care industry is among those most heavily enmeshed with government at all levels (regulation, gatekeeping employment, funding/subsidizing, etc.). Whether you think it's good or not, most everyone would agree that level of involvement would result in a heavy distortion from what the free market would provide on its own.

One rhetorical approach might be to say that since this is already the case, let's acknowledge that reality, then decide whether to increase/decrease/alter that reality.

If you like this, you'll want to see this AI-generated music video if you haven't already:

https://www.teddit.net/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/x6d3c3/ai...

Nice to see the data confirm the general consensus (by my measure, at least) regarding the Clojure STM options.

Like others, I've been telling Clojure newbies something like: When you need Clojure STM, default to using an atom unless you really know you need to use something else.

I had a long-untouched copy laying around and read this chapter on your suggestion. There's definitely some good info in here if you haven't been exposed to these ideas. However, I'd probably review Ch. 1 as a mixed bag overall. A good chunk of it is out of date info-dumps about the state of the industry 30-40 years ago. That said, its central thesis of media we consume being largely propaganda (and necessarily so, given the reasons provided) is certainly still true. I think one could filter and update these points, however, to make them more accurate to the current state of affairs and thus make more compelling of an argument.

I'm being serious, and I do this when possible. My non-gardening relatives will sometimes even drop off a pile of unusable produce for such purposes when visiting.

Ideally, it's better not to overproduce and overbuy. But I'm suggesting making the best of a situation where the bananas can either go to the landfill or still be of some use.

You can take them home to add to your compost bin. Then you can put this excellent and free compost in your garden.

> There are a few other articles of Nazi belief: for example, that acting ("the will") is better than thinking (a sign of weaker races).

Perhaps this explains the otherwise strange title of the film "Triumph of the Will".

Interesting info here, if these points are true. However, initiating political violence by punching people seems counterproductive. Punching is an act carried out at an individual level, so unless you need to engage in self-defense against a specific individual who is actively physically attacking you, you're the aggressor.