chmod600

What does "legalize and regulate" mean? Isn't that true of most drugs?

We are talking about what those regulations should be and what to do when people break the regulations.

When it comes to dangerous drugs, nothing "works". We have to choose the least-bad policies.

A lot of people, including me, thought the war on drugs was pretty much the worst policy position. Now I'm seeing that there are (perhaps) worse policies. We need to be quantitative and nuanced, not speak in sweeping characterizations.

Is a federal wealth tax constitutional? Income tax is specifically allowed.

"I don't want anyone thinking I support Musk."

Twenty years ago we would have dreamed of an all-electric superfast luxury all-American best selling practical EV. The model Y is that.

I can't speak for you, but if I asked you twenty years ago if you would have wanted that, my guess is you would have flipped for it. If I told you the price was that the CEO would be an asshole, you'd have shrugged. Obviously I'm projecting and you may have been consistent, but I also think it's possible that we often obsess over unimportant details and take great stuff for granted.

And EVs really are good, so you'll probably get one. And if not Tesla, there's a good chance that you'll be "supporting" the Chinese Communist Party or whatever.

"a pathological level of lies and hype from a person who has real achievements to boast about, if he could just control the need to promise the sun and stars"

Can these things be separated? Can someone be reasonable and realistic and also achieve huge things?

I'm sure there are a few examples, but I wonder whether those other high-achievers just seem more reasonable because they aren't on Twitter/X.

I'm not sure quite what you mean. You loved it but it was actually bad?

While certainly possible, it merits more discussion about why you loved it in the first place. What was new? Why did it earn such a solid place among classics? Why do so many other stories derive from it?

A related effect that I've wondered about is: perhaps lower-skilled people compare themselves to the general public, while perhaps skilled people compare themselves to a smaller group of skilled peers.

In other words, if you asked me if I'm good at riding a bicycle, I'd compare myself to others in the general population and say "yes". But if you ask a weekend bicyclist, they'd be better than me but perhaps compare themselves to weekend bicyclists, and rate themselves lower. And the effect might repeat for competitive bicyclists.

If true, this could explain why we intuitively believe the DK effect.

Isn't that the problem though? No outside feedback? Just whatever the current board thinks?

How is board membership controlled?

For a profit company, you buy shares and elect the board, right? If they turn the company into something nobody wants, the shares lose value, and maybe someone picks up the shares cheap and turns it around. So there's a feedback cycle. The profit motive is almost incidental.

But here do the current board members just appoint the next board members and grow/shrink the total number?

TR went to significant risk and effort to retrieve his boat and see that the thieves were jailed. It would have been much easier - expected, even - that he would have just shot them dead.

Of course not everyone is TR. He is a high moral standard to live up to, and he was also a lot stronger than most then and certainly most today.

Theft is different in the sense that you don't willingly engage in a transaction at all. Wage "theft" is not usually theft; it's one party not fulfilling their obligations.

In practice not paying someone for work already done is really bad, so we should (and do, to varying degrees) have laws to try to protect workers.

"Guns are far more likely to kill oneself or a loved one in an accident or suicide than to stop an attacker or robber."

Accident rates are really low[1], part of a 3% "Other" bucket for gun-involved deaths.

Suicide is not commonly viewed as a threat to one's safety. You could try to look at it that way but I don't think it's very convincing as you presented it.

So if your point is that guns are a net decrease to an individual's safety, you need something more.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-...

"The FCC Is Trying To Stop Discrimination In Broadband Deployment. Telecoms Are Mad"

That title could be more neutral.

What particles? Why?

Can you explain "proper closures"?

Loyalty has trade-offs and it's neither completely good or completely bad. Training is one of the benefits, but friction is one of the costs. If you are out of work, "loyalty" looks like an insider club that you are blocked from.

Factor looks cool, but what's it really about? Can someone who loves the language explain why?

I think you missed the point: the author is suggesting that everyone would give up guns and exchange them for bows. Including military and police.

But only strong and well-trained people can use bows effectively. In other words, it's a world where the strong are in control.

I'm not sure what that means when you net it out. Maybe mass shootings go down and regular violence goes up? Who knows?

The safest places still have some guns around. Enough that when something is happening, they arrive on the scene quickly. You could imagine those translating to skilled bowmen instead, and that's an interesting thought experiment, but it's hard to conclude much.

The point of weapons is a bit complicated. One interpretation is that they create fear of engaging in violence in the first place. In that respect the killing ability may be secondary.

The author misses on a few points and the article comes across as nostalgic more than realistic.

First: violence was a lot worse before, so what makes the author think going back in time with weapons is actually good?

Second: that guns allow the weak to be as threatening as the strong is considered a feature by many people; an equalizing force. As the saying goes: "God made men, Sam Colt made them equal." The idea that you can find vulnerable people and exploit them without fear is a big driver of violence -- but if everyone must fear violence coming back at them, that's a pacifying force.

Third, the author goes on about the sustainability of guns. But arrows are a lot bigger and more expensive, so I question the idea that they'd be made sustainably. "Artisanal" means wood, I suppose, and that could be much more problematic than a few factories cranking out bullets. People would reuse arrows more, but there are also a lot more people today so that would really involve some kind of industrial process and I doubt it comes out as a net advantage.

Even when it comes to public safety, I'm not quite sure it's a win. We are pretty safe most places, and in the US, violence is mostly local to known areas.

If I were pursuing this line of inquiry, I'd use a variety of questions to understand biases in both directions on a number of topics.

For instance, when Covid was at maximum political polarization, you had some people partying like it's nothing and other people convinced that the Covid mortality rate was 20%. Both groups may have been swayed by fake news, but with different directionality.

You also need to provide similar sets of facts in different contexts. E.g. news that came from a friend vs a three-letter agency vs podcast vs CNN vs Fox News.

As presented in the article, the study just seems to be a conformity test.

Where do the leaves fall, and do you use that surface for anything else?

Leaves get everywhere and cover sidewalks, roads, roofs and gutters, etc. Over time, they degrade into an unsafe slimy surface.

Favorable in that they may support your acquisition of power. Almost never favorable at a human or family level.

So if all you care about power, they media is a great ally. If you also have ordinary human desires, like not having a constant mob of haters saying horrible things to you and your family, then the media is not great.

In other words, the media filters out most normal people from politics by the sheer horrribleness of the process.

Seeking political office is asking for punishment. The media can be brutal. A small slice of the general population will be haters no matter what and in absolute numbers that's a lot of people that hate you.

Billionaires can insulate themselves from this brutality and may have some experience with it already. Non-billionaires can't, and so it's just not worth it to run for office unless you care more about power than about yourself and your family.

Not saying that billionaires are great politicians or anything, but it certainly makes sense. If we want something better we need more civilized discourse.

So if the shared public school system is teaching something wacky (creationism or whatever), how should that be changed? If not parents or influential people, who would cause the change to happen?

Tax money is a collective "yours" and when it stops aligning with the values of the voters then they will vote to make some serious changes. Without some widespread consensus on what the system should be about it's going to look more like a collapse than a reform.

Ideally, it would be a back-to-basics reform that would be more neutral. But probably what would happen is a slow draining of the best students along with money until it spirals.

You can say that shouldn't happen, or be mad at the people who opt out, or be mad at the people who underfund it. But it would be better to save it by at least making an effort to be neutral before it gets to that point. Too many teachers look at students as their children to mold according to their personal or party values rather than educating them according to collective or neutral values.

Lack of perfection doesn't mean you shouldn't try to be more neutral. Trying by itself (even if failing) earns the trust of voters.

And if you live in an area where evolution is a controversial topic, then you should leave it up to the parents. You don't have a right to use their money to teach something that a lot of people don't want to be taught. Of course, there's some line where something is fringe enough and you don't have to accommodate every last person. Again, try to be neutral, don't aim for perfection.

And you know what? Evolution is a nuanced topic. The actual claims that can be backed up by first principals using the scientific method are fairly narrow. Much of the reasoning is very prone to confirmation bias and all kinds of after-the-fact fitting rather than forward-looking predictions. To stick to the science on the topic of evolution you have to be pretty careful and most teachers are not. Not saying it shouldn't be taught... I think it has a lot of explanatory power outside of pure science and represents a large body of important observations. But I don't think it's a good example of science-vs-idiots.

Schools are one area where there's a lot of money involved, it's a direct service to normal people, and those people actually can do a pretty good job without the school (not saying that everyone can or that it's easy).

Some communities highly dissatisfied with their police attempted to defund and/or defunded their department. That's not a great example because self-service policing doesn't work very well, but it's kinda close.

Ultimately, if you want the voters' money, you need to convince them that you at least won't use it against them. And it's really easy for people to start thinking that it's being used against them when engaging in culture war or political issues.