fighterpilot

I don't think it's an absurd comparison. Nuclear is so safe and always get replaced with fossil fuels when a plant is decommissioned. The anti-nuclear sentiment is therefore detached from the reality of how safe it is relative to how damaging the inevitable alternative is, in the same way that anti-vaxxers are detached from the reality of the vaccine/virus trade-off.

  "We need to find ways to combat at the very least the state-sponsored disinformation campaigns"

Require each account to have unique ID verification in order to confirm that it's a real person. Government can provide this service if there's concerns about user data. Allow users to post under a fake name in order to protect open speech, the only requirement is that it's a real person. This removes the bots. Foreign govts can still co-opt real people's IDs but it would be much harder for them.

There is an innate ability that drives it to a large extent: inherited intelligence. Recognizing this might not be helpful to the individual's motivation but that doesn't make it untrue. Not everyone can be a 10x (or 100x) Ramanujan-level genius, you really need to win the genetic lottery, in addition to working very hard, for elite level cognitive performance in STEM domains.

Moreover it's gross that Jack Dorsey is put on a moral pedestal and Zuckerberg/FB employees are villainized. I'm not saying there's an exact equivalence between Twitter and FB (due to lack of transparency around news feed, Instagram's impact on young teen girls, FB's history of lying) but the disparity in rhetoric and treatment is concerning given that Twitter has undeniably played a role in some of the same societally destabilizing things that FB is involved in, such as extreme echo chambers, abundance and virality of fake news, abundance of bots and scams.

I haven't figured out the reason for the out-of-whack disparity yet. Is it because Zuckerberg lacks charisma, because he has Aspergers and people hate the awkwardness, or because FB is the tallest poppy, or because journalists have found a credentialed home on Twitter (blue check mark)?

  "high frequency trading"

It's wrong if you think HFT belongs in a category like tobacco. HFT has significantly reduced rents collected by market makers and significantly reduced bid offer spreads, and most importantly it doesn't kill people and doesn't destabilize democracies. They've automated market makers and brought scale economies and the efficiency of technology to the game. It's a great thing on net. The race to the bottom incentive for speed leads to some waste but that pales in comparison to the benefits.

I feel like this should be obvious but wide roads don't imply sitting in traffic. If traffic is 1.5x but road width is 2x then you're less likely to be sitting in traffic.

That correlation analysis is not good, you've got N=1 there and an astronomical number of confounders. A better analysis would be to look at inter-city or inter-municipality variability in crime and correlate that with the cross-section of housing price changes. You'll have a rich N=50 to N=5000 dataset.

I don't agree with your assertion that homelessness isn't caused in part by house prices. That seems unintuitive to me. Yes some people will get roommates, but what about people that already had roommates and were barely meeting rent? Some of them will have the foresight to get up and move interstate before they get wiped out, but there's frictions and costs associated and not everyone will succeed.

And bitcoin has value to some people who wish to avoid local hyper-inflation or who wish to do transactions not allowed by financial institutions.

> gold

> real estate

> stocks

Sure, these things aren't ponzis. What about art and stamp collecting, though? How are they not ponzis under this definition?

Where can I read about that?

It would depend on individual ability to metabolize D3 and amount of outdoors sunlight and the extent that local food is fortified with D3. So everyone's situation is unique.

I'm confident that 2,000 IU daily is safe, though.

International units. OTC quantities tend to be quite low, e.g 300-400 IUs, which aren't sufficient unless you're also getting daily sunlight not through a window. 1000-2000 IU is better - widely regarded as safe and no cases I've ever read of of hypervitaminosis, but it's above usual OTC doses. 4000+ daily is pushing it and I have read of cases of toxicity above that, but if you're struggling to get serum levels up then perhaps it's needed.

Megadosing D3 on the rare occasion is similar to gradually taking normal amounts as far as serum levels go. It's common to see in studies. You wanna be careful doing it without supervision obviously but I don't see why there would be a difference in a study if the hypothesis is that deficiency is causing the sleep problems.

As far as the study goes, it was significant at a p 0.05 level so will wait for replication.

Why? It should increase low-skilled wages since you're removing a chunk of low-skilled labor supply. It'd reduce rents by a little since the housing stock remains unchanged but demand is reduced, but the effect is probably small. Bad for the economy overall but these two claims seem pretty straightforward.

After Ross Perot's modest success in 1992 I think a very charismatic person could do it. But Yang lacks charisma and the mainstream media hates him (remember MSNBC and CNN editing him out of 30 infographics, which Yang says is intentional) so I don't think he can pull it off at the end of the day, even though his ideas are the ones that could actually unite the country.

It reminds me of when some atheists ran a campaign to be called The Brights. A name that can be seen as a little pretentious doesn't help. I think calling his party the Liberal Party, to borrow from Canada and Australia, would have worked well.

Great and we should invest in this tech but be weary of politicians who use this as a misdirection. Australia is investing large amounts into carbon capture even though the grid is mostly fossil fuels. It's a misdirection to avoid changing the grid and a corrupt transfer of wealth from regular people to oil and gas firms.

My anecdotal impression is that YouTube and Twitter played a big role in spreading election misinformation. The main basis of the Kraken conspiracy theory came from a YouTube video which was spread on Twitter and I remember numerous election integrity fake news tweets getting hundreds of thousands of retweets from a large right-wing echo chamber. It may have been worse on FB but I do think the asymmetry of attention and scrutiny is far out of whack.

I'm going to guess the reason is that congresspeople and journalists see Twitter as their domain of control now and benefit from the privileges of a blue check mark and the other side being kicked off. Probably Zuckerberg's lack of charisma and physical appearance isn't helping either, however unfair that may be. Another reason might be that the FB newsfeed lacks transparency unlike Twitter which contributes to distrust.

I don't get why Twitter always gets a free pass on the harms from misinformation. I have seen so much fake news around vaccines, election integrity on there not to mention that it's the nexus of woke cancellation mobs. I think it's because Twitter is seen as doing more (banning Trump, putting notifications on posts), but is that actually the case relative to what FB is doing?

I think the facts on the ground preclude the moral panic angle. Skyrocketing teen depression since 2012, a genocide in Myanmar, ethnic violence in India, a riot/insurrection borne out of fake news on election integrity, woke cancellation mobs empowered by Twitter and the power of wokeness over institutions, large amounts of vax hesitancy. All of these nasty things are circumstantially tied back to social media in one way or another.

We need to see the actual data to conclude either way. It's so easy to make a statement like that which sounds compelling but conveniently hides some nastiness somewhere else. Just as it is so easy for the whistleblower to cherry pick a stat to make her point. Neither of them are lying but their framing may have some level of dishonesty which is obscured from us since we can't look at the bigger picture. We have no idea how these questions were asked, the methodology, etc.

Anyway, there's lots of research on social media done in universities, so we don't need to take their word for it.

Not sure if I fully agree with that argument. With the US being a superpower, the stakes are high and this invites unique foreign influence via social media. That foreign influence could be state coordinated or just come from regular people who have an emotional stake in US politics. I've seen it myself, outside of the US people are more concerned about US politics than their own and engage with it on social media which only adds to the pile of insanity. Also, because of limited bandwidth, only a small handful of topics tend to monopolize, and as such they are usually US topics.

If we split insta from FB, what incentives change that will cause a change in behavior?

The problem is roundabout externalities. If you're a genocide victim in Myanmar, whether or not you stayed off FB is irrelevant.

The other problem is informed consent. Kids don't have the mental defences to avoid the dopamine trap. Whether parents allow the kids is beside the point. A parent can allow a kid to have sex but it's still illegal because the kid isn't capable of consenting.

The leaker herself says breaking up FB won't solve anything and what's needed is far more resources internally

Video games are a flawed analogy because the evidence that video games are harmful for kids (except in situations of extreme addiction) is far more flimsy than the evidence for social media's widespread harms to kids. If you're for the alcohol age limits but against the same for social media I'd ask why the difference.

What if the government gives each valid person a unique token that they can use to register once per social media site?

  "Free speech is a right in the USA, not a "value"."

Speech on someone's private platform isn't a right, it's a privilege that they're choosing to extend to you. That's why in this instance, this ID verification law is merely protecting the ethical value and culture of free speech, not the legal right to do so which remains unchanged. It's a shame we don't have separate terms for the legal right of free speech and cultural value of free speech, since it's easy to confuse the two.

  "As for alcohol - purchasing alcohol isn't a protected right and not analogous to speech at all."

I hadn't thought of the angle that banning kids off social media was effectively a government restriction of free speech. Interesting perspective! Any 1A afficianados want to provide commentary here?

  "news site"

Because social media is a status and looks competition between peers which is where the depression comes from. If they're just reading news and commenting that's fine. The internet itself isn't the problem, it's specifically social media.

  "Furthermore, why give social media entities more data in the form of government backed authentication?"

Part of the law could be to require an outsourced solution, with a Chinese Wall between them. The solution is only able to relay to the company that the person is a real person and over the age of X. Or a government solution, where the government provides a unique token to each valid person which can be used once per registration, so no ID needs to be given to the companies. Whatever it is, I'm sure a solution can be thought of.

Is KYC that expensive? It's a mostly automated process that takes at most 10 seconds of human time per user and has a number of outsourced solutions available. Or the government can provide a solution. Or they can implement these regulations only on social networks with more than X thousand users.