hncurious

Is this GPT-3? I'm legit curious, because the post exhibits a bizarre lack of self awareness.

Just tax it like we do cigarettes.

That's all true and why I included social failing. We are fighting against an industry that's trying to convince us to eat their junk food. They are making it as addictive as possible. They are trying to present it as healthier than it is. It is hard to resist. So yes, it's absolutely a factor and a significant one.

However, despite that, I have a hard time believing that most people think eating at McDonalds is healthy, or that drinking Coca-Cola is healthy, or eating a bag of chips is healthy. They know it's not. Don't they? Am I wrong about that?

The average person in this country has time to binge watch Netflix and social media. Have you seen the stats? We do have the time.

Of course there are exceptions, but we're a long long way from only having the exceptions left.

Unpopular opinion: It's both a personal and societal failing, but personal choice is dominant. You can choose to eat rice and beans and drink water. You don't have to eat hamburgers and fries and drink sugar.

You're right that communication is critical, but it's precisely because facts are omitted that causes the problem. Those facts just come out later, and that only makes things worse. Instead of transparency and straight forward communication, public health officials are engaging in manipulation of the public. So called noble lies, like telling people masks don't work in order to cover for the lack of mask availability. That burned their credibility and is just one example.

The lies and lies by omission are literal oxygen to anti-vaxxers because they can point out, with proof, that we were lied to. Naturally the next question is, what else are we being lied to about?

Stop lying, start treating people like adults, be upfront from the start, and you'll see anti-vax and anti-expert sentiment dissipate.

I would also point out that there is an intentional conflation between anti-vaxxers (those opposed to all vaccines) and vaccine hesitant (those who are pro-vaccine generally, but are weary about a new vaccine or were already infected and have natural immunity). The latter are being grouped with the former, and this has also destroyed a great amount of credibility and trust.

They're not voting for anyone practical. They're voting for career politicians who are in the pockets of big corporate donors. That's why nothing changes, they work for the donors, not the voters.

If you took Rogan's podcast and transported it back to, say, 2014, there would be no controversy. He would simply be seen as a liberal comedian having casual, friendly conversations with a wide variety of people.

It's just that we're currently in the middle of a moral panic and the self righteous authoritarian hall monitor types are having their day in the sun. Just as we saw in the 80s/90s with Howard Stern who was offending similarly delicate sensibilities. Although today's empowered puritans are not the same group that went after Howard, they are of the same cloth, merely rebranded to the time. It's an unfortunate recurring bug of America.

Frankly I find it incredibly boring, anti-intellectual, anti-curious and absolutely stifling. The sooner we all get back to ignoring them the better.

Here you go

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs

You may not realize this, but policing the speech of communities and advocating that they be re-educated by the proper authorities has historically been the stuff of nightmares.

You might argue barbershops are better.

1. They are cheaper.

2. You get a haircut.

3. Community.

4. They are trained in the real world, and within the community they are serving.

5. The barber's incentives are aligned with yours. If they solve your problem, you're still a repeat customer. In the case of therapists and chiropractors, they are incentivized to manage your problem indefinitely or to find new problems.

It does sound like they are on the verge of collapse...

"Tallia says his hospital is 'managing, but just barely,' at keeping up with the increased number of sick patients in the last three weeks. The hospital’s urgent-care centers have also been inundated, and its outpatient clinics have no appointments available.”

"Dr. Bernard Camins, associate professor of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, says that UAB Hospital cancelled elective surgeries scheduled for Thursday and Friday of last week to make more beds available"

“We had to treat patients in places where we normally wouldn’t, like in recovery rooms,” says Camins. “The emergency room was very crowded, both with sick patients who needed to be admitted”

"In CA… several hospitals have set up large 'surge tents' outside their emergency departments to accommodate and treat … patients. Even then, the LA Times reported this week, emergency departments had standing-room only, and some patients had to be treated in hallways.”

“Hospitals across the state are sending away ambulances, flying in nurses from out of state and not letting children visit their loved ones for fear they’ll spread… Others are canceling surgeries and erecting tents in their parking lots to triage the hordes of… patients.”

“We’ve never had so many patients,” said Adrian Cotton, chief of medical operations at Loma Linda University Health in San Bernardino County.”

...but then again, maybe not. These are all quotes from 2018, flu season.

https://twitter.com/justin_hart/status/1422243808536715265

There's no accountability and the equipment already served its purpose.

Julian Assange, 2011: "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war"

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1427929346262642688

US veteran who oversaw training of Afghan forces, 2021: "I would sit in on staff meetings, because part of my position there was with a Joint Command that was building the Afghan military and police force — the division that I worked with was about training and policy for the Afghan police. And that also included arming and funding them.

I don’t think I could overstate that this was a system just basically designed for funneling money and wasting or losing equipment."

https://mtracey.substack.com/p/a-big-money-funneling-operati...

That's actually what Dr Fauci initially talked about with regard to the general public. With how masks are worn and used in practice, he was probably right.

Fauci: There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.

LaPook: And can you get some schmutz, sort of staying inside there?

Fauci: Of course, of course. But, when you think masks, you should think of health care providers needing them and people who are ill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gYAka7qSnM

Covid is going to be endemic like the flu and cold. It's not going to be eradicated, unfortunately, and I don't think we've come to terms with this yet.

Now what's our plan exactly? Get vaccinated every 6 - 12 months indefinitely and always wear masks? What's our goal and what's our new normal?

I'm curious about how this works in practice. Did you just pick and buy houses for all of them? Or did they pick and you paid? If the latter, did you set some kind of price range?

Also, do you worry about any future expectations they might have?

What was your experience? How did they treat you differently once they found out?

I agree with you completely. I'm just pointing out that this is the status quo of how politicians talk. If you watch for it, you'll see it regularly on both sides of the aisle.

Politicians constantly use that kind of hyperbolic rhetoric to rally their base to increase engagement, protest, make noise, vote. It doesn't mean it's some hidden code or message to their followers to go outside the bounds of the democratic process. That's tinfoil hat level thinking.

Our government is run by a gerontocracy born decades prior to PCs and the internet. They have no idea what the root problem is or how to fix it. How many of them even know the absolute basics? What a for loop is? Or Postgres? Or http vs https? Anything they actually do will be written by lobbyists on behalf of tech giants and other multinational corporations and big donors.

Between that and the increasingly fundamentalist, censorious, puritan, social justice takeover of tech companies, I also feel like I'm being forced to become a luddite despite my life long love for technology.

As toxic as fb is, twitter is even worse. It just doesn't get as much scrutiny for whatever reason.

I hadn't even dared to think that Sturgeon's Law might apply to output in the field of science. Yikes.

"Anyway, science right now is in an existential crisis. This is a real, real issue, and there’s now a generation of scientists who specialize in pointing this out and analyzing it. Andrew Gelman and others. I’ll give you an example: I had a conversation with the long-time head of one of the big federal funding agencies for healthcare research who is also a very accomplished entrepreneur, and I said, “do you really think it’s true that 50-70% of biomedical research is fake?” This is a guy who has spent his life in this world. And he said “oh no, that’s not true at all. It’s 90%.” [Richard laughs]. I was like “holy shit,” I was flabbergasted that it could be 90%.

He’s like “well look, 90% of everything is shit”, which is literally this thing called Sturgeon’s law which says that 90% of everything is bad. 90% of every novel written is bad, 90% of music, 90% of art… 90% of everything is bad. So his analysis was, anything you get in the field of medical experimentation, biomedical development, and this is going to be true of any field, there’s like five labs total in the world that are really good at what they’re doing and doing really cutting edge work. And this is true of quantum computing; pick any field for advanced technology you want.

So those five labs have a pretty good shot at doing interesting work, even some of that is going to reproduce and some of it isn’t. But once you get out of those top five labs, it’s pretty much make-work, incremental, marginal improvements at best, and a complete waste of time otherwise. And I said “good God, why does the other 90% continue to get funded if you know this?” And he said, “well, there are all these universities and professors who have tenure, there are all these journals, there are all these systems and people have been promised lifetime employment.” Anyway, a longwinded way of saying that we have pretty serious structural and incentive problems in the research complex. "

Oil is largely a red herring, in this case anyway.

Julian Assange in 2011: "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war"

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1427929346262642688

US veteran that oversaw training of Afghan forces, 2021: "I would sit in on staff meetings, because part of my position there was with a Joint Command that was building the Afghan military and police force — the division that I worked with was about training and policy for the Afghan police. And that also included arming and funding them. I don’t think I could overstate that this was a system just basically designed for funneling money and wasting or losing equipment."

https://mtracey.substack.com/p/a-big-money-funneling-operati...

And now said equipment is confirmed lost or in the hands of the Taliban: "A U.S. defense official on Monday confirmed the Taliban’s sudden accumulation of U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment is enormous."

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-army-taliban-185017ba29...

We don't know what the cause is. From the article:

Scientists are now scrambling to figure out what is killing these 40-foot-long marine mammals. The “what” is anything but obvious.

Some scientists believe there may be too many whales for the population to sustain itself. Others say this explanation of “overcapacity” and “natural causes” overlooks the gantlet of hazards that grays now face — including ecosystem alteration, ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, plastics pollution, disease, ocean acidification and loss of kelp forests.

I've come across crypto pumps on Reddit, but might not be on the right subs to have come across the network posts (or just haven't noticed yet). Do you have some links to those posts?

Imagine starting a GIF site 8 years ago, in 2013. Would you ever have thought it could sell for $400M?

It's a cruel fate of any privacy-focused service, as they are more likely to be used by criminals. Be it mailinator or TOR or monero.

This is ultimately a question of freedom vs security. Said government entity is prioritizing security over freedom.

You're clearly not familiar with hiring in tech. It's 2% because the available pool is tiny. It's not for lack of trying to hire non-white, non-asians in tech. Tech minorities are in fact prioritized in hiring AND there are countless programs to increase the pool. Aimed at girls and tech minorities, not white and asian boys.

That misdirection is convenient for the upper class, not so convenient for the rest of us.

The regulators were way too aggressive. They overburdened farms and dispensaries to such a degree that legal sources are having a hard time competing with the black market even though dispensaries were considered essential businesses (able to stay open) through the pandemic.

Now California is bailing out the industry to the tune of $100M.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-06-14/californ...