jhpriestley

What bearing does this thought experiment have on our reality, where Nazi race science is completely false and discredited?

Ah, you're right, Marks clarifies that racists appropriated the term he coined (http://anthropomics2.blogspot.com/2019/12/i-coined-phrase-hu...). Siskind obviously was referring to the nazi/alt-right/nrx meaning of the term, associated with Sailer, though.

Hmm, which geneticist coined the term? Oh, it was VDARE contributor Steve Sailer? The one who writes about black genetic inferiority and Jewish control of the media?

Can you point out for me then where the order of magnitude suburban inefficiencies are accounted for?

If Walnut Creek paid an extra $9000/year for each resident then they could easily offset whatever extra environmental cost. Carbon offsets etc are not all that expensive.

Walnut creek (suburban city near San Francisco) budget is about $1500 per resident, Contra Costa county, which contains Walnut Creek, spends about $3500 per resident. San Francisco is like $14000 per resident.

For reference of the many people who apparently have no clue, this is an example of a "hatchet job": https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/10/the-fanatic-frau...

"They have insufficient talent or skill, and even less desire, to take on real power centers"

funny line in a story that's basically just twitter/clubhouse drama

If you read the news every day then you will certainly hear from the other half of the country. I just checked CNN's front page, and while most coverage focuses on the new President, these three articles all feature right-wing viewpoints:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/21/politics/2024-republican-prim... https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/21/politics/fact-check-marjorie-... https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/01/21/conspiracy-th...

I'd be curious to know more, I'll try to take a look at that book when I get a chance. Are you saying, though, that Nazi Germany was very poor relative to its neighbors (e.g. France, Poland, Italy) or relative to the world at the time (e.g. Mexico) or in an absolute sense (widespread extreme poverty, lack of basic necessities of life)?

Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were major industrial centers with large cities, educated populations, newspapers, trains, etc. They were vastly richer than peasant societies like China or Mexico.

For a somewhat objective example, look at the life expectancy around those years ... Japan and especially Germany are near the top both before and after the war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_life...

Modern USA hardly even engages in full scale warfare since starting one of the deadliest wars of the late 20th century, except for the time we started the deadliest war of the 21st century?

Your reasoning strikes me as kind of post-hoc, but maybe I'm mistaken .. could you say more precisely what you think causes countries to go to war, in a way that I could take a random country and see if it fits the criteria?

A lot of the great wars of history have been instigated by rich countries - modern USA, Nazi Germany / Imperial Japan, Spanish Empire, British Empire, Napoleonic France, Roman Empire.

This is my qualitative sense from studying history, and it seems to hold up quantitatively based on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

I don't get the joke in naming a laptop after a Nazi stronghold, could someone explain it for me?

I don't really understand what you're referring to when you say that Iran has a choice to improve their people's lives today. The Iranian leadership talked to the USA and worked out a deal. The USA then went back on that deal, reimposed sanctions without even trying to renegotiate, and basically declared war on Iran, assassinating a top Iranian general. What choice do you think that Iran has right now? Their choices are surrender to US aggression, or continue to resist. I've mentioned a few of the many recent regional episodes - Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the Kurds - which make it completely obvious that appeasement of the US will not end well for the Iranian government or its people. They are making the only rational choice at this juncture. Since they have no alternative they are blameless at this juncture. Since the USA does have choices - to go back to the deal, or to try to renegotiate a new deal with whatever demands they might add - the USA is therefore to blame for current Iranian suffering.

Iran's, and North Korea's, strategies are working out pretty well for the people making those decisions. Khamenei, like Kim Jong-Il, looks set to die of natural causes at an advanced age.

The people of Iran and North Korea are not doing so well. But if you were an Iranian citizen hoping for a better future, would you really pin your hopes on a US-backed regime change, after seeing the aftermath of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria?

Yes, why won't Iran simply disarm under US pressure, like Gaddafi and Saddam did?

this is quite an academic exercise since a decade of intensive research hasn't brought us close to working self-driving cars, much less 1x safe self-driving cars, much less 5x safe, nor is there any clear path to resolving this open research problem.

The Rails people never went for SPAs though. Releasing another server-rendering AJAX thing for rails (previous was TurboLinks) no more represents "the pendulum swinging back" than a new version of COBOL that runs on mainframes represents the pendulum swinging back to mainframes. If this approach gains market share against React etc., then that will be meaningful - but don't hold your breath, there are legitimate reasons for the move to SPAs and also an enormous amount of institutional inertia behind it.

or "servers you don't control / can't debug / pay extra for"

Insane that I can buy a fuel-cell Toyota but not an electric. The Hummer is actually going to go electric before the Camry. I get the feeling that Toyota wrote off existing Li-Ion batteries as not good enough to make a marketable car, focused their resources on next-gen moonshots like fuel cells, and are now stubbornly refusing to admit their mistake after Tesla proved them wrong.

If it is past exposures and disease resistence, how do you explain early spread in Wuhan? Why does Aus/NZ enjoy natural immunity but not Indonesia? Quarantines are effective against all infectious diseases and have been for centuries, why do you assume they were not effective in places like China and Vietnam? Where is the evidence that disease resistance plays any role?

If the goal is to prevent traffic fatalities then funding self-driving research must be one of the least effective methods. Tens of billions of dollars have been spent and no lives have been saved.

If we could achieve cycling usage at the level of the Netherlands, mass transit usage on the level of Japan, and road safety on the level of Norway then we would cut road deaths by 90%. These are ambitious goals but can actually happen and are not an open-ended research project.

90% of PCR-positive subjects in the ENE-COVID test, for example, did also have a positive antibody test. So actual infection numbers might be ~10% higher than the raw numbers from the antibody tests (and I believe that this is factored into the results reported by such studies). It doesn't change our big-picture understanding of the disease.

I don't quite know what to make of the WHO estimate. I can't find further details about it. I don't think it makes sense to take this estimate and try to extract an IFR from it. They could be suggesting that the IFR of the virus is much lower than expected, but they could also be suggesting that deaths have been badly undercounted (e.g. in areas with poor health infrastructure), or that it has spread more widely among younger populations in places like Africa, where IFR would be expected to be much lower.

Bhattacharya's estimate is being criticized because, even though he was taking a contrarian view on the virus and getting results that were out of wack with other lines of evidence, he rushed out a highly flawed study (the Santa Clara seroprevalence study). This came out when we had little data about antibody prevalence, his study was one of the first ones, and it had the big name of Stanford behind it, so it was reported very widely and misled an awful lot of people about how dangerous this virus is. In his position he should have been bending over backwards to make sure he was on sure footing and not misleading the public, and instead he let this paper full of basic mistakes go to press.

If you look at the responses to that editorial, they note that the 11% positivity of igA tests, cited as suggestive of a high level of undetected infection, is actually the false positive rate of the test, among other embarrassing errors.

The first citation on your linked editorial is Ioannidis, which is the same Stanford researcher in the OP article here, and the same group responsible for the utterly flawed Santa Clara study. It seems like it's literally this one group, and a few other weirdos and contrarians, singlehandedly raising spurious doubts about the science, and then being amplified beyond all reason.

The cited Ioannidis study also sucks, he takes a number of seroprevalence studies, including some very flawed or underpowered ones, and then takes the unweighted median for some reason? More details here, including an illustration of how the high-quality, randomly-selected samples do not vary so much https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1283232023402868737

The CDC estimate was from before we had any good studies using antibody prevalence. It was too low.

The WHO estimates a fatality rate of 0.6%. If you are simply dividing deaths by (an estimate of) current cases then you will get an inaccurate number because many of the current cases will eventually die of the disease.

1) I'm not a researcher and I can't claim to have a comprehensive view of the evidence, but I think there have been enough high-quality studies based on seroprevalence to give a good estimate. This one https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.06.20169722v... found an IFR of 0.83% in spain, or 1.07% if counting excess deaths. This one https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.27.20141689v... found an estimate of 1.39% in NYC. The WHO has estimated 0.6%. These studies are based on representative antibody surveys with good statistical power, they should be accurate. There are factors like demographics and comorbidities that can push the number much higher or lower in a given community, but the range does not seem that wide to me.

2) I haven't been tracking hospitalization data very closely, you may be right that this has changed ... I've seen little discussion of it.

I agree that mask use in particular was controversial for a rather long time, with bodies like the CDC seemingly dragging their feet on recommending the use of masks. Still, I think that it's been a pretty settled question since April (CDC recommended masks from April 3 https://www.livescience.com/cdc-recommends-face-masks-corona...).

I've been reading about this virus daily since February and my impression has been the opposite. It's a very boring virus which has offered very few surprises. We knew since February that it is a flu-like respiratory disease with high rates of hospitalization and death, especially among the old. The initial estimates for fatality rate were about 4% and that has now been narrowed to 1% based on better testing and treatment. Social distancing and masks are effective at controlling the spread. All of this has been known since February/March, most of it is spelled out here: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-chi...

At the same time, there has been an endless parade of contrarians trying to make the whole thing into a big mystery and muddy the waters for some reason. There was the theory that the virus was spreading much earlier than expected. There was the theory that most cases were asymptomatic and that immunity had already been reached. The theory that lockdowns are not effective. The theory that there were different strains with highly different behavior. Some vague theory about t-cell immunity.

None of these contrarian theories have been supported by any real evidence, but there is a large appetite for them and people will seize on any puzzling number to try to rethink the whole picture of the virus.

Damn, these are the same people who came up with that ridiculous antibody study which fueled the crackpot "widespread immunity" theory? They must have no shame to keep pushing their contrarian covid takes.

Clinton was in fact a centrist "third-way" democrat who often compromised or coopted Republican issues, e.g. welfare reform.

Obama was not as much of a centrist but he was obstructed heavily by the opposition.

I'll continue to blame the people who vote 90% in one direction over the ones who vote 90% the other lol.

Edit: you added some specific comments about immigration. This is correct, Democrats are not very pro-immigration. They are more pro-immigration than the GOP, e.g. DACA order vs. DACA repeal, but the two parties are pretty close on immigration. There is a much bigger gap on issues like healthcare.