larnmar

The question posed here, about why Eastern Europe fell behind the West, is an interesting one, but the approach taken here (pick two random-ass variables we can measure and try to explain everything with them) seems pretty damn weak, as does the attempt to tie these explanations to modern EU politics.

Colour me skeptical. That certainly doesn’t sound like a plausible number, and the article doesn’t cite any sources.

This article http://www.worldstopexports.com/top-blood-exporters-by-count... total US blood exports at $1.4 billion, a distant second to Ireland. That includes both human and animal blood, and I’m not sure what fractions human.

Soybean exports, on the other hand, are closer to $17 billion a year: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/international-markets-us-tra...

Total US exports are $2.5 trillion, so blood is about 0.06% of that.

Edit: found a couple of reputable sources that put blood plus blood plasma exports in the $20 billion range. Possible that the discrepancy comes from whether plasma is included.

Oh yes, certainly no University would dream of actually paying for the research that goes on within their walls.

Even better, if a professor actually gets a grant, the university will “tax” the grant at around 50% to pay for the overhead of providing office space for your post docs.

No, I feel that they should all go and get other jobs.

a) off topic, and (b) representative of a global trend that was going on at the time, led by the psychiatric profession, rather than being any kind of personal whim of who your president happened to be at the time. We in Australia closed our mental asylums at the same time, with the same effect.

Blame Jack Nicholson if you want to blame someone; or rather the rash of 1970s “aren’t asylums terrible?” asylum fiction.

Funny part is that all these extra administrators don’t actually help out the faculty much.

Thirty years ago, most senior professors had secretaries, but now secretaries are almost unheard of. Individual professors wind up spending most of their time on ridiculous administrivia required to keep their grants.

If an administrator sticks his or her head into a profrssor’s life, it’s to make it harder, not easier.

Also as long as US education remains a strongly positional good — that the value of your education continues to be mostly dependent on where your university sits in the pecking order, rather than on some absolute value (e.g. of the knowledge you actually learn).

With a positional good, demand can never be really satisfied, because everyone always wants something further up the chain, so prices expand to whatever people can possibly pay.

I can’t quite see how suing a company on behalf of its own investors is supposed to work, but I assume that if I’m an XOM shareholder it would involve wealth being transferred from me to me via lawyers who get to take a significant cut for themselves.

Fares have come down in absolute dollar terms (let alone inflation adjusted) over the last twenty years, while economy seat sizes have barely changed.

What has changed is yield management — airlines have got much better at flying with as few empty seats as possible. So the main thing that has gone down to allow prices to decrease in real terms is your chance of getting an empty seat next to you.

The whole thing seems to be a narrative designed to deny the sincerity of anyone who disagrees with you.

If someone has a different opinion to you, then clearly they’re a troll. Or maybe a bot, or a shill, or a paid Russian propagandist influencer. And if they’re none of these things then clearly they’re the victim of one of the above, hijacking their mind.

What they’re definitely not is a real individual who sincerely believes their opinions and has arrived at them by the same process as you have.

As an English speaker who knows a bit of German, Dutch basically seems like a random combination of English and German words with a few misspellings thrown in for kicks.

Speaking of eternal September, I feel like some of the latecomers need to be educated on the actual meaning of “troll” (eg this writer, and most journalists).

A troll is someone who posts deliberately provocative content for the purposes of deriving shits and giggles from the outraged responses of others.

A propagandist is not a troll. A paid shill is not a troll. A person who sincerely holds views which you dislike is not a troll. Only a troll is a troll.

This being so, I’m not convinced that trolls are a significant issue at this point, although partially it’s getting harder to tell due to Poe’s Law.

Do the people he’s denouncing actually exist?

This got me thinking about the economics of sunshades.

According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade the simplest plan involves a huge cluster of lightweight shades at the Earth-Sun L1 point. Supposedly it would require around twenty years of daily launches of a 100-ton-to-LEO vehicle, which used to sound like science fiction.

But soon we will (fingers crossed) have Starship, a reusable space vehicle capable of 150 tons(?) to LEO and multiple launches per day. With a claimed cost to orbit of $2 million, suddenly we’re talking only around $10 billion in launch costs and five years for a 2% solar shield, which means we can solve global warming quicker and cheaper than we can build an aircraft carrier or a new subway tunnel (let alone a high speed train from Fresno to Bakersfield).

Those are optimistic estimates, yes, but it seems odd that this solution is barely on anyone’s radar.

Call your consulate. Call your cruise company.

It seems to me that if a psychological effect is so small that you can meta-analyse hundreds of studies and still not be sure whether it exists or not, then it doesn’t matter if it does or not.

This isn’t physics, where the existence of a tiny effect such as time dilation might nonetheless have significance beyond the observable regime. If a psychological effect is barely measurable then it’s of no use to anybody. In particular you don’t need to go around taking it into effect in your everyday life.

Compare to the original analogy of a muscle. An actual muscle, if you work it close to its limit, will be weaker one minute later... but if you work it to its limit three times a week for a month it will get stronger. These effect sizes are large, they’re consistently observed in ~100% of healthy adults, and you can actually apply them in your life.

Being small doesn’t necessarily make you insignificant. Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t, but a vast quantity of completely empty space shouldn’t make you feel that way. It’s empty! Some big rocks? Chunks of ice? Clouds of gas? Who cares?

More terrifying, if you ask me, is the possibility that out of all this stuff we might very well be the only significant thing in all of it.

I’ve always thought that the author of that phrase showed a fundamental misunderstanding of what ought to make a country prosperous. He seems to think it’s surprising that Australia’s success has come from the bottom up (millions of individuals acting in accordance with basically-sensible cultural norms) rather than top down (imposed by the will of some great leader).

But societal success always comes from the bottom up, and great cultures come from evolution, not intelligent design.

May the reins of political power in our country continue to exist in the hands of uncreative intellectual non-entities and suburban solicitors. When Great Men with Big Ideas get into power it always seems to result in a disaster.

Whoever has deep pockets but is politically weak enough.

I feel like this is the kind of content that is slowly ruining the internet. Take a single interesting fact (cribbed from a different blog), put it in the second paragraph, write three other paragraphs of gunk to surround it, press publish, and repeat dozens of times a day for twenty bucks a pop or whatever a freelance writer gets paid for this kind of content.

And there it is, indexed forever, clogging up search results, and stopping you from finding more substantive articles on the same subject.

If it’s a crime, it is a crime of which we are all guilty.

Have you heard of the concept of anarcho-tyranny? When everyone is guilty of a crime, always, then prosecutorial discretion becomes absolute power.

My English edition is five paperbacks, but these paperbacks run at about a thousand pages each. A 1000-page paperback is a major hassle to read (how do you comfortably hold it?) or carry around, and they seem to get damaged pretty quickly (the spine is a mess by the time you’ve finished reading). I’d prefer a larger number of thinner volumes.

I found the speech very interesting, and the columnist’s attempt to twist it into relevance about his own hobbyhorse of US politics to be very boring.

Russian politics is very interesting on its own, and we hear far too little about it (whilst also hearing far too much about US politics). The analogies between the two are extremely weak and generally uninformative; saying “my opponent is like Putin” carries no more information than “my opponent is a big poop face”.

Not sure, although you’d think the energy cost of re-making the can each time would be pretty significant. Also tou need to drink two cans to replace one water bottle.

My other favourite “environmentally friendly” thirst quencher when I can’t get bottled water? Coconut water, imported from god-knows-where.

That’s the same as every other fibrous cement product, though. Is this different apart from using hemp for the purposes of marketing to a certain crowd?

I assume that in the game, though, being treated by the medic means you go straight back into play, rather than being medivaced and spending months in hospital followed by years of learning to walk again?

Sometimes when I’m bored and out walking, I play this game with cars. I pretend I’m allowed to keep any one of the next ten cars that go past, but I need to accept or reject it the moment I see it.

If the second car is a Volvo do I pick it, or hold out waiting for a Mercedes? If I pick that Mercedes, am I going to regret it in thirty seconds when a Rolls rolls past? Am I going to get stuck with an old Hyundai due to my inability to settle?

Luckily someone invented La Croix so you can just drink your water fizzy, lightly flavoured, and in a super-wasteful tiny can.

No, just intrinsically.

There are always multiple establishments. If one establishment doesn’t suit you, you can always go right next door to the other establishment labelled “the anti-establishment” and enjoy the company of like-minded individuals as you sneer at the other establishment and congratulate yourself on your independent-mindedness.

Nowadays the anti-establishment is bigger and richer than the actual establishment, which is why we all wear t-shirts to work and sneer at those who have to wear suits.

Are there groups that exist outside both the establishment and anti-establishment? Sure, but they’re weird and scary and if you join them you’ll definitely be banned from polite society.