pasabagi

It's definitely a bad idea, but at the same time, are nuclear power plants the sort of things that go horribly wrong if a human doesn't press a button quickly enough? I would have thought all the things that need to be timely would probably be automatically managed, leaving humans to do the high-level decisionmaking.

Don't you think 1400 years is a bit long? If you considered 'native people' to go back that far, you could get all sorts of really strange 'native lands'.

Normally, right of return is for people who were living somewhere, or have parents or grandparents who live somewhere. So it's obviously very strange when that applies to jewish people, who potentially have some ancestors in biblical times that were living in Jordan, but doesn't apply to Palestinians, who had grandparents living there.

To be honest, I have more sympathy for the argument that, yes, Israel is a typical colonial enterprise, but it's also been a while (70+ years), and people have made their lives there, so 2SS makes sense. It seems more consistent with how words like 'native', 'colony', and 'original inhabitants' work everywhere else.

That's a built-in failing of the genocide definition: it requires intent, otherwise no doubt the US would have been on the hook as early as the Korean war.

Sadly for the Israelis, they have a cabinet of the kind of people who just cannot help themselves from communicating intent.

Eh, Germany, Japan, and the US all extensively used central planning after WW2. The results speak for themselves. The Chinese government, for it's many faults, has a good track record when it comes to modernization.

Or because of unbelievable amounts of rights won through political struggle, which cannot be spent, only lost through getting complacent.

Europe was a lot poorer in the 80's. China today has a higher GDP-per-capita then the EU did in the 80's. India has a higher GDP-per-capita than the EU had in the 70's.

If you have a decent political culture, you don't need a lot of money to avoid the worst kinds of poverty.

... That's just nonsense. Normal scientists working in genetics don't believe in race. The field has moved on from the 40s. It's not a conspiracy, there's just no evidence, because why should there be? It would be very surprising if a bunch of 19th century racists had accidentally discovered a deep truth about genetics before anybody had even discovered DNA.

Honestly, you just sound like you're a racist. Which is sad, but it's also indicative of a lack of common sense that you expect the universe to conform to your prejudices.

So IQ is a word used to describe the results of a bunch of tests first established by eugenicists in the late 19th century, and has no scientific extraction whatsoever. Genetics is a field of science, and you can identify groups that carry particular genes. However, the 'races' don't map to distinct genetic groups, which is very unsurprising: the 'races' or 'ethnicities' are just administrative or cultural groupings from the 19th century.

I mean, nationality is obviously an enviromental factor, right? There's no 'german gene'. Ethnicities like 'French' don't actually exist in genes. So even if there is this nation-by-nation IQ variation, it shouldn't matter if you let people live where they want.

I think you'd have to be a bit of an expert to understand these results, just because of words like 'intelligence', that could mean anything, really, and I think accounting for 20% of the 50% heritability of intelligence is not exactly blowing the question out of the water.

All the same, I guess I am out of date (in 2017, they were getting 1% - perhaps in 2030, they will be up to 50%? Or back down to 2%?)

In general, I don't think there's any problem with saying some traits we call intelligence are heritable and that has a genetic component. I'm less sympathetic to the idea that intelligence is a simple scalar (the Q in IQ) or a quantity that should be used to prejudge candidates for given technical or social tasks. I mean, if somebody is good, does it matter that they are dumb as hell? I certainly would rather a talented dumbass than a useless genius as a coworker.

You can train a predictor on anything: that's how the famous cases of 'racist AI' came about. The point is, you can't establish a causal relationship without accounting for confounders. If you're starting with a question established by racists, with 'race' and 'IQ' as your two poles, and human populations as your data, good luck managing that.

In general the thing people find obnoxious about this kind of argument is that both 'race' and 'IQ' have their origin in eugenics, but are meaningless in genetics. The genetic variation across one race (say black) is much greater than the variation between races. There are no well-established genetic predictors of IQ. So, even if you do find evidence that there is a statistical correlation between these two unscientific and essentially meaningless concepts, your correlation is equally unscientific and meaningless.

So, the reforms to the university system from the 90's on were supposed to 'normalize' university employment and organization, so researchers would get the kind of contracts other workers get, departments would be subjected to constraints normal organizations are subjected to, and universities would operate like normal midsize-large businesses.

Unsurprisingly, since researchers are in the position of the 'workers' here, they get exploited to hell, and they hate it. Unsurprisingly, since departments are in the position of the middle managers here, they become populated with jaded ladder-climbers who have totally forgotten why they got into science to start with. Unsurprisingly, because university admins are in the position of CEOs here, they become staffed by MBA types, with all the typical 'we're in the money business' insanity, so they start pushing completely perverse and counterproductive incentives down the chain.

This is not a university problem: this is a social problem. Just look at Boeing. We've created a 'normal' for organizations that drives everybody insane and produces mostly hot garbage.

I have come off my bike a whole lot of times, but they've always either been I've been doing something stupid, or the street design is stupid (there's a spot in my city where you can sit and watch cyclist after cyclist eat shit when they hit a particular bunch of tramlines).

In general, I think anything can be made safe if you make appropriate design decisions: consider nuclear reactors. Unfortunately, we live in an era where urban planning is generally neglected as a discipline, so states tend to try and push safety onto the street-users, which is often pretty silly: no amount of high-vis gear and protective equipment is going to make sharing a road with 60mph cars safe. You can't stop drivers from driving drunk by just shouting at them: you actually have to plan cities so you can get home from a bar without using your car. You can't stop cyclists from riding on the sidewalks without providing cycle lanes, and so on.

The thing that boils my blood a bit is that the car industry has lobbyists, while cyclists do not, so often planning law is massively in the favour of cars. For example, in Germany, you need multiple cyclist fatalities before the city is even allowed to build a bike way[0].

[0]: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stvo_2013/__45.html --- basically, the city is only allowed to cordon off a bit of the street for 'specific' uses when there's a proven danger. So the road is, in the eyes of the law, 'generally used', even if in practice only cars can actually safely use it, and the city is not even allowed to put in a bike lane unless in the normal course of events you get like a bunch of cyclists being mulched.

> I suspect bike collisions are more common than car collisions

You do? I was thinking the opposite: I've never hit anybody on my bike, I've never been hit by a bike, I've never seen nor heard of anybody being hit by a bike. How about you? I have absolutely hit a few cars, though.

I figure that since you have to pay attention when cycling, otherwise you end on the ground, and speeds are relatively low, you're never really in danger of hitting someone. I had a close calls with a kid literally jumping out of a bush once, but that's it.

Obviously, I'm not cycling on sidewalks, so in cities with crappy infrastructure, maybe it's more likely.

Vis-a-vis the chance of injury: I think car bonnets have generally got higher in the last few years, but I think the main question is the weight. If you get hit by a bike, both you and the bike are going to bounce. If you get hit by a car, you're going to be doing basically all the bouncing. The energy of an impact is F = mv/2t. So mass is just as relevant as velocity.

Regardless, the statistics bear this out: your stats showed that even if there were as few cars as there are bikes, they would still kill an order of magnitude more people. Perhaps this is because cars are much faster, perhaps this is because they hit more people, or injure them more when they do so, but I think in general if you're taking a purely objective, statistical view, every person who leaves their car in the garage and takes the bike instead makes everybody safer.

I guess if you get hit by a bike (which is pretty unlikely, because bikes are slow and have good visibility), you probably hit it at an angle. So you're likely to get a handlebar hitting you, but there's not going to be much weight behind it, then the bike itself and person on it are going to sort of ragdoll into you, which sucks, but is probably better than getting hit by 2-tons * 15mph force.

I mean, I would rather not be hit by either. But I think physics suggests it's probably better to be hit by the lighter object.

> I am more afraid of cyclists and scooters than of cars.

You shouldn't be. Cars are a leading cause of death across the world. The likelyhood of being hit and killed by a cyclist is, I don't know, very small? Nobody even collects statistics on it: it just doesn't happen often enough to register.

> like you have just tried to murder them

I think a lot of the anger comes from the fact that a lot of people, maybe even most people, are just not temperamentally suited to operating heavy machinery in mixed-use public spaces every day. They'll be half asleep, or on the phone, or distracted and daydreaming, and then the visibility in a car just isn't that great, so you don't have good situational awareness. So cyclists get a lot of bottled up anger from all the times a car has knocked them down, or they've come a hair's breadth from death, and the driver is still halfway thinking about what they're going to have for lunch as they drive off, wondering about the cyclist that 'came from nowhere'.

You also can't really just follow the rules of the road as a cyclist: if you have right of way, but the car driver doesn't see you, you're still dead. You have to operate under the assumption that cars can't see you even if you're literally right in front of them.

> Cyclists here operate in a gray area a mile wide. They are nominally supposed stop at stop signs and red lights, respect pedestrian right of way, signal turns, and all that stuff. But virtually none do, and I’ve never seen any consequences.

All of the signage and rules were introduced and installed to make driving safe - because, as your anecdote shows, being an idiot on a bike is just not that dangerous.

If cars drove at an average of 15mph, weighed 30kg, and had the all-around vision of a cyclist, then you wouldn't need so many rules for their use either.

It's also a funny story because this is the most popular garage pulse jet design, but it's not really a good design other than the fact it reliably makes thrust and the most godawful noise in the world. It's so inefficient you can see videos of these things literally melting themselves into spaghetti, so I don't know if you're going to get more than a single flight, even if nobody shoots it down.

I suspect somebody is just trying to get their nose in the defense trough.

It's also Kurt Vonnegut's rule, for what it's worth.

I think the problem with semicolons is twofold:

1. It allows you to write these horrible long sentences (that thankfully nobody does anymore, but if you look at like a Dickens novel they are everywhere).

2. They're a sort of mark of sophistication and wordiness, probably for reason (1), and it's very much the mainstream of the US tradition to reject that.

For all their desperation for simplicity, I don't actually think US novelists are particularly simple writers - Cormac McCarthy is kinda purple a lot of the time. So my feeling is just wanting to get away from wrought sentences and superficial sophistication isn't really worth anything in itself - it just brings you to a different manner of expressing sophistication.

If you look at the rich history of nuclear near-misses through the cold war, I don't think there's any reason to feel secure in the idea that nuclear deterrence ensures peace. What it does do, is ensures that the consequences of war will be catastrophic, likely civilization-ending.

Which, you know, is the dice we're going to be rolling from now on. Maybe we'll survive the next century, then maybe the next, but in the long term? Humans just don't have that good judgement.

What a great article! Not an area of special interest of mine, but the piece was a joy to read.

Mechanical objects frequently fail unexpectedly, especially if you're trying to do something weird or unusual. We're just used to living in a world of machines that are in their second century of iterative improvement.

I make installation art, and from personal experience, despite being an equally shitty programmer as I am an engineer, the software is way more reliable, and there are way fewer ways in which it can fail. Anything from materials being not what they say they are, to some jackass accidentally making earth live, to stuff catching on fire - it's all possible.

> All electronics fail, and all systems reliant on electronics fail. Not all worm gears fail.

This is kind of a weird take: I was reading about the Therac 25 (radiation therapy machine that killed a few people because of software bugs), and one of the reasons why they were so confident it was going to work is that software isn't vulnerable to two classes of 'bugs' that analog devices suffer from: wear, and manufacturing defects.

I mean, they turned out to be wrong, but they have a point: physical devices are subject to entire categories of bugs that software can be reliably proofed against. All worm screws will ultimately fail, while software can (if done correctly) run forever. All manufactured devices are unique and have unique defects. Software can be reproduced without any defects whatsoever.

Chile's a very weird country, economically speaking - I don't think it's a good point of comparison.

I sort of sympathize with your thinking, but at the same time, the problem with foreign intervention, even the subtle kind, is it distorts a nation's political structure by creating client elites that have part of their power base outside of the nation. These client elites then have a power base that waxes and wanes according to the current disposition of the foreign power, so you tend to get very chaotic politics, even if the investment of the foreign power is somewhat small. You have to remember it's not just spooks - it's also an entire ecosystem of people trained in US universities, working for US companies, or even, benefiting from a US-oriented Argentina.

It's a fairly natural consequence of the US being such a big economy, and it's obviously going to create very unpredictable externalities for neighbors (drugs in Mexico, raw materials in Canada, etc).

Calling German infrastructure 'creaking' is also completely ridiculous. What would you call infrastructure in the UK, then? The US?

> Actual “labor” has a strong social conservative streak, especially in regards to migration.

Eh, this varies. Most people in the labour force are young, and young people are generally leftward-leaning. In some regions of the UK, labour have traditionally been pretty socially progressive.

Does anybody know of a good reference text that can teach you the basics of optics? I've been messing around making little projectors out of old camera lenses and cheap lenses from ali express, and I've had some success, but I have basically had to design everything so I can get all the lenses in the right place by moving them around, because I don't really understand the principles.

Inflation in basic goods and exorbitant rents mean that a lot of people are struggling far more than GDP-style indicators would imply.

There's also secular decline in a lot of southern european manufacturing, so the economic basis for stable income and family life in a lot of places just isn't there anymore.

You can also say 'consciousness doesn't exist, we're all P-zombies'.

Or even the more limited version: consciousness exists, but doesn't have a lot of the magical powers usually ascribed to it (free will, etc).

Farmers use their tractors year round, though? I see what you're saying vis-a-vis specific sprayers, ploughs, or even a combine harvester, but tractors are in pretty continuous use.