snakeboy

Is there any momentum behind these ideas? I don't have any idea what the state of US healthcare reform is.

Google image search "generational wealth USA" You'll find several similar charts. I dislike the Washington Post, but it's just the first result: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/03/precariou...

> TV talking heads bemoan about this, but billionaires still remain the most admired people in this country (Trump, Musk, Gates, etc).

Okay, now include Jeff Bezos, George Soros, and the Koch Brothers :)

But in all serious, I'm not talking about anecdotal "admiration" of billionaires. I'm talking about literal wealth gaps[1]. The Bottom 50% of the US held 21% of the wealth in 1970, and the Top 1% held 11% of the wealth. 21% to 11%. By 2014 this had changed to 13% to 20%. Meaning the top 1% doubled its share of the wealth while the bottom 50% lost 38% of its share of the national wealth.

> If there was anger at the older generation, we wouldn't have so many sacred cows regarding older people (social security and medicare). Average age of senator and house member has been growing over time. Hell, we just elected a 78 year old as president. How about before the revolution we just start with voting for younger people

There is massive systemic momentum keeping these programs in place untouched as they are because of gridlock in the national government, I'm not really sure how their existence supports or rejects my point. I agree younger people need to be more active in the voting process and to elect younger people. I'm optimistic about several state-level voting reforms gaining momentum in the coming years to help this.

But at least at the presidential level, our arcane primary/caucus and electoral college systems give a huge advantage to older people living in rural areas. There has been increasing consolidation of young voters in urban areas which are severely under-represented in choosing the president.

And of course campaigns are financed by large wealthy interests that are mostly controlled by older generation who have an incentive to maintain the status quo. As long as we don't have congressional term limits, poor campaign finance regulation, and a massively gridlocked Congress, it's difficult for the state of things to change from what we have, which is domination by those lobbyists and a federal government which doesn't accurately reflect its populace.

> Most people don't remember this. I'm surprised how rarely its actually discussed

What is your definition of Most People? This comes up every time I've ever seen wealth inequality, accountability and government bailouts discussed (A lot in 2020, naturally).

> This is mostly true but people don't see it that way. They're too busy yelling at people that refuse to wear masks or people that are forcing others to wear masks.

It's concretely felt among those who have lost money, jobs and opportunities. Twitter arguments about masks can be present at the same time as the literal felt effect. Anyone who has followed economic news this year has seen the repercussions even if they weren't directly impacted. In my opinion you're underestimating the mood on this, but I'd like to see some data on it.

> Again, we elected a 40+ year veteran politician. House and Senate re-election rates are still 85%+ and we're ceding ever more of our authority to the [health] experts.

I already talked about federal government above^ But I think this has actually been an incredibly interesting year in that divergence from health experts became "mainstream". Tons of people getting Covid news from people on Twitter who called out studies being used by mainstream press and national governments to justify their policy decisions. I can point out a dozen random people on twitter who I trust more than NYT or Dr. Fauci to give me relevant, contextualized analysis of different COVID-19 strategies around the world. And most importantly, there's little social risk to this. I can tell that to people and they don't think I'm a quack. Half of them do are doing the same thing. Additionally, you're seeing protests break out across the world as governments try to lock-down and re-lock-down without legitimately strong evidence to back up their proposals.

[1] Figure 2.4.1a, https://wir2018.wid.world/part-2.html#article-39

OP means even among those who have never invested before, there are a lot of people who want to buy GME to support the cause, not caring if they lose a bit of money in the end.

I think it's important to put this in the context of many other related issues/pressures:

* Increasing wealth inequality for several decades now

* older generations holding onto more wealth and power in society than ever before - with a large share of their wealth in the stock market

* Wall Street is seen as entirely unaccountable due to 2008 bailout

* Pandemic this year has basically been a huge wealth transfer from normal people and small businesses towards large conglomerates and the wall street hedge funds who back them

* Institutional trust is at historic lows, while online spaces become more and more regulated by those same institutions

So maybe GME stock is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, but it seems like all of this has to reach a boiling point eventually. I'm not sure what that will look like, but violence wouldn't be surprising.

More likely is that most if not all of them saw something innocuous, but constant screaming about corruption from certain public figures colored their recollection a bit.

It's like when you hear a muffled audio recording but it's incomprehensible, and then you're told by a headline, "Can you believe Mr. X just said Y?". Then you listen again, and voila, you interpret the audio as Y. You've been primed to hear Y, so your brain hears it.

When you've been primed by all your anti-establishment media sources to see fraud, then you think back to that time 3 weeks ago when you thought you overheard two coworkers at the mail-sorting center talking about "post-dating the ballots". Well, maybe they didn't say "ballots" exactly... But it was "post-date the fourth", and surely they meant "November 4th", right? I mean election day was the 3rd, and they weren't trying to count late ballots, were they? But what else could they have meant? And they sure looked suspicious when I came over and interrupted them. I mean they didn't mention ballots again that whole conversation because I guess they were worried I would tell someone.

Reading through some of the affidavits and watching the interviews gives the impression that these are well-intentioned folks who just wanted to report something without understanding the context, and they've been primed for fraud. Unfortunately, they get picked up by politicians and media figures who have a clear pro vote-rigging agenda, and get made a martyr for the cause by plastering their face all over OANN, Project VERITAS, etc. It's depressing to watch.

Edit: For fun, here's a tweet demonstrating the audio-priming example you can try for yourself! https://twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1086436669413183488

From what I remember from previous discussions,

1. It's more expensive than standard cattle feed so it would need a subsidy to incentivize its use (probably a worthwhile investment for the Biden administration if they're serious about climate policy) and

2. there are some hurdles to massively scaling up the growth of the algae to supply the massive US cattle population.

I do hope Scott will some day restore the old website to its original layout rather than the default WordPress template it's had since he pulled it. At least for archival and nostalgic value.

Does anyone know why SubStack doesn't allow more customization of the blogs? I feel like every one is nearly identical in font/layout/"feel".

> how is value determined?

It's a good question, I'm not sure I'd have an insightful answer there. Surely there's a difference between Q-Anon, the brain-child of one guy just a few years ago, and questions like "how to derive meaning in life?", "how to be a good person?", which have been discussed in virtually every culture over millennia. Q-Anon may be an interesting case study of some aspect of our current zeitgeist and on the nature of truth and could play a role in understanding some small part of the "meaning in life" question.

In my opinion, equating "Q-Anon theory" and pretty much any well-established field of academic study is like comparing one single rubber boot and the evolution of bipedal life. Sure, one can learn a few things from studying the boot, but the depth understanding of the world and our place in it from understanding the evolution of microbes, to animals to even have legs, let alone feet and toes, and an intelligence and culture to the point that we manufacture footwear far surpasses the surface we breach with any one modern example.

If a homeopath isn't promising tangible physical effects (and isn't charging $19.99 per dose, haha) but just spiritual effects, well I don't know. I wouldn't try to judge the validity of his spiritual claims against modern medicine in a controlled trial, no. You can distinguish my previous response as relating to scientific claims posed by certain homeopaths. Beyond those physical claims, anything else doesn't sound too far from a religious claim.

> science for the world, religion for the soul

You say that like it's a bad thing :). I'm not religious, but it's obviously played a major role throughout history in people's search for meaning and for how to be a good person.

I'm not sure I understand your last point. Could you say more about what you mean? Their lack of appreciation for empirical rationalism in their own fields lead them to underestimate the value of other fields? How does one imply the other?

Homeopathy promises tangible physical effects that should be able to be measured, so as a field of study it's "competing" with medicine, so in my opinion it's only fair to judge it on equal terms via empirical study.

Philosophy as a field of study is not at all making those claims, nor is anyone expecting it to.

Uh, did you perhaps reply to the wrong thread? I'm talking about art, philosophy, aesthetics, etc... nothing about research output or p-hacking :)

What exactly are you expecting OP to provide as satisfactory evidence here? Anything anyone says is gonna be anecdotal.

Personally, probably a solid third of the guys I knew in a college CS program were insufferably close-minded and reductionist about non-"hard stem" fields of study.

It sounds like cynical politicians doing what they always do: pitting their followers against "the enemy" for personal gain.

In reality, these days -- along with most other so-called dog whistles it's quite effective in trolling reactionaries on the left. That's all. Everyone is in on the joke.

If I'm Don Jr. or Charlie Kirk or whoever, my prerogative is to invoke liberal "tears" so yeah I'm gonna use all the dog whistle words like "thugs" and flash the OK symbol, because it scores them points with the right, multiplied by the amount of outrage it causes from the left.

Of course this dynamic only really exists in political contexts. Elsewhere it just means "OK" as always. However, it would be equally absurd to assume that politicians haven't caught on to public perception of this kind of stuff and are exploiting it for their advantage (via democrats clutching their pearls and republicans trying to induce said pearl-clutching)

If I'm a USAn doing business with a private company in a foreign country, that's not relevant. OP is using population-level trends to influence develop his bias towards individuals.

That's why I don't let black people into my restaurant. Statistically, they're more likely to commit a crime once inside, so I don't want to take the risk. All the black people in town end up going to the restaurant down the street, who had their register robbed one time by a dark-skinned fellow that I turned away because he sure looked suspicious! I sure hope they've learned their lesson by now.

You can bet that as a black person in our town, you'll pay substantially more than white folks, because most of us understand that black people have a reputation for this sort of stuff and general trouble, and we don't want to take the risk.

I really wish there was some kind of certificate to let us know which ones are the docile blacks...

(Note: It should go without saying that this is a tongue-in-cheek response)

How do you even define "debunked" here? It's a subjective conclusion as to whether the immense energy costs are justified by the net value added to society.

Personally, I'd tend towards air travel being a net positive, while Bitcoin is well into the negative.

I love the teacup mascots with the "refilling each other" visual. Nice touch.

This could exists a fun puzzle genre, replacing substforbidds of words with synonyms. Perhaps with muloanle dened itefractionns. Could even have replacementb agrosb lade boundaries.

To be fair, it's obvious the author is a non-native speaker. It's totally reasonable to miss the subtlety that a "cult classic" usually implies that it's not mainstream. Google doesn't even make that obvious in it first result: "something, typically a film or book, that is popular or fashionable among a particular group or section of society."

I don't really see how that hurts his credibility, since it's clear what happened and what the author meant. If your interpretation was that the author was trying to highlight his niche 90s sitcom tastes, then I think you were the one committing the communication error here.

Yeah, vast majority seems like a stretch. Back-of-the-envelope calculation:

Google says ~100 billion humans ever lived ~60 billion since 0 AD.

Let's say since 0 AD, 10% of the average person's lifetime encounters are non-consensual, while the ancient human had 33% non-consensual. These proportions are totally made-up by me.

Anyway, that would give us .33 * 40 + .1 * 60 = 19.2% of all intercouse being non-consensual. It seems like any reasonable estimate would put the number well below 50% just given how many modern people there are.

But honestly how reliable do you expect the data reports of individual counties? As I said elsewhere, stuff like this is mostly meaningless without comparing to a random sample of other counties, preferably from other elections.

Of course as another commenter said, we can't find the data they're using, so theres is an entirely worthless analysis.

My experience flying from the US to France through Portugal was that an agent at the gate looks over whatever paper you give them and highlights "PCR", "NEGATIVE" and the date and then hands it back. Then in Portugal they asked for the paper and waved me through, and the same at the French border.

So logistically, pretty easy to fake (unless you're stupid enough to be trying to buy the fakes in the airport like some guys who got caught in Paris a few months ago) but I agree with other commenters it's better than nothing and will almost surely improve the rates of testing/precaution around travel.

Specifically, it's not airborne, which is the only relevant mode of spread in an airplane.

Thank you so much. It's people like you that are helping me stay sane these days.

Thank you. That quote does seem rather damning. I imagine similarly in Georgia the judges saw evidence and proceeded at their discretion.

This is one fallacy I saw over and over and over again back in November. Taking 10 counties in Pennsylvania and saying "Doesn't that look suspicious to you??"

It's all meaningless junk stats without a random sample of other counties around the country and from the last few elections for comparison.

Can someone help me to understand this election fraud stuff? I promise I'm not a quack.

I pretty much ignore anything Trump has to say, since he was obviously going to say it was rigged upon losing, so his opinion contributes no info to my mental model.

I keep hearing from conservatives that the actual evidence was never properly examined in court, and that the cases were mostly dismissed on issues of legal standing. Not being a lawyer, I have no idea how to interpret the legal results from any kind of objective standpoint.

I feel crazy, because every rational person I usually turn to is saying that it's a settled matter, but I haven't seen any good "breakdowns" of the actual allegations and their validity.

Back in November I felt pretty confident dismissing stupid Benford's law claims and sketchy graphs pointing out "Biden spikes" in Michigan. I had the data in hand and could confidently dismiss those. No fraud.

I watched the whole interrogation with the PA whistleblower mailman who talked with Project VERITAS, and I came away understanding that he was paranoid and confused and probably in way over his head. No fraud.

Electronic voting has always been criticized, so I don't know why this year should be any different. But that just seems worse, that potentially decades' worth of elections could have been tampered with if any of those Dominion claims are true?

But it's been weeks and weeks and there was a bunch of "evidence" since then, and I don't have the time or energy or legal expertise to make any sense of them. I feel like I'm going crazy because all my moderate/liberal friends are convinced it's the stuff of conspiracy theories. This is keeping me up at night, feeling like the whole exercise of democracy could be a total sham, and possibly always was.

Is anyone else having this epistemic crisis since November? Is this how people become conspiracy theorists? Can anyone else relate?

I would argue yes, at least for Plato in particular, the commentaries take their time to discuss the topics in the so-called "Socratic" style, and its easy to engage with the arguments and counter-arguments directly. I think with a commentary you risk reading someone else's opinion, without challenging yourself to form your own. It's more-or-less equivalent to doing the exercises in a math text rather than just reading the chapters and letting the author convince you that you understand.

Obviously the ideal is the read the source material and then read commentaries after once you've had a chance to reflect on it for yourself.

Of course for me, I have only ever managed to read Plato and Karl Popper. Other "Classics" like Hume or Kant I can't make heads of tails of the source material without some guidance. I haven't even tried the most notoriously dense authors like Nietsche or Hegel.

Hey this looks awesome ! I've been getting into guitar this year during confinement (apologies to my equally-confined neighbors), but Ultimate-guitar is so bloated it barely loads on my shitty wifi. This is exactly what I need.

Thanks :)