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swallingon Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

Either way the point that America is very rich but we do a comparatively terrible job of ensuring our people have long, happy lives is still true. You can pretty much apply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_... to any phenomenon that kills lots of Americans, except cancer and Alzheimer's.

If we are so rich, why can't we provide for the kind of programs that would deal with so many early deaths? Money should be able to deal with the issues at the very bottom of Maslow's hierarchy.

swallingon Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

The easier method to do a more nuanced analysis is to use data visualization where you put income on one axis and lifespan on another. https://www.gapminder.org/answers/how-does-income-relate-to-...

Interesting question though. Someone's probably thought of this already and it's just not in wide use. Maybe something like annual income in dollars cut by average life expectancy?

swallingon Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

”Average incomes have grown much faster than in western Europe or Japan. Also adjusted for purchasing power, they exceed $50,000 in Mississippi, America’s poorest state—higher than in France.”

The article casually dismisses the counterpoint that the US trades high income for a lower social safety net.

The average French person has a life expectancy of 82. In Mississippi it’s 74.9, on par with Lithuania. Even Vietnam and Cuba have significantly higher average life expectancy than that.

swallingon Office vacancies in San Francisco jump to a record 33%

My casual observation that drove that thought, which was admittedly off the cuff, is the people who really want to go back in-office are new grads who want to live in an exciting city, and NYC is way more livable and exciting than SF. That urge to live and work in SF, instead of the suburban Valley, was part of the gravity that brought big companies back to the city 2010-2020. Secondary NY hubs seem to be doing much better than pre-2020, though to your points, making the leap to NY primary is a much higher bar.

swallingon Animal Sex Determination Is Weirder Than You Think

Yeah unfortunately for conservatives, the annals of history are generally a story of culture evolving more rapidly than traditionalists are comfortable with. We happen to live in a country where the core Constitutional answer to that problem can best be summarized as: tough shit, get used to it. You can move to Saudi Arabia if you want to live in a traditionalist autocracy that will protect you from the horrors of drag brunch.

swallingon Animal Sex Determination Is Weirder Than You Think

It's almost LOL wrong to state that conservatives have gladly accepted that trans people are entitled to full and equal treatment under the law.

Conservative groups have sued to get religious exemptions to Bostock (https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/religious-g...) which is particularly pernicious given the number of religious organizations that operate large employers like hospitals.

Just one Tucker Carlson clip (https://www.foxnews.com/video/6324164359112) shows how American conservatives are continually frothing at the mouth about trans rights. There is a related wave of anti-trans laws being pushed through by conservative elected officials at the state level right now. They're specifically attacking trans children and school policy, as the soft underbelly that gets conservative parents riled up for a culture war and which is legally more vulnerable.

swallingon Office vacancies in San Francisco jump to a record 33%

This is also the lingering effects of zoning and San Francisco business tax policy.

De-regulating downtown zoning for conversion and tax breaks (https://sfstandard.com/business/mayor-breed-introduces-tax-b...) are both likely to be tried, though what impact it will have seems limited in the near term.

If it does rebound, it might not be until the next generation of startups reaches mid to late stage on the other side of the current lending crunch, presuming they don't exclusively work remote or choose NYC as their primary hub.

swallingon Animal Sex Determination Is Weirder Than You Think

The mainstream liberal interpretation is that gender is a social construct separate from sexual identity/preference, and you can’t constrain the expression of either to the historical Western norms, because that’s an attack on Constitutionally-protected individual rights. There’s a more extreme leftist interpretation that says both are fixed identities practically from birth, but it ends up with the same conclusion: let people be and do what they want, even if it doesn’t fit into heteronormative expectations about gender or sex.

My entire point is that’s the morally and legally correct framework, because we shouldn’t be using scientific determinism to make decisions about how individuals with free will and rights can express themselves. The article is correct to have the disclaimer, in this light.

swallingon Animal Sex Determination Is Weirder Than You Think

Only if you're dumb enough to assume that all or most of behavior is biologically determined, instead of being a complex mix of biology, culture, and learned individual patterns that produces a spectrum of individual expression.

The question isn't "is gendered behavior rooted in biology?" it's "how much / to what degree?" and the honest answer is, we don't really know with confidence, especially when it comes to humans. The fact that Western culture seems to be currently undergoing a Cambrian explosion when it comes to gender expression contributes to how hard it is to answer this question. Unfortunately that's also why people are anxious and waging culture wars about it.

swallingon Animal Sex Determination Is Weirder Than You Think

Right, it's useful, realistic, and mostly uncontroversial to assume that there are typical vs. atypical sex differences in behavior in basically any population.

The problem is there are a ton of people who try to use that fact to justify forcing everyone to fit the typical trend. "Most people are right hand dominant, so everyone should learn to write right handed or be punished" is the milder historical example. The worst case scenario is "it's legally defensible to murder someone because they don't conform to expected gender roles" https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/member-...

swallingon Animal Sex Determination Is Weirder Than You Think

It’s not true that biological sex is completely deterministic in the behavior of non-human animals. For instance: there are gay penguins where two males will adopt eggs to hatch and raise chicks. Homosexuality and associated behavior changes are observed in a wide array of species. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals

Conservatives trying to use biology to argue that gender and sex are fully equivalent is akin to 19th and 20th century attempts to use evolutionary theory to support racist social policies. It's not only wrong morally, it's bad science.

swallingon India’s Tigers Bounce Back

You're totally correct at the demographic level. Probably the best trend for tigers is the fact that India and China are getting richer and people will consequently be having fewer kids. It will result in less pressure on habitat and hopefully less demand for things like traditional Chinese medicine products made out of tigers.

I was mostly reacting to the hypocrisy of the kind of Western liberal who would crucify a trophy hunter online, but who flies all over the world for vacation and buys Shein hauls to post on TikTok. The personal consumption choices of rich people are still driving a lot of environmental degradation. Hating hunters is more of a liberal tribal shibboleth than a meaningful way to have impact on global biodiversity.

swallingon India’s Tigers Bounce Back

There are larger predators like lions featured heavily in cave paintings and other forms of the earliest human art for a reason. We have never hunted predators like bears and big cats as a primary food source, but a willingness to defend humans and our food with hand weapons is actually a skillset actively practiced until very recently in societies like the Maasai. The Human Planet docuseries has a pretty incredible scene where hunter gatherers coordinate to steal a kill from an entire pride of lions. It makes you see why people on the other side of the world in highly industrialized societies would find it to be an adrenaline rush to hunt the biggest, baddest looking animal they can find (not that I do this personally).

You're completely right that the desire to hunt a tiger isn't really logical or necessary, I'm just pointing out that it is not psychologically aberrant that some people (mostly men) would find it satisfying to do things like that as a thrill-seeking activity.

swallingon India’s Tigers Bounce Back

It should not be surprising that humans find it fun to do something that we did for survival for most of our evolutionary history. The evolutionary function of play is the practice of adult skills.

What's actually bizarre is that the billions of modern humans who would find it sickening to kill any animal personally have no issue thoughtlessly living a lifestyle whose need for ever-expanding consumption of living space, energy, and other resources is directly contributing to a human-caused mass extinction.

swallingon American IQ scores have rapidly dropped, proving the 'Reverse Flynn effect'

Link to the study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...

swallingon Xylazine, a dangerous new drug fuelling Canada’s opioid crisis

People who have the highest disposable income also have the most opportunity for mobility. It’s entirely possible that a disproportionate percentage of those moving away are people who care more about high property and income taxes vs. lack of a state sales tax.

Note that I said the decline is multi-factorial though. A significant part of it isn’t even outward migration, but excess deaths due to COVID combined with a low birth rate and a lack of inward migration. (Here again though, who do you think has the most opportunity to move to a new state and what kind of tax policy deters them?)

swallingon Xylazine, a dangerous new drug fuelling Canada’s opioid crisis

46.7% of the state's population is in the Portland metro area as of the last census. Multnomah County has the second highest tax burden in the country for top earners. If a new capital gains tax proposal is passed this year, it will have the highest. There are many reasons why the state lost population starting in 2022, but taxes are definitely one of them.

swallingon Xylazine, a dangerous new drug fuelling Canada’s opioid crisis

How many years did Portugal’s approach take to work?

Oregon decriminalized personal possession of basically all of these drugs in 2021. As of today, a large swathe of downtown Portland is basically one highly dangerous open air drug market. It’s going to end up like the Tenderloin and Civic Center in SF. The cannabis tax money flooding into addiction treatment businesses seems to be not making a dent. Between lower quality of life and some of the highest tax burdens in the US, Oregon is decreasing in population every year now.

swallingon Hexatrek: The long distance thru hike in France

If you include Alaska, ~75% of the US coastline has meaningful public access protections. If you don't include Alaska, because people don't sunbathe topless there or whatever, it's like ~20% based on my napkin math?

The original comment was "Nothing comparable exists in the US". Given that the entire West Coast and other key beach recreation states like North Carolina and Hawaii have stellar laws on public access, the root comment was simply not true.

swallingon Hexatrek: The long distance thru hike in France

Yes, you use taxpayer funds and volunteer trail crews. Having done trail volunteer maintenance myself on the PCT, I can tell you it works just fine. There are also low cost permits for thru hikers and trailhead parking, which offset some of the cost without creating nasty externalities like getting people lost (which is what happens when you charge for maps).

swallingon Hexatrek: The long distance thru hike in France

There are more miles of coastline with legally mandated public access in the US than in France. It’s simply handled at the state level not the federal.

https://beachapedia.org/Beach_Access

swallingon Hexatrek: The long distance thru hike in France

France specifically seems to have a bizarre tolerance for "pay to play" culture and limited access in outdoor recreation. Countries all around them have shown how strong freedom to roam laws (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam) can work. Those just don't exist in France. Even in the US, trails are largely maintained by volunteers, non-profits, and federal institutions.

swallingon Police relied on Clearview AI and put the wrong person in jail

The standards of evidence in the justice system are universally pretty weak. From suspect lineups easily manipulated by police to phrenology-level bullshit like bite mark analysis, this is why fair estimates are that up to 10% of convicted criminals are innocent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_Project

swallingon Milton Glaser made America cool again

NYC in the late 70s had a major branding problem. It was widely thought of as a dying, crime-infested shithole (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/10/t-magazine/1970s-new-york...) Like per the 1975 headline "[President] Ford to City, Drop Dead".

Making it t-shirt worthy to say you loved NY was a major turnaround for the popular image of the city. No one thinks it singlehandedly saved NYC, but it's one of the most famous ad campaigns ever for good reason.

swallingon The TikTok ban is a betrayal of the open internet

This is a key example of the paradox of tolerance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)

Saying we should tolerate the influence of a totalitarian state over a major communication platform (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/10/21/more-americ...) in the name of the First Amendment and democratic values is setting up our democracy to be weakened and fragmented even more than it already is.

We already know that domestically-controlled networks like Facebook directly contributed to electing a demagogue President who tried to disrupt the peaceful transition of power. We'd be morons to accept the same thing but under the influence of an autocratic country which has clear intentions to erode American influence and power.

swallingon Show HN: Apple Notes Liberator – Extract Notes.app Data and Save It as JSON

Just works: fast to load, works offline, I don’t have to think about sync

Just notes: It’s not trying to be a programmable networked knowledge engine or a no code app builder or a toaster.

Not ugly: You can technically change fonts and crap but it uses clean system styles out of the box, so even as a font snob I don’t get distracted changing formatting instead of writing.

Free, or at least really cheap if you have a lot of stuff in iCloud

swallingon Researchers are trying to mitigate the spread of wild pigs in Canada

From the USDA source I cited:

“While recreational hunting for feral swine is popular in many states, it is generally not considered an effective management option. Significant population reductions typically do not occur and feral swine behaviors or movements may be altered such that they impede other removal operations (e.g., trapping). Hunters usually target large males instead of females, which has little impact on overall population reduction. Additionally, recreational hunting creates incentives to maintain feral swine on the landscape and move feral swine to new areas for increased hunting opportunities, which has largely been attributed to the expansion of feral swine across the United States. Although controversial, several states have outlawed hunting in attempts to better manage feral swine populations. Research has shown that feral swine removal via hunting is often negated by the use of bait to attract feral swine. The supplemental food source increases fecundity and population growth despite hunter harvest.”

swallingon Researchers are trying to mitigate the spread of wild pigs in Canada

The open hunting season in states like California and Texas actually creates a perverse incentive among hunting guides and private land owners to deliberately introduce and maintain feral pig populations, in order to act as supply for their business.

It’s widely accepted among wildlife ecologists that hunting has minimal control effect and might actually be causing more spread.

https://www.aphis.usda.gov/wildlife_damage/reports/Wildlife%...

swallingon Half of Black High School Students in the Bay Area Can Barely Read

idk lowkey seems like when u txt with yr besties its not hella similar to Moby Dick or a college essay thass on some fire Noam Chomsky game u feel me?