IG_Semmelweiss

Lindy's law:

For non-perishable things - i.e technologies, ideas, books, institutions - the expected remaining lifespan is roughly proportional to how long they have already survived

Time acts as a filter: what has already withstood a long stretch of disorder is more robust, so the longer it lasts, the longer it is expected to last.

The old nuclear software running on mainframes have passed the test of time. The new software, has yet to.

Nassim Taleb talks about this at length in his book, Antifragile.

Is it correct to say that the video looks far worse than it actually is ?

As in, the dust/mud particles sprayed & floating in the air do not have the force to do harm beyond vision or breathing impairment, similar to the dust from a collapsing building, or the lead shockwave of a nuclear bomb detonation.

Of course, it looks terrible, and certainly somethingbut its not a reason to perish as long as you can stay away from the following water wall and mud current that does strike sometime after.

birth rates are falling off the cliff in all developed nations, most are below replacement rate already

>>> Like 26 gas turbines that make a ton of noise and pollution?

there's only noise pollution if there's anyone around. If there's anyone around, odds are land value is too expensive for a datacenter. As for pollution, that's already regulated. As is noise anyway. Lets not be pedantic. No one is protesting these due to pollution or noise.

>>> What? How does one BYO water?

Tankers. Like 95% of the world. Its a thing. This is actually the least likely to be an issue, since most datacenters run a closed loop water system anyway.

>>> Pipes and sewage to where? There's an implied common ground at the end of those.

Porta-potties for humans. Tanker disposal for the rest (to the extent you do have waste).

Buses were indeed the logical solution before Waymo/etc. Now, they are just a modern version of horse carriages. Dirty, slow, smelly and insecure.

The faster you get out of the bus, the faster you liberate grandma and kids from a fall, being mugged, or from freezing to death while waiting, and instead you promote an active lifestyle.

Waymo-like transport is incredibly liberating for low middle class parents, that cannot be trust their young kids to ride a bus alone and take time off blue collar work to take their kids to X practice.

Plus, they are much cheaper and safer to operate long term

Buses are a solution today, but only for upper class americans & soccer moms, who don't realize the issues that low income or limited fixed income seniors face in their everyday life.

neutralize largest threat surface, work your way down.

First is email. Have their login. Then can-spam everything from nigerian princes. Usually if they have been pig butchered in some way before, they are "hot targets". SO they will continue to receive emails until the algo has been retrained to reject the massive amount of junk they likely get. Set up tons of filters as well.

The 2nd threat surface are landlines, since they usually have been around for a while and the number has been passed around. Force VM-only for unknown callers. Then have VM transcribed and sent over to you. Scammers will not usually leave VM so its an autofilter. Anything important, you can relay. With LLMs this becomes considerably easier.

This could have been stopped so easily on its tracks with a simple premise: 1 day turnaround build permits, to any proposed off-the-grid data centers.

BYO power. BYO water. BYO pipes & sewage. OK, you are good. Now build!

Instead they are look like parasites invading the heartland and sucking resources (true or not), and owners pretend to be surprised when they are getting voted down.

>>> Nowadays when a slide-in appears that sneaks through ublock origin

Does that really happen ? I don't know what this is

Note: I have Ublock set with no JS permissions by default, so maybe that's why i never see a slide-in menace ?

Here's a revolutionary idea.

Instead of mandates, why not lower the tax burden on citizens. That would give move freedom to parents to decide not to work, and actually, parent their kids.

Don't force parents to both be absent from home because the burden of the bureaucracy salaries is too great without sucking blood from the middle class

Houses don't need to cost 0.5M AUD with long mortgages that force 2 parents to work. They cost that because the government is spending like a drunken sailor and destroying the value of money held by everyday australians.

>>> Those with power try to bend reality to their desires

you won't get much disagreement there. Yet to say that WaPo has a lib left bent at the whims of bezos in the last 10 years, is a stretch of the imagination.

However, you don't need to do much of mental gymnastics for

>>> Those with power try to bend reality to their desires

to remain accurate. Because those in power - the WaPo Editorial Board - used the WaPo as their personal megaphone until Bezos noticed his toy was on fire... and burning his rug made out of $$$ dollar bills.

Not every parent has the time or energy to do so, but i certainly thought i was on the more relaxed end of parenting. I'm glad i appear to be different online! I will take the intensity of my parenting as a compliment.

PD - I never played D&D. If there were any non-RPG games that were extremely plot driven or written, i'd be all over them.

Action games turn out to be heavy on clicking, low on reading.

agreed. The sale of data is effective a run around existing law that forbids govt to collect it.

This is a huge issue. Privacy is dead as long as the government can buy its way around it.

Sheriffs depts and FLOCK, Ring Cameras, FBI , etc.

Do you let your kids eat candy for lunch? DO they eat pizza for breakfast ?

If not, why not ? Aren't you managing their food intake ?

So, what's so different from managing their information diet ?

I respect that. What would you do to teach your kids advanced math, electrical engineering ?

Does your recommendation hold with a full time job ?

My kids are rapidly approaching an age where they should be experimenting, and I can't offer any solutions short of involving AI in some way.

EDIT:

>>> At some point around age 9,you will need to decide if violence and some adult themes, are tolerable (Dragon Wing series).

I am sorry. I mixed up series.

The series I was alluding to in my comment above, as the "grey" area for violence, death, and some adult themes is "WINGS OF FIRE " , not "DRAGON WINGS"

Dragon Wing series as top 5 as the most wholesome series for U8s , along with MAGIC TREEHOUSE etc.

Apologies for confusing dragons :)

Dragon Wing is great. It is a high recommend for early book readers.

I got my series mixed up . My intent , was to say WINGS of FIRE, is more adult themed and higher violence. APologies for the confusion

Earlier poster nailed it. LLMs are a godsend here.

There are tons of parents that have traveled this road before you and I. LLMs leverage this data. Its just a matter of writing a decent prompt, and recycling it.

Cynicism, Disrespect, Bullying, Violence, Sarcasm.

Wimpy Kid is a valid gateway drug if your kids refuse to pick up any books. But in my opinion, its a break-the-glass situation.

Its the book you buy only because nothing else will stick (options have been tried and failed).

>>> Kids aren't LLMs, they know that what they're reading is fiction

My comment was not one-dimensional. Its not that they can't tell the difference between realitiy and fantasy.

Every kid is build differently. It sounds cliche, but it is not. Some are incredibly resilient, some are extremely sensitive. Think Briggs Myers = some extremely concrete-driven, others perceiving. My recommendation was built on experiences that worked for all kids, the concrete and teh perceiving, the sensitive and aloof, which means you must consider all dimensions of a kid when sharing books with them.

Reality matters little when mimicking behavior. Kids will learn to respond with "This is stupid!" when they are given specific books.

Can a resilient kid capture that this is unacceptable ? Some will. OK, but why risk it ? We are talking about your lifelong companions here. Potential best friends. Caretakers.

Parenting is hard. There will be a time for risks.

I'm torn about this.

I primarily think that a a kid who won't pick books is a failure of the family of not noticing their interests.

When i noticed my oldest 3 yr old was obsessed about cars, i bought him a car encyclopedia. He probably could not read most words or did not understand them. But pretty soon he was telling me about car models that i did not even recognize myself.

And as i saw interests, i kept feeding them.

My biggest struggle now is to actually keep books away from them at key times (morning routine, etc) , or keeping bad books (think cynical like My Weird School Daze, etc; or books that openly demean adults or parents) away from them

Start small. Graphical novels, mostly drawings, and continue to buil on that. It can be done. Rome wasn't built on a day.

At some point when they hit 5 yrs old, Grok / OpenAI are great tools to find good series appropriate to their reading level. Before that it can be vibed. Feed the addiction, buy whatever they like.

At some point, you need to watch out for cynical/nasty series. In fact, all of the books we purchase are ranked against peers they have read in the past, or those we know to actively avoid buying due to cynicism, sarcasm, or open disdain towards adults (Wimpy Kid).

At some point around age 9,you will need to decide if violence and some adult themes, are tolerable (Dragon Wing series).

This iterative rocess also works really well for foreign language learning (reinforcing via reading mostly), by leveraging localized RPG video games.

With all that said, notice that I've focused on reading skills.

I don't know how i'd go about replicating this iterative path on other skills like math, mechanical, or electrical engineering learning. That's where I think a busy parent will need to find AI as the solution.

Great article. One item that it avoids touching even though it clearly insinuates it - the solutions.

And among the solutions, there's one that is briefly alluded to, but skipped around like a hot potato.

What if EMS were to refuse services for those who don't pay for the option on a monthly basis? And for the rest, if they choose to pay "on the spot" they can be OON like everyone is now? Why give out a free (or subsidized) option out, at all ? After all, I dont think it is illegal to turn away Medicare & Medicaid patients if you are not in-network with them.

We pay for other types of insurance. EMS insurance seems like a natural fit for a family.

That number looks low.

we have multifelons (+10 arrests) running around and committing new crimes -often killing- in nearly all major urban centers.

What makes you think police are going to pay heed to teens with heavy pyrotecnic ordinance ?

And even if they did, would the DA prosecute ?

>>> Property taxes are not calculated that way. The property tax rate for a given year is backed into (a "mill rate") based on approved dollars of spending divided by total property value. If total citywide property value drops by 50%, the property tax rate doubles that year.

When the LLCs that own the commercial buildings declare themselves bankrupt, and walk away from the asset and throw the keys on the table, who pays the 50% increase ? The banks?

Will banks own a 50% increase in property taxes ?

What about residents ? Renters ?

What are the financial "instruments" ?

The main claims from the article seem worrysome, IN particular, the 37% vacancy rate, as well as multiple buildings underwater[3], etc.

Now, lets dissect the claims that this is part of some cycle, and not the result of new city hall management. The reality is that with Jumpstart, and with the vacancy rate, enterprises are not renting. But, the owner is stuck with the asset in what is now a hostile jurisdiction. So, even if owner may not be able to change terms on their mortgage, they certainly can charge less for rent. Empty units do not contribute to cash flows to pay the building mortage. I understand there may be consequences to lowering rents, but those consequences are coming home anyway: The building will need to be sold, at a loss, by the bank to a new owner. And as you said, that process takes time. And the jurisdiction seems hellbent to make it harder.

Now, as buildings sell, this in turn lowers the appraised value, which is key to the Seattle tax base.

So, the downtown core is going to produce far less in property taxes in the foreseeable future, with fewer tenants paying (at least in short term) occupancy taxes, etc. This is going to play out in a decade.

According to this, commercial property taxes are about 26 %[1] of the Seattle budget

Let's assume appraisals go down 50% for those impaired offices. This is not crazy, there's precendent for it[2]. That means the Seattle budget must be cut by 13%. This is not even factoring other losses from job loss, sales tax lost, etc. Maybe that's not "Seattle is dying" , but sound pretty bad ?

[1] https://www.seattle.gov/documents/departments/financedepartm...

[2] Seattle/downtown office properties lost ~$10–15+ billion in assessed value since 2020 (46–48% drop) . https://cdn.downtownseattle.org/app/uploads/2026/06/New-Repo...

[3] https://www.king5.com/article/money/business/downtown-seattl...

(a) has to sue and they will prevail.

(b) does not have standing.

The theme of this article is seen directly as a major plot point in the series Shogun.

Its quite a good show!

this article feels 10 years late. Toys R us marked the end of the toy store.

Its just a matter of time before other stores follow, except for the Lego flagship stores , or the ocassional anime store in a bigger city.

Its sad.

>>> by just having a copy of the encrypted data sent to some cloud service, e.g. iCloud/OneDrive/Google Drive, but decided you couldn't trust any?

False sense of security. As proven countless times in these forums, a ban on 1 product or 1 account on Google, is a ban on all of Google for that device and linked devices. I dont think you have factored in this risk. Or that commercial products get discontinued all the time. Open source (syncthing) doesn't have that issue. And we haven' touched billing yet.

>>> There's no one you would trust with an encrypted copy?

Doing password backups is particularly tricky. Commercial vendors are robust and depend on local circunstances. They do have changes in ownership which do change security priorities. Its a bit of a moving target whether they can be trusted or not. For non password needs, the answer is much simpler:No. They will sell data, at a minimum.

>>> o you have any automated backup of your phone to a cloud service, or only local?

Only local. I have 1 device parked in a relative's house that gets updated everytime i am there. That's my remote backup. But its not a daily backup, but i can live with that.

>>> I am overseas holding a new replacement for a lost phone, looking at the text "Enter the 6‑digit verification code", I will wish I'd thought about more carefully.

This is, indeed, the most important thing you must resolve. How urgent you need access to X ? Maybe you should solve for that separately. Everything else is much simpler and done.

same. Recommend

as long as the house doesn't catch fire, or as long i run outside with 1 of my syncthing devices (have several), local cloud is the best.

in my humble opinion, Dominos ?