chlodwig

My problem is not that I'm never willing to be generous and charitable with people who are genuinely edge cases. My problem is corporate and government policies that require me to lie about non-edge cases.

* I know a lot of trans people - MTF and FTM - who are not distinguishable from your definition unless you interrogate their genitalia, or in some cases, their genetics. If you see such a person, and use the "wrong" pronouns according to your definition for them, would you then feel guilty for not using the "right" ones? If not, why not?*

Again, my problem is required being to lie. If I have a coworker who I know is a man, he has always called himself a man, he has the secondary sexual characteristics of a man, he is six foot with a beard, he has sired a child -- and then one day he comes into the office wearing a dress and long-hair and insist on being called a "she" and insist on going into the woman's locker room at the gym, I would find that intolerable because I know the coworker is not a woman. I am being told to lie.

If my boss says "There are four marbles in this box" and I have never seen inside the box, I will say, "Ok, got it, I have no reason to accuse you of lying, there are four marbles in the box." But if I see with my own eyes that there are two marbles in the box, and my boss says, "There are four marbles in the box, say it say 'there are four marbles' it or you are fired" that is dystopian and intolerable.

Now, let's say I have a coworker who always presented as female, the coworker maybe had a bit of an uncanny valley thing at times, but I have never asked about it and have always called the coworker "she." One day, there is a work-family outing to a water park, and in the locker room the coworker is naked and exposes zis penis in view of my wife and daughter and they tell me about it. I would not feel guilty about calling the coworker "she" but I would feel angry with the coworker for lying about his sex.

And even if that isn't true, why does "adult human female" have to map to "woman", and vice versa?

The entire point of language is to "cut reality at the joints", we create words in order to group natural kinds together in a way that allow for common understanding and decision-making. If society wants to redefine "woman" as meaning something else, we would still want a word to mean "adult human female" because it is a natural kind. When we redefine woman, we see all the contortions people go . All of science, all of human knowledge relies on being better and better at organizing and recognizing and create common language around finding patterns in nature.

All of this is to say that I don't see how your reduce-it-to-biology-and-never-waver definition is workable in society, and I don't understand why folks - yourself included, it seems - are so insistent on it.

For all the reasons we make distinctions between men and women, or divide up men and women -- from locker rooms to sports to prisons, to assigning rooms during multi-family vacations, or assigning rooms at college, to single-sex schools, to certain dress standards, to sexual harassment litigation, to etiquette and social norms around inviting people to do activities -- it all comes down to biology. It all comes down to massive physical disparities between men and women (eg, a punch from an average man does to a woman does approximately 1000% the damage a punch from a woman does to a man), and the male potentiality to impregnate women, and all the physical and biological differences that have evolved as a result of reality. The reason historically cultures have clothing and appearance cues to distinguish sex is because the biology is very important, we want to know it as soon we meet someone, but we don't want to look at their genitalia, so cultures have arbitrary conventions (pronouns, male & female names, pink versus blue) etc. to indicate biological sex at first meeting. Destroying these distinctions and saying, "it's all what a person wants to be" is completely novel in history and the burden of proof is on those who want to change the status quo, and after following this issue for 15 years I only become more convinced that burden-of-proof has not been met and that it really does all come down to biology.

I found two of these three books on Lexile Hub and it looks like they are written at the level of Nancy Drew (Zoboi) and Harry Potter (Beah). So maybe they do like them better because they are much easier.

I'm a little skeptical of the claim these books "reflect their lives and experiences" because they are about three different demographics, so at most, only one of the books could be speaking to the experiences of any given student. And frankly, I hated these kinds of books in school. Dickens and Vonnegut was the fun stuff. But at any rate, the traditional point of an education was not exactly relevancy, it was 1) to seem the commonalities of human nature even in very different circumstances and 2) to teach the texts that create a common culture.

In a move as cliché as blaming standardized testing, Horowitch takes aim at smartphones and social media, a constant classroom annoyance to be sure, but old news, at least among high school educators, who have already read The Anxious Generation, adapted our routines, and moved on. It seems too easy of a target to take seriously in the context of a major American journal like The Atlantic, but here we are.

But she then she admits it is true:

Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read. While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects. My students code switch into my spoken dialect to engage with me -something that I never had to do to communicate with my teachers in high school.

Creating space for the joy and curiosity of reading is important work that high school teachers step up to every day, designing lessons to teach what once came naturally. Previous generations turned to reading as a leisure activity, so they had an innate sense for how to read in school and how to read sneakily under the covers way past bedtime.

To summarize: Students are no longer reading for fun, they are using more casual language on social media, so instead of teaching kids challenging texts in school they have to focus on simply being able to read anything.

A lot of this comes down to this teacher not believing that traditional Anglo-American civilization, or more broadly the Latin Christendom civilization, is worth teaching and preserving:

From a similarly stodgy perspective, Horowitch’s article reflects a frighteningly narrow definition of what constitutes worthwhile literature. Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box.

My students code switch into my spoken dialect to engage with me -something that I never had to do to communicate with my teachers in high school. ... As a society, we have become more accepting of vernacular differences and demand less code switching -all good and important changes that validate students’ identities.

It used to be the point of a public education was to "melt" all the immigrant communities into one American identity. That meant enforcing a standard dialect. (And the same thing happened in many other countries, such as France). It is notable that the teacher no longer thinks this is a good thing.

This really is a basic difference in values. It has been said about public policy, "We all want the same thing, we just have different ideas about how to get there." But in this case, we simply do not want all the same thing and there is no getting around that.

If you think that the manufacturing output in some of the things I listed declined or stagnated -- but it is countered by the fact that US manufacturing of other newly invented goods has increased -- then please specify what those goods are. Seems to me like the US manufacturing also lags in newly invented goods -- like drones.

There are two separate questions:

1) Has USA manufacturing increased or declined in its output (measured in things, not $)?

2) If output has declined in terms of things, is this ok because of comparative advantage? Is this ok because the US mains a competitive edge in the highest value most technically advanced products?

As for 1), you say "The net result is that US manufacturing output in real dollars has increased 4x, in the past 70 years." Are you familiar with the term "researcher degrees of freedom"? "manufacturing output in real dollars" is an impossibly complicated statistical construct with infinite researcher degrees of freedom. There are infinite opportunities for "Getting Eulered" https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/ That is why I insist on starting with the most straight-forward numbers -- how many cars? How much steel? And then layering on adjustments on top of that. If steel is down but it is compensated by some other high value product being up, OK, but show me the calculation, show me the work. Otherwise your argument boils down to "Trust the US government's impenetrable statistical calculations, we are getting richer comrade"

As for 2), when I first heard that argument from the most prestigious and credentialed economists twenty-five years ago, my toys and clothes said "Made in China" while advanced technical products like my computer motherboard was made in the USA. Now it's OK that the motherboards are all made abroad and because the most technically sophisticated motherboards are made in the USA. Well, it seems to me like the areas where the USA has comparative advantage in making the most technically advanced products is becoming a smaller and smaller every year. Just this year we are made aware of how much Boeing has lost ground to Airbus. Seems to USA is increasingly reliant on low-tech exports like soybeans, or worse, exporting dollar bills. It seems to me like our trade deficit is gaping wide, which means our real export is living off our status as the global reserve currency. Which feels nice until ones military might is no longer able to support that status (see 16th century Spain). Seems to me that the US is losing ground on military relevant manufacturing -- particularly drones but also steel, ships, etc. And without that, it will not be able to maintain its status as reserve currency in the long run.

Really? Every time I see this claim its based on some citing some statistical mismash that the person citing does not understand and cannot explain.

How much tonnage of merchant shipping does the USA build in 2020s versus the 1960s?

How many TVs and computer monitors does the United States make in 2020s versus 1990s?

How many tons of steel does the USA make in the 2020s versus the 1970s? Of tool steel?

How many nuclear reactors are produced in the USA in 2020s versus the 1970s?

How many railway rails graded for high-speed trains are produced in the USA in 2020s versus 1980s?

How many CNC mills are produced in the USA in the 2020s versus the 1980s?

How many artillery shells are produced in the USA in 2020s versus the 1980s?

How many jet engines are produced in the USA in the 2020s versus the 1980s?

How many car engines blocks are produced in the USA in the 2020s versus the 1980s?

How many computer hard drives are produced in the USA in the 2020s versus the 1990s?

How many motherboards are produced in the USA in the 2020s versus the 1990s?

(Also, adjust all the comparisons above for population growth, we should be comparing manufacturing production per capita)

If you think that these comparisons are misleading because there are 'quality changes' please tell me exactly how you quantify these changes in quality.

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Infrastructure as a Service product

or

IaaS product

means a product or service offered to a consumer, including complimentary or “trial” offerings, that provides processing, storage, networks, or other fundamental computing resources, and with which the consumer is able to deploy and run software that is not predefined, including operating systems and applications. The consumer typically does not manage or control most of the underlying hardware but has control over the operating systems, storage, and any deployed applications. The term is inclusive of “managed” products or services, in which the provider is responsible for some aspects of system configuration or maintenance, and “unmanaged” products or services, in which the provider is only responsible for ensuring that the product is available to the consumer. The term is also inclusive of “virtualized” products and services, in which the computing resources of a physical machine are split between virtualized computers accessible over the internet (

e.g.,

“virtual private servers”), and “dedicated” products or services in which the total computing resources of a physical machine are provided to a single person (

e.g.,

“bare-metal servers”).

---

So Dreamhost counts, any web host where you can run arbitrary PHP code would count. Wordpess.com -- where you cannot actually modify the PHP code yourself -- would not count as IaaS. But any web host that allows you to install applications on your own, or run any of your own code, would count as IaaS by this regulation.

In other words, if you want to run your own Wordpress, or Mastodon node, or your own custom CMS web site or group chat or IRC or bitcoin node, you would need to reveal your identity to the hosting service that you want. This does seem quite bad and could obviously be used to identify political dissidents.

On top of that, the IAAS must report to the US Commerce department about foreigners who are using services to train large AI models.

1) YIMBY's want to keep out crime.

2) The only tool available for keeping out crime, is to keep housing prices high and to keep out low-income housing projects, because low-income people disproportionately commit more crime.

3) Even though this is sub-optimal and I would like a much more fine-grained tool for keeping out crime (eg, being allowed to run criminal background checks on every person moving into my neighborhood), it is the only tool I have to protect my family and my children, and so I feel no moral guilt about using it.

4) Because black people have 10X-30X higher rates of crime, and higher rates of poverty, ANY policy that keeps out criminals or keeps out low-income populations will disproportionately keep out black people. But the end goal is not to keep out black people, that is not the point of the policy, that is an unfortunate side-effect caused by the higher-crime rates and higher rates of poverty among black people, which I have no power to fix.

2. Is it immoral and racist to point out that because of (1) any policy which aims to reduce or prevent crime in a neighborhood, will therefore have 10X to 30x the impact on black people?

3. Is it immoral and racist to advocate for any policy which will reduce or prevent crime in a neighborhood? If not, which policies do you support?

No, I'm saying you are getting the causality inverted. You then "translate" what I am saying by inverting what I am saying and then call me names. How about you argue with exactly what I write rather than trying to "translate" it.

Is any policy -- even if prima facie race neutral -- that tries to limit higher-crime-rate populations from moving into a neighborhood inherently racist and immoral if said policy has a disparate impact on black people?

My friend no longer send his kids to his local playground because the young men at the local scattered site public housing project were engaging in crazy shoot-out in the playground. Is it morally wrong for other people in the city to observe this and then oppose a housing project in their neighborhood? What is the moral thing for them to do? What policy do you actually suggest for keeping crime out of a family.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v2.full

What are the one to three highest quality, most convincing studies showing that eating unprocessed ruminant meat (ie, beef and lamb) is bad for your health?

My impression is that there is far less of this now than there was thirty years ago or fifty years ago.

Here is a small quote:

Around this time of day, I’d be taking my time walking home with my friends from Most Blessed Sacrament School, or “MBS” as everyone called it. Once home, I’d quickly get out of my school clothes, put on my play clothes, and be on my way to my favorite place in the world, Myers playground.

I always felt so safe on Cecil Street. On warm summer nights, lots of adults would sit on soft cushions on the top step of the four concrete steps that led from the edge of our front porches down to the sidewalk. Neighbors would sit out for hours, talking with other neighbors, many of them enjoying a cold beer or some other cold drink. At least one neighbor would have the Phillies game blasting on their transistor radio. So we’d be able to keep track of the Phillies game while we were running up and down the street having fun. I knew everybody on Cecil Street, and they all knew me. In fact, I knew almost everybody in our section of the neighborhood. And I felt safe no matter where I went. All us kids knew that most parents around here looked out for all the kids, not just their own.

The way I heard it: right after I was born, Dad simply didn’t renew his license, sold his big black Chevy, and never drove again.

Years later, when I asked Dad about it, he said, “Kev, I could take the “13” trolley on Chester Avenue to work. I could walk to the grocery store. I could walk to the bar. And I was tired of driving your mom and Nonna all over the city. What the hell did I need a car for?”

I have heard personal anecdotes from family relating similar stories.

Which church?

But how many normal people bought and lost crypto with FTX because of their Super Bowl ads and celebrity endorsements? How many people thought FTX was just the new normal for investing and they should get in before getting left behind (anaglagous to to how once upon-a-time stocks made a transition for ordinary people from bucket shop gambling to mainstream investing)?

Sure would be nice to read an article about normal people who bought crypto with FTX as a result of the mainstream ads and endorsements.

This is like if you put $100 in Chase's security deposit box, and they opened it up, took the cash, and lent it out, and then when you come to get it, they say, woops, we lost it all. That would be just straight up theft or fraud.

In the FTX International terms of service ( https://help.ftx.com/hc/article_attachments/9719619779348/FT... ) they say that users have full title, ownership and control of digital assets. They say that the assets are the property of the user, and shall not be loaned to FTX trading, shall not be treated as they belong to FTX trading, and that users control the assets in the account.

So if they did indeed loan out customer deposits, that is just straight up criminal fraud, open and shut. This isn't like some DeFi scheme where they are working around some legal loophole or in the fine print tell you that they will probably lose your money. This is just straight up illegal under the plain vanilla theft and fraud laws of any country. This isn't even a bank run (banks at least tell you they are loaning your deposits out) -- it's a run on a U-Haul self-storage where you find out that they actually sold all the furniture in your storage unit to a pawn shop.