eucyclos

>This is undeniable unless you have an argument of how a pool of 500 kids would somehow have less diversity of personality, thought, languages, physical features, intelligence, etc.

I have such an argument - have you considered the amount of forced social conformity in a public school versus a community of homeschooled people? Humans are weird in a way that 'public school culture' tries to paper over.

Speaking of bullying, high school caused me to greatly overestimate how important unarmed combat would be to my future success in life.

It's nice to not worry about it on the rare occasion that I go to sketchy places, but it also highlights that dealing with a cross section of our country's population is not necessarily relevant to the kind of life we build when we can choose our peers.

I read something about unaffordable housing being a function of English Common Law systems - couldn't find the original piece so I asked chatgpt to compile some data:

Legal System Average Price-to-Income Ratio

Common Law 8.9×

Civil Law 6.1×

Mixed / Hybrid 6.5×

Islamic Law 5.1×

I'm not sure of the accuracy but it sure seems like common law systems have quite the surcharge, do any scholars of comparative law have theories as to why?

from OP's tone I'd guess personal experience - I lived in one in my late teens/early twenties (Alberta still allowed them at the time, maybe it still does IDK). We had a guy attempt suicide in the kitchen one night. I heard after moving out that another roommate I'd been friendly with got kicked out after relapsing and getting 'back into the crack', according to the landlady's boyfriend.

It is a fact that criminals and addicts will flock towards the cheapest housing options and bring their problems with them. That's just the nature of being the cheapest option.

A shrinking population like Japan's also changes the supply/demand curve in favor of people looking for housing options. That's probably a major factor.

Add an 'instant pot' or similar (or replace the microwave with one if you're really short on space) and you actually have a huge variety of available meals with a regular outlet + countertop. Home kitchens are designed around old fashioned stoves that required a lot of space to produce heat, and they've stayed around because everyone likes to have lots of counter space. These days the actual cooking process can be done quite well even in a very small area.

I'm probably ignorant of how indexes work at a nuts-and-bolts level, but intuitively this seems like a good idea for certain situations. E.g if we want to keep entries in a specific order but don't know ahead of time how many entries will be added between two existing ones. House numbers in areas with a lot of development are an example of the kind of problem this seems ideal to solve, when there's a clear 'order' based on geography but no clear limit on the number of addresses that could be added 'between' existing addresses.

I was gonna say. "to bind your spell true every time, let the spell be spake in rhyme" doesn't just work on spirits, apparently.

That's my favorite rap artist!

interesting. I have the theory that most networks, and most social networks, are doomed to tolerate too much or too little deviance - sailing between 4chan Scylla or reddit Charybdis. I hope you manage to thread the needle!

Do you have a plan for dealing with the clickbait problem?

I think it was mostly caused by fear about nuclear Armageddon during the cold war - it's hard to feel like the world could end at any second due to nuclear bombs while also feeling grateful for nuclear electricity generation. Would be even if there was no overlap between military and civilian nuclear industries, which of course there is.

Even if it had never had those issues, nuclear power would still be the textbook example of a fragile system - capital-intensive, centralized projects that can be shut down by disruption to fuel shipments halfway round the world, droughts in the cooling system's water sources, or any of a dozen unions of specialized workers going on strike. Add to that iteration cycles measured in decades instead of years and it's hard to imagine how Nuclear could ever even close the gap, let alone pull ahead.

I have a theory that smart financiers avoid nuclear because getting a new version done on time and under budget is so damn hard, and smart physicists gravitate to nuclear for the same reason. I wish the nuclear-curious factions would pivot to a project Orion style endeavor instead of powering a UK hamlet sometime in the 2030s. Now there's something insanely difficult and likely to fail that I wouldn't mind my tax dollars being spent on.

I would rather not trust the first person who claims <outgroup> wants to starve me. Polemnics may be legitimate - they may not be, I haven't thought about it deeply - but they are undoubtedly worth dropping from my own information diet.

There are politics and there are Politics, and I don't think the two of you are using the same definition. 'Making decisions in groups' does not require 'oversimplifying issues for the sake of tribal cohesion or loyalty'. It is a distressingly common occurrence that complex problems are oversimplified because political effectiveness requires appealing to a broader audience.

We'd all be better off if more people withheld judgement while actually engaging with the nuances of a political topic instead of pushing for their team. The capacity to do that may be a privilege but it's a privilege worth earning and celebrating.

I found the same when I was taking intro to stats - I did get a much better intuition for what stuff meant after reading 'superforecasting' by tetlock and gardner - I find I'm recommending that book a lot come to think of it.

I've found large entrenched players tend to prefer slightly more than a reasonable amount of taxation and regulation in any industry; governments are easier to predict and handle than scrappy competitors.

From what I see in the roads in China, Tesla is pretty competitive in the right environment

This makes me think of Alexander's pattern language- according to that framework one of the key components of beauty is texture. I wonder if our dislike of untextured experiences stem from an unease at not knowing where the thing is hiding its warts.

Since microsoft kinda sorta owns or is merging with openai it's probably already close to that... copilot is constantly down for me at least, but I assume that's not a hard thing to fix on Microsoft's end if it wants to start paying the server costs...

shift could be the metakey? Maybe too many syllables...

How many hours writing emails does it have to save human cancer researchers for it to be effectively true?

Then at least all the rare earths inside the cars we've already imported are inside or borders ;-)

It is weird to me that nobody wants to import Chinese electric cars. If Chinese investors and politicians are really subsidizing the production of electric cars, importing them would be basically having the new grid subsidized by a foreign government!

I wouldn't bet against your 50 year prediction but that's because there will always be more infrastructure to extract oil, even as the oil left to extract dwindles. My own prediction is that rates of oil extraction will continue to increase with minor fluctuations until about 2160 and then fail off a cliff.