fatcat500

What in me is dark

Illumine, what is low raise and support;

That to the highth of this great Argument

I may assert th’ Eternal Providence,

And justifie the wayes of God to men.

Interesting how our leaders see their role not as representing our interests, but in shaping our interests. There exists an entire subject in political science dealing with how to increase compliance with the schemes of regulators (see Nudge Theory).

The mistake they make is a classic short-run vs. long-run miscalculation. In the short-run, you can get away with these kinds of tactics to increase compliance. For example, running talking points on the MSM works well. They run the talking points and in the next days, everyone is parroting what they heard on the news, as if it's their own views.

But in the long-run, people will become more familiar with these tactics, such that they will become less effective (e.g. waning trust in the media). They are burning through the cultural & social capital which sustain these institutions (like the MSM or academia), and don't realize that once it runs out, they will no longer have these levers and buttons at their disposal.

At that point, the only way to increase compliance is with force. And once you go down that road, it becomes extremely clear to those wielding that force, just how precarious their situation is (e.g. Maduro assassination attempts). That is how totalitarianism takes root, fear of the people.

Macroscopic politics is a phenomenon in its own right. Something that should be studied like one would study chemistry or physics. No one person or party controls the course of events.

I don't believe there is a grand conspiracy with shadowy bond-villainesque bad guys. It's simply that there is positive pressure in one direction (to have an easier-to-manage populace) and negative pressure in the other (to have a virtuous populace (harder to manage)).

A population of ignorant and illiterate peasants is great for maximizing political capital. They are receptive to propaganda. They are an energetic bloc of voters. They know something is wrong, but are too ineffective to correctly identify the problem, which means politicians will continually entice them with "solutions" that solve nothing but increase the political or financial capital of interested parties.

We're headed toward a medieval "Three Estates" type system reupholstered with a post-modern aesthetic: the ruling class (brokers of power), the intelligentsia (white collars), and the peasants (everyone else).

All that brilliance and knowledge, used to get vulnerable, suggestible teenagers addicted to mind-numbing, anxiety-inducing media. The shame of software engineers is that we have been used to create 1000s of these inhuman products.

No offense but the logo looks disgusting.

Looks like we have some old timers in here

> If there is not enough of a flow of cooling water, the rods can overheat, and the entire facility is at risk for a nuclear meltdown.

This is not true. Water is the moderator in a light-water reactor. Without water the reaction will stop. Water is both the coolant and the moderator, unlike the Chernobyl reactors, which used graphite as the moderator.

The GDP of Singapore is around $340 billion.

Goldman Sachs manages $2.5 trillion dollars worth of assets.

Of course I want the gay people in Singapore to flourish. That's not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is that it is illegitimate for private companies to use their vast wealth to influence the affairs of a comparatively poorer country.

Western countries colonized entire continents with force and violence. Now we're doing it again, ideologically, with business and geopolitics.

What you're saying is effectively: "But we're right and they're wrong, so I don't care."

Everyone thinks they're right about what they believe in, especially moral beliefs. The purpose of political systems is to provide a non-violent, transparent medium by which disagreements can be resolved.

In public health, the protocol is to maximize trust in the people you are serving. For example, if a female doctor is turned away by a sick misogynist, the correct reaction is to say, "Ok, let me find you a male doctor." The incorrect reaction is to become offended and attempt to use public health as a political chess piece to "make them more inclusive."

Global trade cannot flourish if every business attempts to install the moral values of its stakeholders in whatever country they're doing business in. There has to exist a level of professionalism where business people understand that they are not there to judge or influence other peoples and their governments.

> Goldman Sachs partners had something to say about this law

Don't you think it's absurd that an investment bank has influence over a country's social policy? For all the cheerleading we do about democracy, we also don't seem to care that behemoth US companies exert their influence over other countries, thus diluting the value of a citizen's vote. No one is concerned that there is no wall of separation between business and politics.

Safetyism in regards to nuclear power is nothing more than the environmental lobby attempting to derail the only viable solution to climate change. They will lose an excellent source of political capital if climate change is solved, so they will always fearmonger nuclear power.

Fewer than 50 people have died from nuclear power in its entire history, meanwhile an estimated 8.7 million people die each year from fossil fuels [0].

[0] https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-are-the-ef...

Love the idea, will definitely try it out.

One bit of feedback I want to give is: when I'm answering questions on the iPhone app, there's a dialog that shoots up from the bottom... this is too much motion and I don't like it. Especially since there are multiple questions back-to-back, it feels a bit nauseating to see that dialog shoot up over and over.

I think a quick fade in (or no transition at all) may be better suited for that part of the app.

This is the kind of subject where your typical engineer, who took 10s of high level math and science courses, who proudly carries the torch of empiricism and scientific skepticism, who literally uses logic in his day-to-day (&& & ||), will suddenly become viscerally offended at merely questioning the orthodoxy of gender ideology present in academia & the white collar world.

You can visually see when the ideology 'hits' by their body language and facial expression. It's a hell of a drug

They burnt through all the cultural capital they had by spending it on short-term political victories. Now people see the media not as a source of information, but as an instrument of the establishment to influence and control.

The same will happen with the other institutions. We already have large amount of people skeptical of the CDC, WHO, and other health oriented orgs. We have growing skepticism of large financial institutions (fed & inflation, IMF & "you will own nothing", etc.). There is widespread skepticism of academic institutions, which will cause the value of academic titles to depreciate.

All this because the people who control these institutions insist on using them as political instruments (at certain times).

I wonder what the situation will be 50 years from now...

At this rate, Europe will become 2nd world by the end of the century.

Instead of focusing on innovation and competition in the global market, Europeans are busy legislating their freedoms away.

> Environmental review has become a tool of environmental extremist militants to derail and progress in energy.

Hmm... I wonder why they are so bent on blocking the only viable solution to climate change?

Almost as if they are being used a pawns to shift over the control of energy to the government... after all, if I wanted to nationalize every industry, I would start with the industry upon which all other industries depend on: energy.

No a/b testing?

right, because people who live in small towns are known for their knowledge of electromagnetism

Because the elites are a bunch of right-wingers, right?

Yes. Nuclear Is a threat to socialists/environmentalists because it would deprive them of an excellent source of political capital. Namely, the justifications required to artificially increase the price of energy, to pass regulation which controls the manufacture of goods, and to regulate lifestyles and culture.

All sectors of the economy depend on the energy sector. Control the energy sector means control of the entire economy.

I’m not saying that climate change isn’t a real threat, nor that scientists are wrong in their predictions, nor that we don’t have to make a change in how we produce energy. However, what makes environmentalism useful to the political class has nothing to do with the hard science behind energy, civilization, and the health of our planet. What the political class sees in this movement is the perfect set of excuses to increase the size of the central government.

For years, fraudulent “academics” have pushed phony concepts like “white empiricism”, and no one aside from far-right types, hungry for ammunition to use against their ideological enemies, bothered to seriously criticize this gibberish… Now that it’s going mainstream, it’s kind of funny to see people freak out about it and realize just how entrenched their interests are, and how for a huge number of scientists, ideological orthodoxy is far more important than the philosophy of science

makes you wonder what’s so threatening about religion that they want to ban it… maybe because in totalitarian systems, the state is the source of moral truth?

Vitamin C and Ivermectin aren't experimental. I'm not against the vaccine, but to say that an emergency approved drug is as circumspect as older drugs (e.g. Ivermectin was approved as early as the 1980s) is misleading.

That being said, I still think it's the right move to take the vaccine because the statistics show that it is effective.

If there was a button on Github that donated small amounts of money to the maintainer(s) of a project, I would press it frequently for many libraries I depend on.

For example, donating 25 or 50 cents every time I visit gofiber/fiber would be fine with me.

However, there is no way to feasibly charge small quantities of money without the majority of it getting raked in processing fees. For example, Stripe charges 30 cents plus 2.9 percent (last I checked), meaning only ~20 cents would make it to the maintainer(s).

The same issue exists with rewarding content creators. You either donate a non-trivial amount of money (often recurring) like $10 a month (which means you have to keep track of that expense, which is arguably an even greater disincentive for donating), or you don't donate at all.

The people who support defunding the police have never felt genuine fear from being victimized by crime.

It's only after the crime, when you're thinking about how someone else had the hubris to threaten your life, thinking about how you could have died, or worse, if your loved ones had been with you, that they could have died, that you begin to wade yourself into a deep and abiding anger.

I used to feel sympathy for criminals. Especially seeing how many of them have led rough lives, having been raised by bad parents, in horrible environments, having been led by others to delinquency as youth, then into crime as adults.

However, once you have been victimized, this sympathy vanishes. It does not matter how bad you've had it -- violence is never justified. Any person who resorts to violence instantly loses all justification.

It is only the rich who can afford to stroke their moral ego in such an egregious manner. It is the poor and the middle class who pay with their lives for this sanctimony.

I would probably buy a ~$200 HP Stream and use that...

Unfair having to spend such money, but textbooks aren't that much more expensive, and you can use it for more than one course too

The people who are currently successfully utilizing science to legitimize knowledge are doing so off of the moral, social, and cultural capital accrued by previous generations of scientists.

The assumption that the general public will always perceive science with a reverent and trusting eye is wrong: once the capital runs out, science will be perceived as just another tentacle of the establishment. Politicizing scientific language is a surefire way of accelerating this process.

This is what has already happened with the MSM, of course.