168 karma · joined August 4, 2023
If it is a random Joe and not, say, a malicious effort of a major government posing as one. That's the problem.
Yeah, famously no hostile laws against queer people in Texas. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/08/25/texas-transgender-ki...
The proper comparison here would be charcoal.
(Volcanic ash, on the other hand, contains common rock-forming elements: silicon, magnesium, and iron, with the proportions depending on the type of volcano.)
If ZTm0038 does indeed have a 3% chance of impact, it would, like Apophis, land as a 4 on the Torino scale, tying the record for the most threatening asteroid in history. Unlike Apophis, however, the impact has a lead time of hours, not decades. Efforts might have been made to deflect Apophis; no such effort could realistically be made for ZTm0038.
It's worth noting that NASA's Scout page (https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/scout/#/object/ZTm0038) for ZTm0038 has a much higher probability of impact: of their 1000 sampled orbital solutions, 160 of them impact Earth. A 16% chance of impact for a 400m asteroid would put ZTm0038 on the border of a Torino 5, and would make it by far the most threatening asteroid ever discovered.
That said, note that the prior here has to be that an impact of such a size is very unlikely. Such impacts are exceedingly rare. The Tunguska event, for example, was an asteroid 1/8 the diameter (so 1/8^3 = 512 times smaller in volume) as ZTm0038, and it was by far the largest impact in recorded history. Since impacts roughly follow a power law, the much larger putative impact of ZTm0038 would be proportionately rarer, the sort of thing you'd see every hundred thousand years or so.
The other part is that trying to construct all truth from first principles is a hopeless endeavor for a single person or even a group of people. The rejection of institutional expertise - and the collective knowledge of failure modes that is embedded deep within institutions - leads to a lot of predictable failures.
Discussion is a commons. It relies on trust and symmetric cooperation. When those things are betrayed, the commons breaks down.
Is the covid vaccine effective at reducing the chance of contracting, and the severity of cases of, covid? Yes. And that is what vaccines typically do. As for stopping its spread: the original vaccine came very close to herd immunity against Alpha, yes. What it didn't stop (but did mitigate) was Delta, which evaded some of the proteins it targeted and which was so much more contagious that even substantial protection wasn't enough for R << 1.
As for the word "vaccine": a vaccine is a deliberate exposure of the body to an infectious agent or a component of such in order to sensitize the immune system against it. The covid vaccine, which exposes the body to a protein that is a component of covid (an infectious agent) qualifies. The delivery method is novel, but the principle - using a component of an infectious agent to sensitize the immune system - is the same.
Again, "beating the experts one time" does not mean that betting against them is a good bet. For every person that fits your description there are a hundred not getting vaccinated because they've "done their research". The literal comment right below mine is some anti-vax nonsense right here on HN, in a community that is overwhelmingly better-educated than the public at large.
Places with populations that shut up and listened suppressed covid nearly entirely until the rise of the much-more-contagious Delta and Omicron, neither of which would have realistically arisen at all if the whole world had applied suppression of that magnitude. New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Korea, and China remained open for business throughout most of the pandemic precisely because they had strong institutions and because they successfully enforced expert consensus.
Even within the US, the map of covid deaths is practically an electoral map, which is itself practically a map of trust in institutions. San Francisco had a death rate of 134 per 100k. King County (Seattle), 158. And less you think it's an urban/rural thing, rural Vermont sits in the 150s. Meanwhile, almost nowhere in the South or Great Plains is below 400 per 100k, and almost everywhere that is is a blue island amidst a sea of red. Raleigh-Durham, Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and St. Louis are all visible clear as day on a map of death rates.
Even if we assume that expert consensus got covid's origins wrong - a fact that is far from demonstrated - I will happily take a temporary error in a relatively unimportant fact about the virus' origins over hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and years of shutdowns that could have been avoided with better coordination any day. Experts are sometimes wrong, but from an outside-view, probabilistic standpoint, a person betting against expert consensus is almost always going to lose, especially if they are not themselves an expert.
a+b = a + a(b/a) = a(1 + (b/a))
People aren't opposed to helping people who need it. They just don't understand that people need it.
That's largely because both the 2016 and 2020 generals, and the 2016 and 2020 primaries, were highly split along racial and educational lines. Black voters voted overwhelmingly for moderates in primaries and Democrats in the generals in all three contests, while white voters tended towards the more radical candidates in both primaries and the general (although the Bernie -> Trump vote gets exaggerated, it certainly existed, and his massive upset in Michigan foreshadowed Clinton's weakness there).
> Also because the Democratic primaries were objectively and transparently rigged.
Well, in terms of delegates, sure. But Bernie didn't win the vote, either. Clinton beat him by 12 points, not all that much different from the margin Biden was beating him in '20 prior to him dropping out.
> IIRC wasn’t Sanders polling better against Trump than Clinton? Then again most conceivable candidates probably would have…
The polling was a wash, ish, between the two. But of course the polling was also wrong in undersampling critical demographic groups that probably preferred Sanders to Clinton (although I'll note that Clinton won the primary in Pennsylvania, which she ultimately and decisively lost).
With the benefit of hindsight, maybe Democrats would have done a lot of things differently. (I certainly would have - I was so frustrated after Bernie lost that I ultimately voted third-party, although I might not have had I lived in a competitive state.) But certainly conventional wisdom at the time for virtually anyone in the know was that Trump was very unlikely to win, even as his popularity endured through things it never should have, and I don't necessarily blame them for mis-reading an electorate whose simmering frustration was suddenly at a boil.
My point being that Bernie being right does not mean he was, even with the benefit of hindsight, the correct electoral choice, nor does it mean there's some silent majority of Democrats who want progressive action but aren't voting for it.
He was closer in 2020. But in 2020, Democratic primary voters got a very simple choice: double down on moderate neoliberalism, or try progressivism. Democratic primary voters made a very, very clear choice, and Biden wiped the floor with Sanders from the day it became a two-man race. Biden won nearly two-to-one in vote share and in delegates and won numerous states that were Sanders' base of support in 2016.
Is there a progressive wing in the Democratic Party? Yes. Is it a lot bigger than it was ten years ago? Yes. Is the fact that we've been right all along becoming more obvious by the day? Yes. But are progressives the majority of the party? No. Are we competitive in national primaries right now? No. We have simply not convinced half of the half of the country that votes Democratic that we are in the right.
Part of that is our serious problem with the black vote - it's very hard to win a Democratic primary without it - but it goes well beyond that. Republicans have very successfully painted us as a bunch of frothing-at-the-mouth fools who want to waste all your money sending men to leer at your daughters in locker rooms, and we need strategies to convince people otherwise. We need to play politics. What that looks like, we can debate, but we have so far failed to win the game of rhetoric even though we are, objectively, right.
Will and work ethic are weakly necessary for success, but they are not at all sufficient for it. (not successful) -> (not work ethic) is denying the antecedent: (successful) -> (work ethic) is, if not always true, at least often true, but that doesn't imply its converse.
People's objection to social safety nets mostly isn't their desire to keep their money. It's a perception that the people who need those safety nets are lazy bums who don't deserve help. That's a particularly common perception among hard-working professionals, whose logic is "I worked hard to get where I am, so if others worked hard, they wouldn't need help". What they miss in that analysis, of course, is that their hard work combines with talent, luck, privilege, and health, things that many people who suffer lack. As a relative newcomer to the economic elite, I find it pretty distressing to hear how wealthy people talk about the poor when I myself was homeless less than five years ago.