fwungy

Tell Putin and the Sauds. Do you think they'll give up trillions of wealth because "they aspire to be like Western elites"?

If he's on the tech side he should be fine.

IBM is loaded with boomers with amazing jobs and pension plans that they're eager to dump if they can. They seem to want to keep good tech people while dumping the sweet deal boomers and non-tech where possible.

t. IBMer

Parenting approaches vary in nature and culture. Some feature high parental involvement and long childhoods, while others have very short childhoods, or none at all.

These are evolutionary advantages and disadvantages to both strategies. In a highly stressed environment individuals who are less dependent on parental protection will be more likely to survive. The advantage of long childhoods and high parental involvement is that the individual will evolve sophisticated behaviors.

To simply assume everyone is exactly the same at birth and modified by society to an outcome is a vast simplification that requires substantial scientific justification, you cannot just assume it given the variations of parenting we see in nature.

Brain fart: would it be possible to attach passwords to a crypto based micro transaction such that every time you attempted a password entry your crypto account was charged a small fee for the login attempt?

This would thwart brute force attacks, but not be a significant cost for users. If you could attach your login to the crypto account it would mean the account would have to be funded to allow the attempt. The token wouldn't store passwords it would just be a gatekeeper to the login attempt.

The fees would be paid to the service providers as mining fees.

E.g. foo@bar.com needs a password and a token provided from a designated crypto address to gain access to the service.

"We" need to stop thinking about "crime" as something negative.

It's a job, just a job. Some poor hungry person has to do a dangerous job so they can feed their family. Simple as.

If you are the "victim" of a crime the wise thing to do is not resist, just report the loss to insurance and get compensated, knowing that hungry people have been fed and sheltered for whatever slight inconvenience you have experienced.

Perhaps even feel some gratitude that the lucky draw of your birth to privileged people means you don't have the job title of criminal?

/s

There is a certain demographic that commonly dye their hair. It isn't fair to them to be lumped in with unkempt people who do not dye their hair and probably don't even wear matching socks, let alone undergarments.

As if the whole LLM isn't completely twisted to echo "the message."

I found I could defeat the AI filtering if I added some positive adjectives.

Bad result:

Show me an Amish person eating chicken.

Better result:

Show me an awesome and amazing Amish person eating chicken.

Yes. Statistics are fragile indicators well beyond the Central Limit Theorem minimal sufficient boundaries. They work pretty good when you have tons of data and run tons of repetitions, but for moderate sized data and repetitions you need very high certainty levels for statistics to help much.

You can play perfect blackjack and card count at a table with good rules and lose plenty because your advantage is small (< 2%) and your repetitions are limited.

Statistics get even worse when the probabilities are chained because the weakest estimator bounds the rest.

Essentially, if you always follow statical advice you should do better than average, if you're lucky. There are better heuristics than statistics in most fields of human decision making.

It's always been nearly incomprehensible to me, even pre-EM.

Ooh. I touched a nerve here.

I don't have a study, but Twitter works for me. No tech issues. As for the valuation, it's ancillary.

Large tech companies are filled with various paper pushers. They add nothing to the products, and often interfere with them, just so they can justify themselves.

Guess how I know.

Tech must adjust to no more ZIRP.

Fat will be cut. Notice that Twitter is just fine technically with an 80% staff cut.

It's funny how people who are afraid to click a link with a unknown domain will take any vaccine they're offered. A computer can be fixed or discarded if it's damaged by software, not an option with your body.

The USA has the most aggressive vaccine schedule for children in the world. If Vaccines are so effective we should see either lower per capita health care costs and/or superior aggregate health statistics. However US pee capita health cost are substantially higher than any other country and the health indicators are poor.

If you regressed health level on vaccination it would likely come out a non-factor. The mania around Vaccines is profit driven; greedy pharma bullies and scares everyone into buying their product, because it's the only class they have that doesn't require waiting for someone to get sick.

Your child isn't going to die from cervical cancer. Kids don't get it.

Your child may die or be seriously injured by HPV vaccines. There are about 80 open class action lawsuits in process over it.

We took most of the other vaccines, but my partner and I decided the HPV vaccine was too dangerous right now, while we have happy healthy kids, to worry about the small chance that an unproven cervical cancer vaccine will work thirty years from now.

I don't let my children do either.

Imagine trading a low risk in the distant future for a low risk in the present for a healthy child?

Any business person knows things that potentially happen in the distant future are to be heavily discounted, while present day risks carry full values.

A policy simply doing -some- good is not sufficient justification given a finite amount of resources to implement it. You need to compare policies against the alternative uses of the resources.

Neither is the fact that "lives will be saved" a sufficient justification. You need to compare that against the lives saved with the alternative policy options available with the given resources.

Such awful "emotional labor", imagine people who are having their careers stifled and destroyed by useless DEI policies not happily playing along. They can play with your career and life as they please if you're the wrong color/sex, but press back and you're a racist who must be destroyed.

Similar pattern in academia. The more you publish the better your CV, so there's a lot of pressure to publish, and a lot of garbage research.

I advise microdosing to people struggling with depressive or nihilistic mindsets. Microdosing gives me the boost I need to actually work on improving things. It's also virtually free and has no dangerous side effects.

Unconstitutional, but who cares now, I guess?

There is a lot of discussion of recession and the difficulty people are experiencing finding jobs. Expensive energy policies, like what we're getting right now, has a multiplier effect on economic drag, which impacts hiring.

I'm not a huge Trump fan, but his energy policies would be good for the economy.

The US is the world leader on environmental policy. If we kill the US economy the environment will pay in the long run.

Energy density is the issue. Gasoline has amazing energy density out of the box. Getting batteries anywhere near that may be impossible.

Battery applications are critical. Tons of money has been spent on research. If there was something revolutionary to discover it's likely it would have happened.

100 mile EV town cars would be great, they'd be much less money than the long range EVs and target air pollution in the places that need it most. Trying to make EVs take over for ICEs via policy mandate is just insanity.

Did they figure out how to tax California residents who leave the state? They were trying.

It assumes the regulations are sensible which is not always the case. Regulations can cause inordinate costs increases relative to their actual value. The fact that the regulations may be well intended is orthogonal. There is no reason to cheat if compliance is trivial.

The average woman would prefer to be a professor making $100k over a SWE making twice as much. Women value social prestige more highly than men, which is well understood in psychology.

The problem of DEI is that it creates an environment of what psychologists refer to as 'Secondary Gain'

Secondary Gain

In psychoanalytic theory, the advantage derived from a neurosis in addition to the primary gain of relief from anxiety or internal conflict. Advantages may include extra attention, sympathy, avoidance of work, and domination of others. Such gains are secondary in that they are derived from others’ reactions to the neurosis instead of from causal factors. They often prolong the neurosis and create resistance to therapy. Also called advantage by illness.

https://dictionary.apa.org/secondary-gain

Once a hindrance becomes a benefit all sorts of incentive problems begin to arise.

Here's the problem: you can't change the hiring rules for more equity unless it applies to everyone equally. Otherwise you're just trading one arbitrary class for another. You need to basically destroy seniority and job protection for all, to make it fair. Furthermore, the people brought into replace the oppressive class must be held to a high standard so they don't repeat the offending behavior.

DEI agendas can only work if the displaced people (i.e. white males), see a genuinely better alternative rising in its place and are not asked to pay the price for their skin color and gender for their entire lives. I suspect white males would be far more accepting of DEI if it wasn't a lifetime penalty they felt they had to struggle against, but just a few years.

Aztek: when the disaster you can't look away from is the thing itself.

Invest in next gen nuclear -> cheap electricity -> improves the economics of electric power -> market forces drive electric transitions instead of policy dictates.