fwungy

"It's for the children"

Big red flag.

Global Warming will kick in in two more years.

Why didn't I think of this? Very cool.

Here for the F-104 discussion. Fascinating plane.

They make the tax code complicated so they can leverage it.

This is why they can't get Trump on tax issues. Trump pays the best tax people to cover him. If they nailed Trump on anything they'd have to nail a lot of other people too, who are otherwise untouchable.

A flat tax would work just fine, except for all the people in the tax industry that is. You just level the flat tax until you get the equivalent revenue from the current scheme.

Simple, relatively high, taxes for the plebs and a complex, exploitable tax code for the rich.

There's no need for wagies with low net worths to go through the full process.

This is the most important quote for the modern era.

A dict_to_object function would be a good little intermediate exercise.

Typing is nice just for the documentation it provides. Refactoring old python scripts was a pain because you had no idea what the arguments and return values were.

Is date a string or an object? It gets tiresome.

It's almost always straight white males slated for personal destruction.

The funniest was probably Marilyn Manson. These women really didn't know that he was a disgusting pervert just from seeing him, then dated him for years, complaining a decade later? Manson is an awful person and makes no attempts to hide it. No one could say to the accusers, "you really had no idea this guy was a horrible person from second one?"

If Manson can be attacked and canceled any man can be.

He used to go to strip clubs with his sketch pad and draw the strippers. It was an effective ice breaker and relationships with the strippers outside the club are inferred.

Feynman was a successful, charismatic man with insatiable curiosities about many things. He may have caused women to do things they later regretted, but it's unlikely he forced anyone against their will.

These stories surround virtually all successful straight men. Even Garrison Keillor, as mild mannered as they come, got taken down for it.

We are simultaneously told that women are equal to men, and yet we also are told there are male predators and womanizers who women need special protection against.

This dismisses women's sexual agency. Specifically that women may choose, consciously, to exploit their sexual attractiveness to get something from a man.

If women don't have agency, i.e. men can manipulate them into damaging sexual relationships which they are helpless to avoid, this posits women as less than equals to men, as men are expected to stand up for themselves when someone attempts to manipulate them.

Time series works amazing until a fundamental assumption breaks or the time frame extends too far. It's pretty much just drawing the existing pattern out further with mathematical precision. It only works till the game changes.

It's a small upward movement in a larger downward trend.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/...

Replication is a real problem in modern science, especially with more complex subjects like medicine[0].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Consumer spending is getting hit hard and luxury campgear is easy to forego.

1) Military has minimum intelligence standards for entry and intelligence is a heritable trait.

2) Military members are required to show discipline and are held accountable.

Both of these factors make military schools different from public schools.

Smart children will learn with bad teachers. Dumb children will not learn no matter how much you spend on them.

Base Model 3 is under $35k and has well over 200 mile range.

  Step 1. Write crappy paper
  Step 2. Seek peer review. 
  Step 3. Wait months for peer review
  Step 4. Apply to journals for publish
  Step 5. Wait months for journal publish
  Step 6. Add paper to CV

Most research papers are garbage, and almost completely ignored, unless it can be used as a cite in a similar crappy paper. The major journals aren't going to take your paper unless you already have a reputation, or you're connected to someone with a reputation. They aren't going to take a poorly thought out provocation piece from a nobody, when they are swamped with poorly written garbage from researchers trying to make tenure.

There are highly placed researchers, people who've climbed the ladder over the years and have lots of authority in their field. They have their preferences about the direction the field should go in, and who should be doing the work, as well as protecting their own legacy.

Whether their reasons are benevolent or not, the existence of these people is the rule in science. If the knowledge moves too far forward, or away from their expertise they lose their relevance, and so they have incentive to protect it. This leads to biases in scientific research that are politically difficult to overcome.

Science advances one funeral at a time. -Max Planck

Like many corruption deniers you assume everyone is basically good and that the insiders don't rig the game, because... no reason given.

A myriad of psychological experiments, e.g. Milgram, show that people are easily influenced to do unethical things if the incentives are set right and an acceptable rationalization is provided.

A true leader takes hard questions and answers them live. Watch some footage of Steve Jobs taking hard questions (yes, I know Steve Jobs had some real issues, because we have to mention that, but I cite him because he is one of the great leaders in the tech space).

When Fauci went in front of the media and dodged and weaved he didn't build trust, he made people question.

If you're ever in a situation where a leader is dodging hard questions that's a big tell. Take note of it.

Doctors depend on the free exchange of information to help their patients. It is one of the pathways that medicine advances. Covid was managed in a top down, hierarchical mode. Doctors who questioned it were threatened and punished by medical boards, some lost their licenses.

Had a non-vaccine treatment for covid been discovered via clinical practice it would have destroyed the EUA for the covid vaccine, i.e. that's how they were able to issue an experimental vaccine widely to the public. An effective covid treatment would have cost the corporations billions of dollars in the present, and the ongoing subscription income of annual covid vaccinations for hundreds of millions of people.

When you've got billions of income it's easy to spread it around to politicians, media, and scientists who are willing to carry the story. You just pay them well and make them sign NDAs: no one will talk. This forms a ready alliance to silence anyone who dares question the corporate narrative.

Because the evidence doesn't point that way, and it's very expensive to make such an assumption, especially when much of the rest of the world doesn't follow.

Every Ph.D. goes through oral qualifications. An expert should be able to articulate and defend their views on the subject at hand in a live question format.

I'd just like to see them answer some hard questions, just like I have to answer on my job.

The point of vaccines is to extend human lifespan and reduce illness. It should be a relatively easy matter for them to show that taking more vaccines does those things, right? Assuming similar infrastructure and income (rough) between countries there should be some correlation between vaccine rates and healthcare outcome statistics.

We could even rate individual vaccines on how much illness and expense they alleviate. Perhaps some are more effective than others?

But to even questions anything about a vaccine somehow makes one an "antivaxxer" - someone who irrationally hates vaccines. There would probably be a lot fewer "antivaxxers" if the media and medical corporations did not respond like jerks when people had honest questions about vaccines, like they would when choosing any other product.

Not really. They do it all the time.

Legislator votes for the right bills and her niece gets a cushy job somewhere in exchange. You can't prove anything wrong happened.

It's a big club, and you ain't in it. - George Carlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyvxt1svxso

You don't become a career scientist or doctor by rocking the boat. A medical degree is a huge investment. Doctors have student loans and families. Anyone who sticks their neck out is at risk of losing their license or research grants.

Poor countries have no incentive to pay carbon fees. Then have rich countries pay their carbon fees? So then tax payers of developed nations take the hit and have their own economic output lowered while countries ignoring carbon fees move ahead. It's a death spiral.

Have a look at Steven Koonin's "Unsettled". He was an Obama DOE appointee and Provost of Caltech (he's a physicist). He makes convincing arguments that the climate change models are highly unreliable. It's not Fox News garbage, he's legit.

The US and EU are making very large policy moves based on models that are not necessarily accurate.

China is the world's manufacturing powerhouse. It's very difficult to get the economic leverage to sanction China, and convincing developing nations to go along would be virtually impossible.