544 karma · joined July 8, 2014
1% die in a car accident
10% serious injury in a car accident
Accidents 1 / 500,000 miles.
https://www.torquenews.com/14335/how-safe-are-tesla-vehicles...
I have been in a few accidents, none that serious so far.
I think two things led to this.
1. In ante-natal classes the person took us through child development and what children are capable of at different ages. In particular, newborns to about 6-8 months do not even have a concept of themselves as separate people. All they can learn at that time is whether the world is a good place where their needs have a chance of being met. They are incapable of e.g. deliberately crying in order to get picked up. If you do not respond to their suffering you are just going to create a needy and insecure child. So we dodged that bullet.
2. The book "Parent Effectiveness Training" which was a revelation to me. The basic idea is that children own their lives and the consequences of their decisions. Of course there is a limit - you don't let a 3 year old run into traffic. But as far as possible let children make their own decisions. They learn really fast that way. If you micro-manage their lives you end up with 18 year old children.
This does not mean you do not have rules in your house. You are not allowed to play drums at 3am, but that would apply to everyone.
So many parents impose their own choices and preferences on their children for no good reason, and it creates resentment and stops children from learning from their own decisions.
As one example, I have lactose intolerance but I was forced to drink milk, with resulting stomach aches, etc, for many years. I literally knew better than my parents and school in this matter. Similarly if you think you know better than your children in every matter, may I suggest contemplating the spectacle of a 15 year old dressed for a party by Mom.
After our daughter turned 12 we only overrode her on two things - becoming a vegatarian (not allowed until she completed her growth) and a change of school. In both cases we carefully listened to her point of view and considered it, and explained why on these rare occasions we overruled her. Because this was so rare, and handled in a respectful manner, she accepted the decisions.
My own mother waited with great anticipation for the teen rebellion that she had forced her own children into, but it never came with my daughter. Why rebel when there is no need? She never lost the love of learning and ended up with a PhD in a hard science.
One other comment on the OP. There seems to be a wider issue here. If you let children not work, and fail, then the first time there will be a commotion. But if teachers did this consistently, word would get around and it would be accepted. Students whose life goals required passing the test would do the work. But in fact many school subjects are useless to many people and not studying is a rational response to being taught irrelevant nonsense.
That is insane.
I notice a number of smart investors are starting to accumulate cannibis stocks. The trigger might be a repeal of the federal ban, which seems to be on the cards, even though (sic) Joe Biden promised to do it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2021/07/14/senator...
High histamines give me the opposite of the effect of taking anti-histamines, which normally make you drowsy.
You would be amazed how many foods are high in histamines. Basically anything that is really flavoursome. And many additives either inhibit histamine breakdown or promote release from the mast cells.
Not to mention MCAS mast cell activation syndrome.
This means that it is basically illegal to provide a capacity for backup power that is only used intermittently. This is because the backup power needs to be priced high to justify having it sitting there all year doing mostly nothing.
Having banned a market solution, governments then stepped in to overcome the "market failure" by running and funding their own backup power supplies.
Source a friend who trades electricity for a living.
There seem to be a few democracies sliding increasingly into chaos.
Actually this seems unlikely given the sequence of evolution. But...
Here is a spoof of Allistic Spectrum Disorder imagined as if it affected a small minority of people (trigger warning for those obsessed with status).
From [nonexistent] DSM-VI: Hyper-Social (Allistic) Spectrum Disorder
HSSD is a syndrome in which there is an over-focus on social phenomena at the expense of other aspects of the world. Contrast with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, which is in many ways the opposite.
Diagnosis: Any 5 of the following are present:
Inability to express self clearly; use of ambiguous and vague language; discomfort with clear language
Obsessive interest in knowing personal details of acquaintances or strangers e.g. celebrities, or even fictional characters
Unfounded belief in being able to read other people's minds, in particular to know if someone is lying or not.
Difficulty in thinking in a systematic logical way, e.g. to do math or program computers
Tendency to try to bend and stretch rules for no obvious reason. Discomfort with accurately following instructions and processes.
Forms beliefs based on the opinions of others rather than on facts and evidence Tendency to affiliate with groups and to align all opinions to the group
Frequently lies, mostly for social convenience (studies suggest 3-5 times a day)
Preoccupied with social status and “looking the part”
Focus on status symbols, and symbols of virtue and group affiliation
Focus on appearances more than underlying reality
Intolerance of diversity of opinion
Intolerance towards people who do not have HSSD
Spends large amounts of time on shallow “social” activities with little actual content. May lead to destructive activities such as substance abuse e.g. alcohol, and over-eating.
Lack of interest in mastering difficult, especially technical, subjects in depth Tendency to stare into people's eyes, and to believe that this gives great insight into the other person's mind. Usually unaware that this can create discomfort in the other person.
Tendency to think that staring into people's eyes demonstrates trustworthiness.
Asperger was Austrian. Asperger was never a member of the Nazi party.
Impressive to make 2 errors in 3 words.
Asperger was literally never a member of the Nazi party. So what you said it literally a lie.
This is a literal lie.
See the wikipedia article for example.
The fact someone on the internet claimed he was german and a literal nazi is no evidence at all.
Asperger was never a member of the Nazi party.
I invite everyone here who has stood up against a murderous totalitarian dictatorship at the likely cost of their life to tell us how Asperger should have done better.
> now everything falls under the Autism Spectrum
This is only true in the US. And people who were previously diagnosed as Aspergers retain that diagnosis, even in the US.
You might like the book "Simple Heuristics that make us smart" which explores this idea
https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Heuristics-That-Make-Smart/dp/...
Why would you subscribe to SA when the internet has more good material than you can possibly digest? That is their problem in a nutshell.
Another once mightly magazine The Economist, whose founder was praised by Nietzsche as "an objective journalist", has also gone downhill IMHO.
I cancelled my subscriptions to both a while back.
There are vast resources available from books to many good youtube videos.
Getting a formal assessment is fairly expensive but screening tests are free.
https://novopsych.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Autism-S...
https://novopsych.com.au/assessments/diagnosis/autism-spectr...
https://www.aspietests.org/userdetails.php?target=raads/inde...
Mostly it is about managing your levels of stress and knowing your limits. And lots of good strategies rather than therapy. One thing I realized is I need a lot more sleep than I had been getting. And I need to ration social 'work' (that's how it feels - hard work).
Autistic people are very prone to trauma - basically they are hyperspensitive to many stiumuli and emotions - so there may be residual trauma to deal with. But there are multiple ways to do that.
This is simply not true especially if you take inflation into account.
And even more so if you look outside the US (one of the top 1% of market performers over the last 100 years - hindsight bias).
For example Japan total return index had a 30 year drawdown post 1989 even in nominal terms. The US market from 1966-1992 total inflation adjusted return (26 years) was zero. http://www.simplestockinvesting.com/SP500-historical-real-to...
Thank you for pointing this out. People blithely assume that U235 is available in unlimited supply when it is not.
My own view is that it is a useful partial interim solution that buys us some time. That is worth quite a lot.
It is not useless but it does have its price in terms of complexity and usability. With off peak at night you tend to run out of hot water during the day at times e.g. if you have visitors.
It is not a new idea and it is no panacea.
As the poster above you pointed out the capacity of LI batteries is tiny. Yet you tout car batteries as though that were a new idea and a meaningful solution. And you ignore the fact that if you use car batteries as storage for the grid, that detracts from their use to, you know, run cars.
You also ignore the losses from your solutions. What is the round trip loss from heating up rocks and getting the energy back? It is huge. And you artfully forgot to mention all the equipment needed to get the energy back out in usable form such as electricity.
All the books and studies talk about load shaping, contrary to your "astonishment" that no-one is considering this "brilliant idea". The problems with load shaping are many. If you shut a factory down to spare the grid, then it is not producing. So all else being equal, you need more factories for the same production. Building and maintaining those extra factories takes labor, management, and energy.
Getting people to turn off air conditioning means that they are less comfortable, or perhaps unable to sleep, or unable to work. The South of the US more or less became viable economically due to air conditioning.
This is not unique to you, but I am really fed up with people spouting half-assed ideas and thinking that they constitute a solution.
As they said in the dot.com era - ideas are cheap.
None of which work beyond a few hours. The sheer number of batteries and the amount of pumped hydro needed is phenomenal. As one data point, Elon Musk's much heralded $100m battery in South Australia stores a few seconds of Australia's total energy use. A few tenths of a second for the US.
When it is cloudy and there is no wind for a week, renewables are a complete failure.
> is dropping in price
Batteries have been dropping in price for 140 years. But the best batteries have only been getting better at about 7% per year. Specific technologies have improved faster than this early on in their lives (e.g. LiIon) but during most of this improvement they were far from the best.
First, it only refers to the US, while the headline makes no such qualification.
Second, this refers only to electricity generation, which is roughly 25% of US energy use, or 20% if you include energy embedded in imports, mostly fueled by fossil fuels in China.
Third, this refers only to gros capacity. For those who have been asleep, the effective energy capacity is far lower for renewables than for stable power sources due to intermittency.
inb4 By referring to facts you have shown you are clearly on the wrong team.
> `(* x x))
Two bugs in two lines. Lisp is indeed a powerful language.
The problem is to do with things called "numbers".
1. There is no spare land to devote to CC. You could do this only at the cost of poor people's food supply.
2. The rate at which plants remove CO2 from the air is very low. Far too low to solve the problem.
a) More smart
b) More correct.
It is not that complex.
Also they are more likely to be using emacs, another big win.
The problem is that the AI is held to an impossible standard of near perfection, yet we happily accept that human drivers kill themselves and others in droves.
The right question is whether self driving is better than the human driver.
Did you know the S&P500 stock index was highly and 'significantly' correlated with butter prices in Bangladesh for many years?
What I don't like
1. Passive observational studies only. Therefore a huge risk of confounders (e.g. people who generally live a healthy lifestyle).
2. The effect size is not very large, making it much harder to winnow out confounders.
3. Invariably attempts to 'control' for confounders use simple linear models that that come nowhere close to actually controlling for confounders.
4. They generally only control for known confounders. If there is an unknown confounder it will get through and mess up the results.
5. It is really hard to tell what is a confounder and what is a legitimate node in the causal chain. As a simplistic example consider 'controlling' for lung cancer in a study of whether smoking is bad for you. Of course this would take away much of the reason why smoking is bad for you. You need a proper causal model informed by data - something that is hard to do. See Judea Pearl "Causality".
6. Note the heterogeneity of results. This suggests that things are going on that are not captured by the studies. Note also that the types of mushrooms don't seem to matter - a strange thing if there were some magic factor in mushrooms, given how mushrooms vary greatly in nutrient content.
7. Misuse of the term "significant" usually a shorthand for statistically significant. A very different thing from "practically significant, large enough to matter".