Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
1mo ago
The threshold of herd immunity and endemicity is the same. R=1.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Sweden's population is almost 90% urban. It is just not the case that most Swedes live in rural areas.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
I didn't claim that Twitch Plays Pokemon actually beat the game with random inputs, just "very-close-to" random.
I think claude is also barred from #1 because I don't think the software interface ever gave the power to hold down A, B, Start and Select simultaneously (assuming that's the combination you mean). The description of how it works only refers to button sequences, not holding multiple buttons at once. As for #2, performance so far suggests that Claude will struggle at this in pretty much the way you'd expect the actually random input method to also struggle, because it's one of the few segments of the game that can't be cleared with button mashing.
Impressively, I don't think the original run of Twitch Plays Pokemon ran into any notable glitches, despite the game being so buggy that many of them are plausible occurrences during casual playthroughs.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
If the region got Under the Dome'd and external support no longer existed, Israel would not only still win, but they'd win even more than otherwise.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
The exact moment is the Six Day War, so 1967. A consequence of Israel embarrassing the reds by absolutely crushing Arab countries which were primarily armed by Moscow.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
How likely is it that Trump will do something about the Houthis.
How likely is it that the Houthi shipping attacks will stop because they expect Trump retaliation without Trump having to do anything?
Tophattingson
10mo ago
The governments were doing all this while using standard propaganda channels to force public opinion to be in it's favour. That these efforts would grow weaker over time as the disconnect between the government line about the properties of covid and the real-world properties of covid was increasingly noticed by a public that knew more and more people who got covid and then didn't die is unsurprising.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
The effect of both smoking and obesity on COVID mortality are inconclusive and therefore, at worst, small compared to the effect of age. This is true for pretty much every "comorbidity". It's just hard to do anything to make it more likely you will die of covid that won't get drowned out by being a few years old.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
MMT does not fit with the other two, because it was explicitly arguing against the economic consensus, and the economic consensus ended up being correct.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Sometimes I wonder if "banality of evil" is just a way to downplay regular evil. In other circumstances, if someone commits or aquiesques to evil deeds for the sake of personal success, that just gets called evil. If an armed robber murders a clerk, they don't get the privilege of having their evil called "banal" even if it was done seeking personal gain. Perhaps confronting the alternative, that some 90% of Germans simply were evil with no qualifiers during the height of Nazi rule, is too politically awkward?
There's a certain sick irony to an article in The Guardian discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the last few years in the UK with lockdowns. Then again, maybe banality is still the wrong word for it, given that at every turn they wanted the government to go even further, lockdown harder and for longer, and be even more aggressive towards dissenters.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Why would China have worse optics for, approximately, doing the same lockdowns that many other places around the world have seen, complete with hunger and nigh-satire levels of totalitarian imagery?
Tophattingson
2yr ago
"you're banned for spreading misinformation" is downplaying things. In the real world, where mask mandates were sometimes enforced, the bailey sometimes became "of course masks work, and the police will beat the shit out of you if you disagree."
Tophattingson
2yr ago
There are competing hypotheses for how it works, but nothing conclusive.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Medicine does not work on the basis of theoretical mechanisms, but rather on the basis of empirical results. The most obvious example of this is general anaesthesia, which has no solid theoretical basis for why it works, but we definitely know it does work. Masks are the opposite. Work in a spherical cow sense in blocking particles in a lab. When applied to the real world? No evidence they reduce covid spread.
Not a rightist, don't have a daughter. Way more concerned about the British regime fucking up their life with lockdowns 2 when the next spicy cold comes around than anyone not taking birth control or covid vaccines.
Hananiaism will always run aground on the problem that for every low human capital right-wing fad, there's something just as bad on offer from the left, with the added danger that it will also be state-mandated.
Metropolitan Borough refers to the type of local government, not that Rotherham is a large metropolis with Rotherham Town at it's centre. And the map you linked randomly includes Swinton (population 15k) and Wath upon Dearne (population 16k) with Rotherham. You are otherwise right to question whether this is the best number to use. The Rotherham Grooming Gang seems to have been specifically based in the town proper, but this doesn't necessarily mean their victims were limited just to the town, or even to the Metropolitan Borough. Sheffield is the likely alternative target. But it's also possible Sheffield has it's own separate grooming gang.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
I prefer to describe these as anxiety-like illnesses, since they're all co-morbid with each other and with anxiety, and share demographics. Yes, that includes hysteria.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
Ok we have a problem here, your comments about the government wanting to purge anti-lockdownists
The problem here is a conversation about vaccine mandates being motivated by political purges in the US soon turned into one about the motives for lockdowns, a separate policy, in the UK, a separate country. This is because you mentioned "Conservative UK Boomers" and their calls for lockdowns, then I responded to that, perhaps without making clear enough that I don't think the same applies to the UK and the US. Mainly because vaccine mandates never got very far in the UK.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
They are referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaroslav_Hunka_scandal
Tophattingson
11mo ago
Then there's something wrong with the software of the site, because it's fixed for me.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
This depends massively on where in the world you are. In the UK, most of our beef is domestic, and most of our domestic production is fed via grass forage. Now, I suppose you could consider pastures to be industrially farmed grass, but I don't think that's what most people would think of it as. Humans cannot extract meaningful nutrition from eating the grass instead.
So, two years on, how are things going for the galaxy’s least heteronormative entry in the franchise after a BILLION dollar marketing campaign?
We’ll let the Bookscan figures speak for themselves:
If it weren't for the alleged billion dollar marketing campaign those would be decent sales for these books. Like, what figures were they expecting? The average traditionally published book gets in the low thousands of sales (and the median, worse). All the books listed here range from very good sales to mediocre but still acceptable sales. We can't tell the exact deals offered, but at a fairly typical 10% royalty per book, Daniel José Older would have gotten $39k from Midnight Horizon, and at the rate he writes he'll be making a fairly decent income from this. (I don't know the exact details of what sort of contract you'd get for this work, however. I imagine writing books for an established franchise like this will involve more payment up front, less royalties.)
Tophattingson
2yr ago
I'd be missing the financial resources to make any meaningful contribution.
Regardless overthrowing the north korean regime is a sort of inevitable end-point of effective altruism even with a strong anti-coup bias. You eradicate malaria, you cure world hunger, you're living in a megastructure in the outer solar system... And the slave-masses of the country-sized concentration camp that is North Korea continue to scratch the dirt for a meagre near-starvation diet.
What is the net gain in QALY from switching the population of North Korea to living under the known next best alternative of South Korea. How much does each QALY then cost? Is dropping automatic weapons on North Korea the new malaria nets?
Tophattingson
2yr ago
I don't think that's the point of banality of evil as given in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Instead, I thought it was about the lack of clear evil intentions. This would also apply to an armed robber unthinkingly killing a clerk because they happened to be in the way of their actual goal of committing a robbery. Now, maybe because the goal is still a robbery they have an evil intent, so this isn't the best example. However, in most cases, unthinkingly committing evil acts because not doing so is an obstacle to your goals tends to get called evil without the banal qualifier.
Eichmann's actions were not ordinary or boring. He was not some random low-level bureaucrat unthinkingly crunching numbers or a labourer loading Zyklon B. His position was fairly high-up, including his involvement in the Wannsee Conference.
Agreed. But it at least lets us skip any debates about determinism. It has already been demonstrated wrong. The absence of determinism isn't actually useful for identifying free will, however.
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