Today is Eurovision! For you Americans this is like the Super Bowl, only with power ballads, ABBA nostalgia, residuals of nationalism and flamboyant glittery gayness. The European song contest is often watched ironically in a party setting with family or friends, we print out sheets of the participants and give them points and have a competition who can make the most snarky comment, but deep down under the snark, irony and sarcasm we love it!
This year it is sadly very very political, because of the participation of Israel. The songs name was named „October rain“ but had to be changed, together with lyrics, to remove references of the Hamas attack. So there isn’t plausible deniability that it is an unpolitical love song.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/eurovision-israel-eden-golan-protests-gaza-palestine-072826896.html
He said the majority of the crowd were booing and shouting 'free Palestine' with very few people cheering for her. Mina said: "I could see people arguing in the standing section, and people were shouting at others that were booing to shut up."
For television the sound engineers did amplify applause and mute the boos which also gives a nice discussion about truth and Orwell etc. It will be very interesting what sound from the audience will be broadcast at the final show today.
Surprisingly (or not) Israel doesn’t have only haters, their betting odds improved massively, they actually have a chance to win the contest!
https://twitter.com/DrEliDavid/status/1788690154133012637
Italian TV accidentally revealed their televoting percentages during tonight's #Eurovision semi-final, according to which the Israeli 🇮🇱 song is leading by 40%, with a huge margin ahead of all others.
Blueberry
6mo ago
even the new “black” national anthem
The what? I’m not American and don’t get the reference?
Blueberry
6mo ago
Btw: it was the right decision to flee reddit. Before their IPO recently they banned a few inconvenient subreddits. The specific case I know was that a country had two subs, a bigger progressive one and a smaller right wing one, and the latter was heavily brigaded and any small infraction was reported. It was then closed by the admins as causing too much work and being badly moderated (which it wasn’t).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-01990-8?fromPaywallRec=false
Global GDP is estimated to be 3.2% lower (lower/upper decile: 1.2–5.4%) at +1.5 °C of global warming, compared to a world with no further climate change beyond recent levels. At +3 °C, global GDP decreases by 10.0% (5.1–14.9%).
The damage of climate change, up to 10% of global GDP, is such an enormous sum that it is always cheaper to instead invest in carbon reduction and reduce climate change.
Of course all the same arguments and attitudes from before apply here: If one doesn’t believe in the scientific consensus in climate change why should one believe the financial modeling and projected costs of extreme weather events are correct?
Regarding the comparison and how to deal with uncertainty: I think one main difference is that vaccination was not needed for the survival of civilization. But renewable energy and electrification is needed in any case, sooner or later, because fossil fuels are a limited resource. Even under most optimistic calculations we have only 100-200 years of oil reserves left.
Blueberry
6mo ago
It is even more strange when they stay principled! There are people in the worldnews subreddit arguing that Ukraine should draft women.
Blueberry
7mo ago
The deniers are just coping or contrarians.
It is very easy:
A) CO2 absorbs infrared radiation.
B) Industrialization increased its percentage in the atmosphere.
Preindustrial CO2 rate was under 300 parts per million.
2000 it was 370 ppm
2024 it reached 420 ppm
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region
It is skewing to the last decades: half of the emmissions from 1750 to now were emitted in the last 30 years.
The amount of coal and oil we burned and will burn is stunningly large. A hundred times more every year than all vulcanism. HOW could that NOT have an effect?
The only explanation I've seen is "well, retarded people do poorly for reasons other than IQ" which is also a violation of common sense.
Here is a blog post by Kirgegaard arguing this:
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/10/african-iqs-and-mental-retardation/
When people think of retarded people, they mostly have in mind someone who has Down syndrome, or a similar severe genetic disorder. … They usually suffer from some kind of syndrome, which is why it’s usually called syndromic retardation. But the more important point is that Down syndrome does not just make your intelligence very low, it also causes other behavioral defects. As such, people with Down syndrome are not representative of people with <70 IQ.
It was noted by Jensen:
Many of the latter [minority lower-class children], despite IQs below 75 and markedly poor scholastic performance, did not seem nearly as retarded as the white middle-class children with comparable IQs and scholastic records. […] EMR [educationally mentally retarded] children who were called ‘culturally disadvantaged’, as contrasted with middle-class EMR children, appeared much brighter socially and on the playground, often being quite indistinguishable in every way from children of normal IQ except in their scholastic performance and in their scores on a variety of standard IQ tests. Middle-class white children diagnosed as EMR, on the other hand, though they constituted a much smaller percentage of the EMR classes, usually appeared to be more mentally retarded all round and not just in their performance in scholastic subjects and IQ tests. I asked myself, how could one devise a testing procedure that would reveal this distinction so that it could be brought under closer study and not depend upon casual observations and impressions.
So in a sense HBD is exaggerated, because we have a (mis)conception of what a person 25 IQ points below the norm is like, which is skewed by those with quite heavy mental problems. Thought experiment: Imagine you are the person 2 standard deviations below the norm, simply because you are a 100 IQ person who stumbled into a neighborhood full of extremely bright Caltech/MIT students. There are things in which you notice a difference, like everyone seems to do math in their head quicker than you can tap on your phone to open the calculator app. Maybe you browse funny Instagram stories, instead of wasting your free time in obscure internet boards where users post walls of text about arcane topics. But in most ways you wouldn't seem "retarded" to the genius egg-heads, but them and you would socially interact quite normal.
Blueberry
7mo ago
India is really interesting. I just looked up a map of rich/poor Indian states, but for example Tamil Nadu, which is shown as quite wealthy, has relatively low Brahmin but high Dalit demographics. I would have expected the reverse.
Blueberry
7mo ago
Yes, because their (now grown up) kids defend Allen & Soon Yi:
Whatever one can sneer at the marriage, it held better than many others. They will stay together until Woody dies.
Even with regard to Ronan Farrow
I bet good money that Allen doesn’t have any biological children. I subscribe to the Frank Sinatra’s theory.
That's a messed-up family dynamic.
True.
Blueberry
7mo ago
Italy’s birth rate is decreasing further to 1,2:
Financial Times: Italy’s births drop to historic low
Just 379,000 babies were born in 2023, despite PM Giorgia Meloni’s efforts to reverse demographic decline
Meloni has continued a child allowance scheme introduced by the previous government in 2021 and slightly increased the monthly sums families receive for small children, but her rightwing government has also experimented with other incentives.
After coming to power in late 2022, the coalition government halved VAT on infant products such as baby formula and nappies, but it has since scrapped those tax cuts. This year, Italy has allocated €1bn in other measures aimed at supporting mothers, including temporarily making pension contributions on behalf of working women who have at least two young children.
But Maria Rita Testa, a demographer at Rome’s Luiss university, said policymakers needed to address other factors, including parents’ economic stability and access to affordable childcare, now in acutely short supply. “They should try to tackle the problem of reconciliation of family and work tasks,” Testa said.
Italy had planned to use some of the €200bn in EU recovery funds it receives to build new childcare facilities for 260,000 infants and pre-school aged children, but Rome has now cut that target to 160,000.
The article notes that Meloni is herself a single child, but fails to mention that she also only has a single daughter. Still the low birth rate is a core issue for her and her right-wing coalition, but as in leftwing governments elsewhere they can’t find policies to reverse course.
Blueberry
7mo ago
Eventually, my boyfriend and I decided we couldn’t carry on like this.
This was the most surprising thing in the text. If she lived there alone, ok, it is like boiling the frog and people can get accustomed to everything. But there has to be some social control going on, so this wasn't only her fault but that of her bf too.
Blueberry
8mo ago
"Moby Dick" is a novel by Herman Melville originally published in 1851 and its full text is protected by copyright law in most jurisdictions
So close by the AI, that it is strange that it misses. Explicitly reminding that this was 170 years ago persuades it to answer correctly.
Blueberry
9mo ago
I even think "cultured meat" will be a dead end and plant based substitution products will win:
https://www-merkur-de.translate.goog/verbraucher/als-vegan-variante-unternehmen-sieht-langfristige-entwicklung-ernaehrung-wurst-klassiker-jetzt-nur-noch-92781805.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp
[German] Sausage manufacturer completely eliminates “classics” – and only produces vegan versions
“This shift in the range is not an effect that we are only seeing now in the current Veganuary, but rather a long-term development,” explains CEO Michael Hähnel of the decision. The proportion of the range has been shifting towards plant-based products for years.
Blueberry
10mo ago
sounds more like Wini, Widi, Wicky
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet …
Vici is related to victory. And the hard c=k is manly.
Blueberry
10mo ago
The dysgenics is trivial to solve with embryo selection
The obesity pandemic is also trivial to solve with people eating less. Mass migration would be easily solved if a wall would be build at the Mexican border.
Even if an easy solution is known, even if the solution is proven to work, it can be very very hard, often impossible, to implement it.
Blueberry
10mo ago
I was once in a monogamous relationship where my partner then expressed a strong desire to date other people.
Did you keep in touch and know how that turned out? Did she date multiple others (genuine slut interest) or gravitate to a an upgraded ymeskhout replacement (opening the relationship was an excuse to shop for something better)?
Blueberry
10mo ago
Websites such as Pornhub, which is less targeted to specific sexual attitudes and is more a repository for a wide array of content, are designed to "push the envelope" with straight users by suggesting gay and transgender videos to them, Rice explained.
I noticed that. Pornhub is showing more gay/trans/kink into the little thumbnails. I dismissed that as changing mores, a neutral algorithm just showing what is popular. But now I wonder how much ideology is behind that? If one registers a PH account (shock!) instead of incognito browsing, is there a way to set preferences and filter effectively?
Blueberry
11mo ago
Noticed this too and confuses me. Even if they normally would react to sexual aggressive/leering men with "thats creepy". Maybe they feel like a tourist viewing a pack of lions on a safe Safari?
To simplify it: A Napoleon movie which isn't done by the French for a French audience is cultural appropriation.
Also Napoleon was 29 in Egypt campaign and 35 when he crowned himself Emperor. A younger sexier actor should play him.
Blueberry
1yr ago
But the world did that with Atoms for Peace:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoms_for_Peace
See also the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Countries like Japan have highly developed nuclear industry, but they don’t have nuclear weapons.
Just saw this geographic fertility map of Turkey on reddit. The statistics were released yesterday:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1ctccjz/turkish_fertility_rate_20162023_comparison_oc/
Population map for comparison (urban rate is a whopping 75%):
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Visualizing-Population-Density-in-Turkey-Full-Size.html
In 7 short years FTR crashed from 2.11 in 2016 to 1.5 in 2023.
https://ilkha.com/english/health-life/turkiyes-birth-rate-declines-despite-ranking-high-in-europe-393736
Women get children later (average is now 29 years; which is older than in the US (27 years in 2021)) and there is an increase in one-person households (14.4% -> 19.7%)
And despite President Erdoğan being more powerful and way more conservative (out of touch?) than other leaders:
https://www.turkishminute.com/2024/05/16/turkey-records-dramatic-decline-in-its-fertility-rate-official-data/
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