Glassnoser
1mo ago
That's just a way of saying you'd rather have savings than not. It doesn't tell you anything about the merits of owning versus renting a car.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
How do you build out a network? What does that even mean?
Glassnoser
1mo ago
I keep having a confusing experience where immigrants from third world countries, especially India, keep telling me that things are better in their home countries than they are here in Canada. This makes no sense to me given that the GDP per capita in Canada is about six times that of India, even after adjusting for cost of living. Also, the reports from people who visited there and the media show it to be an extremely poor and dysfunctional country. Far more Indians move to Canada for a better life than go the other way, giving up their maids and office jobs to work minimum wage jobs here, but then they say things are better in India.
Specifically, I've heard that the quality of healthcare is better in India and that the standard of living is generally higher. The people who say this still want to stay here, despite having been among the most privileged people in their home countries and living in a country that often doesn't recognize their qualifications or experience.
I've heard similar things from people from China. What is going on? Are they just lying? If so, why?
Glassnoser
2mo ago
I don't think any time of my life after about 5 was happy, but I do enjoy the freedom of adulthood, so I'm probably happier now than I was. But problems just seem to compound throughout life for the most part, and your health and looks get worse over time.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
I was a student, so I had no income, but make less now that I thought I would make as a starting salary, live in a much much smaller house. I have a little bit more savings, but I'm also considerably closer to retirement.
I thought you were actually going to say something different. Most people's lives just get worse and worse as they get older, but each generation is better off than the last.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Smartphones are much better. Video streaming is much faster. It's much easier to navigate in a car by hooking it up to your phone and using the built-in display. Half decent laptops are much more affordable. Good quality large televisions are much more affordable.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Why does the mere pressence of foreigners constitute an invasion? They don't control the place. They're not doing anything to the locals.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Is his model telling us what the probability distribution of the result would be given the election were held today or is it a prediction for the actual election?
When a trait is selected for for a long time, it's heritability ultimately drops to zero. If fertility has been strongly selected for, we should expect its heritability to be very low and, therefore, further selection should be very difficult. That said, heritability actually probably hasn't been selected for for very long because having as many children as possible doesn't make sense if you don't have the resources to support them all.
We didn't evolve to actually want kids before we have them.
Judging by the behaviour of some of my ex-girlfriends, this is obviously false.
We have seen an inversion in the economics of having children thanks to retirement. In the past, children were your retirement, the childless depending on the kindness of strangers or at best their neighbours and friends. Kids could help on the farm as early as the late single digits, and could be gainfully employed by 14.
This is a popular myth, but it's false. Empirical evidence shows that children have always been net recipients of resources from their parents over the course of their lives. If you think about it, it's the only thing that makes any sense evolutionarily. Parents who don't invest as much as possible into their offspring are a disadvantage to those that do. It makes no sense for old parents who don't reproduce to take resources from their children instead of letting their children invest those resources in their grandchildren.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Wouldn't this make voter registration a lot more complicated? How do you prove you're a parent?
Pay people a huge amount of money, like at least $100,000 for each child they have, then deduct a few tax points from their income tax.
Get rid of child car seat laws.
Legalize (paying for) surrogacy.
Completely deregulate childcare.
Make child care expenses and private school tax deductible.
Provide school vouchers.
Do all the housing deregulation economists recommend in order to make housing cheaper.
Aggressively focus on supply side economics to increase everyone's incomes since fertility starts to go up again once people make a lot of money.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
I used to post there occasionally, though not often. I largely abandoned Reddit about a year ago after my account was permanently suspended for some little thing I can't even remember and they started cracking down on ban evasion and a lot of subreddits started shadow banning accounts with low comment karma which made my alts almost unusable.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Every time I've tried Tor, it was extremely slow to the point of being unusable.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
If one does it and the other doesn't, then the one who doesn't will lose an enormous amount of market share. But if the demand is sufficiently unreasonable, it's easier to count on the other party not doing it. It's a coordination problem solved by the ridiculousness of the demand.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
If they just randomly search people's phones, the fine is so devastating that people might be very afraid of getting caught even if there is a low probability.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Couldn't Apple and Google easily refuse? It would be hard for him to ban Google and Apple from the country and the people wouldn't stand for it. There would basically be no smart phones for people to buy.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
The first time I drove on a public road was driving home from right after getting my licence. I was going very slowly (maybe 20 or 30 km/h in a 50 km/h) at first as a I pulled out of the parking lot and approached a red light. The driver behind me blared his horn for a full second or two before rushing around me.
I learned to drive when I was 15 to 17 and didn't experience anything like this at all. I think you're just way past the optimal age to learn to drive. Not to discourage you, but I have a few friends who learned to drive in their mid-20's and they're terrible drivers. I think 30 is about the age where it starts to become really hard to learn anything new, and I read a study once that the teens are the optimal age to learn the specific skills involved in driving. I'm in my mid-30's and I've noticed that, whereas learning new skills was a joy when I was 20, now it's kind of painful and tedious.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Wouldn't it take the same amount of time to explain to ChatGPT what you want in the contract as it would to just write it yourself?
OpenAI management stole the IP of the non-profit for their own financial gain.
What? How?
Glassnoser
2mo ago
What do you mean by "parents' basement studies"?
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Only if you have a student loan.
None of the content on TikTok is Chinese, so it seems a bit inaccurate to describe it as Chinese entertainment. I've always thought China punched way below its weight culturally. I can't think of any TV shows or movies to come out of that country. I can think of very few books. There are almost no Chinese intellectuals who are commonly read in the West. Compare that to India, which has Bollywood and much else, despite having the same population and far less wealth.
You've listed two successful video games (League of Legends is not Chinese, I don't think), which doesn't seem like much. Maybe they're starting to get good at writing software.
Japan and Korea do seem have an outsized influence given their size. I don't know the reason. China can't compare to them yet.
Glassnoser
3mo ago
The UK has an unwritten constitution. But that's irrelevant. I didn't say it had a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech. It has freedom of speech. They could repeal that law, but they haven't. They've simply interpreted it to not be as restrictive as the first amendment. The US Supreme Court has done the same in the past.
They seemed to be talking about India in general terms, not just for themselves. I told one Indian that I heard their public hospitals are really bad and she agreed, but then she said it's even worse here.
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