SkoomaDentist
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User ID: 84
SkoomaDentist
10mo ago
No. As long as the disease is infectious enough before major symptoms hit, having 100% fatality rate isn't much of a problem. See the Black Death for an obvious historical example of a disease with massive mortality rate that still caused pandemics (at a time when travel and thus spread was much rarer than today).
The reason eg. Ebola hasn't and can't in its current form become a mass pandemic outside some African areas is because it's really quite bad at spreading and wouldn't cause even local pandemics if not for some truly idiotic customs.
SkoomaDentist
10mo ago
One thing I've learned from the internet is that American schools and universities seem to love making students do large amounts of largely pointless drudgework.
SkoomaDentist
10mo ago
You can't build a deployable nuke out of reactor-grade uranium. Even for highly enriched uranium, you need tens of kilograms of it. Plutonium is much more efficient, which is why everyone who can uses it. A "shitty gun-type nuke" needs even more of the material than implosion type weapon since it's significantly less efficient at getting enough of the material to go critical before the whole thing blows up.
SkoomaDentist
10mo ago
In contrast I'd put estimate the Japanese at something like 6-8 weeks
How would that work out with the need to refine enough weapons grade plutonium / uranium?
SkoomaDentist
10mo ago
You might want to refresh your history knowledge. Europe wasn't particularly early in abolishing the death penalty. Ironically for this subthread, several Central / South American countries were among the first.
SkoomaDentist
10mo ago
Ecuador hasn't had the death penalty since 1897. They can't (legally) execute him without changing the constitution.
SkoomaDentist
10mo ago
That'd be because Finland was much more sensible about the masking and "lockdowns" (*) than US / Canada ever were.
*: Why yes. I am still annoyed by too many Americans here implying that actual lockdowns were some universal western phenomenon.
SkoomaDentist
10mo ago
especially outside.
Wait, what? Do people wear them outdoors? Seriously? That's just so incredibly stupid and something that I almost never saw here in Finland even during the worst peaks.
SkoomaDentist
10mo ago
That’s just lack of willpower.
82 percent of papers in humanities don't get a single citation 5 years after they are published.
Are we talking about regular papers published in journals, conferences and such and not some university internal reports?
Even my (engineering) masters thesis got 10 citations in Google scholar in the first 5 years and it's a common saying here that likely nobody beyond your professor will ever read your masters thesis. Just how pointless are those humanities papers if they get no citations at all?
SkoomaDentist
11mo ago
To be fair, we can see gamma rays, astronauts see white spots/flickers of visual noise in their vision from cosmic rays detonating against their retinas.
Those are not gamma rays but mostly high energy protons and atomic nuclei.
SkoomaDentist
11mo ago
I would say that Twitter witch hunts are less common in Finland than what seems to be the case in the US, which of course might simply reflect that in a smaller nation it's harder to create the sort of a critical mass that you really need for a proper pile-on with an effect.
Or - as is my theory - witch hunts are deprived of much of their power if what they ask for is explicitly illegal due to well established workers' rights legistlation. When most people outright can't be "canceled" the "cancellation meme" loses much of its power.
SkoomaDentist
11mo ago
why doesn’t the hero just murder the antagonist and bury him in the woods?
I'd love to read some fiction where that is the premise. Anyone have suggestions for books where that's the case?
SkoomaDentist
11mo ago
Not necessarily. Or rather, such environments aren't all That rare these days unfortunately. All it takes is that opposing hatred is interpreted to mean opposing hatred of and off you go.
Some time ago I shared on FB an IMO particularly well written letter to the editor from the local newspaper of record where the writer advocated for more tolerance of differing opinions (and was clearly very careful to frame it completely neutral). This resulted in several progressive leaning acquaitances unfriending me and we're all middle aged or close to that, so they were hardly even people enmeshed in ideologically pure student circles.
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
Note "parts of the country that get the top 30% population growth" which is the key. This measures the inflation for new adults who are moving on their own and starting families which is the segment that matters much more than pensioners who have already paid off their houses or living in areas that will have few people in 20 years. It addresses the very common complaint that the wages are no longer enough to buy a reasonable house / apartment even though the official inflation says everything is perfectly fine.
It is one of the few significant parts where the cost is largely determined by policy (ie. city planning, building permits and, if necessary, public projects).
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
To me it's obvious that if "vibes" and official inflation measures disagree significantly, the official inflation measures are broken and don't measure what's actually relevant to people. Housing prices are more important to most people by a massive margin than the price of cheap consumer crap from China. The second artificially pushes down inflation measures while having ultimately very little effect on quality of life.
For quite a few years I've thought that an inflation measure that better matches peoples' lived experience could be built on just two things: Housing prices in the parts of the country that get the top 30% population growth and the price of a cup of coffee. The first is a fairly good measure of the parts of country that actually matter (what the inflation is in some place that'll be half empty in 20 years is largely irrelevant) and that will be even more relevant in the future. The second captures "opportunistic inflation" that measures price pressure for consumer visible businesses (the ones driving inflation) and is immediately felt by ordinary people.
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
It's well known that Iran wants to be a nuclear power but I've never seen even one bit of credible speculation that Iran would actually have a working nuclear weapon.
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
There's a difference between having a plan and being ready to execute a plan with zero preparations or forewarning.
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
But the truth has been the same all along - George didn't plan anything. He was blindsided by all of it at every stage, constantly reacting to the last round of criticism without ever understanding it - and aside from A New Hope, the Star Wars movies have always and only succeeded in spite of George's best intentions.
Isn't it an old "joke" that the less George had to do with any particular Star Wars movie, the better it ended up being? (pre-Disney acquisition)
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
3b. The plane was shot down as a gift to Putin, a gift that Putin has no problem with.
Why do people who do a lot of exercise just never seem to be obese?
Plenty are!
Several years ago I lost quite a bit of weight by tracking my calories. I made no changes to my exercise routine which had been stable for the previous six months or so and just made sure to keep average consumed calories around 2200 kcal (maintenance level for a person my age and height). I ended up having an average 1000 kcal daily deficit for months while losing around 25 kg overall, meaning I'd been exercising ~1000 kcal worth daily for many months prior to that while having obese BMI and without any weight loss.
Exercise alone really doesn't work for weight loss for most people because they just end up increasing the number of calories eaten without even realising it.
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
How long are / were the distances to closest stores and such?
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
I'll just have someone drive a pneumatic drill into my ears to simulate the experience.
Reminds me of one time a friend was visiting and we managed to recreate Hans Zimmer's Bladerunner 2049 by fooling around with a synthesizer and couple of effects units. Which really says a lot more about modern soundtracks and their reliance on distorted booms and horns than about anything else.
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
any judgement like this depends on your own, idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences
This is a false premise not supported by any evidence. There are loads of commonalities that humans find aesthetically pleasant. Things like nature, symmetry, balance etc. Sure, you might be a massive outlier but then who cares? Outliers are irrelevant when it comes to what should be provided in the public realm.
You know, I just realized that the second era of great music corresponds almost exactly to Thatcher's time as the UK PM. That can't be a coincidence.
I've noticed a similar thing to your observation when it comes to approaching doom. Back in the day the cold war and threat of nuclear annihilation inspired a whole bunch of great songs. Today the doom is climate change and we get... nothing.
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