nopie
1yr ago
The standard definition of success for a company is how much money it makes (profit) and not how many people it employs. Although I can imagine that from the government point of view the number of employed people is also important. But the number of people working for Twitter was probably insignificant even for the US. I don't see any huge implications in this case.
nopie
1yr ago
Some people are waiting for Twitter to fail just like some were waiting for Russians to take Kyiv :)
Musk makes mistakes but overall I think Twitter will neither be a great success nor failure.
nopie
1yr ago
It is a really weird logic. Russia didn't attack Ukraine until 2008. Does it mean that Russia would never attack Ukraine?
Hitler didn't attack the USSR until 1940. Does it mean Hitler would never attack the USSR?
Obviously if a thing hasn't happened in a certain year, it cannot be the evidence that it would never happen.
nopie
1yr ago
The USSR send military force to the Baltic countries to prevent them from declaring independence. The coup against Gorbachev was attempted.
Argument that because Putin didn't do it in 1999, therefore he would never do it given the chance, is very weird. Sorry for saying that because the rules probably do not allow me to talk like that.
nopie
1yr ago
The article itself (with which you still have yet to engage) provides plenty of context on this, e.g. re: "negotiations as 20" vs. "negotiations as 19+1." Russia even wanted to join NATO at one point, so the idea that Russian security concerns are purely a cover for stopping neighbors from joining alliances is ridiculous.
No, it is not. If not for NATO, Russia by now would have started war with the Baltic countries, probably even gained quick victory because they are smaller than Russia.
As for the fault of the west, some are saying that Hitler got to the power because of hyperinflation. Other economists are quick to argue that it was actually due to austerity policy that followed it. In any case, we can analyse what could have other countries done to prevent fascist Germany. But the arguments that we only had to convince the Jews in Germany to stop predatory banking practices and the WWII would be averted are wrong on too many levels.
The same is about Russia. What the west could have done is to support post-Soviet countries more to avoid crash of their economy. I don't know how feasible it was but at least it is open for debate.
High level court officials were giving completely misleading data about how many kids have been hospitalized due to covid and how many of them died from covid. I cannot simply trust any officially published data now. I will need several confirmatory sources with good methodology and tested by rigorous review process.
I work at the pharmacy. Some children we dispense medicines to are wheelchair bound. In fact, they have severe disabilities, including mental disabilities. In vulgar language such a child is sometimes called “a vegetable”. People talk like that although I am conscious that some people will consider that it is very disrespectful to use such a word. In any case, one of them died from covid. It is sad but I am sure the parents saw his death from covid as mercy. He had no chance of fulfilling life and was only suffering every hour of his existence.
Elon Musk refused to reinstate Alex Jones on twitter because he was using child tragedies for personal gain. I agree with this decision. But I think that many people were using those rare child deaths from covid to spread fear and push their narratives. Their actions are abominable similar to Alex Jones'.
My personal experience with my relatives and friends is that people who died from covid were already on the verge of death (very frail, in really bad health, in most cases bedridden) and their deaths didn't surprise anyone. Now that pandemic has ended I wonder if those with better access to global data have evaluated if my experience is true globally? Of course, there will always be exceptions but generally speaking I think that excluding this vulnerable population, not many people died or suffered severe consequences from covid.
I base my assumption from the fact that we know that risk from covid was greatly stratified by age. Statistics show that some younger people also died but we don't know very well what was their health status. Even listing of all comorbidities is not very helpful because the health of people can be different. People with diabetes can be very healthy and can be in very poor health, the same applies to people with different heart diseases. Hypertension may be nothing in one person, and it may be causing heart failure in another.
Anecdotal data is not very helpful. We really need to evaluate this aspect because there was so much fear and paranoia that a lot of purported data is not trustable. Probably, those with access to this level of granularity (like NHS in the UK) do not want to do this type of research because the outcomes can be politically unpalatable, i.e., it would show that it really was the case that most people who died from covid would have been dead a few months later in any case. It was sad for them to die but it was inevitable outcome that didn't deserve damaging the lives of children and all of us.
nopie
1yr ago
Fair enough.
Ironically “showering people with money” was very successful monetary policy in the situation where there was no political will to avoid lockdowns. It certainly lessened economic impact. We still got inflation later but I still prefer inflation to recession whatever the cause.
nopie
1yr ago
As I mentioned above, the electricity prices has quadrupled in Latvian and yet the price for whole range of energy dependant services haven't increased significantly yet. I don't that gas price accounts for 50% of, let's say, of the price of milk. I have been offered such narratives bud do the calculations work out? By my rough, very approximate estimate, they don't. I am not an expert in this and might be wrong but I suspect that this narrative is not correct either.
nopie
1yr ago
Yes, but it is not 25% of total global wheat production either. And in the EU agriculture is subsidised, and the prices farmers get hasn't changed much.
Ukraine played the role but I suspect that the usual reasons for inflation (like free money, supply chain disruptions etc.) played even greater role.
nopie
1yr ago
Very doubtful. The bus rides didn't increase when petrol prices increased considerably. Just because grain is more expensive now, doesn't mean that pizza prices should increase by 50% or so.
nopie
1yr ago
No, most of the food in Latvia is not imported from Ukraine/Russia. Only very few products are actually imported from there.
nopie
1yr ago
People voluntary locking down is a very strong argument against mandatory lockdowns. There was no need for police fining people jogging in park when the same result can be achieved voluntary, letting people themselves to decide what is more important for them.
However, the governments should have decided to leave certain services running, for example, schools.
The last thing – idea about difficulty to avoid large numbers of deaths completely ignores that covid risk was strongly age stratified. Some governments still ignores that by pushing vaccination to young children who all already have had covid.
Immunity debt is a possibility but needs more studies.
We don't need to prove that public health interventions caused harm. Those who decided to implement them had to prove that they are safe and effective, just like we do with medicines.
A lot of inflation in Europe is not related to Ukraine. Maybe prices for energy could be explained by war in Ukraine but food is very questionable. Even if the price of grains is determined by global market prices, their impact on total food should not be that much.
nopie
1yr ago
Sweden is relatively small country that depends on global connections and trade. Things that happened in Europe affected it regardless of their own policies. The same applies to inflation.
It wasn't only vaccines. Paxlovid was effective for high-risk unvaccinated elderly to reduce chances of death and severe disease. This community were begging it to be given to young, healthy, fully vaccinated adults with zero evidence that it improves any outcomes for them.
Medicine is extremely complex and generalizations work poorly. Any drug, any vaccine should be judged only on the basis of actual evidence (double-bline RCTs if possible) and not by induction – something like if it worked for flu, it is reasonable to assume it will work for covid.
Even Scott failed in this regard when he wrote his first post about mask effectiveness. The actual evidence showed that masks practically have no effect and the health authorities were right to not recommend them to people before obtaining sufficient evidence.
All these things 1) lockdowns, 2) mandatory masks, 3) vaccine mandates, 4) travel restrictions after covid was already spread locally had no evidence and not only did considerable harm but also unnecessary restricted essential freedoms.
It didn't help that serious people who expressed worries were silenced, even banned from social media. And then only extremist were protesting and that made any objection to masks, lockdowns or vaccine mandates to sound like an extremist (or communist or whatever).
Rationalists really dropped the ball on this one. They didn't win, they lost hard.
nopie
1yr ago
I read this and doesn't convince me. Surely, it wasn't just politics but still. It is like some people say in no way a white male could be overlooked for promotion in preference to some minority. But it happens all the time even when there are no specific quotas. There was one person here got freedom of information request from Canadian government that confirmed that they only hire people with some minority status because didn't want to sort through too many qualified candidates.
nopie
1yr ago
As for naivety in general, I would say that we all can make wrong judgements when we step outside of our sphere of expertise. We can be wrong even in our own areas (for example, was FDA right to approve aducanumab or not) but it tends to be corrected over time. But if I tried to make judgements when it is appropriate to increase or lower taxes depending on current state of economy, I would be wrong most of the time, even if I have some superficial understanding of macroenocomics.
Or even more science-based example – someone complained that the main bridge in our city is unsafe and should be closed immediately while some city official publicly announced that it is only a rumour and the bridge is safe. Whom to believe? I wouldn't know unless I had spent really long time studying dynamics of bridge safety. It was a true case that happened 5 years ago in Latvia but the bridge is still standing and in use.
nopie
1yr ago
Exactly, Dr. John might have rigged the coin throw but in a way that it doesn't land heads on the last toss.
nopie
1yr ago
Nice sub. But the author failed miserable with the previous article: https://felipec.substack.com/p/the-boy-who-had-to-bring-a-wolf.
It wasn't that the US though that Russia is 50% weaker than it pretended to be. It was actually 50% weaker than the US thought it was.
Dictators tend to overestimate their power. The only reason the US does not push to overthrow them is that it becomes very ugly, like war in Ukraine with many innocent people dying. But Putin had a choice to do nothing and remain at status quo. Now he has destroyed his lie about powerful Russia.
nopie
1yr ago
You have a specific job but I don't. Although you could say that by posting here and on reddit I am probably using code that runs on some Amazon cloud services or whatever but that is too indirect.
I just wanted to see if I could be a part of bitcoin network without any extra expense by using my own laptop. It wasn't really possible.
nopie
1yr ago
I am not sure what do you mean by this. Why would I even want to run some code on a supercomputer?
nopie
1yr ago
You cannot win every fight, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't put efforts to support democracy and freedom of speech.
I cannot blame EA or rationalists for not taking greater stance against the government restrictions including vaccine mandates. That's everyone's personal decision to choose the hill to die on. But I am annoyed for them to actually support restriction of speech during the pandemic out of fear from disease. When I tried to speak out in the beginning that forced lockdowns are extremely damaging and will not prevent the spread of covid significantly, they called me names. At the end I was vindicated and the governments that forced lockdowns and vaccine mandates and fired unvaccinated people from their jobs were proven wrong, and that's not even acknowledged properly.
Possibly we got into this situation because dissenting voices were subtly and unjustly suppressed on all levels, including on social media. Alex Berenson was kicked out from Twitter for saying that vaccine does not prevent the spread of infection when this information was already publicly known. I don't agree with everything he says but clearly the overzealous fact-checkers had no understanding of nuance and scientific details.
In spite of all these setbacks, I believe that the only way forward is to foster debate, free speech and democratic norms. We need to learn from these mistakes. It is not too late to fix Canadian customs law and make them to respect minorities. Concentrating too much on technical solutions makes us to lose the focus on these important aspects.
nopie
1yr ago
I think that modern finance is complicated and may not be optimal but overall it is working fine. It could be improved but only by people who really understand how it works and what are the actual problems. The crypto essentially proposed to restore the gold standard in a digital format. It completely ignores all the reasons why the gold standard was rejected and tries to solve non-existant problems.
The second aspect that worries me is that most crypto supporters are so much against the government that it could be called anarchist movement. I agree that any government can become dictatorship. But the solution is to make sure it doesn't instead of creating society or any aspect (like finance) that doesn't need government at all.
I think there is a great chance (>50%) that it will be worth more but probably not by much.
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