pbmonster
2mo ago
Is there any vitamin C in milk?
No, zero vitamin c in milk. Alternatively: Orange juice? Lemonade or lemonade-y soft drinks?
pbmonster
2mo ago
Why is Haiti so much worse than other overwhelmingly-African Caribbean countries? Is the difference between 80% African DNA and 90% African DNA the difference between a functional and non-functional society?
If you want to look for a genetic explanation, I'd bet the brain drain during the dictatorship of Duvalier is actually more important than that 10 percentage points difference. The human rights abuse of the dictatorship caused most of Haiti's wealthy class to flee the country, taking their material, cultural and genetic wealth with them. And it's hard to rebuild after a dictatorship if most of your doctors, engineers, scientists and teachers have fled the country.
There's also a large number of other factors, the most prominent ones that are completely independent of the genetic angle are:
- poverty spiral: Haiti is so poor/dangerous, it can't even get its tourism industry off the ground
- climate: especially compared to the Dominican Republic, Haiti's side of the island is significantly more arid and less well suited for agriculture. The classic West Coast problem.
- deforestation: the previous point is made much worse by the massive logging operation Haiti executed while trying to pay of its debt to France by exporting timber
with the same kind of coast-hugging galleys they plied the Med with
Well, they didn't exclusively coast-hug. They routinely attempted real crossings of the Med - going to Alexandria, Carthage/Tunis and Tripoli by coast hugging just would take much to long. Sure, those crossings aren't huge, and the Med in summer is one of the most benign waters to cross (and they pretty much stopped shipping completely in fall, the Med gets angry in winter). But still, it's sailing without sight of land for at least a day or three.
pbmonster
2mo ago
Some examples
Whats up with the separation of kitchen, dining and living rooms? Is this how modern apartments/houses in the US are designed right now?
I strongly dislike it, especially the cases where the dining room is "across" the hallway from the kitchen. I would always choose an eat-in kitchen, probably open floor with the living room.
pbmonster
2mo ago
Jesus Christ they literally used nameplate capacity for solar. So multiply all the solar figures by .12
While this error is atrocious, capacity factor of solar in the entire US is around double that, almost tripple for the sun belt.
next year Biden's 100% tariffs on EVs, solar and batteries hit
Will be interesting how/if that changes the installation numbers. The Chinese are sitting on close to 1 TW of yearly production capacity. They'll probably lower prices, again.
I know a guy who directly imported the newest generation of 400W panels for his farm from China himself. He jokes that the panels are now cheaper than glass, cheaper than wall cladding and almost cheaper than fencing. He puts them on everything. 100% tariffs wouldn't change things much at this point.
Also, right now installation costs are dominating the price of new solar capacity anyway.
pbmonster
2mo ago
In case you're not being ostensibly obtuse: you can also just reduce the number of car lanes on multi-lane roads. Not all those strips replace one full-size lane each.
pbmonster
2mo ago
The US security forces are pretty much all blacks and republicans.
Just above 20% and just below 60%, respectively. I'm not too worried yet. Also, in the grand spectrum of possible political ideologies, Republicans and Democrats stand pretty closely together.
pbmonster
2mo ago
The state capacity in these shithole countries is low and the discipline and morale in their armed forces is even lower. This can't happen in HK at all.
True, HK is a totally different story. But it's also very different than the US. I'm also not at all convinced that a few hundred thousand AR-15s would change their situation all that much.
History has shown that they will kill if ordered to. Kent state is the most obvious example but there are others.
That's kind of my point. Kent State is the obvious worst case example. At 4 dead and 9 wounded. The number of guardsmen actually aiming at bodies was probably lower than those two numbers, and it happens exceedingly rarely.
Which brings us back to discipline and morale. Unless some out-group is identified and systematically "othered", I can't see a guard unit murdering students in larger numbers without both going out the window on day one.
Meanwhile the poor saps in HK and venezuela got no chance in heck of throwing off the yoke of communism.
I think this isn't applicable to a theoretical "disarmed" US. Just look at how other recent civil wars started out, where an autocratic Government pushed the populace to far. Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Ukraine.
They all tried to violently suppress street protests, and the moment the badly armed population needed to fight back because they were getting shot in the streets, they either sacked police stations and military armories; or entire guard/police/army battalions switched sides and brought their guns with them.
I see no reason to think the US would turn out different. It's unthinkable that large-scale violence would be used against citizens in the streets with police/national guard/fed. armed forces just watching their neighbors and brothers being killed. The US still has sufficient diversity in its armed forces, there is no large distinct outgroup they would collectively tolerate being violently suppressed.
Also, police armories have gotten ridiculous, and defending them seems like a daunting task once you start slaughtering people in the streets. We've seen burning police stations before, at much lower stakes. Looting them before setting the fires is kind of a given.
it is low enough that anyone who is highly motivated can save that much over the 20s, to make the move before they're 30.
This is delusional for even the 99th percentile of talent from most of Eastern Europe. Starting salaries in high value professions are just to low. The only people below 30 you'll get that way are people draining their entire family network of funds and a few lucky entrepreneurs, who might not be able to replicate their luck in the US.
Also, why wait till they are 30 (and thus, in many cultures, married with children)? Just take them young and tax them for 10 years. For the immigrant, this tax will not make a huge difference, because if they drained their family network dry before leaving, they will be expected to send large amounts of money back anyway.
pbmonster
2mo ago
Me neither, unironically. Got a little bored of swords and space ships and started with Russian literary fiction. Just Dostoevsky, Tolstoi and Chekhov seem to be a life-long project...
pbmonster
2mo ago
Yeah, that was my point. Normal male fiction readers really don't care that much, because the backlog of good fiction is absolutely massive anyway.
Really sucks for young authors today, of course.
pbmonster
2mo ago
it's just the fiction guys have been chased out or fled
My social circle is staying out of the culture war and the guys are heavy fiction readers. I'd say they pretty much all are unaware about the more recent developments in the publishing world. It just doesn't affect them. Because if you like to read about sword fights or space ships, there are already more high quality books to read than you can fit into a lifetime.
Same thing if you are more literary-minded and like to read fiction about Russian nobility, or German interwar drama. In that genre, you could also argue that nothing worth reading has been written for the last 30 years anyway.
pbmonster
2mo ago
rain isn’t too unpleasant when it’s warm IMHO, especially if you’re on vacation and not wearing a suit or something you’re trying to keep dry
This again depends on the type of rain we're talking about, and of course wind. 65F, windy and soaked to the bone is unpleasant no matter how good your rain hat is.
I’ve tried some expensive brands, but even with the most “breathable” fabric a raincoat is always going to heat you up and be sweaty
This is true, but there's still a huge difference between wearing a GoreTex membrane with open ventilation zippers and an oilskin raincoat / plastic tarp cover. If you're wearing it for days, several hours each, I would spend the money.
Personally, my choice is always an extremely compact umbrella, and a un-insulated GoreTex jacket that folds down very small, which I only put on when I need my hands free or the wind picks up.
pbmonster
2mo ago
It's kind of sad because it means I can't get any of the sacraments, but what can you do. At the end of the day, I still took a vow before God (we had a Christian ceremony, just not Catholic) and I intend to uphold i
This is interesting, I have never heard of this before. You had a Christian marriage in a protestant church, and thus consider yourself to be living in serious, unrepentant sin - baring you from receiving any sacraments? I thought the church has accepted protestant marriages as sacramental since Vatican II?
pbmonster
2mo ago
"Why do you do what you do? How do you think this happened?"
Are you familiar with Tommy G on Youtube? He does videos like that with all kinds of people, almost always lower class. Here he's with the Somali gangs in Minneapolis.
pbmonster
2mo ago
The risk I'm most concerned with is a phishing campaign against me, personally, specifically. Their end goal would be identity theft and causing financial damage.
Those tailor-made campaigns are much, much easier if you have a large online presence. And if done well, they are extremely difficult to defend against.
pbmonster
3mo ago
but the language itself is on the Pareto frontier of information efficiency.
Hasn't it been shown that all major spoken languages are riding extremely close to that frontier? Once many people speak a language over a long period of time, it quickly evolves towards extreme information efficiency. For its speakers, there's really no clear advantage English has over its more complicated cousin German, or over Chinese or Arabic.
English is clearly the easiest to learn if you aren't a speaker already, so there's certainly an advantage in that. But only a very minor advantage for English natives...
pbmonster
3mo ago
I think it's just a normal bubble effect. I read a lot of social media content on literary fiction, speculative fiction, and just a whole lot of tech. And discussions in those spaces all felt like this in the beginning. Genres titles are abbreviated, authors I've never even heard of a constantly referred to and used for comparison, third-party apps/forums/podcasts are referenced and every thing with more than 2 syllables gets an abbreviation. It always was like this in tech, and the jargon really lends itself to it. It's kind of expected. But other fields of interest pretty much are the exact same, if you go deep enough.
Ist just happens that "rationalists" communities are a both large and tight enough community now to have formed a bubble.
pbmonster
3mo ago
Definitely go for a trans-alp tour. One of the classics is Munich to Venice, but I'm more fond of the more western routes through Switzerland.
pbmonster
3mo ago
Very interesting, thank's for that detailed reply! I assumed by default that biological systems are full of such feedback loops, however complicated they may be in real life. Is the water equally as muddy for core temperature, blood sugar, testosterone level, serotonin, dopamine? I assume the first two are understood well, and testosterone starts being muddy?
pbmonster
3mo ago
my body's set weight
This is a theoretically-fraught concept that is not (and perhaps can not be) supported by the data.
Do you have more detail on that? I've followed the TimeMoldSlimeMold "chemical hunger" theory and most of its in-detail critiques, and I don't remember one disputing the existence of the "Lipostat".
I also predisposed from personal anecdotes to strongly believe in the Lipostat, since I'm fit and very active, but also never have gained a single kilo during the long periods of sports injuries I've suffered through in the past.
pbmonster
3mo ago
Dominos pizza is a particular stark example, and that change happened in 2010, in part because they had fallen behind, because all the other pizza places had been upping their game for years.
Can you expand on that? I haven't been following trends in American style pizza, but the idea of "upping the game" on pizza seems absurd. The thing has been perfected decades ago. It's yeast dough, tomatoes, meat and cheese.
What could you even change to make it more calorie dense? More cheese? That's called pizza quattro formaggi and has been a classic since basically forever.
OK, maybe I'm completely out of the loop, but what exactly are they doing in Minnesota and why doesn't this article explain that at all?
Are late second trimester/third trimester abortions legal in Minnesota? Are they really doing them under conditions where the fetus is NOT suffering from a condition incompatible with life?
Because essentially, what they are performing is an emergency early term induced birth (which is done - and only done - in many places around the world when the life of the mother is in danger), right?
To an outside observer, this just sounds like "if a serious genetic/developmental defect incompatible with life is discovered late in pregnancy, abortion remains legal. In this special case, doctors are no longer forced to get an incubator contaminated for literally zero gain (since the malformed early birth baby will die under any and all circumstance anyway).
If this is the case, I personally would support all this. It would be cruel (and needlessly dangerous) to force the mother to carry a dying baby to term and birth it. It would be wasted equipment and medical labor, if doctors where forced to use an incubator for the dying baby in a case like that.
Because literally nobody is getting an elective abortion late second trimester and going “Oops I meant to kill it before I could see it out here in the world” when the fetus turns out to just keep on living, right?
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