recovering_rationaleist
No bio...
User ID: 1768
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
Licensed Nurse Practitioner
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
But it sounds like you can't just have any CPAP machine: it has to be one your doctor prescribes, and it has to send your usage data to the government. That rules out generic devices and locks you into the hell that is new regulated internet-connected medical devices, maybe even with a subcription model for quarterly reports that get sent to a physician. Looks like the top result on Amazon (not FDA approved and doesn't connect to the internet) is $899. Multiply that by at least 3 if you are purchasing through a reputable medical device supplier with insurance.
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
The report [1] makes it clear that CDC didn't want to test anything. Their official position is that a fridge with an "Ebola" label isn't worth testing for ebola unless the vials in the fridge are themselves labelled "Ebola", and "there is no evidence" [2,3] that this company imported any pathogens. I mean, CDC "[i]ssu[ed] an Import Permit advisement letter to Prestige Biotech to ensure they know the Import Permit Regulations for importing infectious substances into the U.S.” and “[i]ssu[ed] a Federal Select Agent Program advisement letter to Prestige Biotech informing them of the requirements for possession, use, and transfer of select agents and toxins if the entity decides to possess them.” No response, so obviously Prestige Biotech has not imported any infectious substances (/s) [4].
You can't make this shit up. The only reason we are still alive is because nobody has tried any serious bioterrorism, not because the CDC would be able to thwart a motivated and intelligent bioterrorist.
[1] https://dig.abclocal.go.com/kfsn/PDF/Reedley-Bio-Lab-Report.pdf [2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag [3] https://dig.abclocal.go.com/kfsn/PDF/Reedley-Bio-Lab-Report.pdf, p. 14 and p. 40. [4] ibid, p. 40.
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
I bet they got them on the cheap in a yard sale.
I would bet not, unless it was in the spirit of teens who put "biohazard" stickers around their bedrooms.
One researcher I work with has a story about moving a plate reader into a BSL3 lab to do research on Covid-19 in 2020. The research project has finished and they could use that plate reader elsewhere, but it will probably stay in the negative-pressure zone until the lab itself is decommissioned.
N=1, but this makes me extremely skeptical that one can buy a used fridge from a BSL4 lab, especially one with an "Ebola" label still on it.
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
My impression is that Covid was a signal for Boomers to retire. Now all those service jobs which used to be filled with Boomers are staffed by nobody, so labor is hard to find and more expensive. As a concrete example, an aquaintence was a nursing assistant and dropped from full-time to retired in May of 2020. They have since returned to work, but only around 4 hrs/wk, and only in 1-1 care for clients they like, rather than the more economically efficient (but more demanding) group care. Social security is paying about what they used to make; why would they subject themselves to the stressful job?
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
The difference between "occupation" and "allies" or "mercenaries" is that you can politely ask "allies" or "mercenaries" to leave, and they will pack up and go, whereas once you are occupied you lose that ability forever. Guantanamo Bay is occupied. Korea is not.
In the 1950s one could plausibly say that the US was occupying Korea. US troops based in the center of Seoul propped up dictators that benefited US interests. However, fifteen years ago the democratically elected Korean government asked the US to get its troops out of Seoul. The US did. Now there is a large swath of vacant land between the old city and Gangnam. The US is still in Korea, but critically the US garrison in Korea is maintained on the request the Korean government. The relationship is mutually beneficial: the US gains a base of operations counter Chinese expansion, and the Koreans gain a tripwire against North Korean expansion. In particular, the Koreans are willing to pay to keep the US troops garrisoned: when Trump hinted at leaving, the Korean side fussed and then increased their side of the bill. (Japan picked up the whole bill right away without a fuss, because Japan knows it is in their interest to pay to stay in the Pax Americana.) So Korea and Japan willing to pay to be "occupied"? That's not a military occupation by any definition I know. (I don't know anything about Germany but suspect the situation is similar.)
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
I looked up the page for "evolution" on both of these sites, then looked up "Gamergate", "Gaza," and "Trump" on Infogalactic vs. Wikipedia.
Conservapedia goes ad hominem in the second paragraph of "Evolution", stating that the majority of the vocal proponents are atheists and agnostics, and proceeds to go into 12 paragraphs of skepticism, including in there the whopper that "The fossil record does not support the theory of evolution and is one of the flaws in the theory of evolution." (Sources: "creation.com" and "annointed-one.net"). Combined with the failure to properly explain what evolution is, this bias makes it useless as an information source.
Infogalactic, in contrast, takes the text for the "Evolution" and "Gaza" articles straight from Wikipedia. Gamergate, as one may imagine given the Vox Day connection, is a completely different article from that of Wikipedia: the Wikipedia article emphasizes the "harrassment campaign". The Infogalactic article emphasizes the revealed corruption in journalism, but does touch on harrassment allegations.
Finally, the "Donald Trump" article: Infogalactic auto-redirects from "Trump" to "Donald Trump". Wikipedia redirects to "Trump (disambiguation)". The intro to the Wikipedia article injects POV in where it doesn't seem appropriate (differences with Infogalactic emphasized):
Trump won the 2016 presidential election as the Republican nominee against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton while losing the popular vote.[a] During the campaign, his political positions were described as populist, protectionist, isolationist, and nationalist. His election and policies sparked numerous protests. He was the first U.S. president with no prior military or government experience. The 2017–2019 special counsel investigation established that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to favor Trump's campaign. Trump promoted conspiracy theories and made many false and misleading statements during his campaigns and presidency, to a degree unprecedented in American politics. Many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racially charged or racist and many as misogynistic.
The corresponding infogalactic paragraphs:
Trump won the general election on November 8, 2016, in a surprise victory against Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, and commenced his presidency on January 20, 2017. He became the oldest person to assume the presidency (surpassing Ronald Reagan), until Joe Biden in 2021, the wealthiest person ever to assume the presidency, and the fifth to have won election while losing the popular vote, though his supporters claimed there were irregularities.[1] His political positions have been described by scholars and commentators as populist, protectionist, and nationalist. In the first year of Trump's presidency, the economy improved significantly[2], but progressive opponents strongly criticized his direct and plain-spoken personal style. With no significant scandals or international events to report, the democrat media focused on unsubstantiated allegations that Trump's election campaign team had colluded with Russian intelligence agencies to influence public opinion[3][4]. The official investigation was eventually closed, with no evidence of the conspiracy theory[5].
Infogalactic definitely has a bias, but it isn't leaving as many details out selectively. I might start preferring Infogalactic now. However, from the change log it looks like there is only one active contributor?!
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
Motivated by a Manifold market on whether racism is bad [1], I thought it might be profitable to argue the opposite. Alas, having drafted my argument, I don't think it is appropriate to post in a place where my ID is tied to my real name. So here is an argument, advocatus diaboli:
Racism is just the expression of an ingroup bias for one's ethnic group, like an ingroup bias for one's own family. What I discovered living in a foreign culture is that people tend to have an ingroup bias to their own ethno-cultural group, and Westerners call this racism. It is easier to communicate with people of shared language, and people of the same cultural background will have shared interests. People of shared ethnic group are more likely to share values, and more likely to agree on topics political and personal. This isn't even a conscious thing: in my experience people of a shared ethnic group are even more likely to make strong eye contact with each other.
The bias is similar to how (most) people have an ingroup bias for their own family: I don't see my siblings often, but when we meet we connect strongly, and discover inadvertently that we face similar challenges and overcame them in similar ways. If my sibling confesses to me of a misdemeanor, I am not likely to hold it against them, and if they confessed to me a felony I'm not sure I would report them. If they are in need, I would help them with minimal complaint, and although we disagree vehemently in politics, we still love each other. My family is my ingroup. This is not a bad thing, it is just the way things are.
Now at the social level, that ingroup bias for family has its drawbacks: nepotism is common and harms society as a whole, and as I would be willing to help my sibiling get away with a crime, so does that closing of ranks around family horrific enable horrific acts, domestically, in the wider society, and even at the level of public policy and the economy. However, on balance the ingroup bias for family is a great thing (there is a reason why evolution has selected for it!). People take care of each other, they love each other, loneliness is diminished, and we trust each other more.
This is also what I see as an outsider in the foreign culture: people take care of each other, they love each other, they find companionship with each other, and they trust each other more because they share ethnic and cultural bonds. And while those bonds disadvantage me as a foreigner in their society, they have provided an evolutionary advantage, and I can't deny envying them life in the hamlet their forefathers made.
[1] https://manifold.markets/levifinkelstein/is-racism-bad
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
You really want a digital seismometer network. Google cache indicates that digital seismometers used to be advertised on Amazon for $8999 each. Which is a steal for defense technology, but the real engineering costs probably come from setting up the network and the analysis software to detect tunnelling without triggering on nearby trucks or nearby uses of bunker-busting munitions.
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
The Joint Direct Attack Munition is a guidance kit that converts unguided bombs, or "dumb bombs", into all-weather precision-guided munitions. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Direct_Attack_Munition)
What's this about a "JDAM missile" sound from the video? I heard something that sounded a lot like a missile launching, but JDAMs don't have engines.
The bottom link in this comment is a pretty good match for the sound: https://www.themotte.org/post/716/israelgaza-megathread-2/149933?context=8#context
Just to play devil's advocate on both sides:
- The hospital is in Northern Gaza, dead center of the region that was given a "24 hour" evacuation notice a few days ago now. The evacuation notice specified that hospitals should also be evacuated. If this was Israel, they might be "softening up" northern Gaza for their ground offensive, or they might have been returning counterbattery fire without restrictions, since civilians are to have left the area.
- With Biden visiting Israel tomorrow (in ~12 h?), presumably to talk Israel down from a ground invasion, leadership on the Israeli side might benefit from a rapid escalation of violence, and leadership on the Hama side would benefit from a rapid escalation in civilian casualties. Good for both sides no matter who did it.
- The fact that there does not seem to be a clear video makes it less likely to me that it was an Israeli strike. Israel tends to either record its own strikes, or provide enough warning that journalists are already pointing their stabilized camera tripods in the right direction from a safe distance. In contrast, Hamas strikes and false flags like yesterday's "airstrike" on the evacuation routes tend to come without warning, and videos tend to show only the aftermath. But it is also possible Israel has gunsight footage of the whole thing and it will be released 5 to 10 years from now.
- All the casualty numbers are claimed by Gazan authorities, who are probably exaggerating. Yesterday's Israeli hit on a UN school where 4000 people were sheltering only killed four people, and we're supposed to believe that 800 people died when a bomb hit a courtyard? I guess it is possible the bomb was fragmentary and there was no cover, but something seems off. I'm not sure if high casualty numbers would shift the blame toward Israel (more likely to have large bombs) or Hamas (not Israeli MO).
Edit: Wikipedia says the summit with Joe Biden has been cancelled, but Manifold is 98% pretty confident that Biden is still going to Israel.
Act 3 of the Hamas' ideal outcome involves international condemnation of Israeli human rights violations, televised slaughter of Arabs, and the hardliners within Saudi Arabia vetoing a normalizing of Israeli-Saudi relations. The beginnings of this were already visible in the Asian news tonight: the official Korean national broadcaster (KBS) had a segment focused on the blockade of humanitarian resources (with mention that fuel cuts impact hospitals) which segued into a report that Israel has dropped white phosphorous bombs. (The NYT reported one day ago that "the Israeli army denied the use of white phosphorus, saying soldiers had deployed only illumination flares." Footage was from broad daylight, so either the footage is old/repurposed, the denial is out of date, someone is lying and it was white phosphorous, or it was actually anti-SAM flares.)
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
Korea has a "National Pension System" much like Social Security, except that the fund is invested in the domestic stock market. This has a number of negative consequences:
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The fund has immense power over private businesses due to its size. Via its minority share, it has even vetoed restructurings of the Samsung group (remember that the Samsung group accounts for roughly 20% of Korea's GDP).
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The fund is not invested well. It gets put in places for political as well as economic reasons, and in theory a purely economic fund would perform better.
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The fund makes transparent financial decisions. This means everyone with assets who pay attention to the news has a chance at front-running the fund.
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There are going to be issues in liquidating the fund when it is needed. This to me is the biggest issue - that selling off the assets of an entire generation is going to devalue those assets, and I'm not sure that anyone realistically accounts for this when determining the present value of such a huge fund.
All that said, NPS is currently in surplus by an amount corresponding to 1~5% of Korean GDP, and is expected to remain solvent until 2055. So perhaps there really is an argument for "privatization" (at least until the end of this stock market bubble).
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
In Korea, Uber was kicked out of the entire country, and only foreigners complained, because domestic app companies worked with taxi companies to come up with non-shitty ride hailing services of their own. I think they might have a Korean service now, having miraculously discovered how to work within the confines of existing taxi regulations.
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
@sodiummuffin and greyenlightenment's points below are correct: underpaid "essential workers" only have low wages because there are so many people able and willing to do their jobs at low wages, relative to the "need" for those jobs.
Several years ago I saw a cleaners strike happen at a university. (The cause was dissatisfaction with a middleman temp firm which was taking a large cut of the budget allocated for cleaners' salaries). The hallways and lecture halls were messy after only 2~3 days, and after two weeks they were full of trash. At which point graduate students were paid extra to clean up the hallways and lecture pits. To have graduate students cleaning the hallways was much more expensive than having the cleaners do it, but the labor market was suddenly artificially tight, and the department feared that having trashy lecture halls would result in undergrad enrollment dropping.
In labor markets flush with workers, salaries are completely unrelated to the infrastructure that makes it possible for jobs to be done, as well as completely unrelated to the upper limit of what people would pay for that job to be done (i.e. what would be paid if there were absolutely no workers), despite the net value of their jobs to other people in society being several orders of magnitude larger than the prevailing salary. They cannot negotiate higher salaries because if they do then someone else will come in and replace them, getting the job by undercutting their wage.
The same is true in reverse: if there were only one person able and willing to do plumbing in the entire country, that person would be paid millions of dollars per hour servicing nuclear reactors. If there were only one person able to clean in the entire country, they would be paid handsomely to work in a semiconductor fab.
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
Ballot secrecy serves to stop a specific problem of coercion and bribery when voting, which were a big problem back in the Gilded Age but which are far less prevalent now.
Are you sure? Another thing associated with the Gilded Age is machine politics, which is supposedly just fading out in Chicago as of 2021: https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-prem-mike-madigan-chicago-machine-politics-illinois-progressives-20210305-cmh33nn2svbajlkk7ma6omo4ee-htmlstory.html
Given how the incentives are skewed, I predict that it will only take a few election cycles of widespread mail-in voting for coercion and bribery to become commonplace again. It will be implemented with plausible deniability a la Wells Fargo: swing-state campaigns tell their campaign workers to get out the vote, and pay them per ballot in their precinct of responsibility, multiplied by the percentage of the vote they win on election day. Campaign workers in turn will do the rest quietly and of their own free will, and will also have plausible deniability: "gift cards" for votes, no matter who you vote for, but we'll love you more if you vote for X. (The few campaign workers who step over the line and get caught will be prosecuted, but there will be no evidence of systemic fraud.) Frankly, I think we already had gift cards for votes in 2020.
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
many women don’t want to spend more than a decade without much adult company
This means that, at least among smart or educated women who choose when or if they have kids, often only those most set on motherhood have children. People on the fence might like the idea of having children, might feel the biological imperative, but they override it because it seems like an impossible sacrifice.
This idea of leaving one life and entering another (which again, if you like the company of other adults, is strictly worse in ways) is what scares many women about parenthood
You repeatedly call this a lack of adult company, but the problem you describe is not leaving the company of adults, but one of changing from socializing with non-parents to socializing with other parents. As a SAHM after the first year or so your free time is mostly during the workday, while non-SAHMs mostly have time to socialize after the work day ends (which for parents corresponds to mealtime and bedtime). To put it another way, motherhood comes with all the social detriments of a long-distance move. (But people still move all the time.)
Having experienced a modern society where SAHMs are normal, the first year of the first child is all about baby all the time, but the moms still socialize: they have support groups with other moms of their age group, call friends, use social media, and get a lot of emotional, logistical support, and time off via their parents and parents-in-law. Then once the kid socializes well with other kids they start meeting other moms almost daily, chatting while the kids play. The conversation is mostly centered on parenting, but that's mostly because, as you note, intellectuals aren't having kids.
As soon as the kids go to school (or usually preschool) then these SAHMs either gradually start working part-time or spend large portions of their days with their friends. I used to work in cafes a lot. There were many groups of SAHMs who would come into the cafe after lunch and spend roughly 1 PM to 5 PM hanging out. Book clubs, sports clubs, investment clubs. Of course, this society is almost invisible to non-SAHMs, because non-SAHMs are confined to the workplace during the day in places far away from where people live and where toddlers are raised. To the extent that non-mothers are ignorant of how much adult interaction SAHMs can get, I guess one might steelman your precise wording, but the true core of the issue here is that it's a change in social groups, not completely isolating. Unless you are in the top 5% of IQ, in which case you probably moved away from your parents and none of your friends who share your interests have had kids yet. Which I guess describes the average person in the Bay Area rational community as well as the average Mottizen.
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
A lot of the discussion about shame in the US revolves around fat-shaming, but I think we would be better served to directly shame unhealthy eating and unnecessary lethargy. As far as I see it, the difference between culture in the US and Asia is threefold: (1) It's acceptable in Asia to tell someone if they gained/lost weight. (2) People in Asia don't drive everywhere, but walk / bike / public transport more. (3) People in Asia eat a lot more vegetables and a lot less carbs / refined sugars.
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
When I see a comment like this, my instinct is to ask "How?" We just traded a personal-level problem for a politics-level solution, which means it will happen approximately never. Not only is the morass of US politics highly illogical, it is supported by a whole ecosystem of bad decisions and incentives which work against change, from zoning laws which benefit existing suburban homeowners to subsidized housing requirements which force new developments to be low-status places to live.
I guess the personal solution is to just buy a home for yourself in a nice urban space. Not only can you become part of a community which walks everywhere, but your neighbors will share your values (Hopefully), and if land values go up, other landlords will be motivated to make more places like your urban space.
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
The College Board could just be skipping ahead in the script.
Important to note that classes start in about 25 calendar days, so it is important to the Florida schools (the College Board's clients) to figure out whether to offer the class now, rather than in December.
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
Traditionally, stories of UFOs were planted in the population by undercover members of the intelligence community [1], who needed to provide chaff to distract from civilian observations of advanced spy balloons [2], U-2s, SR-71s [3], and later stealth fighter/bombers. I see no reason to believe this is any different: USAF is researching drones, next-gen missiles, and maybe next-generation fighters/bombers, and needs to get the public excited about UFOs. We'll learn the truth about this in about 40 years.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/exair-force-law-enforceme_b_5312650,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men,
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul#Roswell_incident,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_balloon#Skyhook_as_UFO,
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB7/nsaebb7.htm
[3] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005517742.pdf : "According to later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U-2 project and the OXCART (SR-71, or Blackbird) project, over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States. (45)"
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
You're failing the intellectual turing test. They see themselves as saving children who were born trans. It isn't obviously mutilation if the child is born trans and the diagnosis is accurate. Thus the phrase "coming for the children" has a relatively innocent interpretation here.
On the other hand, nobody has yet performed a randomized controlled trial on outcomes for different treatments for (or diagnostics of) trans children. (I looked very hard for papers on this last year. The only RCTs are on adults, and in non-RCTs measuring suicide rates in teenagers the effect sizes for surgery and for social transition were about the same. A trans rights activist I was conversing with argued that to perform an RCT would be unethical.)
recovering_rationaleist
1yr ago
I'm not going to read your link. It's 50 to 60 printed pages long. I skimmed the first 2500 words, and the gist of it seems to be that the neoconservative movement was an academic movement supported by majority-Jewish media, and took a pro-Israel foreign policy stance. That's fair, and I will concedie that the most prominent neoconservatives on that list were intellectuals of Jewish ancestry. However, looking on Wikiepedia it seems that most of the prominent American neoliberals on Wikipedia are also Jewish. Can we name an American political movement from the past 20 years which was not dominated by Jewish intellectuals? Do Jewish intellectuals just originate all (American) political movements?
Also, you still need to make the very important causal link from this academic movement to the actual war in Iraq. From the unfinished Gulf War, it is likely that Rumsfeld and Bush had a vendetta against Sadam from 1991, and from the Bush/Cheney oil business it is likely that the war was motivated by the capture of oil fields. Did these neocons originate the invasion, or were they merely providing a convenient rationalization for it? (And why was the supermajority of the American public in support of the Iraq war, when the American public is not Jewish?) You (and Kevin McDonald) admit that the "frontmen" were not Jewish, so you don't get to strip them of agency and culpability for what happened without a very well-articulated causal model.
That's an interesting comparison. While the historicity of Jesus is debated downthread, the Gospel accounts IMO have a very valid purpose: they can teach the reader how to be a
charismatic psychopath who motivates his followers!devout leader of a church: (1) Gather some small number of people who worship the predecessor religion, which contains some prophesies. (2) Find an interpretation of the predecessor religion or religious text in which the prophesies refer to things that happened to you and your group. (3) Act and teach as Jesus did in the Gospels, with a focus on the corruption of and persecution by The World (4) Die according to your prophesies and (5) be rememebered forever!Experimentally, we have evidence this works for many groups. Most of them don't make it to (5) because they don't make new prophesies of their own, but some do.
So the natural place to go here from gender ideology is to ask whether gender ideology provides a sufficient set of social tools to build a movement, or whether the ideology sources those externally.
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