rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
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User ID: 1473
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
2d ago
Korean pay scales reward seniority, not technical skills. All engineer starting pay is 1/3 to 1/5 the equivalent US starting salary, except Samsung which is 1/2.
But the US is an outlier in programmer salaries and in minimum cost of living. So someone can live comfortably on 40k USD in Seoul. Compare the US where cheap 100 to 200 sqft rentals don't exist anywhere.
Someday I need to post my student budget. I was able to save up 10k USD over three years while making less than 10k USD annually, paying tuition and living in central Seoul.
rokmonster
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10d ago
Back surgery works for severe disk herniations, but the mechanism is that it removes pressure on the nerves. The nerves die under pressure resulting in partial paralysis if surgery is not done within 48 (ideally 24) hours. Nerves don't regenerate/grow after age 30 or so.
I'm reading a lot of stories on reddit of people whose back surgeries were delayed 2 to 6 months over insurance stating that a surgery would not be paid for without a diagnostic MRI (which is fair), and a diagnostic MRI would not be paid for without weeks of physical therapy first (which is unconscionable).
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
17d ago
There's a lot of detail that hasn't percolated into the Western press yet, but I've been watching the videos, and they are wild. Here's a rough timeline:
- 10:23 President announces martial law. Some percentage of civilians immediately head to the National Assembly, many of them coming out of bars.
- 10:?? Police cordon off the National Assembly, barricade the compound's gates.
- 11:00 Martial law command (military) announces that political activities are banned, public assemblies are banned, broadcasts are to be subject to censorship, people may be arrested without cause.
- Also, doctors are ordered to return to work within 48 hours (they walked off last year). I'm happy this is now within the Overton Window.
- Some number of civilians and most Assemblymen jump the National Assembly fence.
- 11:02 The opposition leader livestreams himself making the jump.
- 12:?? Special forces land helecopters on the football pitch of the National Assemby.
- Opposition newscasters and personalities flee their homes and offices. Video of special forces assembling on the street in front of the homes of opposition newscasters and personalities.
- 12:15? Special forces (armed only with simunition) in shoving matches with drunk civilians over the entrance to the National Assembly. Some actual servicemen appear apologetic, but orders are orders.
- 12:30? Special forces lose the shoving match with civilians, break a window to get in.
- 12:40? Special forces repelled by Assemblypeople with fire extinguishers and makeshift barricades. Military didn't look very motivated.
- 12:45? National Assembly convenes.
- 12:45 A friend gets a text from their employer not to come into work tomorrow.
- 01:01 190 votes (unanimous) for a formal request to disband martial law. 18 members of the President's party crossed the aisle.
- 01:10 Military starts to withdraw. Protestors start chanting "arrest Yoon".
Korea was so close to losing its democracy. If the fence were a few meters taller, if the soldiers had arrived 30 minutes earlier, if they had been given live ammo, or if they had followed orders with intent instead of half-assing the arrests they were told to perform, the Assembly would not have been able to reach quorum.
Going forward, President Yoon is fucked. 200 votes are required for impeachment, and it looks like the requisite 8 representatives from the President's party are already pledged. The Constitutional Court needs to try the case, and with three empty seats they do not have enough members to do so, but no doubt the National Assembly will now nominate the one more justice to have a 2/3 majority for the impeachment trial.
There's a lot of wondering how Yoon got elected, but his opponent in the last election (the Opposition Leader who livestreamed jumping the fence) had ties to organized crime and several of his opponents died under mysterious circumstances. The opposition leader has since been found guilty of a number of crimes, but enjoys immunity as a member of parliament.
Finally, it is interesting to contrast this attempted coup to Jan 6th. It tells us what Jan 6th would have looked like if Trump had been actually malicious and motivated to perform a coup: military would have been storming Congress, not directionless protestors. The President would have been in a bunker, not holding a rally. Congress would have been barricading the hallways to maintain their quorum, not retreating to saferooms and giving up the chamber. The military would have been arresting opposition leaders and shutting down broadcasts, rather than totally absent from the Capitol area.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
19d ago
This is embarassing.
Phone 1: 365, Phone 2: 265, Personal Computer: 84, Work computer Browser 1: 227, Browser 2: 267
In practice, I'm only aiming to close 10% of tabs on the systems I use on days that I use them.
Also, fell into Factorio on the weekend and got nothing done.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
22d ago
I meant tasks due tomorrow. Thanks for holding my feet to the fire, though.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
22d ago
Day 2's tasks:
- [ ] Language and science reviews
- [ ] Close 10% of tabs and get inbox to 50
- [ ] 100 pushups, 100 squats
- [ ] 1 hr walking
- [ ] 45 min rowing
- [ ] Drink 2l water
- [ ] File reimbursement requests
- [ ] Data analysis
- [ ] Holiday shopping
I've been pretty lazy this month. Starting now I precommit to daily accountability updates in this thread. Please hold my feet to the fire.
Tomorrow's tasks:
- [x] Language and science reviews
- [-] Close 10% of tabs and get inbox to 50: Closed 10% of tabs, but inbox is at 87
- [ ] 100 pushups, 100 squats: pushups done, squats Fail.
- [ ] 1 hr walking:Fail
- [x] Drink 2l water
- [ ] File reimbursement requests:Fail
- [ ] Set up beeminder?: Bad idea in retrospect
- [x] Watch a lecture
- [x] Outline a lecture
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
23d ago
Wait. The NHS thinks semaglutide is cost-effecrive? In what formulation? Could you share the math/link with us?
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1mo ago
They might, but that ignores the collective benefits of vaccines. Imagine that our smallpox vaccine from above kills one in ten. Surely, compared to four in ten deaths from smallpox, we collectively are vastly better off with one in ten deaths and immunity to smallpox, or zero deaths if we can beat smallpox and phase out the vaccine. But now the vaccine company has liability for post vaccine deaths, and so a single dose of the vaccine is going to cost... $1M just to cover the liability. No patient/government is going to pay $1M to save a 4/10 of a life when there are cheaper QALYs to save elsewhere, so we will never beat smallpox and we will see 40% fatality rates in perpetuity.
The fair mathematical solution might be to limit the vaccine manufacturer's liability to the collective damages or to damages external to the vaccine (i.e. negligence). So if you have a vaccine which saves lives (or QALYs) on net, you have no liability, but you'd better be sure your vaccine saves lives.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1mo ago
No it doesn't, because people don't pay anywhere near the QALY value of vaccines to the vaccine company.
Let's pretend we have a vaccine for smallpox (40-50% fatality rate in babies). People/governments pay maybe $100 per dose (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines-for-children/php/awardees/current-cdc-vaccine-price-list.html). The value of a wrongful death is $10M, so you would break even on a $100 vaccine for smallpox at one wrongful death in 100,000, while the vaccine would save 40,000 to 50,000 lives per 100,000.
I actually have to compliment @Quantumfreakonomics here, because until 15 minutes ago I thought liability was reasonable.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1mo ago
I heard rumors that Omicron looked like it was developed through serial passage in lab mice, but do you have any details?
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1mo ago
I don't know about New York, but in several states any penetration is legally rape if not consensual. Dildo in mouth could be rape. Finger in bellybutton could be rape. Finger in vagina could definitely be rape.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1mo ago
I think it just doesn't sound right otherwise. To match with the other terms, they need something that is short and not ambiguous. The standard term for the act of sex (sexual relations) is three syllables. They could shorten it to two, but then it would just mean "relationship".
There are also taboos about talking about sex, where even the common euphemisms and clinical terms are not uttered much in public. I guess using the English loanword is the most socially acceptable way to specify "act of sex" in print.
Also radfems seem to get their craziest ideas from their academic connections to the anglosphere, so they use loanwords more than the general public.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
3mo ago
Fair point. That text is not in the law. Removing.
Instead, a clinic employee offered Thurman a two-pill abortion regimen approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, mifepristone and misoprostol. Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment.
D&C
No abortion is authorized or shall be performed if an unborn child has been determined in accordance with Code Section 31-9B-2 to have a detectable human heartbeat except when
I am in agreement with you that there would have been no violation of the law as you have quoted, and that the hospital's behavior here sounds egregiously negligent. Under what circumstances is it permissible to wait 5 hours to treat acute sepsis? D&C is usually indicated when a fetus has no heartbeat, and the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol will stop the fetus's heart (mifepristone=shed uterine lining, killing the fetus, misoprostol=induce contractions to push the dead fetus out). So when she showed up at a clinic in Georgia, performing a D&C would have been within the letter of the law.
To steelman the opposing side, perhaps there is another exemption in the law for "care which aids and abets an illegal abortion," or
Anyway, after hearing about the sepsis the lesson is to never visit Georgia, and if you do, never go to Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge. Never know if doctors there will wait three hours to treat your heart attack because your wife is pregnant.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
7mo ago
That's a good question, but I don't know anything about Japan.
Also, I somewhat dispute that the gender war has "turned hot" in Korea. I think this "gender war" mostly journos trying to make a big issue about gender, for the reasons outlined in the second half of my grandparent comment. Surveys in 2021 showed that in every demographic surveyed, "inequality between men and women" was considered less of a problem in 2021 than in 2016. Also, if you are not terminally online you won't notice any gender war. (But Korean society does tend to be terminally online, so most people are aware of some feminist/anti-feminist drama. )
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
7mo ago
Haha. You fell for the bait! Ok, some anecdotes that come to mind now. Might add more later:
-
Careerist girl in her early 30s spent years watching South Park. Gets really good at English (in a South Park drawl!), but remains single for years. Discovers the Man of Her Dreams on Tinder. Spends two months raving about how perfect he is, how Tinder is different in Korea. Then learns he was also dating three other Tinder girls.
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Staunch feminist sits next to foreign guy on the subway. Guy completely ignores her. She tries to get his attention, he keeps ignoring her. She gets up and starts berating him for "manspreading," threatens to take his picture and put it on Twitter. Incident resolves when he threatens to take her picture and send it to the police for harrassment.
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Tall (= tough dating prospects) artistic (=open-minded) girl falls in love with a foreign guy. Everything seems to be going well, except he's not very patient about her lack of English fluency. He takes her home to meet his family ... and it turns out they all live on a trailerpark. Relationship survives until he goes on a date with another girl. When she does meet a guy who is patient with her, that's one of the points she brags to her friends about.
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Staunch feminist in her early 30s meets foreign guy. Everything is going well, except that he walks out of a movie when it gets to a particularly girl-power scene. She has a two-week identity crisis over meeting someone so "anti-woman".
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Early 20s reader of The Ethical Slut finally finds the rich foreign gentleman she's been trying to snag. Comes back raving about how the first date was amazing, he must have spent $500 between dinner and the hotel, she's finally found the man of her dreams. A week later he has to go on an international business trip, and stops answering his phone. Oddly, his phone is ringing like it's still in Korea ...
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
7mo ago
It's not just the ownership that matters, it's that renting is frouned upon, housing loans are not cheaply available (30% down payment is common, IIRC), housing is treated as an investment, the closing price for typical condos is now 20x~30x the median annual salary. I only know one 20-30 year old who purchased a condo in the last 5 years without parental assistance (and the one guy sold his startup to a conglomerate for millions.)
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
7mo ago
Without doxxing myself, all I can say is that I am immersed in Korean life. My source is mostly synthesis of what people have told me over the years while talking to me candidly and first-hand observation while experiencing the rat race. In my workplace, I saw men putting their children to bed on Kakao Facechat. In my extracurricular activities, I met a few mid-30s journalist women who were writing for foreign-language outlets. I saw friends get married, be disappointed, and turn bitter, and know many who cannot afford to get married.
So you should treat the above as original research, almost anecdotal. I was trying to convey the economic and social forces which push men and women into discontent with each other (well, mostly a subset of women into discontent with men), but also the filtering effect of what gets to English-language media, and the citogenesis effect of the English-language media on Koreans' understanding of their own culture (which I think is despicable).
As with anything sociological, an examination of the Korean situation is incomplete without an economic background.
- Wages have historically been low in Korea.
- Korea is a cutthroat meritocracy.
- Men (or their parents) are still mostly valued as "providers".
- Housing prices in Seoul, the only city worth living in, have almost tripled since 2018.
- This generation of women is the first generation to be fully entering the workforce.
- Buying a house is a precondition to marrying under Korean social norms.
- Koreans, in comparison to Westerners, don't like to violate social norms.
What 1 (low wages) + 2 (cutthroat meritocracy) imply is that Korean men have to work hard to get promoted to management if they want to support their family. This has historically taken the form of 60-hour work weeks (8 hours plus "voluntary" company dinners, Monday to Saturday). As women enter the workforce, the culture of company dinners has been pared back, and now it is 8 hours plus unpaid evenings if one wants to have a chance at being promoted to manager. (Women don't on average put in those hours, since 60% of them plan on leaving the workforce when they are married and have kids.)
Adding 3 (the social role of men as providers) means that their value is measured by the thickness of their wallets, and their wallets are on average not very thick, because 1 (wages are low) and their wallets are getting thinner, and less valued, because 5 (because women are entering the workforce).
Now owning a home is a precondition to marriage (and childbirth) in Korea, and this means that it is mostly the upper middle class which can afford to have kids. So you get a whole generation of women who were raised by their mothers in houses where their fathers were working 60-hour weeks to be that upper middle class. They grew up in material luxury, but their fathers would home drunk late at night after these company dinners and pass out immediately. They see their mothers working thanklessly in their home, barely time for a conversation with their fathers, and want none of it. Thus the mythology is born. "Korean men suck."
These women in the upper middle class have gone onto college, where they major in the humanities and are exposed to the imported concepts of third-wave feminism. Men are the oppressors, women are victims, and life sucks because of patriarchy. Life does suck. They try going into the workforce and see that wages are low and the culture sucks. Must be the patriarchy holding them back. (To emphasize the point, men in their cohort who enter the workforce had their mandatory military service counted as work experience and so enter at a higher pay level.)
Growing up in the upper-middle class with material opulence, these Korean women have high expectations for their quality of life, and instead of finding a marriagable high-status husband, their age-matched prospects are only poor men who are struggling to get ahead in the rat race. Then when they are looking for a husband, none of the available young bachelors have any money or free time. Nobody is buying that house! If they are schooled in third-wave feminism, the message is clear: "Korean men suck."
These feminist women go into jobs like journalism, where they write tons of articles about how terrible the men are, with no consideration for the economic constraints that got the entire society into this position. They hit age 30 (or 35) and are forced to marry by social forces (and that ticking biological clock). If they are marriageable, they end up settling for a man who they are not happy with, read HuffPost, and inhabit "mom cafes" online where they post screeds about how terrible men are. If they have poor personalities, they write screeds even more vociferously about their bosses and the men who rejected them. Somewhere, they read that foreign men are feminists and get the idea that foreigners will support them. (And boy the stories I have of what happens when they actually meet foreign men!)
(Women who were aware that their fathers were making sacrifices for them see the feminists going off the deep end and no longer feel comfortable calling themselves feminists.)
Young Korean men, on the other hand, see their fathers working 996, and instintively understand that their fathers are working as a sacrifice to provide material wealth for the family. They see that the women of their cohort (especially the self-proclaimed feminists) do not appreciate these sacrifices, and especially don't appreciate the sacrifice they made in lifetime to keep the country safe from the North Koreans. The women appear thankless and shrill. The men put their heads down and try to work harder to get ahead. If they are responsible, they save every last penny to buy that house when they get married.
The left-wing Moon administration rejiggers the housing market to try to lower housing prices, and ends up adding fuel to the fire and doubling housing prices in three years. The left/feminist wing also hushes up several cases of sexual assault by the left-wing mayor of Seoul, who commits suicide when the allegations become public. The right-wing candidate vows to abolish the "Ministry for Women and Family" (English translation: "Ministry for Gender Equality"), which is seen as a think-tank and jobs program for these radical feminists. In response mostly to housing prices but partly to the MfWaF who hate them and the hypocricy of the leftists covering up sexual assault, men in the next election vote for the right-wing candidate.
Korean journalists - especially ones who know enough English to write for foreign journals like CNN and the NYT - are largely drawn from those upper-class women who went through college in the humanities and were radicalized on third-wave feminism. The election of a right-wing government is portrayed by these Korean journalists (who never studied economics and don't want to talk about the rapey left-wing mayor) as a sign that Korean men hate women. (The actual surveys show that they hate "feminists".) Western media comes to believe that Korean men are sexists engaged in a gender war, as everything available in English is filtered through the lens of Korean feminists.
Edit: And as my Korean friend points out, Korean journalists frequently cite foreign (CNN, NYT, etc) articles about Korean gender wars to assert that these things are real, without thinking about the filter effect and the fact that the foreign journalists' friends are all upper-class English-speaking Koreans (i.e. filtered for feminists).
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
7mo ago
Damit. Why didn't you link to the YT video the first time? Would have saved me a lot of time drudging through Pelosi's official statements. This is the kind of link I can save for use in future online arguments.
Nancy Pelosi telling people to go out and Celebrate Lunar New Year (as in telling people to go out in public around large groups) when fear of Coronavirus was right-coded. Its right there in an official communication.
While I agree that there was a very interesting dynamic with left-coded cries of "racism" being used by public health and "pro-science" professionals to pooh-pooh the need to close ports or intitute quarantines on points of entry in January 2020 (1), these particular statements by Pelosi were boilerplate well before the pandemic from 2006 to 2021, and only stopped when China went full Wolf-Warrior diplomacy in late 2021 and early 2022.
As evidence, I give you some other official announcments. The omission of years prior to 2017 just means I didn't bother looking for them, and the URL wasn't obvious.
- 2022 to 2024: Missing
- 2021: https://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/pelosi-statement-on-the-lunar-new-year-3
- 2020: https://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/pelosi-statement-on-the-lunar-new-year-2
- 2019: https://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/pelosi-statement-on-the-lunar-new-year-1
- 2018: https://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/pelosi-statement-recognizing-the-lunar-new-year
- 2017: https://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/pelosi-statement-on-lunar-new-year-5
- 2015: https://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/pelosi-statement-on-lunar-new-year-4
- 2014: https://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/pelosi-statement-on-lunar-new-year-3
- 2013: https://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/pelosi-statement-on-lunar-new-year-2
- 2012: https://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/pelosi-statement-on-lunar-new-year-1
- 2008: https://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/pelosi-statement-on-lunar-new-year
- 2006: https://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/pelosi-statement-on-the-lunar-new-year
Please check your arguments to verify that they are solid before presenting a weakman argument for your point.
(1) IMO, the Trump admin could have used the national emergency to close all border flows, left the US epidemiologically secure like Taiwan, and used the inevitable leak as further justification for border security. But Trump is incompetent, Trump's staff was incompetent, and the CDC isn't competent enough to quarantine tourists anyway.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Does every country with a large uncontrolled land border have a drug problem? It's possible.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
How would we know what the effect (or intended effect) is? Perhaps the CCP wants to sway the election left, and their only thumb on the scale will be spreading pro-D get-out-the-vote videos on election day. Or perhaps they want to sway the election right. Perhaps they just want to keep Chinese citizens abroad from hearing about corruption at home, and all it takes is a thumb on the scale to keep China out of the minds of TikTok users. Perhaps the goal is intelligence collection rather than propaganda, and anything viral is fair play, as long as it gets data from the highest number of devices. Or perhaps the goal is the disintegration of Western Society, and all the inane influencer trends that go viral are centrally programmed so that the most inane and least productive ideas enter the largest number of impressionable young brains. It is even possible that they want to swing the opinions of the American electorate to be anti-China, so that the anti-China US turns into a bogeyman to distract from a stagnating domestic economy.
My point is that we have no way of knowing what the CCP propaganda goal (at any moment in time) would be and the algorithm is a black box (with different output for every user), so it is entirely impossible to see the broader effect the algorithm is having, let alone whether that effect is intended. The result is that anyone concerned about epistemic safety would support banning the black box.
I concede that the same concerns apply to other media companies, too. While I would argue that there is a qualitative difference between TikTok and domestic social media companies in that the owner and programmers of Facebook at least in theory lives in the same society as me and share some of my values, the ability to cause a partisan shift in voting rates or voting direction - by say 10% - is too large of a power to entrust to any black box controlled by a single entity. As they say, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Two crazy statistics to think about:
So there is social pressure to not have kids out of wedlock, and more than half the population is deferring marriage until after the fertility cliff. I blame the marriage deficit on high financial expectations on young couples and a culture which teaches that marriage at 35 or later is okay. The birthrate crisis is downstream of the marriage crisis.
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