wlxd
2yr ago
That’s what I am conflicted about. Sure, there is no fundamental reasons why the west/US couldn’t mine and extract its own lithium, so that it’s not dependent on China. But, would it actually be able to do it in practice? Would the overcome the political, NIMBY, environmental, ecological etc opposition? Can they actually get necessary know how and workforce to build what is needed?
Consider the current energy crisis in Europe. Seems like the obvious answer would be to just go all in on nuclear fission. Is this what is happening? No, European countries seem like to be more into trying to survive winter, expanding LNG terminals, and hoping that there is enough LNG capacity in future. Will there be? Can they depend on their US ally providing all of it? No, US is still not pushing hard into expanding fossils, instead we still go all in on ESG.
Seems to me that even if it is clear what needs to be done, the ability to actually pull it off is no longer there, there is no leader to pull the Realpolitik off and align everyone towards the goal. Instead, we get the standard multitude of interest groups that just makes everything impossible to build, as usual.
wlxd
2yr ago
They don’t get to just stop funding everything. Assume that pursuing the war is in US/NATO interest. Suppose they make a decision, and Zelensky (or whoever is also taking part on Ukrainian side) disagrees. They cannot just withdraw their funds and their support: this would damage Ukrainian’s strategic position, and reduce the chances of successful military outcomes. It would be cutting their noses to spite their faces.
This does not mean that they have no say in what Ukraine does. They do, but so do the Ukrainian rulers.
wlxd
2yr ago
Why would you think that “Parler staff will still be working on the app” has any bearing on the size of the stake?
wlxd
2yr ago
Sure, some indeed actually dedicate their lives to these kind of competitions, but this is not big fraction of the people partaking, and even their career is not that long. They usually move on from there to more typical places of status. I also think it's not instructive to focus on the actual winners, instead consider people in top 10, or even top 50.
I am working in tech industry, and don't have much personal experience in US academia, so this will be mostly based on experiences of my friends and family, and my knowledge of intricacies of US immigration system (the legal one, that is).
The typical wage of US postdoc researcher (and these are the ones who do most of the actual work) is something like $50-60k. Entry level positions are often in low-to-mid $40k, and salaries below that are not unheard of. These are all people with PhDs, not necessarily extremely smart (like my friends I mention above), but nevertheless significantly more intelligent than an average person earning six figures, and at least as driven and conscientious. How is that possible?
The answer is quite simple: these position are filled with mostly foreign researchers. They come here on J1 or H1B visas (occasionally on O1, but that's less common among junior researchers), and are tied to their PI and their lab to a very high degree. On J1, they literally cannot change they job, and on H1B, they can only switch to another research job, they cannot leave and go writing ad targeting code for FAANG. Even if they want to switch lab, that's usually not very easy. The job market is much smaller, based on recommendations, so their PI can completely torpedo their career if they so choose, making them beholden to their whims. And I haven't even mentioned the two body problem, affecting the scientists very acutely.
This means that the foreign researchers are, to a large degree, indentured servants of the labs they work for. This is not to say that they are exploited: no, they are typically rather fine with the arrangement, given that they can always go back to their home country, but nevertheless chose it, being mostly aware of its realities, and stay here. This is rather similar to the original indentured servants back in the day. The point is that the realities of what awaits them back home, along with the incentives that the immigration temporary work authorization system (H1B and most other employment visas were not meant result in immigration, indeed, before the invention of the legal fiction of "dual intent" policy, applying for a green card while on H1B resulted in not being to return to US if you leave it before you obtain the GC) highly reduce the pool of options available to them once they're here, and make foreign researchers being highly attractive, captive workforce for the research organizations.
wlxd
2yr ago
wlxd
2yr ago
Okay, so I set the price at $1B, and everyone else does that too. Why not? Oh yes, because this will bump the property tax beyond what I can afford. On the other hand, if I bring it down to what I can afford, bots will no longer leave me alone. Point is, you’re trying to pull a fast one here.
wlxd
2yr ago
Why is it then that the social ties among residents of SFH neighborhoods are almost universally stronger than among apartment dwellers? I don’t think that a typical renter even knows the names of people living in the neighboring apartments, or, for that matter, anyone else in the building.
If you are not living in a huge metro, most of the people you can conceivably meet on a regular basis will be within 10-20 minutes drive, because driving in non-dense places outside of big metros is very fast. This is not the case in big metros, to be sure, but in big metros, you cannot cram everyone into walking distance from everyone else anyway (see: NYC). The choice is not between driving 20 minutes to see your friends in suburbia vs waking one block over to your friends, it is between driving 20 minutes vs taking 20 minute subway trip. If your friends are free to move so close to you, why cannot we assume that they also cannot buy a house in the walking distance in the same SFH neighborhood? If you are instead assume that you make friends with people who already live close by, why not assume the same when you’re living in SFH?
Frankly, I am reading often about how suburbia is alienating compared to dense city living, and I am frankly bewildered. My experience have been completely opposite of that. I think people are comparing suburbia today vs communal living in cities 70 years ago, where yeah, you could make the case that the social ties in cities 70 years ago were stronger than are in today’s suburbs — but this is the whole Bowling Alone thing, not dense city vs suburbs issue.
wlxd
2yr ago
Of course they force me to work. Without income taxes, I’d be already retired, instead, I have to work for couple more years.
wlxd
2yr ago
In late 2020, I believed the same thing as your friend, that vaccines will stop transmission. It was very reasonable belief at the time, especially given the vaccine trial data. Had it actually been true, vaccine mandates would have made much more sense, and I wouldn’t have had minded them. Too bad it turned out false.
wlxd
2yr ago
You didn’t pay attention to this stuff back in 2020? We discussed it extensively at the motte.
Pfizer execs didn’t have to “acknowledge” that they didn’t test for transmission reduction, it was quite obvious from the get go, based on the actual design of the clinical studies. This was never seen as a requirement for approval.
It sure would have been nice if vaccines stopped transmission, and many (including me) believed at the time that the vaccines will in fact do so. This turning out not to be the case was initially a big disappointment, and then, when they started doing forceful vaccination mandates when we already knew they don’t do shit for stopping transmission, was pushing me into white rage every time I thought about it. Nevertheless, the actual studies never tested that.
The reason was twofold: first, the higher priority was to figure out if there actually is reduction in symptoms and negative outcomes — this is what was meant by “efficacy”. Initial studies used for approval showed pretty huge risk reductions, on the order of 90% reduction in having observable Covid symptoms with positive tests. I don’t believe that anyone believes that the vaccines have this good efficacy at blocking symptoms today. I am not sure what is the reason for this discrepancy. Maybe it’s because the vaccines were targeting original variant, and the virus evolved to be much better at spreading. Maybe the elevated response from vaccine lasts for very short time, couple of months at most. I don’t know, stopped paying attention at Covid science altogether somewhere in the middle of 2021, when I realized that the science and the truth were mostly irrelevant for the policies and narratives.
Second, it is actually pretty hard to design a study that measures efficacy at stopping transmission with any good degree of confidence that would be approved by IRB, a notoriously NIMLY (Not In My LaboratorY) bodies. Useful studies are “””unethical””” to run, so we’ll let the virus spread to billions and kill millions without trying to understand how it does so through direct experiment, instead we collectively decided to just watch its shadows on the cave’s wall.
Yes, I agree with you that most of the covid restriction have made very little sense at best, and starting from somewhere in 2021, they were basically a lunacy. But, dude, Covid is so last year, we already litigated this here to death, there is probably nothing new you can say here on this topic that hasn’t been already said last year by others. At this point, I’m so over it that I’m actually puzzled when someone around me even brings up Covid unironically. I will never trust the “””experts””” on this, or any other topic that actually matters to the society ever again, but, again, I already said it last year as well. It’s over, current thing is different now.
wlxd
2yr ago
Being poorer is an asset, not a drawback, at competing in things which most wealthy people dont find worth doing. It drives down your opportunity cost.
wlxd
2yr ago
I have a good number of friends who had pretty good results in programming competitions like Google Code Jam (think, top 5 scorers). They come from an Eastern European country, and, most probably, they are more intelligent than basically anyone you have ever personally met. Among them, they boast dozens of IOI/IMO/ICPC medals etc. Top tiers of sheer brainpower, by quote objective standards.
Here is something to understand about them: based on their individual background, those international competitions were some of the best options to gain success and status available to them at the time. After these competitions, they went on to become grad students at Harvard, Columbia, CMU and the like, and/or got a job at top FAANGs, making $500k today (roughly a decade after their competition successes). These options simply weren’t open (or even, for that matter, conceivable) to many of them when they were honing their competition skills way back in high school, or freshmen years at university, purely because your options are much more limited in second or third tier countries.
Now compare this to the options available to a highly intelligent and driven American young adult. Is try-harding at these objective merit-based competitions worth it? Not really: you will be competing against literally billions of people across the world, and your inborn advantage of being born in US, the land of many opportunities, will help you very little.
The more typical way of succeeding in current day America, which is getting to an elite college, are in fact conflicting with tryharding at competitions: practicing for those will take a lot of your time, which could be more effectively spent on honing items that will look better on your college applications. Quite simply, foundational Americans have better ways of enjoying success and status than these competition.
This is even better seen in those gaming competitions, which are dominated by lower class people from poor countries, as for them, spending 12+ hours a day playing video games have lowest opportunity cost. I would never allow my son to even try to get into that “career”.
This is also why Soviet science was such high quality: for the top people, there was little way to achieve success “in the industry”, and so the position of university professor was relatively really good compared to potential earnings and responsibilities you’d have at a high level position in some state owned enterprise. The wage and status differential was not huge. Compare this to today’s enormous differential between what you can make in US academia, vs the industry, and note also the incentives of US immigration system on foreign researchers (I can expand on this at some other occasion).
wlxd
2yr ago
It is definitely possible that someone lecturing them might cause them to change their behavior. It definitely did and does happen in many contexts and for many behaviors. Humans behavior is most definitely malleable.
Now, will this cause the outcomes to converge across the board? I wouldn’t bet on this.
wlxd
2yr ago
Frankly, I don’t find this whole angle of “who sees the body” to be very interesting. It is highly unlikely that this will affect my thinking about the issue in any significant manner. Finding someone’s body is normal, if not exactly everyday part of human existence. I don’t think that the issue of dealing with dead bodies should be the driving factor in the matter.
wlxd
2yr ago
I don’t understand the point you are trying to make. Killing yourself gruesomely in public is deplorable, same as defecating in public. We manage to have people avoid doing the latter, we can also have them avoid the former. Just because you want to kill yourself doesn’t mean that you’re released from all societal expectations as to your behavior. For example, a mother of small children killing herself to escape from her psychological or mental issues is despicable: you are expected to provide for your children without shirking the responsibility.
That I allow people killing themselves doesn’t mean I condone that decision in every circumstance. My view is rather (and this is also a response to /u/VelveteenAmbush) that suicide is in some situations not a sign of mental illness, but instead a quite reasonable decision given the circumstances. If a 20-something girl tries to off herself as a result of “psychological trauma”, yeah, I think she most likely should be involuntarily committed. However, keeping elderly, sickly and suffering people alive despite their wishes is pointless and disrespectful.
wlxd
2yr ago
You’re missing the entire point. If she simply killed herself, we wouldn’t be discussing it here. Instead, she said that she want to be killed, the system ground its gears, approved her killing, and as a result someone killed her. This is fundamentally different, because it affirms her choice and, in fact, means that people are complicit in the tragedy. That’s the opposite of virtuous.
wlxd
2yr ago
I’m pretty conflicted here. On the one hand, I think people should have right to commit suicide: prohibiting people from doing that, keeping them prisoner in this world, is rather ghastly. At the same time, I don’t think that anyone should actively assist in the process, except in cases where the person is literally unable to actually proceed at the task, and only to the extent of their actual physical inability. For example, quadriplegics who can still move their heads get a setup where they get a button that they can press that will inject them with lethal drugs, people who have enough motor control to inject themselves could have the drug delivered to their beds, so that they can pull it into syringe and inject themselves, and people who are “just” depressed, but otherwise physically fine, get no help whatsoever.
I find the idea of euthanizing a healthy young person rather morally revolting. If they want to kill themselves, they should just do it, and if they can’t bring themselves to do it, this strongly suggests that the person is not actually fully into this. The person in question has, allegedly, two prior suicide attempts. Normally, most suicide attempts from young women are just performative attempts at getting attention, so they are not meant to succeed, but here it is more likely to have just been ineptness at getting things done, given that you do not sign on a professional to do the job done if it’s just performative. Still, I would be more fine with the setup of 1) getting a professional advice on an appropriate method, 2) creating some kind of DNR statement, so that if you fail at killing yourself quickly, nobody will try to rescue you, and 3) doing it in some place and time where and when you are unlikely to be get interrupted in the process, so that nobody is actually put into position of having to decide what to do about your not quite yet dead body.
This way, while healthy young people killing themselves will still be a tragedy, at least nobody will be complicit in this. Euthanizing healthy young people due to “mental health trauma” seems akin to me to deciding that giving heroin addicts as much heroin as they want is actually a perfectly good solution to the problem of heroin addiction, or, at even more basic level, giving a child a candy any time they ask for one. Indulging someone else’s wishes is not always good for them, and killing a healthy young person is definitely a central example. We should inculcate virtues, instead of maximizing expressed utility functions.
wlxd
2yr ago
The $16k quote included the following hardware:
4A6L6024A1000A 4A6L6024A1000A Single Stage, 17 SEER, 9.5 HSPF, 24,000 btu 2 Ton, 20 Amp
1.00 $8,844.78 $8,844.78
AMSTEM6A0B24H21SB AMSTEM6A0B24H21SB Air Handler 2 Ton, Communicating, Variable Speed Blower
1.00 $5,925.21 $5,925.21
Install and permits were listed as ~$1500. I was trying to find out how much these actually retail for, to see how much I'm being overcharged, but apparently the suppliers hide the prices from end-users for some completely inexplicable reason.
The heat pump I have also works as AC in summer, in case this is relevant for pushing up the price of the device (which I don't think it really should, given that pretty much all that is required to make a heat pump work as AC is a reverse valve).
wlxd
2yr ago
I am very interested in hearing how much it is going to cost you. My 15 year old heat pump broke last winter, and I was considering replacing it instead of fixing, but the quotes were in $16-20k range, compared to $1000 to repair, so I decided to punt it. This is in expensive liberal coastal city.
wlxd
2yr ago
-Much like Google, there is an incentive for starting new projects, but not necessarily finishing them,
I don't think this is a problem at Google. Google actually has rather strong focus on launching things, and the promo process strongly incentivizes it. The issue is rather with maintaining it post-launch. The typical story is that you get the project to launch, stay for a quarter or two to bask in the glory, and then move on to fresher, greener pastures.
wlxd
2yr ago
I haven’t actually watched The Expanse, but I read it, and I wouldn’t mind reworking some plots and characters in later novels: they just weren’t all that good in the first place. Same with the last books of Witcher series (though I read these close to two decades ago, so maybe they were actually better than I remember them).
The real issue is not so much lack of fidelity, but rather changing things in order to make some kind of political or cultural point, especially if they change good parts to be bad. But, I don’t watch any of the new moving pictures anyway, so I’m probably not the person to talk to about it.
wlxd
2yr ago
"not the sole driver" brings to mind 99%, maybe 90%. "Not necessarily the biggest one" immediately brings us below 49.9%. Which?
That obviously depends on the circumstances, people involved, etc. What do you expect me to do here, give a rigorous, quantified analysis of a rather qualitative statement?
Actual, real people who are very skilled at, and work very hard at, profit-maximizing - as in, specifically, understanding how the company makes money and making decisions to increase profit.
Some are, but so what? My argument is not that nobody ever tries to maximize profit for the company, but that it is not the sole, or often even main goal of people who make decisions.
Executives often have compensation plans that directly hinge on stock price, though?
Let me quote the next statement that comes after the one you quoted:
You get paid in Amazon stock, not in your project’s stock, which creates a sort of tragedy-of-commons situation.
Did you miss it, or do you need me to elucidate what I meant here?
Less strong than 'total universal law' ... sure, but how much so? Enough to be 'not even the biggest driver'?
Well, let's be specific then. Consider Melonie Parker, Google's Chief Diversity Officer. In what way, do you think, she focuses on the company's bottom line? How exactly do you think her initiatives and decisions can quantifiably lead to differences in profitability? How can the CEO or the board track her performance year over year? Or compare it to her predecessor, Danielle Brown? Clearly, not by tracking the revenues and profit margin of her department. What tools does the board have available to measure her impact on quarterly earnings with any reasonable degree of confidence? The answer is, really, none. It's all gut feeling.
Do you have any real first hand experience working in a large corporation? Do your meetings and decisions always focus on bottom line first and foremost? This has very much not been my experience.
But would you have specifically made the cast of a TV-show all white
I actually find this suggestion pretty funny -- it really tells more about you than you think. This is a real failure to understand the other side, it's like Christians who think that the atheists oppose prayer in school because they secretly worship Satan.
To the point, no, if I had my way, ensuring specific skin color standards among the cast would not be my priority. I find the race-based casting practices grating not because I have some kind of aesthetic preference for white-skinned actors, but rather because it is often done deliberately to not cast white-skinned actors. This is similar to why progressive would complain about an all-white cast (including all extras) of a Hollywood movie set in modern day America, but do not mind an all-white movie produced by Czechs, set in Czechia: the former can only be done to make a particular point, whereas the latter is just normal.
when the market research showed having it be 50% hispanic and 50% black would get the most views because the viewers want diversity?
You're talking as if "market research" was activity akin to determining tensile strength of a steel alloy, for the purposes of minimizing amount of material used given the desired load bearing capacity. The truth of the matter is that you can make "market research" say anything you want (in fact, this is the main purpose for the existence of consulting firms like Deloitte: to get the "independent experts" to say that the company needs to do what the execs wanted to do anyway), and if the movie flops, you can always blame something else, because there's always more than one cause of a flop anyway. It's not like government regulator of movie industry will start an independent committee to study the cause of the flop, and will unearth the shoddy report made by paid-off consultant. Again, all of this is obvious to people who actually have corporate experience.
We've totally avoided things like 'how common is this', or the specific contingency that could lead here, in favor of broad, general statements that don't connect to much.
This is just an isolated demand of rigor. What do you expect me to do, get quantitative data on what happens in closed meeting rooms?
Like, the above style of argument really isn't gonna prove much.
But see, I'm not actually trying to prove much, only that the focus on the financial bottom line is not the sole driving force of corporate decision making.
How much first hand experience do you actually have working for the large corporations?
In mine, money is not the sole driver of decision making, or even necessarily the biggest one. That’s because it is not the abstract rational profit-maximizing agents who are making these decisions, but actual, real people. Moreover, these people often don’t even stand to lose or gain the actual figure that their decisions result in. You get paid in Amazon stock, not in your project’s stock, which creates a sort of tragedy-of-commons situation.
Next, if product is less profitable that it could conceivably be, how would anyone even know that? If you’re a mid level exec, you can present your case to higher level execs in a light positive to you, you can cherry pick metrics, shift blame some unrelated causes or some poor schmucks etc. You can pull it off, because you are good at corporate politics, why, that’s how you became a mid level exec in the first place.
As you can see, the incentives to focus on the bottom line are less strong than you suggest. This is why economists keep talking about principal-agent problems. Would people actually do that? I’ll say this: if was in a position where I’m in control of significant amount of resources of a wealthy corporation, and I can use it to nudge it to achieve my own political/social goals with small risk to my own career, and with damage to company’s bottom line, I would have totally done it. Would SJW-aligned execs, unlike me, stick to the moral principles of the gods of capitalism, and only care for the bottom line? Obviously not.
Germany is not even able to keep their existing power plants open during energy crisis in the face of opposition from the greens. I don’t think reopening a mine closed for more than a decade is going to be any easier.
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