domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
faceh
1m ago
One involves cognition, but that doesn’t alter the addictiveness.
The argument perhaps goes that you can mentally train yourself to resist the effects of a given stimuli when the source of the neurological effect is entirely local to your own brain.
But there's no training yourself to resist the introduction of exogenous drugs.
That’s because the choice is not actually free. It’s either coerced by an illusion or coerced by an animalistic instinct.
I'd object to the use of the term 'coerced' here, but otherwise mostly agree. I think its mostly based on the idea that they are not psychologically or philosophically prepared to give 'informed consent' to behaviors that have complex long-term implications. They literally cannot comprehend the effects, so while they can 'agree' to the terms, the consent lacks the actual 'comprehension' which is necessary for someone to truly consent to and accept the risks of a given transaction.
And the world has only gotten more complex, not less, so normal legal standards around 'age of consent' are, arguably, entirely outmoded for addressing this issue.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8m ago
I think this is a textbook case of the wisdom of keeping things that will be addictive as hard to ge5 as possible. Sports gambling in a casino might not be so terrible. The steps necessary to get to a casino for any sort of gambling serve as an important brake on the behavior. The fact that such gambling can now but done using stored credit card information on a device that is carried in the pocket makes it almost impossible for anyone with the proclivity to addiction to ever have control. And this is true of other potentially addictive behaviors— if you have your addiction always available, you can’t easily say no to it.
faceh
9m ago
I think the most palatable change would be something akin to banning those under age 16 from having social media accounts. Maybe a step further, banning them from possessing smartphones altogether (yes, enforcement would be a bear. No arguments there). Give them a basically functional blackberry-esque device that can send and receive messages and has GPS functionality and bluetooth, and no app store.
I think there has been vastly insufficient discussion of superstimuli and policies that.
Like, I am libertarian as fuck when it comes to social issues, but I've experienced the rush that gambling brings and my sincere belief is that we HAVE to provide some 'friction' in place to prevent people from slipping into deep, DEEP holes from which there is no escape, or at least they'll be stuck climbing out for years.
Consider if you owned a property with an extremely deep sinkhole on it, that was surrounded by smooth, polished rock with low friction coefficient on a 20 degree slope, so that anyone who wants to approach the edge of the pit would find it very difficult to climb back out without special equipment, and some % of people are going to slip and fall into the pit. If you're charging admission to view the pit, I argue we can reasonably say you're being extremely negligent (and therefore at least partially responsible) if you didn't provide people with adequate warnings, safety equipment, and AT LEAST a guardrail around the edge to keep people from sliding in.
ESPECIALLY if you were enticing people to come view the pit with the promise that some small number of guests would get fabulously wealthy, and the closer they get to the edge of the pit, the more they could possibly win.
Even my deepest belief if personal freedom doesn't require that the pit must be tolerated as-is, in its maximally dangerous state.
But metaphorically speaking, we're apparently allowing thousands of these sorts of pits to dot the psychological landscape, with bright flashing advertisements drawing in patrons and no mechanisms in place to 'rescue' those who fall in.
It is bad enough for adults who get sucked in, kids whose entire development was awash in these stimuli might not even develop basic defenses, since this is what they would consider 'normal.' The kids these days have gambling mechanics in ALL their video games, they've already made and lost minor fortunes in Crypto, they can gamble on literally any sports event they want, and they grew up watching influencers shilling them on the most harebrained of get-rich-quick schemes.
And meanwhile, financial literacy is barely ever taught.
Also, it is patently absurd that the rules as they exist allow anyone over 18 or 21 to throw money away gambling, but if they want to invest in early-stage startups they have to have a certain amount of wealth built up already.
The 'problem' such as it is, if we start investigating and making rules for those who have addictive personalities, or are easily manipulated, or simply don't understand odds/statistics and restrict their ability to use their own money in ways they wish. Maybe they have restricted bank accounts that limit them to, say $500/day withdrawals. Maybe they're not allowed to take on long-term debt, or we legally cap the amount of debt they can take to some specific % of their net worth. Or require them to pass an annual financial audit to exercise certain rights...
Because if we don't, there's a certainty that many of them will blow up the entirety of their savings and becomes a burden on the rest of us later on. And thus we can only do our best to mitigate this externality.
Well, we're essentially carving out a different class of citizens with reduced individual rights due to their vulnerabilities. What's the justification for letting such people vote? Or
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
12m ago
It is not generally the case that works of state and local governments are public domain.
State and local governments usually do retain a copyright on their works. 17 USC §105 only places federal documents in the public domain.[11] However, laws and/or court decisions in some states may place their work in the public domain.
Even if the photo in question was in the public domain, it's still required to indicate this on the photo (example). Having no license on a file is not the same as having a PD license on it.
jkf
16m ago
Yes, police departments do not typically license their mugshots -- this does not mean that they aren't in the public domain.
Quantumfreakonomics
17m ago
I still audibly chuckle every time I hear the phrase “subject-matter jurisdiction”.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
17m ago
Was that a deliberate attempt to kill pedestrians (terrorism) or just complete reckless disregard in the heat of the moment? The degree of premeditation wasn't clear to me from what I read of the press coverage at the time.
There was also the 2014 incident at SXSW that killed 2 and injured 23, although that seemed to be reckless disregard while fleeing police, rather than ideologically motivated.
Not sure if it makes a difference to me in terms of the relevant criminal punishments, but it seems like it would be relevant for trying to categorize similar events.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
18m ago
I’m not sure it’s naughty thoughts so much as a deep need for a cause to fight for. For most people the dominant issue is boredom in some sense. There’s no greater thing in most people’s lives than going to work and coming home. It’s a bit empty and quite boring. At the same time our culture has been heavily promoting the idea of heroes saving the world. We’re part of the culture of the spectacle and our dominant way of interacting with the outside world is screens. We’re seeing a movie and want to be the heroes of the movie.
I think there is a rather large dose of narcissism involved here. They’re hoping for disaster so they can be a hero or heroine. I just don’t under the need to put yourself in the center of historic events. I’m hoping for a nice quiet, boring life. I can’t imagine that it’s going to even be helpful to anyone caught in the crosshairs to have the fight taken up by people doing it out of boredom.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
20m ago
This photo continues to exist, so it seems that in this particular example the tactic is not working.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
21m ago
What is the licensing issue with a mug-shot?
The licensing issue with the previous photo appears to be that there was no license on it.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&logid=355493040
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
22m ago
I question whether there’s a difference between addiction to drugs and addiction to gambling. If gambling induces an endogenous release of dopamine at a level commensurate to the release of dopamine from cocaine, then there is literally no reason to treat cocaine as “more addictive” than gambling. It’s the same addictiveness. One involves cognition, but that doesn’t alter the addictiveness.
what are the major culture war angles on digital addiction? For kids
Every child allowed to play a modern video game is being trained for a life of gambling by way of lootbox mechanics. It’s really the ultimate disproof of liberalism. We shouldn’t give people free choice where (1) they lack wisdom to discern the complicated costs and benefits, (2) their instincts overrides rationality. That’s because the choice is not actually free. It’s either coerced by an illusion or coerced by an animalistic instinct.
07mk
23m ago
I've often dreaded the inevitable Back to the Future remake/reboot that Hollywood will jump on once the stubborn owners of the franchise die off. I just wonder how they'll manage the whole central plot line involving near-incest and a boy punching out another boy in order to protect a girl and win her heart.
Marty McFly will have to be a woman, likely black and gay/bi. Martina's equivalent-age father from the 90s being sexually aggressive towards her just isn't going to be as funny as the actual male Marty getting sexually assaulted by his equivalent-age mother from the 50s. Changing it to her mother could work for laughs and for the spectacle, but then the central plot being around getting her lesbian/bi/bi-curious mother to pair up with her father would probably not be acceptable to Hollywood.
NewCharlesInCharge
23m ago
The judge did plenty, though granted him a whole lot of leeway. Eventually he ended up having to attend the trial from a separate room via videoconference so that he could be muted when he wouldn't behave.
This was a fun watch. The guy was a Soverign Citizen, and a small corner of Reddit went nuts with it. "Estoppel" became a catchphrase. I just checked and it's actually still quite active: https://old.reddit.com/r/DarrellBrooksJr/
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
26m ago
Using a truck rental as a weapon wasn't a thing until that Nice attack.
As a ramming weapon, yes. But there was a spate of using them in bombings in the '90s. The 1993 WTC bombing and 1995 Oklahoma City bombing both used Ryder rental trucks. But I suppose that just proves your point that people crazy enough to commit mass homicide are rather derivative in terms of their methods.
Rov_Scam
35m ago
Lol, Uber has been offering this for years.
Another example is that the financial industry already pays for employees to take late night taxis home.
It's common in law, too, and you can also order food if you're working late. I worked in an office on the North Side from 2015 to 2017, when we moved into new digs in the Strip District. The move roughly coincided with Uber Eats launching in Pittsburgh and us switching over to them for our "late night perks". To be clear, the late-night car service is aimed toward people who rely on transit to get to work and is only offered by companies that don't offer parking passes. the rationale was that after 8 pm, transit switched from operating every 15 minutes to operating every hour, and since we were on the North Side you'd have to either walk across the bridge to Downtown or take 2 buses unless you happened to be on your route already, and doubling the wait times made that impracticable. I lived in the exurbs at the time and almost always drove in anyway, so I never used it.
Anyway, prior to the move the firm used a black car service which was better than Uber but a bit intimidating for normal people. A guy a worked with who used it once was kind of freaked out when a guy showed up in a Lincoln and opened the door for him. The reason why we switched was that the process, for both that and ordering food after 7 pm, used to be cumbersome. You had to use the company credit card and get receipts, and then fill out an expense report and submit it to HR. Then, just to make things perverse, HR would come back to me with another form I had to sign to demonstrate that the expense had been approved by an attorney (even though I already signed the expense report). The HR lady was thrilled about the switch because we could just order everything through the company account which would put the appropriate restrictions on time, location, price, etc., and then not worry about the forms. Then like 6 months later they started charging an additional 10% on business accounts and she was mildly pissed. I still had to deal with a ton of other credit card approvals, petty cash forms, reimbursement forms, mileage logs, and other bullshit that I (and everyone else) waited to do until the last minute to the long-suffering HR lady's eternal consternation. Good times.
In any event, I haven't heard of anyone using Uber for Business other than for occasional transportation like when traveling out of town or something like that. I don't see it ever becoming an everyday perk for anyone, let alone common enough to have any significant impact on traffic. Perks are usually commensurate with the level of responsibility and the nature of the work involved. Lots of people work late, but most of them can't bill food to the company because the added value doesn't justify it. When the extra 3 hours you spend at work clearly nets the company an additional thousand dollars, 20 bucks worth of takeout isn't an issue. Company cars are usually reserved for people in sales or other jobs that require you to be on the road all day, and even then they have to pay taxes on them based on personal use. One firm I worked at gave the attorneys parking passes but admins had to take the bus. This is because they expected the attorneys to work late hours regularly enough that paying for a spot was cheaper than paying for a car service. Admins never worked late. I switched jobs specifically because I hated being stuck at work late enough to be able to watch night games at PNC from my office window.
ArmedTooHeavily
38m ago
The one time I asked a doctor, he told me that donating a pint of blood cost closer to 2000 calories for your body to replace.
ArmedTooHeavily
40m ago
More or less 100% of people who refer to it as "the JQ" are using it as you describe.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
45m ago
I found this blog when I was trying to figure out what a “Soviet triangle” meant. Thought it was interesting reading. That article is about bus networks, but there are others on subway placement, throughout, all sorts of stuff.
congestion fees
Those certainly disincentivize traffic, but I’m not sure I grasp the economics. Taxing consumption reduces the clearing quantity. But the clearing quantity for roads is the supply of workers! Any intervention that doesn’t change the ratio of road usage per worker is going to affect the cost of labor, too.
So we need to ask whether self-driving cars fundamentally changes that ratio. I think it has to, right? Flawless zipper-merging. Reduced accident rates. Shorter following distances, perhaps ending in attached convoys to reduce drag. There’s a lot of room for technical solutions.
I don’t think we’ve hit the limit on people-miles per hour. Until we do, we still have room to make congestion more efficient.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
49m ago
Redot
I'm happy to hear it. If they can make it so that compiling for double-precision AND C# actually works, then they're winners in my book. I'll check it out once I've established a new weekly routine that makes some suitable time for sitting down and tinkering.
@Southkraut, you mentioned you probably wouldn't have time over the past week, but I'll traditionally ask how are you doing anyway.
Thanks for asking, and please do keep it up, even though it's a bit of a drought right now. I did not get around to anything at all - I was always at work, or making up for my absence by going full hog on dad duty, or just plain tuckered out.
Can you elaborate on this. I think I know what you mean, but I don't know what consequences, if any, it would have on picking an Engine, for example.
It wouldn't. It's not related to the engine question. It's rather a change in how I approach my cluster of projects, and a change that snuck up on me and I only recognized it long after it happened. Let me illustrate the comparison a little.
Old: There are many Physical Entities. All these entities have complex physical properties and interactions. All these entities are always rendered and physically simulated. Some of those entities may contain so-called Functional Structures. Some of those Functional Structures might support Behaviors. Some of those might be Agents, who actually act upon the game world. All their actions and interactions go through the physical properties of their Physical Entities.
New: There are many agents. All these agents have goals and sets of possible actions. Some of those agents have physical bodies. But the actions and interactions of the agents only account for their physical bodies in the broadest sense, i.e., usually just location. Those physical bodies that are very close to the player's location are actually rendered and physically simulated, but the abstract behavior of the agents has priority over the physics simulation, and they can interact with non-rendered, non-physically-simulated agents just fine.
Also, congrats on the new job! I recall you posted about being burned out with the old one a while back. I've been in a similar position not long ago, so I'm glad to hear you took matters into your own hands, and hope the new job is a better fit.
I didn't really take the initiative on this until the last job really started falling apart, but it's still a sound improvement overall. Better salary, conditions, benefits, location, and most importantly I get along with my new colleagues very well, which was sadly not really the case in the old job. That last point is very important to me; I'm much more motivated when people I actually like depend on me. I'm also on premises all the time, which helps a lot with actually focusing on the job - no more distractions on the home front. The work itself is extremely dry and technically uninteresting, but I suppose you can't have it all. I'm honestly surprising myself with how easily I manage to adapt to the new working conditions after four years of practically pure home office, and how much energy I can muster for work after so much time spent just dragging myself along in a job I hated. It's nice. Exhausing, too, but I'm happier than I've been in a long time.
How did your similar situation turn out?
MathWizard
Good things are good
50m ago
I am absolutely not blue tribe, and never have been, this does not describe me. I grew up with Christian Republican parents, got a hunting license at 12 years old, I hate cities, am highly skeptical of big government and redistributive policies, and think the majority of social problems are best solved by self control and personal responsibility, or failing that, ruthless law enforcement. My grandparents on both sides are rednecks and they are wonderful and kind people who I adore. But I personally would rather spend my day on my computer than outdoors on a pickup truck, and I think the Republicans are equally braindead as the Democrats, just less trigger-happy about their stupid plans. I suppose you could define me as "a particular disaffected part of the red tribe", but then you have to explain why I have more in common with the other blue-grey people than I do with the pure red people. I think lots of the right-leaning Mottizens have similar cultural leanings. Some of them are disaffected blue tribe, but others came from Red. But most of us don't fit in nicely with either.
Even if you don't think "gray tribe" is the best way to describe it, there's clearly some real thing that the term is pointing to, something that bridges the gap between Red and Blue.
roystgnr
56m ago
No one thought of using airliners as weapons until Al-Qaeda did it.
Tom Clancy, "Debt of Honor", wasn't too far off. Disgruntled pilot rather than hijackers, one plane into the Capitol building rather than 4 planes into assorted targets, but it obviously conveyed "a jumbo jet full of fuel is a dangerous missile", and it was the 7th book in a best-selling series that had already been adapted into 3 blockbuster movies.
Using a truck rental as a weapon wasn't a thing until that Nice attack.
It was the weapon delivery system in the OKC bombing, but yeah, not the weapon.
as a result pretty much every major public square in Europe now has bollards to prevent people from getting vehicles into them during busy times.
I've always half-wondered why truck attacks didn't become a more serious threat. It seemed so trivially easy and moderately effective that in the wake of Nice I expected it to become just another Thing that happens regularly. Wikipedia doesn't even list more than a handful of copycats.
it certainly seems like people who commit terrorist attacks want it to be recognizeable as such; or alternatively are just generally uncreative.
IIRC this still holds even if you have a very loose definition of "terrorist"; the "contagious" timing of school shootings suggests that the kinds of assholes who try to become infamous for shooting up a school are much more likely to do so if there's been another famous school shooting recently, as if even though the idea is hardly a secret at this point they don't really take it seriously until they see a de-facto commercial for another one on the news.
I do also think there might be something to the theory
Is killing a lot of people with a gun just that much more satisfying than running them over with a car?
The black trench coats and guns at Columbine were like an evil echo of The Matrix protagonists superhumanly fighting The Man, whereas simply running people over feels like something that could be accomplished by an elderly person confusing the gas and brake pedals. They say that "nobody thinks they're the villain of their own story", but also nobody even wants to think they're just a half-competent mook in their own story, so perhaps when they do slip into villainy they try to make it dramatic. The sort of utilitarian who deduces that you can massacre more people with a car than a gun might also generally be the sort who deduces that massacring a bunch of people doesn't actually accomplish any of your real goals anyway.
haroldbkny
1hr ago
a modern take on Back to the Future featuring a Cybertruck
"The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with a complete lack of style?"
some
1hr ago
The article still includes:
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported that the contents of Brooks' Facebook account, which contained "Black nationalist and anti-Semitic" viewpoints, and his crime were exploited by white supremacists in order to push racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, claiming Brooks' attack was racially motivated, that he killed his victims specifically because he hated white people, and that left-wing media were attempting to cover up the incident. Law enforcement did not give a motive for the attack.[109][110][111]
Through the "shamelessness", to use your accurate term, is so off the charts, it may have been added by trolls seeking to discredit ADL. It certainly lowers my opinion of this anti-antisemitism organization to see it defending an antisemitic murderer, by pining of the label of "antisemite" onto his critics.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
Mobile sports gambling is like, really, really bad, mmm'kay
Color me in the not surprised category. The article, and the additional one's it links at the bottom, do a good job of toe-ing the line between "people should be given the freedom to make choices" and "holy shit this is sentencing those with addictive personalities to lives of poverty."
I'm not super interested in talking about sports gambling itself, although I welcome any good anecdotes, and would instead like to invite comments on the concept of "digital addiction."
There's enough literature out there now that there's a strong enough case to be made that digital technology - very specifically smartphones - can cause behavior patterns that can accurately be described as addictive. However, there is still a delineation between digital addiction and physical/neurological addiction of alcohol and drugs. As a society, we acknowledge the basic danger of these substances by age-limiting some and outright prohibiting others.
My general question would be; what are the major culture war angles on digital addiction? For kids? For all of society?
if the goal is to reduce poverty globally, build a Kowloon Walled City metropolis in the Nevada desert and encourage people to move there
if we're confusing "everyone should be able to live in a quaint quiet town" with "reduce poverty globally", my answer is NIMBY
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