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so an OoM less than trillions

In case anyone really cares about the technical definitions of order of magnitude. The numbers 175x10^9 and 10^12, might correctly be said to be of different orders, but the former is not an order of magnitude less than the latter.

To differ by an order of magnitude two numbers X and Y must satisfy abs(log10(X) - log10(Y)) >= 1. In this case log10(1000) - log10(175) ~ 0.76. It did seem a bit hyperbolic to say trillions, but it's not technically an OoM less.

On the other hand, to express the order of magnitude of each number individually, the conventional range for the significand is [1/sqrt(10), sqrt(10)). In this case 1.75x10^11 and 1x10^12. So the first has an order of magnitude of 11 and the second 12.

Depends on the variant and how it mutates. If it becomes an easily transmissible virus that attacks the lungs it could get much worse than covid. Ferrets, who are quite similar to humans as far as respiratory system goes, afaik, have a terrible death rate to h5n1.

There was a campaign video (which I haven't seen) where Vance tried to present himself as a "regular dude" by going into a donut shop and buying a box of donuts. Apparently the person behind the counter wasn't interested in taking part, Vance stumbled over his words and the whole thing was awkward and uncomfortable for everyone.

Leaving, but turning around long before they get there. It will be an in-joke, and we get to make fun of the idiots who actually fly to Alaska.

What do you mean? He all but name-dropped each and every one of us individually and hand-wrote the themotte.org URL on every surface in the world!

I will not be satisfied until young men leaving for the Hock each winter becomes a tradition.

Threats to our community aside

Are we going to move to an onion site now that the VP candidate made a 5 second vague reference to a writer whose comment section inspired this forum?

Please explain for someone out of the loop.

Terms that were popular only in small, socially ostracized circles of internet weirdos and incels are now mainstream.

I still have yet to see "Bayesian", "quokka", "defectbot", "epistemic status" or "toxoplasma" in the Washington Post. Heh.

He says it's actually the Russians funding the German Green party, not even hedging or speculating.

It was going around in the news a while back:

Has the Russian Federation been funding environmental activists around the world? A few more voices point in this direction.

WWF Germany, BUND (Friends of the Earth), and NABU (Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union), three environmental organisations who were avowed opponents of Germany's NordStream pipelines with Russia, dropped their opposition after Gazprom promised funding for environmental protection, according to a 2011 report from the European Parliament. A foundation set up by a German federal state, environmental organizations, and NordStream (controlled by Gazprom) had filled its coffers with €10 million with representatives of the environmental organizations sitting on the board. Did these groups drop their opposition to the pipelines because of Russian funding? Whether they did or not is anyone's guess.

Another striking example is Belgium, where the federal energy minister Tinne Van der Straeten (from the green party "GROEN") has sought to dismantle Belgium's nuclear energy capacity. Van der Straeten’s former job? Lawyer and associate at a law firm whose largest client is Gazprom.

It shouldn't really be surprising, as this is the straight-forward result of everyone's incentive's on the issue.

Greens were pushing for no fossil fuels,

The Greens were pushing first and foremost for shutting down nuclear power, at which they have succeeded last year. They would have done so sooner, but the Ukraine war erupted just as they were first scheduled to shutdown their last reactors, and the uncertainty over energy security made it impossible to shout down people raising questions like "uh... is this really the best moment for that?". Which doesn't mean they didn't try. They first said the shutdown process is in motion, and impossible to reverse for technical reasons, to which the staff of the last functioning power plant said "uh... we can run this as long as you want, it's just a question of getting more fuel", to which they tried to say "well, we can't get nuclear fuel on such short notice", to which the US said "we'll gladly sell it to you, with Amazon Prime next day delivery included", to which they finally had to say "fine... we'll keep it running for one more year, but don't think this will avoid the shutdown!".

They have done so with full knowledge it will increase carbon emissions, and only offering the excuse that a switch to renewable sources will drive it back down later on, in the long term.

This is months after you wrote this and I was not the intended audience, but after re-seeing this by chance of you linking it in another post I want to leave my regards to it. There is hard-earned wisdom in this that speak to me. It has been an aid in resisting certain mindsets I am not immune from, and I would be a lesser person without it at times, which is to say I would be a better person if I remembered it more often.

Thank you for writing it, and I hope you keep linking back to it in the future.

Add in that the war has increased food prices because the “breadbasket of Europe” can’t plant crops

This has little to do with food prices because the EU doesn't import much of the kind of foods that Ukraine produces. The EU is a massive food exporter, both cereals and more processed goods.

The reason food prices are up is due to increased fuel and fertilizer costs (and to a lesser extend a lack seasonal workers), which has to do with the war but not the economic disruption of Ukraine. Disruption of Ukraine farming primarily drives up food costs in the middle east and Africa, not Europe.

The 60% billion from the EU is just financial aid, there is also 47b in military aid.

Your point still stands but European aid isn't so low as just 60 billion.

Delhi smog is caused by the terrible industrial setup in India and people burning agricultural waste in punjab. Blaming diwali for smog is the same as blaming GTA games for shcool shooters. Fireworks are not healthy but the underlying cause is far far worse which is farmers in punjab and Indias abysmal living conditions.

Look up the river yamuna or ganges, like every Indian water body they get raw sewage dumped in them. This is also why Indiasn congregate to goa as literally every other water body is polluted to the point where it stinks from a mile away. Yamuna looks like its a free bubble bath due to the fucking foam.

Also swastikas are everywhere here lol, I helped paint some yesterday. It is a holy aryan symbol, just that euros and north americans cant use it.

Tangentially related but this reminds me of a tweet playfully mocking Vance which I found pretty funny, primarily just for how it was phrased:

[vice presidential debate]

moderator: what makes you smile

tim walz: my kids

jd vance: pass

moderator: what’s your favorite donut

jd vance: what if i killed you

It's interesting that Vance can see the parallels between pride parades and civil religion, but I wonder if he can see how christianity and wokeness fit in. Pride parades are positive rites - they celebrate the existence of LGBTs without demonizing straight people. Then wokeness came along, and its core thesis was original sin: you are born racist, sexist, and homophobic, and only through listening to marginalized voices, unpacking your racism, and de-toxifying your masculinity can you ever hope to be saved.

I think I'm mostly focused on terrible outliers, and the mortality for H5N1 just doesn't seem that high. Say 0.05x to 3x covid, something in that range. You then have to add long-term effects, which are hard to estimate &c, but it just doesn't seem very existentially threatening.

Why doesn't monkeypox excite you? It could fill in the niche that smallpox previously had.

Reuters: Diwali celebrations hit air quality in New Delhi

New Delhi topped charts on Friday as the world's most polluted city after revellers defying a ban on firecrackers to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, helped drive air quality to hazardous levels.

Thick smog wreathed the Indian capital, shrouding the presidential palace in the central district and the surrounding gardens popular with joggers and cyclists, after Thursday's celebrations.

Local government officials have banned use of firecrackers during Diwali and the winter over the last few years, in line with Supreme Court directives, but have had difficulty enforcing the measure despite the threat of jail.

In New Jersey, the posting of celebratory swastikas by Indian immigrants is causing some confusion.

After the Montville Township Police Department received a few phone calls about swastika sightings in October, it posted on Facebook to explain why.

The reason? Diwali.

"With Diwali coming up this October, I want the residents and citizens to be aware that a common symbol of this holiday is a Diwali swastika," the Oct. 16 post read. "...This post is in light of our police department already fielding calls regarding people seeing this symbol on cars and houses. We are trying to eliminate any unwarranted hostility toward any person displaying this for their religious purposes."

Except tried to overturn the results of an election and coup the most powerful country on Earth.

Live footage of TheMotte rn.

Is JD Vance here? Maybe, maybe not.

But if he was here, I don’t imagine he would be a prolific poster. Very busy guy, you see.

He’d most likely be a lurker that posts in inspired bursts and then slinks back into lurker mode for days, or weeks, or even months. He might have even got an AAQC or two.

He’d have been lurking around since SSC and the split with the subreddit, so he’d have some intermittent poasting history over at /r/themotte but probably not before.

I imagine he checks TheMotte regularly between his busy work life that doesn’t allow him much screen time.

He’d also be mega-based, undoubtedly.

Anyways, I’d look out for a guy like that.

The fact that he’s into Moldbug also suggests Rat adjacent. I mean I’m not surprised at all that someone reading Moldbug also reads Slatestar.

I want to point people back to my old comment on Grants Pass, because this logic has really infected tons of things. They were so successful in playing this game with sexuality (going all the way to effectively banning Christian groups from campuses) that it's almost hard to blame them for thinking that they could get away with it everywhere else, too. I don't really like to let my mind drift to partisan politics (rather than just focusing on understanding what is actually true), but it's hard to not have the thought floating around that we could easily have been two Clinton appointees in place of two Trump appointees away from this stuff metastasizing even more. Frankly, it just makes it annoyingly harder to simultaneously follow the news in the legal realm while also trying to stay personally philosophically coherent when to even explain what has happened requires constantly reminding yourself, "Of course this is complete philosophical bollocks."

I am Spartacus J.D. Vance.

This is Diwali week here in North India. I had a fun time, people make sweets, light up thier houses, in my city, markets are lit up too. There are fireworks everywhere, people burst crackers. A lot of shopping gets done, the air starts cooling down. It marks winter here. People who are not wokring soul crushing white collar jobs in a metropolis get a week long holiday here on the week of diwali. You have diwali themed parties too where people wear kurta pyjamas and play poker whilst sloshed. Also my mothers birthday yesterday, i gifted her some clothes, we did not do much else as it was also diwali. Earlier my grandad and dad would go to city palace here as grandad was a part of the royal staff due to being a part of the former feudal system but stopped as my grandads 92 now and broke his femur in half 4 months ago so cant walk much.

Here is some food that I ate yesterday, potato curry with puris (deep fried whole wheat bread) and kheer (rice pudding). Kheer is my favourite food on the planet, it takes a little time to make but well worth it. The recipes have english captions.

I saw the fights last weekend where Max Holloway got flatlined completely. He had it coming, you cannot fight for so long with small gloves in the best weight division and take this many shots, no matter who you are, you will get kod. The other fights were not as fun, Rob's freak injury and Rakic being gunshy was not fun to watch. I have had a bit of a change of heart in terms of MMA, I don't find it as fun now. I have been following it for 8 years now, just not as exciting now. The CTE stuff and fighter pay is another part of it.

My shoulder feels a little wonky. I got a partial labrum tear on my right shoulder 5 months ago, no surgery needed. I joined the gym again for the first time and feel slight pain in my shoulder even though I used way lighter weights and aimed for like 20-25 reps. I think I should not to go to failure on my exercises otherwise this can get worse. Will work out tomorrow. I will avoid shrugs altogether and avoid reaching failure or even getting close to it. I was told to do daily rehab stuff that I have not done in over 4 months which was not smart, started the rehab stuff again.

There will be no polo this weekend. I have started listening to more trance music since I started Concerta. I really like the vibe of late 2000s melodic trance. I lay down on my bed and just listen to some music; it's very fun. Listening to music whilst walking or driving isn't as enjoyable as it is when you are in a relaxed environment. Would appreciate some recommendations for music, any kind really. Posted a tweet about recs on my twitter!

P.S. It is also Movember officially, do donate to men's charities. I used to think therapy and prostate cancer stuff was cringe till I attended a session last week and my grandad got cancer and beat in the span of one or two years without any harm. So if you can donate, please do, get tested for testicular and prostate cancer and help other dudes struggling

Here are some killer glitch hop tracks that were released just for movember cascade, [if you had'nt] (https://youtube.com/watch?v=14UjO4QzPfE) and mosaic