domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
WhateverHappenedToNorman
4hr ago
Yeah, the idea is that new blood is less polluted. You're dumping all of that on whoever gets your blood, but I think if you're in that situation, that's the least of your worries.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
4hr ago
But this doesn't scale, does it? How many people can achieve amazing wealth?
erwgv3g34
4hr ago
That luxury has been reserved for the rich ever since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. See "When Did Healthy Communities Become Illegal?" by Charles Tuttle.
Rov_Scam
4hr ago
In fact, self driving cars should save urbanism by getting rid of all those horrid parking lots and parking garages. Infill replacing surface parking will bring up density and also close the gap between existing businesses that are surrounded by seas of parking.
Except all the cars in those lots are now on the road, with nobody in them. The streets are the new parking lots. This wouldn't be a good thing.
faceh
4hr ago
I think it presents an interesting calculation though.
It makes it more palatable to sacrifice your 20's and 30's in the pursuit of wealth (rather than social life, sex, etc. etc.) and then, once you achieve amazing wealth, spend some portion of that to get yourself back to the vitality of your 20's (or close to it) and make up for your lost time, with a LOT more money than you'd usually have.
If money can buy back some time and health, it makes it much more palatable to sacrifice those earlier on.
Rov_Scam
4hr ago
I already addressed this, but, aside from economic concerns, the biggest downside to this idea is that it would massively increase traffic. With few exceptions, cars only contribute to traffic when someone is actually trying to get from Point A to Point B. When I drive to work, I'm creating traffic between my house and my office, but after that my car is just sitting in the parking lot all day. If cars are a service I'm start creating traffic as soon as I summon the car, which now has to get to my house from wherever it is. And once I get to the office it's unlikely that there is going to be anyone here who happens to need a ride, so it now has to create more traffic while it either finds a passenger or heads back to home base.
Now consider a typical urban rush hour. All the cars that would normally just disappear into garages for the day are now driving around looking for fares. Or driving back out to lots in the suburbs. Now, in addition to the typical morning rush, we have to contend with a corresponding late-morning rush that consists entirely of empty vehicles. Imagine what it would be like if even a quarter of the cars that are currently parked were out on the street and you have an idea of what this would be like.
faceh
4hr ago
ALLEGEDLY it helps clear out toxins, heavy metals, and other 'forever' chemicals that the body can't otherwise process.
I believe it.
Also supposed to help with blood pressure, which anecdotally seems to be the case for me (I give blood, sometimes double red, on a very regular basis).
jeroboam
5hr ago
Supposedly it's good for you, although that seems awfully convenient doesn't it? What if the research showed the opposite effect. I doubt it would get published.
The primary mechanism for benefits would appear to be reducing iron levels in males. But it also apparently burns 600 calories, so it's a great way to stay trim for the summer bikini season ladies!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5hr ago
This would be solved by introducing a huge amount of Cars-As-A-Service. I believe Elon has already published this idea on the Tesla website.
The idea would be that very few people outside of enthusiasts actually own a car. Everyone else simply pays $50/month (or whatever the price point is) to have on demand access to a Tesla. It's not an uber pool where you share, it's a private car that carries you to/from anywhere even if that anywhere is very far away. You get it in, get to your destination, get out, and the thing just flies off to whomever needs it next. Utilitarian all the way, no "joy of driving" here.
This would do a lot in the way of reducing the need for parking across the board in urban centers because most of these cars would never actually "park" in the sense we think of today. If they aren't moving to serve customers, they're self-refueling or limping back to some sort of service factory for repairs and what not.
The couple tradeoffs I can think of;
- People still want to own cars because cars are emotional attachments and status symbols. They're number 2 in this category besides houses.
- Privacy issues start to become far more real. 100% chance trip telemetry - associated with an account that includes some sort of identifiable info - is constantly logged. A car is downstream from a horse and a horse = freedom to move. The price and convenience tradeoff is for the customer to make - unless human piloted cars are banned from urban centers. And this is the complexity of the system; for it to work, there may be a fundamental personal choice tradeoff. That's the harder barrier to overcome. Noise pollution etc. are all details that can be worked out later.
Rov_Scam
5hr ago
I think that if autonomous cars are ever widely adopted, the idea that they can also be a valet service will die pretty quickly. Imagine a typical Wal-Mart on a typical day. The vast majority of people park in an available space and walk to the store, then walk back out to their car. Now imagine if everyone were dropped off at the entrance. Now imagine if everyone summoned their car to the entrance as soon as they hit the checkout line. Now imagine both happening at once, all day, every day. The road in front of the entrance would be a nightmare. Now imagine that instead of the dropoff area being a private road with a large, adjacent lot, it's a public through street where the nearest parking is blocks away, and the cheapest parking is miles away. Imagine what an already busy downtown street would look like if 500 office workers all summoned their cars to pick them up at 5 after 5.
This is the kind of idea that sounds good when you assume the current traffic environment stays the same and you're the only one doing it. It changes greatly when everyone is doing it. If autonomous vehicles are ever widely adopted, I imagine there will be legislation prohibiting deadheading, with possible limited exceptions for people with disabilities.
veqq
5hr ago
Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization is precisely about this. Here's a book review which answers your question: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-energy-and-civilization-by
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5hr ago
A partial explanation that is boring and, therefore, higher in explanatory value;
Some of these PMC white women simply enjoying politicizing their sexual fetishes. Remember when Fifty Shades of Grey was crowned the king of "Mommy Porn?" The oft cited statistic (maybe internet levels of quality, however) is that 80% of women have entertained some sort of submissive sexual fantasy. If you get to transform this into a publicly acceptable display of political "outrage" it's like getting to partially entertain your fantasy every day and get positive feedback for it.
I know this is flows to/from the deeper waters of The Last Psychiatrist, but I am earnest in my belief that it explains some of the hyperbolic emotional broadcasting. I'll emphasize, however, that it's partial at best. Not everything derives from our naughty thoughts and childhood experience (fuck you, Freud).
2020, the year COVID hit: 906 deaths
2021: 1,355 deaths
2022, when the conservative government ended lockdowns: 10,301 deaths
Your comparison is hopelessly confounded by the fact that Australia, unlike the overwhelming majority of countries which enforced lockdowns, is a geographically isolated island nation without land borders, which has far more explanatory power in explaining the country's low rate of Covid deaths than does the strictness of their lockdowns. It's true that Australia ended lockdowns in 2022. It's also true that 2022 was the year the country first reopened its borders after Covid. I guess you could say that these are "deaths caused by a conservative policy" - but are you seriously proposing that Australia ought to have kept its borders shut to immigrants and tourists permanently? All to prevent a few thousand old people dying from Covid every year? A significant proportion of whom, if not an actual majority, would have died of flu or pneumonia within the period if Covid hadn't got them?
I don't think I've ever seen a source that listed less than 90% immunity from the vaccine - what exactly is your standard here?
The vaccines were very effective at preventing serious illness, but practically useless at preventing transmission. Users on this forum have been gaslit for years with politicians and representatives from the pharmaceutical industry claiming after the fact "we never said that the vaccines would prevent transmission!" but we were there and yes they did and we have receipts.
7 million Covid deaths in 4 years VS 42 million AIDS death in 40 years
Not a like with like comparison. By a very wide margin, the vast majority of people who died of AIDS were otherwise healthy adults or young adults between the ages of 15-49 (https://ourworldindata.org/hiv-aids). By contrast, 75% of people who died from Covid were aged 65+, and more than 50% were older than 75 (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#SexAndAge). For a very high proportion of these people, if Covid hadn't gotten them in the last four and a half years, something else would have. Thus your comparison fails from a QALY perspective. A young American man in his twenties dropping dead from an infectious disease is unusual; an immunocompromised 85-year-old dying of a respiratory illness is not even news.
Dean
5hr ago
And I approve! It was meant to be a joke, but I realize now it might have seemed a bit mean-spirited, which I apologize for.
It's actually as short as it is because I cut off a bit of a nerd spiel. One of my favored commentators for analyzing video games (specifically Elden Ring) was- for some unfathomable reason- only posting on Tumblr. It was just that level of 'niche access' and 'you have to really be dedicated to this topic' that I now associated with Tumblr, for its highs and its lows.
5434a
5hr ago
Isn't donating blood supposed to be good for your health too? Within limits, obviously.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
5hr ago
Another part of the answer is status.
While smartphones may be counted as a necessity, you will be perfectly fine getting a $200 Chinese phone, yet iPhones have a huge demand. Same pattern with many, many other goods.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5hr ago
It all feels fairly high-decoupling to me, which was a surprise, as I'd assumed it was a solidly blue tribe rather than grey tribe show.
Once again, there's no grey tribe - there's just a particular disaffected part of the blue tribe.
Grant_us_eyes
6hr ago
I assumed he was being sensible and complaining about the largest sources of high-speed cars - IE, interstate traffic. Hence, you focus your sound-mitigation efforts there.
Off interstate/highway, you simply use speed control to keep the sound down. Perfect? No. But hardly the dystopic landscape the video likely paints.
Grant_us_eyes
6hr ago
I did add alot of prefaces and assumptions to my argument, yes. I personally doubt we'll be seeing functioning, self-driving cars any time soon.
Redot
With the limited amount time that I have recently, playing around with Redot feels like something more doable than slogging through bigger Highspace features I got stuck on, so it looks like this is what I'll be doing until my brain resets and/or I'll have more time to push through the block there. Contrary to @Southkraut's pessimism, it looks like they're pulling through. Last week I took it for a spin and saw that everything seems to work pretty much like with old Godot, so I dusted off some old projects to see what I can do with them. Ages ago I took a GPU programming course, and made a little simulation of a swarm chasing the player, while respecting some basic rules of physics (like collisions with each other). This was still done in Unity, and while it mostly worked, I started running into some performance issues as complexity grew.
Years later GPU programming is still a niche, but it looks like there's more experience around it, and I can strip-mine other projects for insights. Specifically what I'd like to do is see if I can adapt this into Redot, and push my old simulation to really high numbers (aiming for millions, go big or go home).
@Southkraut, you mentioned you probably wouldn't have time over the past week, but I'll traditionally ask how are you doing anyway. Also, last week you said:
Looking back upon my Unity project and comparing it to my current Godot/Stride iterations, I am struck by one fundamental difference that wasn't even intentional. My old project is primarily a physics simulation, and whatever abstract logic or behavior happens is a consequence of physical entities interacting. In the new version, everything is abstract entities that possibly project into the physical realm. Huh. I'll need to do some more thinking about this.
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.
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.
roystgnr
6hr ago
It's not a discrete "rapid shutdown mode", it's just the smooth Gompertz-Makeham curve. Your odds of a natural-causes death double every 8 years, starting at age 30 at the latest (though possibly much earlier; non-natural causes obscure things for 20-somethings and teens).
Come up with a medical revolution that cures 50% of death? You'd think that would double lifespans but no, it just buys everyone 8 more years. Exponentials are wild.
AverageMinimax
7hr ago
Not Just Bikes's proposed solution is to completely ban anything related to cars from city centers
So it seems that they are effectively "Just Bikes" instead of "Not Just Bikes", right?
Astranagant
7hr ago
This is exactly wrong in my experience, my social group are late-20s early-30s, and the least intelligent ended up in labouring and other outdoorsy jobs and as a consequence aged way faster than those who hid from the sun in an office all day.
AvocadoPanic
7hr ago
Is buying blood of teenage boys better than other 'fluids'?
As someone without a car living in a city with functional public transport, a big feature of cars I'm envious of is their function as a mobile personal space. A car doesn't just get you places, it's a tiny room you can bring with you. People frequently use this as both temporary and permanent storage, and imo there are emotional benefits to spending your commute in a place that's yours.
Losing this is by far the biggest tradeoff I see.
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