domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
Corvos
1m ago
Forgive me, I didn’t mean to imply that drinking bottled water was stupid in literally all circumstances, only that it would be strange to but it when properly treated tap water is a viable alternative.
I would normally refill a flask or old bottle from the tap if I wanted portable water, but I drink bottled water in countries where the taps aren’t safe or if I’m suddenly thirsty when out and about.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2m ago
According to the World Bank, Russia is now a high-income country. Real GDP per capita growth was at 3.6%!
The World Bank also says that the year before, 2022, saw real GDP per capita decline of -2.2 %. And that for 2023 total GDP and GDP per capita were both lower than in 2022.
https://data.worldbank.org/country/russian-federation?view=chart
If an Australian politician could deliver that kind of growth, they'd be heralded as a living god and probably get Putin-level approval ratings
According to the World Bank Australia saw real GDP per capita growth in 2023 at 3%, and in 2022 it was at 4.3%.
John_Doe_Fletcher
anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy
6m ago
Like the IBC spent the last three revisions updating the spacing of outlets on a kitchen island, but there's no standard place to mount an extinguisher.
Oof, that's annoying. Especially doesn't help that mine is mounted under the kitchen sink, which is a great way to rarely see or think about it.
John_Doe_Fletcher
anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy
14m ago
Is your bathroom fan on a timer that runs for hours a day?
It is not, we just tend to run it a lot cause GF and I tend to nuke the bathroom. Plus the white noise helps me sleep, usually.
Having a washer and dryer in the house rather than a shed sounds like a lot of trouble. I'd never even thought about dealing with lint in an interior.
To be clear, the bathroom fan is on a different duct than our dryer - there was just so much dust buildup/clumping on the fan intake that it was basically the consistency of lint. Sorry if that was confusing. I've had a washer/dryer combo in every place I've lived in and never had much trouble beyond the dryer not drying effectively. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18m ago
This makes me think of someone stuck on a very sticky wicket, trying to justify an argument that was fundamentally wrong. Of course there are facets of any sophisticated but wrong argument that are right. You can highlight the correct facets and minimize the wrong facets. You can pre-prepare reasons for why you might be wrong to conserve credibility.
Nate has the rhetorical skills to pull it off. But it still feels very slimy. The 90 IQ twitter pleb mocking him with '60,000 simulations and all you conclude is that it's a coin flip?' may not be that numerically literate. But he has hit on a certain kind of wisdom. The election wasn't a 50/50 or a dice-roll. It was one way or another. With superior knowledge you could've called it in Trump's favour. Maybe only Bezos and various Lords of the Algorithms, French Gamblers and Masters of Unseen Powers knew or suspected - but there was knowledge to be had.
I prefer prediction models that make money before the outcome is decided, not ones that have to be justified retroactively. Nate wasn't heralding before the election that this 6% was the modal outcome, it wasn't really useful information.
nomenym
38m ago
Is the problem a lack of trust or a lack of trustworthiness? Are they more trustworthy than we think? Or is it good for us to believe they're more trustworthy than they are?
-_-_-_-_-
40m ago
Federal Executive: Trump's first term included him saying "take the guns first, and do due process later" and the ATF continuing to be the ATF.
States and Federal Courts of Appeal: Whatever the fuck they want.
SCOTUS: Issued Bruen, then ignored violations of Bruen.
Even in the absence of new federal gun control statutes, why should we expect gun control to significantly decrease? (With regards to your reply to Hieronymus, "legal gun owners" want to remain, you know, legal, and DIY tech is established FAFO territory controlled by the fuzz, not the populace.)
dr_analog
razorboy
42m ago
This will almost certainly not affect your life in any way!
And this is almost certainly wrong. It won't be the most important thing in most people's lives, but the federal government writes laws by the thousand and writes regulations by the million and spends dollars by the trillion. Even the second and third order effects on people not directly impacted can be huge.
I should say, won't matter in any legible way versus the counter-factual.
Like, obviously inflation affected people but it is debatable whether this would have been worse than high unemployment, and it's not clear at all that Biden would have done one and Trump would have done the other.
ace
49m ago
Is it a priori plausible that IQ is so sensitive to a naturally varying element which is sometimes found in much greater concentrations?
You mean like lead? Yea, I think that's plausible.
naraburns
nihil supernum
49m ago
I can't discern him breaking any rules, or you explicitly accusing of breaking him of any rules, apart from the subjective "wildcard rule" about obnoxiousness.
Are you not reading carefully, or are you just reading selectively? Look at my mod comment again. I first said
grumping about someone else's award because their comment doesn't reinforce your preferred narrative is obnoxious at best
That's the wildcard rule, applied not for what he said, but for grumping about what someone else said--so you mischaracterized my criticism in exactly the same way that coffee_enjoyer mischaracterized it, by suggesting it is about my "taste" rather than about coffee_enjoyer's insistence on his own taste being the proper determinant of quality. So right from the starting gate, you have demonstrated that you don't know what you're talking about.
Then you said
someone who only ran afoul of that rule
but this is clearly an unforced error. In my very first mod comment I also wrote:
your emphasis on "pre-teen" and the way you referenced "the past decade" while quoting Dean referencing "the last few decades" suggest very strongly to my mind that you are not engaging charitably, or even just honestly
"Be charitable" is a very clear rule. Coffee-enjoyer broke it, as I demonstrated by mentioning how he broke it, and I said all of that quite clearly. So the rest of your comment fails to land entirely; I'm sure you can think of some other reason to criticize my moderation, and yet at this point it seems that your real goal is just that--to criticize my moderation, regardless of anything I have actually said or done. By your own logic, at this point it seems like you should probably just recuse yourself from criticizing my moderation approach.
I will address your parting question anyway:
Do you imagine there is any argument or evidence at all that could persuade you to change your current approach to moderation, or is it a matter of either having to take your ride to wherever it leads or getting off?
I imagine there are many such arguments and evidence; I hardly imagine myself to be a paragon of human judgment. But as you have not presented any such arguments or evidence--as you indeed failed to even notice the rather explicit rule breaking I spelled out in my initial post--what is it you expect me to change?
That is, is there some specific change you have in mind? You mention recusal but actually the whole mod team does recusals pretty often, calling for others to come in and handle stuff they don't think they can be impartial about. However it's basically never about topics, because the whole mod team has opinions on just about everything. If we recused ourselves from topics we happen to know and care about, none of us could moderate anything! Rather, usually mods will recuse themselves from dealing users who get under our skin (or are just particularly under our skin on a given day). You mentioned darwin; back in the day, I recused myself from moderating him a lot.
So beyond that, what "argument or evidence" do you think you have in mind, that you think should change moderation policies here? Sometimes you write as if you think people should be moderated more ("Plenty of completely normal posts these days would have been moderated 5 years ago...") but your argument in this case is that coffee_enjoyer, at least, should be moderated less. As far as I can tell, you are engaged in the same special pleading that nearly all rules-lawyers and mod-critics bring to us, as if we'd never seen it before: "why don't you moderate my enemies more, and my friends less?"
And once it is recognized that that is the substance of the question being asked, well, it kind of answers itself, doesn't it?
Quantumfreakonomics
51m ago
We had been dating for over a year. None of that mattered. It was like it retroactively made everything we went through together a lie to her.
justmotteingaround
1hr ago
Nothing was more "move fast and break things" than entire neighborhoods of kids riding their bike behind "the fog truck" spraying DDT everywhere.
spring
safe, legal torment nexuses
1hr ago
I'm almost done with it and all in all I've been very pleased with it. There are several design choices Earendel made for SE that I much prefer over SA though, mostly related to ships and platforms.
Reaching the derelict platform in SE is both a really cool moment. But it also serves as a good introduction to working in space as you can very quickly see which buildings you might want to rocket up. Its also provides a very tactile and satisfying experience of scavenging for new toys. In SA you launch your first platform and you get a popup about building out your platform. It's not particularly well explained, noob traps abound and unless you had the foresight to build a lot of rocket silos you will be waiting awhile before you even start building out your platform simply due to the time it takes to launch stuff into space.
SE's focus on doing research on your space platform also makes SE feel very distinct from the vanilla experience of working on terra firma, and it acts as a focal point to your interplanetary activities. You go planetside, you build a base, you rocket your new widgets back to your platform to do more science. SA has you shipping all your science back to Nauvis, it's the vanilla experience but more so.
All that said most of what I haven't mentioned is lightyears aside of SE. SE's planetary outposts felt like setting up mining outposts with 10-20x the busywork. Each planet in SA provides fresh and unique challenges that require novel approaches to factory design, especially Gleba. Interplanetary logistics mostly just works compared to the SE's which despite my best efforts I never managed to master.
I'm pretty iffy about quality, it's too good not to use, but simply unlocking introduces UI frustrations, never mind actually trying to design and deploy it at scale.
TheFooder
1hr ago
I've often thought, "If they just told us what the trade offs were and were honest about it, they'd get my vote," but I doubt that's a winning strategy.
SkoomaDentist
1hr ago
I legitimately can't tell if it's real or not.
It's easy to tell it's not AI: It's coherent over a very long time which is beyond what video AIs are capable of currently.
yofuckreddit
1hr ago
I think being compared to what appears to be a braver and more charismatic character is... pretty positive. Nice.
Factorio is a uniquely addicting game for me. I love it - however I can't escape the fact that the time I spend playing it is the same muscles as programming (which has a high $ROI compared to gaming), and I just don't have the time right now. If my battletech group takes a sabbatical I may be able to schedule 1-2 days a week to play.
I suspect that most of the 3d games use a grid system somehow. My buddies have really liked Satisfactory if you'd prefer to get the 3d experience.
Also, speaking of factories, I watched an awesome little sci-fi vignette about it recently: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cntb3wcZdTw (Mid voice acting/writing but can't have it all)
I literally typed "bomb ranges near me" onto google and pressed enter.
Sadly I can't be of much more help than that
It typically takes a while to get permission, but when you have a Federal explosives License (from the ATF) it's a lot easier to get allowed in.
spiky_fungus
1hr ago
600-700 tonnes
surely more?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
despite signs that the Russian economy could well collapse within a year.
What signs?
According to the World Bank, Russia is now a high-income country. Real GDP per capita growth was at 3.6%! If an Australian politician could deliver that kind of growth, they'd be heralded as a living god and probably get Putin-level approval ratings (as opposed to negative approval ratings).
https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2024/05/russia-war-income?lang=en
Even the Carnegie Endowment is struggling to find much bad to say about Russian wages growth. If Biden had delivered positive real wages growth over his term, I think he would still be in office today. Just look at the chart on page 25. Apparently the crushing impact of Western sanctions in 2022 was less harmful to the Russian worker than whatever was going on in America (or the UK, Germany, Australia...) with inflation. And in 2023 Russia left the US in the dust in real wages.
China's struggling, failing economy was massively outperforming the vibrant, dynamic US economy in 2022 and 2023, presumably it's still doing so. Real wages, real GDP per capita are rising much faster in China and Russia. They're rising from a lower basis level but are rising fast nonetheless. Yet all we see in newspapers and television is stories of disaster, stagnation and decline over there.
-_-_-_-_-
1hr ago
Historical nugget: Philip the Arab, emperor of Rome, will always be remembered for his celebrations of the 1000 year anniversary of Rome in 248 AD.
First I've heard of him. That you described it as a "historical nugget" somewhat gives away that it's not very significant.
I feel like we're living in the dark ages of dentistry. There's apparently also no data to support flossing or dental x-rays.
I stopped flossing about a decade ago. Yep, still no cavities. I'm going to drop the x-rays too. Cavities seem to be mostly a function of what kind of bacteria lives in your mouth + sugar consumption. I have the good bacteria, lucky for me.
In terms of fluoride, I'm going to do some research on how people suppose that fluoride is actually supposed to prevent cavities. Is it via consuming it orally? Because, if so, it's strange that there are also a bunch of products that APPLY IT DIRECTLY TO THE TEETH. Like you, I feel like there's not a lot of good information. The comments in defense of fluoride here have definitely not reassured me.
Anecdotally, I have used a high fluoride toothpaste in the past and it reduced teeth sensitivity.
Why can't we just put it in mouthwash and toothpaste and let people make their own choices?
Edit: I spent some time talking with Claude AI about this issue and it was strangely non-cucked and helpful. Yes, it would seem that topical application of fluoride is likely to confer more benefits than drinking it, and without the potential downsides. This seems like a no-brainer. The one exception is that children may need some fluoride while teeth are forming. Nevertheless, they get it from food anyway. I might look into a way to test and filter fluoride levels.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1hr ago
I feel like you are confusing several separate issues. Nothing I've done in this thread is aimed at "protecting a user from criticism." Coffee_enjoyer was breaking the rules and obnoxiously axe-grinding
I can't discern him breaking any rules, or you explicitly accusing of breaking him of any rules, apart from the subjective "wildcard rule" about obnoxiousness. It's fine to have a wildcard rule that essentially says "don't do things we don't like", but to then try to pin the "breaking the rules" label on someone who only ran afoul of that rule is somewhere between a case of the noncentral fallacy and plain self-aggrandizement, where you expect other people to treat your taste with the same reverence as a written rule.
Your complaints are not at that level, but your candor over your distaste for Dean suggests to me that you are making a similar mistake: allowing animus toward a user to blind you to the fact that this is not ultimately about the user, but about the rules.
I think hounding other posters for evidence and forcing them to produce more evidence in a more legible way is an unalloyed good, actually. I'd love for you to prove me wrong, and show me an instance where someone is doing the same thing for a position that I agree with or user that I like where I think that it would be appropriate to moderate the pursuers. The closest example I can remember is where back in the Reddit era, people were piling up on darwin2000 (might have gotten the number part wrong) over not taking responsibility for boldly wrong predictions (in contexts such as the Smollett case). I was rather fond of him as a user and thought that he was an asset by virtue of putting out some overly welcoming hearths by merely existing, but was absolutely in favour of him being held accountable in the way he was.
I initially didn't want to make an argument based on accusations of bias, but looking through your posting history it seems plainly evident that you are deeply aligned with Dean on the Israel/Palestine question, and back the Israeli side in a way that can't be described as dispassionate. Are you sure that you are not letting your animus towards a side blind you to the fact that you are just using the rule that basically says "excuse to be deployed in edge cases" as an excuse in a case that is not particularly on edge? It's not like not being candid about this, or mostly avoiding engagement on substance (easy when an "excellent poster" is around to make your case for you anyway), magically makes you neutral. The least you could have done to not make this look as bad would have been to recuse yourself and let this be handled by another moderator who can express his views of the object-level issue with fewer expletives than this.
Separately, everything I said about Dean being a good poster was in direct response to coffee-enjoyer's obnoxious, overwrought, and rhetorical "is this the kind of posting you want!?" The answer was "yes, that's the point of the AAQCs, these are the kinds of posts we want." I was trying to find a way to help coffee_enjoyer understand why he was being moderated. Ultimately, I seem to have failed to find such a way; coffee_enjoyer seems to me far more interested in being angry about the disagreement between him and Dean (and, by extension, my moderating him over his approach), than in understanding that the problem is not the substance, but in the uncharitable and antagonistic nature of his engagement.
Well, forget about him. Can you explain to me, or anyone else, why he was being moderated? My current understanding is that you like Dean's posts in general and are moreover extremely unsympathetic to the anti-Israel position, and therefore perceive any persistent attempt to impose a tax on Dean's pro-Israel posting in its present shape as something that needs to be suppressed using the wildcard rule. Is this accurate?
You've left out my quite explicit point that AAQCs are not a bar to banning. Users cannot get away with "more extreme posts" indefinitely.
The clause doesn't have to be parsed as "(more extreme) posts" for the cycle to hold; it is absolutely sufficient for it to be "more (extreme posts)". Plenty of completely normal posts these days would have been moderated 5 years ago - and the way in which they are bad was originally trailblazed by "quality posters" who evidently were so favoured that unless someone took one for the team and raised a stink out in the open, you wouldn't even know that reports were just being redirected into the trash due to their standing, as opposed to nobody seeing a problem at all to begin with. Once the prolific and beloved posters all do it, the nobodies are free to follow suit.
In the end, we can't maintain this space at all if we worry too much about what might or might not "drive users away."
Is this a belief that's based on a concrete observation of bad things that happened when you "worried too much", or just rationalising the easy option of going with your gut?
One person's final straw is someone else's welcoming hearth.
One does not make up for the other. People can still make good posts and interesting conversation away from a welcoming hearth, but by definition they won't after they had to bear their final straw. You can run a good version of this forum while being a welcoming hearth to nobody, but you can't run one while putting the final straw on too many, especially if you selectively do so on just about everyone except those having a particular gamut of opinion.
Do you imagine there is any argument or evidence at all that could persuade you to change your current approach to moderation, or is it a matter of either having to take your ride to wherever it leads or getting off?
AvocadoPanic
2hr ago
I don't think Richard Spencer's endorsement matters, but I think his motivation may.
It reads to me like the 'Sex traffickers for Harris' yard signs I saw. Mocking.
It's a bit early to tell — everyone still seems to be reeling and emotional over the results. That said, while a lot can happen in two months, and I'm not ruling out any of the above, I'm going to have to rate it fairly low — something like 10-15%. The surprising lack of Valkyrie memes (or references to von Stauffenberg in general), as well as the relatively conciliatory attitude of Democrat party elites — "Kamala Calls For Peaceful Transfer Of Power To Adolf Hitler," as the Babylon Bee calls it — makes it seem more unlikely.
On the other hand, said "peaceful transfer of power to literal fascist" attitude on the part of our elites raises my estimation as to their confidence in having "Trump-proofed" the government over the last four years, and that people on both sides should probably stop acting as if Trump is going to have any more authority or control over the executive branch than Biden currently does (i.e. basically none).
As long as I've been politically aware (~30 years now), the Republican party has consistently failed to turn electoral "wins" into actual political victories (save tax cuts for the wealthy, a bigger military, and "well, the left only got part of what they wanted this time" that is really just losing more slowly). The go-to excuse has always been whichever branch[es] they didn't control. Why can't a Republican president get things done? Democrats have the House and/or Senate. Why can't a Republican Congress get things done? They'll get vetoed by a Democrat president. Why can't a Republican president and both houses of Congress all together get anything done? The liberal activist judges on the Supreme Court will just strike it down.
But now we've got the closest thing to a trifecta. The White House, the Senate, and probably the House of Representatives — and with a lot more "MAGA" populists and fewer old party-establishment swamp-creature squishes. Plus, the most favorable Supreme Court in my lifetime. So, when 2028 rolls around, and nothing's been accomplished and everything has still moved leftward, what excuse is left? How do you keep right-wing voters believing that if they do everything they're told, and just show up and vote in large enough numbers, they can win, once it's finally made obvious that the game is rigged, and that "If you lose, you lose. If you win—you really lose."?
So, I actually have some hope. That is, I hope the next four years will finally convince enough people that voting doesn't matter, that there's absolutely no way forward for the right within the system and the law, and to give up entirely on that futile path.
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