domain:thezvi.wordpress.com
Ioper
14m ago
North American housing crises are manufactured.
Where (in the industrialised world) are they not?
Blueberry
19m ago
are there any heuristics
Look where past floods / natural disasters (blizzards, forrest fires, earthquakes) were?
There are services like this:
https://www.augurisk.com/risk/state/north-carolina/buncombe-county/37021
Good bet would be that insurances have the best models and risk assessments.
ControlsFreak
35m ago
What I was told did not correspond to my lying eyes. What should I do? Check myself into an insane asylum?
Check your hyperbole. Think seriously about whether this is a remotely reasonable thing to suggest. Perhaps think about the example of someone trying to make their own semiconductors. If their project fails, and they decide that being told that semiconductor physics works and that semiconductor technology is possible disagrees with their lying eyes, would you suggest that they check into an insane asylum? If not, what might you suggest instead?
Yes, if there is no challenge one can master it often is just a hedonistic treadmill.
There were a few posts last month on Reddit about American Beauty, the 25 year old Oscar movie with Kevin Spacey, and how weird not only the movie but the past time now feels. Together with Office Space and Fight Club artists struggled to find something to rebel against. Cold War was won, war against terror didn’t start yet, economy was great, racism solved, the environment ostensibly protected, peak oil unknown, feminism a joke, and gayness widely accepted by enlightened centrism. So the only way was to attack the mundane boringness of a secure middle class existence.
This is Lester Burnham‘s House in which he lived in 1999 with a wife and daughter and got deeply unhappy:
https://filmoblivion.com/2019/01/15/american-beauty-1999/
Sept 2024 the U.S. housing deficit has increased according to Zillow to 4.5 million.
ControlsFreak
40m ago
Can I piggyback and have a non culture war sub thread?
I'm interested in learning and pragmatics. I've looked at predictive flood maps before, but it's hard to have any sense of 'how good' they are. I'd also like to know if they are pretty off in some ways, are there any heuristics shy of literally replicating all of the work of coding up a topographic model, a precipitation model, etc., and just turning the dial up, that I could use to more easily get a sense of where is still pretty safe and where might be deceptively dangerous.
One thing that would be helpful is that if anyone knows where I can find recent observational data to compare to the old predictive maps, so preferably maps of the current major flooding with geographic detail that is somewhat close to federal predictive flood maps. Any other reasonable heuristics would be appreciated, though I am open to the answer being that there just aren't any good heuristics that can be generalized beyond detailed knowledge/modeling of a particular geographic area.
TowardsPanna
1hr ago
https://fortune.com/2024/09/26/bird-flu-us-health-officials-h5n1-cdc-information/
This is concerning IMO. Avian flu slowly but surely gets closer to becoming a human pandemic. The CDC and other officals drag their heels and drip-feed information each Friday afternoon. Farmers are reluctant to test their animals. The authorities lack authority to enforce testing.
There has been a human hospital patient with bird flu in Missouri. Why is that interesting? Because he had not been in direct contact with likely animal sources. A household contact of the patient became sick but was not tested. Several of the healthcare workers who cared for the patient have become sick too. It's too soon to declare human to human transmission however. It may be the case that the healthcare workers got covid or something.
The problem as a whole is not taken nearly seriously enough. My only hope is that the vaccines for both animal and human use are developed quickly enough to prevent a pandemic, or to or mitigate it before it starts. It's a race against the clock and the officials don't seem motivated to run.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
1hr ago
Do you have RoR experience? I might have something for you.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
1hr ago
Mann unprivate ur profile I wanna read ur other comments, always a comedy show
comicsansstein
1hr ago
I need a side job.
I am an Eastern European webdev, earning Eastern European webdev wages: good compared to the country median, so-so compared to the devs in the west, especially in the US. For reasons, I do not particularly want to change jobs, but at the moment things are going a little tight so I know that I can't just ask for overtime there if I need some extra money. Which I do because I want to expedite building a house.
So I need something that's either explicitly a small-scope side hustle or a series of odd jobs. What would be the best way to arrange that? Create a profile on upwork or something and trawl for limited-scope offers fitting mu skillset? Pimp my linkedin? Something else entirely?
Speaking of skillset, I'm fullstack-ish, on the backend side primarily Django, on the front I mostly do React and Angular these days, I used to do Vue too but haven't touched it in ~3 years so I'd need some time to get less rusty. Can setup things with Docker. Not ops - I don't know AWS etc.
(Yep, I'm the TS code monkey 120 IQ midwit walking among you ML intellectual titans ;) )
Inb4 "move to the States". It's not completely off the table if things go south enough either in Ukraine or with regulations throttling AI in EU. But it's a rather distant option.
Lizzardspawn
1hr ago
Does every virtuous cycle turns automatically into vicious when conditions reverse? I was thinking that a lot of our society is based on the assumptions of ever growing virtuous cycle - more growth -> higher salaries -> higher consumptions -> more growth for example, that make the whole thing quite fragile when the music slows down or stop.
Your assumptions are wrong. The happiest people I know had a life of struggle, but improved it through their own dedication and competence. Being fortunate makes you less, not more, happy. Not to mention that imo modern-style living makes generally less happy since we are adapted to something else entirely, but that's another discussion.
But also, I think happiness is just not very important, nor do I think suffering is intrinsically bad. Hell, I don't even think they're opposites.
Edit: Also, since it always gets brought: No, putting yourself through pointless suffering/struggle doesn't help, especially if you yourself don't believe in it. It needs to be necessary or at least helpful for a purpose you yourself consider meaningful.
RenOS
I cope, therefore I seethe
2hr ago
You might as well say that they're not right since they're not trying to restore the monarchy.
Also, as I've explained beforehand, the current state of german abortion law is right if not far-right by american conception, and pretty much already what many moderate american republicans desire.
Lizzardspawn
3hr ago
Not if the oven has pyrolytic cleaning. It requires some tinkering with thermostats though.
mdurak
3hr ago
For an actual prisoner’s dilemma situation where I’m staring down years to decades in prison? Man, you have way more faith in the average American rando than me, because I’m defecting for sure. I would most likely defect on the friend too unless they were one of my closest, most trusted friends.
For a metaphorical one where the stakes are much lower and it’s much more likely to be an iterated prisoner’s dilemma? There’s no way I’m defecting first, even with the Haitian. I just don’t see any real life situations where the rewards are big enough that I could justify acting in such a petty manner. Can you think of any?
This is an argument I have never heard before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_philosophy
Though I suppose Guénon and Huxley make a stronger claim about the nature of reality. I'm restricting myself to the practical considerations.
What information does society need to function that it can only obtain by the costly closing off of an entire avenue of expression?
What you see as closing off I see as codification. More on this later.
How would we know that it is not enough/too much?
This is the major problem of modernity, we have no way to know how load bearing Chesterton's fence is. The implications of destroying traditions that we, by construction, do not rationally understand, are unclear and can range from entirely inconsequential to catastrophic.
The promise of the Enlightenment was that rational inquiry would permit scientific government, and thus that we'd be able to lay society on top of reason itself, but Positivism has totally failed even in its mildest incarnations, so now all that is left is raw post-modern games of power.
The best way I've seen to attempt to answer this question comes from Durkheim and the opposition between anomie and fatalism.
By the atomization of life, I presume that you mean that individuals are isolated from each other instead of forming healthy communities
Once again here, what you see as closing off, I see as codification. It is much easier to form communities in an understandable world where you can make assumptions about the results of your actions, and others can properly interpret them. Norms reduce the randomness of intersubjective communication.
Let us consider tatoos again. In my grandmother's time, there was a strong taboo against them; though not illegal you would never get hired for a proper job if you had them, because they were the mark of sailors, criminals and other rough fellows.
It's easy to consider this a 100% bad arrangement from the standpoint of bourgeois morality. After all those people are stigmatized in such a way that they cannot join us in bourgeois life.
But consider the advantages of doing this to yourself if you are about that rebel life: you instantly share camaraderie with someone who also bears the mark, people know not to mess with you, the ladies know you're a badass and you can have a codified relationship with the cops where they won't let you into rich neighborhoods but they know not to tread in areas where you and people like you hang out. The fact it's painful even works as a sort of initiatic ritual.
In the liberalized world where this is a mere avenue of fashion, nobody can tell anything about you from this, and nobody knows where they stand.
Total unconstrained bodily autonomy, or indeed total licence, comes at the price of the destruction of a lot of unquantifiable but nevertheless useful social commons.
Is the aforementioned atomization what you mean by “fungible shapeless good”?
Liberalism has a tendency, by the necessity of its moral agnosticism, to break away thick concepts into thin. The former are the staple of traditional institutions, whose phenomenal goal is to compress as much meaning as possible into anodyne symbolism. Hence, such institutions are destroyed by the Liberal tendency.
What are some good previous discussions on the effects of sex segregated spaces on mental health?
I'll admit I'm too lazy to burrow in the archives of the last threads for it, but the topic keeps coming up so if you lurk enough you may just catch yet another one.
The basic argument I'm referring to here is that by which the Civil Rights Act and legislation like it has made sex segregated spaces practically impossible and with them much of male socialization, and with a rise in the sort of anomic suicide I was talking about earlier. Women were spared this for a while, but are in the process of this destruction now, which has made Feminists and proponents of traditional gender norms the strange bedfellows we see.
jeroboam
4hr ago
Isn't this just 20th century thinking?
Their human capital sucks. Israel would destroy Turkey in a war despite a much smaller population and inferior geography. The world has moved on from the era of the Dreadnought. Today's it's all about raw materials, supply chains, and microchips. Turkey is a dinosaur whose poorly trained troops would only be cannon fodder in a conflict which involved the U.S.
veqq
5hr ago
Of course it's less credible. It's naught but bare faced lies with the purpose of destroying all that we hold dear.
RenOS
I cope, therefore I seethe
5hr ago
Happiness in general doesn't seem to work the way modern people think it does. From my view, among the best predictors are is a) there are real, serious problems + b) we feel confident to handle them well.
2D3D
6hr ago
Having a unifying overculture is extremely helpful in forming common identity. Every Israeli is 3 opinions sharing a bipolar body, but one of those opinions is 'our neighbors want to kill us'. It is a remarkably clarifying point that can unify literally every Israeli, from an Israeli Arab Muslim to the gayest Tel Aviv homo.
Except for the Haredi. Were it not for the Arabs, the Haredi might be a sufficient spoiler to break Israel entirely.
Anyways, with a common overculture it is easy to reach a fairly baseline happiness, even in the face of adversity. If the source of unhappiness is a local element within your nation, happiness indices will likely fail. The Arabs all hate the Israelis, but they hate the Shia/Sunni/Deobandi/Kurd/Turk/Khaleeji/Phoenician/Saudi/Azamigh next to them juuuuust a little bit more.
A completion model called gpt4t-lu-test just appeared in OpenAI's API Playground (and presumably the OpenAI API generally), and it's not documented anywhere (including in Pricing), and ~nobody seems to have noticed yet. It doesn't seem to even be instruction-tuned, and will gladly complete a meth recipe etc.
As far as I know, OpenAI has never allowd any public access before to a GPT-4 base model, but that seems like what this is.
What is this, and what does the lu there stand for?
update: gpt4t-lu-test is no longer available as a completion model, but now as a chat model, that seems at very shallow first glance to just be a normal GPT-4 chat model (guardrails and all). I guess I caught a brief misconfiguration.
Might as well be a slave.
Pay by role Some Amazon warehouse worker roles and their hourly pay include:
Warehouse associate: $21.22 per hour
Packer: $17.92 per hour
Store shopper: $17.80 per hour
Order picker: $18.65 per hour
Handler: $16.88 per hour
Fulfillment associate: $20.28 per hour
Package handler: $17.46 per hour
So not quite slaves. I won't bother looking up gig worker pay, but similarly find the comparison to slaves (which the US famously had for real) to be silly.
2D3D
7hr ago
Women vastly overestimate how clear their deliberate outward presentation is to observer's, much less thoughtless presentation. Leaning forward and pushing ones chest out may be an tremendous effort for a woman that is blindingly obvious to other girls who understand the effort made, but to guys we literally have no clue it could be happening.
Bearing in mind that our own lived experiences will feature a gigantic amount of inconsistent behaviors from different women, and any man who lacks mind reading and errs on the side of caution will find the mental effort of parsing microbehaviors too exhausting.
The alternative is to he a dweeb who thinks every friendly interaction with a woman is a sign of her wanting to fuck. These guys are the worst, mainly because their mechanistic approach to parsing sexual receptiveness captures the error bound of drunk/lonely/bored women who decide to catch some strange for the hell of it regardless of the womans actual effectiveness in displaying receptiveness. With a statistically high rate of success to expended effort for the shithead guys, this reinforces shitty behaviors of both men and women. The guys think their shitty pickup lines and NPC flirt phrases are actually good tools to get women, the women think their subtlest of subtle hints was sufficient to bag a dude without seeming desperate. Women are more likely to regret their choice of bedpartner after coitus, but till the deed is done women are as capable as men in deluding themselves that their chosen partner is a prize worthy of the expended effort.
SlowBoy
7hr ago
Red voters in red states will not switch blue after a natural disaster. Why would they? At best the Biden administration handles this competently, at worst it's a disaster. Is Kamala Harris going to lead a public relief tour? Trump would.
Going further, does the administration even care about red voters in red areas? They haven't stopped spending money on charter flights for resettling Haitians. That's their priority. They will authorize whatever emergency funds sound good on a campaign ad.
If anything voter turnout will increase. When normal life is suspended public life becomes that much more important. Documentation will not be a problem: emergency atmosphere and community mindset will make people solve problems.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7hr ago
I tentatively expect this to shift things towards Trump.
There's an old article on SSC: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/
about how right wing politics are optimized towards surviving, ie in an apocalypse, and left wing politics are optimized for thriving when there are plenty of resources. When things are tough you make tough decisions and sacrifices in order to survive, and make stable family units that can replace the people who inevitably die. Which right wing politics are optimized for. When things are great and there's plenty to go around then you can do whatever you want and be inefficient but free and happy, and anyone trying to restrict you is doing it for selfish reasons, so you should ignore them, which left wing politics are optimized for.
Maslow's Hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to tip it sideways, so the lower baser needs are on the right while the higher needs are on the left, as those are their strengths.
When things are tough, people want a tough leader who does what needs to be done, who will ensure their basic necessities, security, and establish confidence and project strength. Regardless of whether Trump is actually more effective at this than Harris, he certainly appears that way superficially. I expect more swing votes to shift towards Trump compared to the counterfactual scenario where these floods did not happen, though I have no idea how strong of an effect this will be, so not sure if it will matter or even be statistically significant.
Looking back, Katrina was politically and electorally brutal for Republicans, while Sandy clinched re-election for Obama. This despite neither storm primarily impacting swing states. It's all in the optics of the president being in control or out of control.
The takes post hurricane are always hilariously stupid, the kind of weird bourgeois socialism that Trump would love. Insuring beach houses that get flooded every couple years to preserve homeowner value after the private insurance market refuses to play there. Hubristic rebuilding of stuff that'll last another few years. This is right in Trump's wheelhouse, so maybe he'll benefit more than average.
More options
Context Copy link