domain:astralcodexten.com
Zephyr
10m ago
Unfortunately, I think this runs into the same sort of issues that the foreign student process does.
For anyone who isn't aware, Canada requires that foreign students demonstrate that they have enough money to support themselves for the time that they enrolled. It sounds like a good plan, but:
- The amount is laughably low (it was $10,000 CAD until very recently - for reference, rent averages around $2100 a month for a 1 bedroom in my city).
- The verification is only done once; the government checks if you have the funds once, then never checks again. There's an obvious loophole (that has been exploited) of people getting very temporary loans to pass the check.
- The government has no interest in pursuing individuals who blatantly abuse the system - a recent estimate had about 1 in 40 people in Canada being present from overstaying visas, for example.
My concern with the grandparents is that "supporting" their grandparents does not actually reflect all the services that they consume (healthcare, primarily), and even if it did, the government isn't going to do anything about it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11m ago
Yeah, being a rich foreign tourist is a very different position than being a permanent resident.
07mk
12m ago
Entropy means disorder, randomness, chaos, and the like, so "low entropy" would refer to something that is well ordered or well structured. I think most people would interpret that in this context as something that has less "noise" compared to the "signal," since "noise" could be considered to add entropy, due to adding content without adding meaning.
Botond173
16m ago
he strongly supported Ukraine in the current war and he participated in anti-government protests that were organized basically since Fico took power
There is supposedly even video evidence of this, courtesy of a local TV channel. I can't comment on this because I don't speak Slovak.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
16m ago
Wait. How?
I’m willing to believe that they’re so much more dense, but I want to understand the mechanism. Is it heavily mid-rise? Is it the reduced car infrastructure? Has their density trended up or down in the postwar era?
Just saw this geographic fertility map of Turkey on reddit. The statistics were released yesterday:
Population map for comparison (urban rate is a whopping 75%):
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Visualizing-Population-Density-in-Turkey-Full-Size.html
In 7 short years FTR crashed from 2.11 in 2016 to 1.5 in 2023.
Women get children later (average is now 29 years; which is older than in the US (27 years in 2021)) and there is an increase in one-person households (14.4% -> 19.7%)
And despite President Erdoğan being more powerful and way more conservative (out of touch?) than other leaders:
The alarming decline in Turkey’s birth rate comes against the backdrop of frequent calls from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who advises families to have at least three children to boost the country’s population, drawing the ire of feminist groups and women’s rights associations. He also advises “Muslim families” not to use birth control or family planning and opposes C-sections as well, angering the same organizations.
newly-arrived grandparents
It's insane to me that this is allowed. The justification for immigration is that these are net contributors and we need them to prop up the social safety net but instead actually we're letting in people who will never work again (or not for long) and will almost immediately start collecting benefits.
Mass immigration as a policy rests on a tripod of supporting interests: 1. disinterested economics and demographic realism (or academic dogma posing as such); 2. ethnic hate of/guilt by native populations combined with charity towards foreign populations; and 3. high-middle-low factionalism to gain votes/a client class for the current ruling elite.
In different parts of the online right, it's fashionable to speculate that one of these is the "true" reason, and the others merely a facade or pablum for useful idiots. In reality, the technocratic center-left is not a monolithic. Each leg is true reason for different parts of the governing coalition. The current policy is a negotiation between their interests, and its "illogic" is an illusion born of your assuming a primary motivation.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
19m ago
Good law is a moving target, too. At least in our world of imperfect information.
And current AI does not care about logical consistency. It may usually say something consistent, because the humans who generated its training data usually tried to make their statements flow from one to the next. Unless they were being sarcastic or subversive.
Nor is there a guarantee that they were correct in their own logic. For example, they could have been starting from the assumption that things they don’t like are logically incoherent! Then, even if the AI decided to replicate their beliefs perfectly, it too would be swinging at strawmen.
That’s not a recipe for good law.
Botond173
22m ago
I sort of remember when the Berlin incident was discussed here. It seems that it was not going to be culture war fodder at all without the climate protestors added to the mix. I can imagine the local rightist opposition, to the meagre extent it even exists, would have still tried to turn it into a scandal, but which leftist is going to question the victim status of an almost murdered trucker who wanted to assist a female cyclist (so presumably a leftist voter/sympathizer) after accidentally running her over, warm feelings toward both the homeless and refugees notwithstanding?
To the extent that the flames of the culture war were being fanned in this case, I reckon 95% of it was due to the climate protestors doubling down in characteristic fashion, and explaining, with their usual mix of complete cynicism and complete idealism, that of course public protests entail negative consequences stemming from the disruption of traffic, dumbass!
quiet_NaN
29m ago
To keep such a system fair, you would also need a lot more crosswalks perhaps one every 50 meters in dense cities. As others have implied, you would have to sacrifice one lane per side plus change for parking so that drivers can get out of their car without stepping out onto the death zone. Or you just make parking on the side of the road illegal.
I think the result would be rather hellish for drivers.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
35m ago
Saw it with Thatcher, saw it with Scalia.
quiet_NaN
36m ago
Agreed. I think culpability should be assigned on a case by case basis. Someone jumps off a highway bridge in front of a moving truck, you can hardly blame the truck for not going slow enough so that it could come to a stop within a meter. Someone went 50km/h in a 30km/h zone and runs over some kid? Whole different story.
pigeonburger
37m ago
Family reunification in Canada requires that the sponsor vouches that they can financially support the sponsored immigrant and that they will not need to ask for social assistance for 3 years. They check that the sponsor is in good enough financial health to support them. If they do ask for social assistance, the government can ask the sponsor to reimburse it.
I mean, it's not perfect, but it's not like no one though of this problem.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
37m ago
johnfabian
38m ago
The beats of these two stories are basically structured like bad late-night TV jokes. Like you can imagine Jay Leno saying "Hey folks, you heard this story about the Indian getaway driver?"
Botond173
45m ago
Let's not get carried away.
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It was by no means extraordinary anywhere. It may seem extraordinary to many youngsters, I suppose, because they compare a world of fancy touchscreens of all sorts, social media, the laptop class lifestyle etc. to a world of stagnant socialism without any of those, and conclude that there must have been a huge improvement in the average quality of life, when in fact there was no such thing, and it's all just self-delusion driven mostly by Russophobia. I can very much assure you, for example, that there is no, and has never at any point been, consensus on this supposed extraordinary increase in Hungary.
-
To the extent that there was tangible increase in prosperity in Poland, most of it is obviously explained by the severity of austerity measures introduced in the final years of socialism. It's a matter of relative difference, and people's emotional revulsion at a regime which permitted the evil Russkies to station their orcs on sacred Polish soil and whatnot.
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I find it somewhat odd that you added Belarus to this list. As far as I know, it was, in fact, the one post-Soviet country that largely survived the '90s without economic collapse, social disintegration and widespread anomie, at least compared to the other unfortunate post-USSR republics.
But anyway, let's not pretend that this is not even surprising. Slovakia has been an independent polity for a combined period of roughly 35 years (1939-45, 1993-). Was there even one political assassination such as the current one during those years? As far as I can tell, no.
To borrow a quote on this subject from my boss: "Silicon Valley Brain-rot". I wouldn't go that far but the sentiment exists.
I don't know what it is about the Bay but I can only hypothesize that for some reason when you stick a bunch of uber-nerdy, neurodivergent, high openness and high neuroticism people in an environment. Shake it up a bit, eventually the most neurotic, nerdy, and neurodivergent rise to the top. Big Yud has essentially L. R. Hubbard-ed himself into the leader of a cult that goes catatonic over the wildest sci-fi shit.
My analysis on that tweet is such:
- Peak Quokka: Altman is a huge follower of Yud and genuinely believes, through a failure to not realize he lives in a bubble, that Yud's AI teaching inspired all the greatest minds of the AI world.
- Less Quokka: Altman is a genuine follower of Yud and due to his ego, believes He(Altman) will make the biggest contributions to AI, thus since Yud inspired him Yud is a huge impact.
- Cynic: Altman is a shrewd power player, as evidenced by the whole board fiasco. He knows that if he refences a big name in the Bay Bubble AI Sphere, it will signal boost him at no cost. It acts like a scissor statement to the Pro/Anti doomers, generates lots of clicks and draws talent from both camps to OpenAI.
I'm somewhere between less-quokka and cynic. But take what I say with a grain of salt. I don't live in the bay, I work in defense, and years back I decided I'd rather take the quiet and stable life instead of gunning for a job at OpenAI/Deepmind/FAIR, where I could make the most impact on AI
yofuckreddit
49m ago
I agree with you on all counts. I don't dismiss eating less and exercising more because I don't want or need to do those things, just that they're already such table stake requirements that it should be a given.
The eating less part is very difficult for me since I'm a fast food addict and consider eating one of life's great joys. But I cycle 75 miles a week and do full-body workouts frequently as well.
RegularlyExpressed
53m ago
I wonder how much of the relative smallness of Berlin is due to late German unification, and hoe much is due to being damaged in WW2, followed by being split in two during the cold war and dragged down by being located in communist East Germany.
SSCReader
1hr ago
That seems like a lot of side effects for something that doesn't happen that often.
Places with no cross walks? Places with no sidewalks so people have to walk on the road? Places where people have obstructed the sidewalk by parking on it? The fact people have to get out of cars onto the road when parking or when getting into their car?
Not to mention how it allows you to murder someone just by waiting nearby until they walk into the road to get into their car. Shoulda yielded to me! I was in a car, he wasn't! Sure he was about to get into a car, but he wasn't actually in one! Yeah I aimed for him, waited for him and accelerated to 80mph but so what?
freemcflurry
1hr ago
newly-arrived grandparents
It's insane to me that this is allowed. The justification for immigration is that these are net contributors and we need them to prop up the social safety net but instead actually we're letting in people who will never work again (or not for long) and will almost immediately start collecting benefits. There was a similar deal a while back in the US when a Pakistani Uber driver was killed after his car was hijacked by a couple of, um, youths. The guy was 66 years old and driving for Uber. He had only immigrated a few years previously. The citizens who fund this stuff in the US and Canada are getting fleeced. You work for 40 years and instead of getting to leave it to your kids it all gets sucked away to pay for people who just showed up and never contributed a dime.
That takes a sort of good thing and goes too far and makes it a bad thing. I jaywalk all the time. Usually with the flow of traffic which makes things way more efficient (pedestrians crossing opportunistically means you don’t need 40 seconds of pausing the road for them to cross).
Your idea would make it legal for the car to speed up and kill me while driving outside of the flow of traffic conditions. Also would provide no zone of safety if I make a mistake. This applies to cars too. If I accidentally pull out in front of you it’s better you brake than have a right to ram my car.
More broadly this applies to all sorts of things. If someone in a business deal has their lawyer make a mistake in the other sides favor is it better to bankrupt the guy or adjust the contract. Maybe for the other side it’s even more profitable to burn the guy but for society as a whole it’s better to adjust and continue with the deal providing a good/service for society. In business deals like this if you always chose short term gain it would mean all deals needs more lawyers for longer contracts detailing every possibility and more eyes to catch mistakes. But lawyers overall are a negative sum game as they costs money and produce nothing.
Of course in many ways these protestors who glue themselves are shitting on the commons. We won’t run them over because saving ourselves 2 hours isn’t worth killing them just like it’s not worth killing a pedestrian who fell into the street when you could have just breaks. Yes the pedestrian is an annoyance to you and costs you 10 seconds and the pedestrian is in the wrong but the commons are that everyone is sometimes partially in the wrong and inflicting maximize damage on them for a small gain to yourself doesn’t benefit the whole of society.
For the protestors though you could argue running one over when they are costing 300k people one hour or like 13k days gets close to being net efficient.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
1hr ago
protestors who had glued themselves to the road
When protestors started using the roads, I came up with the idea of making roads (outside of crosswalks) open range cars. Meaning you can do what you want but if a car hits you not only is the car not liable for any damage done to you are liable for the damage any damage you do to the car. That remains true even if the car speeds up or aims for you. The car has a priority right to use the road, and other users must yield to that right or bear the consequences.
So you're against the ADA and the CRA, then? And are voting for people willing to repeal both?
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