MCllorf

Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. It's amazing how easy communication is when your words aren't interpreted in the most obtuse and uncharitable way by extreme progressives

He still has time to do loan forgiveness "helicopter money" style. But even if all we got was an expansion of targeted relief programs I think it totally counts as fulfilling his talking point. The issue with student debt is that for some people there's no way out, but generally speaking college-educated people are more well-off and forgiving all debt would be a regressive stimulus that targets the wealthier side of the population. Targeted relief is a great way around that.

I'm mostly basing my comments off of info pulled from this site https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcyc...

A major factor that I see surprisingly few people advocate for even in an educational setting is helmet color and high-visibility clothing. If I remember correctly just wearing a white helmet alone is associated with a 25% lower risk of being in a fatal accident. A white helmet + high vis gets you closer to 40% or 50% reduction.

There were rumblings in Australia about making high-viz clothing a requirement but I'm not sure if that actually got passed or not. From the data I've seen it makes nearly as much of a difference as wearing a helmet vs not.

From what I've seen, collision coverage tends to be used for cases where you made a mistake and need to get your own vehicle fixed. Generally all the coverage sections will get more expensive when you move to a more densely-populated area but the from the cases I've seen, collision coverage will tend to be significantly more expensive in Chicago than southern Illinois.

I think it's safe to use insurance rates as a proxy for the likelihood you'll get into a crash. Rates are almost invariably higher for every type of coverage if you live in a more densely populated area.

Motorcycles have about 29 times the deaths per mile compared to cars. If all you're worried about is saving space and gas they're a great option - my Honda cruiser gets about 80mpg. But it's incredibly dangerous. I think it's plausible that safety could improve with infrastructure changes and driver education, but I don't think it could ever compare to being strapped into a metal cage with airbags and crumple zones

Producing data for something like that sounds like an incredible ask and I'd be super interested to see how other people have tried to tackle that problem.

My anecdotal experience is that they teach something close to that in philosophy departments, at least insofar as you need to be able to present the logical steps and connections you're making in a plain way so your paper is easier to engage with regardless of how abstract the topic is.

I think the actual critical thinking is something that happens internally and you can't really correct or improve that as a teacher if the student isn't capable of explaining what they're thinking - and if you can teach the student to explain what's going on inside their head, they can learn more effectively from people more intelligent than them later on because then it's public knowledge what they're screwing up instead of private. So to that end good writing might be even more fundamental than critical thinking skills.

If they took the same heavy-handed approach to diet that they took with smoking I'd find the policy approach a lot more tolerable honestly. Just picking one or the other seems like discrimination because I think generally being fat is comparably unhealthy to smoking.

yeah 100%. I do wonder about the energy requirements though because intuitively they don't totally make sense. I still don't understand why it couldn't be used as an infinite energy generator. Is it really just that the ship would move without gaining any momentum since it's the space around it moving instead of the ship itself?

Even if the FTL aspect turns out to be impossible, I think it's still an interesting hypothetical alternative to chemical and electric thrusters. More realistically I'd bet it's even further off than terrestrial/lunar mass drivers to solve the payload problem but it's an interesting thought nonetheless.

I don't know if this was clear to you, but the link was no associated health problems -> less funding for research -> no available cure. I'm sure hairline surgery would be a lot more popular and people wouldn't balk at the cost nearly as much if the surgery added 20 years to your lifespan

It would be worth quite a bit, but it would have to be comparable to either rogaine or hair transplant surgery. Hairline surgery isn't worth the money for most men, but they wouldn't even blink paying that much for cancer treatment. If it were comparable to rogaine in price it wouldn't be as much of a cash cow since they're making less per sale and maybe making fewer sales because it cures the problem. And if I remember correctly, we only have finasteride/minoxidil for hair loss because they were originally used for high blood pressure

What on earth are you talking about. Some dudes rock the bald look by choice. Cancer will literally kill you if you don't pay to get it treated.

Something gives me the feeling someone would have cured baldness like 50 years ago if it actually caused health problems for people.

I've always been curious on this question because I don't have any physics background.

If you made something like a gravitron ride on the moon, would it take a slower rotation speed to reach perceived 1g than if you spun up a ring station in orbit? This calculator makes it seem like you could get pretty close to 1g with just a bullet train running on a 3.14 kilometer loop.

It seems like the main thing stopping earth trains from being faster is that most of our tracks were built a really long time ago and it's not worth the effort replacing them, but if metal is readily available and you're laying new track already, designing for ~300km/hr wouldn't be that much of a stretch no?

My guess would be that online dating is extremely biased in favor of women because men tend to over-value looks while women tend to value things that are harder to communicate at a glance. Which would be why men generally feel ignored and women generally feel like they have tons of really shitty options.

from my experience, it's absolutely necessary if you listen to a lot of podcasts because every tech-illiterate podcaster dude will see an EQ setting on their microphone/recording software and think "low frequencies are manly and sound good" and boost the hell out of it, and it sounds absolutely awful.

Granted my home speakers might have something to do with it, and headphones/earbuds do tend to have a high-pass filter built in just from their construction, so it probably doesn't affect everyone the same way.

I've been using equalizerAPO for desktop for years. I can only think of a handful of content creators that don't pull that bass-boosting garbage anymore, so the high-pass filter pretty much always stays on unless I'm playing music.

Once the child is past the age of breast feeding, biology has nothing to do with how well you can raise a child. It might determine who ends up with the child since judges tend to favor women, but that has more to do with tradition than their innate parental expertise.

If secular therapy needs to provide a view from nowhere in order to fill a need, then I'd say you're right. But it seems like the goal here instead is to provide an alternative for people who are disillusioned with the answers their religion was able to provide, and who no longer feel that other religious people are trustworthy. There's quite a few people like that in America right now.

It feels like in a lot of circles now the expectation is for Conservatives to be unreasonable idiots, so people tend to put the blame on non-conservatives in the same way you'd blame the parent for raising a snotty child

It sounds really stupid but being desirable by potential partners makes an unfathomably huge difference in your outlook on life.

It does make sense to use "whatever the contemplator thinks to be moral" as a stand-in for moral behavior. My only quip would be that whatever the contemplator thinks to be moral and what actually is moral are not necessarily the same thing though. I suppose in that case the study would just be asking if ethicists follow their own rules - I've been out of college for a bit but I don't think common courtesy is a hot topic in ethics at the moment.

"Moral (or amoral) behavior, I would think, requires intent."

That itself is not something all ethicists would agree with. Finally, my bachelor's in philosophy comes in handy.

I don't understand the point in even writing an article like this because it's impossible to begin without staking out your moral positions, and at that point 99% of the work is just writing a philosophy paper. I don't think you can even say that most philosophers would agree that moral reflection promotes moral behavior, because you'd have to get them all to agree on what moral behavior is - or in other words, you'd have to solve the problem the field has been trying to solve for the entirety of its existence.

I'm not trained in STEM at all but these discussions are always a little confusing for me because if our goal is to bootstrap mining/manufacturing in space, why does everyone jump to expensive, complicated and inefficient solutions like "energy lasers" when we've had power lines for like 150 years and can make them on-site much more easily?

There is no arguing with you people. The sort of things you miss out on if you're homeschooled are totally unimaginable to you so there isn't anything I can say that will change your stance unless you literally live through the experience. It has nothing to do with only comparing yourself to the median or upper quintile of public school socializers. The only way that position would seem reasonable to you is if you never met any homeschoolers or only talked to the parents, who obviously will be extremely hesitant to admit to mistakes because it makes them look bad.

There's also a huge and obvious problem with studying homeschooling. Part of the disadvantage is that each homeschool environment will be radically different because it's impossible to control for what a given home life is, the type of parent that would homeschool their child, and the sort of education they otherwise would have had if they weren't homeschooled. It's also really easy to track down all the homeschoolers that ended up going to college because that data is already gathered. It's a lot harder to track down all the homeschoolers that never left their parents basement or work the night shift at the 7/11 because they barely learned how to read, so you really can't say that "statistically" it's better or worse. Of course the data will be skewed so homeschoolers seem like higher performers.

To argue against your point that public school wouldn't have helped requires me to share really personal experiences. It's frustrating to be forced to share them over and over with people who probably won't take the time to actually learn from them.

I picked up social skills extremely quickly when I started college, but the first two years were absolutely abysmal to such a degree that I genuinely believed for a period that I had undiagnosed autism. I ended up turning out pretty gregarious and I'm probably average to above-average at making connections and coming off as normal by now, but an enormous amount of suffering could have been avoided. The social situations I was afforded as a child didn't provide nearly enough opportunity to learn and fail.

I had a glimpse of what the alternative would have been like because I got to take drivers' ed at a public school. You might think putting your kid in cub scouts or homeschool co-op is a substitute but it really isn't. If your kid only hangs out with homeschool kids they only get to see how the weird kids act. And if they're in cub scouts they're automatically at a disadvantage because a lot of the other kids are going to already know each other from school.

A lot of people like you come into the conversation asking to hear about the experiences of grown homeschooled children, but once they say something you don't like you suddenly turn into an expert on the subject because their lived experiences aren't representative of whatever you imagine homeschooling is like.

As someone else pointed out, it's not clear that school helps with [learning how to be likeable]

The rebuttal to your point is so simple and obvious it's really hard to take you seriously. Socializing is a skill that can be practiced. If you have fewer opportunities to practice, you're less likely to get better. The children that are bad at socializing despite going to public school do not show that public school doesn't teach socializing, it means they didn't learn as much from their practice. For all you know, poorly-socialized public school children would have otherwise ended up living in their parents' basements until 45 or turned into serial killers if they were homeschooled. Public schooling doesn't need to guarantee good outcomes to be the more desirable choice.

I made an account just to comment on homeschooling since I grew up homeschooled in the US and have a lot of opinions about it.

It's great if you have intelligent parents who know when to say "I don't know," but if you aren't an expert on a given subject, you should bring in a private tutor. This means that for most parents, once your kid hits highschool you can't teach them anything outside of whatever you have a bachelor's in, so to homeschool effectively you'd have to just pay for a bunch of private tutors for each subject and then you're not really homeschooling anymore.

Also, depriving your kid of the socialization they'd get from more traditional non-cult schools in the US is almost universally seen as bordering on child abuse by people who grew up homeschooled, so keep that in mind moving forward. Learning how to be likeable is already difficult enough for kids who have social opportunities all day every day. The stigma absolutely did not come out of nowhere. It's unfortunately common for homeschoolers to leave the house and present as if they have autism or some other social learning disability. For some reason it isn't taught as a learnable skill, but I think nearly everyone would agree that it takes practice. There will be obvious differences between a kid that practices 2 hours per day instead of 30 minutes a week.

Edit: I'd also caution anyone against giving too much credence to the stories of parents who homeschooled their children but were never homeschooled themselves. Parents and children often end up having wildly different perspectives on this subject.