Starman_Jones

Our brains also have evolved rewards for performing life-continuing behaviors, and then evolved to rewarding proxy behaviors, instead of the actual life-continuing behavior. This is perfectly in line with what you are saying, but now we are rewarded for spotting enemy snipers in CODBLOPS, rather than spotting lions/snakes/crocodiles.

We have gotten very good at hacking this reward function. It has reached a point where a thinking-minimization engine will pay a significant amount of resources to, say, Paradox Studios to do what is effectively the opposite of not thinking.

Through Medicare and Medicaid, the US spends more public money per capita on healthcare than any other country spends period. This is largely because Medicare/Medicaid were not allowed to negotiate pricing; they were legally required to accept whatever price companies wanted to set for a treatment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

For the cost to develop the polio vaccine, March of Dimes could have bought enough iron lungs to save 12,000 lives. Of course, they had no idea what the actual number would be beforehand; all they knew is that they were spending enormous sums of money on something that could turn out to be a catastrophic waste, rather than saving thousands of lives. At the end of the day, they felt that was a worthwhile risk. With hindsight, we can see that they right.

I just learned earlier this week that he produced “In The Dark of the Night” from Anastasia!

Without condoning this, I think it’s important to be very clear about what this is: it’s an automation improvement to a decades-old existing system. Most retail stores already keep (and share!) photos of suspected shoplifters, with the work being done by printing screenshots from security camera footage. The goal is to discourage them from shoplifting by constantly having an employee nearby, and to only kick them out if they’re caught in the act. Personally, I don’t think increased surveillance is a worthwhile use of resources, and I think it could lead to abuses like you’ve described, but from the POV of the people building this, they’re taking an existing labor-intensive task and making it easier. From their perspective, it’s easy to argue that this won’t lead to blanket bans and lists of undesirables because those could already exist, but they don't.

My grandparents lived north of Salt Lake City, close enough that I’ve been there at least half a dozen times over several decades. Last time I did,I drove across a bridge with no water under it to an island that was fully connected to the mainland by dry land. It was very melancholy to reflect on how the natural world I grew up with is disappearing.

You’re dodging their question.

I apologize if I’m missing the point you’re making, but trench foot and vaccines are completely unrelated.

Vaccines fundamentally impact viruses. Trench foot is not caused by a virus, or any infection. It’s more akin to frostbite.

We’re really pushing the boundaries of what we can do with vaccines, but the root cause of trench foot is poor circulation, and a vaccine can’t really fix that.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. You’re going to need to justify both of those claims.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

It reflects incredibly poorly on management, bordering on incompetence. If those 10% of employees were needed, then management obviously shouldn’t fire them just to make the stock price go up. If they weren’t actually needed, then management shouldn’t have hired them in the first place. If they’re only sorta needed, then that means management wasn’t able to come up with any ideas to grow the business.

Furthermore, regardless of what expectations are set, it’s not the remaining employees’ job to figure out how to do 111% of the work. That’s literally the job of management.

That’s also true of companies that AOC wants to raise taxes on. She’s not forcing anyone to pay those taxes. Companies that don’t want to pay those taxes are free to relocate away from America, abandon selling to the US market, and cut themselves off from the American labor supply. Of course every company wants to be successful in big cities in America. But taxes are very low in dying small countries in the middle of nowhere.

“…for energy is the lifeblood of this society and when the chips are down he who controls the energy supply controls Planet. In former times the energy monopoly was called ‘The Power Company’; we intend to give this name an entirely new meaning.”

— CEO Nwabudike Morgan, The Centauri Monopoly

Negative.

“…the data does not by themselves establish the physical origin of the light that generated the images…”

1) because there aren’t enough teachers in-state + coming out of the lower 48 to meet demand.

2) Pay alone can’t make people happy, which is why there’s a very high alcoholism/suicide rate among oil workers, despite it typically being a more temporary gig than teaching and paying considerably more. I also hold teachers to a different standard for on-the-job demeanor than oil workers.

3) Per my brother in law, they’re happy to be in Alaska for the American experience.

4) Foreign teachers in Alaska aren’t suppressing wages. That would be true for free market jobs where schools can simply decide not to teach students if it’s not profitable, but teaching isn’t like that.

At a general level, it is a simple fact that there are more qualified/happy candidates globally than there are just in the United States. For the second part, no, I assume that money/opportunity are WHY they’re happy to teach up there. If that’s the motivation that keeps qualified teachers from turning to alcoholism or suicide, that’s a good thing for the kids.

My sister was a schoolteacher in Alaska. They pay a premium, but it’s still not a life that most Americans are cut out for, including me. That means the schools have to choose between giving these kids subpar teachers who are happy to live up there, or miserable teachers who are only doing it for the money. Or, we can hire foreign teachers who are qualified AND are happy to teach up there.

Since Bari Weiss took over CBS News, there’s been a number of controversies involving corporate interference to nix or promote politically-charged stories. Most recently, at 60 minutes, a lot of senior journalists were fired. The touchpoint seems to have been that they pushed for journalistic independence and maintaining the long-form “gather all the facts” investigative journalism that the show was known for, while corporate leadership was pushing for them to “get with the new way of doing things.”

The index is intended to follow the all of the largest large-cap U.S. equities, not pick and choose which ones to invest in.

This particular piece is incorrect. S&P has preexisting rules to pick and choose which large-cap equities to follow. They had a discussion about whether to drop those rules in order to become a more accurate benchmark, and they chose to stick with what they had been doing.

Regardless of what they say they were doing (or what they’re trying to do), the fact that they changed nothing means that what they had been doing is the same as what they are doing now, ie, picking and choosing stocks at the risk of diminishing their benchmark capabilities.

truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

Given the events of the past week, this letter really comes across as nothing more than public grandstanding.

They aren’t. The US built monitoring infrastructure there because it’s our project, and that’s where the science needs to happen.

It’s the same reason that many more countries than just Argentina built the Pierre Auger observatory, or that the Vatican built the Pope Scope in Arizona.

If these rules go into effect, is it not true that individuals, state governments, and non-governmental organizations could still fund scientific research that the federal government won't fund?

This administration’s actions towards Harvard and other schools would suggest not. If a state or university is doing verboten research, the federal government can make them stop. Previously, that didn’t happen - it was unthinkable. Now, it’s forever on the table.

What do you mean by that?

The good news is that people have looked into it! And not just in a modern-slop-journalism kind of way, but in a serious, rigorous kind of way. And many of the resulting scientific papers are published online and available for you to read!

You’re right, I was mistaken. My bad.

In American English, “race and religion” is an old-timey expression that’s typically used as a broad identifier in a melting-pot context, eg. “We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions…” ~FDR

The idea behind YEC is that God created a world which is visibly, quantifiably, and measurably 6000 years old. According to this, scientists, in their hubris, failed to see what was right in front of them, and were led astray. It’s imperative that the earth NOT appear to be older than 6000 years, because if God put forth evidence that it was that old, then he did so for a reason, and we should treat it as being that old.

Catholicism introduced the whole concept of purgatory, which specifically avoids the idea of eternal suffering. Water baptism is not a requirement for grace (read: salvation), although it is a requirement to be recognized as belonging to the Church.

As a non-Catholic, this shows such a poor grasp on what makes Catholicism different from Protestantism that it’s comical. Some early Calvinists, for example, said that Catholics were wrong because they DIDN’T believe that. It would have taken you so little effort to uncover your lack of understanding before broadcasting it to the world.

The hardest part about not using Meta products is deciding not to use meta products. When I stopped using Facebook, I had resigned myself to spending a lot of time and effort to stay in touch with my friends and family. As it turns out, all I had to do was mention that I was using Signal, and the people closest to me, then pretty close to me, then kinda close to me all started using that too. The network effect cuts both ways.

Yes, that is a description of comparative advantage. You must ask yourself this, though: why can a country be worse at manufacturing/growing yet still trade with the US? The answer is, of course, opportunity cost, as I said above. And, as above, then you must ask yourself what would happen to comparative advantage if there were no opportunity cost?