squirrelicus

When you convince people they're being robbed because of inequality, it's a problem. Envy is the problem. It's a cognitive defect. There's a reason it's a considered a sin. You are not entitled to what other people have, and justifying that feeling is how you destroy prosperity for all.

Generally you get downvoted for doing so, but people still try to argue. I have a lot to say on the subject, but one thing I still need an argument for is why inequality is bad intrinsically. I'd love to hear a cogent argument that addresses that fundamental point, but what I end up seeing in the wild is camps of people who think inequality is some intrinsic evil, and those that don't think it's relevant to anything.

I think all the fish I eat is farmed... Now I'm curious, because that's a partial counterpoint. Doesn't defeat the message, but it's certainly a gap.

I'm certain we're talking about two different things. I'm talking about the West's distance from the depravation of the state of nature (capitalism certainly causes), and you're talking about some cherry picked metrics that make some countries in the West look better than others.

Let me try this again. Seriously today was busy as hell.

I'm not sure exactly the point with respect to the soil and soil nutrients. The dust bowl area isn't unfarmable, it's a goddamn breadbasket. And if the Amazon, if it's a cloud forest goes more arid, that's (a) not intrinsically bad, and (b) might make it a farmable breasbasket of South America instead of the hostile, relatively uninhabitable place it is now. Although, if it does become more arid, which still seems unlikely, I'll admit the probability that biodiversity will be replenished is low. We might lose some cancer cures or whatever, but gain the elimination of South American food scarcity.

I'm just fucking tired of the doom and gloom that has no room for seeing the potentials for exploitation. The good kind. The kind where South America might be able to turn into a high standard of living, developed world power, for example.

What changes and what food chains? Your statement is just false. We don't live off the wild. We're long past that point, and the developing world is increasingly past that point.

But... Like... Economies of scale are literally what gave the capitalist West it's unthinkably high standard of living.

FWIW, not trying to troll. I grew up with and was in favor of 90s environmentalism, which seems to mostly have been a success [0]. The latest environment doom and gloom doesn't have the impact and persuasive power that the previous environmental crusade had. Maybe it's just that I had school indoctrinating me then and don't have that now. But I like to believe that's not the only factor here. There's something lacking about the biodiversity and climate change outrages of the late. Some scientific persuasive power, some rigor missing.

Don't get me wrong, I'm generally supportive of the fundamental argument that we ought not to change anything too fast because the consequences are terrifyingly unknown -- that's what makes me a conservative, in fact. However, there's a damn good reason to make that gambit: the elimination of global food scarcity, lifting the developing world out of poverty through industry, allowing developing worlds to be self-sufficient and not dependent on the West. If we lose the Amazon in the process and sea levels rise many meters, as a hyperbolic example, maybe that price is worth paying until we figure out how to not do that. We definitely don't know how to not do it yet. I don't know, and neither does anyone else. Well, that's only half true. We could force every country on the planet to build nuclear fission reactors and electric vehicles at threat of war. But nobody's willing to do that, so it seems like climate change must not actually be that pressing.

In summary, it's risk, and it's scary, but I guess my biggest problem is the idea that it's likely to be bad for us. The opposite seems true, in the medium term. I mean... If Coruscant is devoid of naturally grown life and is fed exclusively from hydroponics, is that planet instrinsically bad?

Sorry for the shallow response and analysis in this post, but I wanted to respond with something before my busy afternoon today. I'll be back.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened-to-90s-e...

So that's the jump I don't understand. Why would dramatic decreases in biodiversity cause any dying off of humans at all?

So replacing the Amazon with monoculture farming, as you say, increases the number of humans the planet can support, right?

For what it's worth, clear cutting the Amazon and replacing it with farms is probably better for humanity when it comes to Maslow needs

Is it just me or does the biodiversity crises seem a bit blown out of proportion? I mean, I think it's true that humans are causing faster species loss than the historical average. But I think it's hard to suggest we're an historical anomaly in this regard compared to Yellowstones and meteors and such.

I mean, I know that ecology is very complex and small changes can have big impact. But the world isn't really much different having lost mammoths and dodo birds. And if ecosystems do collapse in catastrophic ways, I find it difficult to believe that the gap wouldn't be filled by other creatures after the previous distribution of life changed dramatically. There's nothing particularly balanced or normal or good about the ecology we had yesterday. It merely is.

Like... If you cut down the Amazon, hypothetically, it's not like that land will necessarily become a barren lifeless wasteland. Other life will move in after the culling, right?

I pretty much always get downvoted for these posts where I bounce heterodox ideas of y'all. And it's totally worth it. I'd like to understand why I don't understand the biodiversity concern.

WRT that guy who's going to post about the medical breakthroughs from rainforest specimens... That's cool and all, but why wouldn't we expect a similar thing to happen with the life that moves in after the hypothetical clear cutting of the Amazon? After all, such events tend to be catalysts for punctuated equilibrium which appears to be responsible for much of the biodiversity we have today.

I know that was an example out of thin air and not to be taken literally, but I can just see the commercials a la Juicero or Morus or Waterseer. What you need is an overpriced device that makes doing laundry even more exhausting and time consuming because technology! Now when the laundry piles up, you'll feel daunted AND fat!

The best advice I can give us to build something for pain you feel. Maybe it's edtech integrations or a part of your workflow or life that needs optimization.

If you build something for other people, you'll need user discovery and project management skills up the wazoo if you don't have a team with that expertise. And you're at risk of building Facebook for Cat Owners or something like that. Start with your own pain until you have more experience transforming user pain into something they'll pay for.

I'm sure everyone is different, but it's worth saying that I find myself spending more time in the writing code phase with dynamically typed languages than statically typed languages.

If you're talking wood and clay and stone, I think your supposition is potentially reasonable for some very narrow definition of civilization. Perhaps two digits worth of humans.

Surviving artifacts of the metal ages are very much the norm though, so I wouldn't expect early human villages to have gone beyond the stone age. And with coastal weathering it would be hard to identify any stone tooling from that long ago.

Kinda puts the old religous flood stories in a different context eh? There were almost certainly costal communities who were consumed by rising sea levels the world over. Recent global flooding.

14 years in the industry, and I often describe typing the code as the easy part of software engineering. Once I'm typing the code, I already know in large part what code needs to be typed. The hard part was understanding the problem model enough to know what code to type.

That being said, executing the code while typing it is critical. You cannot build a mental model of all edge cases. At best, your personal discipline will allow you have habits around preventing and catching edge cases. But you won't find enough edge cases just by thinking about the code to type. You do have to discover them by running the code, and the sooner you discover them, the faster you will be at producing high quality code.

As far as how much time I spend building a mental model vs coding... It's at least half mental model time. If I happen to predict enough edge cases, then it might be 90% of the time. But the critical part is that I'm not done until I've exhausted the edge cases I can imagine. If I discover sufficiently big edge cases that brick my code, it's time to step away from the computer and fix my broken mental model.

Note: tests are a way to do this, but so is white box poking and prodding at your program in debug mode.

So this. Go down rabbit holes when you get stuck. Understand your tools deeper as time goes on. Learn by doing. You can't learn programming by reading. Learning programming has more in common with plumbing and carpentry than medicine and law in this regard.

I'm not on board for designing economy based on the happiness levels of the envious. Besides, the literature is clear that rising in status has very little long term impact on happiness.

Edit: it kinda goes like this

"I'm not happy because i don't make enough money"

"Here's some money"

"I'm not happy because i don't make enough money"

"Here's some money"

"I'm not happy because i don't make enough money"

"Ummm.... Maybe you should find a better metric for meaning in your life, because we're getting nowhere."

Beyond a certain point, which appears to be "bill collectors aren't knocking down your door", more money does nothing for your mental health. Look up Jordan Peterson to find the non-controversial reasons why.

Edit 2: the great tragedy of the leftist economic designer seems to be that subsidizing the poor seems to have no effect. If you do that, the labor costs of goods rises to meet it. So all you did is eat into already-narrow profit margins to, at best, raise prices for everybody including the middle class, or at worse, kill local small businesses.

The real darkly funny part about this whole thing is that, in America, controlling for factors like disability, poor individuals don't stay poor very long. You work hard, you're not poor for much longer. If you don't work hard, you're poor forever.

Edit 3: I often hear a politician say a thing that's false, that people "can't get ahead". It might be true that they can't get ahead as fast as they would like. But so what? We can't fix that problem. Literally, it's not possible. How fast you get ahead is a function of how hard you work. That's how capitalism works.

I'd love to understand why you think that.

Electricity costs for the 70s mainframes running COBOL probably. Only half tongue in cheek.

Hah! It's Data Mining all over again! Do... Do you guys remember Data Mining?

Well, I've never been called to participate in a political survey poll thing, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen to people. There's a lot of doctor's offices out there. What was your sample size?

This is really applicable to any products that are valued based on their marketing efforts instead of intrinsic value or utility

Care to elaborate what your distinction here is? I don't see it.

Hmm. By compatibility do you mean translatable metadata across filesystems?

I'm not sure Linux fs devs care about point 1, the simplicity and ease of implementation. They're already beyond that need. I might choose exFAT if I wrote my own kernel, but LOC and complexity don't care Linux fs devs.

Points 2 and 3 are moot in the era of ext4 and zfs.

Not sure what their strategy actually is here.

There's reasonably compelling evidence that Russia is engaged in exactly that as we speak.

I mean, not through marketing. Through exposing the DNC's treatment of Bernie, yes. But...I mean... Have you seen the Facebook ads they put out? It's possible they convinced more people to vote, but they didn't change any votes. It's stuff like "Jesus loves Trump and hates Hillary" level rhetoric.

It is, however I support both of those things because sometimes it's better to slope the playing field to the advantage of those with the bureaucracy set up to enforce safety and pollution requirements. It harms the competitiveness of the market internally and globally, and it makes it harder to do startups. There is a huge trade-off there. And I believe it's worth it, in general, in moderation, with respect to pollution and safety. And I think we have acheived a historic happy balance on those two issues, in general. So my political philosophy is "things are pretty amazingly great, so let's slow the fuck down and not change anything without deeply considering the trade offs"

Shifting the blame through scandal to take attention away from your failure and ignorance is the longest political tradition of humanity.

But in the days of Twitter, you can't take a breather.

Devoid is an overly strong word. There has never been zero nuance, and there isn't zero nuance today.