rwtwm

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Yeah but these are often accompanied by us flying all of our military aircraft over London. I think the analogy holds, even if ours is a bit eccentric.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

I'm not American (but we do get a lot of US Pol foisted on us), so forgive me if I'm missing something... I thought the US democratic party was basically everyone more left wing than Joe Manchin. There are 'third parties', but in general the broad church argument applies... Anyway aren't USians able to actually pick the candidates that stand for those parties? So wouldn't you use the generals to vote 'against' Republicans, but then use the primaries process to vote for the shape of D you wanted? Here that's not an option, the party puts up candidates. But you have the ability to pressure the candidates even after they are elected. Might be a long shot, but is inherently less fatalistic than just giving up, or even (as seems disturbingly popular these days) calling for some form of civil war.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

You've worded it best.

My version of the take is; The world will be on average easier if more people are pleasant to each other. You can't make everyone join in, but you can make the world better on average, which surely is good enough?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I'm not a 'we won't be friends' person. But I do think this is a really poor response. Who you work for is one of the biggest ethical decisions you make. You take years of training and skills and you use them for 40+ hours a week to... Well, support the actions of an industry that brings misery to millions of people.

Getting a job is hard, but it's not impossible. And you're choosing avoiding that discomfort over making life worse for people. You may be but a tiny cog in a giant machine, but if that cog has to turn you're part of the problem.

I know this is gonna come off as aggressive. I have no beef with you personally, and you are but one of hundreds of millions of people shrugging and working in destructive of unethical enterprises. But that shrugging is the system. Collectively the system doesn't work without you all dedicating half your waking life to it.

I do wish you the best, but hope you'll eventually do the hard thing. Because it's the right thing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

What was the Sheriff of Nottingham doing in St Albans?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think a lot of people in this thread are overstating the suspicion of outsiders. International trade has existed for thousands of years. There was even limited tourism in the middle ages. It would be rare to encounter people that you couldn't communicate with, but I don't think you'd be automatically sacrificed.

I'm in London, so would fare better than most as they would definitely be familiar with outsiders. That said people in many of the old European cities would likely be able to blag their way to local universities. Oxford definitely already existed 650 years ago so I'd start by heading there.

I think all scholarly writing was in Latin at the time, so I'd need somebody to translate, but (with luck) I could move maths on a couple of hundred years. I reckon I could get basic electricity going too. Obviously the more you said upfront the more suspicious people would be, but if you drip-fed knowledge over a few years, trying to let the steps rest upon each other you could probably share a lot of what we know today.

 

I'm only really sharing this to give me somewhere to voice my bewilderment. Economists and financial reporters strike me as among the most gullible uncritical people on the planet. Reeves had a panicky Spring statement because of a missing £10bn in the projections for 5 years time!

Now it seems the forecasts were £15bn out at a lead time of a single quarter. Yet I bet come autumn we'll be soberly reviewing the OBR report and talking about how tax changes might impact the final year of the projections.

BTW financial forecasting is hard. Most models are wrong but some are less wrong than others and all that. I'm not arguing against using the best info we have. I'm just astounded by the level of precision we work to at these sorts of lead times, given the evidence before our very eyes of how wide the error bars are.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Isn't that a 'necessary but not sufficient' condition though? I'm thinking principally of the struggles in Zimbabwe here.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

It's been 15 years and I'm still not sure if MMT is an accurate description of Economics, a persuasive analogy, or convincing bunkum.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

This isn't a comment in support of the actions described, but a comment about unintended consequences...

If you reclassify putting stickers on a car as domestic terrorism, you're somewhat removing the disincentive for some in doing an actual terrorism.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

I love how memes (in the Dawkinsian sense) work. Lots of people have enjoyed this, but I can imagine this being quoted as the original is lost to the sands of time.

Young people everywhere thinking that Aquaman was someone who just bought failing assets from everyone.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I know this is a joke thread, but I think this is a great example of a poorly designed survey question that charitable people would say 'generates discussion'. I would say it enables confirmation bias and just creates animosity amongst people looking for reasons to dislike an imaginary other.

My instinct when I first saw reporting of this was, yeah I probably could. But that's because I read the question as me being able to play until I won a point. If I even won one, even by a double fault, I win. When I said as much on social media people jumped on me. But here's the thing, I think theres like a 99.8% chance that the world's best Female tennis player wins any given point against me. I'm just expecting one shanked return from 500 efforts.

Then uproar. Because it's only because she's a woman. Except... Well there isn't an equivalent question for Novak Djokovic! So people are jumping to conclude reasoning, and YouGov is formenting that by reporting on a shoddy question with no control to give us a benchmark. For the record I think on average I'd have to wait longer to win a point against the worlds best male tennis player, because they serve so much faster, but I don't think I'd be waiting forever.

So people read the question and assume both that the question refers to a one point shoot out, and they already think the greater portion of men are misogynists. Well then that's the explanation! It cannot be an ambiguous question interpreted differently!

And I'm not denying that for some people the worst explanation is unfortunately the correct one. But I do have an issue with people dismissing or ignoring fairly rational objections to the survey or interpretations of it because of their pre-existing biases.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Not true either, someone has linked the survey question above 12% of men said yes, 3% of women

 

This popped into my mind the other day, and I've been distracted by it since.... You know when you're trying to recall something, and a wrong answer pops into your head, but you know it's wrong. Like how does that work? E.g. if you're trying to remember who made a song, and your brain can almost simultaneously go - oh it's that band, and then oh no not them. It feels like there has to be two (at least) parts of the brain working on it at the same time.

Maybe I'll be lucky and a neuroscientist will drop in and link me to a paper. More likely it's something to discuss with wild speculation. Either way, I'm hoping writing it down will stop it distracting me.

 

I'm learning the piano. I think the development is aimed at those a little above my skill level, but it's interesting about what it implies about how we learn physical skills.

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