The Even Prime

One of the ways I constantly visualize myself dying is a giant log falling off a truck straight into the car I’m in, exactly like in a scene from one of the Final Destination movies. Anyway the other day I was going to get a burger and there was some gardener’s pickup truck in front of me which had a bunch of tiny unsecured logs piled up in the back with the tailgate down, which made me laugh because of how much it resembled a harmless mini version of what’s in my imagination. Then I noticed the unsecured chainsaw.

That scene from that one Final Destination movie. It’s bizarre how much it sticks in the memory, even for people who haven’t seen it.

It was played multiple times in the trailer, and the trailers were everywhere for weeks. I've seen that scene more times than any scene from any movie I've actually watched.

That's a big part of why it sticks in memory.

Also even like. Economically. It’s better to give money to poor people. That’s basic Keynesian economics.

Give $600 to someone with no money and they will put it back into the economy, buying groceries, clothes, accommodations, maybe some small luxuries. Give $600 to a rich person and it goes into their bank accounts and just stays there being useless.

If you give a poor person $20, that same $20 will be spent easily 10x over, by 10 different people, in 10 different businesses- within a week.

1- poor guy buys groceries at a local bodega.

2- the bodega owner pays his employees from the cash in the register.

3- bodega employee goes to Starbucks and tips the barista in cash.

4- the barista owes their roommate from lunch last week and pays them back

5- roommate buys something from an indie creator on Etsy

6- Etsy creator splurges on takeout & tips in cash

7- the takeout delivery driver fills up on gas

8- gas station manager (who got paid from the register) takes their kid to the ice cream truck

9- Ice cream truck driver buys a new tire and gets an oil change

10- mechanic gets lunch on a shift

….and so on.

Giving money to poor people is the single best way to stimulate and energize the economy… because poor people do something with money that rich people don’t- THEY FUCKING SPEND IT.

Giving $600 to a poor person is like composting food scraps. It returns nutrients to the economic ecosystem and supports the livelihood of others.

Giving $600 to a rich person is like tossing plastic into the ocean. It’s added to a massive floating garbage patch of corporate wealth. It disrupts the balance of the economic ecosystem, leading to consequences like economic ecosystem collapse.

In a healthy economy, money continues to flow. Rich people are bloodclots.

Billionaires are where money goes to die.

Everyone so far is wrong.

Give money to a poor person, and it's spent several times over as it changes hands, and the person receives basic necessities.

Give money to a rich person, and it's spent several times over as it changes hands, and the person receives some future claim, usually partial ownership in an enterprise, sometimes municipal bonds.

These multiplicative effects can ricochet differently through different segments of the economy, and different goals will suggest different courses of action. Fiscal policy to improve housing outcomes will look different than fiscal policy to improve employment, or inflation, or basic research.

But money in investment accounts is not gold buried beneath the floorboards. Investing money is spending it.

something something we are the daughters of the witches u couldnt burn but also we’re really fucking annoying #girlboss

"We are the daughters of the witches u couldn't burn" is how you say "we're really fucking annoying" in #girlboss.

what if vampires are like mosquitoes and only the ladies drink blood

Pretty sure that would mean the fellas drink tree sap or something. Imagine running from a vampire thru the woods and passing her husband who’s biting a tree real hard

Maple syrup vampire husband

Encounter: Maple syrup vampire husband drinking sap in the woods, also trying to lure you to his literally bloodthirsty wife.

The wife has the classic Villain Of The Night aesthetic, all black, flowing cape, everything, and her husband is wearing red flannel, overalls, a beard, and is welding a log-splitting axe

This person gets it! Classic vampire lady and her lumberjack husband!

I regret nothing

This is exactly the aesthetic sexual dimorphism of Minnesotan Millennials.

I've had an eyebrow up about attempts to push American tipping norms from 15% to 18% but I'm willing to accept that labor inputs constitute a bigger share of the total input pie now and should be compensated accordingly

You see on the one hand it doesn't feel like more but on the other (before apps, lol) it's a lot easier to mentally calculate 20%, isn't it?

very curious to see if Americans will ever figure out how to price services with a single number instead of factoring out labour costs

???? 20% has been the standard default tip since forever?

yes tipping is an insane institution and we should just pay people, but leaving that aside- 20% is just What You Tip, only boomers who think they need to punish waitstaff for not performing servility hard enough ever tip less than that

Like I may have had older parents than many of my cohort and been acculturated to older standards but I don't remember seeing 15% even challenged until the 2000s and then it was by back-to-the-city we're-too-good-for-suburban-careers-so-we'll-be-pissy-service-workers types so

This is one of those Great Wars you see people fighting - those who just accepted the anchoring that printed tip suggestions and digital tip buttons pushed tend to think its 20% and Always Has Been, while others fight for the “15%, 20% if they do exceptional/its a really fancy place” consensus that was nigh universal until the 2000′s. And it plays out within generations too! Since a sizeable contingent of Millennials+ read (correctly) those anchoring tipis as corporate social engineering and reject the attempt, leaving fights among peers.

I watch for the occasional tip anchoring approach that tries to treat 25% as the “natural” rate, and I have seen it a few times, but the war hasn’t settled down enough for it to work. I do think odds are it will though, and many years from now itll be “20% or 25%?” fights raging.

It turns out that if you tip 50% and go to the same places repeatedly, you get seated uncannily quickly without having to wait in line (and your dates will be impressed as fuck).

Also, people who are bad at performing humanity but tip 50% are “eccentric” rather than “assholes.”

Well worth it.

15% is standard, and it always has been, but it's polite to round up to an even multiple of $1, or $5/$10 for large bills. It has always been thus. I will die on this hill.

That said, I will absolutely go to a restaurant that has 20% higher prices if it disallows tipping. Tipping culture Delenda Est.

After WW2, the US wrote Japan's new Constitution, including a provision about how they weren't allowed to have military forces.

These days, they have a Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (totally not an army), a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (totally not a navy), and a Japan Air Self-Defense Force (totally not an air force).

But their Constitution is, to this day, still interpreted as banning aircraft carriers.

Anyway, meet the Izumo-class multi-purpose destroyer (a military boat which carries aircraft) (not an aircraft carrier).

The entire Wikipedia article is gold, but some choice excerpts:

(B-but not in, like, an aircraft carrier way, b-baka.)

It's like that scene in The Emperor's New Clothes where the kid shouts "that's an aircraft carrier!" and the emperor's advisor says "no, Emperor, it's a multi-purpose destroyer which happens to carry aircraft; it just looks like an aircraft carrier to stupid people."

"What if our esteemed allies, the US, somehow got into an emergency in which they need a place to land their F-35B's? Oh, by 100% pure coincidence, we just happen to have these boats, which totally aren't aircraft carriers, but could support having F-35B's land on them! In fact, let's do some upgrades to make it easier for F-35B's land on them, for this specific situation and no other reason."

"(Please ignore the leaked military documents saying it was always planned to be an aircraft carrier.)"

The Commerce Clause has been stretched to allow the US federal government to do some shit that was pretty clearly not intended by the framers of our constitution, too.

Richard Best twitching in his grave.

@onenicebugperday can you explain this?

Yep, it’s a rolling swarm of caterpillars. They just happen to move more efficiently that way! A rolling swarm can move a lot faster than individuals can on their own. Using other moving caterpillars to walk on is sort of like those moving walkways we use at airports :)

Hey mutuals, do this

huh does this actually increase their speed or just their endurance, it’s hurting my head

If the ones on the bottom are moving at their regular speed, then the ones on top are moving twice as fast, or 3x if there are 3 layers, so it’s probably at least a 1.5x speed boost on average.

so why don’t we let cars drive over the top of other traffic, just think of the savings!

Square-cube law. At caterpillar size, it’s relatively easy to carry multiple times your body weight. Also, caterpillar bodies are relatively flexible and well-suited to bumpy terrain. Not so much for cars.

okay so why don’t we just ride caterpillars to work

The missing information here is how much speed or energy is lost for the caterpillars on the bottom, from bearing the extra weight and being actively pushed backward by those treading atop them.

presumably it would be possible to model them as tanks on treads or something but it still sounds a little fiddly

Very little energy is lost. At those weight scales, the difficulty is extending the leg, not bearing the weight. And the friction of the bottom caterpillar against the ground is high enough that there isn't much inconvenience to being inched along on top of.

I've been gone almost a week and never knew that this was added

Plan:

I don’t much care for the term “mansplaining” but making a statement about your academic field, having a guy [eta: apparently maybe nb? breaking gender barriers for brand new genders ig] tell you that you are an embarrassment to so much as discuss it, telling them you know more about it, and then getting this

in response is um. Yeah wtf

oh yeah they did this with history too a while back. very bad case of STEMlord disorder

The aspect of stemlord disorder I'm down with is making conclusions about relative difficulty. The aspect I'm not down with is the idea that "I could've specialized in this but I did something harder instead" implies "I definitely know more than people who did soecialize". The latter just isnt a great look and doesnt make sense.

git gud stemlords

Heyting is somehow able to make cogent points while still being so completely un-self-aware that they believe the different sections of the gre are necessarily calibrated to be equally difficult, despite the entire conversation--the crux of the argument--being incompatible conceptions of "difficulty" across fields.

The initial point was "more people score perfectly on the math portion than on the other sections," which, as I pointed out, doesn't suggest that math is an easier field, whatsoever. Maybe the math gre is easier than the other sections. Maybe they're similar, but because there's less luck, correctness across questions within test-takers is more highly correlated.

But none of that does anything to diminish the initial complaint about advancement in the humanities academe being a lot of politicking and zero-sum political games. This isn't to say that history, as a field of study, is "harder" than physics. What would that mean? It does make the allegation that success in the academic field will, in the absence of rigor, be achieved through a lot of luck and manoeuvering that taints a lot of the output, which ends up being bullshit.

But even if the gre chart above had anything to do with anything, it's still not a persuasive chart from simple selection bias alone. The smartest physics students have tech firms, hedge funds, and consulting gigs clamoring over them. The smartest philosophy students could probably get many of the same interviews, but aren't as aggressively recruited, unless things have changed quite a bit in the last ten years. I would absolutely expect the segment of Philosophy concentrators who take the gre to be selected differently than the, e.g., CS folks.

But even if that's not the case, even if the conversation we were having was "who's smarter," and even if GRE scores were a solid metric for that, and even if there weren't selection bias there, well, they seem pretty interleaved between the two categories. So it's still an unimpressive chart to use.

I really don't know what they were thinking. If I had to guess, I guess they were thinking [unbridled rage at dipshit evo for trolling them], which, like, fair enough, I would too. But that shouldn't mean they get a pass on making a bad argument.

As an asthmatic, this was critical advice. It can also be helpful to splash cold water on the back of your neck or forehead, which helps distract you from the panic. 

If you are having issues with what it feels like breathing in a mask, practice in a calm environment where you feel relaxed, and if you can’t get it to be ok, try different masks.

yeah it's absolutely important that we talk about how masks can make people feel like they can't breathe, and that is itself difficult. my mom has straight up developed some sort of agoraphobia during the pandemic and has had to skip out on events because she can't be in a crowded room with a mask.

good idea to check in with your body and what you're feeling, what exactly is it that's causing that suffocating feeling? is it contact with the material or the way it traps warmth near your face? try different fits and materials

Having run several miles while masked on numerous occasions, I am somewhat skeptical of the claim in reference to surgical masks, and certain that it is wrong in reference to respirators like N95s.

This seems like something where there’d plausibly be a lot of variation between individuals in how strong this response is and whether it happens at all, so I don’t think “this doesn’t happen to me” is a good reason to dismiss the idea that this is happening to other people.

I don’t know if this is exactly what’s happening when I put on one of those masks that makes the experience uncomfortable for me, but it sounds like a plausible model of it.

The claim I dispute is the one in the original image. Oxygen intake *is* reduced.

What they invariably mean is "O2 sat is not reduced, because people instinctively compensate by breathing harder when something obstructs their breathing." The reasonable version of this claim is "under normal circumstances, this compensatory effect is automatic and sufficient." But the claim as it's usually promulgated, (and no one tell my very medical family I said this), is horsefeathers.

self referential/self aware horror is trying to stretch out its shelf life because the industry is afraid of the next step in the logical progression of appealing to modern horror audiences: what if there was a crazy monster coming for you and you tried to suck it off

This is just Species. Or Under The Skin. Or Jennifer's Body. The industry has no compunction about that genre if they think it'll sell.

This is apparently a major villain from Kaitou Sentai Lupinranger VS Keisatsu Sentai Patranger, her name is Goche Ru Medou and she is an evil doctor whose motif is supposed to be a sea anemone (she does not look like a sea anemone)

With anemones like that, who needs fiends?

its common wisdom among some ppl that math/stem skills are objectively harder than verbal/hum skills and i think an interesting empirical counterpoint to this is that high-achieving testers consistently do worse on the verbal sections than the math sections of the gre/sat—to the point that a perfect score on the math section of the gre puts you only in the 96th(!!) percentile while you have to lose at least five or so points in the verbal to exit the 99th

hardly the be all and end all of this “debate“ but it does sit poorly with some popular narratives

The thought process I see a lot of people go through is “STEM is rigorous whereas non-STEM fields are mostly about bullshitting, therefore STEM must be more difficult.” Popular examples of this line of reasoning include long stretches of Cryptonomicon and various xkcd comics (for example).

Even assuming for sake of argument that the humanities, history, and the social sciences are all bullshit, it still feels like there’s a missing step here. Or perhaps if bullshitting people really is that easy, one ought to put one’s Dunning-Krugerrands where one’s mouth is and pursue a career in film acting. One can afford to donate a lot more bed nets on a movie star’s salary than even a doctor or a software engineer’s, after all.

Yeah, mathematician here, and I mean, I do have the impression that humanities such as literature and art do involve much less rigor (at least, for a certain common definition of rigor) than the “hard” sciences or some parts (but not others!) of certain non-STEM disciplines more on the humanities side of the spectrum (such as sociology or psychology).

The issue I have with people who view STEM fields as more difficult, even commanding of more respect, is that there’s no reason whatsoever to suppose that [less rigor] = [easier], particularly with regard to getting published! To me, having less rigor is precisely what makes a discipline go from challenging to absolutely terrifying.

Every time I reflect on my struggles to get enough mathematical results to be published in good journals, I thank the whatever-force-may-or-may-not-run-the-universe that I’m not trying to get published in, say, literature or philosophy, where I’d have to appeal to others’ subjective judgment in arguing some thesis regarding ideas or works that have already been discussed/debated for centuries.

Partially it is because the difficulty doesn’t count

It might be harder to get published, especially if you’re in a field that is intensely status driven, but that doesn’t matter - you can just kill all your competitors. There is no intellectual challenge there.

Meanwhile in surface science, there is nobody you can kill to make it easier to determine the boundary influence of doping a palladium/vanadium alloy with chrome - you gotta actually shut up and do the math/experiments.

the difficulty in those fields is not something you approach by getting better at what you do, it’s a thing you approach by playing more negative-sum status games

a discipline with no rigor means they can’t tell correct from incorrect, and everything is about status games

“a discipline with no rigor means they can’t tell correct from incorrect”

Tell it to Zelensky, pigpot :)

oh please, do go on, explain to us whatever the fuck it is you just said

Are you fully doxxed and easily accessible as such?

…is this word salad?

No, I just helped OP bolster his case. You are very stupid in social intelligence, so stupid you didn’t even think to ask some of the most obvious questions about the subject matter area you are trying to denigrate.

You are below novice. You are not even wrong. You are keeping bad company who is making you more delusional about the world, and instead of clenching your butthole so tightly and becoming more reeeeee about things, you should pierce your stone before it stays black forever.

“Is this world salad”, jesus christ you little shit, that’s a question easily answered by just reading. Are you a native English speaker? Can you not read and form your own conclusions?

Is this word salad?

Because I ordered the word soup.

To pull it back from whatever the fuck she-who-should-spend-more-time-observing-and-less-time-embarrassing-herself is trying to say, and returning to heyting's initial thought, a cluster of high scores is exactly what you'd expect if there were some underlying understanding being measured. Remember that binomial distributions are found in the scores of coin-flipping contests. "The test set up to examine math is based on understanding which you may or may not have, the test set up to examine vocab is more influenced by the randomness of the words you're exposed to" is exactly what the reported curves suggest.

big fan of the genre that’s just “what if there was a fucked up city”

So, Star Trek?

I think there are still a few people around (like perhaps @athingbynatureprodigal ) that don't think we need to start ripping this stuff out with defunding, combined with modernization of civil rights employment law (to weaken the undemonstrated racially scientific assumptions present in e.g. the 4/5ths rule).

Nuclear reactors do not grade on a curve.

It's one thing if people argue about whether a nuclear power plant is or should be built on Native American land. That's a political question to be answered by politicians.

It's quite another to argue that standards need to be lowered for the field of nuclear engineering (given the current state of the talent development pipeline), or that it's 'white science' (what "epistemic racism" and similar jargon will likely boil down to).

Most likely there hasn't been much impact yet, but this sort of thing involves getting people to agree to some statement and then exploiting that for leverage later. There is no point in waiting for this to become an actually serious problem where standards have been lowered for reactor operators.

Yes. Return to German physics. Enough of this--wait, what?!

For the record: I am still a New Atheist. There is still no god. Richard Dawkins is very smart and interesting and an excellent biologist. I agree with most of what he has to say and would love to meet him. The Christians are wrong and the Muslims are wrong and the Jews who believe in God are wrong and the Hindus are wrong too. Anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution is super ultra wrong. And, modulo the simulation argument, there is no god.

endorsed, although the only thing I would do in the presence of Dawkins is irritate the heck out of him with memes, to be honest.

I met him at my college's Secular Society breakfast. (I wasn't even a member. My friend/ex was the president, and she woke me up with a phone call at 6:30 and just said "Get dressed. We're meeting Dawkins. I'll text you the address. [Click].")

He's super personable. He also didn't know what "meme" meant in popular usage, so I got to explain that to him. He was a little baffled.