@ishouldverun @mattyglesias @bscholl No. Too much spent on defense, definitely, but it's not even the #3 category.
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Andrew Flicker
3K posts
Andrew Flicker
@aflicker
Nerd: Spends his work-hours hip-deep in stats and math models, and his free-hours buried in books and computer games.
Nürnberg, DE Katılım Mart 2009
290 Takip Edilen284 Takipçiler
@mattyglesias @bscholl Isn't most the spending on war?
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Stop deficit spending and inflation will end as if by magic. This isn’t hard, except getting Congress to make the necessary cuts.
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I graduated high school in 2003, but was working part-time from 2001 (junior year) through lower-division college, and working full-time through upper-division undergrad. So... no, I probably read more now, since I have slightly more free time! Possibly less than when I was a highschool freshman, though, and chewing through the school library.
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@C_Hendrick @paulg Do you read (for pleasure, not teaching books) as much as you used to, pre-2005? I certainly don't. Probably still more than the average person, but a long way from what I was like before.
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This bodes ill. Readers used to outnumber non-readers 2 to 1. Now non-readers outnumber readers 3 to 1.
It's hard to imagine a change of that magnitude not having significant effects.
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@wendyxoxcupcake @PalmerLuckey The USPS has a monopoly over the carriage of "letters" (first-class mail) as defined by the Private Express Statutes. Fedex etc. can only do more-expensive express mail delivery, by law.
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@PalmerLuckey You dope. The reason no one uses those private corporations to deliver business advertising (which is what ‘junk mail’ is) or a letter for that matter, is because it’s easily 50 - 100x the cost
So much for the efficiency of the private market.
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It is time for the United States Postal Service to ban junk mail.
Unsolicited spam calls are already prohibited by the FCC. Emails are heavily regulated by the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Junk mail is the majority of mail, 100 million trees per year. Enough!
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@fsd_norway @PalmerLuckey Same in Germany, except it doesn't work, ha.
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@PalmerLuckey In Norway, you can put a “no junk mail” sticker on your mailbox, and postal services are legally required to respect it. It’s simple, cheap, and it actually works.
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We let him work as a car salesman to acquire the money instead, and a sick person dies on the kidney waiting list.
Coercion problems are more worrying, but considering the already significant-screening, simply adding some (additional) anti-coercion screening seems like it would be the best approach.
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@ANon46561976893 @RichardHanania We must have very different views of morality and bad incentives then, to me letting some 20yo go sell his kidney to go buy the scat pack he saw some influencer driving on TikTok just doesn't sit right with me.
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Attitude toward kidney markets is probably the closest thing you get to a pure test of reasoning ability in politics.
Alexander Berger@albrgr
Nobel laureate Al Roth has a great piece in @washingtonpost today on why we should compensate kidney donors. Kidney failure disproportionately hits Black and low-income Americans, costs Medicare $55B+/yr, and most people who need a transplant will die without one. 🧵
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@h8box @Noahpinion #2 for Germany was still "sex", so not that far off US/UK/France/China that just had it one off. Japan with sex at #5 is pretty different!
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The amorous Japan of my youth is gone 😭
麻子@asa_ko_tko
TENGA調べ 「最も気持ち良いと感じることは？」 アメリカ「セックス」 イギリス「セックス」 スペイン「セックス」 ドイツ「人を抱きしめる」 フランス「セックス」 中国「セックス」 韓国「セックス」 台湾「愛している人と共に時間を過ごす」 日本
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Yes, the Democrats are the tax and spend party, and the Republicans are the don't tax and spend party.
Sara McGee for Texas HD 132@SaraForTexLege
If there is ever a social phenomenon that needs to be studied, it is how the GOP has been able to hoodwink people for decades into thinking that they the party of “fiscal responsibility” when there is absolutely ZERO evidence to support that claim. And I mean ZERO.
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"superior" is a tougher bar to clear and highly personality-dependent, but "comparable" is obviously true and real life is crowded with things like that! (many short-duration crafts, short-duration art production, almost any sport / physical game, certain types of reading, many/most types of learning- and for certain personalities, things like "inbound sales w/ commission", "coding bug fixes", "optimizing runtime", "delighting an interlocutor", "impressing someone", etc. can all be life-enhancing in terms of health or income as well as addictive/dopamine-producing in similar ways as video games.
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@sentientist @ubiquitousnewt last sentence here is a self-limiting belief.
there are absolutely numerous healthy real-life pursuits that offer superior reward ratios.
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Actually what it means is that "I would prefer it if you had a hobby that increased your status and shows off your skills"
Gaming is fun. But for the vast majority of men its a waste of time because it neither generates resources nor status in the eyes of most ladies.
Connor Tomlinson@Con_Tomlinson
When women say they don't like a male hobby, you must translate this to, "I feel anxious if I see my boyfriend/husband spending time on a surrogate activity rather than a tangible achievement, because I feel our resources are insecure, and like he isn't prioritising my needs." If a woman feels safe with you, and knows you have things taken care of, she won't care about you spending the occasional hour a week on Rome Total War.
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“Suffice it to say that I believe the Ousters have done what Web humanity has not in the past millennia - evolved... Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.”
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"barbarians squatting in the ruins" is adapted from a phrase from the Hyperion books, and I've gotten so much mileage from it over the years
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼@Noahpinion
The USSR sucked, but imagine Putin's empire building anything like this. Modern Russians are barbarians squatting in the ruins of their ancestors' achievements.
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@tanka_o_pardil @wrathofgnon Yeah, I mean just do the standard "no construction outside of normal working hours", and the town's so small you can walk to the parkland outside quite easily. Sunlight in the apartment is overrated- go to the square, the countryside, the roof!
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@wrathofgnon it would be quite a bad place to live in. you'll be able to hear everyone around you and sunlight would be blocked in many areas. won't have any open space near your house and any kind of construction job would be felt and heard by everyone around
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Still dreaming of visiting a living town based on the layout of ancient Pompeii. Majority of buildings one or two stories, with taller towers scattered throughout, a higher density than any modern capital and taverns and eateries on every corner.
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Reasonable, but also easy to oppose robot taxes from the principle of "tax things you want less of, if you have to raise money, or things that have an unchanging quantity".
James Medlock@jdcmedlock
Yea taxing capital income strikes me as much more coherent. It's gonna pick up that robot money wherever it ends up.
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@robinhanson Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No?
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We can't imagine a utopia that lacks struggle.
LoLNothingMatters@DastDn
Francis Fukuyama is a fucking genius and a prophet.
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@paulg Most of the time I see it used, it more-or-less meant "this take displays bad taste".
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You never need to describe something as a "bad take." If it's false or irrelevant or omits something important, you can just say so. And if it's true, relevant, and complete, it's not a bad take.
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@EarthToBreLive @knimbot Over the years building PCs, I have:
A) started a small fire
B) singed some eyebrows when a PSU had a small explosion
C) bled on multiple carpets
D) scared my dogs from cursing
It's a lot easier nowadays, though! Tool-less cases, more reliable parts, and a lot fewer sharp edges.
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@EarthToBreLive @jeffbrutlag Good line. Very glad I'm not in the dating life anymore- everyone I know of every gender and orientation just tells horror stories.
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@jeffbrutlag A friend of mine once asked me “Are you having fun with them because they’re fun… or because you’re fun?” and I’ve never stopped thinking about it.
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The amount of men on dating apps who bring absolutely nothing to a conversation is far too many
I should not be the only one driving the conversation, and at this point, I refuse to
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@made_in_cosmos Micro-culture. One dedicated bike thief can steal a lot of bikes in one town every week! (One town I lived in had a small group of guys with a pickup truck that stole a few dozen every week from bike parking lots, caught only after years- so ~thousands of bikes)
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I don't understand where the difference could possibly come from, I live in a super densely populated city area with many rental dorm buildings and lots of traffic
their town and especially their neighborhood seems so chill in comparison
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I don't ride my bike too often but when I do I always leave it unlocked and nothing ever happened to it for years
meanwhile my parents told me someone just stole their neighbors bike that was behind 1) a door code, 2) iron bars with a pad lock, and 3) chained to the wall
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Glad they caught the guy! I was expecting it to be a bureaucrat or political appointee, rather than a soldier, but yeah. If you increase the financial incentive for this sort of thing, it's a natural outcome. Still worth it for the markets to exist, but challenging.
bbc.com/news/articles/…
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@BrmnLukas @JcoSalt @RhyminCarly Around 2/3 of leather comes from cows raised for meat and dairy. Most of the other third is leather made from animals other than cows. My understanding is about 99% of cow leather is from livestock raised for meat or dairy cows too old to produce milk profitably.
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@JcoSalt @RhyminCarly You can't make leather shoes from mass farmed cattle. Too many cuts and other injuries on the hides
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A while ago these parents told me they didn’t want to buy shoes that had real leather on them, so I brought shoes I thought were synthetic, but the ones the kid picked ended up having leather at the toe. They said it was up to him. He asked what leather was. They explained that
John Thomas@thebbvegan
Do you think if children were told that they were eating a baby cow or a baby pig for dinner, that they would be happy about it and continue eating it as if nothing happened? No. I can guarantee you that if kids knew where their food comes from, they would be upset that they’re eating a dead animal.
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You have failed the ideological Turing test- that is not a good description of my belief. There are algorithms and ideas for how to improve these systems that achieve their stated goals better than does your plan. Of course, that's no argument if your goal was to mix randomness and majority bias.
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@aflicker @mattyglesias I understand that you believe there can be some neutral human arbiter, or a commission of such, to oversee the process. There cannot - there will always be biases within individuals.
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