Matthias Schabel

Just in case you're wondering how Portland stacks up in terms of city budget expenditure per capita in comparison to other major cities in the US and why our taxes seem so insane : @MayorKWilson @PortlandGov @GovTinaKotek @pdxreal1 @Oregonian @KGWNews

@RonWyden How about we actually arrest, prosecute, and jail drug dealers? One can argue that incarcerating users is unproductive, but it’s hard to see the upside of being a benign place to sell drugs.

Heard today in Beaverton from local law enforcement & public health experts about the urgent need to stop drug dealers peddling nitazenes, a synthetic opioid much deadlier than fentanyl. I’m all in to get Oregon communities the devices they need to detect this looming threat.

@Andercot @grok What’s the history behind this (fake) photo?

People think the future of defense is low cost drones but actually it's this

@biogerontology This dying business is a drag, and it's annoying that it is so difficult to stop.

If you hear another AI celebrity telling you on stage that in the next 5 years we will double lifespan or eliminate all diseases - please show them this output from their own LLMs and ask them "How?". This simple analysis makes me very sad because statistically, it means that if all my longevity drugs get approved, impact on human longevity will be just a few QALY in the best case and it will take years until these drugs get validated beyond the approved indications and diffuse into population as longevity therapeutics. We need more people working on this problem and more alternative approaches.

@SamaHoole @mattwridley Also decreases the urban heat island effect by converting 20% of the sunlight into electricity and intercepting the much of the remainder before it can heat the surface.

@matthiasschabel @mattwridley Pavement, car park roofs, warehouse roofs, and motorway verges. Unlimited surface area, no farmland sacrificed, no thousand-year grazing tradition lost.

Activist: "You can graze sheep underneath solar panels. It's called agrivoltaics." Farmer: "I've read the brochures." Activist: "Best of both worlds." Farmer: "The panels shade the sward. Productive species die back. What grows is what tolerates shade and compaction. Sheep won't finish on it." Activist: "But the trials show it works." Farmer: "The trials run three years and measure ewe presence. Not lamb growth rates. Not finishing weights. Not what the soil looks like in year fifteen." Activist: "It's still better than nothing." Farmer: "It's a 30% stocking rate, a steel frame I can't plough around, panel-cleaning chemicals running into the watercourse, and a 40-year lease I can't break." Activist: "But you're getting energy AND lamb." Farmer: "I'm getting a third of the lamb, a maintenance contract, and a field my grandson can't farm." Activist: "You're being negative." Farmer: "I'm watching a thousand-year-old way of feeding people get traded for twenty-five years of subsidised electricity. Negative would be the polite word."

@DrCatharineY Probably will work for hantavirus, too.

Oh no. Here comes the mRNA vaccine being all effective again.

@SamaHoole @mattwridley There are places in the US Southwest (and elsewhere) for which partly shading land for intensive agriculture may make sense, but I struggle to come up with a scenario where doing so is logical in the UK…

@SamaHoole @mattwridley On the other hand, there’s an almost unlimited supply of pavement that we could put panels over that has none of these issues.

"uninterrupted incompetence leading to tragedy"...

@cremieuxrecueil I’d love to see the statistics on other aspects of social order (losses due to shoplifting, graffiti/vandalism, assault, robbery, drunk driving fatalities, etc…) I’d wager that the correlation with murder rates is high.

By locking up <2% of the population, El Salvador took itself from being the murder capital of the world to being safer than Canada. With sufficient effort, anywhere can become peaceful and crime-free. And it's on track to get even more peaceful this year!

The man holding this squid is Bajau, a member of an Austronesian ethnic group known to spend their lives living on the water. Bajau have an amazing adaptation: they can stay underwater for a very long time. Thanks to chubby seals and Korean pearl divers, we know why.

In all honesty, I don’t think most people give a fuck if the 1-2% of people who can’t function in a high-trust society end up incarcerated indefinitely. Where the public safety regimes seem to go wrong is their inability to resist the temptation to start categorizing their opponents/people who disagree with them in that 1-2%.

No matter the poll, Bukele's approval rating is nearly always over 90%. In the last three polls, it's 93%, 93%, and 94%. I've never seen anything like this. We need to study this regime. The international community has massively underestimated the importance of public order.

@KatjaGrace Goodwill?

Does anyone have a really satisfying way to store clothes? An account of my present objections to approximately all of the ones I know of, which I'm not recommending you read unless you are curious or want a break from talking about AI: worldspiritsockpuppet.substack.com/p/is-there-an-…

@cremieuxrecueil Amazing but not surprising. I bet they will see the same effect with other compulsive/addictive behaviors (drugs/sex/gaming/gambling/etc). I’d love to see a study of the effect of GLP-1 on ADHD, too.

We finally got the results of a trial of GLP-1s for alcoholism! At 26 weeks, alcoholics on semaglutide had 13.7pp fewer heavy drinking days than placebo, they drank ~500 fewer grams of alcohol/month, had 1.5 fewer drinks per drinking day, and saw 10.1pp more alcohol-free days!

I can only wonder what kind of society finds tolerating this sort of dysfunction to be enlightened?

@Abizzle2121 @no_luck_4_you @oregonducksmama If you honestly believe that abortion is murder, lying is by far the lesser moral harm. It doesn’t take exceptional insight to recognize that.

@no_luck_4_you @matthiasschabel @oregonducksmama She’s said many times she wouldn’t mess with state law

People like Brittney from Momsfororegon will still vote Democrat even though she pointed out she’s being gaslit by Oregon Governor Tina Kotek and that schools have been backsliding for 20+ years. The definition of insanity… Electing the same people who are destroying your state. 😵‍💫🙄🥴 Oregon public school proficiency percentage decline from 2018-2025… Beaverton- Math 53%⬇️36% Portland- Math 48%⬇️41% Eugene- Math 48%⬇️34% Salem-Keizer- Math 35%⬇️21% Tigard-Tualatin- Math 46%⬇️29% Enrollment also down 35,000-40,000+.

@KarlPfleger But there does appear to be some evidence for latitude dependent increases in rates of dementia…

There could be confounders but reverse causation 16yrs ahead seems absurd. But you're phrasing it backwards: Implication isn't D supplements magically protective, it's that deficiency speeds age-related neurodegeneration, which is very plausible, esp given that deficiency clearly impairs immune function & the data connecting infectious agents to dementia, plus all the other data showing that deficiency speeds aging in general. For a list of relevant papers see: x.com/KarlPfleger/st…

Many papers associate low vitamin D levels w/ worse health outcomes. What's notable about this new study is how long subjects were followed: Low vitamin D in midlife predicted tau burden on PET 16 years later. neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WN…

@KarlPfleger grok.com/share/c2hhcmQt…

@Abizzle2121 @oregonducksmama Ummm. oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2022/10/21/vot…

@matthiasschabel @oregonducksmama Bro. That’s literally Christine Drazan.

@SandyofCthulhu @AtheistTakes Whatever you specifically believe, questions that keep recurring for hundreds of years (or longer) haven't really been answered, at least not to everyone's satisfaction.

@AtheistTakes I’m begging you, real internet atheists, please give us an argument that wasn’t answered 500 years ago.