321–330 of 452 posts
He may have lost his bet, but maybe he came close. 2020 was the closest I’ve come to feeling that society was collapsing.
You're going to compare that to Cambodia in 1978, China 1961, or Germany in 1945?
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The US is just one country and we're talking about the future of humanity as a whole. Here in the UK we've eliminated more than half our carbon emissions from energy generation, and generally the US is lagging far behind a lot of other countries. Covid aside, economic and health improvement trends globally have been incredibly positive. Since 1995 about a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty. That d…
>Since 1995 about a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty That is a great soundbite for the news but is it actually as great as it sounds? If we take it as fact that "one billion humans have been lifted out of extreme poverty" what about how many are in extreme poverty? Note that how many is outside extreme poverty doesn't say anything about the amount in extreme poverty, just that more are now above…
This is a simple and knowable answer. And it doesn’t change the facts the sound bite is based on. Extreme poverty is lower now as a percentage. There are fewer born into extreme poverty now, etc.
You can also pick other cutoffs and they are improving as well. Obviously the goal is to raise people higher than $3/day, but this is just an existing measure that’s getting better.
It’s frustrating to me when people nitpick unimportant details as if they were significant.
I don’t think anyone who established the extreme poverty cutoff thinks that it is the end goal, or that $3/day is as good as $30/day. So everyone agrees that 10x is better. But there are measures for extreme poverty because it’s a problem and needs to be addressed differently to get people from $.01/day to $3/day differently than interventions for $3 to $30 (and $30 to $100).
Pinker’s book, Angels of our Better Nature, goes into this quite a bit. And there’s a lot of global health primary sources to also help answer your questions.
This is such a bitter note. I would have paid the 1000, but Kelly was very predatory. He set up a gotcha interview and then a surprise bet on some pretty wild claims from both sides.
In any case, the world has clearly gotten worse and more unpredictable, so the spirit of the bet favours Sale, but because he lost to a technicality, now he's being compared to trump??
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Yes, MADness. Because the attack entails utter destruction, it would be irrational to attack, so no one attacks. Bernard Brodie, naval strategist, figured this all out as the inevitable endpoint of nuclear weapons in 1946. People have been trying to get around it ever since, but there is no way around it. Disarm, and a handful of nukes rule the world. If armed, the only way to avoid war is to make it utterly irration…
> And offence has an apparently permanent advantage over defence with MIRVs, as it will cost more to shoot down a rocket than to launch it, so missile defence doesn’t work as a strategy to exit MAD. But not shooting a missile down is massively, massively more expensive. If the missile scare on Hawaii had been real and North Korea had launched a single nuclear missile and the US had shot it down, do you think anyone w…
But it isn’t 2x. Try 10-20x. Modern MIRV’s can have ten warheads, and it is also substantially more difficult to target a moving missile than to hit a launch silo. Tests so far have not been anywhere near the accuracy needed to confidently guarantee you could shoot down a first strength. You need 100% performance, they’re getting less than 50%, for ideal conditions.
The economics just don’t work with a 20x cost gap. What’s more the attempt to built a unilateral defence system would encourage a massive arms race.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targe...
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Well I'm a Brit, but I did write that with an eye to the fact that most people here are yank... er, I mean my esteemed colonial colleagues. Yes you have fewer and more threadbare social safety nets that in Europe, but a heck of a lot more than in China.
I am from Latin America though and have a 0.025 USD / year tuition on my current math undergrad education, public healthcare, and a more robust social security net overall.
I live outside the US and I can assure you the universal healthcare here doesn’t not provide the same level of care that even Medicaid does in the US. Sure if I had a routine broken arm there would be little difference, but if I had a serious cancer I’d be dead here.
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You know there's a difference between a computer and a computer program, right?
The funny thing is that your low effort zinger is factually wrong. Something you'd learn in second year compsci: >In computer science, a universal Turing machine (UTM) is a Turing machine that simulates an arbitrary Turing machine on arbitrary input. The universal machine essentially achieves this by reading both the description of the machine to be simulated as well as the input to that machine from its own tape. ht…
Einstein invented the theory that later went on to predict black holes yet Einstein himself didn't believe they were possible.
It's entirely possible to invent something and yet still underestimate the practical applications of it. Heck, the hacker culture and even a great many musical genres are based on people saying "this thing is cool, but what if we do this with it instead?"
> In short: if you are the type of person to think she had anything important to add to computer science you are the type of person to think Steve Jobs was anything but a snake oil salesman with a decent understanding of typography.
Lovelace and Jobs couldn't be more different. One was a socially revered individual who made millions selling other peoples work. And the other was mathematical genius who had a significant amount to contribute but society forced to work in the shadows because of her gender.
I'm not saying Lovelace didn't have her flaws. But dismissing her achievements as being Baggages is, ironically, akin to your complaint about Jobs.
"Kirk must hit the trifecta to win, meaning that all three horses of his apocalypse must come through" Shouldn't it be Sale?
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So, how rich is your dad? Because unless it was "can drop quarter of a million dollars or more" rich, then no, in the US he would've just been sent home to die. The existence of a public healthcare system running at capacity is not evidence the US system "doesn't have this problem". Being denied treatment because you can't afford it is objectively worse then being denied treatment because the system is busy. One prob…
Perhaps there's another way to put this. In an ineffective public healthcare system, people are denied treatment because the public body has determined it is not worth the cost. In an ineffective private healthcare system, people are denied treatment because they cannot afford to pay. > Being denied treatment because you can't afford it is objectively worse then being denied treatment because the system is busy. Is i…
That's not including the costs of follow up treatment, the increased cost of your insurance after an event which changes your risk category, or the byzantine system by which your job will be gently encouraged to let go of a "significant risk factor" because it will reduce the cost of them providing health insurance.
And in reality - people in socialized healthcare systems aren't denied life saving treatment. The availability of treatment is a priority list for "elective" surgery - that is, surgery not immediately necessary to save one's life. And this also does not affect the availability of private care - in Australia you always have the option to pay for private treatment, but controversy over waiting times exists precisely because the vast majority cannot afford to pay. And our costs are cheaper then US to start with if you do.
Hence the original question of how rich the OP's father was: because the reality is, if he wanted surgery right away he most likely could have got it. That he didn't is telling - because he actually couldn't afford it. Couldn't afford to fly to the US and have it done either. The US would have "denied" them treatment just as assuredly. And they did eventually get it where they were.
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> He wasn't defending destroying the frames though Agreed > In modern developed countries we have social security benefits, health care and such, to varying degrees depending on the country, to try and make sure people don't starve like that. And the country with the highest GDP lacks anything other than the bare minimum social security and the article is very-USA centric. (Both China and Europe have a more stable so…
> the country with the highest GDP lacks anything other than the bare minimum social security and the article is very-USA centric. As with many similar topics, the US actually spends a much higher amount on social welfare than people realize, more than most developed countries. As always, it just does so uniquely inefficiently, for reasons that are complicated and possibly related to our sclerotic politics. https://w…
Basically this article is about someone's exercise to persuade themselves a lie is true. Keep squinting, keep finding ways to tilt the numbers, until, like a word you've read over and over they become nonsense and then pronounce yourself satisfied that you've proved Up is Down and Black is White. Congratulations I guess, to Kirkegaard? A Wall Street firm sends an exec on a $10M tour of Europe for "wellness" and that's now welfare expenditure, but there's tax charged on the food an unemployed steel worker in Liverpool buys so his unemployment cheque doesn't really count as welfare after all.
I look forward to a study showing that the US has really good paid leave compared to the rest of the world, so long as you denominate it in dollars not hours so that a marketing exec's six months "gardening leave" to prevent them stealing accounts outweighs Amazon warehouses with zero paid holiday...