This is a staggering chart. Life expectancy is now declining across major Western states. In the US, life expectancy is lower than it was in Japan in the 1980s. pic.twitter.com/vDs5DeDipq
— Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) July 31, 2019
We have done fucked up.
And just wait till you see what this chart looks like when climate change really hits.
It’s so odd that all the centrists and “progressives” come out of the damn woodwork to ask, “Where’s the money?” and “How will you pay for it?” when talk of health care for all or free college is mentioned, but never make a peep about highway construction or military spending.
Here’s a clue: with the amount we waste on those two alone, we could fund health care for all and free college with hundreds of billions left over.
The Dream of Open Borders Is Real—in the High Arctic.
The only places in the world that open borders can actually work is where hardly anyone wants to live. That comports with the available evidence. Also notice how social services are deliberately curtailed as that’s all that open borders can really support.
But for some, belief is all that matters, all that is.
But this doesn’t matter to Rackete, she’s an idealist and for true idealists there are no trade-offs, no negative externalities, no unforeseen consequences…there is simply the ideal and anything that furthers that is good and anything that doesn’t is bad.
Never mind that it’s impossible for hundreds of millions of anyone to move to Europe, and for Europe to survive that onslaught. Survival doesn’t matter to these idealists because as long as you are doing the right thing, providence will provide. And of course that will work out about as well as it ever has in history.
every time some tech bro tries to say we don't need humanities education they always, inevitably, end up proving exactly why we need more humanities education
— Take your stars, and give me my scars (@venatrixlunaris) July 31, 2019
True. And every time some STEM type says that philosophy is worthless and should not be studied nor taught, they inevitably spend the next half hour expounding on some weirdo, thoroughly-discredited epistemological ideas that they would not even consider if they’d spent any time studying philosophy.
I have been saying this for many years. It’s not important being the very smartest one. It’s far more important not to do the stupidest possible action at the most inopportune time. Unfortunately, that’s just what most people end up doing in this domain.
The Dalbar results for 2018 are especially painful to contemplate. The inflation rate was 1.93 percent, so investors would have had to earn that just to tread water. Instead, the average stock fund investor lost 9.42 percent, for a gap of more than 11 percentage points.
How, just how, do you lose so much money in a year like 2018? Just…what?
Though that’s not really fair to regular investors, as the S&P 500 returned -4.75% that year, including dividend reinvestment. In 2018, though my broker makes it difficult to calculate, my return was 5%, approximately. So I beat the market by about 10 percentage points, which is what I try to average year over year. If you can’t do that, you aren’t even trying.
Looking at it more realistically, then, the average investor was -4.67 percentage points vs. the market, which is still absolutely awful. (And that means many investors likely lost a lot more, which is what makes it an average.)
All of this is a scam, but it’s a scam I am good at.
My resting heart rate is now 46 bpm. Not bad for a 43-year-old who doesn’t really do that much cardio.
Weightlifting works, ya’ll.
Another Life is a work that seems content to explore every single sf TV show cliché, and often two or three of them in the same episode. Additionally, while doing this, it seems to aspire to be Real World: Space Edition. None of this works well, and it works even less well juxtaposed against the parts of the show that are actually good. It turns out that a show that is 10% good and 90% bad to terrible is worse than one that is all dreck because you start to get your hopes up for any improvement and then are sorely disappointed as someone, say, creates a Space Vaccine for a boron-based (I know) virus in an hour.
The writing team seemed perfectly content to do no research at all on any science, or how astronavigation works, or why exposing the entire crew to unshielded gamma rays from Sirius B would not be a great idea. The writing is so shoddy and careless that you get the idea that the authors of this rubbish must actually despise their viewers openly. Nothing in the show would work how it’s depicted, even stretching the science as many other shows do.
And if you think the human relationships would rescue all that, as they do in some shows? Well, no, they only make it worse as crew meetings consist of the cast yelling at each other repetitively while alarms sound menacingly in the background and no one ever seems to do much of anything but flirt in between attempting to kill one another, all while they should be doing other tasks. These people all relate to each other like toddlers in spacesuits, opening their visors on unknown planets, attempting to kill one another over minor slights, arguing over trifles while the ship is nearly destroyed by a heliosphere. It’s baffling, because no humans alive ever acted how the people on this show act. This show might’ve literally been written by aliens for all the verisimilitude it has to how any humans behave anywhere.
I would say that Katee Sackhoff is a bright spot, but even with her intensity and wealth of emotion she can bring even to a tough character, there’s just nothing there for her to latch onto as the world is so implausible. The few good moments, mostly involving her dealing with the aftermaths of crises, are subsumed in the river of garbage this show delivers. (I also enjoyed Blu Hunt and her deep humanity, but once again, she had nothing to work with. Will watch for her in other works, though.)
Another Life is thoroughly insulting as a show, because it does a disservice to its viewers and to the actors who should’ve had better material to work with. The basic premise is a good one, but as is often said there are unlimited ideas and execution is everything. This damned show demonstrates the truth of that assertion.
What're the apps that send you push alerts that really have no good reason, save trying to get you to spend more time on the app, to send you a push alert?
— Anne Helen Petersen (@annehelen) July 29, 2019
I turn all push notifications off on everything right away. The only thing that has the right to hijack my time is my own bad self.
Why do people so willingly and cavalierly cede their time to apps and corporations? Don’t you have better things to be, to do, to learn? I sure as hell do. I don’t give a crap about what Tim Cook or Delta wants me to see. Humans are not cognitively set up to handle what smartphones do to us. We’re just not.
The left’s denial that biophysical evolution has occurred and is still occurring to humans has resulted at least in part in the horrors of our built environment. If you posit as much of the liberal faction does, that humans have no evolutionary history and are infinitely adaptable and moldable, then it matters not that you embed them in horribly-designed cities, have them dwell in sepulchral concrete boxes and enact aesthetic crimes upon them. Because for these liberals there is nothing there but a tabula rasa, no environment that we’ve evolved for and is more salubrious for us, for that would imply we had been molded by our genes and our environment to be a certain way.
Of course, all the evidence points the other way. We’ve evolved to prefer and be enhanced by contact with nature, to enjoy color and variety, to like trees and to be biophilic in general. This is our evolutionary history and nature. Sure, some liberals are waking up to to this fact and dispensing with their hatred of the idea that humans evolved like every other living creature. But mostly, it’s too little, too late.
Almost everyone who ever says “I’m no prude” is a huge prude. It’s kind of a law of nature.
I'm sorry, younger people. I really am. I really mean it. I wish I didn't have to say this. but I think you'll never be filthy computer dumpster goblins in the precise way that those of us who were glued to CRTs at one in the morning were.
— Oh Hey, Gravis Is Here! (@gravislizard) July 28, 2019
Ha! I agree. CRTs felt just more physically present. De-gaussing, the weird “clunk” sounds they made sometimes, and their other electrical noises, and just how damn heavy they were. They were formidable physical objects with their own personalities.
LCDs feel like the future. They are sterile and lack personality. Their temperament is always neutral, their behavior always predictable.
I prefer them but they also have no soul.
Younger people probably won’t believe this, but it used to be possible to destroy your CRT — and I mean physically destroy it — by setting it up wrong in Linux. I remember the first time I ever loaded up Linux and checking my CRT’s documentation about 10 times to make sure I had all the settings correct before I pressed the enter key.
Luckily, my CRT survived and Red Hat showed me a pretty GUI rather than smoke. I was a happy dumpster goblin.
It’s easier to do the “impossible” when you realize that often what people tell is you is impossible is emerging only from their own fears and limitations and not any aspect of the real world.
I was reading this piece today and it made me ponder again something I’ve been thinking about on and off recently.
As we looked over our carefully assembled treasures, they still didn’t seem adequate for a great journey into the future. I had an idea: Why not each write the story of our lives? Whatever else we put in the tin, we knew this would make for good reading, especially if we’d forgotten our childhoods, like most adults we knew.
I’ve never understood it, but most adults seem to have no ability to remember anything about their childhood at all. Oh, sure, they might have specific event memories but they seem to have no recall at all of what it was like, how adults treated them like subhumans, and no memories of what it was like to be under the complete control of someone else.
This puzzles me, as I have very good recall of how that felt and how much I thought most adults were idiots (spoiler alert: I was right, they were). Might it be that adults must forget so they can allow themselves to treat children as poorly as they were treated?
Also, something I learned only later in life is that most people — the vast majority — are not very introspective or contemplative. Assumption of similarity bias, I know. I thought most people were mostly like me. I was wrong. Thus, if you are not very contemplative, you probably don’t even consider how you were treated and connect that to how you in turn treat young people.
Kevin Drum is so fucking stupid that it’s hard to understand how someone can breathe and be so fucking stupid.
I know, it’s pointless, because his whole schtick is showing how young people are just somehow pretending to be broke, and that therefore nothing at all should change.
I love how this (actually decent) economist calls Drum’s hokum “data free” and makes Drum look like the complete assclown that he in fact is:
One of the great things about twitter is that data-free arguments have a decent chance of running into someone with actual expertise who can just create and tweet the correct graph in a few minutes. pic.twitter.com/AK9Q19HewM
— Gray 'serial millennial myth debunker' Kimbrough (@graykimbrough) July 28, 2019
Drum is what motivated reasoning looks like in combination with not understanding your own data, not realizing when someone else is far more an expert than you are, and in addition you are a huge fucking dipshit.
I don’t often agree with Megan McArdle, but when she’s right, she’s right:
So there's a certain trust gap. Especially because the way we talk about things like immigration and trade is in this universal morality which declares that a US citizen has no more moral weight than someone outside the US.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) July 27, 2019
Right on. For the past 30 years, much of the left and a large part of the right has told Americans that they are “deplorables” if they don’t want their job replaced with an immigrant willing to work double-shifts at $4 an hour under the table, and that the immigrant due to their lack of privilege has more of a moral claim to this terrible job than an American citizen.
That’s what I mean, partially, when I say that neoliberalism has taken over all of the thought and discourse. It annexes morality claims about human rights and human worth into its domain, conflates them with the needs of the market (which is itself equated with a natural force) and then declares that anyone that doesn’t support this unholy miscreation is a racist cretin.
In a very real sense, then, under the dominant neolib thought structure and societal organization (and everyone will hate me for this), supporting ill-conceived notions like “open borders” is more racist than the opposite as it imbues greater moral worth and more notional rights on those with different-colored skin rather than everyone having the same natural rights by virtue of simply being human.
Of course, it doesn’t work this way in the real world, but I am talking about liberal utopia dream world here — which in reality are just ramifications into dreamspace of current conventional neoliberal thought structures.
After all, Consuela has a right and a duty to wipe your nana’s doody.