I have not actually forgotten that the rest of the world exists. As usual, this is everything that wasn’t worth an entire post and is not being saved for any of the roundup post categories. (Roundup post categories are currently AI, Medical and Health, Housing and Traffic, Dating, Childhood and Education, Fertility, Startups, and potentially NEPA and Clean Energy.)
Re the gpt 4 estimates: iirc most particulate pollution is caused by brakes/tire wear and not tailpipe emissions, so if people were stopping for the toll (full stop and reacc) vs just rolling through that could plausibly make a much bigger than 30% difference.
Re certainty and punishment, Megan McArdle's "The Up Side of Down" has a chapter about an innovative probation system in Hawaii called HOPE which emphasized certainty.
The judge explaining the system to new probationers:
“Now, let’s say you have an appointment with your probation officer on Monday and that morning your friend calls you and says, ‘I’ve got a beef with my landlord, I’ve got to move,’ and you drop everything and run over. Then at six o’clock that night”—the judge slaps his forehead—“you think, ‘Oh, no! I missed my appointment!’ What you do next will matter a lot. No matter what happens, you’re going to do some jail time. But if you turn yourself in immediately, you’ll do as little as possible. “If you come in the next day, they’re going to drug test you. If you test dirty, they’ll take you into custody. But if you’re clean, you’re working or in school, we’ll schedule a hearing later in the week, and try to have you do time on the weekend. Usually, it will only be a few days. “On the other hand, some people on that Monday night are going to say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to go back to jail, so I’m going to go out and party and wait for them to find me.’ If the police have to arrest you and bring you back, then I generally give you five times as much jail time as I would have if you’d turned yourself in.
McArdle, Megan. The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success (pp. 218-219). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
> IRS changed Section 174, under the ‘Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,’ such that R&D expenses can only be expensed over 5 years, or overseas over 15 years. All software development counts as R&D for this.
My friend running a startup said that this only affects up to $70k/year in taxes. Unpleasant but not a huge deal.
> Our Parliament is sovereign, and it should be able to make decisions that cannot be undone in our courts.
This happens all the time in the US as well. If the Supreme Court rules that something is illegal according to current law but not against the Constitution, Congress can go ahead and adapt a new law to override the Supreme Court's judgement. For example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lopez#Revision_and_re-enactment_of_law
Maybe duh gubmint shouldn't be subsidizing loss-making venture backed "startups" with tax breaks? Imagine what our tech industry would be like with legitimate businesses competing, instead of leviathans dumping their product on the market for less than the cost of producing it, to crush all competition.
Imagine if good ideas and hard work, not family connections to big money, determined who runs startups. Imagine what the culture of Silicon Valley would be like if it were ruled by legitimate businessmen rather than nepotists and oligarch-fellators.
Will the mentioned tax changes achieve this? Most unlikely. But we can still imagine.
This is very likely idiosyncratic to me, but I am a person who often does the click the links and who also never reads stuff on Twitter. I'm not avoiding Twitter for any ideological reasons, I just find its confusingly threaded bite-sized info nuggets to be the worst information delivery mechanism ever devised. Unfortunately, approximately 100% of the links in these posts appear to be to Twitter.
I'm not sure if the idea of linking to Twitter for all this stuff is a) to give credit to the source of the reference; b) because Twitter actually is the original source of the information and there is no deeper reference; c) because the surrounding discussion provides useful or interesting context; or d) because it's just easier to link to Twitter than to dig out the deep links. But outside of (b) I'd certainly appreciate more links to the original material! (And in case this seems like a criticism rather than a mild suggestion: thanks for all of the great writing.)
“A lot of people can’t even handle the life part of work-life balance” isn’t a very compelling reason for denying me the freedom to control my own work-life balance, try again Matt.
The prison bit is interesting to me, partly because that’s where I’m working presently and partly because I’ve been idly reading through Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project’s Prisoners’ Rights Handbook (edition I’m using at https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/media/publications/pa%20institutional%20%20law%20project's%20%20prisoner%20handbook.pdf ). Have read through a few of the operations manuals for the CA prison system on a couple things including religious accommodations but won’t have much time to dig through them again before my contract expires.
Definitely weird to think train robberies are making a comeback.
So I’ve been out of retail pharmacy for a few years now but around the time I left CVS et al. were pushing very hard to just hard cut all their front-end store staff for self-checkouts, and had been insidiously downsizing pharmacy technician hours over time. I actually went to the CVS where I used to work to pick up something recently and was sort of surprised how much better staffed it was for the time I was there, both in the front and the pharmacy. I wonder if the push for self-checkout is reversing? Asking “why is/was it popular [to cut customer facing staff]?” is a mystery I’ve been trying to solve since 2016.
I’m finding I take issue with the standard “superhero movies are killing movies” take because I have trouble thinking of any that aren’t Marvel/Disney[/Sony] or DC/WB. Are there even any other major studios desperately trying to make superheroes work? When you reduce it to “this genre is only being made by like 5 people so no wonder it’s getting stale” it’s kind of a mundane take that doesn’t really explain much.
I am extremely surprised that you're in favor of RCV. It's not just that it fails to give us the things we'd actually want (like viable third-party candidates not acting as spoilers) - it's that its outcomes are _weird_, in a way which makes voters distrustful of the process. The precise outcome shouldn't be so sensitive to small differences in rankings between losing candidates.
Approval, range, and STAR all seem like much, much better options. IRV seems like it's literally the worst non-FPTP option, and when you take into account the effect on voter trust in the system, it might actually be worse.
Arrow's theorem is overstated: it only applies to ordinal systems, not cardinal systems like approval or range.
My guess is that the CEO of Cruise was politely fired, rather than resigning out of honor. GM is doing layoffs at Cruise and vaguely saying that they are deprioritizing it, so there is clearly a lot of negative feedback coming down from central corporate decisionmakers toward the Cruise unit, and a polite CEO firing would be a natural part of that.
Personally, I am not disappointed specifically that the CEO was fired, but I am disappointed that GM seems to be moving away from both of their main future technologies, self-driving cars and in EVs. Sometimes large corporations do manage to reinvent themselves as part of the forefront of new technologies, and I was hoping that maybe GM could make it work. I'm a bit personally biased since I grew up in the midwest and many of my extended family worked for GM or GM suppliers and it is sad to me to see what was once a symbol of American technological advance stagnate.
I have it on good authority from a flight attendant that is it more legal to kick the seat of the person in front of you, than to have a backpack on the floor
I found the story of the man who was forcibly shaved somewhat surprising. I would have predicted that the courts would take offense to their own authority being so brazenly disregarded.
> I am sad that she is missing the opportunity to do better. But that is supererogatory. ...
This section is excellent and crystallizes one of my main complaints about EA discourse: its bullet-biting consequentialism has trouble distinguishing between poor altruism and poor epistemology.
Is giving a marginal dollar to a homeless shelter rather than malaria programs (or, to heighten the cognitive dissonance, malaria programs rather than AI safety) "worse" than not giving that marginal dollar at all (to the homeless shelter, let's assume)? For many ways of measuring outcomes, yes. Is that the right way to frame it? Almost never! The social moves needed to get that dollar donated vs. direct that dollar better are massively, qualitatively different.
Regarding the proposed rule on solar, energy storage, and transmission line upgrades - it's great news, but I feel like your "ugh finally" vibe is a bit unjustified on an administration level. Administrative law has gotten more complex and more hostile to rulemaking, so the administration knows it needs to really dot its "i"s and cross its "t"s or else the rule will be tossed out. This is why it takes so long. From a society-wide perspective (which includes the courts in its critique), I agree with "ugh finally."
Re the gpt 4 estimates: iirc most particulate pollution is caused by brakes/tire wear and not tailpipe emissions, so if people were stopping for the toll (full stop and reacc) vs just rolling through that could plausibly make a much bigger than 30% difference.
Re certainty and punishment, Megan McArdle's "The Up Side of Down" has a chapter about an innovative probation system in Hawaii called HOPE which emphasized certainty.
The judge explaining the system to new probationers:
“Now, let’s say you have an appointment with your probation officer on Monday and that morning your friend calls you and says, ‘I’ve got a beef with my landlord, I’ve got to move,’ and you drop everything and run over. Then at six o’clock that night”—the judge slaps his forehead—“you think, ‘Oh, no! I missed my appointment!’ What you do next will matter a lot. No matter what happens, you’re going to do some jail time. But if you turn yourself in immediately, you’ll do as little as possible. “If you come in the next day, they’re going to drug test you. If you test dirty, they’ll take you into custody. But if you’re clean, you’re working or in school, we’ll schedule a hearing later in the week, and try to have you do time on the weekend. Usually, it will only be a few days. “On the other hand, some people on that Monday night are going to say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to go back to jail, so I’m going to go out and party and wait for them to find me.’ If the police have to arrest you and bring you back, then I generally give you five times as much jail time as I would have if you’d turned yourself in.
McArdle, Megan. The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success (pp. 218-219). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
> IRS changed Section 174, under the ‘Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,’ such that R&D expenses can only be expensed over 5 years, or overseas over 15 years. All software development counts as R&D for this.
My friend running a startup said that this only affects up to $70k/year in taxes. Unpleasant but not a huge deal.
> Our Parliament is sovereign, and it should be able to make decisions that cannot be undone in our courts.
This happens all the time in the US as well. If the Supreme Court rules that something is illegal according to current law but not against the Constitution, Congress can go ahead and adapt a new law to override the Supreme Court's judgement. For example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lopez#Revision_and_re-enactment_of_law
Re R&D tax changes:
Maybe duh gubmint shouldn't be subsidizing loss-making venture backed "startups" with tax breaks? Imagine what our tech industry would be like with legitimate businesses competing, instead of leviathans dumping their product on the market for less than the cost of producing it, to crush all competition.
Imagine if good ideas and hard work, not family connections to big money, determined who runs startups. Imagine what the culture of Silicon Valley would be like if it were ruled by legitimate businessmen rather than nepotists and oligarch-fellators.
Will the mentioned tax changes achieve this? Most unlikely. But we can still imagine.
This is very likely idiosyncratic to me, but I am a person who often does the click the links and who also never reads stuff on Twitter. I'm not avoiding Twitter for any ideological reasons, I just find its confusingly threaded bite-sized info nuggets to be the worst information delivery mechanism ever devised. Unfortunately, approximately 100% of the links in these posts appear to be to Twitter.
I'm not sure if the idea of linking to Twitter for all this stuff is a) to give credit to the source of the reference; b) because Twitter actually is the original source of the information and there is no deeper reference; c) because the surrounding discussion provides useful or interesting context; or d) because it's just easier to link to Twitter than to dig out the deep links. But outside of (b) I'd certainly appreciate more links to the original material! (And in case this seems like a criticism rather than a mild suggestion: thanks for all of the great writing.)
“A lot of people can’t even handle the life part of work-life balance” isn’t a very compelling reason for denying me the freedom to control my own work-life balance, try again Matt.
The prison bit is interesting to me, partly because that’s where I’m working presently and partly because I’ve been idly reading through Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project’s Prisoners’ Rights Handbook (edition I’m using at https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/media/publications/pa%20institutional%20%20law%20project's%20%20prisoner%20handbook.pdf ). Have read through a few of the operations manuals for the CA prison system on a couple things including religious accommodations but won’t have much time to dig through them again before my contract expires.
Definitely weird to think train robberies are making a comeback.
So I’ve been out of retail pharmacy for a few years now but around the time I left CVS et al. were pushing very hard to just hard cut all their front-end store staff for self-checkouts, and had been insidiously downsizing pharmacy technician hours over time. I actually went to the CVS where I used to work to pick up something recently and was sort of surprised how much better staffed it was for the time I was there, both in the front and the pharmacy. I wonder if the push for self-checkout is reversing? Asking “why is/was it popular [to cut customer facing staff]?” is a mystery I’ve been trying to solve since 2016.
I’m finding I take issue with the standard “superhero movies are killing movies” take because I have trouble thinking of any that aren’t Marvel/Disney[/Sony] or DC/WB. Are there even any other major studios desperately trying to make superheroes work? When you reduce it to “this genre is only being made by like 5 people so no wonder it’s getting stale” it’s kind of a mundane take that doesn’t really explain much.
I am extremely surprised that you're in favor of RCV. It's not just that it fails to give us the things we'd actually want (like viable third-party candidates not acting as spoilers) - it's that its outcomes are _weird_, in a way which makes voters distrustful of the process. The precise outcome shouldn't be so sensitive to small differences in rankings between losing candidates.
Approval, range, and STAR all seem like much, much better options. IRV seems like it's literally the worst non-FPTP option, and when you take into account the effect on voter trust in the system, it might actually be worse.
Arrow's theorem is overstated: it only applies to ordinal systems, not cardinal systems like approval or range.
My guess is that the CEO of Cruise was politely fired, rather than resigning out of honor. GM is doing layoffs at Cruise and vaguely saying that they are deprioritizing it, so there is clearly a lot of negative feedback coming down from central corporate decisionmakers toward the Cruise unit, and a polite CEO firing would be a natural part of that.
Personally, I am not disappointed specifically that the CEO was fired, but I am disappointed that GM seems to be moving away from both of their main future technologies, self-driving cars and in EVs. Sometimes large corporations do manage to reinvent themselves as part of the forefront of new technologies, and I was hoping that maybe GM could make it work. I'm a bit personally biased since I grew up in the midwest and many of my extended family worked for GM or GM suppliers and it is sad to me to see what was once a symbol of American technological advance stagnate.
I have it on good authority from a flight attendant that is it more legal to kick the seat of the person in front of you, than to have a backpack on the floor
https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/fake-instagram-post-2?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web
I found the story of the man who was forcibly shaved somewhat surprising. I would have predicted that the courts would take offense to their own authority being so brazenly disregarded.
The George Mack High Agency People link points to the wrong place.
> I am sad that she is missing the opportunity to do better. But that is supererogatory. ...
This section is excellent and crystallizes one of my main complaints about EA discourse: its bullet-biting consequentialism has trouble distinguishing between poor altruism and poor epistemology.
Is giving a marginal dollar to a homeless shelter rather than malaria programs (or, to heighten the cognitive dissonance, malaria programs rather than AI safety) "worse" than not giving that marginal dollar at all (to the homeless shelter, let's assume)? For many ways of measuring outcomes, yes. Is that the right way to frame it? Almost never! The social moves needed to get that dollar donated vs. direct that dollar better are massively, qualitatively different.
Marshawn Lynch puts Bottoms over the top. He's the best part of that movie.
> George Mack on how to spot high agency people
This link leads to a Reddit thread about ChatGPT, is that intentional?
Regarding the proposed rule on solar, energy storage, and transmission line upgrades - it's great news, but I feel like your "ugh finally" vibe is a bit unjustified on an administration level. Administrative law has gotten more complex and more hostile to rulemaking, so the administration knows it needs to really dot its "i"s and cross its "t"s or else the rule will be tossed out. This is why it takes so long. From a society-wide perspective (which includes the courts in its critique), I agree with "ugh finally."