It’s that time again. Bad News Guardian analyzes projects from world’s biggest carbon offset provider, finds ‘94% of the credits had no benefit to the climate.’ Bloomberg found something similar in 2020, changing nothing. Carbon offsets are not about carbon. Very little that is said or done in the name of carbon or climate change is about carbon. Or at least, not about carbon
The Florida law is what happens if educators stick their thumb in the eyes of parents repeatedly. It might not be ideal, but perhaps the teachers unions will show some introspection and humility.
I assume that parents can still send their children to private schools to learn gender theory, CRT, etc. in the same manner as other religious groups.
I'm an "Aspie", which they up and decided to start calling a type of autism a few years back. This "masking" controversy looks pretty stupid to me. Maybe the same sort of phenomenon as deaf activists objecting to curing deafness?
I mask. I put long hard years into learning to do it. Before I finally got good enough at it to have something vaguely resembling a normal social life, my life was miserable; Bullied and shunned in K-12, lonely as an adult, gradually slipping into depression. Just because I was terrible at social interactions didn't mean I didn't have a psychological need for them. It meant I went without and suffered. It took me until I was middle aged to get good enough at it to date, marry, and finally have a kid at 50. And enjoy being HAPPY.
What do they want those of us with Asperger's to do, embrace the loneliness? Create Aspie communities where we can live in some sort of ghetto?
I am a big fan of re-reading books that I love both for their language and their depth.
I have my own modest free sub stack and my last post was prompted by my re-reading Seize the Day by Bellow. It was the first time I really connected with the book in a deeper way. We experience great literature in different ways as we change.
"Games are responsible if someone says the wrong thing to an underage person in the in-game chat. There is no good way to be sure a given person is not underage. The response of most games I know that don’t need chat for coordination between players is… to kill the chat function entirely."
I do not believe this. The average MMO has text chat and the average shooter has voice chat, but no one has shut down COD over strangers cussing at little Timmy. I am willing to believe game developers are scared of letting people send words over the internet, but when circumstances force the them to do it anyway, they seem to be fine. This suggests that those complying with the imagined incentives are simply wrong.
This is still a real chilling effect, but it has a much simpler solution. Stop being such cowards, nothing bad will happen!
"An argument (now gated) that chickens should be kept caged because keeping them ‘cage-free’ is bad even for the chickens, who are violent animals that will kill each other and get sick and die from each others’ filth, and that these are the main reasons caging is actually cheaper. I am sure some will say ‘this is an argument that chickens should not be used for food at all’ or even ‘this is an argument for Wild Chicken Suffering and we need to exterminate chickens’ and one of the things I could but choose not to is even. "
Is there a missing word in the last sentence?
What was missing from that argument was any attempt at quantification. I want to see some nerdy EA try to measure how much chickens suffer when caged vs cage-free vs state of nature.
I think Noah Smith is unfair to the 1950s house. I live in one, built 1958, 950 sqft. It looks very much like the one in his twitter thread. Its fine for me, I live here alone, its actually more space than I need. It might be tight if you are a married and have even one kid, but, you should be buying a bigger house in that case. But I'm personally somewhat in the anti-natalist camp so I think more people should not have kids, or have 1 kid, and thus live in smaller houses. (For one thing, the income and job security requirements to raise 2 or more kids are so high in the US, that the bigger house will seem cheap by comparison to other related expenses).
A point Noah missed. Those 1950s houses were often built on pretty big lots. Including mine, most of which is trees and grass. If I had the money and will, I could put a large extension on it. Many of my neighbors have done that. Some have put second floors on their house. You can also expand the house in different directions at different times, and some have clearly done that at well.
There are many other ways I live the 1950s lifestyle. I don't go to restaurants. I don't use streaming (I have a hand-me-down TV which is currently unplugged). I have one old car. Its fine, no complaints, and actually I have ADHD too so the fewer things I need to keep track of, the better.
Re books, I think the problem with discoverability of new books is a major issue. There was another study recently showing bestseller books are increasingly concentrated on a small number of authors, which also makes social recommendations harder (since what I read by default is more correlated with what my friends read).
I don't think I can fully solve this problem with old books - finding more B-tier old books is easy, but I've read enough of the known good ones that finding new A-tier ones is pretty hard and new S-tier ones is incredibly hard. Ideally there being more writers today would help the rate of S-tier books being written go up, but the actual rate (or at least the rate at which I can discover then) seemtto be even or declining.
Epistemic status: probably wrong, but moderately interesting. After 50+ years of just being weird and having people comment on it, "masking" is second nature. I've never thought of myself as spectrumy (see the age above), but I sure didn't/don't fit well with most people and have worked hard to cultivate a professional/family/friend group which generally (sometimes greatly) appreciates me. Even among them, I'm most comfortable with are my kids because they only know me the way I am. Doesn't mean that I don't mask with them, but I think almost everyone does (reading Aella's poll results, you gotta think everyone masks). At the risk of referencing Freud, if you're weird, your Id/drive is deeply or distractibly interested in things other than just cake and sex, and Ego can take a long time to mature. Of course the booze helps.
Question then: at what point did people begin to think that you can survive without working hard on filters?
Wealth isn't the only determinant of wellbeing. While people that I grew up with in NH during the 1950s were less well off, we were, in some ways, better off: I was a "free range" child and roamed wherever I pleased and played with whomever I wanted to without supervision. One learned of necessity to negotiate relations with others.
"Coffee machines continue to improve, the exception among kitchen appliances. The general lack of improved kitchen technology remains strange to me"
I feels like there is plenty of improvement in the technology though. The efficiency of fridges has been going up quite a bit. Dishwashers consume way less water and energy for cycle.
If you want to talk about functional improvements instead, fridges and freezers are now often "no frost", which is nice (yes, a century old technology, but i don't remember seeing it available in mid-range prices before. I actually don't remember seeing it at all, though i didn't check high end models).
There are also self cleaning ovens. I don't remember seeing them available say, 10 years ago.
The Florida law is what happens if educators stick their thumb in the eyes of parents repeatedly. It might not be ideal, but perhaps the teachers unions will show some introspection and humility.
I assume that parents can still send their children to private schools to learn gender theory, CRT, etc. in the same manner as other religious groups.
I'm an "Aspie", which they up and decided to start calling a type of autism a few years back. This "masking" controversy looks pretty stupid to me. Maybe the same sort of phenomenon as deaf activists objecting to curing deafness?
I mask. I put long hard years into learning to do it. Before I finally got good enough at it to have something vaguely resembling a normal social life, my life was miserable; Bullied and shunned in K-12, lonely as an adult, gradually slipping into depression. Just because I was terrible at social interactions didn't mean I didn't have a psychological need for them. It meant I went without and suffered. It took me until I was middle aged to get good enough at it to date, marry, and finally have a kid at 50. And enjoy being HAPPY.
What do they want those of us with Asperger's to do, embrace the loneliness? Create Aspie communities where we can live in some sort of ghetto?
Screw that.
I am a big fan of re-reading books that I love both for their language and their depth.
I have my own modest free sub stack and my last post was prompted by my re-reading Seize the Day by Bellow. It was the first time I really connected with the book in a deeper way. We experience great literature in different ways as we change.
If anyone's interested, below is my post.
https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/p/carpe-diem
"Games are responsible if someone says the wrong thing to an underage person in the in-game chat. There is no good way to be sure a given person is not underage. The response of most games I know that don’t need chat for coordination between players is… to kill the chat function entirely."
I do not believe this. The average MMO has text chat and the average shooter has voice chat, but no one has shut down COD over strangers cussing at little Timmy. I am willing to believe game developers are scared of letting people send words over the internet, but when circumstances force the them to do it anyway, they seem to be fine. This suggests that those complying with the imagined incentives are simply wrong.
This is still a real chilling effect, but it has a much simpler solution. Stop being such cowards, nothing bad will happen!
"An argument (now gated) that chickens should be kept caged because keeping them ‘cage-free’ is bad even for the chickens, who are violent animals that will kill each other and get sick and die from each others’ filth, and that these are the main reasons caging is actually cheaper. I am sure some will say ‘this is an argument that chickens should not be used for food at all’ or even ‘this is an argument for Wild Chicken Suffering and we need to exterminate chickens’ and one of the things I could but choose not to is even. "
Is there a missing word in the last sentence?
What was missing from that argument was any attempt at quantification. I want to see some nerdy EA try to measure how much chickens suffer when caged vs cage-free vs state of nature.
I think Noah Smith is unfair to the 1950s house. I live in one, built 1958, 950 sqft. It looks very much like the one in his twitter thread. Its fine for me, I live here alone, its actually more space than I need. It might be tight if you are a married and have even one kid, but, you should be buying a bigger house in that case. But I'm personally somewhat in the anti-natalist camp so I think more people should not have kids, or have 1 kid, and thus live in smaller houses. (For one thing, the income and job security requirements to raise 2 or more kids are so high in the US, that the bigger house will seem cheap by comparison to other related expenses).
A point Noah missed. Those 1950s houses were often built on pretty big lots. Including mine, most of which is trees and grass. If I had the money and will, I could put a large extension on it. Many of my neighbors have done that. Some have put second floors on their house. You can also expand the house in different directions at different times, and some have clearly done that at well.
There are many other ways I live the 1950s lifestyle. I don't go to restaurants. I don't use streaming (I have a hand-me-down TV which is currently unplugged). I have one old car. Its fine, no complaints, and actually I have ADHD too so the fewer things I need to keep track of, the better.
Re books, I think the problem with discoverability of new books is a major issue. There was another study recently showing bestseller books are increasingly concentrated on a small number of authors, which also makes social recommendations harder (since what I read by default is more correlated with what my friends read).
I don't think I can fully solve this problem with old books - finding more B-tier old books is easy, but I've read enough of the known good ones that finding new A-tier ones is pretty hard and new S-tier ones is incredibly hard. Ideally there being more writers today would help the rate of S-tier books being written go up, but the actual rate (or at least the rate at which I can discover then) seemtto be even or declining.
Epistemic status: probably wrong, but moderately interesting. After 50+ years of just being weird and having people comment on it, "masking" is second nature. I've never thought of myself as spectrumy (see the age above), but I sure didn't/don't fit well with most people and have worked hard to cultivate a professional/family/friend group which generally (sometimes greatly) appreciates me. Even among them, I'm most comfortable with are my kids because they only know me the way I am. Doesn't mean that I don't mask with them, but I think almost everyone does (reading Aella's poll results, you gotta think everyone masks). At the risk of referencing Freud, if you're weird, your Id/drive is deeply or distractibly interested in things other than just cake and sex, and Ego can take a long time to mature. Of course the booze helps.
Question then: at what point did people begin to think that you can survive without working hard on filters?
+1 to its own post on management as a technology. +100 to it being its own recurring series of thoughts.
Wealth isn't the only determinant of wellbeing. While people that I grew up with in NH during the 1950s were less well off, we were, in some ways, better off: I was a "free range" child and roamed wherever I pleased and played with whomever I wanted to without supervision. One learned of necessity to negotiate relations with others.
"Coffee machines continue to improve, the exception among kitchen appliances. The general lack of improved kitchen technology remains strange to me"
I feels like there is plenty of improvement in the technology though. The efficiency of fridges has been going up quite a bit. Dishwashers consume way less water and energy for cycle.
If you want to talk about functional improvements instead, fridges and freezers are now often "no frost", which is nice (yes, a century old technology, but i don't remember seeing it available in mid-range prices before. I actually don't remember seeing it at all, though i didn't check high end models).
There are also self cleaning ovens. I don't remember seeing them available say, 10 years ago.