16 Comments

For a longer treatment of the theme quoted by Laing, I suggest Lacan's "Seminar on The Purloined Letter".

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Apr 3, 2023·edited Apr 3, 2023

Re: Japanese homemaker spending, I don't think it's actually patriarchal dynamics... in fact kind of the opposite? Patrick has mentioned (e.g. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/689631987326255104) that social convention in Japan is that the wife controls the finances. So the proximate cause here is "person with notionally zero income spending on behalf of a whole family" being difficult for a legacy system to distinguish from an actual credit risk.

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Fun. I got a rat. 10.97 from Aella, but I got a PhD in condensed matter physics.

Re: housing prices. Absolutely no-one should move to Buffalo or the area, I would like the worth of my house to go down and not up.

Are you going to say something about Eliezer Yudkowsky with Lex Fridman? I want to say that the podcast was great and fixed a lot of misconceptions I had about Eliezer. I'm not sure I'm in anymore agreement with him, but I understand his position better. I still think that making/letting machine intelligence look like life is maybe a way to control any take over. The way life 'cures' cancer is with programmed death. I'm 64 and death looks like a good thing to me, let my kids control my/our assets.

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I'll talk about Lex at some point this week.

I am strongly against death, and against humanity losing control of the future - if you're for those things, then I can see how you'd have different other preferences.

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Yeah, it's hard to say I'm pro death. But death is the flip side of birth. If we stopped death, we'd have to stop birth. And that would be the end of change and new people. Life invented death to stop the maximization of one thing. (a cancer in the organism.).

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. ... :^). Maybe these are just old man thoughts.

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I remain confused as to why "savings" accounts exist at all. Even under inflation-fighting rate increases, the yield on offer from a typical bank remains a rounding error...and it's not exactly difficult to access "high-yield" savings accounts, either. Feel sad about the decades I let my money sit around doing nothing, neither invested properly nor passively going up and to the right at *checks current rate* 5%. Lotsa income forsaken just to maintain maximum liquidity.

The AI write-ups have been great, but yes, it is nice to come up for a breath of air and remember there's a whole other world of things going on too. Things that usually don't include covid or Ukraine, even. Appreciate it.

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I mean you want to keep some cash that's available at a moment's notice and you need to put it somewhere.

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To be more clear, since the APY on an ordinary checking account is 0% and the APY on a "savings" account is 0.epsilon%, but with slightly more features/external interaction possibilities on a checking account...feels like unnecessary product differentiation. Perhaps that's ahistorical and I've just got a ZIRP hangover, perhaps that epsilon percentage entices some extra amount of deposits beyond what merely checking accounts do, perhaps it's more convenient to have one checking and one savings account per bank account vs. two checking accounts per bank account?

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My checking account is tied to my debit/credit card, and I feel it's somewhat exposed to bad people stealing my money. So I like to keep most of my cash in a savings account. I have no idea if it's any safer there, but it feels that way. I will say I wish there was no inflation.

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Why is Princeton a bad pick? I thought it was great

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It should not be surprising at all that there isn’t a cortisol monitor on the market. Look at the “next steps” Sarah outlines: prepare for a long and expensive clinical trial. A cortisol monitor is actually reasonably doable with the same basic principle as continuous glucose monitors, but who’s going through the cost and hassle of getting a new medical device approved to sell to the public? Especially for something with a very niche end user base

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Glad to see people are saying Octopath Traveler 2 is quite good. Working on a completionist playthrough of the first one on Steam right now. I remember playing the demo on Switch ages ago and being kind of unimpressed but I gave it a go again when I had game pass briefly and was very pleasantly surprised. Not sure if I'm going to grab 2 as soon as I'm done with 1 or wait for a sale price but it's going to be tempting.

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Apr 4, 2023·edited Apr 4, 2023

Given you're boosting Haidt's excellent Mental Health piece, could you boost or perhaps even give special coverage to his LetGrow organization? It's the one that's going around the country passing reasonable independence laws protecting parents from neglect charges for letting children play outside and such things. I live in Texas and only just realized my state is one of the ones that passed such a law, and it's just... it's an absolute joy to be legally protected for letting my child play outside.

https://letgrow.org/

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That gain of function research was increasing mortality by 1000% (10x), not 1000x. Thanks for the great update.

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Oh, good. I feel much better.

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Interesting, I don't. (I'm presuming sarcasm.)

This kind of research seems to fall into the same category as "let's drop a nuke on this town to see how to maximize the death toll (you know, for nuclear safety reasons)".

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