About a decade ago it actually occurred to researchers to try to measure the marginal hedonic value of income at various levels. What they found is that the marginal value of individual income is essentially nil beyond $75,000 (at the time).
So why do people sacrifice so much for a big income? Well, it should come as a surprise to nobody that people are crap at figuring out what will make them happy. At above a minimum threshold for comfort and security lies a hedonic treadmill, because it's not about your needs, which are finite, but your wants, which expand to consume all available resources.
So there's nothing particularly surprising about someone making $200,000, a million or even a billion dollars being unhappy. In part this is the human condition; happiness as an emotion exists to motivate us by its absence. The one factor that does affect our baseline happiness is the strength of our social connections, but for some reason social media doesn't seem to count.
Performing antics for the amusement YouTube randos probably doesn't count as enriching your social network.
I don't think there will be a big enough blue wave to overcome gerrymandering in the House, and there are way more Democratic senators up for re-election than Republicans, which favors the Republicans. 26 of 35 seats up for grabs are held by Democrats, and they pretty much have to win all of them plus pick up another four. That's no longer in the realm of fantasy, but it is at best a 50/50 shot. There's even a possibility of a 50/50 split, which is a Republican "win" with Pence casting the tying vote.
So I think these are the two likeliest scenarios. (1) The Republicans retain their control of both houses, but by a narrower margin (typical of midterm elections). Both parties send more extreme candidates to congress, causing a further break down in regular order and forcing the Republicans to aggressive and dubious parliamentary procedrus to get anything done.
(2) The Democrats take the Senate. The biggest practical difference in this scenario is that they'll be able to block Trump nominees, which they'll do across the board. Democratic-led committees will investigate the Trump administration more aggressively.
Depends on (a) what the order actually says and (b) how far he goes to actually do anything about it.
I don't hate Trump, I just don't think he's a good man or a good president. But if he actually cracks down on Russian interference in the election, and doesn't use it for an excuse for political ratfucking, I won't hesitate to say he's done a good job on this issue.
The thing is, announcing you are going to do something isn't the same thing as doing it, otherwise we'd have that Obamacare replacement in hand today.
In situations like this, people want an answer (or more accurately prefer an answer) to what is in itself a meaningless question: did climate change cause this.
The way this argument is heading is fairly typical: people lining up behind sources that support the answer they want, without asking what the question actually means.
If I am not mistaken, the biggest destructive effects of this storm will not be to wind (which is how hurricanes are graded on the Saffir-Simpson scale) but to rainfall, and the models predict greater rainfall more unambiguously than they predict greater wind intensity.
But even given all that, you still can't say that greenhouse gases "caused" this without getting into a dense thicket of philosophical (the Wikipedia article on causality is actually worth reading here) and geophysical technicalities.
It's a pointless argument anyway. What we're really struggling over is whether this event means we should do something about greenhouse gas emissions. And for that causality is certainly a sufficient justification, but it's not strictly speaking necessary. It just has to be representative of the likely consequences of greenhouse gas emissions.
Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X each use a single enabled core complex (or CCX) from the two available on Pinnacle Ridge Zeppelin dies to get their four cores. Recall that the Ryzen 5 1500X instead used two cores from each CCX to get its core count. A consequence of this architectural change versus the Ryzen 5 1500X is that the Ryzen 5 2500X now has 8 MB of L3 cache, down from 16 MB. That puts both the Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X on par with the Ryzen 3 1300X and Ryzen 3 1200 on a cache-capacity basis.
I can't believe I used to care about this kind of shit.
Let's stipulate that Facebook is not responsible for this development. It doesn't necessarily follow that Facebook has no responsibility to respond to it.
My late father in law was in the Merchant Marine in WW2. One night one of his shipmates came through the mess with his blanket draped over his neck. "Get your life jackets on!" the shipmate said. "The captain's called abandon ship!"
The men in the mess laughed at the joke, and then suddenly my father-in-law realized: his shipmate was sleepwalking, and thought his blanket was a lifejacket. He ran out after the man and pulled him back as he was climbing over the rail to jump into the sea.
Now was it my father-in-law's fault that his sleepwalking shipmate was about to throw himself into the North Atlantic in the middle of the night? No. But did my father-in-law have a duty to save him once he realized what was going on? Most people would say "yes".
So it's clear that fault isn't the only way you can acquire a duty to act.
But if you live in a community where people will stone you to death without consequence, no amount - or absence - of technology can save you.
This doesn't follow at all. Nothing modifies human behavior more powerfully than being seen and noticed.
Think lynchings are alien to our culture? Then why does our language have a word for them? Lynchings in the US were a commonplace event; not just blacks were victims, it was commonly meted out to Irish too. The reason that public lynching declined in the US was the adoption of communication technologies and media which spread the news and images of lynching fast and far. The negative attention this brought ended the phenomenon of public lynchings with tacit official acceptance. The last time it happened with probable law enforcement complicity was back in 1965.
Well, it's because a sailboat is not ideal. If it has any kind of cargo capacity it's going to stick out on radar and take a long time to get where it's going to go.
Drug dealers have used robotic cigarette boats, and even built narco-submarines.
Maybe for smuggling fentanyl, which on a per gram basis with worth nearly ten thousand times as much as cocaine.
Well, I can't answer to drugs generally, but I think the meditative "ego death" might well be like looking at a picture so close it breaks into pixels. The "self" after all is a story the brain constructs. It is an actor in a predictive model of the world. But if you look closely at it, either subjectively through meditation or objectively through neurological research, it looks less fundamental than it does from the inside.
Here's the problem with personal responsibility: you can't do it without your brain. When you're talking about drugs which derange the reward systems of the brain, getting over addiction is not a matter of virtue.
It's basic cybernetics: behavior is controlled by various kinds of feedback loops; break those loops and the system becomes unstable.
When the system goes haywire, it needs support from the outside.
Now it's true that people who have a propensity for risky behavior have a higher risk of addiction. It's also true that people who lead lives of constant, unrelieved stress (soldiers in war zones, poor people) have a higher risk of addiction. But if there's anything the opioid crisis has taught us is that if you expose enough people to the stuff, you'll get countless addicts who don't fit any kind of profile.
The opioid crisis kills many, many more people than terrorists ever have, year after year after year. The problem is they die alone, in their homes, so their invisible except to first responders. If you could somehow gather all the bodies from one year and put them all in one place on a single day, maybe people would take this more seriously.
After the great opiod boom got rolling in the 90s, pharmaceutical companies developed new medications to combat the side effects, like nausea.
Now it's not that that anti-nausea medications for people who legitimately need to take opioids, but pharmaceutical companies aren't humanitarian organizations. They were doing this to push more oipioids, which they knew damn well were being overprescribed on a horrific scale.
What does "removing oneself from one's own mind" even mean? How would that even be possible? This is just a straw man you've constructed with an equivocating interpretation of the word "mindful".
Mindfulness in this context is simply a conscious awareness of your own bodily and mental processes.
When I was younger I was a fairly serious martial artist, and the training involved frequent exposure to pain. The process of becoming inured to the pain of a punch or a joint lock isn't what you'd think. The pain doesn't go away, and you don't suppress it. What you do is suppress a crude panic reaction to pain. You develop a more nuanced awareness of it, become better at distinguishing between pain per se and serious injury.
Pain that you judge to be non-injurious (though familiarity or disposition) is less emotionally distressing. Whether you reported it verbally or through fMRI it would look to a researcher like *less* pain, whatever level of subjective pain you were experiencing.
So here's what I think is happening: as you become more mindful, the connections between the lower levels of the brain and the neocortex (where consciousness "resides", more or less) become richer, and this happens in both directions. You are both more aware of what's going on down there and are more able to consciously alter it.
No, you can leave it out these days. Nobody is typing "www.bing.com". However if you need a distinct host name, why not simply "web", as in "web.bing.com"?
Since when does "antiquated" equal "invalid"? That's kind of my point: it's still valid, even if the reasons people started using it (e.g. to distinguish your likely only web host in a subdomain from hosts running other services like gopher) don't really apply these days.
Of course "www" was always a pretty awkward thing. It's the only abbreviation I know that has three times as many syllables as words it replaces.
But it doesn't mean you can just ignore it. In the URL syntax that part of the URL identifies the host and possibly a user id and port. You can't automatically *know* that "www.somedomain.net" refers to a different host than "somedomain.net", and even if it did the host would not necessarily be configured to return the same information to an HTTP GET.
To put it in perspective, 15 mph is the pace of a 4 minute mile run, which is faster than most people's top running speed. An elite sprinter could hop off a scooter going 15 mph, but it's a safe bet *you* can't.
But you *think* you can, because driving cars has given you a distorted view of what that speed means to an unprotected human body. That makes this the worst kind of dangerous thing: a dangerous thing that people think is safe.
As for wearing a helmet while running, not on a track. But if you are running a four minute mile pace dodging in and out of city traffic and between pedestrians, yeah.
Helmets are worthless at the speed that most riders get up to.
Not at all. To see why, stand on a stairway a couple of steps above a landing, then throw yourself headfirst into a wall as hard as you can.
OK, that's a thought experiment that you wouldn't want to do even with a helmet, but unless you're an Olympic broad jumper the speed you hit the wall is going to be a lot less than the speed you can easily hit even on a crappy dockless bike. And the physical circumstances of this thought experiment are fairly representative of the worst case bike accident where you go over the handlebars into a stationary object like a curb or a car. You could easily kill yourself without a helmet; with a helmet, not so easy.
Now these e-scooters are exactly what you'd come up with if you want to maximize the frequency of that worst case accident. They've got small wheels that can snag on mior obstacles like potholes, a very short wheelbase, and your center of mass is far, far above the axles. They're also capable of speeds that will generate a significant probability of death or debilitating brain injury in such an accident -- 15 mph/24 kph. Add to that a lack of rules or norms for mixing with pedestrians or other wheeled traffic and you've got a TBI perfect storm.
Research has shown that helmets are still highly effective at those speeds. At 20 kph a helmet cuts your risk of brain injury in half, and death nearly in half on a bike. The risk reduction is bound to be much higher on a fast e-scooter because the chance of a worst-case accident is higher.
If you completely surround an enemy, his soldiers will fight bravely. If you leave them a path to escape, they will run away.
This is actually a pretty good time to put some trade pressure on China. They've reached the end of an era of explosive growth and the transition to something more sustainable is bound to put pressure on them. A trade war can really hurt them right now (as it can hurt us as well).
This is a time to have your exit strategy worked out. If we have a shrewd and accurate idea of what we can feasibly walk away with, we could do quite well out of a little trade saber rattling. The thing is if we don't have an exit strategy, we can hurt our own economy and give the Chinese regime a legitimate scapegoat for its own problems.
So this is a test of the president's acumen. Does he have the brains to know when to walk away from a conflict?
When someone else owns it, there is no reason for you to respect their property. If you own it, you take care of it.
This is a quite recent attitude in America. In the late 19th Century and early 20th Century public works were a point of major civic pride. When P.G. Wodehouse satirized small town Americans, they were friendly and enthusiastic and inclined to bend your ear about the local water-works. Because in the early 20th century, when communities built, say, a pumping station, they'd build it like this. And lest you think that was an aberration, here is one across town. When they built a simple gatehouse, it ended up looking like this.
Many people wish to return to what they conceive of as a late 19th Century version of America, in which the government didn't spend so much, but the cost off these structures must have been mind-boggling, especially in light of the much smaller population and economy of the time. It was an era of public works on a heroic scale. In Chicago in the mid 19th Century they retrofittted sewers to what was already a big city, a project that required reversing the course of the Chicago river and jacking up buildings as much as 14 feet as they were being used. Sometimes entire blocks of unreinforced masonry buildings were jacked up at once.
There's nothing that has shaped America we are familiar with than our historical mania for public works projects: dams, highways, subways, bridges. We've always loved big shiny new things. We're crap at maintaining old stuff, though. The only reason those old pump stations are around was they were built to longevity standards appropriate for an Egyptian pyramid.
Slashdot Mirror
About a decade ago it actually occurred to researchers to try to measure the marginal hedonic value of income at various levels. What they found is that the marginal value of individual income is essentially nil beyond $75,000 (at the time).
So why do people sacrifice so much for a big income? Well, it should come as a surprise to nobody that people are crap at figuring out what will make them happy. At above a minimum threshold for comfort and security lies a hedonic treadmill, because it's not about your needs, which are finite, but your wants, which expand to consume all available resources.
So there's nothing particularly surprising about someone making $200,000, a million or even a billion dollars being unhappy. In part this is the human condition; happiness as an emotion exists to motivate us by its absence. The one factor that does affect our baseline happiness is the strength of our social connections, but for some reason social media doesn't seem to count.
Performing antics for the amusement YouTube randos probably doesn't count as enriching your social network.
I don't think there will be a big enough blue wave to overcome gerrymandering in the House, and there are way more Democratic senators up for re-election than Republicans, which favors the Republicans. 26 of 35 seats up for grabs are held by Democrats, and they pretty much have to win all of them plus pick up another four. That's no longer in the realm of fantasy, but it is at best a 50/50 shot. There's even a possibility of a 50/50 split, which is a Republican "win" with Pence casting the tying vote.
So I think these are the two likeliest scenarios. (1) The Republicans retain their control of both houses, but by a narrower margin (typical of midterm elections). Both parties send more extreme candidates to congress, causing a further break down in regular order and forcing the Republicans to aggressive and dubious parliamentary procedrus to get anything done.
(2) The Democrats take the Senate. The biggest practical difference in this scenario is that they'll be able to block Trump nominees, which they'll do across the board. Democratic-led committees will investigate the Trump administration more aggressively.
Depends on (a) what the order actually says and (b) how far he goes to actually do anything about it.
I don't hate Trump, I just don't think he's a good man or a good president. But if he actually cracks down on Russian interference in the election, and doesn't use it for an excuse for political ratfucking, I won't hesitate to say he's done a good job on this issue.
The thing is, announcing you are going to do something isn't the same thing as doing it, otherwise we'd have that Obamacare replacement in hand today.
It's the Russian Mob that keeps The Trump Organization afloat. The Russian government doesn't have the money.
You know, I think the thing I hate most about the Trump presidency is how *everything* has to be about the Trump presidency.
He's better of believing that.
In situations like this, people want an answer (or more accurately prefer an answer) to what is in itself a meaningless question: did climate change cause this.
The way this argument is heading is fairly typical: people lining up behind sources that support the answer they want, without asking what the question actually means.
If I am not mistaken, the biggest destructive effects of this storm will not be to wind (which is how hurricanes are graded on the Saffir-Simpson scale) but to rainfall, and the models predict greater rainfall more unambiguously than they predict greater wind intensity.
But even given all that, you still can't say that greenhouse gases "caused" this without getting into a dense thicket of philosophical (the Wikipedia article on causality is actually worth reading here) and geophysical technicalities.
It's a pointless argument anyway. What we're really struggling over is whether this event means we should do something about greenhouse gas emissions. And for that causality is certainly a sufficient justification, but it's not strictly speaking necessary. It just has to be representative of the likely consequences of greenhouse gas emissions.
At that resolution we should be able to see the abandoned Dornier flying boats used by the Dyer Expedition.
Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X each use a single enabled core complex (or CCX) from the two available on Pinnacle Ridge Zeppelin dies to get their four cores. Recall that the Ryzen 5 1500X instead used two cores from each CCX to get its core count. A consequence of this architectural change versus the Ryzen 5 1500X is that the Ryzen 5 2500X now has 8 MB of L3 cache, down from 16 MB. That puts both the Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X on par with the Ryzen 3 1300X and Ryzen 3 1200 on a cache-capacity basis.
I can't believe I used to care about this kind of shit.
Let's stipulate that Facebook is not responsible for this development. It doesn't necessarily follow that Facebook has no responsibility to respond to it.
My late father in law was in the Merchant Marine in WW2. One night one of his shipmates came through the mess with his blanket draped over his neck. "Get your life jackets on!" the shipmate said. "The captain's called abandon ship!"
The men in the mess laughed at the joke, and then suddenly my father-in-law realized: his shipmate was sleepwalking, and thought his blanket was a lifejacket. He ran out after the man and pulled him back as he was climbing over the rail to jump into the sea.
Now was it my father-in-law's fault that his sleepwalking shipmate was about to throw himself into the North Atlantic in the middle of the night? No. But did my father-in-law have a duty to save him once he realized what was going on? Most people would say "yes".
So it's clear that fault isn't the only way you can acquire a duty to act.
This doesn't follow at all. Nothing modifies human behavior more powerfully than being seen and noticed.
Think lynchings are alien to our culture? Then why does our language have a word for them? Lynchings in the US were a commonplace event; not just blacks were victims, it was commonly meted out to Irish too. The reason that public lynching declined in the US was the adoption of communication technologies and media which spread the news and images of lynching fast and far. The negative attention this brought ended the phenomenon of public lynchings with tacit official acceptance. The last time it happened with probable law enforcement complicity was back in 1965.
Well, it's because a sailboat is not ideal. If it has any kind of cargo capacity it's going to stick out on radar and take a long time to get where it's going to go.
Drug dealers have used robotic cigarette boats, and even built narco-submarines.
Maybe for smuggling fentanyl, which on a per gram basis with worth nearly ten thousand times as much as cocaine.
Caning is certainly more humane than prison. It just strikes us as barbaric because we're used to the barbarities of prison.
Well, I can't answer to drugs generally, but I think the meditative "ego death" might well be like looking at a picture so close it breaks into pixels. The "self" after all is a story the brain constructs. It is an actor in a predictive model of the world. But if you look closely at it, either subjectively through meditation or objectively through neurological research, it looks less fundamental than it does from the inside.
Here's the problem with personal responsibility: you can't do it without your brain. When you're talking about drugs which derange the reward systems of the brain, getting over addiction is not a matter of virtue.
It's basic cybernetics: behavior is controlled by various kinds of feedback loops; break those loops and the system becomes unstable.
When the system goes haywire, it needs support from the outside.
Now it's true that people who have a propensity for risky behavior have a higher risk of addiction. It's also true that people who lead lives of constant, unrelieved stress (soldiers in war zones, poor people) have a higher risk of addiction. But if there's anything the opioid crisis has taught us is that if you expose enough people to the stuff, you'll get countless addicts who don't fit any kind of profile.
The opioid crisis kills many, many more people than terrorists ever have, year after year after year. The problem is they die alone, in their homes, so their invisible except to first responders. If you could somehow gather all the bodies from one year and put them all in one place on a single day, maybe people would take this more seriously.
After the great opiod boom got rolling in the 90s, pharmaceutical companies developed new medications to combat the side effects, like nausea.
Now it's not that that anti-nausea medications for people who legitimately need to take opioids, but pharmaceutical companies aren't humanitarian organizations. They were doing this to push more oipioids, which they knew damn well were being overprescribed on a horrific scale.
What does "removing oneself from one's own mind" even mean? How would that even be possible? This is just a straw man you've constructed with an equivocating interpretation of the word "mindful".
Mindfulness in this context is simply a conscious awareness of your own bodily and mental processes.
When I was younger I was a fairly serious martial artist, and the training involved frequent exposure to pain. The process of becoming inured to the pain of a punch or a joint lock isn't what you'd think. The pain doesn't go away, and you don't suppress it. What you do is suppress a crude panic reaction to pain. You develop a more nuanced awareness of it, become better at distinguishing between pain per se and serious injury.
Pain that you judge to be non-injurious (though familiarity or disposition) is less emotionally distressing. Whether you reported it verbally or through fMRI it would look to a researcher like *less* pain, whatever level of subjective pain you were experiencing.
So here's what I think is happening: as you become more mindful, the connections between the lower levels of the brain and the neocortex (where consciousness "resides", more or less) become richer, and this happens in both directions. You are both more aware of what's going on down there and are more able to consciously alter it.
No, you can leave it out these days. Nobody is typing "www.bing.com". However if you need a distinct host name, why not simply "web", as in "web.bing.com"?
Since when does "antiquated" equal "invalid"? That's kind of my point: it's still valid, even if the reasons people started using it (e.g. to distinguish your likely only web host in a subdomain from hosts running other services like gopher) don't really apply these days.
Of course "www" was always a pretty awkward thing. It's the only abbreviation I know that has three times as many syllables as words it replaces.
But it doesn't mean you can just ignore it. In the URL syntax that part of the URL identifies the host and possibly a user id and port. You can't automatically *know* that "www.somedomain.net" refers to a different host than "somedomain.net", and even if it did the host would not necessarily be configured to return the same information to an HTTP GET.
The thing is, ordinary people are just as crazy. There's just more of them.
To put it in perspective, 15 mph is the pace of a 4 minute mile run, which is faster than most people's top running speed. An elite sprinter could hop off a scooter going 15 mph, but it's a safe bet *you* can't.
But you *think* you can, because driving cars has given you a distorted view of what that speed means to an unprotected human body. That makes this the worst kind of dangerous thing: a dangerous thing that people think is safe.
As for wearing a helmet while running, not on a track. But if you are running a four minute mile pace dodging in and out of city traffic and between pedestrians, yeah.
It was a rhetorical question.
Helmets are worthless at the speed that most riders get up to.
Not at all. To see why, stand on a stairway a couple of steps above a landing, then throw yourself headfirst into a wall as hard as you can.
OK, that's a thought experiment that you wouldn't want to do even with a helmet, but unless you're an Olympic broad jumper the speed you hit the wall is going to be a lot less than the speed you can easily hit even on a crappy dockless bike. And the physical circumstances of this thought experiment are fairly representative of the worst case bike accident where you go over the handlebars into a stationary object like a curb or a car. You could easily kill yourself without a helmet; with a helmet, not so easy.
Now these e-scooters are exactly what you'd come up with if you want to maximize the frequency of that worst case accident. They've got small wheels that can snag on mior obstacles like potholes, a very short wheelbase, and your center of mass is far, far above the axles. They're also capable of speeds that will generate a significant probability of death or debilitating brain injury in such an accident -- 15 mph/24 kph. Add to that a lack of rules or norms for mixing with pedestrians or other wheeled traffic and you've got a TBI perfect storm.
Research has shown that helmets are still highly effective at those speeds. At 20 kph a helmet cuts your risk of brain injury in half, and death nearly in half on a bike. The risk reduction is bound to be much higher on a fast e-scooter because the chance of a worst-case accident is higher.
If you completely surround an enemy, his soldiers will fight bravely. If you leave them a path to escape, they will run away.
This is actually a pretty good time to put some trade pressure on China. They've reached the end of an era of explosive growth and the transition to something more sustainable is bound to put pressure on them. A trade war can really hurt them right now (as it can hurt us as well).
This is a time to have your exit strategy worked out. If we have a shrewd and accurate idea of what we can feasibly walk away with, we could do quite well out of a little trade saber rattling. The thing is if we don't have an exit strategy, we can hurt our own economy and give the Chinese regime a legitimate scapegoat for its own problems.
So this is a test of the president's acumen. Does he have the brains to know when to walk away from a conflict?
When someone else owns it, there is no reason for you to respect their property. If you own it, you take care of it.
This is a quite recent attitude in America. In the late 19th Century and early 20th Century public works were a point of major civic pride. When P.G. Wodehouse satirized small town Americans, they were friendly and enthusiastic and inclined to bend your ear about the local water-works. Because in the early 20th century, when communities built, say, a pumping station, they'd build it like this. And lest you think that was an aberration, here is one across town. When they built a simple gatehouse, it ended up looking like this.
Many people wish to return to what they conceive of as a late 19th Century version of America, in which the government didn't spend so much, but the cost off these structures must have been mind-boggling, especially in light of the much smaller population and economy of the time. It was an era of public works on a heroic scale. In Chicago in the mid 19th Century they retrofittted sewers to what was already a big city, a project that required reversing the course of the Chicago river and jacking up buildings as much as 14 feet as they were being used. Sometimes entire blocks of unreinforced masonry buildings were jacked up at once.
There's nothing that has shaped America we are familiar with than our historical mania for public works projects: dams, highways, subways, bridges. We've always loved big shiny new things. We're crap at maintaining old stuff, though. The only reason those old pump stations are around was they were built to longevity standards appropriate for an Egyptian pyramid.