kaitai

It's so disappointing that you have made the mistake of thinking that those two possibilities listed cover the entire set of possibilities.

The Parable of the Polygons is a cute case study that shows that it is possible, in a mathematical sense, to prefer diversity and yet end up segregated: https://ncase.me/polygons/

The whole point of studying institutional and structural racism is that no one needs to be racist per se to have racially discriminatory outcomes. Perhaps a good analogy is the higher mortality rates among left-handed people. We no longer persecute them and drive them out of society or beat them for their sin, and yet, they die earlier due to structural factors.

I agree with you that "people don't like other people believing they-en-masse discriminate." And that's why science in the US is f*(&ed, because somehow everyone takes intellectual inquiry as some sort of personal affront or verdict on individual virtue, and that's the one thing the American cannot abide, the thought that someone else is judging them and finding them wanting.

The loading phase frankly was designed for studies. Studies are often short-term, say 6 weeks. You've got to get everyone's creatine supplies "loaded up" quickly in an effort to make sure the bulk of the study is on folks with relatively comparable creatine stores. The easiest way to do this is to have everyone do a loading phase to reach max intramuscular creatine concentration. It is not for the benefit of the study participants; it's for the benefit of the study.

We humans not in studies are generally looking for a health benefit, not max intramuscular creatine concentration as fast as possible at the price of side effects. We are optimizing for something different than study authors. 5 g is fine.

Agree with the other commenter that there is no implication of mixed orchards in their comments.

It is commonplace to decide that a particular plot of land needs to be either maintained or moved to production of another crop. When those production change decisions are made, it is in response to an assessment of the market and the properties of the plot of land. (The assessment may be wrong or short sighted of course.)

The article says, "This pattern, of only those without good alternative options riding the bus, is especially pronounced in the US. But close stop spacing creates problems." But it does not address the point. The bus in the US is aimed at poor, elderly, and disabled people. Elderly and disabled people want stops closer to their homes, especially given the low overall density of bus lines.

The US has a lot of competing problems, and underinvestment in poor people and health support is one that collides with public transit.

One thing I've realized in the US is that because of our inequality, people strive hard to earn and buy their way out of misery in a way that is not necessary in large parts of Europe. So in the US we work very hard to earn money to pay for big cars to drive through the suburbs so that we don't have to see homeless people sleeping on the bus when it's cold, and once we've invested in our suburban cars & houses we have personal assets we need to defend (at the expense of communal infrastructure in some cases).

I take the bus regularly in my city, often with a child. janalsncm has legit criticisms of many US public bus systems. I take the bus with the kid so I can avoid driving/parking and go to a few spots that are convenient unencumbered by a vehicle. We tend to take a rapid line that has fewer stops -- and the speed makes it convenient. So the article isn't all wrong. The rapid transit line does earn my business. But at the same time, we don't take the bus everywhere because it is not convenient for long trips with transfers, and I likely have a higher threshold for explaining, "Honey don't stare at that guy with the foil and the lighter" than most well-off US parents. (In Europe we take transit all over.)

I just find this so fascinating!

Some people say "he was a protestor and protestors who bring a gun to a protest deserve to be shot (FAFO)".

You say he's not a protestor, so as an observer he deserves to be shot because somehow he was interfering.

And your characterization of citizens forming "military squads" is also fascinating. What does that mean to you, in detail? Does it mean... uniforms? central coordination? simulated exercises? None of those are the case here.

Who are the out of state agitators?

Why do you think the governor is involved? I think you've been watching a lot of Cam Higby & friends. This is their rhetoric. And I know some ppl who've changed their name to Tim on Signal to troll you back.

Feel free to listen to the actual speeches of Mayors Kaohly Her and Jacob Frey. They have consistently urged staying peaceful and resisting the provocations to violence of both the agents and outside provocateurs. They know we're under the knife of the Insurrection Act and everything is under a microscope. We know it too.

The incredulity that people like you have about the level of organization points to your lack of involvement in your own communities. Have you ever organized a PTA fundraiser to raise $25,000 for school activities? Have you ever had to sign up three children across one daycare, an elementary school, and a middle school for summer camp activities, six months in advance, coordinating all the different schedules? Let me tell you -- doing these things develops a lot of skills that then carry over very easily into organizing a patrol at pick-up and drop-off at the Spanish immersion daycare. That's the "military force" you're up against. In my neighborhood an old lady organized her senior building to send people over to stand around the Spanish immersion daycare daily, because ICE/CBP keep showing up even though all the employees have work authorization and have been background checked.

You're right: it's not protesting. It's just showing up for your neighbors. Bearing witness, even in a Christian sense.

Indeed, as sibling commenter notes, it's not to prevent ICE from doing their jobs. Observers do not take physical actions to block ICE/CBP. Observers are there to

1) get the name & some other info from the person being abducted so that their family can be contacted

2) record the encounter so that ICE/CBP has some check on their behavior, or legal action can be taken in the future to prosecute them for violence and destruction of property

3) recover the belongings of the person abducted and ensure family/friends can get these things, as often wallet, cell phone, shoes, coat, and vehicle (even still running) are left behind

4) get a tow truck for any vehicle left behind, preferably from one of the tow services that is towing for free or low cost

4) connect family/friends with legal resources, if needed, or simply let them know that their lawyer needs to get to the Whipple Building ASAP

None of those things are illegal. In some of the small rural towns in Minnesota, there aren't observers there, and the phones/vehicles/wallets of people kidnapped from Walmart are just... left in the parking lot, in the snow. It adds insult to injury to have your phone & wallet gone, your car window smashed in, and a big fee from the municipal towing lot if you're a US citizen who is then released from detainment 12 hours later. And if you're not a US citizen but you have legal status, you want your family to get an attorney working ASAP to ensure you're not flown to Texas -- because if you're flown to Texas, even in error, you need to get back on your own (again without your wallet/phone/etc if those things didn't happen to stick with you).

Not to mention they keep releasing people with no phone & no jacket, even no shoes, into the zero or negative degree weather we've been having.

They are going door to door in the neighborhood I grew up in.

They're bringing in a lot of US citizens here in Minneapolis/St Paul, including a bunch of Native folks.

The sex offender they'd been looking for at ChongLy Thao's house had already been in jail for a year.

The Dept of Corrections is annoyed enough about the slander of their work that they now have a whole page with stats and details about their transfers to ICE, including some video of them transferring criminals into ICE custody https://mn.gov/doc/about/news/combatting-dhs-misinformation/

I am pretty nervous about the possibilities for trampling peoples' Constitutional rights in ever more sophisticated ways, but the current iteration can't even merge a database and then get accurate names & addresses out to field agents. (That doesn't stop the kidnappings, it just makes it a big waste of money as adult US citizens with no criminal record do by & large get released.)

Yeah Cam Higby & friends have "infiltrated" the Signal groups. It's not that hard frankly, and most of the chats emphasize that 1) they're unvetted, 2) don't do anything illegal, anywhere, including taking a right on red if the sign is there saying not to 3) don't write anything you don't want read back to you in a court of law. Higby and friends do have "How do you do, Fellow Kids?" energy in those chats.

Here's what I'm interested in: anyone know what Penlink's tools' capabilities actually are? Tangles and WebLoc. Are they as useful as advertised?

Your phrasing "something more productive in the private sector" is taken from the DOGE emails to federal employees. Note that in this sense "productive" means "makes money for corporations". If your utility function is different, these jobs are no longer more productive.

For a very concrete illustration, I know a Veterans Administration physician who got the DOGE emails. He's been underpaid by $50k-100k per year compared to private market rates, for the last twenty years. He is happy to take that discount because the mission of caring for veterans is something he cares about, and because he feels he can practice better medicine if his goal is patient outcomes rather than billable procedures. He also values the education and research priorities of the VA.

It is absolutely true that he would make a lot more money for a private provider maximizing procedures and billing.

But is that what we should be optimizing for as a society? Is that what you personally aim for from your doctors?

It is not only about labor prices being high enough (creating consumers who can buy more). There is a significant religious component to the introduction of fixed pricing. Quakers are often credited with introducing fixed pricing in the Western world, because they felt that charging higher prices to those less able to haggle (or higher prices by age, gender, race) was immoral, dishonest in the eyes of God. They then experienced greater sales because you could send your kid to the store and trust the kid wouldn't get ripped off. It just took a layer of stress off going to the store. John Wanamaker (a Presbyterian?) I think is the one who really started a retail empire on fixed pricing. One of his main selling points was one price for anyone, and a fair return policy.

The behavioral economics here is that many people will pay a consistent (fair) price to not be surprised and not feel ripped off.

Agree that automation will engage in price discrimination whenever possible. When will we see the backlash? I have heard stories of outrage ("when I looked for airline tickets at work they were way cheaper than when I looked on my home laptop!") but we haven't seen a widespread reaction, and the moral aspect seems to be relatively overlooked at this time.

Adverse childhood experiences definitely correlate with socioeconomic status. It's possible to disentangle their separate effects on some statistical level, but very difficult on a practical level. For instance, losing your home and living with your mom in a car when you're 6 is a socioeconomic ACE.

Someone else in the discussion here made a comment that service members should be mad at this blog post, as it is essentially saying that people cause their own adverse experiences. Well, again, the US armed services tend to draw disproportionately from lower socioeconomic groups, who tend to have higher numbers of adverse experiences. It's very hard to disentangle these correlated variables when it comes to outcomes for real people. And it's a total copout to then blame servicemembers for their PTSD.

We have the language of a cycle of abuse, a cycle of poverty, a cycle of violence. People have recognized the cyclicality of this for millennia. It's good the blogpost brings that out.

The thing that disappoints me about the discussion here (and in the blog post) is that there is this relentless focus on the psychology of things. Being homeless as a child, having a parent die, having family die violently, etc all do correlate with higher rates of cardiac disease, diabetes, etc. Again, can't disentangle from the socioeconomic aspects, but you also can't blame a kid for their family member dying. The idea that "unhealthy people may be more susceptible to trauma" has some veins of validity, but is also just deeply unkind, inhuman, and inaccurate taken to an absolute. Kids in foster care, kids who experienced a school shooting, kids who had a parent die of cancer, etc -- it is immorally self-serving to say it's their own fault. You know it's not.

The blog post itself cherry-picks by focusing on PTSD and the brain, ignoring correlations between ACEs and cardiac problems and diabetes. By focusing on the brain, the author can easily imply it's made up weakness (no lab results to confront) and then move on to "just get over it", which is adjacent to "it's not my problem". I'm not a fan of over-therapizing and I don't think therapy or crystals will fix your diabetes. But don't throw the baby out with Bessel van der Kolk's bathwater.

Don't worry, it also hits birthday cards from my cousins, Christmas presents from my siblings, care packages with those favorite candies and coffees that aren't sold in the US. My sibling can't send me hand-knit items or hand-me-down kids items, items truly of de minimis monetary value.

It may be accomplishing what was intended -- but I don't think that people in the US (even those paying attention) understand what was intended. The lack of clarity in terms of regulations and collection of fees/tariffs show that it is not about efficiently collecting the $ but instead about breaking the chain of goods, from big business to small business to family ties, and cutting off flow to the USPS, supporting the privatization of the entity.

I agree that the de minimis exemption was being abused at scale.

I'm also salty that my family can't send birthday or Christmas presents, even a home-made card.

Whatever you want to say about this administration, always look one level down for the wholesale reconfiguration of supply chain and international connections that they're aiming for.

There has long been a desire to privatize the USPS, so this also fits neatly into the narrative that the USPS should not be a public good.

Energy independence. The US fought wars for oil before fracking. Supply chains are complex and disruptable. Dependence on Russia for fuel leads to... dependence on Russia. Or Iran. Or Saudi. Whatever country it may be, it's dependence, and dependence can always be weaponized. This is pure geopolitics. "You can just buy oil" is deeply foolish.

I was absolutely impressed/puzzled by the Leningrad Cowboys as a kid.

In the mid-2000s, J. Karjalainen (a Finnish musician) put out a concept album called Lännen-Jukka. If you like Blues, it's worth checking out. YLE, the Finnish media network, put out a documentary on it. Karjalainen travels through the US including significant time in Upper Michigan, where many Finns settled a hundred years ago (and more recently).

Another thing I remember is that while here, Karjalainen & his bandmates were detained by the TSA at Minneapolis St Paul airport and treated rather poorly. Apparently TSA thought they were gonna overstay their visas in the US and try to "make it big in music". It was very bizarre.

Recent events made me think of that again.

At the VA medical system, they word-searched for "consulting" and cancelled contracts for.... surgical equipment sterilization, medical waste removal, stuff related to air quality that's required for hospital accreditation, and local burial services for people who die in the hospital.

Then a lot of those had to be reinstated because you simply can't operate a hospital without sanitation.

Just like they had to scramble to hire back the folks at the National Nuclear Safety Association.

Yeah, efficiency is great. But this is like ordering tacos and getting... a used tire and some dirty diapers...?

Breast density affects the imaging you get from x-rays. It is well-known that denser breast tissue results in x-rays that are "whiter" (I'm talking about the image of the tissue, in white, on a black background, as x-rays are commonly read by radiologists). Denser breasts are associated with less effective screening for breast cancer via mammogram. A mammogram is a low-dose x-ray.

When using a chest x-ray to look for pulmonary edema, for instance, I would be unsurprised if breast tissue (of any quantity) and in particular denser breast tissue would make the diagnosis of pulmonary edema more difficult from the image alone.

Also, you seem to have conflated a few things in your second sentence. Deep in the article, they did have radiologists try to guess demographic attributes by looking at the x-ray images. They were pretty good at guessing female/male (unsurprising) and were not really able to guess age or race. So I'm super interested in how the AI model was able to be better at that than the human radiologists.

Here is an academic medicine perspective: https://www.aamc.org/news/why-we-know-so-little-about-women-...

To give you some TL;DR from personal-ish experience, women have historically been excluded from medical trials because:

* why include them? people are people, right? * except when they're pregnant or could be pregnant -- a trial by definition has risks, and so "of course" one would want to exclude anyone who is or could get pregnant (it's the clinical trial version of "she's just going to get married and leave the job anyway") * and cyclical fluctuations in hormones are annoying.

The first one is wrong (tho is an oversight that many had for years, assuming for instance that heart attacks and autism would present with the same symptoms in all adult humans).

The second is an un-nuanced approach to risk. Pregnant ladies also need medical treatment for things, and it's pretty annoying to be pregnant and be told that you need to decide among unstudied treatments for some non-pregnancy-related problem.

The third is just a difficult fact of life. I know researchers studying elite performance in women athletes, for instance. At an elite level, it would be useful to understand if there are different effects of training (strength, speed, endurance) at different times in the menstrual cycle. To do this, you need to measure hormone levels in the blood to establish on a scientific basis where in the cycle a study participant is. Turns out there is significant heterogeneity in how this process works. So some scientists in the field are arguing that studies should only be conducted on women who are experiencing "normal menstrual cycles" which is defined by them as three continuous months of a cycle between 28-35 days. So to establish that then you've got to get these ladies in for three months before the study can even start, getting these hormone levels measured to establish that the cycle is "normal", before you can even start your intervention. (Ain't no one got $$ for that...) And that's before we bring in the fact that many women performing on an elite level in sport don't have a normal menstrual cycle. But from the sports side, they'd still like to know what training is most effective.... so that's a very current debate in the field. And I haven't even started on hormonal birth control! Birth control provides a base level of hormone circulating in the blood, but if it's from a pill it's varying on a daily basis, while if it's a patch or ring it's on a monthly basis (or longer). There's some question of whether that hormonal load from the birth control is then suppressing natural production of some hormones. And why does this matter? Because estrogen for instance has significant effects on cardiovascular health, being cardioprotective from puberty up to menopause. (Yeah, I didn't even get started on perimenopause or menopause.)

Fine, fine, it's just data analysis & logistics. If you get the ladies (only between 21-35) into the lab for blood samples frequently enough and measure at the same time of day every time to avoid daily effects and find a large enough group that you can dump all the ladies who don't fit some definition of normal & anyone who gets pregnant but still get the power for your study, it's all fine, right? You've just expanded medical research to incorporate, like, 10% more of the population....!

Had the same problem (with MIT among others). Somehow I heard farmland was treated a bit more generously (a recognition that you can't just sell the land to pay for college & remain a going concern). For a small biz with 4 employees, though, the math was impossible. Good thing Caltech was cheaper.

s1artibartfast below is saying that it seems intentional. But how can someone with a small business sell the assets, eliminating their own income in the process, and provide for the remaining children/themselves/etc? Sacrifice is one thing; killing the job you created is another and far too short-sighted.

Unfortunately as a practical and legal matter that is false. First, physician incentives are aligned to deny care: they have a defense for denying care ("my lawyer isn't clear that I have authority to do this") and the woman has no recourse. Second, there is a simple matter of skill and availability. Fewer facilities allow abortion; fewer OB/GYNs are skilled at doing it safely. In my pregnancy I wanted a perfectly reasonable and legal thing supported by medical evidence and was unable to find a doctor in the state to provide it (vaginal breech birth as opposed to forced C-section).

When you are pregnant, and particularly if you are experiencing complications, you do not have time to shop around and convince people and schedule in advance and all that. You are constrained by the spatiotemporal availability of a skilled medical professional.

Many women get pregnant and want a kid and experience complications. Roughly 25% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Restrictions on abortion care must necessarily negatively affect care for pregnant women who have not sought & don't want abortion. The care for complications of abortion and miscarriage are essentially identical. Incentives are aligned for doctors to deny care for either. There is no medical, civil, or criminal recourse for women who die or have their health affected by improper care for pregnancy complication, miscarriage, or complication of abortion; there is no punishment for doctors who fail to provide medical standard of care; there is an affirmative effort by some states to punish doctors who would provide such care.

I deal with a lot of business people who have processes that rely on 15th/85th percentile, or 25th/75th percentile. They want to see the median, the low/high percentiles, the max/min or outliers, and they don't want to see all the data points jittered in between. It's just overwhelming extraneous information. They in fact like tables with those numbers written down, but they want to compare ten different (time series of historical prices for different markets) and see it on one Powerpoint slide. The box plot allows a fast visual comparison of medians and other key percentiles (label the plot with the percentiles if you're doing something non-standard!). With jitter or violin they get hung up on weird random stuff and it derails meetings.

Important caveats: the generating processes for all these quantities are the same in a physical sense, so they are comparable. All the distributions are roughly lognormal-ish, so they are single-peaked distributions, as folks are discussing here. The point of the visualization in theses cases is not to understand the properties of the distribution per se, it's to show the important percentiles because they have business implications.

It's important that we marry viewpoints when looking at what we call "meaningful". I spend a lot of time right now with a 6/7 yr old. This child does not care about meaning. This child likes to solve arithmetic problems one after another. It's motivating -- it's like a game -- the kid gets them right and gets a thrill. Word problems? Well, the math ability is outstripping the reading ability right now so 2000 x 2000 x 2000 is way more fun than reading some stupid sentence about tulips.

I've spent plenty of time on math (PhD in algebraic geometry) and educating people, and for sure when I taught college freshmen and master's students I spent a lot of time challenging folks to engage their minds, spirits, and intellect. At the same time, we have to admit there is a stage of childhood where kids just love memorization and facts. Dino facts, shark facts, math facts, Pokemon facts, My Little Pony facts, whatever. Let's not force kids to reckon too much with meaning when they're in the facts for facts sake stage -- and once they've got their impressive facts list, they'll make sense of the meaning much more easily, as discussed in the article and here!

You are a lucky person. I just looked up my tax statements for 2022 and I paid $1341.67/month for an older kid (not infant). Waiting lists are atrocious and everywhere (and many places charge a $75-150 deposit for the waiting list alone); we got in fast because it was a new location. I am in the Midwest, not a coast.

In my Midwestern area, infant care is ~$2000/month or more at a center and you get down to ~$1200 a month if you're at the right kind of center by age 4. So there are still some thousands to contribute to childcare even with $16k "off" and then that doesn't count diapers or clothes or formula (breastfeeding is great but you can't do it forever, some can't do it at all, and it is very hard to do on a practical level if you've got an hourly/service job).

Yes, I wondered about this as well. I understand why the author might not have observed women sleeping, and certainly wouldn't have photos, but one might at least mention it (especially given all the attention to the penis). Bust size & placement for sure has a significant effect on where arms can be placed, among other things.

It seems that the author's observations are primarily from various camping-equivalents, more so than home life.

To my sibling commenter, whether pregnancy is or isn't "healthy" isn't quite the point, IMO. Various stages of pregnancy do occupy a non-trivial part of many people's lifespan and significantly change the ergonomics of sleep. Given that humans have been getting pregnant for a long time, it is a big miss to not even mention that it hasn't been considered. Academic training tries to impress on most authors that they should mention what they're ignoring and why, not least to set up the citation train for the future and support grant applications.

This response, to me, misses the point. Yes, you gotta play the hand you're dealt. It's not crippling at all to acknowledge the cards in your hand. If you don't have any pairs or face cards or whatever, it is not crippling to acknowledge that. Acknowledging the help of other is not telling ourselves we're succeeding because of "what we were given", and acknowledging the role of chance isn't denigratory either. To me, acknowledging what others helped us with, the chance encounters that helped, etc can help us seek out more chance, more help, and then provide that to others as well. Then we can indeed make our own luck and create luck for others.

Acknowledging the help of others is just not at all the same as lessening our own contributions.

I guess it is true that some folks see it that way, that if you ever thank or acknowledge anyone else then you're weak, there is this pressure to pretend that everything is original and done alone, but... that's just lying.

The reason folks are unhappy with your take is that many people are personally adversely affected by doctors and others ignoring their physical symptoms. It's worth looking up Stephanie Aston of New Zealand, who just died at age 33; she apparently had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Several doctors told her she was faking her juvenile arthritis etc.

People like accusing others of faking their symptoms because it allows the accuser to avoid moral injury from doing nothing to help or even just the discomfort of witnessing the suffering of others with empathy.

No, in that for people who are fully healthy, they don't have periods of avoiding exertion due to fatigue, which precedes the push in the push-crash cycle. People with well-balanced health and energy can certainly over-exert themselves, but it's not a common cyclical pattern for them characterized by the push happening when some recovery from fatigue occurs.

Because men & women are still overall looking for something different, that's my 2 cents. What you say about the romance publishing industry is roughly correct although your algo description flattens the diversity of the genre (note the popularity of shapeshifter novels, paranormal, Amish with no sex, etc etc; there are many subgenres). What you don't note is the distinction between romance and erotica. Romance has a story with a happily ever after. Can TikTok or Instagram AI Boyfriend ads provide a story satisfactorily?

I'm not sure if research has really addressed evolution of women's expressions of sexuality over time and changing social norms. Even in the romance genre, what's considered appropriate in terms of consent and fantasy has evolved quite a bit over the last 40 years. That's true in terms of porn aimed at straight men as well, though not necessarily in the same directions.

But anyhow, how would AI boyfriends continue what's popular about romance -- the customization (subgenre for every taste), the story, and the happily ever after or happy for now for the woman? The last part in particular doesn't seem to be relevant/considered in the AI girlfriend discussion, it's just not part of the structure.

Also, dating sims seem to be popular in some geographies and not others; I know nothing about them, so there's got to be a story there...