Agassi’s book suggests that a life of tranquility and satisfaction, “barbecues and ballgames,” is not compatible with high achievement. All the tennis stars are obsessed with their game, they never say “I’m good enough.” That gloom, the sticky paste of frustration and yearning to achieve our dreams, satisfy our absent fathers, make a lasting impact, be remembered, it can pull you down and it’s also what propels you forward. Onward!
From the poster: “Eight-hour TRE was significantly associated with higher risk of cardiovascular mortality in the general population” People who restrict their eating to eight hours per day may be more likely to have extra weight they hope to lose, and that extra weight may put them at greater risk of cardiovascular mortality compared to the general population. “Surely they controlled for weight” one thinks, before clicking on the link…
I saw Andromeda this morning. Like most of us, I live in a place with too much city light to do much astronomy. But I’ve wanted to see our nearest neighbor galaxy for a long time. On a visit to Ajijic, I didn’t have binoculars and wasn’t sure where to look. Later, in Izmir, I was pretty sure I was looking in the right direction with 10× pocket binoculars, but there was a nearly full moon nearby and I didn’t see anything. On this visit to Arizona, I was unable to spot Orion one night and an app revealed that it, and Cassiopeia and therefore M31, the Andromeda galaxy, were below the horizon, so I would have to observe in the early morning. The monsoon season has begun, with risk of storms and cloud cover, and last night the sky was cloudy. But I woke up early and the weather app said it was clear, so I went out with a good set of binoculars. I covered one eye, walked to an open field away from parking lot lights, and located Cassiopeia. Soon after starting to pan around with the binoculars I saw a faint smudge which I thought was probably the target, unimpressive as it appeared. I made a sketch (annotated afterward) which matched up well with the view in Stellarium This is the only galaxy visible without assistance, but there was no way I could spot it without magnification. Satellites were much easier to see. There’s a paradox that the night sky is not as bright as the sun, which I thought was explained by interstellar dust, but apparently it’s more complicated than that. It does appear that the background of the magnified view is not uniformly black, but finely textured with fainter light sources. As the sky brightened, Mt. Lemmon appeared, from which I recently saw the boneyard 20 miles distant. Today’s plan includes a visit to the Titan Missile Museum. In 1980, a similar missile silo in Arkansas blew up because a guy dropped a socket.
The strategy of giving up on "determination, grit, self-confidence, desire" might be more relevant to the typical NYT reader if the author were not already an expert climber with decades of experience. The Everything Store has a preview of his book, The Zen of Climbing, in which he recounts this episode in more detail. The route, "a soft 5.13a/7c+, but not a gimme" is in fact the highest expert level, just before Super Expert, Elite, Super Elite, and Aliens. He did not give up on his hard-earned skills, nor the physical capability developed over years. "When I took away (the desire for success), my body moved with greater fluidity and naturalness." One wonders why he would even make a second attempt if there was no desire for success, but I think this implies a relaxing of the standard for success, not simply getting to the top but facing the challenge and learning from it. This sounds like good advice for someone who has reached the level of mastery at which "nerves" have become the biggest obstacle.I wasn't mad, but for the first time in my life, after climbing for nearly 30 years, it struck me that the desire to climb the route had actually been the thing preventing me from doing so. That was the beginning of a massive shift in my perspective.
Your only goal is to breathe, and stay there, each move by each move. Just execute. Try hard, but not too hard. But don't panic. Relaxed aggression. Poised, but with nothing to lose. Listen to exactly what your body needs. Respond as quickly as possible. Make good decisions.
After 96 hours and 400 miles, eight runners remain in. BEL 2 Merijn Geerts USA 5 Harvey Lewis JPN 13 Terumichi Morishita USA 20 Jon Noll CAN 24 Ihor Verys BEL 25 Frank Gielen POL 32 Bartosz Fudali They are tied in first place, all having completed 96 "yards," the 4.17-mile course. They are now on yard 97, running on the difficult daytime trail course, having survived 11 hours of the tedious nighttime road course. Bib numbers are assigned by previous longest distance, with Phil Gore leading at 102 yards (425 miles). live video live results AUS 1 Phil Gore
2/22/22 is a … Tuesday.
All very salutary, but I remain curious to know what you think of Huemer's (relatively simple!) arguments about corporations and government. Do you disagree with any one of his numbered headings in particular? For what it's worth, he hates Trump. I observe that The Trump Organization is a corporation, one I can avoid with ease, aside from seeing the name on large buildings now and then. Trump the politician, however, has gathered power using democracy (as it is practiced, which matters more than how one might wish it worked) and this power is harder to avoid. DEC 21, 2018 Trump is your fault FEB 29, 2020 A Right-Wing, Populist Critique of President Trump JAN 16, 2021 What's So Bad About Storming the Capitol? DEC 30, 2023 Saving Democracy from the Voters JUN 24, 2023 Who Can Best Destroy America? I wonder how much left-wing intellectuals have contributed to the rise of Trump and the alt-right.
Trump does not encourage respect for our country.... President Trump does not make America strong. He weakens America, in several ways.... Trump’s trade war is estimated to cost average Americans about $1300 a year... When he dies, Mr. Trump will go to his grave laughing at all the people he scammed in his life, not least of all the American voters.
What matters is, if they had somehow succeeded in getting Congress to install Trump as President (which I think had about zero chance of happening), the result would have been a collapse of social order in America. There is no way in hell that the other half of the country would have accepted it. There would have been a civil war.
His remarks on January 6 were intended to intimidate Congress and Mike Pence into going along with his plan. Attempting to overturn an election using threats of violence sounds like “engaging in insurrection” to me.
If you’re a Woke ideologue, antifa member, or member of ISIS, you should vote for Donald Trump in the next election, because he will do the most to accelerate America’s destruction.
I understand the point of the article to be that it's interesting when artifacts evolve and previously functional elements are retained for a purely decorative purpose. I take your point to be that it's not so interesting. Consider that a typical Kindle contains dozens of books, so it is more like a bookshelf than a single book. The original design intent was for the device to "get out of the way and disappear so you can enter the author’s world." The display may have a page-turning animation, or a dog-ear icon indicating a bookmark, or adjustable margins, but outside of the reading interface I don't see book-like structural features, certainly not a spine to hold the pages together and display the title while the book is shelved. A cover is a functional accessory "to keep clean and avoid problems with the screen" and not a merely decorative replacement for a formerly functional element. Hardback books have dust jackets that also have a functional purpose: to protect (and decorate) the book. I don't see the relevance of the floppy disk or save button. Storage media has evolved considerably, from flexible plastic disks to hard platters in metal enclosures, shiny CD-ROMs and DVDs, and now solid state flash memory. At no point was a previously functional element retained for decorative purposes. The GUI happened to become popular when the 3.5-inch disk was in service, the save button adopted that image as an icon and has not evolved since. Indeed, that must be why I was looking for dentils in my photo, but I forgot by the time I got to the nitpick-Devac stage. "Vestigial" is probably a better fit, but it implies uselessness so maybe we are stuck with "skeuomorphic."The OP said that.
I don't see the word "trust" in either of those articles, so I am curious to hear your thoughts.
Scale should be permitted to offer jobs to whoever they wish, but I don't think it's a a mistake to believe that merit (i.e. ability to contribute value to Scale) and diversity are somewhat in tension. No age group has a monopoly on excellence, but would not be surprising if almost all of the Scale workforce is drawn from the 20-39 year old age bracket, which makes up 30% of the population. If Scale hires solely on merit, staff will show some variety in various demographic dimensions, but it won't be a strictly population-balanced representation.There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity. I strongly disagree. No group has a monopoly on excellence. A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. Achieving this requires casting a wide net for talent and then objectively selecting the best, without bias in any direction. We will not pick winners and losers based on someone being the “right” or “wrong” race, gender, and so on. It should be needless to say, and yet it needs saying: doing so would be racist and sexist, not to mention illegal.
Philosophy Bro, as Hubski dubbed Michael Huemer, has moved to Substack. I Love Corporations is archived. This was a great discussion. Further reading: The Basic Social Problem Humans are selfish. Some actions harm others but benefit the agent. Prediction from 1+2: There is going to be a lot of extremely net-harmful behavior. 2 Solutions Individual Retaliation The Fantasy Solution: Let’s just teach people to be nice. Government Anarcho-Capitalism Now, what sucks about the first three solutions? The Basic Problem of Government Government officials are selfish. Some government actions harm other people but benefit government officials. Prediction: There is going to be a lot of net-harmful government behavior. Here are four solutions, from the same post: Meta-Government Separation of Powers Constitutions Democracy Let’s think about why each of these are weak solutions. If you would like to have a conversation about these, post one up here.1 The Fundamental Social Problem
The basic problem of government, from my previous post:
We reserved a RAV4 “or similar” and they gave us this. Any GeoGuesses?
That phrase has been on money since the Civil War era.
100 miles in Crocs. 100 miles. In Crocs.
Yep, dirt and decay are minor nuisances, vermin can be a headache, but water is the enemy. I give about 1% of my attention to the sump pump. I don’t trust the float switch, so I put a security camera in there and manually run the pump when the water gets high, and monitor it while on vacation. Supply hoses for the washing machine get one day closer to failure every 24 hours. Good luck with the roof! Tending to Maslow Level 1 issues is a good way to satisfy higher-level needs.
Some back story, from thousands of days gone by:
gwern quotes a 2019 book suggesting that DRH has been far more concerned about AI than his recent scoffing would suggest.
Hoftsadter: It's not clear whether that will mean the end of humanity in the sense of the systems we've created destroying us. It's not clear if that's the case, but it's certainly conceivable. If not, it also just renders humanity a very small phenomenon compared to something else that is far more intelligent and will become incomprehensible to us, as incomprehensible to us as we are to cockroaches. Q: That's an interesting thought. [nervous laughter]
By convention, the first transaction in a block is a special transaction that starts a new coin owned by the creator of the block. This adds an incentive for nodes to support the network, and provides a way to initially distribute coins into circulation, since there is no central authority to issue them. The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended. The incentive can also be funded with transaction fees. If the output value of a transaction is less than its input value, the difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive value of the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free. — Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System Fees provided incentive to miners from the start. Bitcoin was not intended to run on good will. If users don’t find using the technology worth the cost, they can switch to alternatives.6. Incentive
Two more stories in Jarhead Adventures.
Went fishing in the Potomac for artifacts. Got a fence post and no rusty guns or money boxes. At the boat house they told us there were dozens of cell phones 40 feet down, but I only found fasteners. And a mystery object.
Range heater element patch held up through a few breakfasts until a hot spot burned through. Replacement burner expected today. DIY success: fashioning a replacement air return vent cover. Ugly replacements seemed expensive, presentable ones were over $100. Key search term was “decorative metal sheet.” https://designertrapped.com/diy-vent-cover-its-pretty-and-easy/
I went to a game Monday with one of the Little League dads and the boys. The home team trails the league, has been eliminated, and was shut out. We mostly talked about trains. It was great.
Turns out it’s pretty simple to diagnose a bad burner on an electric range as a switch problem or a burner problem. Mine turned out to be a burned-out spot in the heating element. In our post-apocalyptic world, badly corroded burners harvested from old appliances go for $40, so I plan to try to bridge the gap with a copper ferrule. Melting point is 1984°F, but I haven’t found a good estimate for how hot the resistance wire itself might get. There are stories of unattended aluminum pans (mp 1221°F) melting on a stovetop.
Response to Tyler CowenIf you create something with superior intelligence, that operates at faster speed, that can make copies of itself, what happens by default?
I used to have something riding on this question so I looked it up. Took several clicks to get the whole rambling shout. What do we think the probability of an arrest by midnight Tuesday is? Despite the strangely specific time, I put it at 1%. Also, 0.1% chance of political violence leading to any human death within a week if not arrested Tuesday, 1% if arrested.
The same could be said of its opponents; capitalism makes civilized life possible. Prices, including wages, are not "set" by market players. Prices come about as a result of buyers and sellers interacting. Sellers can choose any price at which they are willing to sell, and buyers can choose any price at which they are willing to buy, but a sale only occurs (and a market price decided) when the two sides meet and agree on the same price. Customers are the primary driver of technical change. You can still buy a typewriter, but most customers demand keyboards and touchscreens. Public choice theory is a discipline of economics that considers how political actors are influenced by incentives like anyone else. I don't see ethics and welfare being neglected, but there are many new avenues to explore. In recent decades the abundance of data and software has enabled a boom in econometrics while Adam Smith had to rely more on intuition and almanacs. What other discipline tries to carefully measure what matters to people? How else could you do it, if not by paying close attention to how they spend resources like money, time and attention? The base of Maslow's pyramid is formed of goods consumed in exchange for money. The opposite of efficiency is waste, from which no one benefits. A concrete example of upward redistribution (not the result of government action) would be helpful. Social justice and liberty? These are political considerations, not economic. Indeed, this is simply a misquote of the original essay:economists, who have prospered mightily over the past half century, might fairly be accused of having a vested interest in capitalism as it currently operates
Our emphasis on the virtues of free, competitive markets and exogenous technical change can distract us from the importance of power in setting prices and wages, in choosing the direction of technical change, and in influencing politics to change the rules of the game.
In contrast to economists from Adam Smith and Karl Marx through John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, and even Milton Friedman, we have largely stopped thinking about ethics and about what constitutes human well-being.
We often equate well-being with money or consumption, missing much of what matters to people.
Many subscribe to Lionel Robbins’ definition of economics as the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends or to the stronger version that says that economists should focus on efficiency and leave equity to others, to politicians or administrators. But the others regularly fail to materialize, so that when efficiency comes with upward redistribution—frequently though not inevitably—our recommendations become little more than a license for plunder.
Keynes wrote that the problem of economics is to reconcile economic efficiency, social justice, and individual liberty.
The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: Economic Efficiency, Social Justice, and Individual Liberty.
Water is not transparent. Water is opaque, in almost all frequencies of light except a narrow band, which happens to be the range the eye is sensitive to. Cool materials Threadapalooza mentioned by Guzey.
johan you getting this