TangoTrotFox

19 ms·

91.
by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I think money in politics is certainly an issue, but there seems to be an increasing amount of evidence that this its influence seems to be diminishing, not increasing. One party's presidential candidate in 2016 achieved record breakin
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
The alternative is centralization of government which changes nothing except ensures that once corrupted its scale would affect what, at scale, could even be the entire world. It also gives bad actors a single target to focus all their ener
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
There's a funny thing about society. Do you know how you create wildly misinformed idiots? By assuming people who disagree with you on topics are wildly misinformed idiots. The National Academies put up a release in 2011 surveying all
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Not against vaccines, but I think understanding the views of things you disagree with is important. And even more so on this issue because people believe things that even more absurd, but more socially acceptable - and so these ideas persis
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
One thing most people do not understand is that the former net neutrality rules did not prohibit throttling, in and of itself. Every rule and clause in the net neutrality bill has a little clause following " Though shall not [...] exce
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Problems getting harder is not really a valid explanation for the current state of science, or any particular field. At any given glimpse of society, their current state of the art is the best they've managed with all they know. Furthe
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
There are some very practical problems with nuclear that people are hand-waving away. One of the most significant is simply longterm cost, because you have to consider what nuclear, at large scale, would entail. Because of the specifics her
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
What is the difference between today and 20,000 years ago? What's the difference between today and 20,000 years from now? There are of course social and political changes but the key thing that invariably is behind all progress and imp
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I agree, with one exception. In certain ultra-urban locations, excessive advertising begins to take on its own sort of aesthetic that can become paradoxically pleasant. Some streets in e.g. Hong Kong [1] look like something out of Bladerunn
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
The problem with non-falsifiability is that let's say we avoid 'overgeneralizing' from a categorization as you suggest. And instead we stick to whatever tightly constrained region of classification or prediction you'd co
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Something interesting is that numerous studies have shown that a number of psychotropics, including the monstrosity that's fluoxetine/prozac, perform at levels that is hardly better than placebo. In many cases the difference is no
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Politics is extremely divisive and, even more importantly, is perhaps no longer a major vessel to enact meaningful longterm change. There is of course the issue of one decade's change being overwritten by the next decade's party.
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China unveils new 'Heavenly Palace' space station as ISS days numbered(phys.org)
1 points by TangoTrotFox 8y ago|0 comments
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
IRV doesn't solve the right problem. The biggest benefit of IRV is that it helps to reduce the spoiler effect, but not much else. But I don't think when people talk about election change that they are talking about the spoiler eff
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
How do you propose I'd be caught? This isn't a rhetorical question. It's just not at all apparent to me. Nearly all detected 'voter fraud' is not actually fraud, but people making ostensibly honest mistakes - such a
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
A couple of problems with this view. The first is that voter fraud is not easy to detect. When I voted all I had to do was walk in, sign a sheet by my name, and go vote. There was no verification or validation of anything. I could have just
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
You're straw manning. The point is you need to consider reality before trying to decide how to tackle problems. Your regulations are not only not going to levy any consequences to bad actors, it's going to directly reward their ba
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Sure, but I think this starts getting into ideology. I think people should be taxed rates that, in a vacuum, can be considered fair. I pay 15% of what I can, you pay 15% of what you can is about as fair as you can get. The reason I'm n
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I've also had similar thought experiments here. But take it a step further. It's probably safe to say that the current biggest divide in society is in political ideology. Let's just call this left/right, though that&#x27
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I generally agree with you here, but as an aside there is one nuance you have to consider. And that's taxation vs disposable income. Imagine somebody earns $50k and spends $30k on their living expenses and pays a 30% tax rate. They hav
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
There's an even bigger problem. There was no validation at all. It was based on self reporting which, in turn, was based on asking [ideally] random homeless individuals, and then extrapolating that outward. There is an incentive for in
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I agree with you, but I don't see how this goes against what I'm saying? In 2008 Obama won California by 3 million. He won in the rest of the nation, excluding California, by 7 million. In 2016 Clinton won in California by 4 milli
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I'd go the other direction. I think if you taught every single 16 year old a basic class in surface-level understanding of time dilation/length contraction, gravity as a facet of spacetime, the two slit experiment, the twin parado
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I think this sort of ideal is more likely to reward than punish bad actors. I'm certain you can think of a million and one ways companies/PACs/individuals/etc could influence others in ways that would be difficult, if no
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
One important factoid that goes against this view is that Clinton's margin of victory in California was substantially greater than her entire margin of victory in the popular vote. The reason I mention this is because you spend where
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I think the thing that enables Facebook is also the thing that obsoletes it. If we imagine Facebook 30 years ago when mass media was still a tightly constrained venture comprised of relatively little more than television, print, and radio,
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
You're assuming direct causality. Think of the practically limitless number of major confounding variables here that are practically impossible to control for in a reasonable way. At the most fundamental think of the distinction betwee
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
It's easy to see the logical flaw here by considering a reduction to absurdity. Imagine a minimum wage of $200/hour. This would of course lead to mass unemployment and collapse the market, except for a very minuscule percent of th
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I think most people simultaneously underestimate the cost of labor and overestimate the profit margins of companies, often by quite extreme margins. I think that's because many here view things like Apple as typical where they make som
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
It's sometimes peculiar how quick we are to aim to repeat history, blisteringly awful history, seemingly with no concern or regard for what we are doing. The Arab world was once near the top of the world in scholarship and academic pur

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