jfengel

25 ms·

541.
by jfengel 7mo ago
First, trust the budget wonks more than the politicians. Well, that's kind of the entire point. Trump exists because people don't trust the wonks. They don't trust the wonks because Trump is the latest of a long line of peo
542.
by jfengel 7mo ago
Answer: too much demand for content. Which is funny, because you'd think it would be demand for good content. I don't like reading LLM writing because it's mostly very bad. If a piece of LLM writing were good enough, I migh
543.
by jfengel 7mo ago
Yeah, it's embarrassing, but mistakes happen. This is a one-word mistake, not ignorance or a propaganda campaign. It's attracting attention because it doesn't happen every day. That makes it a juicy target for those who belie
544.
by jfengel 7mo ago
Uh, Nate, you're about a decade or so late to that party. I had to check the date to be sure, because he also keeps referring to "Twitter". I approve of using the previous, much better name, but it still gave the whole piece
545.
by jfengel 7mo ago
Flerfers seem to be a somewhat different problem. In my experience, the vast majority of flat earthers are trolls, pretending to be stupid for the purpose of angering people. I'm sure there are some genuine flat earthers out there, and
546.
by jfengel 7mo ago
The US stopped individual wars. They went on to attack somebody else, but the host of the previous war was happy to see it over. That's why they negotiated a peace treaty, and the US mostly respected that. (Except with the native Ameri
547.
by jfengel 7mo ago
You don't need any advanced science to understand climate change. The basic chemistry and physics of it are readily accessible at a high school level. Current research papers are far more advanced, but they're about the details o
548.
by jfengel 7mo ago
That is the near-universal definition, but I don't think it captures the essence of it. The difference between terrorism and warfare is the degree of top-down control. Warfare is done in uniform, by people in a hierarchy. The reason fo
549.
by jfengel 7mo ago
It's an indicator of how far they've come in supplanting fossil fuels. Today it's one day; soon it will be two, then a week. They can start thinking about next steps.
550.
by jfengel 7mo ago
I'd be curious to know the average IQ of, say, climate deniers. I suspect it's still a perfect 100. I don't think it's about general intelligence. In some ways just the opposite: very smart people have a talent for convi
551.
by jfengel 7mo ago
I wasn't insulted, but it did feel a bit too on the nose to really work as satire. Idiocracy got there just in time, before things became so stupid that satire wasn't possible any more. You have to exaggerate so hard that it lacks
552.
by jfengel 7mo ago
It is unclear to me that sunlight has ever disinfected anything. Lies spread faster than the truth. That's not to say you'll do any good by hiding problems. It's just that exposing them isn't going to fix anything, eithe
553.
by jfengel 7mo ago
It's not plagiarized; it's the same article. The Independent licenses articles from wire services like Reuters. It includes the same byline. Most news actually originates with wire services. News organizations collect the stories
554.
by jfengel 7mo ago
Note that the data period was 2021-2024. So that's different from the health care misinformation currently coming out of the government. It's not great that it helps these sites perpetuate, but it might well be worth trying to rea
555.
by jfengel 7mo ago
Some think of art as the ridiculous "fine art" market for snobs and money launderers. Some think of the kind of people who use Macintoshes for a living, and are therefore pretentious latte-sipping slackers who couldn't get a
556.
by jfengel 7mo ago
Jobs everyone thinks are easy and nobody likes the people who do it.
557.
by jfengel 7mo ago
The important part of the story is that it took so long. People actively searched for an answer for thousands of years. The answer itself is interesting, but more remarkable to me is how doggedly people pursued it for so long. It seems so b
558.
by jfengel 7mo ago
That is a very big deal observation. Philosophers of science have a concept called "theory ladenness". Until the right tool arrives you may not even be able to formulate the question, and you don't know it. You keep dancing a
559.
by jfengel 7mo ago
Lots of bets on horse A. Makes the odds on horse B look cheap. Place late bets on B. It helps if you can also rig the race, but just knowing the odds better than the pari-mutuel stakes gives you an advantage.
560.
by jfengel 7mo ago
I prefer to deal with a company who is making the world a better place rather than a worse one. I don't care whether they like me or not. I'd rather they did it for good reasons. It makes it more likely that they'll continue
561.
by jfengel 7mo ago
You do have to be careful to avoid letting whales manipulate the perceived market. There are ways to con other gamblers with carefully timed bets. The bigger the market the harder that is, so maybe it doesn't apply at the level of onli
562.
by jfengel 7mo ago
We limit alcohol advertising because it also has an addictive quality. Limiting gambling ads the same way might be a good step.
563.
by jfengel 7mo ago
When the dark matter sails through, is there still enough mass to keep it together, or do they evaporate? Are there "dark galaxies" to match the dark-matter-less ones? I can't imagine how we'd ever find them. We'd h
564.
by jfengel 7mo ago
Depends on what you mean by "we". Scientists have a good understanding of what the data actually is. The name isn't important. It doesn't throw them off any more than the up and down quarks do. Non scientists... yeah, ma
565.
by jfengel 7mo ago
The Martian was published in 2011. There are vanishingly few like it since then. Sometimes a book gets picked up purely on its merits. (It helps to appeal to a wealthy target audience.) But on average you'd get richer by getting a mini
566.
by jfengel 7mo ago
Some of it has to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. A lot of those jobs involve holding people's hands, "emotional labor", like nursing and teaching. These jobs are seen as something people (women, mostly) sh
567.
by jfengel 7mo ago
Things are easier with Congress staying out of his way. If he loses Congress he'll roll with it, splashing around lots of accusations of election fraud and generally flooding the zone with poop. In pursuit of... honestly I cannot say.
568.
by jfengel 7mo ago
I have found that the great artists you've heard of tend to also be great marketers, or at the very least found great marketers. I know quite a few extremely talented artists who could never crack the marketing, and so nobody else has
569.
by jfengel 7mo ago
It wouldn't be Hegseth against the President. It would be an auto-coup, where the President forcibly remains in power. The President is not about to leave office, but there is a very good chance that his allies will lose control of Con
570.
by jfengel 7mo ago
There aren't any laws against conflict of interest by the President. It wouldn't stop him if there were, of course. But he doesn't even have to worry about some future independent counsel looking into it. The only brake on it

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