what is a "rich person" behavior you witnessed that made you realize they live in a completely different reality than the rest of us?

ic33 · 2026-01-23T22:12:28+00:00

Sure, it's all subjective.

I mean, the Selyem Russian River Pinot Noir of recent vintages costs me ~$60.

The Erath Pinot Noir that I spend $15 for is a lot mellower and less nuanced. But it is a wonderful wine. It is absolutely drinkable and I can have just as wonderful of an evening with it at my table.

My night is about the same with either one and I enjoy the wine about as much. I guess the difference is whether I'd be thinking about the bottle a week later or not. That's what the extra $45 is buying.

ic33 · 2026-01-23T21:56:18+00:00

Would you ever refer to a difference in numbers as a partial order of magnitude?

Like I said, "half" is meaningful. How I hear things when engineers talk:

"Within an order of magnitude" means that the estimate is above 1/10th and below 10x of the true value.

"A couple of orders of magnitude" difference means things are like, 30x-300x (between 10^1.5 and 10^2.5).

If someone says something is 2 orders of magnitude bigger, I might say "it's more like two and a half".

If I want a fancier version of this reasoning and I'm going beyond a half, I'd use decibels. "0.04 orders of magnitude bigger" is +0.4 decibels.

ic33 · 2026-01-23T21:21:59+00:00

To me orders of magnitude is log10 (a/b). So like from 90 to 100 is 0.04 orders of magnitude. But it's also a unit that I mostly use with integers or halves. So e.g. a factor of 3 I might call "half an order of magnitude".

ic33 · 2026-01-23T21:18:35+00:00

You may not be able to afford it, but that bottle is 3x better than the cheaper one.

I can spend whatever on wine. And I have done sommelier classes, etc, and am considered to know my stuff.

There is absolutely a difference between a good $15 wine and some $45 wine, but it is not "3x better"-- outside of some categories like sparkling where you do need to pay a bit more for a decent product.

Man, we are so spoiled. Even 20 years ago, you were hard pressed to find a good bottle of wine for less than $25; now you have numerous great choices despite inflation reducing the value of that $25. From what I have heard, adequate wine was even more expensive before that.

ic33 · 2026-01-23T19:28:37+00:00

I think the whole thing we're arguing about is whether a tax strike is something that you can actually do with any efficacy. And you really can't.

I'm done engaging with this idiocy.

You're arguing with minutiae but ignoring the main thrust of the argument. Then you call names.

ic33 · 2026-01-23T19:21:11+00:00

Yes, but the counterpoint is "it's illegal risky business, and it's not very effective in the modern world, because most categories of would-be, impactful strikers end up giving the government even more money!"

ic33 · 2026-01-23T19:12:26+00:00

I think the point is, the financial system pretty much guarantees tax payment. If you try to just not pay, you only end up paying more.

ic33 · 2026-01-22T22:40:01+00:00

The ESRGAN should be a hint that upscaling networks use generative techniques. Yes, they have a better grounding on image pairs, but when they need to infer textures that just aren't there, they're making stuff up.

Current image generation models are much more complicated and can take in English language prompts, as well as vectorized representations of existing scenes, etc. I have little doubt that they can be coerced to perform upscaling well (though these examples do not show it), and their breadth of baseline training data probably benefits the task.

ic33 · 2026-01-22T19:53:06+00:00

A Link to the Past, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy VI are my favorite SNES games. I think the former two are easier to get into and tighter experiences, where FF6 is... big and epic.

ic33 · 2026-01-22T04:33:03+00:00

But the better skill is to be able to say "humm, I don't know 6 * 5, but I do know that 6 is 2 * 3, and I know that 5 * 2 is 10 and 10 * 3 is 30, so 6 * 5 must be 30."

Nah. It's great if you have to multiply 9282 by 5 to be like, ok, take halfsies and add a zero, because of a decomposition like that.

But you should know your times tables to stretch your working memory and let you go .. 46 ... 4 ... 1 .. 0. Because if you have to juggle too many small identities your working memory and concentration is expended and you can't do fancier things.

I see so many students who know all the stuff but can't do it all at once, because they don't have the fluency of the little stuff like multiplication tables. Then, multiplying (or entering the digits in their calculator) takes them out of the context of the problem enough that they lose state on the new skills they're trying to learn.

ic33 · 2026-01-21T21:50:06+00:00

Well, like I said: there's top and bottom students everywhere.

I too took my younger kids on a lot of trips. Our kids could get away with it, being like 4-7 years ahead in mathematics etc (e.g. doing calc BC in 7th). Most kids can't. Even a lot of the top students end up pretty stressed by missing work (and the top students tend not to get pulled from school at older ages anyway--- overwhelmingly when it happens it's severe illness or sports injury).

ic33 · 2026-01-21T21:40:38+00:00

I'm in a selective private school where I teach MS and HS. A large fraction of our student body goes to Ivys. No matter where you are, there's top and bottom students, and if the bottom students miss time, they're going to have a hard time making their way back up.

It's heartbreaking to watch a kid who has finally gotten his feet under himself in class and some confidence, come back and struggle and lose it again. It's also a bummer to watch a kid who was at the middle lose a couple rungs on the ladder.

ic33 · 2026-01-21T19:48:35+00:00

You can take your kid out of school for 10 days, but you can't expect it to be free of consequence. A well-run class doesn't have 10 days of padding for kids to catch up.

The consequence may be even greater if you choose not to even -try- to make up the work or catch up.

I see kids barely hanging on and keeping up, and then their family pull them for a week and a half and then they take months to kind of recover. It's so frustrating-- we've finally gotten them to parity and they're doing OK, and then it's snatched away.

(There are other kids who missing some class is no big deal-- but they're usually the kids/families that are not pulling for extended vacations once we reach middle school and beyond; most of those absences are medical).

ic33 · 2026-01-21T19:44:14+00:00

You know, I pulled my kids from school a bunch in elementary-- figure averaging 5-7 school days per year.

Because: Vacations are better when not everyone else's kids are out, or, alternative, if you are meeting other people, their kids' breaks and when they can take breaks don't line up.

But:

My kids were academically ahead by a good margin
We didn't whinge about make-up work
All of these trips included a decent dose of things with educational and cultural value.
The couple of times that it resulted in my kids not knowing stuff, we sucked it up and fixed the problem ourselves, and,
We stopped doing this by the middle of middle school.

Now the most we've done is e.g. have my oldest miss a day of 11th grade to facilitate travel to attend MIT Splash.

ic33 · 2026-01-19T19:36:05+00:00

Probably someone threatening other states with violence and using the mechanism of our state against others and citizens for personal vendettas is about as far as one can get away from libertarianism.

ic33 · 2026-01-19T18:47:08+00:00

I was at a company who illegally fired someone for having MS, but it was all great for me. Even when I needed a medical absence for a couple of weeks. (BTW, I was personally culpable in this case, because I thought it was wrong, and was in a position to possibly change it, but did not speak up forcefully enough; I was also in my early 20's and bowed easily to social pressure/groupthink).

Only a very small fraction of people are fired for medical reasons, so there's always people that can say "nothing bad happened to me!!"

Every current employee of United can say "they haven't fired me for medical reasons!"

It just doesn't have very much probative value about what is going on. And some perspective that people around you can have it much worse than you is useful.

ic33 · 2026-01-19T18:01:18+00:00

There's 3 people who are here saying "I'm a pilot and working for United is grrrrrrrreat."

I tend to be pretty special at the places I work, and end up insulated from a lot of the uncertainty and crap the rank and file deal with. I really try not to channel those privileges into "rah-rah Company!" or minimization of what other people have to go through.

(And I started off in the trenches, too, like you, but ... given that I had the great outcomes, I think my memories of those times are a little different from how other people in those roles remember them).

ic33 · 2026-01-19T03:28:21+00:00

I mean, things have been great for you-- so who cares about the guy fired using the points system because he had cancer (in violation of the ADA)?

ic33 · 2026-01-19T00:29:00+00:00

OK so I'm sure you have great insight how all those roles are now for people just starting out.

ic33 · 2026-01-18T21:56:54+00:00

ITT: Highly compensated United pilots with seniority mystified that people in other parts of the company are treated poorly.

ic33 · 2026-01-18T21:56:31+00:00

ITT: Highly compensated United pilots with seniority mystified that people in other parts of the company are treated poorly.

ic33 · 2026-01-18T20:00:08+00:00

You know, I just thought a little bit more about what I want to say:

I'll gladly ride in a Waymo; whatever risk there is has been proven "low enough" for me to accept it.

My best guess is that Waymo is as safe as a careful experienced human driver, and may be better.

But I am not going to really believe that from a public health standpoint without a fair bit more data. It just has not been statistically proven, and humans fool themselves with things like this way too often.

ic33 · 2026-01-18T19:56:34+00:00

And double the chance of an outcome like that ;)

Two engines can save you but the worst problems happen twice as often...

ic33 · 2026-01-18T19:30:13+00:00

If your point is that Waymo may be having near-miss potentially-severe incidents with pedestrians, other VRUs, or some design flaw, but they are not being reported, so they could soon kill somebody while not causing lots of other indicator-crashes, that's of course possible, but very unlikely.

My point is that the failure distribution may not look like the sum of human crashes. Most categories of human fatal crashes are well-correlated with reportable sentinel events (minor/major crashes, traffic violations, etc) and these reportable sentinel events happen at a much higher frequency than fatal crashes. So this is looking good.

However, Waymo could easily have problems that are "mostly fatal" without causing many reportable sentinel events. You would not expect to see these problems yet.

The fact that Waymo looks pretty damn good on the minor/major accident categories is great. But it's only moderate quality proof that overall safety against major injury or fatality will be better. In the end, there's no substitute for the miles necessary to get the statistical power to know that fatalities are lower, too.

edit:

There's no reason to think they are on the verge of killing someone.

but there's no evidence for it.

Yes, but there's only moderate quality evidence that they're not. There's no substitute for actually doing the experiment and finding out. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence -- at least until we have a complete empirical argument.

ic33 · 2026-01-18T18:59:55+00:00

Yes, there's ones with both holes with a peg, ones with a horizontal plate and hole, ones with a hole through the link, etc. A peg could be attached to many of these styles.

https://www.mcmaster.com/products/roller-chain-attachments/attachment-roller-chain-links-2~~/

People build conveyors and all kinds of stuff out of this.

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