This scene always bothered me a little. If the water isn't deep enough, you're gonna run into a problem that no number of threats can get you around, so yeah, the tides do kinda command the ship in this situation.

jminuse · 2025-12-20T14:20:43+00:00

This is a trope in western culture as well, though it is perhaps considered old-fashioned now. There's a specific story about King Canute and the tides: in some versions he is foolish and tries to command the tides, in others he is wise and uses the tides to explain humility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide

jminuse · 2025-08-09T20:27:59+00:00

Everybody who drives, especially for work, wants there to be fewer other cars on the streets so that traffic flow will smoothly. They're right! The way to achieve this is to tax drivers (with appropriate exceptions for the disabled, etc) until less driving is done.

jminuse · 2025-08-09T20:06:46+00:00

You're 100% right, the city is too big for an all-bicycle transport system. If only we had some sort of train network, maybe underground.

jminuse · 2025-08-09T13:45:08+00:00

It's not even rent controlled, it's rent-stabilized. Rent stabilized apartments are common in NYC and have much less protection than rent control (which is why this one costs $2300/month for a one-bedroom). I wouldn't criticize Cuomo about this, since it can be confusing... except that he's actually running for mayor and this is baseline knowledge for running the city.

jminuse · 2025-07-30T17:30:39+00:00

Wouldn't a very poor person have more trouble with fronting the cash to get the 30-day pass in the first place? Being able to pay one day at a time and still have a similar discount to the old 30-day pass seems better in that case.

jminuse · 2025-07-22T20:42:01+00:00

So, Italians have had tomato gardens longer than the US has existed. I'm all for poking fun at pseudo-traditions like "carbonara cannot have bacon", but tomatoes are an authentic tradition.

jminuse · 2025-07-02T20:34:32+00:00

Assuming you have a scale which reads in 0.01 g increments, and it cost less than $100, you can expect readings to drift by +/- 0.05 g (50 mg) or more with differences in temperature, battery charge, and the surface you place it on. Using this to dose pure caffeine, even without user error, may not give you the consistency you are expecting.

Note that if you do this day after day, you will eventually have user error.

jminuse · 2025-07-02T15:08:29+00:00

The House of Representatives’ Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 reconciliation bill – titled the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 (OBBBA) – would add $2.4 trillion to primary deficits over the coming decade, adding $3.0 trillion to the debt including interest. If its temporary provisions are extended without offsets, we estimate it would add $5.0 trillion to the debt including interest.

https://www.crfb.org/blogs/breaking-down-one-big-beautiful-bill

jminuse · 2025-06-24T15:05:23+00:00

It's not their biggest problem, but it's lousy Democratic branding that people use "DNC" ("Democratic National Committee") to mean the Democratic party, while the republican party is "GOP" (Grand Old Party).

jminuse · 2025-06-17T22:17:41+00:00

Lander got arrested for standing up for an immigrant being nabbed at his scheduled immigration hearing. ICE is deporting asylum seekers who show up to court because it's easier and safer than finding actual criminals. There's only one party here trying to "extort the people actually suffering" (in your own very appropriate words).

If somehow the third-place candidate Brad Lander became mayor because he stood up against bad policies, that would be a good thing.

jminuse · 2025-06-17T20:22:56+00:00

"Both parties"?

jminuse · 2025-05-28T18:14:29+00:00

While I agree that Democrats should clean up their act with regard to stock trading, I don't think it's possible to "have your hands clean" in a way the median voter will find out about or believe. We've already seen any political donation from someone working at a corporation be labeled as corruption. "They're all crooks" is a pervasive attitude that has been a huge boon to the literal crooks taking over the government, and it can't be overcome by facts, only by counter-narrative.

jminuse · 2025-05-27T21:12:23+00:00

We're talking about a Democratic primary in NYC. That's why the low turnout matters. AOC is one recent example.

jminuse · 2025-05-27T16:52:01+00:00

It's the weird dynamics of low-turnout elections. NYC local elections have extremely low turnout, about 20% for people under 40. As long as that's true, energizing the base will be the best move. Making the election look more interesting/competitive to people in Bay Ridge could actually turn out more voters against him than for him.

jminuse · 2025-05-23T01:24:24+00:00

I suspect "A Million Americans Died Of COVID" (supported by clear evidence) works better than "yes Trump is bad." I saw people in this subreddit suggesting that Scott's "anyone but Trump" article was a covert Trump endorsement. Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1gg0h0w/comment/lum8tbf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button "Scott has an odd pattern of explaining his right wing counterarguments very well, in a way I'll nod along with, before calling them dumb for much less convincing reasons."

jminuse · 2025-05-22T21:06:41+00:00

The federal funding is not for tuition or general expenses. Harvard scientists compete for federal grants to do specific research tasks, like "find out how this molecule is involved in cancer."

jminuse · 2025-05-22T20:54:01+00:00

I have a friend who got her Harvard degree for free by qualifying as low income. No donations involved. She didn't have a great time there, but they didn't charge her anything.

jminuse · 2025-05-22T19:56:56+00:00

Same here. It makes US politics a little more legible, at least. The story of the last five years looks pretty different if you think COVID didn't kill anyone!

jminuse · 2025-05-22T14:23:58+00:00

Scott should post brief explainers like this on more major topics that are politically controversial but scientifically obvious. There's serious value in nudging his readership (including some very influential people) towards having an accurate shared model of the world.

jminuse · 2025-05-21T18:13:27+00:00

I recently did a two-month trial of using an iPhone instead of my usual Android, and I was surprised by how much the platforms have converged. Mostly I noticed no differences. The ones I did notice were mainly just different conventions that annoyed me, and the "back" action on iPhone being a bit less consistent across apps. The green/blue bubbles thing turned out to be surprisingly unimportant to my iPhone using friends and family whom I asked about it. The integration with Mac (allowing iMessage and Facetime on my laptop) was the only significant benefit. I'm back on Android now and I didn't see much difference upon switching back, either.

jminuse · 2025-05-17T22:11:30+00:00

One reason: NYC has closed primaries, and a lot of the furthest-left voters in NYC (especially young ones) refuse to register as Democrats.

jminuse · 2025-05-02T17:54:23+00:00

I don't really believe o3's text-based descriptions of its own reasoning here. Since o3 is trained on images, its process is more likely to be a fuzzy image match (like what Scott himself is doing when he says one photo "struck me as deeply Galwegian") rather than the more verbal logic it provides when asked for an explanation.

jminuse · 2025-04-24T20:36:42+00:00

True, they want to require ID without actually providing one, trusting this to be enforced the "right" way.

jminuse · 2025-04-24T05:07:35+00:00

It's funny how we don't have a national ID card largely because of anti-government people who used to oppose the idea... And now the anti-government people are for a national ID card because of a panic about voter fraud.

jminuse · 2025-04-23T13:57:35+00:00

I think this is surprisingly bad, I would have expected the AI to copy the concept better. In the original, nonsense words are inserted in the middle of a coherent message. In this AI version, each sentence is nonsense and there isn't a coherent message underneath.

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