PhaedrusV's comments

Title misspelled "both adults"

How about an internet year off...

It's like people have never heard the word "boycott"

Aaaaand moral high ground: lost

Excuse me, real median per capita income. And it hasn't been declining but it has been flat.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_GDP_per_capita_vs...

Fair enough, I was mistaken

This was a point I made when the pandemic shortages kicked off. The entire world's purchasing habits shifted towards guns, food, prepping gear, and TP. The prices of those items skyrocketed (when they could be found). I predicted at the time that, even though everyone was experiencing massive price inflation in the stuff we were actually buying, largely due to increased demand, it was not going to show up in the numbers because of the way inflation is calculated.

Put another way, if I'm in the market for housing, healthcare, groceries and gardening supplies, and the prices of all those things around skyrocketing, then it doesn't matter much to me if the price of cars is down 20% since the crisis began. The inflation measures, however, don't account for the shifts in purchasing demand, which should weight the measure heavily.

I can't imagine that would go any better. I think I'll just pass on reading the author's thoughts.

Also, all those changes were wrought by government fiat, and have been accomplished almost completely by reducing the weight of the cars, not by quality improvements as the article implies.

Yes, the author is debating a straw man. The argument that the government is understating inflation is a pretty simple one.

1) The government is heavily incentivized to understate inflation in order to limit its expenditures for social security and TIPS, both of which are indexed to inflation. Social security in particular would explode in costs if, say, the official rate had been 1% higher on average over the past 30 years since the inflation measure got significantly changed during the late 80s and early 90s. In fact, if you look back at the discussion surrounding those changes, bringing down the costs of social security was an explicit reason for the redesign.

2) Complexity and obscurity. None of the input data is released, and there's this thing called 'hedonic quality adjustments' which is the umbrella beneath which economists decide how much to lower inflation when the quality of goods gets a little bit better. The FED economists point out that a car from 2018 is better than a car from 2012 and they adjust inflation downwards in order to account for the increase in value that consumers are getting in their car. Consumers counter by pointing out that they still have to spend the actual money...

Analysis) With transparency and a lack of incentive to cheat (see 1) hedonic quality adjustments would be an allowable modification, but with opacity and a strong incentive to cheat, they pretty much guarantee that inflation is fudged downwards. The debates around changing the inflation measure have focused heavily on reducing social security payments. In short, any time you have excessive complexity, lack of transparency, and an incentive to cheat, you can expect cheating.

Why should we care? First and foremost, Anyone who has a relative collecting social security would probably be upset to hear that grandma is getting about 60% of what she should be getting, given the promises made and the value of the money she contributed.

Second, and the big point that the article missed entirely, is that real gdp per capita HAS been declining, reflecting that decrease in standard of living that one would expect to see if inflation were understated.

Conditions were perfectly clear, late at night, at several thousand feet, and the light persisted for about 10 minutes without any flickering or distortion. There aren't any natural phenomena I know of that could have caused that.

Obviously this doesn't immediately require extraterrestrials, but, given the lack of evidence or workable theory that life is original to earth, I'd say Occam's Razor leads that way.

It is interesting how this viewpoint I hold changes how I consume UFO news. There's a whole lot of BS and misinformation in the area, and a lot of crazy people, and a few apparently credible people (like Tom Delong and his To The Stars Academy board) who occasionally still mange to lapse into bizarreness despite otherwise sounding pretty reasonable if you fail to reject the basic premise.

I saw an inertia-less, extremely fast aircraft playing around above the Sierra Nevadas one night about 22 years ago. Obviously you all don't know me from Adam, so I don't expect this to update your priors much, but my personal evidence threshold is pretty low now.

The Lightbringer series by Brent Weeks, and "A Land Fit For Heroes" series by Richard K. Morgan would both make for awesome TV series'.

Yeah, it breathed new life into the basic game in a big way. The mods, on the other hand, get pretty different.

Agree on all points. There's a total conversion mod for the original X-COM: UFO Defense that is amazing, and being actively worked on. New updates every month or so. Hundreds more hours in the campaign. Set a few hundred years after X-COM loses, and earth is a radiated wasteland when some intrepid mutant gals start to fight back against the "Star Lords". It's called xPiratez. Rated a soft "R" for gratuitous pixellated boobage.

Have people decided that they need Facebook for some reason? Just delete your account. If you need photos, or groups, or contact, there's other services.

A good ol' boycott will fix everything wrong about Facebook. No 'terror' required.

Here you go. Video of cop shooting a guy in the back as he ran away, then planting a gun on him. The officer didn't know the event was filmed, and filed a wholly false police report on the subject.

https://youtu.be/XKQqgVlk0NQ

Instead of signal-boosting rotten cops, can we signal-boost the ones who arrest bad cops?

"Maps of Meaning" by Jordan Peterson (yeah, that JP): a extremely interesting textbook-length treatment on cultural meaning and narrative. I found it a little hard to get through the learning curve on the jargon in the print form, but I could tell it had some really interesting ideas so I got the audio version and fully enjoyed it. It was a thoroughly mind-bending look at the meaning and power of shared cultural myths and human myths which transcend culture. It ended up with a fascinating analysis of (even to the point of being a partial rehabilitation of) Jungian psychoanalytic frameworks and pre-scientifc Alchemy. Maps of Meaning was a book that I immediately wanted to re-read as soon as I finished it, because I could tell there was a lot that I missed the first time.

Another recommendation is "Quantum Genesis: Speculations in Modern Physics and the Truth in Scripture" by Stuart Allen. QG is a relatively deep pop sci look at physics, computation, and several related fields where the author points out that the original translation of the creation myth in Genesis 1 matches up extremely well with a modern understanding of quantum physics and simulation theory. (disclosure: a family member is the author).

I'm currently reading "Principles of Secondary Education" by Inglis as an inaugural project for a blog. Share any interesting finds!