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Posts
6
Comments
211
Joined
2 mo. ago

  • Are you familiar with Borderline Personality Disorder? If not, check it out.

  • This sounds like kayfabe, a term which has escaped professional wrestling for politics in recent years.

  • Oh, wow, good for you! I guess I'm lucky that I was born before anti-vax was even a thing. In fact, my mother was one of the "polio pioneers," the school children who served as the nationwide randomized, controlled trial for Salk's vaccine, and her father had nearly died from polio, so I certainly got all my vaccines as a kid.

  • Yes, I misrembered the year. And while Scientific American is not a journal, at least the article explained the work in some depth and provided evidence. Here, you've given your opinion which boils down to, "No, it doesn't." Totally valid, as opinions go, but not very edifying to us readers.

  • I assume that you mean theft of the surplus value of labor by capital owners? If so, that's exactly what the Yard Sale Model captures: One party to every transaction 'wins' and one 'loses'.

    Take a factory as an example. The wealthy owners can afford to gamble on paying less than the full value of labor as wages because they'll survive if widgets don't get made and they can't buy a second yacht. The workers can't afford to gamble on holding out for better pay, because it could mean their families starving in the street. Thus, they're forced to give up the surplus value of their labor in order to survive.

    The YSM just aims to simplify complex, real-world situations like this into a clean mathematical construct that's easy to use for computer simulations.

  • There are a lot of people out there who still believe in trickle-down, Galtism, or the primacy of hard work. Idiots, dupes, or both, we still need to recruit them, or at least stop blocking change. Easily-digestible information like this needs to become widespread.

  • If it's not a good model, then you are welcome to pick it apart. However, the study that applied it for the 2017 paper in Scientific American found that it matches observed data about our economy stunningly well when applied.

    As the author of that study was quoted here saying, the simple Yard Sale Model here can't begin to explain a complex economy, but its function is like an X-ray to cut through the complexity to see the bones of the thing.

    In any case, we know empirically that Trickle Up is the actual effect of the capitalist system. If there's a model that can explain the mechanism more accurately, I'd be happy to hear it.

  • Absolutely, and the headline here isn't (e: whoops) that extreme wealth inequality is not the result of human nature, greed, or anything. It's actually an emergent mathematical property of the system itself. It's unavoidable, even if everybody acts honorably. Proof by physicists that capitalism is wack.

  • You Should Know @lemmy.world

    YSK: Extreme wealth inequality is baked in to the system

    pudding.cool /2022/12/yard-sale/
  • Look up the car-crash head injury rates yourself.

  • I live in Wisconsin. There are tons of deer here. I know wherefore I speak when I say, if you think that deer are all easily visible, you're Just-Worlding, or kidding yourself. They're not always looking at you; sometimes oncoming headlights hide them. Sometimes the road curves, and your headlights don't illuminate them until the last second. Somehow, drivers don't see them, and there are always roadkill deer on the side of the highway every few miles in season.

    But that reminds me of a creature that drivers talk about in near-mysterious terms— black ice. That is usually visible, if you slow down enough to pay attention. It looks like wet pavement.

    Just sayin', it's not a bad idea to be visible when walking, but the person engaging in the inherently dangerous activity (driving) has the moral responsibility should something bad happen. It also happens to be a good idea to slow down and not overdrive your headlights.

    (My college roommate's brother died that way.)

  • Seatbelts are good, too, but they don't protect the head, and head injuries from mild to severe are still quite common. It's utter stupidity not to wear a helmet in the car.

  • As is driving a car without a helmet, given the number of head injuries that result. But here we are.

  • If I am responsible for my safety I should be allowed to carry a brick handgun at all times.

    If we've learned anything from ICE, it's that a vehicle is a deadly weapon, and shooting a driver in the face is sometimes justified.

    /s

  • I like to point out that if you can't see a person wearing black in time, then you can't see deer in time, or a fallen tree, or a broken-down vehicle, or a garbage bin. It's not the world's responsibility to get out of the way when you're operating your vehicle.

    Saying this generally makes drivers very angry. (Well, angrier.)

  • One of my most unpopular comments ever on Reddit was about...

    checks notes

    ...how Wisconsin state parks don't have an admission fee, what you pay for is a parking pass.

    I dunno, car drivers are miserable jokers. It's understandable, because driving sucks so bad, pretty much everybody doing it is miserable and angry. I think it just becomes mindset. (At least, I hope they're not reading and downvoting while driving.)

    ETA: They like to retort that, akshually, they love driving, it's the most fun thing ever, they just don't like dealing with traffic, and I'm like, "But that's what driving is...", and then they really get mad. That was one of my other most-downvoted comments over there.

  • Guys are okay with what? Removing foreskin, or removing the clitoral hood?

  • Honestly, I don't have such a movie to suggest, I don't think such a movie can exist, due to the Backfire Effect. Changing people's minds takes time, and the impetus to change has to come from within. The handful of times that I've managed to do it involved sharing an idea or observation that doesn't immediately trigger their defenses, but metaphorically is like dropping a grain of sand in the gears of their mind, and then letting it do the work of grinding away at the teeth, until one day their old thought process breaks down. It can take months.

  • Favorite is relative, usually the one I'm listening to at the moment. But I keep coming back to the Okkervil River album, The Stand-Ins. It's a companion album to The Stage Names, about the losers and also-rans, so it's full of sad songs.

    My favorites, though, are the last two:

    Calling and Not Calling My Ex, about a man who stagnated after breaking up with his girlfriend while she pursued her career. (Rumored to be inspired by Will Sheff's relationship with Scarlett Johansen.)

    Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979. Campbell was the first openly-gay rock star under the name Jobriath, and now mostly forgotten. He was manipulated and exploited by his manager/agent, and retired from music in 1975 to an apartment on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel. He died there of AIDS in 1983.

  • Fuck Cars @lemmy.world

    Congestion Pricing: Will We Finally Learn?

  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world

    Confidence in a romantic context is like salt on food: It can improve the flavor of good food, but can't be substituted for flavor, and too much spoils any dish.

  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world

    Everyone is a terrorist when you're terrified of everything.

  • Lemmy Shitpost @lemmy.world

    The dream!

  • homeassistant @lemmy.world

    TV and soundbar with local integration