> She couldn’t understand when I said that would take all the pleasure out of it, because talking to people would become transactional rather than joyous.
It doesn't have to and I suspect that's why your colleague suggested it. Politicians act that way because that's what people want except they don't want someone who is acting.
You have what politicians pretend to have because it makes people like them.
You might be a terrible politician for other reasons but I don't think what you've said is true.
There are plenty of politicians who get into politics precisely because they love interacting with everyone.
It doesn't take the pleasure out of it, it doesn't make it transactional. It just gives them incredible job fulfillment, at least in that part of it.
Bill Clinton was famous for this. It was incredibly frustrating to his staff because he was constantly late for his next event, because he always wanted to keep talking to the people he'd just met. They'd have to build in buffer time to plan around it, because otherwise it wound up disrupting his schedule and logistics too much.
I'm surprised by all the people saying they dislike transactional talk. Voluntary trades are positive sum by definition, so a good transactional conversation should also be a joyous one.
I would have rather said he was arguing with who you about who you each think you can be. That is different. The question is whether or not you think you can remain a genuine and caring person while being a politician.
This is what happens when ebike companies take every opportunity to skirt the laws like putting easily removable limiters on motorcycles with pedals and a chain with a gear ratio that makes pedalling practically impossible.
I don't know if there was an existing attempt at regulation in NJ specifically but that's happening all around the country.
The problem is that, while ebikes have a ton of really good use cases, the big market for them is basically kids who want to drive a motorcycle before they're allowed. Ebike companies are going to try to sell to that market any way they can.
Why is it even legal to import illegal bikes into a country? Shut this thing at the source, make Amazon & co liable for ebikes that don't respect national legislation. The entire problem disappears in 6 months.
Long answer, it's a variable you need to consider when doing data analysis, and it depends on what exactly you're talking about, but it's absolutely not true for improvements in cancer survival general. One alternative method is to look at per-capita death rates, for example:
Reduction in global age-standardized cancer death rate since 2000
(Scroll down to second graph. Since the population is getting older, age-standardization makes a fairer comparison)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates
2000 is an arbitrary year I picked for clear visual changes without needing to haggle over statistics. If you want to feel optimistic, switch the childhood cancer death graph to 1960-now.
This method has different possible failure points. It could be that less people are getting cancer, or that people who would get cancer are dying of other causes, or reporting of cause of death has changed, though this is very unlikely for some figures, such as leukemia death rates for children in the US. Statistics is hard. Overall though, the evidence is very good that cancer survival has improved a lot due to better treatments since 2000.
If you have a more specific claim you're dubious about, I'd be willing to look into it for you. I'm very enthusiastic about this topic.
Combined with your data, that implies that whatever wins we got from decreased cancer rates (e.g., less smoking) or improved treatment have been squandered elsewhere (probably obesity / heart disease).
If life expectancy had dropped over that time, then I guess it could be that cancer was as deadly as ever.
I wonder what the deal is with Greenland in your dataset. Lots of smoking? Lots of radiation?
I'm not exactly dubious about anything really, it was just something plausible I had heard a while ago and, while I don't recall where I heard it, I must have given it some credence for it to stick with me.
IIRC survival improvement has happened across all staging categories, including the worst one (IV, distant metastases found), so the answer would be "no".
A friend of mine, aged 50, has worked in pediatric oncology her entire (nursing) career. The ratio of surviving kids has flipped from 30/70 to 70/30 during her tenure.
Cool question. What form would an answer take? We need some detection benchmark data thats invariant over the period of interest. I hope the data exists but I would be surprised.
Another way to come at it would be mortality data. But that has a bunch of its own problems.
Everything is changing at once, it makes this kind of science so hard.
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This joint resolution may be cited as the ‘‘Authorization for Use of Military Force’’.
SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) IN GENERAL.—That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
That's what happens when the majority of people don't actually support the regulations.
If people thought it was wrong to be an unlicensed airbnb or uber, they wouldn't use them. In reality, those regulations are mostly protection rackets and most people don't care about violating them.
I disagree. When you give people strong economic incentives to ignore morality, some people will. Not all, but enough to make a hash of things. In any population there will be some people who will do things they know are wrong just to get ahead.
For Airbnb landlords I'm sure the thought process goes like " I'm just one person so I can't be having enough of an impact to be a problem. And besides, I need the money." But then enough people pile on and in aggregate they ruin the local housing market. But nobody thinks that they themselves are culpable
Your taxi crashes because the driver skipped brake maintenance and his insurance doesn't reimburse you for your hospital costs because commercial transportation isn't covered. Sure would be nice to have some minimum requirements for taxis.
The moral issue is when the executives at Uber know with certainty that their driver compensation and incentives push drivers to neglect required maintenance on their vehicles.
Much in the same way tobacco companies knew for a long time how addictive and harmful smoking was.
And how Facebook knows they let their advertisers scam their users, and the way social media was pushing teen suicides higher. They knew and kept pushing policies which made the problem worse. All so they could collect bigger compensation packages.
Would they risk a taxi ride if they knew that Uber failed to properly background check a driver, who later kidnapped and raped one of his passengers, and Uber's response was to hire private investigators to dig up personal information on the victim in an attempt to discredit her? [1]
Noise, litter, etc, "nuisance" laws are on the books, but mostly depend on people following them voluntarily. The local authorities don't have the time/staff to investigate and resolve them all the time.
You have two parties who want to enter into a contract and a third party unrelated to the contract that doesn’t for whatever reason. Just based on contract law and common sense the unrelated party shouldn’t have standing. Now if there’s externalities to the contract that impact that unrelated party sure, but only insofar as to get those externalities addressed.
This is not the same as a robbery which involves no contract or a willing counterparty to the robbery.
Yeah, IME, if the guests of the rental acted exactly like locals, and the units were not removed from the local housing supply (not sure how that could be), or the local housing supply was in excess to the needs of the population (not sure where that is), it would be fine.
I don’t understand why the local housing supply is privileged in your scenario. And if the local housing supply is a problem it’s one the locals created themselves so…
You believe that the local area has no standing, that's incorrect. Laws and regulations are third parties impeding on the contract all the time. Libertarians may dislike this, but it's one problem with democracy - the majority make decisions you don't like.
This is certainly the most uncharitable way to think about it.
I see a prisoner’s dilemma where people often support regulations even if on an individual basis they would personally violate them, because they prefer living in a the less chaotic society. For example anti-dumping regulations… the expected value for any given individual is +EV, but when everyone is dumping, it’s a big -EV
The perfect example is speed limits: everybody thinks they're good and yet they all seem to classify all other drivers into two categories: slowpokes and maniacs.
Nobody seems to be able to agree on what a responsible set of rules is around the speed of vehicles.
That's because they are slowpokes and maniacs: In a decently flowing road, the majority of distinct cars you see are either moving significantly faster or slower than you (and the more extreme the difference the more likely you are to see them). Of cars that go at a similar speed to you, they approach you / you approach them more slowly so you'll see fewer of them.
no, in the sense that they just follow whatever the rules are and don't care very much, or mildly break them as is convenient and still don't care very much
That's interpreting a failure to fight to preserve ethics as an internal rejection when it could be explained by a lack of fighting spirit, either because the fight seems impossible or the given hill not worth dying on. Another interpretation would be a comfort-oriented, avoidant, and possibly cynical culture facing a power imbalance.
At the end of the day, they're still burning cash. Even if inference is cheap, it's also not hard to compete on. They aren't going to be a trillion dollar
inference company.
Eventually there will be a race to the bottom on inference price to the customer by companies that aren't trying to subsidize their GPU investments.
OpenAI is spending money because they think they need to for their business to survive. They're hoping that the next big breakthrough just requires more compute and, somehow, that'll build them a moat.
OpenAI and quite honestly the others think they are in a race to AGI not the bottom. That's why they aren't concerning themselves with moats or cost. This is quite simply a massive bet that we've already cracked AGI and the rest is just funding the engineering to make it happen.
I personally think we haven't cracked AGI yet but it doesn't change their calculus.
> Your average industrial assembly-line worker is _not_ middle class. They are horrible jobs no-one really wants back, or at least not for themselves.
That's incorrect. Factory work is a ramp from low to middle class. It's low skill on entry but teaches on the job. Long term employees are valuable because they have expertise on the process and are, therefore, more valuable.
Ask Detroit if they want the Auto Industry's manufacturing back.
It doesn't have to and I suspect that's why your colleague suggested it. Politicians act that way because that's what people want except they don't want someone who is acting.
You have what politicians pretend to have because it makes people like them.
You might be a terrible politician for other reasons but I don't think what you've said is true.
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