trauma ride on energized obliques, сотрудник НИИЧАВО
Jun 7, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
the correct way to understand the actions of reactionary centrists like chait and yggy and others is that they're protecting their turf and influence operations from people who might supplant them. it's entirely self-interested
only a few months ago these guys helped give legs to that story about the woman from the st. louis trans care clinic that turned out to be completely made up in the exact way that anyone with brains could see and said that it was
Jun 4, 2023 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
gonna do a thread on this on account of how it's one of my professional competencies to collect and combine datasets. first, a personal story: for a project I recently tried to combine two datasets both generated by the city of new york and had to eventually give up on the idea
the basic plan was to combine the speed data collected by the city on major arterials with the vehicle collision data and try to make some inferences about what sorts of conditions (speed, weather, etc.) influence collision rates
Jun 3, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
ah yes, "personalized tutoring" which is when you ask an llm a question and it invents a seemingly accurate answer that you're too lazy or uninformed to verify. what an awesome revolution. then lengths people will go to avoid reading a book
you would be better served by making anki flashcards out of wikipedia articles
Jun 2, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
sooner or later what is going to happen everywhere in the west is that the interests of a relatively small (in people terms) ag industry are going to run up against the millions of people who need the water to live
western water use is fucked up in all sorts of ways because it depends on things like seniority for allocation rights so we can do things like grow alfalfa to feed cows and walnuts
Nov 18, 2022 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
yes the screencap is mostly gibberish but i do think there's an interesting kernel of truth to this that bears elaborating on, which is that only the king can tell the barons what to do. explanation follows
the thing about being in software or some other tech field is that the labor market is relatively good to you. that's not to say that we aren't all subject to labor discipline by capital, because we are. but not as much as others
Nov 18, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
also if you're a mutual or just someone who enjoyed my posts and want to stay in touch, you can email me at an address by combining my @ with the email hosting service of a popular search engine. put twitter somewhere in your subject line so i know you're from here
honestly as kind of deranged as twitter is sometimes, it was fun and also educational to post here. i followed a lot of people i never would have been exposed to in my day-to-day and learned a shitton
Nov 13, 2022 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
the problem with EA isn't really the idea that doing good is good, or that outcomes should be measured. those are fine in and of themselves (subject to certain caveats blah blah). the problem was that they turned their method into a cult fetish object
i'm old enough to remember when ~20 years ago a kind of weird movement sprang up in the bay area centered around lesswrong. so much of the weird bullshit that is now front and center in the discourse arose from there
Oct 31, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
republican so-called "anti-crime" policies are actually explicitly designed to increase crime as both a way to punish liberal cities and to boost their own electoral prospects
right-wing "jurisprudence" wants to make shootouts on the nyc subway a regular occurrence because it would really help them win votes
Oct 6, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
the upshot of this is that cops do not have to follow the law. they will not face any professional, legal, or financial consequences for anything from drunk driving to sexual assault to murder. if they do face any consequences, judges will step in to excuse them
this is why i have zero time for the german lopezes of the world, who mewl endlessly about how the cops need "better training". you cannot have a legal system that tells you that you are immune from consequences and expect training to make the difference
Oct 6, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
this is such a goofy performance, to the degree that it's hard to be very mad about it because of how nonsensical it is. highly improbable that she herself believes any of this in any substantive way
one of the problems with this whole discourse is the way that, if you respond to this sort of question by pointing to any sort of policy or action (or lack thereof) you get dogpiled by people with charts who say things like "the median american has zero college debt"
Apr 18, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
look at some point you just have to take seriously (i would argue "accept" but i'll settle for less) the possibility that large media institutions are reactionaries and they like it when reactionaries win
the people who are responsible for running the wapo editorial page, the nyt editorial page, and large parts of the newsrooms at both places are actually perfectly fine making an alliance with fascism before making one with the left
Apr 17, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
love too compete with visa by creating a system that is more environmentally destructive, infinitely more baroque and fraud-prone, and just plain inconvenient to use, that's progress baby
the basic problem that all crypto people have is that they are continually seeking solutions to what are clearly political problems but are allergic to actually doing any politics
Oct 6, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
useful reminder that we have publicly funded and can continue to publicly fund all kinds of useful research and that we absolutely do not need parasitic middlemen like merck interposing themselves into the process in order to hoover up rents
allowing war profiteering, which is what this is, is a policy choice. it's a choice made by people who are very sure that the public sector couldn't possibly do the job, despite all evidence to the contrary
Sep 28, 2021 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
since we're doing race and elections discourse again i want to say, predictably, that the shor-yglesias consensus on this is stupid and unworkable even by their own standards. it's wrong because it's fundamentally unresponsive to the conditions under which politics happens today
the basic idea of shor-yglesias thought is that democrats should "lower the salience" of race in elections. they both say this outright, shor explicitly says he wants to go back to the halcyon days of obama 2012. that won't, *can't* work
Jan 2, 2021 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
welcome new followers. allow me to alienate all of you by suggesting that foods should be classified along a two-dimensional diagram whose axes are topological order and number of ingredients
the basic idea is that foods have to primary axes along which their composition matters. one axis is the topology: how many inside/outside transitions are there? in other words, a standard sandwich is constituted by a transition between three layers
Jan 2, 2021 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
the janet yellen speech buckraking contretemps is not only a perfect illustration of the ethical bankruptcy of the elite classes but also a useful indicator of how many people will just defend whatever because "their team" does it
every time these reports have come out about high-level democrats making bank by running "consultancies" or "giving speeches" the same defenses come out: you're doing purity politics by demanding that people stop "participating in society"
