Alright team, we're back for round 2. The Dept. kindly held an afternoon meeting for folks who couldn't get off work (we assume). A couple people actually signed up this time around.

https://twitter.com/ForARPeople1/status/1995885876170117582

First up (and maybe only person?) Jasper Cline (sp)? a junior and UALR. They feel morally obligated to speak out about the misuse of taxpayer dollars to fund private/religious institutions that aren't beholden to public oversight.

"Abandoning our public institutions in favor of private ones that are already funded"

They also point out that the teacher raises the Gov. touts aren't actually funded and leave the districts holding the bag.

@seethroughit2 Well...

You know Muhammed was a follower of a jewish christian ie. ebionite christian religion.

Those followers of Jesus who thought he was a great man, prophet and upheld the obedience to divine law and Talmud and Torah etc as the core of faith.

Muhammed taught that.

@seethroughit2 You see Christianity as it formed with the apostoles and Paul expanded to gentiles (non jewish) and at that pont came to the conclusion that faith in Jesus Christ and love where the core of the message, not acts of obedience to jewish religions law.

But some stuck with law.

@seethroughit2 When Christianity became the state religion of Rome under Theodosius in 4th century, these jewish followers of Jesus as prophet were dangerous heretics. So Ebionites fled out of Roman empire - to Arabia.
Unlike jews they converted gentiles

So a man Muhammed was converted.

@panepoptis @jurgen_nauditt February-March 1944 Germany was still holding the southern coast of Gulf of Finland.

Any attempt at a peace treaty with Soviet Union at that time was going to lead to a German oattempt at occupation and coup d'Etat - as happened in Hungary.

@panepoptis @jurgen_nauditt The initiative was made by Finns - via Stockholm - not Soviet Union. Nevertheless.

Germans turned very cold and stopped weapons aid.

Those would not resume until Finland formally pledged not to make a separate peace. Hitler settled for personal pledge from president Ryti.

@panepoptis @jurgen_nauditt When Allied landed in Normandy 6.6.1944, Finns expected Soviets to start offensive against Germany from the east.

It was not to happen: Red army INSTEAD started full offensive against Finland, to put the country out of the war. After one month the offensive was defeated.

Why Are Governments Racing to Implement AI Without Protecting Citizens?
A thread on four essential books that explain what's really happening, and why you should read them all.
Want to understand why governments worldwide are falling over themselves to implement AI at Silicon Valley's pace rather than building citizen protections?
These four books together reveal the disturbing answer: We've already lost the plot.
🧵

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (2019)
Zuboff showed us HOW this happened: Tech companies learned to claim human experience as free raw material, turning our behavior into prediction products sold in futures markets.
Governments didn't regulate this because they didn't understand it until it was too late.
Zuboff's warning: Surveillance capitalism creates "extreme concentrations of knowledge and power free from democratic oversight."
By the time regulators noticed, these companies had become more powerful than most governments. They now SET the terms, not follow them.
This book explains the foundation of tech's unchecked power.

Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis (2024)
Varoufakis goes further: Capitalism is DEAD. We now live under technofeudalism, where Big Tech owns private cloud fiefdoms and we're all digital serfs.
Every click, every scroll—we're laboring to increase their power while they extract rent from their platforms.
Here's the key insight: Governments can't regulate what they fundamentally misunderstand.
They still think in terms of "markets" and "competition." But Varoufakis shows platforms have REPLACED markets. There's no "free market" to protect anymore—just cloud lords collecting tribute.
This book explains why traditional regulation keeps failing.

As a tailpiece, for those with interest in politics, history, culture and such, I want to add that in addition to Bahawalpur being a sovereign princely state, Multan was the capital of a province called Multan also until 1849 when the British merged it with Punjab

(1/5)

https://twitter.com/omarali50/status/1995939452506833147

after the ten months long bloody siege and battle of Multan. In 1818 Ranjit Singh conquered Multan and for the first time brought it under Lahore/Punjabi sovereign but maintained it as a separate province.

(2/5)

In Durrani Empire and Mughal Empire Multan was a separate province. In Ain e Akbari Multan is mentioned as a province. So Siraiki province demand is historically and culturally rooted and therefore a very strong claim.

(3/5)

San Francisco is the strongest housing market in America right now.

Home sales are 12% above the long-term average.

While inventory is -28% below the long-term average.

The AI boom has flipped SF on its head, and Reventure is now forecasting rising prices over the next 12 months.

(note: where you don't want to be on the graph above is in the top left. That's very low demand, and very high supply).

1) Of course - let's not forget that San Francisco was one of the weakest housing markets in America since the pandemic.

With values dropping 14.7% since the middle of 2022, one of the stiffest corrections in the U.S.

The typical price of a condo/house in SF county is now $1.25 million, one of the highest in the U.S., but much cheaper than it was several years ago.

2) Due to this price correction, and continuously rising median income, Reventure now has San Francisco County tabbed as 17% undervalued compared to its fair value.

This means that San Francisco is a buy from a value standpoint, and that it's likely the correction is over, and that values will rise from here.

A salt flush is one of the most effective gut-cleansing protocols.

It reliably reaches segments that colonics leave untouched. I do it a few times a year, and the results are notable, both physically and mentally.

My exact step-by-step salt flush protocol:

What is a salt flush?

It's an ancient Ayurvedic practice (Shankhaprakshalana) that cleanses your entire digestive tract using salt water.

Unlike enemas that only reach the lower colon, this method flushes all 7+ meters of your intestines from top to bottom.

How does it work? Salt water at the right concentration creates osmotic pressure that won't be absorbed by your body.

Instead, it passes straight through your digestive tract, clearing waste, pathogens, and inflammation.

@BulletRobinson @talzyn7 @wendelltalks I'll take it you meant relevance to the thread, not threat.

I get that it might seem irrelevant (I first thought that back when I was first informed that Christianity isn't a religion), but the distinction forces a different perspective if one cares to understand it.

@BulletRobinson @talzyn7 @wendelltalks Lets try a different approach. The relevance is always: there is a God (OP specifically tied it to the origin of all things). Forget all the baggage you might place front and center when you hear the word "Christianity." Lets start with the core: ....

@BulletRobinson @talzyn7 @wendelltalks The being who created the universe got tired of watching humans try (& fail) to be “good enough” 4 him, so he came here himself, lived the perfect life we couldn’t, died the death we deserved, & then offers the credit for his perfect life to any who'll trust him for it. A gift

HAPPENING NOW: Rahmullah Lakanwal makes his initial appearance in DC Superior Court, from a hospital bed, on charges for last week's National Guard shooting.

He's being apprised, through an interpreter, of the murder charge against him as well as charges of possessing of a firearm during commission of a violent offense, assault w intent to kill while armed.

Prosecutors are asking the judge to keep Lakanwal detained during pretrial proceedings. Lakanwal, who does appear to be in pain, says he can't open his eyes. His attorney is advising him not to speak.

🚨 Long Thread Alert 🚨

I haven't been posting much lately on crypto. Been focused on @Thingshiddenio.

But seeing as we're at year-end, and crypto in 2025 didn't really turn out how anyone was expecting a year ago, a retrospective is in order.

It's called The Inferior Casino.

Below is a chart that shows relative YTD performance for Gold, QQQ, BTC, ETH, SOL, Total3 and OTHERS -

Yeah… So that is just much worse performance than what most anyone was expecting out of crypto this year. Some might say I’m cherry picking the date there. Let’s pull it back to right before the election, so you get all the election gains –

reasonably confident this is a yale demog prof publicly getting a fairly common quant demo problem wrong very publicly

i could be wrong, but the probability nerds in the comments and the people like me doing simulations all seem to agree that it's 50/50

https://twitter.com/DrEmmaZang/status/1995655529608167790

okay, i see what @DrEmmaZang is arguing, but i think this is not a case of some kind of clever problem design but just a lexical problem.

the problem clearly asks what the ratio will "eventually" become. that is, towards what number is it converging. and it is converging to 0.5, asymptotically. hence the 0.5 answer everyone is giving. the question is literally asking the asymptote.

the correct answer to "what will eventually happen to the fraction of girls" is "it will trend towards 0.5"

now, at any given time, it can be above or below 0.5. @DrEmmaZang seems to believe (and FWIW Grok agrees) that it will always asymptotically converge from above, so any "real" society with these rules will be >0.5

but i trivially falsified this. across a bunch of simulations of n=500,000, much bigger than any "primitive" society we might imagine from the question prompt, i had tons of cases where the realized proportion was <0.5. i think the average of the simulations was probably around 0.5002 or something-- but even at numbers much bigger than is plausible for the question text, the simple fact is that you can't even guarantee convergence from above. so the answer "the share of girls will be somewhere asymptotically above 0.5" is not correct; it's easy to generate simulations where this isn't the case.

FWIW, i've literally seen a version of this problem (tho for boys instead of girls) in demo homework, and the correct answer was indeed 0.5

so I think what's going on here is 1) @DrEmmaZang misread the question and didn't notice it's actually asking about the asymptote ("eventually...") and 2) given the "primitive society" part the notion that we should assume large numbers apply isn't even correct to begin with

the correct answer is clearly "it will generally be about 0.5 girls with an asymptote at 0.5." the fact that the expected value at any specific finite number may be 0.500001 is irrelevant since, for any finite number in a primitive society, the variance will be comparatively enormous.

for reference, here's 30 simulations of 100k families. you can see that there are plenty under 0.5. for the 30 100k simulations the average is actually 0.500034, which is below the expected approximation of 0.508. nor was it even converging anywhere close to 0.508 actually.

I've seen this MS Now promo ad, that is claiming to be representing "We the People" and citing the Preamble to the Constitution.
“We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, ...1/

...provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” But nothing at all about the ultimate danger to us all and ...2/

...everything we know and experience. All of this traditional articulation of "what life should be about" cannot seem to lay it's eyes and vision upon the ultimate centrality of earth's ecobalances, and the damages done to these systems. 3/