PrinceWith999Enemies @ PrinceWith999Enemies @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Yes. CA is looking to get single payer, but that has a longer runway because America.

I’m know I’m going to get downvoted for this, and a witch will put her curse on me, but here it goes.

I actually like audible. The subscription runs me somewhere around $12-13 per month, and includes one credit that can be used for any book. You can also buy extra credits for about the same price, and you can give audiobooks as gifts. My partner also has a subscription and I’ll frequently steal unused credits. I used to try to game the system and get the longest or most expensive audiobooks I could find with my credits. It was fun to get a 40 hour long $45 audiobook for $12. Now that I have an audible library that’s starting to rival my Steam library in terms of unplayed content, I’ll just grab whatever has caught my eye and pay cash for anything under $12. They have a lot of sales. They also have free content, but it rotates and sometimes they’ll pull the free books after a while.

Being Amazon, it’s pretty platform universal. Their apps are pretty much everywhere, like with kindle. They also have a very large library with a number of books labeled as exclusive to audible. These include full cast productions, which can be really fun.

All of that gushing aside, their software is fucking horrid. Every few months they’ll do an update that breaks something. It doesn’t make the app unusable, but it’ll change the invisible hit box size for the buttons or screw up the logic somehow. I currently have negative 56 minutes in the book I’m listening to, and although I can go back and forth using the + 60s buttons, the scrubber/progress bar isn’t working. I suspect they have major QA issues at Amazon, like a lot of the big companies do.

Anyway, between the ubiquity, the prices, the free content, and almost seamlessness of the experience, that’s the service I use. I listen to audiobooks every night while falling asleep as well as when I’m working around the house or whatever. I listen to the point of having two pairs of AirPods so I can swap them when the batteries die after 4 hours. Plus, depending on the book, the kindle edition and the audible edition can stay in sync. Sometimes that’s helpful, sometimes very much not.

I know there’s more open source options out there. I had to do that to get Cory Doctorow’s new book since he refuses to publish via Amazon, but it was a much bigger pain in the ass than I’d prefer. At this point in my life I really want something that just (mostly) works and requires zero attention. I’m mid to late stage career in science/tech and I want to dedicate exactly zero brain cycles to listening to an audiobook. Audible does that. Plus, like I said, they have Amazon money so they have a number of exclusives and freebies and sales.

I might have recommendations as far as books go if I knew your or your daughter’s tastes in literature, but as far as the base app, I’m sticking with audible.

California comes pretty close.

To little fanfare, as the new year has gotten underway, California has closed one of the largest remaining gaps in its healthcare coverage system. As of January 1, all low-income Californians, no matter their immigration status, no matter their age, qualify for healthcare coverage.

I know, right? I really liked him until I ended up working at the institute where he regularly interfaced to get some of his ideas. I knew the guy who was the basis for the character of Ian Malcolm - Jeff Goldblum’s character. He was an economist rather than a biologist, but the cool thing is that if you’re working in complex systems theory it doesn’t really matter.

Anyway, I think the book that turned me off was called Prey. It was something about nanotechnology and complex systems. It was just so completely wrong in every scientific detail that it was jarring. I could deal with the suspension of disbelief for things like Jurassic Park, but the grey goo stuff was just so far outside of established science that it made me look at all of his other writings.

I can still enjoy some of his works and some of the films made from them, but there’s always this aftertaste like I’m enjoying something from L Ron Hubbard, you know?

There were so many problems with monitoring time. Even today I always dread it a bit. While we’ve tried to at least move the issues from the mechanistic to the philosophical, we still run into things like the Y2K and the 2038 problems. Hell, I remember running into an issue with calculating leap years and such as an undergrad.

I like to think that, if nothing else, it gives me a greater appreciation for Discworld.

There’s a type of vegetarianism/veganism that only eats plants that “want” to be eaten. Specifically, many plants produce fruits that hold seeds. They make the fruits bright and tasty (which tbh usually means “sweet” but you get the point) so that animals will come along and eat them.

Plants have a problem. They can t walk. That means that any of their offspring are going to grow up right next to them, competing with them for resources. There’s a lot of different ways of dealing with this phenomenon, but one common way is for the plant to bribe an animal to move its seeds further away by wrapping it in something delicious. This is what happens with plants that depend on pollinators like bees - which give pollen to get more mobile organisms to move their genes over there somewhere) and with ones who produce seeded fruits and berries which will pass through an animal’s digestive tract relatively unscathed and wind up in a nutrient rich environment far from itself. There’s also wind-based pollination and different lifecycles and so on, but the point is that being eaten is the entire point of producing fruit - for the most part.

Anyway, that class of people are called “fructarians.” It’s not actually a super healthy diet for a human and I do not recommend it. They intentionally steer away from plants like carrots because you can’t eat a carrot without killing the carrot plant, while you can eat an apple without killing an apple tree, if that makes sense.

In any case, while I respect the motivation, I think it’s going over the top. While I’ll always try to support people’s choices in things like diets and morality, it really doesn’t hold up to scrutiny after a point. I’ve read about religions that encourage people to sweep the road ahead of them as they walk so as to not step on an insect, and who strain their water so as not to accidentally consume what they consider to be a tiny animal. The truth is that you’re messing things up left and right while sweeping in front of you, and anything that does actually get caught in your filter is almost certainly going to die almost instantly.

There was an embarrassingly long time when we thought that animals (and even human children) could not feel pain. This was obviously wrong. At the same time, I don’t think we need to project an existential terror as being felt by a carrot.

Biologist here. I promise I’m not laughing at you.

While I’d be a bit cautious about throwing around a word like “consciousness” without defining it, you’re absolutely right. Trees, and pretty much every living thing, are aware of their environment. They’re capable of communication and coordinated responses to threats. They have complex and intricate lifecycles and many levels of interactions with other plants and animals. One of the more profound passages I read (from Jurassic Park, whose author I otherwise detest) had the paleobotanist comment something along the lines that everyone sees plants as a background against which animals act, but they’re their own ecosystem, just as much red in tooth and claw (or cooperative, if you prefer) as any group of dinosaurs.

Being one of those weird theoretical biologists, I’d even let you get away with using a word like “intent” as long as we mean “a learned and stereotyped response to an environmental condition.” Oaks aren’t debating the meaning of life, and they’re not deciding in a sense more meaningful than an “if then else” kind of clause. I mean, I don’t think humans have free will either, so I’m not just ragging on trees here - but that’s a different conversation. They make decisions like “if it’s been warming up for a while and getting sunny, start making leaves again.” It’s genetic/evolutionary learning rather than neural, but it’s still learning. It’s just much slower.

It’s also not racist for oaks to feed other oaks any more than it’s racist for humans to eat corn. Or corn dogs.

I’m not going to get into the differences between group selection versus kin selection dynamics because that would break my New Year’s resolution.

So I got scooped on the whole candle thing, which I really wanted to go with. Instead, I’m going to pivot and say that accurate timekeeping - day or night - was actually driven by the needs of navigation. 

You could get a pretty good idea of when it was based on the position of the sun and stars, as long as you knew where you were. The opposite is also true - you could figure out where you were, as long as you knew what time it was (and had the appropriate charts/data). The problem was that, while sailing around the world, ships often didn’t know either one.

For rough purposes, people used things like candles. In some cases, monks would recite specific prayers at a given cadence to keep track of time overnight and so know when to wake the others. These methods, as well as later inventions like the pendulum clock that used a known time component to drive watch mechanisms, were all but useless for navigation due to inaccuracies. They were good enough in the 1200s to let the monks know when to pray, though.

What an absolutely believable conclusion announced by an absolutely credible organization that has no motivation except to publish the unvarnished truth.

Thank you for your thoughtful response.

I was thinking of Thailand in particular since that was where my studies were grounded and my understanding is that the general conceptualization of gender is not identical to western approaches. I do tend to try to steer away from terms like “trans” when talking about other cultures because I’m not sure how well the western idea of a trans person translates into cultures with different ideas of genders. I know enough to know that I don’t know enough, but I do know that what we in the US consider LGBT has absolutely no relation to Ancient Greece or modern Thailand.

But I do know that there’s gender-based separation in most of the Thai monasteries that I’m familiar with, and that monks are conscious of sexually based attractions as distractions to be avoided. I strongly suspect that a person we consider trans would be accepted as a nun - at least, in a non-western, traditional order. But that’s based on my overall readings - it’s really weird to realize that I’ve never even thought to ask that question.

One of the most frustrating things about academic Marxism is that it hypothesizes that “capitalists” (whom they bung together with remarkable aplomb) do things like figure in the reproduction cost of labor. They don’t. They’re focused on the next quarter and maybe the next year. Maybe even the next five years. But no one ranging from Elon Musk to (not sure who his opposite would be so I’m kinda taking a stab here) Warren Buffett is thinking in terms of generational replacement. First, they’re not going to live that long. Neither are their shareholders. Plus capital is mobile - it’ll just go someplace else.

This is a headline precisely because it’s a man bites dog story. If your company gives you paid parental leave it’s either because it’s legally required or for retention. It’s not in the hope that the little toy will become a software engineer at the company in 25 years.

I believe that autopsies are often not reliable / have repeatable results. They’re called out in Kahneman’s book Noise as being among the more noisy “sciences.” I have a particular distrust when I think there may be a political or ideological motivation behind the results, such as in this case or in killings by police officers.

I think they might be coloring with a bit of a broad brush, but religion - broadly speaking - is conservative. Some religions may promote values that we agree with and traditionally associate with progressivism (pacifism, egalitarianism, altruism). It’s because they’re based primarily on old or even ancient writings.

I was raised a traditionalist Catholic. I went to catholic school until high school until I went to high school where I became an atheist (which I didn’t even know was an option) and was invited by the school to investigate other educational opportunities.

I also studied Theravada Buddhism for many years. Theravada Buddhism isn’t conservative in the MAGA sense of the word, of course. Especially in the tradition I studied, it concentrates on personal investigation rather than treating the texts and teachings as literally true. A common way of presenting teachings is to say something along the lines of “If it helps, let it help. If not, ignore it.” Still, monks are not permitted (generally speaking) to interact much with women, monks and nuns live separately, and I honestly have no idea how a trans person would fare in that environment.

There’s always a problem when you found the basis of your philosophy in a historical text rather than a constantly evolving understanding. One of Chomsky’s chief complaints about Marxism is that it’s founded on and bound by Marx. He points out correctly that people don’t call evolutionary biology “Darwinism”. I mean, creationists do, and biologists might if they’re referring to a very specific concept, but for 99% of the time we just call it “biology.”

So, building your worldview around a fixed text is by definition conservative. Being flexible about its interpretation can make it less conservative. By and large, though, they’re trying to conserve something.

The West is not “continuing the war at will.” That phrase has no meaning in this context. The West is supplying Ukraine with the means to continue to resist the illegal Russian invasion.

The West would in fact have the right under Just War theory to enter into combat operations in Ukraine against Russian forces, and to operate combat operations against Russia up to and including invasion. Because Russia is the aggressor, Just War theory gives other nations the right to participate in the resistance of aggression.

Ow wow - I’ve fallen behind on that podcast.

Liddy’s autobiography should be enough to freak anyone out. I can’t imagine what BtB is going to dig out on him.

I prefer the traditional recipe that uses actual shepherd, but they’re getting harder to find these days.

This form of protest goes back a long way - famously by Buddhist monks during the Vietnam war.

It’s also very similar to hunger strikes, in my opinion. There was Bobby Sands and his comrades, of course. There were hunger strikes protesting the brutal conditions at Guantanamo Bay, resulting in force feeding techniques condemned as torture by the international community.

Do all of the people performing acts of self harm in protest to bring attention to a situation they consider intolerable suffer from mental health issues? Do people who join the Marines and put their lives at risk in the infantry because they think they’re “defending their country” have mental health issues? Do drone pilots, who in no way put themselves at risk of harm but who absolutely and knowingly end up killing arbitrary civilians have mental health issues?

If you ask me, I’d say yes to all of those. I’d say the same about politicians who pass laws to ban medical care to patients, and I’d say the same about the people who vote for them.

So people protesting via self-immolation, protesting via hunger strike, joining the military in a role that risks death are suicidal. People joining the military in a way that causes death, or who pass legislation that causes death, or who elect politicians who pass legislation that causes death are homicidal.

What should we do about all of that?

Sure. I just wish I ended up in that other timeline where he was running this year.

I haven’t looked into their finances specifically, but $327k sounds like how much money they probably make in a 15m window on a Tuesday afternoon.

I understand that you want Biden to win. I do too.

What you don’t seem to understand is that, in your enthusiasm for the former, you’re failing to identify the difference between “we should have set up an inheritor three years ago” with “we should change the ticket right now! Or in a few weeks!” or whatever it is you’re imagining I’m saying.

I will absolutely guarantee you that our back and forth here - whether it’s an intellectual debate or your defense of Biden qua Democrat - will flip zero votes.

I’d also suggest - and please at this point let’s stop play fighting and just talk - I’d suggest that you take a look at data science or statistics as a career. I think you kind of have an intuition of an argument, but it’s something that you could construct more strongly.

So let’s pretend that we build a function that predicts that a given Democratic candidate wins an election versus Trump etc. We want to maximize the probability of a Democratic win. It’s not necessarily the candidate most likely to win the primary, especially one that’s explicitly non-contested. To be more clear, we want to maximize the chance of a Democratic win, and that may or may not be the candidate most likely to have won either a fairly contested primary election. And even from that model, we’re subtracting the fairly contested primary election. As I implied, no one is going to outpoll Biden because no one is opposing him (which would be VERY BAD) and he did not announce/enact a transition plan staring two years ago (WOULD HAVE BEEN A GREAT IDEA).

So to be even more clear - no, I don’t like Biden. I don’t especially dislike Harris, except that I think she’s a very very bad politician. The Harris we saw in the first debate just never reappeared. I’m not sure Biden will win, and I’m pretty sure Harris would lose. I’m not sure Newsom would have lost (I am a fan and would hate to lose him as governor) had he gotten a $1B coffer and establishment endorsements three years ago. Do you see the difference? I’m not saying that Newsom today could start from Jump Street and beat Trump. I’m saying some people who are supposed to be the adults in the room should have made that call three years ago.