Is this AI-generated imagery? The actors seem a bit... off.

Are you counting cyclists killed by cars as 'unsafe cyclists' or 'unsafe cars'?

Also, per mile driven, bicycles improve your life expectancy even in the USA because exercise outweighs physical risk. Cars also induce travel distance, which makes 'per mile' a poor comparison. When people commuting by car spend just as much time travelling as people commuting by bike (and public transit) then the distance travelled doesn't matter.

Many people get injured or killed by cars. Many people suffer heart disease and other ailments because of a lack of exercise because of cars.

Actually it's only half. In the Netherlands 30% of cyclist deaths are just people falling off their bikes, though 95% of people falling off their bikes and dying are over the age of 50 and 72% are over the age of 70. If you look at people under the age of 50, then cars are responsible for 80% of cycling deaths.

However, if you include the risk of heart disease and other physical ailments, then cycling and walking should be on the left side of the axis while cars scoot even further right, especially for people older than 50.

Klopt, maar dat maakt de weigering van symboolpolitiek nog een stapje erger. Rutte IV had het vorige regenboogakkoord al grotendeels aan zijn laars gelapt, maar ze wilden in ieder geval nog het signaal sturen dat ze aan de kant van queer mensen stonden. Dat de huidige regering dat signaal actief weigert te sturen is slecht nieuws.

"Als ik de politie bel dat ik bedreigd word omdat ik homo ben en de politie komt niet opdagen, is de politie dan tegen homo's?"

De overheid heeft een zorgplicht. Deze zorgplicht geven we de overheid in ruil voor het toezeggen dat wij onszelf niet verdedigen. We mogen geen pepperspray dragen, geen messen, geen vuurwapens.

Als de overheid weigert om hun kant van de afspraak hoog te houden tegenover specifieke groepen maar nog wel eist dat zij zichzelf niet verdedigen dan is dat een aanval op die groep. Het sociaal contract wordt ontbonden.

Het regenboogakkoord is grotendeels het erkennen van voortschrijdend inzicht. Homo's kunnen kinderen overduidelijk goed opvoeden, volwassenen zijn even goed in staat om hun eigen gender te bepalen als een leger psychologen, etc. We hebben meer empirisch bewijs dat dit akkoord helpt dan voor de meeste progressieve eisen van de afgelopen 200 jaar.

"over homoseksualiteit leren" is vrij betekenisloos als je je conservatisme neerzet als "de echte werkelijkheid zien". Je ziet bijvoorbeeld in Engeland dat transfobie wordt neergezet als "gender realism", of 15 jaar geleden toen de Evangelische Omroep evolutie probeerde neer te zetten als een "controverse ten opzichte van creationisme", of tegenwoordig als in Nederland als mensen ontkennen dat klimaatverandering bestaat of dat stikstofoverschot de bodem giftig maakt.

De coalitie heeft ruim genoeg partijen die de werkelijkheid falikant ontkennen. Als Omtzigt zichzelf kan wijs maken dat de beste seksuele voorlichting zelfontzegging is en de beste manier om mensen over homoseksualiteit in te lichten is vertellen dat het een geestelijke ziekte is, dan kan hij best "voor seksuele voorlichting, inclusief over homoseksualiteit" zijn.

Eh, the massive expense of building and maintaining suburban infrastructure should have been a reason not to build it. The massive time and financial cost of car infrastructure should have been a reason not to build it.

Culture can cause entire nations to build and maintain absolute garbage. For at least the next century living on Mars will only be for people with more money than sense, and at that point demanding impractically individualized infrastructure is just par for the course. Or in marketing terms, housing on Mars is for whales.

Adam Something had a nice video about sea pods. The people that spend so much effort into building those pieces of garbage are the same people that try to organize Mars colonization. It's the suburbanite "living on the frontier" bullshit for people with a couple more figures in their bank account.

Having people huddle underground is a practical solution. It's the sort of thing you would do if you want to put people on Mars for profit or political gain. But Mars has neither. It's Antarctica but worse. For science, the same budget in rovers would reveal far more and it wouldn't contaminate the samples with biological materials.

Tiktok is just one of many toxic social media sites. Facebook is doing more damage than good to the older generations. Singling it out is unfair.

The reason TikTok is under fire in the US legislature is that out of all the propaganda-spewing social media that drive people insane in order to push people in certain political directions, TikTok is the biggest one that isn't American-owned and isn't serving US government/capital interests.

Things like TikTok pushing stories of Palestinian children dying from American bombs is not functionally different from Facebook pushing stories that Biden is a pedophile. The only difference is that while Biden-pedophile stories serve Republican interests, the Palestinian stories serve neither Republican nor Democrat interests.

They're just tired.

'unbiased' isn't really a thing. The closest thing is getting your news from multiple sources that wear their biases on their sleeve while being thorough about what they're writing about. And the low-effort version of that is intelligent news aggregators like ground news.

The government is embodied by hundreds of thousands of people who know that doing that is treason, about half of of whom would be opposed either on principle or because they prefer the other guy. The other half rightfully don't expect to win (yet). Or even if they would win, there would be heavy casualties.

Most people don't want to die, especially not for a selfish cause. For people to risk their lives they would have to believe that overthrowing the state isn't just personally beneficial, it's worth dying for.

Ideologies that would get people to believe that are normally suppressed by various national security agencies. Communists, fascists, fundamentalist Christians - all get imprisoned and silenced, or killed if necessary. National school curriculums also contain propaganda painting these ideologies as villains using historical examples, while portraying the current system as the best in the world. All of this serves to massively decrease the number of people willing to be part of such a treasonous rebellion.

But even if people are willing to die for their cause, there's the matter of being able to turn those deaths into control. The US government has separation of powers, with different independent systems able to police each other each with different forms of internal politics and power structures, meaning they would each have to be infiltrated by collaborators independently. Many of these would have to side with the treason for this war between departments to end up in favor of the treason.

And so in order to succeed, the treason would have to have at the very least sympathetic figures taking up a big portion of most government institutions at most levels of organization, and quite a few willing to die for the cause.

That is completely possible, but what is stopping them is that it is not currently the case.

For most of recorded history most places have either been plagued with war or subjugated by a regional power exerting its military dominance to maintain peace. Examples of such long-lasting peace include the Roman Empire, the Achaemenid empire in the Middle East, the Abbasid Caliphate in the Middle East, and the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East.

Really, the periods that the Middle East has been unstable are before 600 BCE, between 323 BCE and 800 CE, between 1250 CE and 1400 CE, and after 1910 CE. So in the past 2600 years, there has only been instability for about half the time. Compare that to western Europe which was only stable between 20 BCE and 300 CE and after 1945 CE, so unstable 85% of the time in the past 2600 years.

So no, the Middle East is not particularly unstable compared to other parts of the globe. And each time it was destabilized the main disruption came from the outside: The Macedonians, the Romans, the Mongols, the English and French Empires, the Americans and Soviets, even the Crusaders if you count their short-lived enclave as a disruption.

Eh. The USA had plenty of NIMBYs complaining about the highways demolishing their neighborhoods, about suburbanites flooding third spaces of neighborhoods that were built to have them, or about suburbs bulldozing natural spaces. That didn't save them, and we all wish it did.

Both the US and USSR were willing to disregard NIMBYs, except in the US case it was restricted to minorities and the poor while in the USSR it was everyone except party leadership and people that bribed them.

And sometimes paying heed to NIMBYs is good, if it gets you to pay attention to a facet that you would otherwise dismiss. Meanwhile, disregarding NIMBYs is only as good as your plan. Plenty of bad plans get implemented with or without public support.

So if you hear that a project you like is shut down because of NIMBYs, ask yourself why the government didn't see fit to override them like they so often do. Is the government really honoring local voices, or are they happy to have a scapegoat for you to redirect your anger at?

1 second after wish: the atmosphere is violently decompressed pulling anything not attached to the surface into the rapidly thinning atmosphere .

Actually, the shockwave of the pressure loss travels downward from the outer atmosphere at the speed of sound. It would take about two minutes before people on the ground would begin to experience pressure loss, and much longer for the air to dissipate over a large enough volume in space that consciousness is lost.

1 minute after wish: due to the rotation of the earth the crust begins too break apart flying into space.

This would actually happen immediately. Centrifugal "force" is just the property of things wanting to move in a straight line, and without gravity to hold stuff together the bonds between rocks would not be strong enough to keep decent chunks of crust together. The speed of sound through rock allows pieces of crust over small distances (~10 km) to exchange momentum in the first couple of seconds as they have slightly different orbits, but cracks would form everywhere as the earth is stretched, and the rock would heat up immensely from the stress.

Also, the Earth's mantle and core are under tremendous pressure. On top of scattering apart centrifugally, after a couple of minutes the expanding magma rush up through the cracks in the crust. Unimpeded by gravity, these eruptions would continue pouring straight up into the atmosphere. The heat from these eruptions would rapidly heat the atmosphere around them, creating deafening explosions that would race with the shockwave of the upper atmosphere to be the first to pop your eardrums.

1 hour after wish: every star in the universe goes supernova, and we find out what's inside a black hole.

Stars going (super)nova is a phenomenon where the amount of fusion increases suddenly as the core implodes due to gravity because fusion went down when lighter fusion elements ran out. If gravity stopped, then the amount of fusion would only decrease as pressure in the core decreases as the star is torn apart by radiation pressure. No light from this event would reach the Earth from any star or black hole except the Sun, and the stars would look unchanging. The slowly expanding Earth gets hit by an ever-increasing solar wind starting at about 10-15 minutes, but the magma eruptions would boil people long before the solar wind does.

So, in the proper order

0 seconds after wish: weightlessness

1 second after wish: Earthquakes pass 4 on the Richter scale. Anything not holding on to the ground is slowly pushed into the air.

10 seconds after wish: Earthquakes pass 10 on the Richter scale. Stuff that breaks off of the ground stays hovering once it's far enough from the ground not to be hit by the oscillations. The crust begins pulverizing itself, with the topmost ~1 meter of surface being pushed upwards by the shockwaves as dense gravel. The earth's diameter is increased by 0.003%.

1 minute after wish: There is no earth left to quake, it's all gravel. All the energy has been transformed into heat and velocity. This heat starts boiling the oceans and burning all organic material on dry land. Temperatures are upwards of 300C on dry land, while ships on the ocean are floating weightless amidst a spray of the upper layer of the ocean.

2 minutes after wish: Through the gravel or ocean plumes of magma break through the surface. The shockwave from the upper atmosphere arrives but isn't really noticed amidst the roil. At sea, temperatures are starting to rise. On land, all organic material is burnt or on fire.

10 minutes after wish: If you were in low earth orbit, the sun's corona looks a bit more active, and your spacesuit is beginning to melt from the atmosphere catching up to you. Atmospheric pressure starts dropping. The earth's diameter is 0.5% bigger at the equator.

1 hour after wish: The Earth's diameter is 5% bigger at the equator. The surface of the sun, pushed outward by ongoing fusion begins hitting the Earth. At this size, it's 2000x less dense than the earth's atmosphere was, but it's going at a million meters per second and the impact starts turning things to plasma.

1 day after wish: The sun's core no longer undergoes fusion, but the Earth is evaporating.

10 days after wish: The Earth is closer to where the Sun used to be than the Sun is. The Earth is a smattering of white-hot dust shaped like a comet, slowly chasing after the cloud of expanding sun-gases.

15 days after wish: the dust comet is below freezing

3 years after wish: the first star visibly goes out. No square meter in the universe has more than a microgram of stuff in it, but all the starlight is still there.

5,200 years after wish: the first black hole visibly ceases to be a black hole, whatever that implies. The sky is as bright as moonlight with the explosions of nearby stars. The Earth has travelled 35 light years from where it would have been otherwise, most of it outward from the galactic center.

16,000 years after wish: there are no visible stars that aren't in the process of exploding, but these explosions still light up the galactic plane as bright as moonlight.

80,000 years after wish: Only other galaxies are visible. Temperatures have dropped down to 3 Kelvin.

160,000 years after wish: the Andromeda galaxy goes out with a slow visible roll across its galactic plane over the course of several ten thousand years.

Upvoting for visibility of the link.

"Economic output" means that people pay for something. That doesn't benefit the island unless the islanders are being paid more for it than the sum of what they would get paid doing something else plus how much damage the tourism industry does to the island.

So as long as cashflow in Majorca drops by less than 70% if tourism were banned, Majorcans would benefit from the ban. gdp would plummet, but everyone would be better off.

Just because other things also suck that doesn't make tourism a solution. It's totally fair for people to want to accept the economic hit of not being a tourist spot. In the most extreme case, you can be like Cuba, for a big part existing outside the global market. Majorca would still be part of Spain and the EU, though, so it would be more like a random Spanish village.

Neither Cuba nor random Spanish villages are economic powerhouses, but they are stable and home to happy enough people.

It's less that they think they're doing the thinking themselves and more that they like the label of free thinkers. As far as I can tell, politics isn't about the content for them, it's verbal warfare. "Free thinker" isn't a claimed attribute, it's a nickname for a verbal warfare unit. Actual thought is a matter of coming up with new verbal ammunition to win the fight or even influence the war, or personal practical matters like how to get an abortion without making your side look bad and without looking like a traitor.

You complain about the Gwern short story not rigorously arguing why an LLM would simulate a paperclipper. The short story is full of links to concepts it is referencing, and in the paragraph where the fictional LLM decides to simulate a paperclipper (specifically the text "with a twist") there is a link to a rigorous argument why a LLM would do that.

I suspect that you are about this rigorous in the rest of your research, and so your opinion is not surprising. Garbage in, garbage out.

Je leven wordt altijd armer als je gedeelten van de werkelijkheid niet accepteert. Hoe is vaak lastig te duiden omdat je niet weet wat je mist.

Als je je afkeur niet voor je houdt filteren mensen in je omgeving zichzelf uit tot het soort mensen dat je afkeur accepteert overblijft. Je gaat aspecten van jezelf uit de weg die je te veel doen denken aan de mensen die je niet accepteert. Je geeft politieke steun aan mensen die de werkelijkheid niet accepteren en daardoor slechtere beslissingen maken. Als je een man bent wordt het steeds lastiger om een vrouw te vinden die met je een relatie wilt omdat steeds meer vrouwen inzien dat het niet accepteren van de werkelijkheid op dit punt een red flag is. Zelfs hechte relaties die je hebt kunnen verbroken woreen als ze de werkelijkheid boven jouw verkiezen: kinderen die uit de kast komen, vrienden met kinderen die uit de kast komen, een partner die ontkende dat die homo is en de relatie na x jaar afbreekt.

Deze sociale isolatie kan ook een neerwaartse spiraal worden, als de enige mensen die je wel accepteren extreem-rechts zijn.

Wij zijn ook opgegroeid met South Park en Austin Powers en zij met Bluey, She-Ra, en Nederlandse programma's als Gewoon Bloot.

rpm lijkt me niet echt een goede indicatie. Als je een houten plank met een tafelzaag in tweeën zaagt gebeurt dat ook niet met de snelheid van de zaagtanden.

Het gaat meer om de snelheid waarmee je door het zaagvlak getrokken wordt. Dat is van een hoop dingen afhankelijk.

TW: te veel details. gore/extreme verwonding

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Dat bedrijven minder verdienen kan ik me wel in vinden, maar waarom moet dat via duurzaamheid? Laten we de grond zo heftig vervuilen dat de landbouw niet meer rendabel word. De beste vorm van duurzaamheid is om niet te consumeren, dus als de levensverwachting omlaag gaat is dat ook minder zorg.

relevant monty python

If not for the housing crisis, that would be genuinely good advice. If you can't improve your attitude, it's probably your environment that is at fault, so leave.