Liz @ Liz @midwest.social

Posts

14

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1,545

Joined

2 yr. ago

But like, money is what creates the profit motive? How do you keep money and remove the ability to accumulate wealth? Money is power and there are those who crave power. I agree, the less money you have, the more help you should get. Same with the opposite. But like, this discussion is based off "innovation exists without the profit motive" and I chimed in to point out that it's not really the innovation that the profit motive is good for. It's all the support systems around the invitation that enable these ideas to become big. The ultra-fast pace of innovation is enabled by these systems and given us all the wonderful medicines and quality of life improvements. I am on disability. My lifestyle is immense luxury compared to royalty from even just a dozen generations ago.

You're looking at the source of new ideas: inventive people, and saying they would exist under any system. I'm looking at the system and saying great ideas go nowhere without a way to engage people who don't care about your idea.

Imagine a world without money. In order to convince people to promote and enable your great idea, you have to convince them it's valuable, beneficial, and actually a great idea. Imagine a world with money. In order to convince people to promote and enable your great idea, you have to pay them. I'm being serious here: which do you think is easier?

You can do it on any PC if you're willing to look up how.

Seriously, we do not need to live with unpredictable, dangerous billionaire middlemen in order to make the world a better place.

You're right! I do not believe the concentration of wealth into so few hands is necessary or even a good thing. What I am saying is that the profit motive is necessary in order to mobilize people who do not care about your great new idea, no matter how great it is. Do you really think intentional shipping would function at any recognizable level if there wasn't profit in it for the sailors, ship builders, insurance companies, port authorities, and so on and so forth? None of then give a shit about your really cool idea. They don't even know about it. But they're necessary for you to get ahold of that molybdenum you need in order to prove your idea works, much less scale it to production levels that would actually benefit society.

You have to remember, the world is filled with people who mostly just want to hang out with their friends, and that's fine. Some of us are movers, shakers, and innovators, yes, but we need help from all those people who would rather be tanning or at a soccer match. How do we get them to help out? Pay em. Give them money for their trouble.

When the Tulsa race riots happened, black applications for patents in the US fell dramatically. Why? Because black people saw that they could put in lots of hard work, become hugely successful, and the US government wasn't gonna protect them and their wealth like it would other people's. Why spend your time on something that could be taken at at any moment? It should be unsurprising for you to learn that increases corruption and authoritarianism cause decreases in inventions and economic activity. Why? Same reason. Why put in the hard work and take the risks if some official's cousin is going to get a contract at ridiculous rates and drive you out of business? Why even bother when the government could just nationalize your industry on a whim?

You mentioned that businesses will kill ideas they don't think are profitable or will cannibalize sales. Do you know who used to be the biggest killer of innovation? The government and the workers. Most innovation is fundamentally finding ways to do things better with less labor. You know who doesn't like suddenly not having a job? Workers. Why would a government oppose labor saving devices? Too many people out of a job can lead to political unrest.

I suggest: Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.

In order to take an innovative idea, develop it into a product or service that can be delivered for reasonable time, cost, and effort, and then spread that innovation to anyone who wants it, you need massive bureaucratic organizations and simple ways of trading effort between organizations. Very few people are passionate about bureaucracy, even fewer when they're not getting paid. Without the safety systems in place to allow for big organizations and reliable imter-organization collaboration, most cool ideas would stay in the garage.

Also, in the modern world, most innovations require access to machines and resources too expensive to be secured by some guy playing with ideas and materials in his free time.

There are examples of innovative individuals doing amazing things for the love of the game on their own dime and on their own time, yes, but their achievements are dwarfed by the innovations created by people working in systems and bankrolled by organizations.

People do it with fruit trees all the time. As the other commenter said, it's called grafting.

The benefits of homework depend on how old the kid is and how much homework they're getting. Too much homework too early is either a wash or an overall negative, but homework as a concept does have benefits.

That's really the crux of this stupid argument. Is a neural network that analyzes x-rays before handing them to a doctor AI? I would say no. At this point, AI means "over hyped LLM and other generalist models." But the person trying to judge others over AI would say yes.

Fucking love my Framework 16 and I'll tell everyone every chance I get.

Okay, so I understand where our interpretations of the same information diverge, but getting into it is genuinely a philosophical argument that won't have practical value. I agree with the information you're presenting. Later!

Your first paragraph is you literally agreeing with my premise.

I understood your premise to be that vitamin deficiencies cause obesity. Is that not the case? Because what I said was different.

I'm currently working my way through this lecture. It takes me a while to get through dense information, so I probably won't get back to you on my independent learning for a long time, if ever.

Cheers.

Additionally, nutritional needs for fat soluble vitamins is supported by WHO

I never suggested you don't need fat-soluble vitamins, I suggested that vitamin deficiencies aren't the main cause in a sharp worldwide increase in obesity. From the abstract of the Cambridge paper, they only say that vitamin deficiency and obesity are correlated, and then speculate about one potential casual link. But like, the kinds of modern diets that produces obesity are traditionally missing vitamins so, it could easily just be that eating a family-size bag of Cheetos for a meal will leave you fat with malnutrition.

Here's another study showing DDT causes obesity:

Interesting study! I haven't read all of it, but this one is certainly higher quality than the other. Even this study doesn't try to claim it's all DDT and other pollutants. Still, I haven't gotten to a part where it tries to estimate an impact fraction from this and similar effects, if there is one. Measurable and meaningful are two different things.

Let go of your eating disorder and self hatred and learn

I'm not insulting you, please don't insult me. I'm here to make sure acturate and reasonable information is what we agree on, and you came in here with a theory I'd never heard of before, of course I'm going to question it. The onus is on you to make a compelling case. Regardless, supposing it is environmental pollutants making people fat (and I am convinced the effect is worth further learning on my part) it is still better to be a healthy weight. It sucks that it's harder than it used to be, and we should really not be fucking up the planet, but when it comes to taking care of your individual health, you should still aim to be a healthy weight.

I didn't bother looking at any of your other links, by the way. Drowning someone in citations and then making fun of them is a terrible way to convince them of something. I might eventually go back and see if any of your other links are any good, but probably not. I'll probably do my own literature search and see if I can get an understanding of the current opinions and when they last changed, if they have.

So if this is such a big issue (polition causing obesity), why doesn't the World Health Organization mention it at all? They're perfectly happy to blame putting in other areas.

Overweight and obesity result from an imbalance of energy intake (diet) and energy expenditure (physical activity).
In most cases obesity is a multifactorial disease due to obesogenic environments, psycho-social factors and genetic variants. In a subgroup of patients, single major etiological factors can be identified (medications, diseases, immobilization, iatrogenic procedures, monogenic disease/genetic syndrome).
.
The obesogenic environment exacerbating the likelihood of obesity in individuals, populations and in different settings is related to structural factors limiting the availability of healthy sustainable food at locally affordable prices, lack of safe and easy physical mobility into the daily life of all people, and absence of adequate legal and regulatory environment.
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At the same time, the lack of an effective health system response to identify excess weight gain and fat deposition in their early stages is aggravating the progression to obesity.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight

Ehhhhh, people didn't suddenly develop vitamin deficiencies in the 1970s. I don't doubt they can play a role in appetite and metabolic priorities, but unless you're also trying to say that our diet has become deficient in micronutrients, it's not really a good explanation for why a perfectly healthy population steadily got fatter starting in the 1970s. Even then, the fix would be the same as what any nutritionist/dietician would do: fix the food system so that people really only have access to healthy food.

Being fat is a risk factor and a complicating for an alarming number of considering ailments. There's a reason why fat people get hammered at the doctors office about losing weight.

HOWEVER, the obesity epidemic in the US and other Western countries is a result of a fucked-up food system and an urban planning system that encourages a sedentary lifestyle. Like, individuals can choose to be less fat on their own, yes, but we're not going to make progress on this issue as a society unless we agree to change the fundamentals causing the problem.

Lol, it's literally labeled other. 🤦🏼‍♂️

It could be "other" or it could be "transportation mode unknown."

To be clear about Lincoln, he was handed a request for an even bigger mass hanging, and reduced it down to 38. He didn't think he could deny the having request entirely without ending up ignored and having even more people killed. You can call him whenever names you like, but his intent was to keep as many people alive as he thought he could.

Very happy to catch him.

Try Vintage Story! The devs are high quality and there are plenty of mods. Plus the graphics range is accommodating for potato computers and beefy rigs.