Where would this blockade be? In the NATO sea (baltic sea)? Covered by European Nato countries at every direction, and then whole entry passes through Denmark.
I live with amazing technology all around me, and I often take it for granted. But whenever I take mebendazol (against e.g. pinworm) I think about my ancestors, and how they just had to live with it!
Your ancestors probably had plant-based cures like garlic or walnut hulls for the same infections. Modern medicine improved on the spectrum of parasites that can be treated but there's still some caveman-level stuff that works reliably for some species.
b/c he lives someplace where people get parasites regularly? Also b/c it is cheaper and easier to treat for parasites (take a pill) than to test and then treat (visit a doctor, get a prescription, take a pill).
Many parasites are endemic to the southern USA. As a child I was checked for parasites every year. Most modern doctors I've met are negligent in this regard. Under questioning several have stated that it is unimportant. Some doctors assert incorrectly that blood tests would reveal any significant parasitic infestation. I always correct them but I also change doctors b/c medical school seems to "harden" the brain - nothing new can be learned once they have graduated.
Ever walk barefoot across the lawn?
Ever eat uncooked fish/flesh/sushi?
Ever own/pet a cat?
If so, you might want to get tested!8-))
Neglected Parasitic Infections: What Family Physicians Need to Know—A CDC Update:
At least in the US parasite risk from sushi is very low because nearly all seafood sold/served is put through a deep freeze cycle.
But if you're slicing up something you just caught that could be an issue. It's a concern with hunting/game as well. Most people who get trichinosis in the US get it from eating bear apparently.
In my case it was getting mud into my mud boot from interacting with an aggressive horse. It took me a while to figure out the thing on my foot was not fungal but a parasite. Ivermectin horse paste cleared it up but I also have FenBen just in case I missed one. Most of them exited on their own after applying acetic acid.
As far as i know, current medical advice is not to treat toxoplasmosis (except in exceptional situations like if you have AIDs) so im not sure what the benefit of getting tested would be.
Are there areas in the developed world where this is common? I’ve never heard of anyone regularly taking anti parasitic medication because their kids kept bringing home parasites from daycare. I had a friend whose son was prescribed medicine for pinworms once when he was fairly young (mostly as a precaution).
Pinworms are particularly common in children, with prevalence rates in this age group having been reported as high as 61% in India, 50% in England, 39% in Thailand, 37% in Sweden, and 29% in Denmark. [1]
Remember that
prevalence is the proportion of a particular population found to be affected by a medical condition (typically a disease or a risk factor such as smoking or seatbelt use) at a specific time.
So it is not just that percentage has had it at any point in their life, it is that percentage that has it at any time.
And yes, kids. Pinworm is literally called 'children worm' here.
That’s interesting, thanks. Looks like it’s 11%-ish in the US which is lower than the other cited countries but still more common than I would have guessed.
If you’re a suburban kid, GenX or later you may have missed the peaks. In the 60s, it was more like 35-45% of kids.
Things like rules for handwashing and standards for things like residential plumbing improved hygiene and reduced ringworms. Many urban and rural households didn’t have things we take for granted like hot water!
Millennial. But I was thinking less about my own childhood and more about never treating my kids or (with the one exception) hearing of friends treat theirs.
It is actually extremely common in Europe (as I linked to in a sibling chat), with 30-40% of kids having it at any time.
With those rates, my guess is that you probably had it several times, but just thought your bum was itching for no reason (or you were one of the asymptomatic cases). I think the awareness of it has gone up, now it's common to let the kindergarten know if you suspect it in your child, and they send a message to the other parents.
To be blunt you do not get it from eating cookies in sand. You get it from ingesting pinworm eggs, you ingest them by someone touching their bum (where the worms lay eggs) and then touching something that you then touch and touch your face/mouth, or scratching your own bum in your sleep then scratching your face / mouth.
If you don’t think it’s super commen in Europe it’s generally a lack of diagnoses. Literally 1/5th
Of British kids have it at any given time (and I imagine that tracks across Europe and USA at least)
Yes, it’s fairly common infection in children. I mean they don’t wash carefully their hands, they put everything in their mouth - it would be a real surprise if they would not catch it.
I believe I know an immune-compromised adult who was taking anti-parasitics for more than two years due to workplace (care context) reinfections. I say “believe” because these are two things people talk about in coded, careful ways. It might be a little more common than polite conversation ever really reveals.
For example if you know anyone who raised early concerns about antivaxxers causing short supply of ivermectin formulations for human use during the pandemic. More or less anyone who knew what ivermectin was at that point in time was either a farmer, a vetinarian, a doctor… or a patient with a condition.
Images are a good example where doing it at install-time is probably the best yeah, since every run of the image starts 'fresh', losing the compilation which happened last time the image got started.
If it was a optional toggle it would probably become best practice to activate compilation in dockerfiles.
How can you conclude that the current price and value is fairly close? Seems to me that all you are showing (rightly so) is that there are some use of gold which has higher value than today's price.
I agree that industry use creates a price floor, but that might be much lower than what the price is today. I.e if suddenly everyone lost faith in gold as a carrier of value, so everyone who keeps gold just as a passive keeper of value started selling it off, then we would get a new market clearing price which represents golds 'real value'. I have no clue what this would be, but it is certainly not obvious to me that it's close to today's price.
I’m talking orders of magnitude here. Supply and demand curves generally have a slope. As in the demand for goods by industry increases as the price decreases. A significantly larger portion of minded gold is used for jewelry than industry or investment, but a price drop would also reduce the amount mined.
Combine those and yes gold could get significantly cheaper especially with the vast quantities on hand, but it would still be a very expensive metal vs steel, aluminum, etc.
Gold's resistance to oxidation is pretty unique and valuable. Every metal with similar properties is also expensive — palladium is the most common and its price hovers around several hundred dollars per ounce despite being much less popular for jewelry or currency.
Notice that the weavers, both the luddites and their non-opposing colleagues, certainly did not get wealthier. They lost their jobs, and they and their children starved. Some starved to death. Wealth was created, but it was not shared.
Remember this when talking about their actions. People live and die their own life, not just as small parts in a large 'river of society'. Yes, generations after them benefited from industrialisation, but the individuals living at that time fought for their lives.
Guess I was wrong, that’s a shocking engineering choice, that engine looks massive and heavy. A four stroke engine is about twice the weight and size for the same power output, but much more fuel efficient.
"Fuel efficient" - that's probably why. If the fuel efficiency more than off sets the additional weight, for range then four stroke might be indicated. There are lots of other factors to consider.
I won't try to defend Chomsky. (Not really a big fan even before this.) But if the mere mention of him is sus to you then I advise you to not study either linguistics or computer science because it's Chomsky normal forms and Chomsky hierarchies all the way down. There's even still people clinging to some iteration of the universal grammar despite the beating it has taken lately.
He's also one of the most prominent political thinkers on the American hard left for the last half century.
There's a joke going around for a while now that you either know Chomsky for his politics, or for his work in linguistics and discrete mathematics, and you are shocked to discover his other work. I guess we can extend that to a third category of fame, or infamy.
The merge operation in the later Chomsky modern linguistics program is similar in a lot of ways to transformer's softmax merging of representations to the next layer.
There's also still a lot to his arguments that we are much more sample efficient. And it isn't like monkies only learn language at a gpt-2 level, bigger brains take us to gpt-8 or whatever. There's a step change where they don't really pick things up linguistically at all and we do. But with a lot more data than we ever get, LLMs seem to distill some of the broad mechanisms what may be our innate ability, though still seems to have a large learned component in us.
A lot of Chomsky’s appeal I believe is due to his politics as his universal grammar theories turned out to be an academic dead end.
But his politics centers around the moral failings of the West so I think yes, if he was involved in the sexual exploitation of trafficked children, then this would devalue his criticism of the morality of the Western political system.
> But his politics centers around the moral failings of the West so I think yes, if he was involved in the sexual exploitation of trafficked children, then this would devalue his criticism of the morality of the Western political system.
Why would it devalue his criticism assuming he was right?
Moral arguments for me don’t stand alone like a mathematical proof or scientific findings which can be examined as some sort of platonic form.
Morality arguments are social and contextual. That 2+2 is 4 won’t change and captures some sort of eternal truth while what is deemed moral is constantly changing over time and differs across different societies and social groupings.
So morality arguments require and appeal to a particular shared sense of right and wrong. If Chomsky was guilty of sexually abusing children, then I do not share his moral foundation and so his appeals to morality arguments do not convince me.
It’s not about agreeing or disagreeing with Chomsky on specific points.
It’s about the validity and strength of his arguments. I could continue to agree with Chomsky on some point but now dismissing his argument.
Or if I was undecided about how to judge something in terms of morality, then yes, if Chomsky was proven to have sexually abused trafficked children, I might skip consulting Chomsky on the matter.
To be honest, I don’t know where you’re trying to go with this line. It feels like you think you have some “gotcha” you feel ready to spring and will keep asking these opaque questions until you think you see an opportunity.
Why not just lay out your argument transparently and I can engage?
Or state exactly what it is about my claim that appeals to morality made by immoral people are less convincing than those made by moral people that you disagree with? Forgot about Chomsky - it has nothing specifically to do with him.
His criticism of the Western political system was always way too simplicist and why it has immense appeal to college students.
Essentially it can be summed as any Western action must be rationalized as evil, and any anti-west action is therefore good. This is also in line with Christian dualism so the cultural building blocks are already in place.
Then you get Khmer Rouge, Putin, Hezbollah, Iran apologetism or downright support
I doubt you can find any essay or such where he said anti-Western action was good on the sole grounds that it was anti-Western.
It's difficult to summarise so many years of writing in a few sentences but from my own reading, he pointed out
a) many things done by the US lead to death or destruction
b) many of these things are justified in the name of good that doesn't stand up to scrutiny
c) the US government is often hypocritical
d) US citizens are heavily propagandized both for foreign policy and domestic policy
e) as a US citizen, it his duty to try and oppose these actions and since he's not a citizen of Iran, he isn't in a position to do anything about Iran
f) a) through d) explain why he is often seen as an apologist, to use your word, for Iran; he tries to explain, from his point of view, why Iran etc. do the things they do
g) a strong support of freedom of speech and opposition to censorship, including what he regards as private censorship as opposed to merely government censorship.
That doesn't explain why he visited Hezbollah and showed overwhelming support, probably aware of the organization roots and past actions such as kidnapping journalists or killing politicians or its self professed goal of creating a theocracy in Lebanon.
He of course has very complex rationalizing but essentially he assumes the opposite of mainstream western opinion and then tries to build ideological structures upon that.
That creates a very simplified version of reality wrapped in a nice intellectual wrapping
Chomsky had been involved in linguistics and politics since the 60s, which is nearly six decades covering a multitude of events and issues. To simplify his work down to even a paragraph is an impossible task, let alone as you have done as simply saying "anti Western".
For example, during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Germany and France were opposed to the invasion, leading to "Freedom Fries" to insult French opposition to the war. The British public was also opposed to the war, although the the Blair government went along with it anyway. Australia had a similar position - public opposition but government went along with it anyway. Canada official refused entry into the Iraq war. Chomsky was also opposed to the Iraq war. Does this mean that France, Germany, Canada and the British and Australian general public are "anti-Western"? Since Chomsky agreed with these countries, does that make him anti-Western or pro-Western? Does it make the US anti-Western since they proceeded with a war despite formal or popular opposition in many Western countries?
I fear you have a certain definition of the "Western" that simply excludes Western opinions that don't fit your understanding.
As to who Chomsky met him; well as part of this Epstein story, Chomsky met with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. In your opinion, does this make him anti-Western?
Indeed, prior to his stroke Chomsky explained that this kind of meeting is why Chomsky associated with Epstein - for the contacts.
I suspect Chomsky is just generally interested in understanding an issues and not bothered by what it's seen as, seemingly to his detriment in this Epstein story.
I am not a fan of Chomsky - the opposite in fact. I was deliberately avoiding judging his actual arguments - to make the point that his own morality undermines his lecturing others on their moral failings.
Over the last 100 years, the S&P 500 has grown with an average of 6% yearly adjusted for inflation (9.8% nominally).
That means an inflation adjusted doubling every 12 year.
It also means that if you manage to live on e.g 1% of the wealth annually, your wealth will double(inflation adjusted) every 15 year.
So yeah, as long as you don't get too many children (branching factor not more than 4) you 'just' need to get filthy rich, and none of your descendants ever need working.
The last 100 years has been the era of the American Empire, which is monetized through the network effects of the dollar and dollar-denominated-assets. We don't have ships full of Potosí silver, but we do have 10% yearly S&P returns in an economy growing 3%. Extrapolating another year of that is probably reasonable, extrapolating another 100 years of that is probably not.
Yeah, it's easier to analyse the past than predict the future. I agree that I made a statement about the luxury of wealth the last century.
I don't know if the S&P500 will grow at the same rate the next century, but I am willing to bet a beer that stocks in wide index founds will grow faster than both inflation and average salary for the next century.
I think the realistic number is is more like 2-4% if it’s not supplemented by working (and sometimes even working) I also think when you add in things like paying for private school/ college, divorces, taxes, carrying cost of real estate, etc. luxury travel/clothes/meals/vacations it’s a big number.
I’m not saying it’s not possible, but I suspect the vast majority of grandchildren of a wealthy couple have meaningfully less than the original couple did, as well as less than their parents did.
2-4% of the wealth you mean? That surely depends on the wealth... If you need 200k a year that's 2% of 10 million, but 1% of 20 million.
If you manage 1% then the real value doubles after 15 years. If you need 2% annually, the real value doubles after 18 years. The moral of the story is the same, with enough wealth you can live comfortably while your wealth grows.
The tough part is someone with 20 million "in the bank" will have a hard time constraining themselves to 200k/yr expenses. It seems like a lot but next to 20 million the temptation to spend a little, like 1m on a house, 100k on a car seems like nothing and a potentially reasonable purchase. But it drastically changes the trajectory of that balance.
And you wouldn't feel as good spending 1m on a house or 100k on a car with a 200k salary and zero in the bank.
and the further you get from the actual work that created the nest egg the greater the temptation - because no one treats found money like earned money.
Paying someone to break a window, and then someone else to fix it, will also stimulate the economy. But it's clearly not a rational use of our time here on earth.
I presume you just mean the farcical "break a perfectly working thing" idea. But, demolition is a thing. Similarly, turning a usable vehicle in for scrap is also a thing.
While I understand the sentiment, it is important to distinguish between mindless consumption and wanting a better quality of life.
Buying all kinds of useless crap (usually items of small value and little utility) should not be conflated with wanting to have better things. Better quality house, appliances, clothes, etc.
It is the latter that is useful and brings peace. People won't get too mad if their neighbors have more stuff as long as their stuff allows them a pretty good quality of life.
But problems arise when you cannot buy the better stuff to improve your life and instead the focus is redirected to stupid items.
This is what the article is about, in my opinion. In the end, filling your house with gadgets and gizmos of dubious usefulness/quality does not improve your life substantially.
But this is what much of the population has been relegated to, and it has a soul-crushing effect.
But still, are you saying that I'd better consume things I actually don't need because that's the only way to avoid war ? I'm not saying that you should stop buying things. We need objects in our life.
But are Apple Watches, Airpods or VR headsets or foldable phones protecting us from war ? I hope not because that sounds depressing.
(Asking genuine qestion, I'm not doing virtue signaling here, I do own a VR headset, a pair of airpods and an Apple Watch and none of those objects are making me happy actually)
The price of peace historically explains how most war is faught over resources or local status games. Both of those behaviors were mostly captured by world trade and consumerism which replaced each respectively.
But then what emerged is that the largest consumer engines of production and consumptions could control the global trade and resources in a way that would suppress warfare globally by creating an economic MAD game alongside the nuclear one.
People don’t understand how much violence this likely saved us. However it is of course not without consequences. I'm just saying so far the side effects have FAR FAR outweighed the sickness (world war)
No, I don't get 'this', because you have not actually said anything. Across this post and the ones above it you have pretty much only insulted me witouth saying anything I can either understand or misunderstand, because there is no content.
In a sibling I see that you actually drop the name of a book, as if you expect the world to read a book to respond to you.
I propose you formulate your argument, if you actually have something to say. Even if it is a summary of a book, summarise it into a argument which is relevant for this conversation. Who knows, maybe even I manage to understand you then.
My guy, the fundamentals of Neoliberalism are like newtonian physics at this point, if it's not my job to explain them for you from first principles. Born out of WW2 and specifically thrived from 'fixing the broken window of Europe and Japan.'
But basically speaking, games of destruction can be obviously extremely economical incentivized regardless of what humans call 'productive.' And economies and markets have never ever promised to be narrowly productive for a specific moral world view. Quite the opposite actually.
Please don't claim insult where basic knowledge is simply lacking.
It would be possible to make a website which proxies other sites, but strips this header, right (maybe with some added ads)?
If so I would expect such sites to appear, and the only way to secure a child device is to have a whitelist of webpages (to avoid the proxies), putting us back close to where we are today.
Such sites would be illegal if not sharing the header back from the source website and be banned as much as adult websites incorrectly setting this header. It’s not a real problem.
Making them illegal does not fix it. There will be a indefinite whack-a-mole game which is very hard to solve without draconian control over the Internet.
The problem is that it's easy to make, easy to deploy, easy to make money on, and a single site opens up the whole Internet. It will happen even if it's illegal.
Compare this to adult webpages setting the header. They will probably be quite willing to do so, since they want to make their money legally, and there is probably little money in serving to kids anyway. And even if a single out of thousand adult webpages refuses, it still only opens that single site.
It's actually hard to understand on "which" side you're on, but a charitable interpretation is that you're arguing that there are no perfect solutions, hence a simple and minimal non-invasive method will probably have the same effect as a complex and invasive method. That is, both methods will add enough friction that children who don't know what they're missing won't bother and the ones who can't do without, will choose every conceivable method to get around the restrictions.
Worrying about the latter makes no sense, because they are sort of like organized crime. People still take drugs even though they are illegal.
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