Casebash @casebash

Prior to 2003, how many points did the University of Michigan award applicants who had obtained perfect SAT scores? Answer: 12 points And how many points did it give an applicant for merely being black? Answer: 20 points

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease. This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit. The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London. A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box. These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel. They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains. They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep. Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”: > “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.” — The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates. It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption. SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins). The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill. With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment. Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two. It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place. All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now. That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective. If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

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Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWI) do own yachts for tax reasons, but not because they are a modern replacement for palaces. Most of the world runs residency-based taxation. As in, if you stay over 183 days somewhere you become a taxable base. The US is the outlier, as it taxes you regardless of where you live, based on citizenship. That difference produces two entirely distinct wealth architectures. European UHNWI have a structural incentive to stay mobile. Not being in one place too long is itself a tax strategy. Yachts happen to serve that lifestyle perfectly - flag-registered in favourable jurisdictions, moving between anchorages, never accumulating residency days (and benefiting from things like Cypriot 2 month stay non-dom status). The tax regime does not cause yacht ownership, but it makes yachts a remarkably efficient asset class for people whose wealth depends on being nowhere in particular. This is why European UHNWI do a yearly circuit - Wimbledon one week, Cannes another, the WEF, the Biennale. The social calendar is not separate from the tax strategy. They are the same thing. This also mirrors the itinerant courts of the past, where the aristocracy would move around from one part of the kingdom to another throughout the year, according to king's mood. American UHNWI face the opposite constraint. Citizenship-based taxation means mobility cannot solve the problem. So they optimise differently - dynasty trusts, LLCs, state domicile arbitrage. They are not less sophisticated. The same economic incentive just produces a completely different behavioural output when the underlying regime changes.

John Adams Esquire @JohnAda80546126

3 days ago

@acuriocabinet It’s why they all own yachts

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"Overseas students starting at the University of Cambridge this autumn will pay at least £450,000 for a medicine degree over six years of study"

The craziest thing here isn’t the yachts. It’s that most of the boats in this photo didn’t even get in. They’re anchored offshore because the marina is full. Port Hercule only has 142 berths, and more than 200 yachts apply for them every year. Imagine owning a $200M yacht and still getting told “sorry, we’re full.”

sim 🇧🇷🇲🇽🇸🇳🇫🇷🇭🇹 @simscircuit

4 days ago

there really is a whole other world out there....

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"they're only withholding the model for safety as a marketing ploy" is such a dumb take and has been for most of a decade. you can think they're wrong about ai risk but nobody is running gigabrain plans to forgo enormous certain profits now for theoretical future profit

“Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl she used to be. But a great artist—a master—can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is…and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be…and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart…no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her.” ~From Robert Heinlein’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’

Sam Altman deserves credit for YC's turn toward hard tech. When he became CEO in 2014 he went out and recruited companies doing stuff like airliners and fusion, and hard tech startups have been some of the best in every batch since.

Did you know that one of the greatest practical jokes ever pulled beyond Earth belongs to astronaut Owen Garriott. In 1973, Garriott was part of the crew aboard Skylab, America’s first space station. The prank he played on Mission Control officer Robert Crippen earned a permanent place in astronaut humor. Before the mission, Garriott brought a tape recorder into space. On it, his wife had recorded several short lines. One day, when Robert Crippen made radio contact with Skylab from Houston, Garriott was ready with the recording. The exchange went something like this: “Skylab, this is Houston. Please respond.” A cheerful woman’s voice came over the line. “Good morning, Houston. This is Skylab.” After a brief pause, Mission Control asked carefully: “Who is speaking?” “Hi, Robert,” the voice replied. “This is Helen, Owen’s wife.” For a few seconds, Crippen tried to process what he had just heard. Then he finally managed to ask: “What are you doing up there?” “I just thought I’d bring the boys something to eat,” the voice answered from orbit. “Everything is fresh.” Mission Control fell silent for nearly a full minute. Then the connection was cut. Apparently, even a trained flight controller needed a moment to recover from that one. 🤣🤣🤣🤣

something that i find frustrating in historical discussions is that historians often sneak in enormous biases by what they semi-arbitrarily decide is the null hypothesis. it's super common to present arguments that boil down to "there's no evidence for A, therefore we have to accept it was B instead." but there's also no evidence for B, it's just been coded as the null hypothesis.

there is a pretty (in?)famous story here from harvey friedman on ultrafinitism friedman goes up to esenin-volpin, a hardline ultrafinitist, after one of his lectures and then posits to him that if the number 2^100 doesn't exist, then surely he believes that somewhere on the line from 2^1, 2^2, ..., 2^100 the numbers stop being real esenin-volpin asks him to be more specific and so friedman begins: does 2 exist? "yes" does 4 exist? (waits a second) "yes" does 8 exist (waits even longer) "... yes" friedman doesn't get to 32 by the time that he runs out of patience, but the point was made

eigenrobot @eigenrobot

2 weeks ago

nice attempt but this inductive method fails when you get to the largest number

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I love this.

Eight years ago this month, a defining brouhaha of the Great Awokening broke out: An 18-year-old high school senior posted her prom pictures, in which she wore a qipao, a type of Chinese dress. Thousands of Twitter users attacked and condemned her for "cultural appropriation."

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My hope is to write essays which cannot be reduced. Every sentence in it contains useful information.

If you want people to believe in the public sector, the public sector simply *cannot* be this wildly profligate with taxpayers’ money.

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

2 weeks ago

Insane story from NYC:

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What a time to be alive

Atheists are okay with lawyer-client privilege, therapist-client privilege and doctor-patient privilege. But as soon as you mention priest-penitent privilege, it’s suddenly deemed intolerable and backwards, and needs to be undermined. I have faith that our priests will stand their ground and refuse any orders to rat Christians out to the secular government.

Frontières @Frontieresmedia

2 weeks ago

🚨 L’Église de France tire la sonnette d’alarme contre une proposition de loi examinée lundi à l’Assemblée nationale, qui prévoit la suppression du secret de la confession. Le texte est porté par Ensemble pour la République (EPR), le groupe de Gabriel Attal. (Le Figaro)

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The Henry Nowak murder case is one of the most shocking cases I have ever seen. It now seems extremely credible that two police officers took an allegation of racism more seriously than a member of the public reporting a fatal knife injury - handcuffing him on the ground and letting him choke to death on his own blood. That an investigation has now been opened is standard, but the authorities must go a step further. Body cam footage, 999 transcripts and the policies these officers were presumably operating under must be made public. If any evidence of wrongdoing is found - and it seems very likely that it will be - then prosecutions and resignations must follow.

cute young couple standing awkwardly to the side in the lobby of the hotel I'm staying at, nervously pacing around and making out with each other. They approach me "H-hey, um, can you... well, I'm 20, and she's 19. But you have to be 21 to check in" They're obviously sneaking around on their parents. The hotel has happily taken his money for the reservation under his ID and credit card. But now they won't let him check in without someone 21+ to guarantee the room Of course, one sensitive young man to another, I agree without hesitation Unfortunately, the harpies behind the checkout counter, clearly vile haters of all young men with a dream, have sniffed out his rather hare-brained scheme quite easily Just as I'm about to put pen to paper with my signature and allow these young absconded lovers to consummate their lascivious weekend, a third managerial harpy-type appears from behind some invisible door and marches sternly toward me "Sir, I know you think you're doing something nice, but I cannot allow you to do this. They've already told me they had no one to guarantee. Really, it's a matter where the police could get involved" My god, woman. The police? These lost souls could walk into an army recruiting office this afternoon and be fighting in a war tomorrow, but they can't check in to a hotel for a surreptitious romantic weekend a city over? Anyway, this is why American TFR is in the toilet. I guarantee you an accidental baby would have been made this weekend. Oh and they kept his money too. Poor kid