All of df fd's Comments + Replies

df fd51

An LVT would massively disrupt millions of people's long-term plans

 

this seem like a fully general argument, any law change is going to disrupt people's long term plans,

e.g. the abolishment of slavery also disrupt people's long term plans

 I suppose you can argue that the magnitude is too big, put then I would assume that some period of phasing in would help.

you can argue that the short term cost is more than the long term gain but I am not convinced.

 The government has incentives to inflate their estimates of the value of unimproved land

by y... (read more)

5Matthew Barnett
In this case, I was simply identifying one additional cost of the policy in question: namely that it would massively disrupt the status quo. My point is not that we should abandon a policy simply because it has costs—every policy has costs. Rather, I think we should carefully weigh the benefits of a policy against its costs to determine whether it is worth pursuing, and this is one additional non-trivial cost to consider. My reasoning for supporting the abolition of slavery, for example, is not based on the idea that abolition has no costs at all. Instead, I believe slavery should be abolished because the benefits of abolition far outweigh those costs.
df fd20

I maybe mistaken as to the availability of the lab grown meat to the general public. apparently they are no longer on sale

https://www.wired.com/story/upside-foods-good-meat-cultivated-lab-grown-sale-stopped-singapore-california-crenn/

seem like my information are out of date

df fd*82

Or try to buy lab grown meat paste? I am given to understand that they are expensive but available

edit: upon further research it seem you can only get them in Singapore and with a very limitted selection [?one]

2peterbarnett
After a very very cursory google search I wasn't able to find any (except in some places in Singapore), I'd be interested if this is available at all in the US
df fd10

sorry for the late reply, I was travelling

here are my guesses as to why the format made me uncomfortable
 

 - The passage is a transcript from a spoken conversation, with incomplete sentences, colloquial phrasing, and less structured presentation compared to a well-edited article. This format can be harder to process, as spoken language often lacks the clarity and conciseness of written language.

 - I am neurodivergent so the text's lack of structure, lack of context, and overwhelming detail might amplify discomfort or disengagement.

 - The passage reiterates concepts in slightly different words which can feel tedious or redundant.

2Elizabeth
This sounds like a problem with the transcript itself, not placing it in the post vs. a separate link? Which is fair enough, just want to make sure I understand.
df fd31

I think another problem with the hypothetical is scope insensitive. I mean I read 10 trillions usd and feel no difference from 10 millions usd or less. And it is unclear whether 10 millions is worth 10 of my fingers, while intellectually I think 10 trillions supposed to be worth it. Hence the discomfort.

2Going Durden
I think money is relatively neat value-holder here, because we can map people, and their options on it. I don't intuitively know how much money 1 mln USD is, but I know a guy who is a millionaire, and more or less know what he is capable of buying for himself or spending on charity. I don't intuitively grasp how much 1 billion USD is, but we have examples of billionaires and their actions to guesstimate what that means. Similarly, I never lost a finger, but can practice using one hand, of just a few fingers of one hand to do everyday tasks, and see how much worse it is. I know several people with 1-2 fingers missing, and they do not seem particularly inconvenienced, some even play guitar! I know a guy with just one hand (which I think is much worse than just missing all fingers on one hand) and he is limited in some things but does fine. So it seems even missing half of your fingers is not that bad if you have a decent middle class career and wealth, and would probably be less of a problem for a millionaire. Even based on that imprecise financial intuition, I can guess it would not be worth it to sacrifice fingers for 1 mln (because its not that much money in the end), worth it for 10 mln (because it would set you for life), and if Im going for 1 billion I might just go all the way to 10s of trillions.
df fd20

just want to express my opinion what I do not like this format, without any other implication.
specifically:

  • I found it hard to read [as in painful [physically] to read]
  • I found it hard to engage/understand the material [after I've read a bit I lose track of what the point/topic]
2Elizabeth
can you elaborate on "this format"?
df fd20

I was under the impression that the biggest cost of grid electricity is stability, that is most of the time the price charged on consumer is much [i.e. about 2x] higher than the average cost on the grid market, but occasionally the grid market price would go up astronomically [ say 1000x] for brief periods of time [say hours], and the household consumer would be insulated from that. I thought that something similar happened in Texas when a cold snap happened?

if you are confident that your battery can hold you over those crunch period I assume you can just ... (read more)

4jefftk
I think natural gas in the US is effectively subsidized by underinvesting in export infrastructure? This country produces a lot of gas.
df fd10

In the context of minimum wage.

I assume Abdullah has many options mean he has many job offers/alternatives to jobs.

What does it mean for Benjamin to have many options?

df fd10

But wasn't bell lab the most innovative when they had monopoly? I recalled people telling me that monopoly has more money to invest in R&D.

1ChristianKl
Paying people to do Nobel Prize-winning physics research is inefficient from the perspective of focusing on business profits. 
Answer by df fd10

contra evidence, I 've been trying to make a vein finder device and multiple Chinese manufacturer on alibaba have been cold to luke warm to talk to me.

been trying to find out how to export squid from australia and both the fisheries and the trandport companies have been ignoring my emails

granted I probably sound totally unprofessional in some way as I don't have much idea how the process look like.

df fd70

Nikkei 225 and Shanghai Composite Index have been flat for decades

to put concrete number on this, the Nikkei 225 is up 41% in the last year and 78% in the last 5 years denoted in yen [which lost 30% of value to USD in the last 5 years] for better tracking, maybe the iShares MSCI Japan ETF [EWJ] denoted in USD would be a better measuring instrument. EWJ is up 53% in the last 10 years [since 2014]

compare to QQQ tracking NASDAQ up 394% and IYY tracking Dow Jones up 170%  in the same time period [since 2014].

Calculation not including dividend

4bhauth
To be clear, I was talking about the period up to 2019 and COVID. The cultural attitudes about investing in stocks vs money in bank accounts came from Nikkei performance before the last few years. Since 2019, it's up 2x, but the yen went down vs the dollar and there's been some inflation. In terms of what a unit of the Nikkei can buy in America, the valuation is flat since 2019. Which might actually be a hint about what's driving the relative valuation...?
df fd20

Any chance we can have the instrument only version so we can do karaoke or somesuch?

df fd20

I am a bit lost. What is that a reference to?

"Mu": Japanese word roughly translateable as 'absence'.

"Kami": Japanese word roughly translateable as 'god'.

"-sama": Japanese honorific for referring to someone whose status/position is much higher than yours.

df fd10

But we don't care about random flu virus. We only track pandemic.

Furthermore random pandemic virus could happen in rural areas but more likely to turn into pandemic when they happen in crowded city. The more crowded the higher the pandemic chances.

How many lab similar to Wuhan in crowded cities vs how many crowded city without lab should be taken into account

3Roko
None. Wuhan is the only BSL4 lab in China, and it is the only place that did bat coronavirus gain of function research. And Shi Zhengli's group at WIV is the premier group in China that studies bat coronaviruses.
df fd10

How many virus strains is the lab studying? If the lab is studying 50-90% of flu virus strain it would not be strange for random flu virus that appeared in some area close to it to be studied there.

2Roko
But this isn't a random flu virus. It's a once-in-a-century pandemic!
df fd0-7

I assume no one will read this comment

assuming the problem is really intractable and the current panel process is the best available solution, then the standard solution is to put up a [scapegoat]

i.e. civil servant do not want to/ not able to do something for someone, instead of saying "this is my judgement", point to an other entity [e.g. code of conduct, boss, etc], and deflect the blame. the point is not to deflect the blame though, but to keep on functioning despite having to make unpopular decisions.  

 

I assume that chatGPT would make an exc... (read more)

df fd74

I am feeling like the dialogue has diverted from its original question, so if I may as a question.

What I am hearing is bhauth formed his opinion on extrapolating from current project, reading papers and talk to expert in the field. And while I certainly can not demand him to declare his source and present his whole chain of thought from start to finish, it certainly make it hard to verify those claims even if there is a will to verify them.

E.g. bhauth  stated heat exchanger is expensive, yet I have no grounding for what that mean, is $1000/unit expens... (read more)

2bhauth
Heat exchanger costs are typically in $ per kW/degree. Maybe you got a different impression, but I don't care that much about correcting people who are wrong on the internet. I care much more about understanding things myself and designing useful new technology. In terms of incentives, prediction markets are a losing proposition on average, plus they take time and effort, plus they tie up money and increase risk unless you're hedging something else. If they would get me jobs then I'd care more, but the people with real power don't particularly care about past performance on them, and if I'm going to bet money on things I'd rather do it with stocks, which is more normal for a reason.
df fd30

I am confused.

I have not read much of this rebuttal and I am not academically inclined but just reading the first part of this

https://www.francesca-v-harvard.org/data-colada-post-1

 

Correct me if I am wrong but Francesca is complaining that of all the duplicate and out of order ID, Data Colada is not listing all of them?

Francesca is also saying that Data Colada only picking on one variable that is suspicious and not talking about the other [?non suspicious] variable? Correct  if I am wrong but isn't this is just banana? obviously Data Colada would... (read more)

4Brendan Long
ACX shared these rebuttals that explain why Gino's defence doesn't make sense: https://fashionalexpectations.substack.com/p/ginormous-coincidences https://twitter.com/JohnHBillings/status/1708187948208857363 I don't think these covers the calcChain part, which I'm now convinced is less damning than everything else, but it is still additional evidence (either the rows were swapped manually, or Excel just happened to recalculate the out-of-order rows in the most suspicious possible way).
df fd50

research found the autism distribution to mathematically have 2-5 peaks if I am parsing the study correctly with 1 corresponding to normal population and the other peaks gathered to the right

the study I found

https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13229-019-0275-3

 

I have not read it in depth, just skimming. [no energy to actually give it the attention]

but the relevant image seems to be this:


 

so it seems to me that it is bi-modal, but not in the sense of male-female bi-modal. and it can mostly be simplified as a slightly skewed... (read more)

3habryka
You tried to embed a hotlinked image from your gmail, which doesn't display. You want to download it and then upload it to our editor.
df fd20

I am not sure if it's the motivated reasoning speaking but I have a feeling that

 if a distribution has 2 or more peaks it is customary to delineate in the valleys and have different words to indicate data points close to each peak [i.e. cleave  reality at the joints] [e.g. autism]

If a distribution only has 1 peak, then you would have words for [right of peak] and [left of peak]  and maybe [normal (stuff around the peak)] [e.g. height]

 

If I understand correctly Duncan is saying that the current word definition cleaving using the above rules in certain cases adheres to a false distribution leading to false beliefs.

3Michael Roe
Without having empirical data to back this claim, my guess would be that the autism distribution has a single peak at "no symptoms". that is, the majority of the population has no symptoms, there are lots of people with mild symptoms, and the severe symptoms are down in the tail of the distribution.
df fd40

massive shame of having, almost deliberately, chosen to obstinately screw things up for four years.

 

I am confused, why shame? I see nothing here to be ashamed of.

can we treat this as sunk cost fallacy? The past doesn't matter except for when it shapes the current situation. Now identify the best way forward for your current goal and take it.

If that does not make you feel better, then does hearing that other people wasted even more time make you feel any better? A lot of people wasted a lot of their life.

I wasted 10 years of my life for a mildly differ... (read more)

3TeaTieAndHat
Yes, you’re quite right, I’m obviously falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy here, and I wasn’t fully aware of that, for some reason. But I guess that, being a smart student at a good famous-ish uni and from a moderately well-off family, I feel more or less entitled to a good, well-paying job? And my worry now is that I may not get it, of course. And the shame would be something like "I could have had the life I want but I didn’t bother, and that was kind of a shameful thing to do, I should have acted more according to my own values". The way I feel it, it’s a mix of disappointment at how unlike myself my behaviour was, and fear that I may not be able to make up for the opportunities I’ve lost and the worsening of my situation I’ve caused. That’s why it feels more like shame, on the whole. But yeah, it probably makes more sense to phrase basically the same feeling as sunk cost fallacy.
df fd10

Yes. This is what I was looking for. It makes way more sense now. I broadly agree with everything said here. Thank you for clarifying.

By the way, I think you should consider rewriting the side note re autistic nerd. I am still a bit confused reading that.

3Valentine
FWIW, I found the comment crystal clear. CFAR's very first workshops had a section on fashion. LukeProg gave a presentation on why fashion was worth caring about, and then folk were taken to go shopping for upgrades to their wardrobe. Part of the point was to create a visible & tangible upgrade in "awesomeness". At some point — maybe in those first workshops, I don't quite recall — there was a lot of focus on practicing rejection therapy. Folk were taken out to a place with strangers and given the task of getting rejected for something. This later morphed into Comfort Zone Expansion (CoZE) and, finally, into Comfort Zone Exploration. The point here was to help folk cultivate courage. By the June 2012 workshop I'd introduced Againstness, which amounted to my martial arts derived reinvention of applied polyvagal theory. Part of my intent at the time was to help people get more into their bodies and to notice that yes, your physiological responses actually very much do matter for your thinking. Each of these interventions, and many many others, were aimed specifically at helping fill in the autistic blindspots that we kept seeing with people in the social scene of rationalists. We weren't particular about supporting people with autism per se. It was just clear that autistic traits tended to synergize in the community, and that this led to points of systematic incompetence that mattered for thinking about stuff like AI. Things on par with not noticing how "In theory, theory and practice are the same" is a joke. CFAR was responsible for quite a lot of people moving to the Bay Area. And by around 2016 it was perfectly normal for folk to show up at a CFAR workshop not having read the Sequences. HPMOR was more common — and at the time HPMOR encouraged people toward CFAR more than the Sequences IIRC. So I think the "smart person self-help" tone ended up defining a lot of rationalist culture at least for Berkeley/SF/etc. …which in turn I think kind of gave the impressi
df fd58

Personally, I am strongly against this, 

I got into Rationality for a purpose if it is not the best way to get me to that purpose [i.e. not winning] then Rationality should be casted down and the alternative embraced. 

On the other hand, I suspect we mostly agree with our disagreement is on the definition of the word "winning" 

I could have failed reading comprehension but I did not see "winning" defined anywhere in the post

Raemon101

Okay, I've updated I should be a bit more clear on which claims I'm specifically making (and not making) in this post.

First, I want to note my definition of rationality here is not new, it's basically how it was described by Eliezer in 2012, and I'm pretty confident it's what he meant when writing most of the sequences. "Eliezer said so" isn't an argument, but it looks like some people might feel like I'm shifting goalposts and changing definitions and I claim I am not doing that. From Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms:

The word 'rational' is p

... (read more)
2ryan_b
That's because it isn't; insofar as rationality is systematically winning, it is meant to be true for arbitrary definitions of winning.
df fd31

I see, I failed at comprehension then, thank you for your replies

df fd64

It seems that I have failed to communicate clearly, and for that, I apologise. I am agnostic on most of your post.

Let's go back to the original quote

Hinkley Point C is an ongoing nuclear power project in the UK, which has seen massive cost overruns and delays. But if you take prices for electricity generation in 1960, and increase them as much as concrete has, you're not far off from the current estimated cost per kwh of Hinkley Point C, or some other recent projects considered too expensive.

I understand this to mean that [plant price increase roughly in l... (read more)

0bhauth
That's not exactly my point. The rate of cost increase for concrete products was higher than the average inflation rate. When you consider that, some inflation-adjusted cost increase doesn't mean people got worse at building nuclear plants, which is the assumption made in many articles about nuclear power costs. I did: ---------------------------------------- You're misunderstanding my point: whether or not the public level of concern over that is correct given a good understanding of the physics/biology/management/etc, I think it's reasonable given that knowing the technical details isn't feasible for most people and experts were proven untrustworthy.
df fd10

ok this is not addressing my confusion, my confusion is that that particular piece of information does not distinguish between your hypothesis and many others [with one example I used]. 

I am not sure why nuclear power cost is so high. Maybe you are right, that nuclear energy just never had improvement since 1960 that decreased the real cost to produce electricity [though electronic component costs had gone down, although construction costs have not]. My point is that this particular piece of information does not distinguish the hypothesis.

My informati... (read more)

0bhauth
As Construction Physics notes in its Part 2, rules about low-level waste were driven by direct public concern about that, which forced the NRC to abandon proposed rule changes. I actually think the public concern about low-level waste was sort of reasonable, because some companies could sometimes put highly radioactive waste in supposedly low-level waste. What do you do when you don't understand technical details but a group of experts has proven itself to sometimes be unreliable and biased? Anyway, when considering relative costs, you can't just look at the cost of regulations on nuclear power and not regulatory costs for other things. How long was the Keystone XL pipeline tied up by lawsuits? How have regulations affected fracking in Europe? And so on. Were regulations on nuclear, relative to appropriate levels of regulation, more expensive than regulations and legal barriers for other energy sources? Probably somewhat, but it's hard to say for sure, and the US government also put more money into research for nuclear power than other energy sources. As Construction Physics notes in Part 2: I originally just wanted to point out that inflation includes some cost reduction from technological progress, and some things naturally increase faster than that, which changes baselines for economic estimations - and I figured I'd frame that around nuclear power since I know the physics well enough and some people here care about it way more than they probably should.
df fd10

Hinkley Point C is an ongoing nuclear power project in the UK, which has seen massive cost overruns and delays. But if you take prices for electricity generation in 1960, and increase them as much as concrete has, you're not far off from the current estimated cost per kwh of Hinkley Point C, or some other recent projects considered too expensive.

 

I am sorry but this confused me, how is this section relevant?

to my understanding, you are saying that if we build an average 1960 electricity plant now [does not matter what type] then as the construction co... (read more)

1bhauth
What specific innovations do you think are being missed? Most of the proposed alternative designs (eg molten salt reactors with expensive corrosion-resistant heat exchangers and other problems) would be much more expensive. The design changes that made economic sense, eg the AP1000 design, largely got implemented.
df fd10

so update, after consultation with a research doctor turn out I am not qualified to do it.
I need to be either a doctor, a higher ranking nurse or a nurse on research track at least.
since I am a nurse on the clinical track so I am not qualified to do the research, bummer.

people could still go to their doctor, get their blood check and give the result to me to tabulate, but it does not require me in particular.

df fd30

jinx, I have applied already, not sure if I did a good job selling it though. Thanks for reminding me though.

still waiting on whether my hospital would be interested in the study. 

 so far community members I have spoken to said "others" should be interested, but few actually gave me a commitment, I am not pushing very hard though.

-1Alex K. Chen (parrot)
Try iollo blood tests too, they're new and can test hidden deficiencies
df fd10

Let's not jump the gun, I'll look deeper into it once I am certain there is huge interest.

tbh the main thing I care about is whether those who self-designated as vegans are significantly more likely to be deficient compared to baseline and whether supplement help. Everything else is extra.

3Elizabeth
Lightspeed grants were just announced, with a July 6th deadline. They are unusually promising as a source of funding, so it might be worth your while to meet that deadline. 
df fd40

RE timeline: no problem, I am happy to wait until September or after, giving me even more time to look into it.

I am going to put a feeler out to see if there is any interest in the Lesswrong/EA community in Sydney, I would not go ahead unless 30 people plan to participate.

RE base rate: I can run blood tests on [say 10+] omnivores in the community, assuming Lesswrong/EA community to be homogenous in other aspects aside from the tested diet, [we do have 10-20x the autism/neurodivergent rate compared to general population]. That should establish Lesswrong/EA ... (read more)

3Elizabeth
I don't think there's a way to get a representative sample of healthy people (vegan or omnivore) without paying them. People just don't care about the information enough.  One thing I have toyed with is comparing [% of omnivores with fatigue who have nutritional issues] with [% of vegans with fatigue who have nutritional issues]. My theory is if all other sources of fatigue strike each group equally often, and vegans are more prone to nutrition-caused fatigue, vegans with fatigue should have a higher % of nutritional issues than omnivores with fatigue. And both groups are more motivated to get tested than unfatigued people. And then you try to control for effort and supplements, but I found getting that information from people to be a real uphill struggle and am probably not willing to run another project myself unless I have enough money to pay participants. I worry I'm being too discouraging, I want you to run this, I think it would be valuable even in a limited form and if you can get the data I couldn't that's fantastic. But I also don't want to set you up for failure by being unrealistic about the amount of effort required. 
df fd40

I'll look into the actual feasibility of this.

May I get back to you in one week?
 

I mean if say 20 EA vegans in Sydney got blood tests and for some reason, none of them has any iron, Vit B12, Vit D deficiency [by some metric] it would be significant evidence contradicting your belief isn't it?


It would help me if you can outline a short sketch [don't spend much time on it] on what you think I am going to do [both to prevent the double illusion of transparency and a type of pre-registration].

4Elizabeth
I want to say "take all the time you need", but then I remembered I go almost off the grid for July and August, so there's a discontinuity there. I may be able to connect you with funders, although I don't know what the situation is in Australia, and EA money is harder to come by than it was when I started.  I feel like this skips over the part where I said my protocol isn't good for establishing base rates, so I'm confused about your plan. What sample size I'd consider convincing depends a lot on the protocol. 20 people randomly selected from a pool of completely naive, no-effort vegans? yes, definitely. 20 people recruited by saying "let's prove her wrong" on a vegan athlete forum? of course not. That would demonstrate veganism can be done healthily by some people, but I already believe that.  Simultaneously I think you're making things too hard on yourself, vitamin deficiencies aren't that rare in omnivores so it doesn't seem fair to expect 0 in vegans. I would love to do a real study to establish base rates in both groups of EAs, with proper quantification of effort, supplementation, etc, but it's a lot of money and effort. I only felt able to tackle that with a co-founder, but after being rebuffed on some direct inquiries I lost a lot of hope for that. 
df fd42

Would a replication of your study of "in-office nutritional testing" in a different EA population [say EA Sydney, Australia] be helpful?

In the sense of knowing how many self-identified vegetarians/vegans are clinically deficient in iron, Vit B12, Vit D,... [maybe even compared to omnivores]. We can then advise people on supplementation. With maybe follow-up surveys in 3,6,12 months to see if the number actually improved and if they actually feel improvement.

 

I am a nurse and I can take blood so that may help. I am willing to sink 40 hours into this if... (read more)

4Elizabeth
As a tool of data collection to inform expectations around EA vegans as a whole: probably not, the format doesn't deliver that kind of data. As a tool to get more people tested and well supplemented: I expect that or something like it could be quite helpful. Even though my follow-up rate was bad, the buzz around it motivated many non-participants to get tested and treated. The fewer people currently testing themselves, the more useful I think it is. I'm happy to provide advising to get this off the ground. 
1Portia
Ironically, for me this sort of thing was the final step to going vegan, so I would be very curious about implementing this. I'd also test the values vegans often reference as positive markers (cholesterol, other b vitamins, etc.) I was a teenager, and had several vegan friends, while I ate meat. I had wanted to go vegan as a young child, but my conservative doctor father had told me it would make me ill, and had driven that point home with rather ghastly methods, until I believed him. (He fed me nothing by carrots for half a week, while showing me pictures of severely disfigured babies who some twerp had tried to raise on apple juice, and as the week got on, the belief that I was turning into them became increasingly plausible.) So I told my vegan friends that as much as I cared for their ethics, I would never go vegan, for health reasons. We were all broke as fuck, and went to donate blood. All the vegans did. Lady at the desk told me that unfortunately, I could not, because my blood values were such a mess, especially my iron. I was utterly stunned. Staring at my blood values. Staring at theirs. In utter disbelief. Saying over and over "but I practically live off red meat, how the heck is this possible". Went vegan shortly afterwards. I've regularly tested and kept an eye on things, and my blood values got better, not worse. Still confused by it.
2lincolnquirk
If you have energy for this, I think it would be insanely helpful!
df fd80

Just something I've accidentally look into Only regarding the extraction of lithium and other rare metal from concentrated sea water.

Paradoxically, increased concentration actually WORSEN the efficacy of our current technique to extract rare metals from sea water (adsorption) which was not very efficient in the first place. Presumably from higher concentration of sodium salt. For further information you can look up extraction of uranium from desalination output.

df fd10

according to wikipedia, pipeline storage of Germany is currently capable of several months

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Power_to_gas

 

I confess I do not know what they mean by that precisely, but I am under the impression that hydrogen storage as low pressure gas is very viable

In fact I if the pipeline can handle town gas, I don't see why both hydrogen and natural gas can not be produced at the same time, to hit the pareto efficiency. Natural gas more heat storage per volume, hydrogen better heat storage efficiency, depending on storag... (read more)

df fd5-2

Latest results from hydrogen electrolysis research show 95% efficiency on theoretical limit converting electricity to hydrogen.

The current mass market fuel cell conversion from hydrogen to electricity is about 70% efficiency.

I am under the impression that hydrogen storage and transport for static usages are not that significantly different from natural gas. Or natural gas facilities can be converted to manage hydrogen with relatively small cost.

6ChristianKl
Hydrogen takes up around 3.3x more volume for the same amount of energy storage as SNG. If you have a lot of energy that costs you essentially zero in some parts of the summer storage costs can become more important than efficiency. 
df fd42

my personal experiences with tradies/contractor of any kind are that 9/10 of them are there to get you [by charging enormous amount of money], it is extremely costly to find reliable ones and online reviews are not of much help since the consumer is unable to distinguish between good and reasonably priced work from the chaff [or maybe the online reviews are faked in the first place].

df fd10

isn't what you suggest basically just rent to buy type of bussiness?

1Brendan Long
There may be some minor differences since people typically rent the product they think they want instead of renting all of them, but I think you're basically right.
df fd10

good point, I would amend that to reducing the marginal incentive to go around poisoning water source then

df fd10

I am not sure how true is this, but my friend in comsumer protection agency told me that after a particular severe weather event there were a conspiracy to raise roof repair price between most trade workers in the area by not competing on price before the agency crack down on it.

Not even sure if the crack down had any effect to be honest.

I can see the argument that this is natural price raise due to increase demand, but look at it another way it could be seen as artificial reducing supply to increase price.

df fd50

one argument against price gouging that I don't see bringing up is the 2nd order effect.

I acknowledge that price gouging can have multiples benefits and act as signal and preventing price gouging would inhibit market's direct action.

However, forbiding price gouging also disincentivise  agents from creating conditions that they can gouge others.

one extreme example: if I can price gouge water, I will be incentivised to go around poisoning all other water source to sell my water at a premium.

since I can not sell my water at a higher price, I am not incentivised to destroy water resource.

3philh
You can sell more water at the same price. So the incentive is less, but not zero.
2TurnTrout
This is worth considering, but I basically expect the rest of the legal system to disincentivize this hard enough, and it doesn't seem obvious that firms can tacitly create these conditions in order to create plausible deniability (as they can with eg tacit collusion).
7tslarm
This also applies to the sweatshop example. If everything else is fixed, then yeah, probably those poor families are better off being allowed to work in awful conditions for low wages. But everything else isn't fixed.  When a bunch of relatively wealthy and powerful people are benefiting financially from the existence of an extremely poor underclass (who, due to their poverty, are willing to do hard unpleasant work for little money), this creates resistance to reforms that would improve the situation of the poor and thereby give them greater bargaining power.  And, slightly more optimistically, the alternative to sweatshop employment might not be as dire as it seems. When people are literally at risk of starving for lack of work, there tends to be greater political and charitable will to help them, compared to when they're out-of-sight out-of-mind doing something unpleasant but useful.
df fd10

I agree, 

tbh it surprised me how infectious the delta variant is. I just could not update hard enough even against what happened in India. 

I do hope that the vaccine push is hard and fast enough, but I suppose we will see how it is going to turn out in the next 2 weeks.

this quote from NSW health is giving me hope

Across NSW, 78.1 per cent of the over-16 population has received a first dose COVID-19 vaccine, and 45.6 per cent are fully vaccinated to

https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/news/Pages/20210912_00.aspx

df fd110

Australian in NSW [heaviest hit region currently] here to provide singular data point.

for my personal life, 0.92 QALY for covid lockdown seems reasonable. But I am generally an introvert and tend not to go out. My friends and families are also mostly tech-literate and able to keep in touch online. I change relatively little of my habits. 

It is certainly much harder to do business 

The lockdown is not that strictly enforces [by my personal experience] and sounds worse on paper than it actually is. Mostly just security theater.

I was unaware of the G... (read more)

4JBlack
I'm also Australian, though not in New South Wales. Prior to the current NSW outbreak, localised and usually short lockdowns (generally one city, or at worst one state at a time) had been overwhelmingly effective at keeping the rest of the nation both COVID-free and free of restrictions. While I do disagree with a great deal that Australia's various governments have been doing, that has not been one of them. The current outbreak has come as shock for two reasons: first is that the NSW state government was slower than every other state to act, breaking the implicit deal of fast temporary sacrifices to eliminate transmission and protect everyone else. The second is that this is the Delta variant, known to be more transmissible. Both of these meant that the NSW outbreak rapidly grew to a size that outpaced testing tracing and isolation, meaning that lockdown measures would take much longer and also require more stringent restrictions to eliminate than any previous outbreak. The NSW premier made the decision to abandon that approach altogether. The new strategy is to rush mass vaccinations and then stop most restrictions. Projections show various Sydney hospitals being overwhelmed within weeks if restrictions are dropped now. So it's now a three-way balance over the next 6-8 weeks between vaccine supply, already stretched hospital capacity, and the ability of people and businesses to endure whatever restrictions are needed to keep the hospitals functioning and reduce avoidable deaths.
1tkpwaeub
Same here - it's truly bizarre
df fd00

raise doubt on issur

df fd10

thanks, I've forgotten that these exist. much oblige.

df fd10

I was mainly inspired by jefftk series on raising his children.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoHcgTvyxdorAMquE/bets-bonds-and-kindergarteners

I do believe that he is using techniques not usually employed by other groups. [heck his post frequently got to the front page and hundreds of upvote on https://www.lesswrong.com/ so I assume it has something to do with the rationality culture]

I also believe that children's literature reflects the culture that creates it. Their value and beliefs. I am not content with just Disney culture and I am trying to find an a... (read more)

df fd60

again, I mostly agree with you. however a few thing I want to submit for consideration:

-unrelated but I am mildly miffed at the comparison of me to a child with the seeming implication of lack of knowledge, power and agency [also did you just called me weak will lol?]. Although this may not be the intended effect.

-If I make take my point to the extreme, say on one side of the spectrum we have what you describe "win-win" situation on the other imagine a chip in your brain that stimulates your pleasure centre when you think of buying the product. I am sure w... (read more)

7philh
I'm very suspicious of this line of reasoning, since I could also say: "those men kissing in public didn't ask for my permission to put themselves in front of me". This isn't a knock-down rebuttal or anything, I just wanted to note this.
1Zolmeister
You have not produced evidence that billboards are generally 'criminal mind control', only that they violate norms for shared spaces for people like Banksy. Ultimately this boils down to local political disagreement, rather than some clever ploy by The Advertisers to get into your brain. This is strictly true in the sense that advertisement is negative cost and negative value, but that is exactly why it is used as a tool for producing otherwise difficult to coordinate public goods. To quote David Friedman:
4aphyer
Fair enough (and apologies for the rudeness).  I do think I'd draw a pretty sharp distinction between 'ads dropped in public spaces where you cannot avoid seeing them' vs. 'ads on webpages that you watch in lieu of paying for things' - the latter seems much easier to avoid and much less likely to be harmful. (And as I understand things OP seems to be mostly working on the latter?)
df fd180

while I agree with most of what you said and in an ideal world ad should work in a win-win manner as you described, I have cut out as many ads from my life as possible since they are significantly net harmful in my experience.

the problem that I found, and you don't seem to address, is that ads are not just a simple showing of "I have the stuff you may want". It is usually an attempt of manipulation using primarily superstimulus or social engineer to maximize profit for the advertisers. e.g. for a car ad they show happy people living exciting lives which ha... (read more)

2clone of saturn
It's actually worse than that -- the way the manipulation works is to induce you to compare the people in the ad with your own life, causing you to feel ugly, unlovable, like you're missing out on life, etc. and then to propose the product as a relief from this deliberately induced misery.
-1aphyer
So, this viewpoint is very harsh and I don't know how fully I endorse it, but my gut reaction is something like this: If you can't benefit from positive-sum informative advertising because you are incapable of watching a 15-second ad without succumbing to mind control, this is a problem with you rather than a problem with ads.  The correct response is for you to avoid ads personally (and in fact  many websites that use internet advertisements give you the option to pay instead, e.g. Youtube Premium), just as a child who cannot prepare food without cutting themselves should not be given a set of steak knives.   It sounds like you are doing that already, so good for you! The correct response is not for you to try to prevent a positive-sum thing from existing for others, just as the correct response to a child getting their hands on a steak knife and cutting themselves should not be to try to ban steak knives for everyone else. Attempts to restrict advertisements on those grounds seem isomorphic to e.g. New York Mayor Bloomberg's infamous attempted ban on large sodas.  The justification there appeared to be 'I am incapable of existing in a world with large sodas without drinking too much soda and getting fat, therefore other people should be banned from positive-sum trade to protect me from my weakness without me needing to exert any effort.'  The argument against soda seems to me a substantially stronger argument than the equivalent argument against ads: first, I think the harms of obesity are substantially larger than the harms of advertisements; and second, I think it is easier to personally avoid exposure to internet advertisements than it is to personally avoid exposure to large sodas.
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