Federal highway officials hate us, tell local and state officials they must stop using humor and pop culture references on their road safety signs because they might ‘distract.’ That’s the point. You get people to pay attention. Also you brighten up their day. I sincerely despise people who issue rules like this. How do we fight back?
I strongly agree with the highway officials here. These are highway signs meant to warn of traffic problems, altered commute times, or potential hazards. Most of the time they are blank or (at least my area) they give co...
With reinvested dividends and rising price, it simply grew to become one of my bigger positions. I invested in a variety of industries and this is how it ended up. I did consciously increase my positions in NVDA, MSFT, TQQQ, and GOOG (Google) in light of recent AI advances though.
Biggest positions (in order):
NVDA (NVidia)
SPLX(3x S&P)
TQQQ(3x tech)
VT (total world shares)
XOM (Exxon Mobil)
MSFT (Microsoft)
AAPL (Apple)
I wasn't initially so heavy in NVDA, but graphics cards go brrr.
I'm the OP of that bigfoot discussion on r/ssc. My views haven't substantially changed on that subject.
I agree with the great-grandparent that aliens being real is an enormously bigger change from the standard worldview than bigfoot being real.
I give < 10% likelihood to these UAPs being genuine aliens as stereotypically imagined, and < 50% likelihood of being some significant scientific update (e.g. weather phenomenon, spoofing technology).
However, assuming actual aliens in spaceships were here and trying halfheartedly to hide from us, I would expect...
It's discussed in the Reddit comments, if you want more details, but briefly: A rare species with a long life might leave on the order of ~100 dead a year. If each corpse has, say 1e-5 chance (low but still plausible number) of being found by a person, then it could take a while.
I don't know of any claim that they would take care of their dead, but I don't see that as implausible.
If they exist, then they would have crossed the Bering land bridge at the same time as humans. They would never have lived anywhere without a human presence. And yes, similar sightings are known from across Asia also.
I wouldn't say I know it to be true, but read and reviewed books by experts (anthropologists, special effects experts, pro and con) and ended up concluding that bigfoot probably exists (~75%).
I wrote up my rationale in r/slatestarcodex a year or so ago:
Some more thoughts pertaining to limits of detection:
The Milky Way weighs 5.8e11 times M*, which itself is 2e30kg. Total mass of the galaxy = 1.2e42kg.
If all that mass were converted to energy with perfect efficiency, say via black hole evaporation, or annihilation with antimatter, then that's a total of 1.0e59 joules.
That many joules over 5 billion years (1.5e17 s) is a power of 7e41 watts. At a radius of 7 billion light years (6.6e25m), that's an energy flux of 1.3e-11 W/(m*m).
The sun puts out about 1400 W/(m*m)at our distance. So the sun would...
I may be misunderstanding: Are you suggesting a targeted beam to the habitable zone of every star they can see?
If so, I don't see how that could work, considering that most stars visible at time of transmission would be dead by the time the transmission reaches them. Also the fact that they have orthogonal velocity that would be difficult or impossible to measure and account for.
My apologies if I have misunderstood.
I expect we don't notice most of them. We may notice a lot more the next few decades though. Some would still probably be hidden behind dust.
This example discusses how a type III civilization could signal its existence to a technological civilization halfway across the visible universe (~7 billion light years) over a time span of 5 billion years. Constraints: It should use a relatively small percent of its available resources, and the methods should not rely on unproven physics.
In the nearest 100 star systems (which include ~150 stars), there are 8 white dwarfs (5% of the stars). There is a distribution of masses, but most white dwarfs are between 0.5 and 0.7 (average ~ 0.6) times the mass of ...
I've been thinking about writing a step by step guide like this for weight maintenance for a few weeks.
Weight maintenance requires long-term adherence. This plan is tailored for practicality and ease of compliance. Notice that each step has concrete goals that you either comply with or not, which makes it easy to assess whether you are on track. The steps are ordered for [efficacy/difficulty].
0) Buy:
- body scale
- food scale (if you get to step 4)
- 8 food containers that can hold ~ 250mL or ~ 1 cup (if you get to step 4)
For the scales, ...
Created an account, because finally, something I can speak about from firsthand knowledge!
For a quantitative person it's helpful to check your weight on a regular schedule. For me it's every morning after waking up, before consuming anything (water, food). It's the most consistent time. This gives a reward for your work immediately, especially because the first week or two you may lose water weight as glycogen stores deplete (each 1 gram of glycogen lost also gives up 4 grams of water, you may lose ~1lb of glycogen). Sure it's just wate...
How might someone figure out what their blind spot (A or B) is and overcome it?