Good. The world is chock full of unproductive, unintelligent, pretty much worthless, people who will flood our borders and take our stuff if given the chance. Immigration from most countries is a clear net negative.
It would be perfectly reasonable to intentionally sink these boats with gunfire; Poland uses live ammo to keep illegals from Russia (via Belarus) from getting close to the border fences.
https://x.com/AkkadSecretary/status/1856386068196573412
Those UK figures are for people who are allowed to work.
The west doesn't have massive shortages of unskilled labor. Quite the opposite: we're losing opportunities for our less well off people to work due to automation. It's a real tragedy for the mentally disabled: they used to be able to get relatively unskilled jobs like restocking and factory jobs, and now just end up aimless. I used to have a fair bit of contact with that group due to involvement in autism support stuff – even 20 years ago this was a big problem.
What's happening instead is unskilled immigrants are screwing over career progression for young people. Eg in Canada, it used to be easy for teens to get their first jobs working at places like fast food restaurants. Now those jobs are being taken by immigrants, giving young Canadians no way to get into the job market. That's an atrocious outcome. And it further depresses birthrates by making it even harder to raise kids.
The numbers don't lie: the world is full of poor countries with average IQs significantly less than the west. Allowing those people into our countries makes our countries worse.
That's a member of parliment quoting UK official stats figures. They're similar to public figures from others European countries; many countries shamefully make it effectively illegal to even collect these stats.
Anyway, the fact you immediately go to "white supremacy" is ridiculous.
There is nothing wrong with wanting more of your country men rather than importing foreigners. Canada has done well with its previous policy of allowing high skilled immigrants in – Canada is a better country for it. Importing unskilled labor en-mass is nuts. Which is shown by the fact that these unskilled migrants are a clear drain on economies, and disrupt our way of life.
Violence is also a serious issue. We're importing violent criminals. That's just a fact. For example, Canada didn't have a significant problem with anti-Semitism until we started importing violent, unskilled, Muslims in large numbers.
Why on earth would I want highly skilled, peaceful, productive Jews to be driven out by unskilled, violent, unproductive Muslims?
Trump? Lolwut? Trump isn't anti-Semitic. He opened his speech at Nashville with a somber statement decrying at attack on Israel that had happened earlier that day.
Woke ideology hates Jews because Jews are spectacularly successful. Same reason woke ideology classifies Asians as white these days. Asians and Jews, among others, show that black underachievement is not due to racism.
Speaking of... In my previous job, at an extremely high end geophysics startup, with most employees being exceptional at what they did, out of my ~10 most direct coworkers ~5 of them were first generation immigrants born outside Canada. (White) South African, Russian, Chinese, Korean (IIRC), and Iranian. My boss – an exceptionally good engineer – was Greek (IIRC, 2nd generation). I'm probably forgetting a person or two born in the US too.
Canada has obviously done really well importing highly skilled people. But that's the thing: highly skilled. The only person I knew at that company who didn't get into Canada on pure merit was an Iranian refugee, and he was one of the least skilled people there. Hell, the South African was so good at what he did that he managed to get _two_ extra citizenships (Canadian and UK) through merit-based immigration before he retired.
There's lots of stats along the lines of this floating around from various studies: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country
I'd take the exact numbers with a grain of salt. IQ is tricky to measure across cultures and there's more than one type of intelligence. There's also the issue that countries are often _not_ homogeneous (a hilarious example of this is how Dutch origin white Afrikaans in South Africa have actually been in South Africa _longer_ than the majority of the black population, as they descend from more recent invaders).
But the rough trends are certainly correct. And the fact that counties _do_ differ is important.
Also, the "more than one type of intelligence" doesn't change the fact that modern technology favors mathematical/logical intelligence: thinking logically is much more valuable than other types of thinking, because machines are so efficient at doing work.
It's interesting how making AI think artistically has turned out to be much easier than making AIs think logically...
Taleb is clearly someone who is willing to bend his intellectual arguments to fit his politics and preconceptions, rather than the data. Just look at how badly he failed on Bitcoin and COVID.
Not unfair to call him a crank...
https://medium.com/incerto/no-covid-19-is-not-an-old-person-problem-6968f720d153
Anyway, the ugly reality is IQ is certainly real, genetically heritable, and IQ distributions vary. The reason why so few engineers are black isn't primarily racism. It's because black populations around the world tend to have lower IQ.
Conversely, in spite of vicious racism in the past (and present...) Jews still managed to dominate the sciences is mainly because their average IQ is high. Same with Asians, though not as extreme.
Of course, distributions are distributions, and some people will beat the odds and you should evaluate individuals on their own merits. But as long as the genetics (and culture) of so much of the world is awful, those parts of the world will remain poor and backwards. And allowing the more talented people in those parts of the world to immigrate to western countries just increases that inequality through brain drain, while dragging down our countries if we're not careful. Canada's prior immigration policy was careful... and probably did the rest of the world a disservice by taking their best people.
The irony here is convincing yourself that IQ isn't real takes intelligence... 😂
It's Taleb. I've got better things to do than debunk him given how he's obviously become a crank.
As for IQ in general, anyone with a bit of sense can see how obviously some people are just smarter than others, and how children tend to be similarly intelligent as their parents. Intelligence in general is _obviously_ a genetic trait: humans have it in ways animals _clearly_ do not, and different animals _clearly_ have it in different degrees.
As I said, you have to actively fool yourself to convince yourself otherwise; the burden of proof is not on my views here. The only reason there is an IQ denial movement is because IQ (especially the inherited component of it) is so utterly toxic to DEI beliefs.
IQ correlates well to success in life, measured in all kinds of ways. It's not the only factor. But it is an important one.
It's just wishful thinking to believe that it doesn't.
Peace in this situation is equivalent to the defund the police insanity. Russia has stolen a bunch of stuff and murdered a lot of innocent people. To actually stop this behavior you need to change the incentives, and remove their ability to do so in the future. A quick "peace" through a ceasefire does not do that.
Territories have to be taken back, and Russians have to be captured and killed, for the incentives to change.
This is no different to how letting off shoplifters with warnings just results in more shoplifting in the future.
There is a very clear path to Ukrainian victory: provide Russia with the weapons it needs (and for that matter, promised) and use them against Russia.
Biden's administration has actually delivered just 10% of what congress approved – Biden has been intentionally holding Ukraine back to try to force some kind of ceasefire. Those billions of dollars of weapons promised hasn't actually been shipped to me Ukraine. It's endless delays and excuses, even though the US has large stockpiles of this stuff.
Yet even with 10% of what they were supposed to have, and never being allowed to use all kinds of long range weapons that would obviously make a huge improvement, Ukraine has not only successfully held Russia back. They've even taken Russian territory.
This isn't hard. Russia is a weak country with a terrible economic situation and failing military. They'd have lost already if politicians actually tried to win it.
Just listened to Paul Sztorx's talk on CUSF at the opnext.dev conference.
It is the worst technical concept I've ever seen presented at a Bitcoin conference. 😂
tl;dr: because no-one wants to merge his terrible soft fork proposals – and he's too lazy to rebase his code – Sztorc wants to ship a separate piece of software that uses the invalidateblock RPC call to detect and reporg out blocks that violate his soft forks. Obviously, if miners actually run this, it makes it a nightmare to actually run a real validating node as now this Rube Goldberg bit of complexity now becomes the Bitcoin protocol. And obviously, that makes it likely that a soft fork won't be enforced by economic nodes, resulting in massive losses when miners get bored and stop running it.
I can now tell you all: OpenTimestamps did in fact have a small role in the US election! I don't know the full details. But apparently it was used to timestamp election data in Screven County, Georgia; possibly others too.
https://www.youtube.com/live/hR9dBzqZvvg?t=18344&feature=shared
The total cost for time-stamping at maximum speed for two days, on two calendars: 259,380sats.
If I get more donations, I'll continue to timestamp faster, giving everyone more accurate timestamps: https://geyser.fund/project/opentimestamps
The interesting thing about anti-fraud efforts like OpenTimestamps is often what they achieve is invisible, because they've discouraged fraud from happening at all.
I've experienced this myself: I was plaintiff in a lawsuit where timestamped evidence was damming to the defendant. Even though the evidence didn't have digital signatures, the defense didn't even try to contest the validity of it. I'm sure the timestamps helped them make that decision.
Previously in Guatemala, the timestamps on the tally sheets in the election did two main things:
1) They showed they the vast majority of tally sheets were filled out soon after the election officially ended, contesting claims of widespread fraud.
2) A significant subset of tally sheets had incorrect metadata times in the computer system that scanned them due to a timezone misconfiguration. OpenTimestamps provided evidence that this was just a timezone misconfiguration, not fraud, and the judiciary in the end accepted that evidence.
I'm not aware of any legal cases where _timestamps_ were publicly used, even though guardtime has been around since forever. My suspicion is that it's good enough evidence that no-one even tries to dispute timestamps.
A few months ago I spent a night in a cave waiting for my water bottles to fill up from a drip in the ceiling while hiking in South Africa.
Nature kinda sucks.
nostr:nevent1qqsgz84njx6ust95gc075hrxc2kqp3vtlza3uzcwlsfd0924qcsrxccppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgsgydql3q4ka27d9wnlrmus4tvkrnc8ftc4h8h5fgyln54gl0a7dgsrqsqqqqqph8j9dc
I'm certainly soft and pudgy. But waiting the night to get more water rather than hiking further without being sure I had a water supply was definitely the smart move.
Polymarket at this point is probably more useful to hedge the risk of your less favorite candidate getting elected.
Who knows, maybe a ton of people who think they'll get screwed over by Trump are betting on him... 😂
A few months ago I spent a night in a cave waiting for my water bottles to fill up from a drip in the ceiling while hiking in South Africa.
Nature kinda sucks.
nostr:nevent1qqsgz84njx6ust95gc075hrxc2kqp3vtlza3uzcwlsfd0924qcsrxccppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgsgydql3q4ka27d9wnlrmus4tvkrnc8ftc4h8h5fgyln54gl0a7dgsrqsqqqqqph8j9dc
You are probably experiencing memory corruption or something similar without noticing it.
The only times I've ever had a leveldb database get corrupted were due to bad memory. I spent a fair bit of ₿ upgrading my desktop to ECC memory a few years ago due to a run-in with bad memory that corrupted files.
It's very easy for minor memory issues to result in disk corruption rather than overall system instability. You just need something like a single bad bit that only shows up sometimes, eg while hot as nostr:nprofile1qqsr6tj32zrfn7v0pu4aheaytdnnc6rluepq73ndc2tdjzus34gat9qpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhswulwwv pointed out.
Not a lot of currency exchanges around either, at least that I've seen so far; in Ukraine you can find a currency exchange booth literally every few hundred meters.
...and to think someone was still shilling Samourai on the privacy panel at the Plan B conference...
nostr:nevent1qqsqqqqaru54ylxfkms0x9e54m85zz5hqtdutrrplnlykhwltdvkkpqppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgsfuv8fgq3cek0ta0rr9qtkm4x3pxqjz22y9u4xcwrj0lrxlfl2jzsrqsqqqqqpgrfz78
“When all the fiat currencies die, what's going to happen to coin collecting?”
“Ordinals?” nostr:nprofile1qqspnc6chqq37h60cefu2ewx6np0x0ejvc05lyyc9j0wms5j4pm5ascpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhszrnhwden5te0dehhxtnvdakz7qgswaehxw309ahx7um5wghx6mmd9u5a9y3e
cashuBpGFkclNlbnQgZnJvbSBNaW5pYml0c2FteBxodHRwczovL3N0YWJsZW51dC51bWludC5jYXNoYXSBomFpSAD2hOihuoaWYXCBo2FhAWFjWCED3rfjef9s1cIMblfdgorofScqzvQsOD_083BvR0XRTbphc3hAMDdmNDkwMjY0NGMxZjE2ZTljZTU4OTc1OTgxZjQwMDQyYzdjNzE4NmY0ZjdjYjM0NjFmMTdhY2I5N2UyZTU4MWF1Y3VzZA
Not your everyday cashu.
The most useful task I've found for LLMs so far was actually to walk through some physics problems to figure out what math symbols are standard for those problems.
It got the physics problems subtlely wrong in annoying ways... But it was a much easier way to figure out what the standards are; that kind of knowledge is impossible to Google.
IIUC WWVB has about 1bit/s of bandwidth. That's not quite enough to broadcast block headers as fast as they are created, and realistically you'd want more to allow a fountain code to be sent to allow receivers to catch up after missing headers.
I dunno what they're licensed to transmit though. A new owner may be able to broadcast with more bandwidth.
That's not an uncommon type of technical fault actually. Often things like low power modes have bugs that cause dropped connections; periodically transmitting avoids going into those bugged modes. I've run into this type of big myself a few times.
Coincidence is probably why it's working now. But it could definitely be the pings too.
https://image.nostr.build/af98a70e2150ecfb84cfc0cf9a2c8362f753970bcf9e6f1a63f231c32fb8648c.jpg
I highly doubt this makes any financial sense.
The marginal cost to kill or seriously wound a Russian is probably something like $50k; the _entire war_ has only cost ~$250k per Russian casualty in direct military spending, and that includes lots of pricey defensive spending like anti-air defense. Ukraine has constantly been short on things like drones and ammo that could easily be purchased if only more funds were available.
I _highly_ doubt the French government is spending less than $50k per Russian. There's a ton of work that needs to be done to vet defecting Russian soldiers given the high chance they're infiltrators, and every failure is incredibly costly. That's on top of ordinary refugee expenses like welfare and other social support, which cost thousands per year.
Just spend the money on weapons and focus on killing Russians efficiently. The ones who are deserting were probably not effective soldiers anyway.
The supermajority of Russians who are dying volunteered in exchange for (by Russian standards) large amounts of money; Russia has not resorted to large scale mobilization yet and it's illegal in Russia to send conscripts to Ukraine. The Russians fighting are psychopaths who thought it would be fun, and profitable, to kill off Ukrainians. That's probably a big part of why they fight in such wasteful ways: their commanders don't give a shit whether the men fighting live or die. They're just meat to them. And the Russians fighting don't give a shit about the people around them: they just want to avoid dying long enough to collect their financial reward.
Not all cultures or people are equal. That's leftist "defund the police" type nonsense.
I also know both Russians and Ukrainians. The sane Russians with at least some wealth have mostly left Russia, for good. The ones I know who have stayed (or returned!) are nutjobs; I'm not concerned about the wealthier Russians who haven't left. And as for the poor ones, if they want to live the onus is on them to do something useful like sabotage to make their country lose faster. It's not that hard.
We should not sacrifice the lives of Ukrainians – and quite possibly ourselves in the future – for the sake of Russians.
The fact is, you do in fact win wars by killing the other side more efficiently. WW2 was won because far more Germans and Japanese died than westerners. We were damn good at killing them, to the point where they simply surrendered essentially unconditionally.
I specifically said "westerners" for a reason. We killed Germans efficiently. The Soviets were brutal and inefficient, including to their own people, and would have been utterly crushed without massive amounts of Western military aid. Allying with the Soviets was an example of joining forces with evil to fight evil.
Also mentioning China here is ridiculous. The massacre of Chinese civilians by the Japanese is one reason why we went to war with Japan in the first place.
It's like arguing that the 6 million Jews that were murdered show that we couldn't kill Germans efficiently and the war wasn't lopsided.
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