What's the citation for the ice core stuff? I found two papers that investigated this and neither found evidence to support the impact theory, so it seems ambiguous to me, but this isn't my field so obviously I might just be failing to find a more recent result.
If you wanna read em:
Paquay, François S., et al. “Absence of Geochemical Evidence for an Impact Event at the Bølling-Allerød/Younger Dryas Transition.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 106, no. 51, 2009, pp. 21505–10
Surovell, Todd A., et al. “An Independent Evaluation of the Younger Dryas Extraterrestrial Impact Hypothesis.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 106, no. 43, 2009, pp. 18155–58.
Update: Found (some?) ice core evidence, it is indeed more recent, but I'm hopelessly out of my wheelhouse at this point so I'll just cite it for anyone also interested and suggest that these more recent publications do seem pretty confident in their conclusion that the impact did happen. So it seems user moloch-hai is correct:
Petaev, Michail I., et al. “Large Pt Anomaly in the Greenland Ice Core Points to a Cataclysm at the Onset of Younger Dryas.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 110, no. 32, 2013, pp. 12917–20.
Pretty cool stuff, thanks for sharing and prompting me to learn more about it.
> Those are both from 2009, ten years before the smoking gun cited.
Just so you're aware, you haven't actually cited the study yet in this thread.
(Kjær, Kurt H., et al. "A large impact crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland." Science advances 4.11 (2018) is the citation, for future reference)
(FWIW, Kenny, Gavin G., et al. "A Late Paleocene age for Greenland’s Hiawatha impact structure." Science advances 8.10 (2022) disputes the age given for that impact crater.)
As already noted, any connection to Hiawatha crater was only ever conjecture. Evidence that Hiawatha was not coincident with the YDB obviously tells us nothing at all about YDB events.
A recent survey article is Sweatman,
The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: Review of the impact evidence
The remaining controversy is how much the strike contributed to the Younger Dryas development and other coincident events, particularly extinctions. To me, it is ludicrous to blame those on Clovis people, or on a climate hiccup smaller than they had weathered easily many times before. Now that we know people had already been there for 10+ millennia, the sudden wipeout idea gets much sillier.
The idea that the strike triggered the YD is appealing, but the record shows several other such cooling periods with very similar profile and duration in the past 100ky. It seems unlikely they were all triggered by comet strikes. But they could have been: we now know our records of comet strikes are woefully incomplete, having detected a very recent one only by enormous effort.
See also Wendy S. Wolbach et al.
Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Impact ∼12,800 Years Ago.
Adding: it is disgraceful how sloppy and unscrupulous most opponents of the cosmic impact model have been. They should be ashamed. There is nothing wrong with demanding a high standard of evidence. Failing to maintain even the most basic standards for your own work is, especially in context, inexcusable.
They are righteous defenders of what amounts to the current creation myth of scientism. Nothing to see here when The Science is understood to be a religion.
Why "probably"? A union is whatever its members make of it, and most engineers at any given tech company have relatively little seniority. It's hard to imagine them voting to join a union that would so obviously not prioritize their interests like that.
My guess is in most cases you'd still end up with an avenue for merit based layoffs, they just wouldn't start until new hiring had been completely stopped, and perhaps include an option for everyone to take a pay cut instead (which might be bad! but it's an idea I've heard floated by engineers way more than seniority based protections).
> an option for everyone to take a pay cut instead (which might be bad! but it's an idea I've heard floated by engineers way more than seniority based protections).
We already do that, it's called RSUs. If a portion of your compensation is in RSUs and the market goes down, you automatically get a paycut. Better than being laid off, isn't it?
There are a few problems with unions, many of which can be summed up as principal/agent problems. But another issue is that unions are fundamentally democratic, which leads to some misaligned incentives.
Seniority is a completely legible and unambiguous criteria, and it’s one that most workers can eventually benefit from in the long run. Merit is more of a judgment call. Management at least has the incentive to get that judgment call right (which isn’t to say they do get it right, but at least they have the incentive to, modulo the same principal/agent problems that unions also introduce), but unions don’t. So if I’m part of the top 20% of workers at a firm, or part of the top 20% that the firm could reasonably hire, my incentives are actually better aligned with management than with the other 80% of workers who would dominate the union. The classic union solution to this problem is closed shops, but that’s hard to achieve without specific legal and regulatory moats.
Also:
> My guess is in most cases you'd still end up with an avenue for merit based layoffs, they just wouldn't start until new hiring had been completely stopped
This is another common failure mode of unions. People who already work in a given field are in the union, but people trying to break into the field are not. So it becomes harder to hire new people, which actually leads to longer tenures and makes seniority seem like a better deal for the union members.
This is like doing the same thing but expecting a different result. You think unions follow some optimal logic but I’ve seen no examples that do. The only real expectation you can have is that it would end up roughly like existing unions.
I have had personal experience with men in leather jackets giving you the “better vote x or you might have an accident” unions. So I’m a bit biased.
> This is like doing the same thing but expecting a different result.
Tech culture, and Silicon Valley in particular, is so obsessed with recreating things from first principles and experimenting for the sake of it, that you would expect that they'd give reinventing unions but under a different name a shot.
Sure, but 1) it goes to show that tech workers won't necessarily "vote with their feet", 2) in the event of an industry-wide downturn, that ability to vote becomes far more limited.
Amazon pays software engineers very well (compared to software engineering jobs in general). Perhaps people don't vote with their feet because they like the money.
Not exactly - while the initial stock they grant vests on a 5/15/40/40 schedule, they also have a large cash "bonus" which "vests" monthly for the first two years. With their assumption of 15% stock growth per year, you should have equal TC per year for your first 4 years. Of course, assuming 15% annual stock growth is silly, but you can run the numbers however you want. The point is that compensation for the first two years is predominantly cash.
I think you're both right, the 1807 version published by Tabart added the moral justification for the killing of the giant which is still common today. But the story may originate in pre-history oral tradition, where it's anyone's guess whether or not Jack is a remorseless violent thief.
Judges in regular courts really don't like "one weird trick" style legal arguments. I'm guessing judges in secret national security courts like them even less. Hence the skepticism that, in this circumstance, they wouldn't just order the site to update their canary and threaten the operators with charges themselves if they refuse.
Judges in the United States also don't like compelling speech. So compelling a private entity to repeatedly update a warrant canary is unlikely to be legal.
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that this is the stated legal opinion of the lawyers at the EFF.
Indeed, the bar is (supposed to be) very high for this kind of thing. But at the same time, it feels like exactly the kind of "gotcha" that rarely flies, because the situation was so deliberately constructed. But without any (public?) litigation, it's anyone's guess what may happen.
I posted links to this survey on my social media, primarily twitter and reddit, with some indirect advertising on fetlife and discord; these made up 74.4% of my results. Another 22.4% reported ‘other’ from the list of sources. The last 3.2% came from telegram, tumblr, and facebook; these categories have low enough sample that I’m not going to include them on graphs in this blog post.
I'm not sure this is representative of anything other than "people who follow Aella and are interested enough in the topic to fill out a self-report survey".
You'll have that bias in any study about non-mainstream sexuality. Most people are vanilla or don't express their sexuality (although that did change with 50SoG, but the influx of people "educated" by it is a scourge on the BDSM community), many cultures (particularly religious fundamentalists) shame sexuality entirely, and even among the progressive crowd it's not really an everyday topic you can run surveys with...
The advantage of Aella's research is the sheer mass of people she draws in. Way more than a lot of research, and the mass eliminates trolls, religious fundamentalists and idiots that plague "popular research" aka yellow press surveys.
> the influx of people "educated" by it is a scourge on the BDSM community
Rarely have I encountered a bigger bunch of insufferable judgemental assholes than in the "BDSM community". They seem more interested in judging what is "true BDSM" than anything else. Reminds me of early black metal community and stuff like this, where it's not really about the topic you're organizing around but more about rebelling against the perceived "mainstream".
yeah because every ten minutes some guy† walks in the door and says 'oh wow you mean i can actually rape and abuse young women‡ and get away with it, bdsm is super awesome, i am so glad i finally found a bunch of people like me'
and the people who are already there, who are not in fact like him†, have to kick him† out unless they want their friends to get raped and abused, and also experience guilt by association
this extremely frequent phenomenon results in a lot of energy being spent on gatekeeping because the alternative is degenerating into a rape gang
sometimes it results in kicking the wrong people out because the gatekeepers make mistakes
That's not even what I'm talking about; it's the "lol they just read 50 shades of grey and are now interested in bondage but they're just p0sers, we're the real kvlt!"
That's pretty far from the biggest objection I've heard from the BDSM community about the book. Pretty much universally they have an issue with the way the book treats consent, and thats a real, real, big thing you need to get right when engaging with BDSM.
that's a book about intimate partner abuse tho, so it makes sense to be leery of people who got their picture of bdsm from it and then wanted to get involved
I have to disagree. I have found the BDSM community here in Spain to be nothing but welcoming and open-minded to newbies like me.
I also haven't seen any other newbies come in like they know everything and own the place. Everyone is super cautious with one another, consent is paramount and the more experienced people are patient guides, not elitist at all. Nobody is obsessed with doing things "the right way" (with some exceptions of very ceremonial things like traditional shibari), and definitely not being judgmental about it, it's more a journey of self-discovery.
I was surprised because what you describe is exactly what I expected.
> They seem more interested in judging what is "true BDSM" than anything else.
I agree and know a couple of these people as well, but my post was not aimed at these, nor at legitimate BDSM newbies.
It was rather aimed at those who got all their ideas about BDSM from 50SoG, but have absolutely zero idea about basic stuff like consent, safety and after-care. Like, if you don't know what you're doing and unwilling to make at least some basic research, you can seriously damage another person - emotionally, mentally and physically.
It's a little sensational but I feel like she's pretty up front about the limitations. The problem with representativeness is admitted, not really engaged with (I'd expect a more thorough study to compare with older results with better understood biases and extrapolate from there), but it's not hidden either.
I think the main problem is actually that Aella herself is not a faceless researcher but a somewhat controversial online personality who used her own brand to find participants. So for example anyone who blocked her on twitter probably didn't have a chance at taking this, even if they are also likely to be closer to kink communities than the average twitter user who wouldn't even know of her existence.
What do you mean by “log transforming”? Are you bothered by the log plot? You really should not be: it’s done for one purpose, make the bottom more legible, as she wrote explicitly. Look at any scientific journal and you’ll find loads of plots with log scales. And at least in my fields, no mention of “log transforming” anything.
What's the point of such an incendiary comment? No, you aren't understanding it right. At worst you are offering a deliberately misleading interpretation. Here's what the link says:
The Boston housing prices dataset has an ethical problem: as
investigated in [1], the authors of this dataset engineered a
non-invertible variable "B" assuming that racial self-segregation had a
positive impact on house prices [2]. Furthermore the goal of the
research that led to the creation of this dataset was to study the
impact of air quality but it did not give adequate demonstration of the
validity of this assumption.
The scikit-learn maintainers therefore strongly discourage the use of
this dataset unless the purpose of the code is to study and educate
about ethical issues in data science and machine learning.
The "B" variable measures how integrated a neighborhood is, and that snippet seems to be saying that its existence is the "ethical problem" that led them to purge the dataset. How is any of that different than what I said?
So, the issue is more subtle than that - if it was just a matter of including demographic data, there wouldn't be an issue. The problem is that the "B" column is _not_ measuring how integrated the neighborhood is- it is a transformed value whose calculation begins with data about integration levels, but the details of how and why that transformation is performed are super important. The calculation the original authors did to produce that column rests on a model about the relationship between a neighborhood's level of integration and its property values, and that model's assumptions are frankly racist and also factually incorrect (and were known to be incorrect at the time of its original publication back in the '70s). As a result, if one were to _use_ the "B" column in a model, one would be getting results that at best were wrong and useless, and at worst would make a model that literally encodes broken 70s-era ideas about how real estate and race interact in the US.
And the transformation itself is non-invertible, so it's not possible to recover the original values for about 7-8% of the rows in the dataset. The commit diff links to a thorough investigation of the data[1] in which the author takes a crack at linking up the ambiguous rows with the original 1970 Census data that supposedly went in to generating this dataset, and long story short, it looks like the original dataset's authors may have made some errors in their calculations on top of everything else.
Expressing incredulity over one piece of context without acknowledging the existence of other parts which modify it. There was a full detailed explanation at the medium blog, and all that was necessary to do was follow the citation given and read it. Repeatedly proclaiming confusion when already in possession of the explanatory material, rather than challenging that explanation, is not a credible posture.
> Please provide a source that says that "number of blacks in my neighbourhood" is a measure of "neighbourhood integration".
It isn't. Bk is "number of blacks in my neighbourhood" as you put it, and the whole point of using B instead of it was so that an all-black neighborhood wouldn't count as more integrated than one with a mix of races.
I don't see why non-invertibility matters. Lots of useful features are non-invertible.
Edit: and if you are dealing with real data sets or producing real datasets for analysis you will often have only approximations to the thing you want to measure. Determining whether your proxy variable is worth including or how to interpret your results in light of it are necessary skills to develop.
The feature is bad. The non-invertibility means that you cannot get back the original data that was used to generate the feature, and try to salvage it.
Sure, that makes it less useful. But why is that so bad that the entire dataset should be discarded and not used, even for uses that don't care about that particular part of the original data?
If you want the dataset, scikit even tells you how to get it. If you just want an example dataset, there are better ones. I mean, this seems somewhat like the Lena debacle: why insist on this particular dataset?
> The non-invertability is part of the problem, and he completely doesn't understand that.
I get that invertibility means that you can't fully recover the original racial percentage, e.g., that a 48/52 split and a 78/22 split will both look exactly the same, since (.48-.63)^2 and (.78-.63)^2 are equal. I don't see why that totally taints the entire dataset.
Sadly, assumptions of good faith are easily exploited by bad actors (the classic term for this is "just asking questions") but I suppose you're right, I should not have assumed malice.
Is it just me or this some horrifically bad English? I have a fairly strong math background and I'm struggling to figure out what the author meant by any of that.
As far as I can tell, it's something like, "The author made a bad variable. Also, the goal was to check air quality but the variable was bad." What does the subject being air quality impact have to do with anything there?
His bail terms specifically restrict him from doing transactions larger than $1,000 without government approval, so he is actually restricted from doing this. Presumably his supervisors are investigating. I think a more reasonable explanation is that this is part of some consolidation of funds associated with FTX as part of the bankruptcy.
"His bail terms specifically restrict him from doing transctions larger than $1,000 without government approval, so he is actually restricted from doing this."
Unless I am mistaken, that exception is narrowly exactly what it says. The only transactions over $1,000 that don’t require specific pre-approval are transactions where the money flows from SBF to his lawyers or the court to pay for legal costs and fees.
Selling something where the proceeds are intended to be used in a later transaction to pay legal costs and fees would still require pre-clearance.
Otherwise, it would be a vacuous restriction, as he could literally conduct any transaction (at least, where money flowed to him; it would be harder but not impossible to justify asset purchases) on the justification that he would eventually be using the proceeds to pay legal costs and fees.
Bail is supposed to motivate you to show up in court, or have whoever paid the bail drag you there, despite the potentially unpleasant consequences that await. Forfeiting it for other reasons would seem like a bad idea - if the money is gone either way, what's the motivation to stick around?
But, if you violate the terms of your bail, you can end up back in custody.
Well what's the other explanation, that he'll cut his GPS monitor off, stowaway on a ship bound for Africa, and take the money out as gold or something? Knowing that this means his parents will lose their house? For a few hundred thousand dollars?
I agree it's suspicious though! I hope it's thoroughly investigated and his bail revoked if he is in violation.
He isn't exactly a luminary when it comes to making well thought out decisions or appropriately evaluating risk. I don't think the fact that this seems like a dumb
decision is a strong argument that he didn't do it.
No it goes way back to the 80s and 90s when radio consolidated. You had guys like Limbaugh reading off lists of men who died of AIDS and laughing at them. Same grift, different generation.
Oh Limbaugh! He was popular before my time, and the more I learn about him the more I am puzzled by who would enjoy listening to something like what you describe.
I wouldn't say that my dad has darkness at the center of his being.
At a certain point there's a real lack of political power in the US-- specifically, I am thinking of Mark Fisher's understanding of Capitalist Realism.
In that system, it feels as if nothing material will ever change, and so all that is left is the aesthetic and apolitical hatred of other groups of people.
My dad was a substitute teacher who mostly took care of the kids and went to church on Sundays and played trombone with a bunch of Shriners. He was never politically plugged in, he just was raised in a house that operated very much like the setting of Leave it to Beaver.
So for him, watching cultural changes and being outraged over them were pretty much the only surface on which he felt connection to politics, as far as I can tell. From my standpoint, those cultural markers are pretty much the main differentiation between liberal Democrats and the GOP. They are both centrist capitalist parties that need to maintain US hegemony through foreign wars and who are both owned by the folks who own the business of the US.
It's a shit substitute for action, but for a lot of folks falling into the tribalism of that culture war is the only possibility they see for political action.
And while I find his political aesthetic to be both self-contradictory and profoundly alienating I have enough awareness to see how people who aren't evil in their intent can take up one side of culture war instead of the other.
And as someone who finds the anonymously penned "Desert" to be a plausible understanding of the current ecological/economical/political climate, I am not sure that short of a wholesale rejection of the politics of the spectacle there is a lot to be gained from these aesthetics... even if I know where I fall and who I support in that game and whose defeats I will happily cheer.
But like I said, I think that's more a product of a shitty situation rather than some evil spot in someones' soul.
I don’t know enough about your situation so not talking about your dad specifically… but there must be something else involved here than just culture war and political powerlessness. Eg going to church and laughing at people who die from AIDS are not easily compatible (or at least _should not_ be easily compatible) parts of one’s life.
Well, I can't disagree that there is not some deep hypocrisy in being both a christian and mocking dying people.
In my experience, this combination of things are quite common. Their (Episcopal) church started doing a different communion process simply because it was revealed that the organist was out and parishioners did not want to share a common cup with him.
There are a lot of ways of describing why that doesn't seem cruel to those folks. To me, "culture war and political powerlessness" could be short hand for a number of things, ranging from neurosis to Žižek-ian "Ideology" to the contradictions of capitalism or the unworkability of philosophical idealism at the core of liberal practices.
It's a fact that these seemingly incompatible positions have gone together, though. So I suppose you could just say folks are "evil" but, that feels like it misses some nuance.
Thanks for your analysis. To clarify my earlier remark: there must be something _personal_ that is at play here. While political, social, cultural dissonances are all often very visible and clearly externalized, personal grievances and deep confusion can be left unseen.
(Again, to be sure - not talking about your dad specifically since I am just a stranger on the Internet.)
I am hinting at depression of a kind a person experiences late in their life when all hope for change and personal growth starts to fade away. But I also don't want to limit the discussion to this observation only, there are other emotional and intellectual hardships involved: resentment, unhappiness, feeling of injustice, etc.
Same reason people today listen to Maddow, Carlson, or Olbermann. Same reason people gossip about what that bitch Becky or that asshole Brent did the other day in your friend group.
A daily dose of bias confirmation and drama, no matter what the politics, no matter how devoid of truth the monologue is, soothes the soul of humans everywhere.
I might be wrong but I like to believe that there is a critical difference between gossiping about Becky and laughing at people dying from AIDS. Saying that… maybe I just don’t know - I don’t like either and in my head there is a clear distinction.
I recall several left-leaning commentators celebrating the (unvaccinated, COVID) deaths of Phil Valentine and Marc Bernier. Is it on the same level as AIDS? No, but the broader point is that all ingroups have their cheerleaders, and those cheerleaders can get incomprehensively nasty.
It doesn't really matter time, nor place, nor politics. It's part of the human condition. My tribe is superior to your tribe, and if we have to piss on the graves of the other side to make ourselves feel good, By God, we'll do it.
edit: I just remembered the deaths of both Scalia and RGB. Right or left, both tribes celebrated, in PARTICULARLY DISGUSTING WAYS, the passing of SCOTUS justices of the opposing tribe. This is just what we, as humans, do.
Good point! I must admit I am not immune to that. While I wasn’t celebrating Covid deaths I certainly wasn’t mourning anyone who died because of what I considered was their own “fault” (Eg not following quarantine guidelines). Which is still quite un-empathetic.
They've found some tables of similar estimations, which apparently match the results you get when you apply the author's algorithm, suggesting that's what the Babylonians used as well. I don't think the method itself is actually attested anywhere in known texts.
If you wanna read em:
Paquay, François S., et al. “Absence of Geochemical Evidence for an Impact Event at the Bølling-Allerød/Younger Dryas Transition.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 106, no. 51, 2009, pp. 21505–10
Surovell, Todd A., et al. “An Independent Evaluation of the Younger Dryas Extraterrestrial Impact Hypothesis.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 106, no. 43, 2009, pp. 18155–58.
Update: Found (some?) ice core evidence, it is indeed more recent, but I'm hopelessly out of my wheelhouse at this point so I'll just cite it for anyone also interested and suggest that these more recent publications do seem pretty confident in their conclusion that the impact did happen. So it seems user moloch-hai is correct:
Petaev, Michail I., et al. “Large Pt Anomaly in the Greenland Ice Core Points to a Cataclysm at the Onset of Younger Dryas.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 110, no. 32, 2013, pp. 12917–20.
Pretty cool stuff, thanks for sharing and prompting me to learn more about it.