Ah, this looks like a generalized version of a tool I made specifically to learn The Lusiads (a Portuguese epic poem). It's called MemorizeOnline and you can find it here: http://memorize.online.
The code is open source, you can find it here: https://github.com/jaysonvirissimo/os-lusiadas. Feel free to fork or just use for inspiration. My email is in the footer of the website if you'd like to discuss further.
And interestingly, the owners who spoke to Robb Report noted only a handful of times their rooms were ever used in an emergency. The notion of safety, however, is perhaps priceless.
The writer's implied argument can easily be shown to be defective by replacing the referenced object with an analogous one (device used to make bad rare events less bad given they happen):
Interestingly, only a handful of drivers have every actually used their airbags. The notion of safety, however, is perhaps priceless.
The basic fallacy in the writer's argument is that your odds of being prepared for a societal collapse are astronomically higher than your odds of needing an air bag.
The difference is distribution.
With apocalyptic events (pandemic, war, coup, hurricane, etc.), 100% of the population is affected in any given region perhaps every 50-200 years on average.
With serious car accidents, a fraction of a percent of the population is affected every day.
We don't tend to prepare well for rare events (like wars, famines, plaques, etc.). We do for frequent low-probability ones. Indeed, we're probably most worried about things rare enough to make the news (like school shootings), as unlikely as they are.
Panic rooms are all about being attacked in your own home. A general collapse of society isn’t required to use them.
Even in the safest countries, you will still have a small percentage of home invasions, kidnappings, and burglaries. That’s why people have locked doors, alarm systems, barred windows, guard dogs, actual guards, electrified fences, and finally panic rooms if all of the above fails.
Just for the record, history shows crises show up in even the safest countries. Some of these are slow and creeping, and some are rapid and sudden. On the other hand, if history is any indicator, you have maybe a 1/4 chance of having some regional, national, or global crisis situation hit during your lifetime. Many of those don't require a panic room, admittedly.
My odds of being unsafe in my home under normal circumstances are small. I'm not going to argue that if you have a billion dollars, you shouldn't get a panic room. Kidnapping a billionaire is much more worthwhile than a normal bloke, and I have no idea what the risk are. For most people, though, the odds are very low.
If I were rational, at my economic level, I'd have food stashed away, a few guns, medical supplies, and similar. However, I'm lazy. It's like backups. It's a good idea, but....
Richer people might have more, and poor people might have less. I've read about safety plans for rich people, and they're interesting. If you've got a few billion dollars, dropping a million or even a few million on a crisis plan is completely rational. Poor people, on the other hand, can't afford something like food+medicine stashed away (especially since they need to be rotated with expiration).
"Cheap" isn't absolute, but is relative to your level of wealth. When airbags first hit the market, they were too expensive for most car buyers and, in fact, most cars didn't get them until decades later. Presumably, the people in the article are wealthier than you or I, and they aren't acting irrationally any moreso than the early adopters (relative to the the late adopters) of airbags.
Panic rooms will never get cheap - except in new construction - though.
Unlike cars, houses aren't replaced every 3-10 years. Retrofitting panic rooms will always be expensive - just like retrofitting airbags to a car without them (no one does it).
Similarly, the cost/benefit isn't there to everyone. Every passenger probably has a roughly equal chance of being in an accident, the likelihood that an average person needs a panic room is much lower than the top 0.001% (and probably bottom percentage in the hood would benefit to, but can't afford it, or even giving up the real estate to one, unless it was the primary bedroom).
Airbags were also expensive predominantly because they weren't being installed - and automakers DIDN'T want to install them: https://www.csmonitor.com/1988/0519/abelt.html. I'm not sure cost of production or installation was ever really the significant hurdle to their uptake.
Panic rooms are already cheap for the "rich people" mentioned in the article, which is the point I was making by characterizing "cheapness" as being relative, not absolute, so the analogy holds.
Exactly. If I hit the powerball, I might as well buy a bunker, get one of those VIP health screenings, etc. The risks may be low, but the relative cost is inconsequential.
They're probably not worth it for most people. They may have enough utility to make it worth it if they're combined with other purposes (eg tornado cellar made out of block and reinforced door). They don't have to be extremely sophisticated, and they could be relatively cheap if one does it themselves. Sort of like the backyard bunkers during the cold war - they were obtainable for a middle class family if they built it themselves.
Also, car accidents are effectively instantaneous, then you're usually either dead or en route to a hospital within some exponentially distributed period of time.
Societal collapse can last anywhere from a week, in the event of a hurricane, to decades. Living self-sustained in relative comfort for a week is difficult, doing it for a month is much more difficult, and longer time periods approach impossibility very quickly.
77% of drivers have been in at least one accident. Your chances of getting into a car accident during a 1,000-mile trip are 1 in 366.
The average driver will file an insurance claim for an auto collision once every 17.9 years. This means that if you obtain your driver’s license at age 16, you will likely have a crash by the time you are 34. This means the average person has 3-4 vehicle accidents over the course of their lifetime
I've experienced four or five, and most people in my inner circle have experienced at least one. Anecdotal only, but I'd contest the claim that "most people will not experience one" at least within places that have mandated airbags in new cars for the last X years.
Ironically, and somewhat supportive of the airbags analogy, none of the accidents I had were in cars that had airbags, or those that were, the airbags didn't / needn't deploy. There was one, however, where seatbelts were critical.
I have to wonder if spending the cost of the safe room on better pay/working conditions for your employees might buy you more safety. Home invasions are pretty rare, but workplace shootings are quite common and have a higher death rate.
There are many variants of Occam's razor, but one commonality among them is that it is for comparing hypotheses that predict the same data (namely, the the simpler one should be preferred).
But in the case of COVID-19 lab escape versus zoonotic origin, the latter doesn't predict that the Chinese government and EcoHealth Alliance would attempt a coverup of the virus origins, so we really aren't talking about two hypothesis that explain the (same) data, and therefore this isn't really an appropriate candidate for the application of Occam's razor.
Chinese government will coverup even if China's lab is not the virus origin. Because their goal is to have a better image of the party.
To say it in other words, politicians will bullshit the populace in any case, they do not care if what they're saying is true or false as long as it makes them look better
McCarthy is a pretty unique figure in US history in that he was infamous for propagating the second "red scare" in the US. That's not to discredit these reports by any means, but it's not like he was do-gooder either. He was a vicious politician that didn't hesitate to accuse his enemies of being communist, which sometimes resulted in arrest and prosecution. [0]"McCarthyist" anti-communist (i.e. opposition political organization) laws were passed that were later struck down by the Supreme Court.
His ability to accumulate power this way made him a major political target, which isn't quite the same as someone just trying to reel in the 3 letter agencies.
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I read "The Crucible" in a high school English class and it significantly affected my political outlook, but having learned more of the history of that era (much of it not public knowledge when I first read it and certainly not when it was written) it's no longer clear to me that it still works as allegory.
From the article: "McCarthy—brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true—boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had “lost China” and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department—staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents—was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that."
Well, as the Venona project cables declassified in 1995 show, the State Department didn't just contain intellectuals that were pro-Soviet: it contained actual Soviet agents in contact with the USSR. This was by no means restricted to the State Department, but also included the Treasury, OSS (pre-CIA), and even the White House. See here: https://web.archive.org/web/20110514040131/http://www.access....
In addition, it is now known that the CIA ran an operation, at the request of Allen Dulles, to feed McCarthy false information about who in the government were Soviet spies with the deliberate purpose of discrediting him: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/48603/did-the-c....
Maybe this calls for a remake of "The Crucible", not as tragedy, but as supernatural horror.
For years, on the infrequent occasions when the subject of "The Crucible" would come up I would tell people, "But there were no witches in Salem."
That's the difference.
Undoubtedly, McCarthy was an odious individual in many ways. That has nothing to do with there being communists in Hollywood, the State Department, and wherever else.
Stay tuned. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
The issue is that being a communist isn't - and shouldn't be - a crime.
Collaborating with a hostile foreign power is - and should be - a crime.
McCarthy made no distinction between these two ends of the spectrum. Collaboration requires intent, which McCarthy often failed to provide evidence of. In those failures, he discredited himself and his enterprise.
In the past I've thought that the trouble with "McCarthyism" was its lack of respect for freedom of expression and freedom of conscience, as well as some of the dynamics of "moral panic". That doesn't mean that McCarthy was literally personally wrong about all of his claims, and as you point out, some of them have subsequently been vindicated. It also doesn't mean that the anti-Communist or anti-Soviet cause was unimportant.
I guess this raises a big question for me: what does liberalism look like in a cold war (or a hot war)? The illiberalism of the cold war as well as other things that were done to prosecute it (including the exaltation of espionage and the seemingly irreversible boom in spy agencies and the classified world) are deeply upsetting to me even though they responded to a real and, I would agree, grave threat.
Freedom has a fundamental asymmetry: it's much easier to give it up than to get it back. Imagine a society where it's possible to sell yourself into slavery -- you start out free, but in a moment of desperation you lose it forever.
Enemies of a free state use the state's freedom against it by exploiting this asymmetry. A moment of naivety by a voter or someone in power, or a traitor/spy, can dramatically undermine freedom.
The only solution is vigilence, which is hard to keep up forever. The Bill of Rights helps, but at some point we need to reject the politicians that are too naive to defend freedom.
EDIT: The socialist movement in the U.S. is of grave concern. Especially the Bernie Sanders brand, where he's a nice guy but somehow can't even recognize a failing socialist state a few years before it fails (Venezuela).
The problem is not the healthcare, but the power that the government is asking for, and the foolishness in thinking that the power grab will stop at some reasonable point.
If Vermont decided to have socialized medicine, I don't really care. But implementing it across the entire US is not going to work out well.
I'm not a fan of socialized medicine, but let's say you want to do it. The first thing to do if you want it to be successful is start with a medium-small state, and then take over a part of the system (e.g. emergency care). Show us all how great that is, and slowly expand. Administrators would gain experience, mistakes would be fixable, hard social questions get answered, etc., and if everything goes well maybe the whole country moves over.
A big bill for the whole country from someone who thought things in Venezuela were just peachy in 2011 is not a path for success.
For one thing, Sanders was not proposing a fully government-run healthcare system. Realistic options would be "a good-quality public option available at the federal level", or "single payer" healthcare where the government becomes the single main insurer, at least for basic preventative care and emergencies, or some other policy that ensures there is a "social safety net" in place that includes access to modern healthcare.
Sanders misjudgment about Venezuela is a valid criticism, but let's stop with the Red Scare rhetoric about socializing things. If we were going to socialize something, we would be talking about directly worker-owned enterprises. Ironically, that might actually be much better than just having the government run everything.
Also, you have deluded yourself if somehow you don't already think the US government is an abusive beast that exists in large part to create and maintain power for itself. Is healthcare really the straw that broke the camel's back? Is the government really that much worse than a private corporation that has almost no exposure to market forces? I can't exactly vote for the CEO of Aetna.
I think many people would be open to something other than "medicare for all", but so far that is the only serious public proposal that achieves the goal of ensuring access to modern, humane healthcare for all Americans.
This argument is similar to Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance [1], where authoritarians can use freedoms given to them by a society to remove those freedoms from others.
However, the statement insisting that Bernie Sanders will somehow turn the USA into Venezuela sounds more like dogmatic rhetoric more than something that is based on concrete fact.
Similar policies to those proposed in America by progressive Democrats, which the American Republican party frequently refers to as being socialist, have been implemented in some countries (see the Nordic Model [2]) without it turning into a disaster.
If socialist policies are going to be implemented successfully in the U.S., they need to be implemented by people who can tell the difference between Denmark and Venezuela. Sen. Sanders, while otherwise seemingly intelligent, cannot.
> Well, as the Venona project cables declassified in 1995 show, the State Department didn't just contain intellectuals that were pro-Soviet: it contained actual Soviet agents in contact with the USSR.
A stopped clock is correct twice a day.
1) Communist didn't automatically mean spy. And spy didn't automatically mean communist. In fact, most of our worst breaches weren't "communists".
2) The problem isn't just saying: "We have spies." It's finding real evidence on them.
The primary problem is finding real spies--and McCarthy had absolutely zero useful evidence to that end. If anything, he made it easier for the spies by kicking up so much cover.
So, McCarthy destroyed a lot of people ... destroyed civil liberties across the board ... and provided nothing useful to actually root out the real threats.
And this assumes that McCarthy was doing this to find actual spies and not for political gain. An assumption which I do not at all credit McCarthy with.
I definitely agree that SRS can reasonably be thought of as a learning superpower. I very much regret that I didn't start using Anki until college.
To save my own kids from such a regret, I've created Boethius, a SRS web application for the classical liberal arts to augment our homeschool curriculum. It's now in public beta here: https://www.boethi.us/.
Boethius (https://www.boethi.us/) is an app I made for my 7yo son to supplement his homeschooling curriculum. It involves completed "daily workouts" of exercises drawn from the seven classical liberal arts (grammar, arithmetic, astronomy, etc...).
The "Try Random Exercise" button lets you see immediately what it's like to use, but signing up is required to get most of the benefits, such as:
* A logical ordering of exercises (learn how to recognize nouns before learning about pronouns, learn what an argument is before learning the difference between validity and soundness, etc...),
* Spaced repetition (you review those you are struggling with most, but those you ace are brought up less frequently over time)
* Configuring your experience (select the number of exercises you need to complete each day for your "daily workout", whether to play audio by default or not, etc..)
* Creating any number of child accounts so you can keep tabs on your kids' progress over time
I had a hard with with "collections of nouns are called" (even though what I know what declensions are) because of a lack of context -- I answered "noun classes"
because that is another kind of collection of nouns that has something important in common grammatically. :-)
I might suggest "collections of nouns that use the same endings" or "collections of nouns that use the same inflections" or something, in order to be less ambiguous.
I don't agree at all that the EU has handled the pandemic well. See https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS... for a comparison of the US, EU, and East Asia (a region that could reasonably be characterized as handling the pandemic well) by linear per capita confirmed COVID-19 deaths.
In general, Europe may have better provision of public goods, but I’m not sure this is true in the current context. For example, it’s much easier to find a free-to-use restroom in Phoenix, Arizona than in Paris, France.
Very cool project btw.