Nazism isn't an internet insult. It was an actual, real thing that happened in this world, with an actual, real ideology, and the core of this ideology was racial-based social Darwinism.
BTW, re: the Congo in particular: the most common traditional type of fishing is basket fishing with woven funnels suspended in the rapids. You sure as hell better know how to swim if you want to do that.
Famous angler Jeremy Wade referred to the local Congo fishermen as nearly suicidal, just diving into the rapids to get nets unstuck and the like.
SIGH.
There were 10 people chosen and people with dark skin in the USA make up about 1 out of 8 Americans.
1 in 8 is 12,5%.
African-American without mixed race in 2024 is estimated at 46,3M, or 14,2%
With mixed race, that rises to 51,6M, or 15,8% of the population.
Some hispanics have dark skin, some light. In 2023 there were 62,5%, representing 19% of the population (though there's a small overlap with black - doesn't affect the numbers much).
In 2023, Asians were 25,8M people, or 7,7% of the population. This is again a diverse group with mixed skin tones (for example, the Indian subcontinent)
In 2023, there were 1,6M people (0,49%) of pacific island ancestry and 3,3M native Americans - again, mixed skin tones.
People of Mediterranean European ancestry often have so-called "olive" complexions.
With a strict definition of dark skin, you're probably talking like 1 in 6 or so (~16,7%). With a looser definition, you could be talking upwards of 40% or more of the population.
The chances of the 10 people to be a perfect representation of the racial demographics of the USA is quite small.
Here are the actual odds of selecting no dark-skinned people at different population percentages being "dark skinned", by one's definition of "dark":
15%: 1 in 4
20%: 1 in 8
25%: 1 in 17
30%: 1 in 34
35%: 1 in 73
40%: 1 in 165
Then consider that NASA astronauts are required to pass a swimming test
It is not a test of swimming prowess, just of an ability to not drown. You have to be able to do three lengths of a 25-meter pool without stopping, three lengths of the pool in a flight suit and tennis shoes, and tread water for 10 minutes while wearing a flight suit. This is not some massively imposing task. You don't have to be Michael Phelps to become an astronaut.
and as a general rule those with African ancestry tend to have less stamina in swimming than those with lighter skin
Yes, white athletes tend to have an advantage in swimming. A 1,5% advantage. While a 1,5% advantage may be of good relevance at the highest level of a sport, it's hardly meaningful in a "can you tread water with a flight suit on" test.
Think of the different races as just really big families
That is not how genetics work, and is instead the pseudoscience that drove fascist movements, and in particular, Nazism.
There is far more genetic diversity within a given "race" than between them. Certain genetic traits tend to have strong correlates - for example dark skin and sickle cell anemia - but that's not because races are some sort of genetic isolates, but rather for very practical reasons (dark skin is an adaptation to not die of skin cancer in the tropics, and sickle cell disease is a consequence of a genetic adaptation to not die of malaria which also happens to be found in such climates). But the vast majority of genes don't have such strong correlates.
The concept of "race" as a distinct biological category is not supported by modern genetics.
If we are to ignore skin color and just put one big family up against another big family on swimming ability then just due to random mutations, perhaps some Darwinian selection way back in the family tree, one family will swim better than the other
The main "racial difference" in swimming ability in the US is "inherited", that is, parents who don't know how to swim tend to not teach their kids how to swim. As a result, white children are 56% more likely to receive swimming lessons than black children. One can expect that to directly correspond to an advantage in adulthood. But again, the ability to tread water is not out there knocking 90% of astronaut candidates out of the race - especially given that astronaut candidates tend to be athletic and motivated to learn new skills.
People with light skin tend to have ancestors that had to go fishing for their protein
Utter tripe. Fish consumption has no correlation with skin colour. How much fish do you think your average herder or plains horseman ate? And fish is massively important in much of Africa - in coastal areas (Gabon, Ghana, Sierra Leone in particular note), along the Congo (it's literally the world's largest river, people have been fishing it since time immemorial), Lake Victoria, Lake Chad, the Niger Delta, etc etc. What sort of racist stereotype world are you living in where black people don't fish?
Having a large candidate pool relative to the number chosen makes it easier to show bias and still get high-quality candidaes, not harder.
The year is 1992. You are an undergrad in physical science at a pretty good school (but certainly not Ivy league). In a freshmen chemistry class final, you use wild extrapolation from a small data set to make significant extrapolation of the x-axis. Your professor gives heavy sigh, and gives out yet-another F. You go on to become a climate scientist and continue to do this because you never understood why it is bad. Your now dead professor can only roll over in his grave.
A number of the PM 2.5 studies I've seen do exactly this. They gather air quality data and run the figures based on preexisting models of health impacts to entire populations or even the entire planet and surprise out comes insane figures.
I just want to know how they came to radically different figures in a later revision of the same work. This is well outside the range of the CI in the version published in nature.
Prior version of this work here:
https://www.nber.org/system/fi...
It states: "We project that climate-driven increases in future smoke PM2.5 could result in 27,800 excess deaths per year by 2050 under a high warming scenario, a 76% increase relative to estimated 2011-2020 averages. "
From abstract published in nature:
"We project that smoke PM2.5 could result in 71,420 excess deaths (95% CI: 34,930 - 98,430) per year by 2050 under a high warming scenario (SSP3-7.0) - a 73% increase relative to estimated 2011-2020 average annual excess deaths from smoke."
This is why you should say please and thank you around LLMs and avoid unnecessary chatter.
DeepSeek the model (as opposed to DeepSeek the online service which is pretty bad) is in my experience no worse in terms of censorship/refusals than the other models.
So I guess the light pollution from LEDs is due to light reflecting off the ground?
Higher frequencies are preferentially scattered. Most LED street lamps operate at higher frequencies than the HPS they replaced.
They make shit up because they have no meta-cognition and don't know any better.
This study applies model of lighting conditions throughout the country to a circadian health model and draws conclusions about health impacts of each of the three scenarios from model evaluation alone.
I am personally skeptical of these types of extrapolations from models generally. Numbers being bandied about in this study seem unreasonably large. I would be far more interested in learning about studies that actually managed to find real world health signals in real world data following time policy changes elsewhere in the world.
A previous well advertised study focusing on transition itself found statistically significant signals for increased heart attacks that magically vanished when averaged over the week. Basically there was a fleeting temporal shift of a few days over when events would occur.
In the absence of compelling evidence and the fact this was already tried in the 70s where this experiment ended in popular rejection I prefer to keep the current policy the way it is.
The US has 6 timezones already. It couldn't be much worse if you just let each state decide.
There are three time zones across the 48 contiguous states.
I opted out of this bullshit years ago.
How does one "opt out"? What does this even mean? Does everyone else now organize their time around your schedule?
Define "works fine". From what I can see core features of Windows 11 fail without TPM, and bonus points your local system credentials are stored locally on your drive, on a drive that can't be encrypted.
There are no "core features" that depend on TPM. Not even bitlocker requires TPM. Personally I do not want and have no use for Microsoft FDE. Ditto for Hello and similar BS.
An encrypted disk provides no useful security benefit and represents an unnecessary additional vector for data loss. The tying of keys to a physical computer
I use class 0 to protect storage on my laptop against physical theft which has no overhead or OS dependencies whatsoever. I trust this solution far more than bitlocker
It works fine as much as a car which doesn't have functioning locks on it "works fine".
Car locks can be easily bypassed. Designing car locks in such a way it becomes meaningfully difficult to bypass serves no useful purpose. People who care will just break the glass to gain entry.
Slashdot used to criticise Microsoft for lax security, and now they are criticising them for mandating hardware security measures despite being the last popular OS to do so.
Slashdot is not a monolith neither are individual needs and value judgements. Personally I want security features that protect me from attackers rather than conspiring against me or seeking to protect systems from users. I have a laundry list of useful basic security features Microsoft has spectacularly failed to deliver on.
Did the loom make it so a clothier only works 1 day a week instead of 6?
Did the tractor make it so a farmer only needs to work a fraction of the time?
Automation gives a person leverage to multiply their labor. So one excavator operator can do the work of 40 shovel ditch diggers.
At the company I work at, we automate tasks all the time and we've never worked less for it, it just means we do other things.
I don't think anything different will happen with AI. Some jobs might be eliminated, workers will be able to do more with less, and they'll either still be asked to work 40 hours a week because that's what they're being paid for, or they'll only be paid for what's needed (24 hours a week, say) which may not be enough to make ends meet. Oh, they thought they were going to get paid not to work those extra two days when AI is doing the job? How quaint.
And most of us have to do something to make ends meet because we're slaves to banks and debt.
What sets AI apart from historical precedence is the immortalization of "dead labor". When it can do everything living labor can do and for free the whole technology creating opportunity thing goes out the window. While this is far from what AI currently is a system that lives up to the hype sure as hell would be.
You voted for this. The Democrats have long since started curtailing these abuses because they are extremely unpopular with their base of minority, specifically black and latino, voters. For obvious reasons since over policeing is basically wrecking their communities.
TSA started using naked body scanners / rape scan (e.g. Rapiscan) machines under the Obama administration. I stopped flying after that so for me the data sale thing is moot.
Again the Democrats are objectively better for the economy and for your pocketbook. That is not a point anyone can argue in good faith.
At this point anything is better than the MAGA cult lead by an incompetent treasonous insurrectionist rapist murderer but this isn't saying much. Democrats have a track record of willingly selling out on privacy and liberty.
That 1000x cost in resources isn't as insignificant as you make it out to be. Password cracking is *all* about the cost.
Password cracking is all about results. 1000x is thermal noise in regimes where exponents protect systems. So a password takes hours instead of minutes or days instead of hours and you have to throw more cores at the problem than you would otherwise. At the end of the day outcomes and expenditures do not meaningfully change.
Getting the job done is no excuse for not following the rules. Corollary: Following the rules will not get the job done.
