• 0 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 27th, 2023

help-circle


  • Not_mikey@lemmy.worldtoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldDeaths from Wars & Cars
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    4 months ago

    What were fundamentally talking about here is cost of human lives. And any cost can be added up for something and compared to the cost of another thing, as long as the units are the same.

    Again if you buy a house over 30 years and pay $10,000 a year you can say that house cost you $300,000. You can then compare that to the car you also payed $10,000 a year for but over 4 years and say that the car cost you $40,000. You don’t say well since I only payed for the car for 4 years so I should only compare it to the 4 years I payed for the house, so the house actually only cost $40,000. We understand that we should look at total monetary cost over time for things. If you don’t than you end up in credit card debt because why would you pay off your $100 debt when you can pay $5 minimum payment, you bought a coffee for $5 the other day and that wasn’t that much. Then 5 years down the line you ended up paying $500 in total and are still paying it because you haven’t addressed the problem/principal.

    If you agree that loss of life, like a dollar, is all of equal value, whether your rich or poor, from the u.s. or Africa, or born 2 years ago or 200, then this argument holds true.

    In this sense you can compare old age to cars and old age probably costs more but there’s less we can do about it. Just like you can say that buying food will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars over your life but that’s just the price of living, it’s necessary. Meanwhile that extra $500 you spent on your credit card is completely unnecessary and could have been avoided if you had decided to solve the problem instead of letting it fester and slowly drain you.

    The best way to get to that person with that problem is to show them what they’ve spent on that problem in total and compare it to something more tangible, eg. you could’ve bought a PlayStation with that money. That person could realize that they need to fix the issue then, or they could continue to ignore it and end up paying thousands over there lifetime, and we could end up ignoring cars and let 70 million people die over the next century.


  • Not_mikey@lemmy.worldtoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldDeaths from Wars & Cars
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    4 months ago

    Ok, then since 1914 cars have killed more people than WWI, that’s the same time frame. We don’t look at deaths from WWI that way though because we view it as a discrete event that took place between 1914 and 1918 and look at that event. No one compares wars by deaths per year, it’s deaths per war. We look at how many people were killed because of this thing, be that war, disease or technologies, that is the human cost of that thing.

    If you look at the cost of things that were paid monetarily you don’t look at the cost per year, at least not after the fact. If your comparing the cost of your house that you paid $10,000 a year totalling to $200,000 to a car you bought all at once for $10,000 you don’t say they cost the same or they can’t be compared, the house cost more.


  • Not_mikey@lemmy.worldtoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldDeaths from Wars & Cars
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    4 months ago

    Do you think statements like COVID was killing more people per day than 9/11 or that it has killed more people than WWII in the u.s. inflammatory?

    If so is that a bad thing? A graph showing the amount of malnourished children in the u.s. would be very inflammatory to progressives, just as a chart showing the amount of immigrants entering the u.s. would be inflammatory to trump supporters. Factual agitprop isn’t objectively bad it’s just subjectively bad depending on what you think people should be angry about.

    Subjectively you may disagree that car deaths are something to be angry about but objectively the graph is fine unless it’s false or misleading. Its not stating or implying that cars are more deadly than all wars combined, it’s stating that cars have killed more than some specific wars. Whether that fact makes you angry is up to you.


  • Not_mikey@lemmy.worldtoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldDeaths from Wars & Cars
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    15
    ·
    4 months ago

    Why? This isn’t making the statement cars cause more deaths than all wars, it’s saying it causes more deaths than specific wars. When people say Spanish flu caused more deaths than WWI or that COVID was killing more people a day than 9/11 you don’t turn that on it’s head and demand you compare the flu to all wars or COVID to all terrorist attacks. It’s just a metric to show the human cost of things, which makes a lot of sense to people who live in a market economy who want to put a price on everything. You can’t compare apples and oranges, you can compare the cost of apples and oranges though.


  • Not_mikey@lemmy.worldtoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldDeaths from Wars & Cars
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    4 months ago

    wars tend to be a lot shorter than the existence of cars

    Yeah but depends on how you define wars. For example the mongol conquests is up there and that lasted a good 60 years. You could say thats multiple wars tied up in a single cause or crisis.

    These events can be on a spectrum between the thirty years war, to the crisis of the third century and the three kingdoms period, each around 60 years, to the hundred years war. The longer it gets the more it goes from being about discrete battles in a war, to discrete conflicts in a war, to discrete wars in greater war/crisis.

    Either way on the ground these crisis look the same for the common people. Armies repeatedly going back and forth over your land, looting, raping, killing and spreading disease and making your life miserable and after a few decades this becomes normalized. In this sense cars could be a good comparison, a persistent normalized threat constantly killing people.

    The casualties for cars even in this context look greater. The three kingdoms period, probably the deadliest of these crisis, caused 30 million deaths. Why it doesn’t compare well though is that was half the population of China, whereas 70 million is probably only a couple of percent of the people who live in car centric countries.


  • I think you misunderstand what apples value proposition is, at least nowadays. The app store and not being able to use other app stores is not a reason people get iPhones. Maybe back when app stores were first created and the threat of malware was greater people might have considered it but nowadays no one cares. Even the idea of a unified ecosystem isn’t as much a selling point any more because Google and Samsung offer similar seamless integrations with their accessories. You can see this in their marketing, they aren’t focused on how all the apple products work together easily any more. In their marketing you can see what they think their value proposition is, and what was their big Superbowl ad this year, longer battery life …

    Apple at this point knows it doesn’t have much of a value proposition for switching from android. So the only way they’re gonna sell new phones is to get the kids who don’t have a phone and convince the people who do have an iPhone to get a new one.

    They convince the kids through their tried and true aesthetics and lifestyle marketing, this is about half there marketing these days. This along with iMessage in the U.S. and the general fear of being in the out group and obsession with brands that younger people have moved them towards iPhones.

    They convince the current users with incremental upgrades, eg. Better battery life, better camera; and maintaining the walled garden and keeping exit costs high so they don’t turn to androids for those incremental updates.

    All this is to say that apple having a single app store isn’t a sign of consumer sentiment, but a sign of apples desire to milk as much profits out of their current users as they can. Other app stores can only benefit the consumers, either they do get them for lower fees or don’t because they put some value on the “ecosystem”. From a company’s perspective yes your right that they want to be able to do anything to their product they want, but the goal of regulation is to step in when the companies desires are at odds with the people or the consumers desire, this is one of those cases.





  • Oh definitely, I don’t see it getting to SF before the bright line opens and I don’t see it getting to la in the next decade. But the bright line is using more tried and tested technology and methods in a significantly less populated area on an established corridor, while hsr is building from scratch through the heartland of California.

    It’ll take a long time but it will eventually get done, because there is still a will, not a strong one, to get it done. Most Californians recognize the immense value it will bring and will keep pushing for it.


  • Oh definitely, I don’t see it getting to SF before the bright line opens and I don’t see it getting to la in the next decade. But the bright line is using tried and tested technology and methods, while hsr is building from scratch.

    It’ll take a long time but it will eventually get done, because there is still a will, not a strong one, to get it done. Most Californians recognize the immense value it will bring and will keep pushing for it.



  • Huge tourist hub and destination for a lot of flights. Need lines from both the northeast and Midwest to capture a majority of the air traffic going there.

    Speaking as a former midwesterner who would drive down to Florida with their family for vacations this would be a god send, I’m sure most east coasters would agree too.



  • That study is like giving a written test to an illiterate adult, seeing them do worse than a child and saying they aren’t intelligent or innovative. Like I said earlier intelligence is multi-faceted, and chatgpt excels at rhetorical, conversational and other types of written intelligence. It does not, as that study shows, do well in spatial manipulation, that doesn’t mean it’s not intelligent. If you gave that same test to a paralyzed blind person with little to no concept of spatial reality they’d probably do just as bad. If you asked them to compose a short story or an essay they might be good at it because that’s where they’re capabilities lye. That short story could still be innovative in its composition and characters, and could be way better than anything a child wrote.

    You have to measure different types of intelligence with different tests. If you asked chatgpt and a set of adults and children to write a short story about a wholey new subject chatgpt would beat most of the children and probably some of the adults.

    And if that short story is about a new subject matter completey out of its training set what/who is it plagiarizing from? You could say it’s taking common tropes, themes and story elements from other stories, but that’s fundamentally what a lot of writing and culture is. If that’s plagiarism then you should be more worried about the marvel franchise as it’s a plagiarism machine that has way more cultural impact.


  • Not_mikey@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldA fair trade
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    25
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    7 months ago

    Screw ball golf, disc golf though solves all it’s problems

    1. Can play in almost any environment so no habitat destruction needed. Might have to clear a few trees or brush in dense forest but otherwise mostly keeps forests intact

    2. No elitism or arrogance. It’s one of the cheapest sports there is, just requires a couple $15 discs and most courses are free and are part of parks. Not much maintenance is needed on the course.

    3. Easier to pick up. Most people can at least throw a disc 10 yards or so after a couple tries. Also more forgiving if drunk or high in that way.

    4. More interesting to watch /play. Courses usually have obstacles like trees and the flight path of discs has a lot of lateral movement so if your good/lucky you can weave it through the obstacles.


  • It can answer questions as well as any person. Just because you may need to check with another source doesn’t mean it didn’t answer the question it just means you can’t fully trust it. If I ask someone who’s the fourth u.s. president and they say Jefferson they still answered the question, they just answered it wrong. You also don’t have to check with another source in the same way you do with asking a person a question, if it sounds right. If that person answered Madison and I faintly recall it and think it sounds right I will probably not check their answer and take it as fact.

    For example I asked chatgpt for a chocolate chip cookie recipe once. I make cookies pretty often so would know if the recipe seemed off but the one it provided seemed good, I followed it and made some pretty good cookies. It answered the question correctly as shown by the cookies. You could argue it plagiarized but while the ingredients and steps were pretty close to some I found later none were a perfect match which is about as good as you can get with recipes which tend to converge in the same thing. The only real difference between most of them is the dumb story they give at the beginning which thankfully chatgpt doesn’t do.

    The 7th grader and plagiarism comment make me think you haven’t played with them much or really tested them. I have had it write contracts, one of which I had reviewed by a lawyer who only had some small comments, as well as other letters and documents I needed for my mortgage and buying a home. All of these were looked over by proffesionals and none of them realized it was a bot. None of them were plagiarized too because the parameters I gave it and the output it created were way too unique to be in its training set.