Well, now we’re getting somewhere! You want to say I’m being hyperbolic? That’s cool. I clearly was. It literally does not happen at every single movie. I exaggerated for effect. Mea culpa.

(Doesn’t change the fact that I’ve heard and seen these things often, of course.)

> Please spare me the high and mightiness about any passive aggressiveness in my post, I just responded in kind to your own passive dig at those locales.

Erm, OK. I wasn’t being passive. I said it pretty bluntly. Was it unclear?

As the kids say: “do better”.

(that’s a joke btw)

Hi! I lived in Seattle, in SF and I’ve been to Portland many times. And I’ve seen the behavior I’ve described in all of the locations I’ve mentioned. Personally. With my own eyes and ears. More than once in each place! Strange, that.

So I don’t know…right back at you with the stereotyping thing? Because what you’re doing is taking your own limited experiences, overgeneralizing those and throwing shade at people who say things you disagree with.

(Also, by the way: the “please stereotype less” response is practically a whole delicious stereotype in itself. And here you are using it! The way non-passive-aggressive people say what you’re trying to say is: “I think you’re wrong, because I’ve never seen that.” This approach has the distinct rhetorical advantage of being honest, clear and direct, but of course, lacks that emotional punch of trying to belittle your inquisitor with a subtle insult.)

That's because it doesn't. I checked today. Japan requires that you renounce your US citizenship after you obtain Japanese citizenship, not before.

No, that's called "obnoxious virtue signalling" and people do it all the time in places like San Francisco, Seattle and Portland. It's gross and unnecessary. Don't glorify it.

That said, the folks who are recruiting for clinical trials are often playing on this emotional reaction, and over-promising what can be accomplished, or simply not correcting the misperceptions of the people they are recruiting.

It's hard to recruit people into trials when you tell them with absolute clarity that there's very little chance it will benefit them personally.

> Your other option is to do nothing and die

I really don’t want to be this blunt, but I don’t know how to say it any other way: death is not an option. When you’re at the stage of clinical trials for cancer therapies, it is the inevitable outcome. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be in the trial. Maybe it extends the inevitable, maybe it doesn’t. The odds lean heavily toward the latter. And there’s also always a cost.

I’ve lost friends and family to cancer too, and watching people you love torture themselves with ineffective (or even minimally effective) treatments is agonizing.

When it comes to clinical trials, you need to start with the cold, hard reality that you’re doing an altruistic experiment with the remaining portion of your life. There are lot of people who don’t understand that, and see trials as some kind of back-door to better treatment.

As GP noted, most drugs don't work. To make it a bit more specific, even in phase 3, the failure rate for cancer drugs is something like 50%. And that's typically for some non-survival endpoint (assuming you even get the treatment, which is itself a coin flip).

Clinical trials are noble, admirable things to do, but too many people think of them as treatments, when they really are not. They're an experiment that you do with your body when you reach the end of the road and there are no more options.

It always makes me a little sad to hear how patients talk about trials and fight to get into them, as if being in the trial is somehow progress. Expectations are not being managed properly.

While using this information for comparing clinical trials is fine, I want to emphasize that it would be phenomenally short-sighted to skip first-line approved immunotherapy in order to preserve the option for some random trial later on.

I'm not sure if you're actually suggesting this, but immunotherapies are some of the best cancer therapeutics that exist, so skipping approved drugs for future experiments is just a bad idea.

I didn’t say that there’s nothing that could potentially be useful, just that the tradeoff isn’t worth it for most people. This post inadvertently makes the case that at least some “normies” who are excited about this stuff are just easily sniped by the new shiny. Said differently, I am pretty certain that if Muse weren’t free, this lady would quickly lose all interest. There’s only so much money you’re willing to spend finding library books and cheap stuff on facebook marketplace.

Persistent searches might be the one area where I broadly agree that there’s a use (i.e. sniping tickets) but how often do I do this? Not enough to justify a subscription. And for the truly valuable stuff (hotels, airline tickets, etc.) I don’t trust the bots to execute without my attention.

I understand the need. I have a calendar. I put appointments in it. It provides alerts. What value does having a lossy/inaccurate/fragile robot in the middle give me? Data entry?

Now look...if I were in a position of power with literally everyone in my life, and I could somehow justify the social cost of requiring that they interact with a robot to negotiate demands on my time (the actual hard part), then maybe there would be additional value. Some people can do this! I'm sure one must deal with Mark Zuckerberg's PA to schedule his time [1]. It is very nice indeed when you are the kind of person who can defer your supplicants to a representative who manages the hoi polloi for you. If you can delegate these irritations to a robot, well, so much the better, I suppose.

If I tried this, as not-Mark-Zuckerberg, I would be what normal people refer to as "an asshole". I would also like to see you try this with your child's teacher, or the PTA, or doctor, or...

The response you will receive, an alarmingly high percentage of the time, will rhyme with "buck off". This stuff reminds me a lot of how valley folks keep trying to push spy glasses on the proles (silly normies never understand the genius of that technology, either...)

> And once they start school there's an endless amount of deadlines and "reminders". A personal assistant that can automatically keep your reminders + calendar up to date based on your inbox would be very nice.

Let me introduce you to...Gmail, from like, ten years ago. It looks for appointments in my mail and put them in my calendar. Somewhat to the point, it is often wrong, requiring more work to correct than it would to just enter the data myself.

[1] Somehow I doubt his wife is in this group.

If you then follow up with the thing using the little chat box, it actually kicks off a non-trivial model result, which can sometimes completely reverse the response. After all, your search results are usually based on a few words.

The pitches for Dots, Grok Bot, etc., have been spectacularly uncompelling for me as a civilian. I don't need or want a bot to book my flights or read my inbox. I'm not so busy that these things have a value high enough to be worth the effort.

As a worker or an entrepreneur...maybe. Depends on the task, and how many other people were flinging slop at me on a daily basis. I could see the value of a calendar bot, or an expense reporting bot or a bullshit paperwork bot or a slop-return (slop jai alai?) bot, but there's no way in the world I'd give a bot access to the information necessary to, say, do my personal taxes.

If so, it isn't particularly surprising that the line would go down.

EDIT: yes, it is. Looking at the same graph for all of Russia, and there's no discernible pattern:

https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=7d

same for the 48h view:

https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=2d

At the least, it means these particular compounds aren't quickly breaking down into ever-smaller nano-particles that can be absorbed into living things.

If there is demand for it, it's "socially justified". We don't live in a command economy, and thankfully, there's not a panel of woke elders deciding what we get to build. One of the great things about capitalism (indeed, the entire purpose of the thing) is that it does a great job of balancing supply to demand.

The decision of whether or not to build one big datacenter, or a billion teeny datacenters is also well solved by competition, and doesn't need our help.

https://datacenters.google/efficiency/

Attacking them for size is a bit like saying that freight trains are bad because they’re heavy.

Not even close to a true statement.

EIA says that the lowest electricity use by state in 2024 was Vermont, at 5.5B kwh. That’s about 0.6GW, if you assume continuous uniform use. By the time you get to #48 (Hawaii) you’re over the 1GW mark [1].

According to the EIA, US utility-scale generation capacity in 2025 was 1.3 million megawatts [2], so assuming that these new 1GW datacenters were on the public grid, they would each consume about 1/1300th of the 2025 supply. Not nothing, but not nearly the dramatic impact that you’re suggesting.

For perspective, the Grand Coulee Dam has a generating capacity of about 7,000MW. Robert Moses dam in Niagara Falls does about 2,700MW.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/state/seds/data.php?incfile=/state/seds/...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

Finding employees who were legal to drive, insurable, at least somewhat able to avoid accidents, and reliable enough to show up to work was a constant hassle.

I've worked physical labor too, though never in a factory. More like lugging baggage and cleaning toilets. Still, people got hurt doing it, especially over a lifetime of labor.

It comes down to rarity of skill. Not to be to crass about it, but when your primary value is that you're willing to put yourself in physical harm, the market for your offering has a lot more supply than demand.

For example, I spend a lot of time in hotels when I was young. Just finding people who were reliable and trustworthy and legal enough to drive the airport van without wrecking it were like 1 in 10 of the people who were potentially eligible to do it. If you were able to do rudimentary math and not steal from the till, you were one of the "lucky" few who got to work at the front desk. If you showed up regularly, well, the world was your oyster.