> The authors pointed out “there are significant drawbacks in the existing human literature” including “lack of longitudinal studies, methodological heterogeneity, selection of tissue type, and the influence of developmental stage and trauma type on methylation outcomes”
The literature in this area is a mess, has become highly politicized. I’d give it another 10 or so years before I made any strong statements about these effects in humans. Famously the study of Holocaust survivors’ descendants didn’t show transgenerational effects.
I think many American movements tend to take on an everything bagel quality and it becomes too unclear what the actual demands are and what any politician could do to achieve the goal.
They literally aren't defending Bircherism ,they say that it would have been more productive to argue against them in public to discredit their ideas rather than letting them fester off in some dark corner. They're talking about how pushing bad ideas out of public view rather than arguing against them can exacerbate negative polarization and draw more people into bad ideas.
You have completely missed the point of the article. So you didn't actually read the article and you're making a dumb claim based on a misunderstanding.
> ,they say that it would have been more productive to argue against them in public to discredit their ideas rather than letting them fester off in some dark corner.
That doesn't work very well either. There are countless examples like the anti-vax nonsense.
I'll agree with the statement that deplatforming doesn't work very well. But it could work better than the alternatives in some cases.
Anti-vaxers were removed from every platform for more than 2 years during the pandemic, and that didn't work. I rarely see anyone actually going into a public forum to try to clearly communicate the evidence for vaccine safety in clear terms rather than just an appeal to authority. Clearly its a hard job, but I think its worthwhile.
> I rarely see anyone actually going into a public forum to try to clearly communicate the evidence for vaccine safety
Then you haven’t looked. There are endless examples of qualified people explaining the actual risks and benefits of vaccines in clear and honest terms.
Perhaps what you actually mean is that you don’t see this happen within the insular communities that embrace antivaccine rhetoric. You don’t see it there because such efforts are blocked. Go explain vaccines in an antivax subreddit and watch as you get downvoted into invisibility and probably banned from the sub.
> Then you haven’t looked. There are endless examples of qualified people explaining the actual risks and benefits of vaccines in clear and honest terms.
Yes there's plenty of that in some places, like tiktok or the NYT. I mean that people need to actually address it in places where people who are engaging in anti-vaxx content will see it and engage with it. There was a successful example a few years back where public health officials engaged with Chabad community leaders in Brooklyn and got them to encourage everyone to get measles vaccines, but it think this is all too rare.
From what I’ve seen there is a lot of effort placed on trying to reach out and correct these misplaced views (or at least there was under the previous administration). You are saying that the issue is that outreach is not being attempted when in fact it is.
> Chabad community leaders in Brooklyn
Was this a case of actual vaccine hesitancy? Most of the antivax stuff is not mere hesitancy but hostility. If you have an audience willing to listen you can potentially sway them. An audience who refuses to listen and assumes you are an evil liar is hard to work with.
> actually address it in places where people who are engaging in anti-vaxx content
And I explained why this is so difficult. Internet echo chambers are a huge source of this stuff and it’s extremely hard to pierce because participants actively block participants who dissent.
No I’m the Chabad case JFK’s bullshit nonprofit had been filtering and making phone calls in Yiddish to convince mothers not to vaccinate their children. However the community was receptive to arguments about the benefits after an outbreak.
So you still didn't read the article and you're changing the subject to cover for the fact that you made up that the article defends bircherism. Nice attempt at a deflection, but you're still reacting to something you didn't read based on basically just the headline.
What I'm saying is that this is a survivor effect: there are plenty of cases where deplatforming does work, it's just not 100% effective and so we have this situation like antibiotic resistance where pathologies have evolved around the defenses. It's kind of incredible that viruses have managed to evolve around vaccines to install a pro-virus person at the top of the US department of health to ensure better spread of viruses, but I guess life finds a way.
Also: this is entirely anglocentric. I don't think you'd find anyone claiming that the Chinese government censorship system backfired or is completely ineffective. It's an even stronger system than billionaires over there.
That wasn’t what you were saying but they’re good observations. This behavior of Americans was observed by Tocqueville’s observations about newspapers and the role that discussing them played in our political outcomes in allowing certain types of populist candidates to bubble up. There are analogues in English politics. The article had a continental example but it was just an analogy. That said, it’s reasonable for Americans to want to understand and adjust their strategies for quirks in their culture and political process; they can’t simply transplant Chinese government and culture here to please you, can they?
> This article is predicated on an unfounded counterfactual.
I think it's just evaluating the claim that removing these people from a public platform removes their ideas from popular discourse, which obviously didn't work. The article is arguing that failing to engage bad ideas head on leads to increasingly insular an polarized groups within society.
But... how obvious is that? Perhaps it did significantly reduce those ideas when it was active. Like, if Musk hadn't reinstated Trump's account we could be looking at a different presidency.
Yeah, I read the article. It doesn't address the possibility that the causality could be the other way around.
The stuff about Trump and Bhattacharya is just odd. Trump rose back to power after Musk bought Twitter and gave him a platform to spread lies again. Then Trump appointed RFK, who appointed Bhattacharya as a sort of token gesture.
The Fuentes stuff is just as odd - his popularity waned while he was censored, but after being reinstated to X he grew his base to a million followers. Again, how does this support the claim that deplatforming was a negative move?
I guess there's two competing narratives: deplatforming never worked, vs deplatforming was working until Musk stepped in and undid it. The article does not give any compelling arguments for the former.
There's a bit about that in the "Tyranny of the Intolerant" section. Imo the article isn't so much making a case for that as it is lifting quotations wholesale from Timur Kuran as a sort of appeal to authority to justify it's own narrative. It makes out like it's obvious that Kuran's work explains the rise of Trump and Fuentes, whilst Musk's hijacking of Twitter strikes me as a simpler more natural explanation.
There are in the US, those places just have more hostile legislatures and regulatory regimes that make construction impossible. See the debacle around the Foxconn Wisconsin project which happened under a very industry friendly governor. The great lakes are has nearly infinite water, and cold aim all winter. What they don't have is the ability to build anything.
The water in the great lakes is controlled by an international compact that prevents water from being diverted from the Great Lakes to other watersheds. So, water utilization from the Great Lakes is constrained. The Wisconsin Foxconn project was a PR thing on both sides. Foxconn started scaling back it's promises and construction almost immediately after the agreement was signed. Scott Walker needed good PR and promised huge tax credits without much in the way of assurances.
> The water in the great lakes is controlled by an international compact that prevents water from being diverted from the Great Lakes to other watersheds.
Who said anything about diverting it? Pump cold water out, store hot water until it cools to ambient temps, then dump it back in the lake.
> Scott Walker needed good PR and promised huge tax credits without much in the way of assurances.
Yeah, this is my point, the state wasn't actually prepared to see the deal through despite nominally being industry friendly vs Arizona where they have some follow through.
> No they do not. The flow there is already balanced, and lake levels are lower than usual.
You aren't going to meaningfully drain the lakes to cool chip fabs when the vast majority of that water will simply go back into the lake either directly or via the water cycle. It's not going to run off the land and into a river like with flood irrigation or similarly irresponsible water uses. The entire global chip industry today uses less water than the city of Hong Kong.
That’s not how the water system works. It’s not like all the evaporated water will end up in the lakes. California uses a lot of water for farming, it’s not like all the evaporated water ends up in the Sierras all the time. Water cycle is complex and reducing it to “it will just end up back to where it came from” is pretty reaching.
Besides it’s not just the evaporation. The leftover water concentrates a lot of the impurities that already exist in the water, and not all of it ends up in proper treatment facilities, which in turn pollutes the place wherever it ends up being. This is actually a problem in parts of Oregon.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/data-c...
California is very arid, when water evaporates it rains out over the ocean or farther north. The upper mid-west is very wet and the evaporated water will come back down over the Great Lakes watershed which is enormous.
> This is actually a problem in parts of Oregon
The problem in that part of Oregon was preexisting contamination in the drinking water.
"the county’s underground water supply had been tainted with nitrates — a byproduct of chemical fertilizers used by the megafarms and food processing plants where most of his constituents worked."
Discharging a little data center water back into lake Michigan isn't going to make any difference. The entire discharge of ever data center in the world wouldn't register.
They do use evaporative cooling. A few sites aren't going to have a big impact on a Great Lake though, especially when lots of that evaporated water ends up falling in the basin.
There's a Microsoft datacenter being built on the proposed Foxconn site and it will use 8.4 million gallons of water per year, so I guess industry got its way eventually?
That is <10% of the amount of water required to grow corn on the same land as the data center. Acre for acre, data centers consume a tiny fraction of the water consumed by agriculture.
Are the corn subsidies to produce high-fructose corn syrup and ethanol that important?
East of the rockies suffers from the problem of water being so unlimited nobody paid it any attention and let the desert states let federal policy reflect their problems and priorities to their detriment.
I think this is because when the water table is as saturated as it is in much of the east, there's no sense in trying to conserve. The water pumped out of the river just ends up on the ground, goes in the watershed, and back down the river. Caveat: Note that I'm talking about surface water. Fossil water sources like the Ogallala Aquifer being overused are another story entirely.
>when the water table is as saturated as it is in much of the east, there's no sense in trying to conserve. The water pumped out of the river just ends up on the ground, goes in the watershed, and back down the river.
The laws of nature may agree with you but the laws of man do not and lawfulness comes at great expense.
As someone in Indiana that is fighting tooth and nail to keep datacenters out (they don't bring jobs, taxes, or revenues and eat up very valuable resources), I say if you want to build here, then move your HQ and 10s thousands of high paid workers here.
How does the data center "eat resources"? Discharged water will stay in the watershed and it rains back down on you. As long as they aren't drawing directly out of the aquifer without putting it back then its fine. How do they not bring tax revenue? Do you not have property taxes? Maybe go lobby for those then.
Gary Indiana had a massive infrastructure for cooling and water diversion for their mega steel industry. Electricity already in place, again for steel industry, and anything it would sink would be a drop in the bucket of the Chicago metropolitan area (so Illinois would eat much of the externalities of whatever hypothetical minor price increase of electricity) grid that it's connected to and likely far less than they were using for their steel jobs.
Probably best to just let it stay an industrial wasteland shithole rather than put datacenters there.
Money is a resource. Someone has to deal with the utility rate hikes that tend to follow large new consumers - even when the AI bubble bursts in a few years, the electricity prices will stay high (or in the worst case, get even higher) because the utility needs to recoup its investments.
> How do they not bring tax revenue? Do you not have property taxes? Maybe go lobby for those then.
Forgot the /s? Seriously, property taxes are a joke because the "wealth" generated by the datacenters is absurdly high compared to their property lot size. If you were to extract the appropriate amount of taxes to cover for the costs, you'd have to raise them so high that you'd strangle the entire rest of your local economy. And stuff like we have here in Europe, taxing corporate profits, is not applicable as well because the profit is officially being made at some Delaware site (or Ireland in our case), not at some random datacenter.
> Money is a resource. Someone has to deal with the utility rate hikes that tend to follow large new consumers
It seems like new power generation should be a trivial concern, the upper Midwest is incredibly windy. The block to adding new generation is mostly antiquated local/state laws about connecting to the grid interchange. It's within local power to fix that. It's the power company lobbying against more cheap energy that causes prices to rise. Point your anger at the people sitting in the way of more capacity not the people wanting to use power.
> Forgot the /s? Seriously, property taxes are a joke because the "wealth" generated by the datacenters is absurdly high compared to their property lot size.
Then assess them on that basis. Property tax isn't a function of square feet, you can assess it on the basis of economic value. Property tax is a local issue, just vote to change the law.
> Point your anger at the people sitting in the way of more capacity not the people wanting to use power.
It's still waste. When the bubble pops, and it will pop, all these data centers will not be around as consumers any more. Just look what happened after the dot-com crash, and I'm not alone in thinking that the AI crash will be even worse than that.
And once again, it will be the taxpayers left with the bill, with half-constructed ruins being a blight on their neighborhoods, and with homeless moving in to the ruins and causing fires and police calls.
> Property tax isn't a function of square feet, you can assess it on the basis of economic value. Property tax is a local issue, just vote to change the law.
Good luck trying to stand up as a community of, say, 10.000 people against the lawyers of a multi-billion dollar company. They will find loopholes or in the worst case get your entire law tossed out in court.
That is why people are pissed, they know that the rich can afford to do whatever the fuck they want, with zero respects for the people affected by it.
> Someone has to deal with the utility rate hikes that tend to follow large new consumers
Commercial power is often charged differently than residential power, and there's also nothing that prevents charging disproportionately higher rates for e.g. 90th percentile power usage.
There's nothing inherent that means a data center in a locale should cause individual residential customers to pay more.
> There's nothing inherent that means a data center in a locale should cause individual residential customers to pay more.
Well the utility will have to make investments that are on a depreciation schedule anywhere on the scale of 20-50 years... so there will have to be a general rate hike to cover for the bank loan (banks aren't stupid, they want at least something in incoming cashflow increase), and when the AI bubble pops, guess who will have their rates hiked a second or third time? Yup the average consumers.
If adding a datacenter to a locale is not a net gain for the locale, you're failing to charge appropriately for things you should be charging for.
I'm sure there have been some datacenters that have tried to use "brings in jobs" incentives, and that could certainly go wrong if the incentives aren't designed correctly (e.g. proportional to the actual number of jobs), but as long as there aren't incentives being abused, a datacenter should be a net win.
Yeah seriously. If you're going to fight. "tooth and nail" against a data center, maybe reevaluate and direct your energy towards some productive like better tax laws, more energy generation, and so on.
It's interesting how simple this looks, off the shelf parts, and 3D printed components. I'm almost surprised this doesn't already exist after looking at it.
> I'm almost surprised this doesn't already exist after looking at it.
What's the use case? We have very good dedicated aerial drones and very good dedicated submarine drones. If something is technically possible but no one makes it usually it means it's not that interesting
If your mothership is low-observable/submersible you could park it in a harbor and when time is right unleash a swarm of hybrid aerial underwater drones with mission payload.
This design uses 1 swashplate server plus 1 brushless drive motor for each prop for a total of 8 motors. Designs in Ukraine are now using 1 brushless drive motor to synchronously drive all 4 props and 1 swashplate servo each prop, reducing total number of motors to 5, which might be a natural path of optimization for this type of hybrid aerial underwater?
> imagine what DARPA and the like have been doing for the past 20 years.
People always say this, but anyone I know who's ever worked in one of these companies that contracts for the DoD or DARPA always complains about how behind the market government tech is. Obviously private industry isn't producing competitors to the F35, but for less complicated kit the government doesn't seem to be doing anything super sophisticated. In fact a bunch of people I knew who went to Iraq bought supplemental gear on the private market.
Jimmy Lai is more courageous and principled than anyone you've probably ever met in your life. He'll die in prison for his belief that speech should be free in Hong Kong.
I will not called Jimmy Lai as principled based on how he run his news outlet. You can just simply check on wikipedia his reputationa and his news outlet reputation.
This is one from Jimmy Lai
https://hongkongfp.com/2020/11/02/explainer-apple-dailys-jim...
It isn't an appeal to emotion. Jimmy Lai stood up for free speech in Hong Kong, factually and it paying with his life. I'm simply pointing out that you have probably never seen real courage or conviction in your life and aren't in a good position to judge Jimmy Lai.
Your whole posting history is just inflammatory claims that you rarely stand behind. I keep bumping into you doing this, it's a bad look.
It's always going to be near impossible to get money back out of Cambodia, which is the implication in the post. You can trivially figure out where the author of the post lives too, but I'm not sure there's much usable advice here.
It is almost impossible. Unlike in developed countries, where banks can offer some level of protection to customers, in third-world countries, banks mainly protect themselves. All responsibility is pushed onto users. Banks take no accountability, and the government protects the banks.
Let me give a concrete example. When money is transferred to scammer accounts, it is immediately distributed across hundreds of other accounts and moved out of the electronic system in under 30 seconds. At that point, everything is gone.
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