Slow Running Catches on Among a Group of Forgotten Athletes – WSJ:
At the end of the day, people shouldn’t be concerned about being a fast or thin runner, says Dr. Tamanna Singh, co-director of the Sports Cardiology Center at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. They should care about being a strong runner.
I don’t run, but I do ride a recumbant. And anything–even just walking for 30 minutes a day–is far far better than doing nothing.
Is China Reshaping the Global Oceans Regime?:
Beijing sees itself as fundamentally above the law and beyond accountability to others, especially smaller states. And while full-scale global change to the oceans regime is beyond China’s grasp, Kardon writes, Beijing’s actions may have consequences beyond its nearby waters.
The law of the sea—codified for decades in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea—is pretty clear on most things. Countries have territorial seas stretching 12 nautical miles off their coasts. Islands do, too. Rocks and submerged features do not. Countries also have resource zones that stretch at least 200 nautical miles, theirs alone to fish, mine, and harvest deep-sea riches. Every state can fly, sail, and operate in waters beyond the territorial seas and pass freely through straits. The problem is that China, though a party to the U.N. convention, flouts each of these elements.
At the bottom of the ontological stack, there is naked force: the ability of a man to put a bullet through the head of another man. Governments are monopolies on this sort of force–and governments establish their legitimacy by promising only to use this force when necessary to enforce a set of laws that are transparent to the people who may be at the receiving end of that bullet.
But without force, laws are simply a suggestion: there is nothing preventing someone with a bigger gun to simply say “yeah, I don’t care.”
China is apparently putting this to the test. And China does not really care what we think of China, so long as it can establish the de-facto reality–which it can when there is no-one who is willing to enforce the de-jure status quo.
And unfortunately the Western world has forgotten that laws without a government willing to enforce them are just suggestions: we’ve seen this with Europe’s approach to international law, with the United States telling the International Court of Justice to go hang (as the US is not a signatory to the treaty establishing it), and even with the “Defund The Police” movement.
Breathing in smoke is bad, mmmkay?
But that’s not the question.
The question is: when you live in a city blanketed with smoke, should you advise citizens to mask when they walk outside, etc? Let’s think through that.
First, recognize that some baseline exposure will happen no matter what. Even in your house, you still can smell smoked salmon. The baseline exposure may dwarf any portion remotely modifiable.
Second, recognize that a tiny fraction of people will mask anyway, and others will exercise outdoors without a mask bc they don’t care. Ergo, your policy will at best affect a tiny portion of people. Those who will now mask who otherwise wouldn’t. This may be a vanishingly small group. Yet, the success of the policy hinges on this!
Now think it through a little more.
How much will they mask? Can they sustain it? Will they have gaps at their nose? Will they alter their behavior (go out more when they otherwise wouldn’t?) Aka the Peltzman effect?
In essence, the societal benefit of a masking requirement is not the same as the individual benefit of masking.
Specifically, a masking requirement will not change the minds of those who are already preparing to mask for their health, and those who are refusing to mask (or are forgetting to mask) probably won’t change their minds.
On the margins, you’re only altering the behavior of a small subset of people–and chances are very good they won’t persist in masking anyway. (How many chin-diapers did you see during the pandemic? How many exposed noses?)
In exchange for this requirement whose benefits are marginal at best (as a requirement is only as good as the behavior it alters and the benefits of that altered behavior), you spend hard-earned social capital that cannot be easily regained in the future. Social capital that cannot be spent on other tasks.
And when you consider this requirement is about changing behavior, you have to consider other potential paths towards changing behavior. Such as an educational public service announcement which briefly explains the benefits, rather than a mandate people that people increasingly ignore.
Worse, you cannot simply pass a policy then, when people change their behavior, you can’t claim a victory: you don’t know–because you haven’t conducted the randomized trial–if the people who choose to wear masks would have put one on anyways. It’d be like passing a mandate about wearing jackets when it’s snowing outside: you can’t declare victory because people then put on jackets before going outside.
Finally, the real motivation for me writing this column is that public health is being led by the dumbest people. They want us to accept that bioplausibility is the basis for costly, recurring policy choices and it simply isn’t. You need real world, randomized data.
(Additional page breaks mine to help with clarity in the extracted quote.)
Three Myths About Marx | AIER:
So when did Karl Marx burst into the intellectual mainstream?
It wasn’t until 1917, when an obscure band of revolutionary Marxist intellectuals took advantage of political instability in Russia and staged a coup d’état, seizing control of its government. The Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath almost instantly turned Marx into an intellectual celebrity on the left.
This fact was widely acknowledged at the time, including among other leftist intellectuals. G.D.H. Cole, a non-Marxian socialist from Britain’s Fabian Society, would quip in that until 1917 “Marx’s works lay securely buried in the grave of their author.” “Lenin,” Cole continued, “altered all that. He resurrected Marx, and gave to Marxism a new theoretical context.” On the other side of the Atlantic, W.E.B. Du Bois would similarly remark in a 1933 memoir that “until the Russian Revolution, Karl Marx was little known in America” and “treated condescendingly” by the few academics who even bothered with his work.
There’s a lot about this essay I’m unsure of, and I need to read it thoroughly to get the gist. But this part made me laugh out loud:
Diversity Really is Our Strength:
After the 1960s, it became impossible to get overwhelming majorities in favor of major additions to the welfare state. Republicans in particular went far to the right on economics, and they started winning more elections. This wasn’t because white Americans suddenly decided markets were good. Again, all populations hate markets, because it takes too high of an IQ to appreciate them, and even among those smart enough, you still have to be more interested in truth than supporting things that sound good in order to give capitalism its due.
My wife and I, both Gen-X, still vacation today in the same way: we planned a trip to Europe, we planned a schedule of places we’ll stay (and booked the appropriate hotels), we’ve rented a car–and we scheduled a tour and we may schedule fine dining at a restaurant.
And the rest is just us making it up as we go.
Generation X Did Summer Vacation Right – WSJ:
Generation X, lurking between the more demographically significant boomer and Generation Z cohorts, isn’t consulted much. But here it’s a loss, since doing more with less has always been our stock-in-trade.
This is how I remember every summer day during my coming-of-age years: underplanned and overenjoyed.
Now has never been a better time to pick up employees from the major companies: just allow them to work at home. Of course that means you know how to manage remote employees…
Silicon Valley escalates the battle over returning to the office | CNN Business:
Three years after Silicon Valley companies led the charge for embracing remote work in the early days of the pandemic, the tech industry is now escalating the fight to bring employees back into the office -— and igniting tensions with staff in the process.
I believe it was from remarks about buddhism where I first heard about “wrong company”, or the idea that there are people who are just ‘bad’ for you.
Over time I’ve formulated my own notion of what that means:
It’s bad to be alone. But being with the ‘wrong company’ is worse than being alone.
After reading Cory Doctorow’s essay on the Enshittification of modern web sites:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
I decided I really didn’t want to play in the increasingly stupid cesspool that is Facebook, Reddit or Twitter.
It was time to set up my own web site.
Of course I run a couple of blogs on WordPress, but the lack of configuration options (you have to pay a small fortune before you’re even allowed to fiddle with the various themes) means I went my own hosting route.
So here’s the thing: I’m paying money to a hosting site to host this site, so I can post comments that you are free to respond to. I’ll set up an RSS feed. And you are free to ignore my nonsense.
Once in a while there are bird pictures. Here’s a barred owl whose photo I took this morning. I thought he was cool.
(There are more pictures here.)
I may also ramble on about electronics, but mostly I’ll probably comment on politics or current news stories.
But I can guarantee you of a few things.
First, I’m not interested in monitization. That means no ads. Just me blathering about stuff.
Second, you are welcome (or not) to read, or comment. I have no interest (outside of weeding out spam, ‘natch) in censoring what people say, so long as it doesn’t venture into the seriously problematic. (Like slander, pornographic stuff, spam, etc.)
Third, if you want to do the same thing, there are plenty of places where you can set up a blog that isn’t a social media site whose algorithms seem designed to inflame or troll for clicks. If you send me a link and I find it interesting, I may update this site to include links to other web sites.
Fourth, RSS is a great technology. Give me a moment to set it up, so you can aggregate my remarks in your own reader. (Think of it like the Facebook news feed but without ads and without Facebook click-baiting you.)
But here I am. Now let me figure out how to set up the ‘share’ button so I can share news stories…
