No update of substance, so here's an update of pure candy fluff.

I'm making some cupcakes for a friends daughters birthday. Tonight I made some of the stuff that goes on top of the cupcakes. The youtube tutorial I was attempting to follow said that they are supposed to be succulents. My attempt tomorrow with a slightly looser icing might be a bit neater. These took a bit too much hand strength to be as tidy as I would like.

And nobody wants to break capitalism.

I finally found my way to the outdoor gym that is quite near my house. It is quite a nice one and I had a good workout. I now have two types of exercise that i enjoy, swimming and this kind of obstacle-course-ish thing.

I also went to the opticians. My eyes are apparently quite out of sync. I then had a migraine for two and a half days. I have an appointment tomorrow with someone who is more specialized in the problem that I have. So hopefully things will get solved soon, because I read a lot and use computers a lot and getting constant headaches is not fun.

The more time I spend in the medical industry the better I like single-payer.

The prices are public, mandated by the state or feds, and argued over as policy. Your lobbyists, my lobbyists, your experts, my experts, your doctors, my doctors, your executives, my executives, they're all going to get together in a public space and hammer this shit out. This ICD-10 code pays this much. That one pays that much. Publish it all as a schedule on the interwebs so everyone can see it (my state already does).

Now any insurance company under the sun can bid on providing services in that state. Their profit is the difference between what it costs them to pay out those codes and what what they pull in as premiums (which are paid, in full or in part, by the state - there's another whole committee there). You can no longer make your profits by screwing patients - they aren't paying you directly. You can no longer make your profits by screwing healthcare providers - their pricing schedule is publicly available and if they gave a shot of Rhogam, you pay what the state says you pay for a shot of Rhogam.

The only way you can make money is by keeping people healthy.

Preventive care starts looking really cheap then. So does group therapy. Nutrition? Fuck yeah let's pay our nutritionist her rate and have her be at the community center twice a week. And now you have a major multinational company whose profits depend on inner-city Detroit being healthy because those guys are eligible for healthcare, and they signed a contract to provide it.

For some reason, public health is considered a private problem. But trust me: you make Aetna's bottom line depend on welfare mothers eating healthy and welfare mothers will be eating healthy.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/12/15629716/aetna-ceo-bertolini-single-payer

I've lost nearly 100lbs (250-160ish) over the past ~13 years simply by being more aware of what I was putting into my body and gradually consuming less. I wasn't really taught that excess caloric intake = increased body fat when I was a kid and I guess no kid really should. Parents need to be taught so that they can be that health-buffer.

(a tangent)

Over the past few years I've been incorporating more exercise and I intend to start a bit of weight-lifting before I hit that age peak where performance drops off. I figure it's an investment into my body that will pay off in me being more mobile should I make it to old age. I've elders in my family that have different levels of fitness at around the same age (say, 60s-70s) and the gap in quality of life is astounding. I do NOT want to be feeble or immobile in my late 60s-early 70s.

Naturally, I'm also self-conscious/narcissistic and want to work myself to a good 'bod' while I still can. Sure, societal pressures drive this a bit, but I don't think it's harmful to my sense of self-worth. Basking in the glory of a six-pack would just be the icing on the cake of my being.

Mystery solved!

Is it still valid that America conducts patrols and operates hundreds of bases in scores of countries, boxing in rival powers?

Oh fuck yeah. That was pretty much the deal at the end of WWII - "don't worry about anything, we got this."

Graeber made the point that ultimately, all rules are backed up by force and the "rule of law" means there are cops and/or tanks and/or nuclear missiles making you pay your tab at the bar. China was just a vast hinterland we used to sap Japanese strength in the Pacific; then Mao Zedong starved fifty-odd million people, then Zhou Enlai dragged the country up through the ruins and now here they are dredging missile bases out of the South China Sea.

Ultimately, this is about who run Bartertown.

China has never won an encounter with a major foreign power. They were subjugated by the Brits when they tried to get their people off smack. You should get the Korean take on every other nation around them; I've heard Hangul was created because Sejong the Great wanted to be as un-Chinese as possible. Robert Kaplan, meanwhile, recounts meeting with officials in Vietnam and being surprised that they were so friendly to an American considering the Vietnam War; one of them said something like "But Mr. Kaplan - we've been at war with the Chinese for centuries and they're our biggest trading partner! What's one war between colleagues?"

One of the reasons I subscribe to George Friedman's Geopolitical Futures is he publishes shit like this:

So yeah - Laura's logic is completely valid. What Laura isn't mentioning, however, is that her life and the lives of everyone she's ever met have been predicated on the fact that everything in that view above is subject to American influence and has been since 1899. Do the Chinese "deserve" sovereignty over their pseudo-territorial waters? If you're Chinese, absolutely. If you're American,

When all you have's a hammer, the world is made of nails.

Gilder made the point in Life After Google that whenever we say "machine learning" or "AI" we're really talking about Markov chains, which are useful for some tasks and suck balls for others. Nonetheless, everyone in tech right now is basically throwing Markov chains at every fucking thing they see, whether it's applicable or not, because that's where the tools are.

The irony isn't lost on me: an entire industry obsesses over how great AI is, then comes home and chortles over how stupid AI is.

On a related tangent, his talk and curve extrapolation got my gears turning. I'm trying to better understand the root of the inherit skepticism I have for AI. It induced me to tweet a rare somewhat related position:

https://twitter.com/MarkKatakowski/status/1043527784134574080

I expect that Kurzweil would argue that nature hit a roadblock with the birth canal, and that if we could just deliver however these folk do then we'd be playing 3D Go.

But I am reticent to count nature out when it comes to creative solutions.

What can a mirror reflect besides the world? We have uncovered plenty that we did not know, but have we ever uncovered anything that we could not?

OHHHHHHH SHIT DID YOU JUST POST AN ANIMATED GIF

Hey everybody! mk just posted an animated gif!

The three books of Robert Charles Wilson's Spin trilogy basically argue that the evolutionarily dominant strategy of gray goo is to capture and tend to intelligence because of its anti-entropic tendencies.

When I see the word "prediction," I think of something like this:

"It will be a very dramatic change in the sky, as anyone can see it. You won't need a telescope to tell me in 2023 whether I was wrong or I was right," Molnar said at the presentation

I don't see many clear, measurable, falsifiable predictions here. Some of the predictions are already true. How will we know if we had any understanding of current events if we can't check our hypotheses later? Saying "it's going to be a disaster" and claiming validation every time something bad happens is too easy.

Bryan Caplan has recorded a number of bets, some concerning Trump.

Scott Alexander has published a list of predictions for 2017 and keeps a scorecard. He also made ten specific predictions about Trump. Some paraphrased examples:

Total hate crimes incidents will be not more than 125% of their 2015 value at any year during a Trump presidency.

The U.S. Muslim population will increase throughout Trump’s presidency.

The Trump cabinet will be at least 10% minority.

No large demographic group will be forced to sign up for a “registry.”

Other sources make some predictions, but the ones I saw were often fuzzy and unclear, like talk of "impeachment" without specifying whether Trump would be removed from office.

Here are my guesses. In brief, I predict more of the same.

The Wall

There are now "more than 580 miles (930 km) of barriers in place" along the 1,954-mile (3,145 km) long Mexico-U.S. border.

I predict that the wall will be improved, but will remain less than half the length of the border. I predict that Trump will not force Mexico to pay construction costs (talk perhaps, but not actions like garnishing money transfers or withholding aid). Aid obligations in 2015 were $586 million, mostly for drug enforcement. The number varies a lot by year, but I predict it will not drop below the 2012 reported value of $215 million during the next four years.

Jobs

There were 12,265,000 employees in U.S. manufacturing jobs in October 2016. The trend has been downward since the 1980s, though there has been some recovery since 2010.

I predict that this number will be lower than 12,265,000 by the end of 2020.

Other

Twitter will still exist and annoy in 2020.

Trump will remain president for a full four-year term.

The number of abortions induced, as measured by the CDC, will continue to decline as it has for years, with no conspicuous change in the next four years.

The U.S. will remain a signatory to the Paris Climate Agreement.

The number of mosques in the U.S. not be less than the 2,106 counted in 2011 during the next four years.

U.S. GDP growth will be positive for at least three of the four years from 2017 to 2020, and not lower than -2% in any year.

Which of these do you think I got wrong? What are your concrete predictions?

but how many of these people are even real?

And this is the key thing. Once you start digging into Twitter, you find that there are isolated pockets of users who are very active. Black Twitter. Customer Service. Affinity circles.

But more than 80% of the activity on Twitter is never seen by human eyes.

The people who actually use Twitter as a communications medium use it as a tertiary or even fourth-level platform.

Twitter is already an afterthought.

Trump's presence and bloviating will further diminish the last remnants of "business tool" sheen that Twitter has, and it will slide quickly into irrelevance. See: MySpace.

I mean, some of these things are already happening. Trans rights are already being restricted in red states, as are the rights of women who have had an abortion - That's right, you just need to have had an abortion and a doctor can refuse service.

But this comment highlights the true problem going in to the next 4-8 years and onward:

Trump's not the problem. The president doesn't have that much clout when it comes to lawmaking. However the US now has -

- A republican senate

- a republican house

- A mildly conservative supreme court that has seats to be filled, making it eventually a very conservative supreme court.

^^^ These are the people who really make the laws in your country, and they're the real worry and fear when it comes to the near future. Trump may be setting the standard for bad behaviour, but the real problems will come when all of these people follow his lead.

All I can say is good luck, and that I have a very comfortable futon for my LGBT friends south of the border should things become so bad that they feel they need to emigrate. If things turn out to be as bad as they look right now, my long term plan is to become familiar with what one needs to gain permanent residency in Canada. We are not a perfect country - in some ways we are terrible - but at least lgbt people don't have to fear for their lives and livelihoods.

Yup