taking out my anger on the people who fuck up my day at work by scribbling scary and inhuman architecture on a piece of paper. once i get good enough at it they will go there in their dreams

Car inspections and repairs take a small fraction of our total spending on cars, gas, roads, and parking. But imagine that we were so terrified of accidents due to faulty cars that we spent most of our automotive budget having our cars inspected and adjusted every week by Ph.D. car experts. Obsessed by the fear of not finding a defect that might cause an accident, imagine we made sure inspections were heavily regulated and subsidized by government. To feed this obsession, imagine we skimped on spending to make safer roads, cars, and driving patterns, and our constant disassembling and reassembling of cars introduced nearly as many defects as it eliminated. This is something like our relation to medicine today. Our public today is like a king of old whose military advisors spent most of their time and budget reading omens and making sacrifices, to gain the gods’ favor, instead of hiring soldiers and talking battle strategy. These advisors knew omens and sacrifices mattered little, but they saw the king was comforted, and feared losing favor by talking of battle strategy. A truly loyal advisor would have told the king what he did not want to hear: “You are obsessing about the wrong thing.” King Solomon famously threatened to cut a disputed baby in half, to expose the fake mother who would permit such a thing. The debate over medicine today is like that baby, but with disputants who won’t fall for Solomon’s trick. The left says markets won’t ensure everyone gets enough of the precious medical baby. The right says governments produce a much inferior baby. I say: cut the baby in half, dollar-wise, and throw half away! Our “precious” medical baby is in fact a vast monster filling our great temple, whose feeding starves our people and future. Half a monster is plenty. Am I being too allegorical? Then let me speak plainly: our main problem in health policy is a huge overemphasis on medicine. The U.S. spends one sixth of national income on medicine, more than on all manufacturing. But health policy experts know that we see at best only weak aggregate relations between health and medicine, in contrast to apparently strong aggregate relations between health and many other factors, such as exercise, diet, sleep, smoking, pollution, climate, and social status. Cutting half of medical spending would seem to cost little in health, and yet would free up vast resources for other health and utility gains. To their shame, health experts have not said this loudly and clearly enough.

-- "Cut Medicine in Half", by Robin Hanson

I must sleep. Sleep is the mind-healer. Sleep is the big-life that brings total ability to fucking do anything. I will face my bed. I will permit the blankie to pass over me and snores to pass through me. And when sleep has gone past I will turn the outer eye to greet the new morning. When the sleep has gone there will be everything. Energy and will to live will remain.

@etirabys: Why does semen taste so bad? Shouldn't evolution have made it more appealing?

me: well, it needs to go in the right hole

@etirabys: [dejectedly] Semen is probably at the evolutionarily optimal tastiness.

never let anyone tell you that trawling through mediocre victorian poetry isn't worth it. we just happened upon an absolute BANGER of a worm poem. go read it or else 🪱🪱🪱

We keep finding space stations, and we don't know why yet.

Most are in orbit around planets, but plenty more are orbiting moons, stars, the odd black hole, or just floating in deep space.

Their age varies, some are so old that just getting close enough to dock makes them shatter like glass, others are so recently constructed that the lights are still on and the reactors are still fueled. All are empty of any life or robots smarter than a roomba.

The ones orbiting planets are orbiting dead worlds, or living worlds where nothing on them is smart enough to launch a space station.

The stations in deep space are weirder. The most information came from the one by Epsilon Eridani. A massive installation, it had docking rings for hundreds of vessels, all empty. It was in remarkable shape for how old it was (from the unrepaired micrometeorite impacts, we estimate it has been abandoned for about 3000 years), so we were able to access a lot of information from its main computer. We found the coordinates of several home planets, and visited them all. All were dead, empty, or in one case, simply missing. The star was still there, the other uninhabitable planets mentioned in the databanks were there, but their homeworld? Gone. No debris or expanding gas cloud, it's just missing.

And that's the thing: if we found space stations along with abandoned ruins of ground-based installations, that'd make sense. If we met dozens of living races, amongst a few empty satellites of long dead races, that'd also be expected. But this is all the evidence we're not alone in the universe we've found.

We've sent probes to over half the stars in this galaxy and visited hundreds in crewed spacecraft, but the empty space stations are the only evidence of alien life. Every planet is either a sterile husk, a gas giant, or a vibrant living world with nothing smarter than a giraffe living on it. Oh, there's strange life forms of every kind! But none of them seem sapient, certainly not sapient enough to build a space station.

Where is everyone? We've been asking that question since we first understood the Drake Equation and the Fermi paradox, but the question has taken on a new form as we've gone to the stars and found endless empty houses in the sky.

It's the difference between looking at an empty desert and walking through an abandoned city. In both cases, there's a silent emptiness, but in the latter case, it seems to contain a sinister element. This place is empty, but it shouldn't be. Something made it empty, and we haven't found out why yet.

We keep looking, and keep listening to the echoes of our own footsteps in the silent habitats.

For the last few months, I've had a major crush on someone at the swing dance I frequent. She's been absent the last couple weeks, but tonight, she's here.

When I walk in, she zips over to ask me to dance before I can even put on my dance shoes.

Now, lately she's been putting noticeably more effort into her appearance. So, even accounting for my rose-tinted glasses, she's stunning. Right in front of me. Asking like she's been waiting all night.

My heart skips a beat. Adrenaline surges. Butterflies-in-stomach.

I tell her yes, absolutely, would like to dance, but not until the next song.

I spend the next few minutes quietly panicking, fumbling my shoe change, exhilarating. Is this ... reciprocation?

The song ends. She looks at me across the floor. I stand up.

Time to dance.

A professional exorcist, but with the attitude of a professional pet handler. A demon whisperer, if you will. Just showing up to places that have a ghost problem, figuring out what the creature's problem is, and then just... give them chew toys, usually. The girl whose soul is trapped in your cellar is scared and bored in there, of course she'll rush at you and shriek every time you try to go in there. Ease her into human interaction, leave the door open sometimes and talk to her until she gets used to you.

Yeah the thing clawing on your walls is a bear spirit. Yeah a bear was slaughtered on the spot of this house incorrectly in the 1800s or something. Yeah performing the proper rites now won't make it go away, it's already used to your trash - bears are creatures of habit. Just do these little rituals to appease it every once in a while. In the good news, the ghost bear will keep the living bears off your trash. Yeah bears have a lot of reverence to their dead.

Oh, "poltergeist" is an outdated term, we don't use it anymore. It was used as a kind of a blanket explanation for a whole bunch of different phenomena that couldn't be explained otherwise. What you have here is an undiagnosed autistic child who's also on psychic spectrum. Yeah no there's actually significant overlap between the two. Here's where to find resources on how to better accomodate your kid, the furniture should stop exploding on its own once you've figured out a better way to communicate so they don't get overstimulated.

This house right here is just build on a demon area. No yeah the mysterious scripts you found carved in the stone that your house's foundation was built on literally just say "DEMON AREA DO NOT BUILD". They don't live here, it's just like an ant road. Except the ants are the size of a truck and immaterial. No you can't redirect the demon highway, you gotta move. You built a house on top of a stone that literally says "DO NOT BUILD". I get that you didn't know it at the time, but you do know now, so if you choose to stay, that's a you problem.

I have tried for years to discover something, anything, about this card with no success.

Husband has discovered you can mail Kraft singles so he sent these out

I made him write “do not eat” because they are not shelf stable. I also decided this was a him-project and if he gets arrested by the USPS Cheese Crimes Council I’m not part of it but if it goes over well I’ll jump in and claim partial credit.

Here is what he took to the post office:

They began arriving this week. Here is our thread with my MIL. (She’s Blue, my husband is Red)

She is amazing. I did not think she’d actually tape it to the Xmas card wall! (Later in Dec that whole wall will be covered in cards.) How long do we think that will last before their dog figures out how to get to it?

Cheese is so far a hit with everyone and has arrived safely at multiple houses. I take back all my criticism and I’m now claiming to be a full partner in Operation Hand-Krafted Card.

@laid-back-at-lunchtime’s card got commentary from the mail lady?! Very glad she found it funny and doesn’t hate us. I was actually kinda worried we were gonna ruin the postal services’ day so this made us very happy.

The last text is sending me. 😂

Endlessly thinking about how hashtag blessed I am that I grew up on the internet in a time when growing up on the internet made you a weird kid who reads text supernaturally fast instead of a iPhone baby who interprets the world through the framework of Roblox

@centrally-unplanned I've had good luck getting specialist appointments with Zocdoc! Though note that I was paying out of pocket instead of trying to navigate the strange health insurance parody-economy.

Interfacing with the medical establishment again today lads.

I called the 86th place I have tried in my area for an appointment with the correct specialist. They told me they could not see me because I had, two years ago, seen another doctor in their practice (I have no memory of this). Because I am therefore "owned" as a patient by that other doctor, the doctor I am calling is forbidden from seeing me. I would have to submit a "case" to be made as for why I need to "switch" doctors. Which I could do, but the doctor I need to see is also declining "cases" right now for unknown reasons. I was explained this procedure for ~5 minutes on the phone, before being told it would be useless.

The original doctor I apparently saw is, of course, not accepting appointments at this time, so I cannot schedule with them either. This has no impact on the idea that they own me.

Speaking of which:

Flight search engines let me search by duration or by price, but not by [duration*$X/hour + price], which is my actual cost function.*

Searching by time+dollars seems like it'd be easy to implement and valuable to a lot of people.

*well, it's the main "cost" against which I weigh tradeoffs for other, more idiosyncratic factors like my schedule at the destination

It's weird that the airline ticket market only has "asks" and not "bids".

Why isn't there a site where I can bindingly offer "I'll buy a round-trip ticket from Seattle for a week in the Bahamas for $250 any time January-October at least 2 months in the future", and where airlines then schedule flights based in part on the seat sales they can make to standing offers?

Looks like I can set up Google Flights to email me when prices are low for a particular destination+duration, but (a) that doesn't commit me to anything, and (b) I don't think airlines use this for demand forecasting?

It's weird that the airline ticket market only has "asks" and not "bids".

Why isn't there a site where I can bindingly offer "I'll buy a round-trip ticket from Seattle for a week in the Bahamas for $250 any time January-October at least 2 months in the future", and where airlines then schedule flights based in part on the seat sales they can make to standing offers?

It's weird that the airline ticket market only has "asks" and not "bids".

Why isn't there a site where I can bindingly offer "I'll buy a round-trip ticket from Seattle for a week in the Bahamas for $250 any time January-October at least 2 months in the future", and where airlines then schedule flights based in part on the seat sales they can make to standing offers?

@arriving-at-new-equilibrium and I were discussing that genre of research which includes things like "we flipped the sign function on a drug discovery ML model, and it made new, deadlier kinds of nerve gas" and "we did gain-of-function research to see what would happen if we made a virus deadlier and more transmissible, and it turns out we got a deadlier and more transmissible virus".

He decided it needed a name, and settled on "dead dove research."