Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Lex Clips" channel.

  1. Why do you consider Gender Studies a part of Biology? They are completely anti-biology.
    123
  2. Lex, the "weird kid" from Gender Studies is the one breaking the glass and strewing it around the playground.
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  3. "Hiking alone, you realize that all this has existed long before you, and will exist long after." The weirdest part of being out in the countryside of New England (after living in California) is the idea that many of the buildings there are older than the trees, rather than the other way around. Also the roads. The road network was literally designed by bears, or something.
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  4. "Mexico is full of foreign intelligence agents" Could this have anything to do with the fact that the US / Mexico border is basically lawless, so if a foreign agent wants to get into the United States, that's an extremely simple matter?
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  5. "Can relationships between leaders counteract forces of crisis?" Lex, if you want to break your heart with might-have-beens, read up on Gustav Stresemann and the Locarno treaties.
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  6. "Autonomous weapons systems" It still blows me away that the original Transformers, way back in 1984, put the Autobots (autonomous cars) as the good guys and the Decepticons (drone warplanes) as the bad guys. Autonomous cars are perhaps the first AIs that have to be trained to recognize human beings, and preserve their lives. Drone warplane AIs, not so much.
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  7. "Software is better with the iterative approach, hardware is better with the perfectionist approach" Very true -- unless the hardware is sufficiently modularized, replacing or adjusting it is vastly more difficult than it is to tweak software.
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  8. "Google should fine-tune as little as possible after training the model" Ha, allowing Google to curate the training data is a mistake in the first place.
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  9. In the first eight minutes, nothing was said except generic process ... nine ... ten ... eleven ... twelve ... ... yeah, nothing interesting was said.
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  10. "The sacrifices the Ukrainians are making" Right, Kotkin is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian, isn't he.
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  11. If it's any comfort, a lot of US elites see Mexico as America's best "friendshoring" opportunity. Leaving aside the desirability of being a source of cheap(er) labor under World Systems Theory, the US does not want Mexico to turn into Afghanistan. "There i no hope of our situation improving ... we don't want US intervention" -- Ultimately, Mexico has the attention of great power bad actors from around the world because of its position on the US's doorstep. I don't think Mexico can fight that off, without the resources of a great power itself, and the only great power with an interest in doing so is the United States. A good solution -- one where Mexico is allied with a country with a vested interest in its stability and prosperity -- is only possible through cooperation between Mexico and the United States.
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  12. "There's something about a war to find the core, the spirit of a people, who wish to be independent" What if the answer to that is, "Nope, there isn't enough difference between Ukrainians and Russians after all, to make all this struggle worth it"? Also remember how the Franco-Prussian wars consolidated the pan-German identity of the previously fiercely independent German principalities...
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  13.  @dravennolan4103  Have you ever seen the meme that shows an overhead view of Manhattan, captioned "New York, because we value your time and ability to get places" and an overhead view of Boston, captioned "Boston, because F* You"?
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  14. "Imagine if the wave of migration is a million" All the more reason for the United States to have in place a system that can deport up to ten million illegal immigrants, starting with any who have loyalties or obligations to criminal cartels.
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  15. Yes. The lockdowns will have far-reaching consequences far in excess of the damage Covid could possibly do.
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  16. Michael, do you really think that Twitter won't cancel Trump's account on Jan 20?
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  17. "Flat Earth" videos are a good opportunity to show how to debunk, and how to demonstrate how to discuss demonstrable truth.
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  18. "There is complete freedom in universities on the subject of science engineering" What would you say to Eric Weinstein if he claimed scientists cannot tell ideologues, "Get the h*ll out of my lab"?
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  19. I'd recommend Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, and Jon Anderson if you like conversations like this. Dave: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJdKr0Bgd_5saZYqLCa9mng John: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtnYSEGViOnb7k8ezUaWUww Joe's heading over to Spotify these days.
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  20. I thought Saturn was the one that ate his children? Including jupiter, but with the help of Rhea spit him back out again. After that Jupiter grew to be greater than Saturn. Wouldn't it be weird if the legends were true?
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  21. "A state is unique in that it acquires its goods by force" Do we want to return to a more Athenian model, where private citizens used their fortunes to build ships to defend the Republic? Would we really be better off, if Bezos had an aircraft carrier group or two?
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  22. "Worst case is that we're back where we started, and Google becomes as powerful as the federal government." We can't vote for Google policies. That's a far worse case, as we're beginning to see.
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  23. The CCP thought they were the hero when they imposed forced abortions to control China's population. And when they put Uyghurs in concentration camps, sterilizing them, again to control population. Could such people think of themselves as heroes, if they rebalanced China's aging demographics with a virus that preferentially attacks the old?
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  24. Poland's nobility had the right to go their own way and refuse to allow the group speak for the individual. Poland was partitioned by Austria, Russia, and Prussia in 1772 as a result. There are too many historical examples of catastrophic failure directly traceable to Malice's type of thinking, that could only have been avoided by avoiding this type of thinking. I do not think that someone so obviously intelligent as Malice is unaware of this.
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  25. As far as awe goes, "No Man's Sky" does a pretty good job of giant bounding sandworms that act like a fifty-story-tall sine wave weaving in and out of the surface of the planet you're on. Even that gets old after a while in one play session, but I'm actually tempted to log back in right now to see if I can nab a scan of one.
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  26. "He wanted things to be beautiful and he understood the user" Steve Jobs was a salesman, not an engineer. Greatest salesman of his generation, obviously -- but a salesman nonetheless.
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  27. "Could you imagine if UPS could just take 20% of the Postal Services' revenue?" Would they be obligated to serve markets that were not commercially viable, with that money? Would they have the obligations of a public utility, by accepting that money? Yet here we are, and somehow UPS still exists, even with that 20% being drained away (although now that Amazon is delivering its own packages, it's tough to tell how long that will last.)
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  28. In the Captain America movie, the "wise old man" says that only those who have been without power can be trusted with it. That's never quite rung true, for me.
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  29. "We don't need more chaos right now" The order that the Left is trying to establish and to a great extent has established, is a malignant order. Chaos is exactly what is necessary to dissolve that malignant order.
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  30. "The fact that we don't see aliens makes me suspect it isn't easy to survive in this complicated world of ours" Just as an energy question, if you have technology to generate the energy to escape a gravity well, you have technology to generate the energy to lay down "kinetics" over most of your globe.
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  31.  @TheLouisisawesome  He's clearly volunteering to fight for Ukraine in "the information war". You're probably right that he doesn't have any influence on the outcome, though. The only thing he's doing here is urging Americans to uncritically believe propaganda. We need to seek good information elsewhere, because without good information you can't make good decisions.
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  32. If we're talking about the Oort Cloud, shouldn't we include our neighborhood stars in that discussion? I mean, if the Oort Cloud is supposed to extend out 2-3 light years, and our nearest neighbor (Proxima Centauri) is 4 light-years away, wouldn't it make sense that our Oort Cloud ends and another star's Oort Cloud begins?
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  33. 1. Start with "No Man's Sky" for a game environment. 2. Build Civ on top of it. 3. Add an Ultima-style RPG, using assets from the first two.
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  34. "They're crushing in the information war" Which means we can't take anything they say seriously, regarding whether they're winning the actual war. The fall of Mariupol was not a good sign.
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  35. "As soon as one bad actor gets punished, there's a huge disincentive to act badly" Yeah, it's why the B-52 has only one tail cannon with ten bursts before it runs dry. That's just enough deterrent that it isn't a trivial thing to down them.
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  36. There's a connection between Epstein and Bill Gates, enough to get Melinda to divorce Bill. That could be extremely useful to investigate, if possible.
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  37.  @chrislane8466  Thanks for your kind words. Isn't influence vs. interference in the eye of the beholder, though? When I try to put myself in the shoes of a Mexican, I'm not sure that any level of influence that doesn't feel like interference. When I picture myself as being on my own team (something that's at least as important as seeing from another's point of view) I see America as having some interests that we should pursue even if it might be seen as "interfering". It seems to me that ultimately this problem is only going to go away when Mexico is as prosperous and secure as the United States. This is the "good ending" to World Systems Theory, which I see as a transitory state, as we run out of sources of cheap labor worldwide, and the rising tide of global commerce lifts all boats. This is something we should embrace, and we should plan for a world where the Core / Periphery distinction disappears. The problem is, security issues endanger this future. So do cultural practices like narcotics (ab)use, which weaken individuals and their countries. What's the best way to get from here, to the good ending?
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  38. OK, so Jupiter would have to be 13 times more massive to become a brown dwarf, and 85 times more massive to become a main sequence star, if I understood my quick Google search results. Could there exist an unstable point on the range of masses between planetary and stellar? If it achieves stellar mass, it evolves to be more massive by some mechanism, and if it doesn't achieve stellar mass, it evolves to become smaller (or harder to detect by the approaches we're using?)
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  39. Wikipedia may have "values", but its mechanisms are not hardened enough against corruption / lies. Unfortunately, the mechanisms to harden it against corruption, when couple with its "values", themselves lead to corruption / lies. I don't trust Wikipedia editors to tell the truth about any subject that touches on their deeply cherished Politically Correct values.
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  40. "This is real reality TV" Or it could be the sort of reality TV that flatters the preconceptions of the viewer. That's the problem, dealing with what you know is not true. You can't trust it.
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  41. "For [a CEO or other executive] to use a company for his own political gain is a violation of fiduciary duty to his shareholders" And yet, this happens all the time on the Left -- see the change in social media icons over a little under a week ago. Elon wants to take this system down. He's the good guy, here.
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  42. Being childless is not what winning looks like.
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  43. A heart / lung machine does the job of your heart and lungs (aerating and circulating blood) while doctors are operating on you, and your own organs are "turned off". I could imagine a "brain" machine that could give you the experience of consciousness even if your brain had the demonstrable characteristics of sleep / unconsciousness. Does anyone have any ideas on how you would build such a thing? It seems to me that if you could demonstrate the (subjective) experience of consciousness even while provably asleep, that would demonstrate that machines could be conscious.
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  44. "The other molecule is SO2" :( So you might be getting a false positive from a sulfur compound?
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  45. "CZ isn't the straw that broke the camel's back" He was the stray breeze that brought down the house of cards.
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  46. HEY LEX! Did you notice any large discrepancies between what Putin said and what his translator said?
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  47. "Smarter than themselves" -- define "smarter". An AI might define that to mean, "better at making paperclips" depending an idiosyncrasies of its initial priorities, training, or experiences. The failure mode of AI is going to be the Sorcerer's Apprentice problem. It picks one job, and does it too well.
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  48. Anyone who has read a biographical sketch of Ayn Rand knows that she was anti-family.
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  49. OK, wasn't Michael making himself the butt of the joke there? Listening to what her father went through, only an idiot could talk about doing the same thing for fun.
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  50. "Cleanliness and beauty are not the main measures of a city" Why would you choose to be in a city if it were not clean, safe, and beautiful? Why wouldn't you prefer to be in the suburbs or countryside instead?
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