Michael Story ⚓
@MWStory
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Making Forecasting Useful at @swift_centre . I like big dogs, fast boats, and old stones 🇬🇧🇺🇲🇰🇪🇧🇪🇺🇲🇫🇷🇬🇧🇷🇺🇬🇧🇹🇼
London 🇬🇧 Taipei 🇹🇼
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Mad respect for Hans Buhr, who built a working model Antonov An-225 *and* a glide-functioning model Buran Soviet space shuttle, then strapped them together and launched one from the other
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What a weird way to say “about $7 of electricity over an entire year”. The taboo on frank disclosure of energy prices is one of the strangest features of modern media
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An important message on energy saving: modern LED bulbs are so efficient that just 1p of electricity will power a light for *6 hours*. Sitting in the dark might feel frugal but it’s not saving any significant sum and is almost certainly not worth bothering with
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Not sure I'm fully on board with the new "legalise violent crime" policy agenda
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When 'masks don't work' was the institutional view, experts performatively refused masks and you could read media speculation about the psychological frailties of those who wore them. Now the positions are flipped, but the pattern is the same.
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People are really forgetting how strong UK government anti-mask measures were! Mask adverts were banned in March on the evidence-free assertion from PHE that "prolonged use of masks was likely to reduce compliance with good universal hygiene behaviours"
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Absolutely infuriating to learn an important lesson, try to explain it and it just comes out sounding like a platitude that your past self would have dismissed as obvious or inapplicable
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It’s taboo to ever advise people to consume more energy, but there are a lot of (mostly older) people who *vastly* overestimate the marginal electricity costs of their appliances and the savings they will make from switching them off
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Disclosed monkeypox cases in the current outbreak are 99% male. If non-sexual contact were significant we would see more than a few female cases. That we aren't means either that it's overwhelmingly sexually transmitted, or we aren't testing women properly
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The best way to understand LVMH is that they sell physical proof-of-work tokens to people in countries with no class system
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The border belief described here was incredibly powerful and wormed its way around institutions the world over. The pandemic preparedness index ranked you *less* prepared if you had previously closed borders in the event of disease outbreaks
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eg this sad story:
A stairlift draws about 250w for the minute it takes to go up a flight of stairs.
1,000w of power for an hour costs 28p.
You would have to forego *four hundred* trips up the stairs to save 50p.
Our national poverty is a disgrace but this won’t help much
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Credit to Lawrence Gostin for acknowledging that this was crazy, but it seems quite bad that an evidence-free political assumption shared by members of one class just became 'science' because nobody checked it?
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UK covid levels were roughly equivalent to Australia in August. When Aus cases jumped to 18 per million they declared a local state of disaster and started a crackdown- the same day the UK began offering people cash vouchers they could only spend in restaurants and pubs
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Using ML to predict shootings in Chicago:
“…of the 500 people with the highest predicted risk, 13 percent are shot within 18 months”
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Feels like even pretty recently it would have been bigger news that the UK had an MP stabbed to death in a church and now an attempted suicide bombing of a remembrance service only 30 days apart
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The WHO had measures to *prevent* border closures in the event of disease outbreaks written into the international health regulations, and even built tools to track outbreak-related border restrictions, so they could lobby to get them removed
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A weird thing I noticed when travelling between countries is that they all seem to heavily regulate *something* which limits prosperity, as though hostility to plenty is human political constant with different expressions
The end of landlords: the surprisingly simple solution to the UK housing crisis
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Large parts of the UK system have given up on getting past vetos and blockers to improving supply of energy, housing, healthcare, and now even water, so attention is switching to creating a "hostile environment" for consumers and nudging them into lower living standards
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A great example of ‘epistemic learned helplessness’ culture in academia. If two thirds of dog fatalities involved the same rare breed, surely that seems sufficient to draw at least preliminary conclusions about how dangerous it is?
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Visiting a Taipei hospital and each floor has public CO2 monitors so everybody can be confident that the building is well-ventilated. It's good for cognition (and therefore medical decision-making) as well as pandemic / hospital infection prevention. Very nice to see!
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Older people often don’t realise how cheap lighting is nowadays and risk stumbling about in a dark home because they expect to see it have a significant impact on their energy bill, which is really only affected by heating- it’s a great time to let them know!
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The UK’s failure to grow can be explained in four words: it’s not allowed to.
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It is absolutely extraordinary to read about this hidden period in Britain’s history and realise how easy it is for governments to be memed into creating poverty and destruction for essentially no benefit
In 1961, West Midlands households earned more on average than households in any other part of Britain.
So, London-based planners banned almost all new building of factories, offices and housing south of Manchester in an attempt to rebalance the economy.
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Tiktok makes this so much more legible too. Every day young Londoners can go online and see, in the background of the latest trend, an American household with a much higher standard of living
The element of UK discussions of emigration (particularly to AUS) I find most interesting is the often-mentioned motivation of "lifestyle."
It's rarer to hear the quiet part, which is that they're notably richer than us now.
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Smart meters are good not just because they let people see which appliances are using the most energy and switch off if needed, but because they identify very useful appliances (like stairlifts) which use barely any power at all, so they can feel comfortable switching them on
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The UK has jailed people for tweets though, so not all crime is going unpunished!
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I don't think there's a more beautiful yacht in the world. A replica of a 1903 design and speeds like a beast (not my vid sadly, but maybe one day...)
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Really interesting how difficult it's been for people to separate their moral intuition and fairness instincts from disease prevention. Widespread belief that fun things somehow "must" be risky, and morally good things "must" be safe
Subtweet, but I see 18 months into the pandemic we’re still taking disapproving photos of people on crowded beaches. They’re outdoors! It’s good! The virus is not spread by fun!
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I would love to attend a one day conference post morteming this
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We're emerging from a pandemic where we learned that national science teams can make bad calls due to groupthink and cultural baggage, and we've put in place mechanisms (banning "anti-science" people from social media) to make it *harder* to disagree with them in the future
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From Time magazine in the US, first week of March: a physician saying that the CDC not recommending masks was proof they don't work, and a senior APA director psychologist brought in to explain the 'superstitious behaviour' of those who wear them 🙃👍
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Stumbled on this anti-regicide protest in London this morning. Nice to see people “getting involved” in the issues that matter to them
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Of the 93 cases of Monkeypox outside Africa where the patient's sex is known, 100% are male (127 confirmed cases overall). Suggests that casual contact probably isn't the driver unless these lads are socialising in *extremely* sex-segregated environments
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Reading a bit more about why people’s phones can be snatched from their hands in London, they can identify the house in which their stolen property is being kept, but police do nothing and the victims just watch as their phone is sold abroad
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People assume that ugly = cheap. I remember talking to a British Airways executive frustrated that he was losing passengers to Easyjet even on routes where BA was cheaper. The ugly Easyjet planes made people assume they were getting rock-bottom prices, so they never checked BA
One of the oddest but most widely held beliefs among people here on Twitter is that poor people should live in ugly places, and the poorer the uglier. When I make the claim that we should build more beautiful for our poorest, I seem to be making a heretical statement.
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I'm fairly convinced that not "reading the room" (or not being socially influenced by popular but wrong beliefs) explains most forecaster success- it's just smart people who like to think about things and care about getting it right
In the Covid era, reading the room rather than seeing the smoke probably cost hundreds of thousands of lives. |
@TomChivers
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My neolib pals are very certain that birth rates will go up with policies like free markets in housing, lower unemployment, dealing with the virus etc. But Taiwan has no virus, the skies are full of cranes building housing, unemployment is low and yet
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Realignment is a kind of magic where the beforetime just recedes somehow. Not long before everyone will believe that nobody in UK science ever supported herd immunity via managed mass infection and anyone who says otherwise is part of a sinister funding network
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A good piece which touches but doesn’t quite tip in that a lot of anti-Deano posting isn’t punch-down snobbery but envy from people who would have been much better off if they’d taken the Deanopill instead of gambling on higher ed and a move to London
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Showing the "socially distanced" room where vulnerable elderly people will sit for 15 minutes breathing in each others air in case of a negligible 5-per-million risk of adverse reaction to the vaccine. It's almost unbelievable to me that this is happening
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Hard to remember now but countries like New Zealand, Taiwan, Australia, Japan and South Korea were pushing against a very strong tide of expert / NGO / pundit opinion when they implemented border restrictions against covid
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This is why it’s really important for people who don’t want Britain to be poor to push back on the “low investment” meme. Low investment is a consequence, not a cause, of the present problems
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You absolutely cannot kill this meme
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For all the publicity Superforecasting got this year I don't think many people absorbed the key message: that if you keep score, you can find the good forecasters, and they don't always look like experts (you can't choose what people notice I guess)
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Nothing will make you more friendly to EA than reading trad philanthropy thought leaders talk about their goals and priorities
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Wild how information can be public knowledge in the paper of record, quickly forgotten, then reintroduced as a fresh discovery with totally different context, emotional valence, and impact, all in just 18 months
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I would like to know more about why the US responds to disease outbreaks by limiting the number of available tests. Happened with covid, now with monkeypox. What causes this?
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If I had said coronavirus was less of a threat than the flu or that border quarantines didn't work I would simply not write twitter threads demanding deference to my credentials
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But that presents a problem in government where "reading the room" is the primary job criteria for most appointments, and people who are truth-seeking will find it hard to compete with those who intuitively and unconsciously adopt the beliefs that help them get ahead
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A lot of US confusion about monkeypox is because the federal gov & CDC have gone with an “anyone can get it” anti-stigma campaign while the NY city authorities are targeting vax doses at the people who are currently hundreds, possibly thousands of times more likely to catch it
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Jotting down things I learned from being a superforecaster
Small teams of smart, focused and rational generalists can absolutely smash big well-resourced institutions at knowledge production, for the same reasons startups can beat big rich incumbent businesses
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Apparently police do not have powers to enter a house full of stolen phones to recover them! Seems wild firstly that the police don’t publicise this fact and allow the public to lose confidence in them, and secondly that little has been done to address the powers problem
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The public largely don't know that our military capabilities have been eroded, and as with health stuff it's possible to hide failings under an appeal to patriotism or exceptionalism instead of actually improving anything- until it's too late
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“The UK’s real problem is low investment” is a perfectly adapted meme for ten more years of stagnation. Not asking *why* people are avoiding a sclerotic centrally-planned economy, just trying to find ways to impede those who have cottoned on and want their money out
Here is US versus UK equities over the past ten years, including re-invested dividends.
210–228% returns for US equities, versus 14–24% (!!) returns for UK equities.
This makes clear how damaging it could be for British savers to stop ISAs from investing outside the UK.
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The WHO was so committed to preventing travel bans in response to epidemics that they built a tool to enable real time tracking of any outbreak-related international travel restrictions, so they could lobby to get them removed
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Putting your lights out creates a false sense of security and actually BENEFITS the German bomber pilots because it helps maintain their night vision. Instead, the science says you should move all your lamps to the roof and dazzle them as they go overhead
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Good tip: any time you see a credentialed public health expert dismiss concerns about virus policy and confidently assert that "laypeople" should stay out of it, search their @ for "flu" or "masks". You'll rarely be disappointed!
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It definitely matches my experience that ‘genuinely caring about the outcome’ is a sort of superpower that only a few people have, and demonstrating this quality opens up all kinds of opportunities
(From
@dwarkesh_sp
’s interview with
@TrentonBricken
)
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Isn't it mad that no journalists ever really challenged or asked about the herd immunity plan? And what's most extraordinary is that some are finding out about it *for the first time* today
If I was a journalist at this press conference I would ask: Do you think South Korea has done the wrong thing? Should they be aiming for herd immunity like us?
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Amazing that the day this announcement was made, the moderna vaccine had already been designed and was heading for a phase 1 trial
14 Jan 2020:
The WHO reports that Chinese government investigations have found "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" of the virus.
Total Deaths: 1
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As a layperson you should humble yourself before trained professionals
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Thousands of QTs, many verified media accounts, nearly all of which have interpreted this to mean that heterosexual people are now more likely to be diagnosed with HIV than gay/bi men
NEW: The number of new HIV diagnoses in heterosexual people is higher than in gay and bisexual men for the first time in a decade.
Straight people are also far more likely to be diagnosed late and less likely to get tested
#HIVTestingWeek
☝️
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I'm a broken record on this but the pandemic is an incredible opportunity to see how theorised social mechanisms can work in real time, like this memory-holing here: not top-down censorship, just that the individual incentives mostly line up behind forgetting uncomfortable stuff
To evey self-appointed expert who says masks don’t work …
… the country’s Chief Medical Officer says they do.
Maybe go with his advice rather than creating your own?
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The most important thing you can do in forecasting is keep score. Otherwise hindsight bias wrecks the distinction between the grifters and the gifted, everybody pretends they knew all along and it's hard to remember who actually did
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Imo people are really freaking out about colleges dropping SATs because it’s a very public bet, made by people whose whole business is ensuring proximity to power, that raw intelligence is going to count for less than it did in the 20th century’s aspirational meritocracy
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Most people who “get involved” in politics don’t really have desired outcomes or policy preferences, it’s more about vibes, emotions and zero sum social games, which is actually encouraging for those who do want specific change- the base rate for success is higher than it looks
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Feels like half my TL (timeline) at the moment is techy/ knowledge worker Americans feeling disoriented as they enter the upper middle class, and the other half is bewildered London Brits getting downwardly globalised out of it
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This is why I'm long EA/Rationalism or anything similar: it seems trivially easy for smart generalists rethinking things from first principles to beat established knowledge producing institutions with just a little bit of critical analysis, and we should be doing way more of it!
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oh my word, here's that same APA director in May, just two months later, explaining how you can cope with the anger you feel when other people *don't* wear masks. Total 180 degree turn. Are credentialists' epistemic standards ok?
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The best way I've found to communicate risks with older relatives (especially if they've been listening to that "covid secure" meme) is get them to imagine everyone has a cig on the go and try not to breathe in the smoke
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In the early 30s people were boarding airships in Germany to spend 5 full days in flight all the way to to Brazil, steadily progressing at 70 miles an hour over the Atlantic
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There's an England themed hotel in Taiwan, with a half-timbered Tudor panels and a mini Big Ben tower under which they serve afternoon tea and sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Might give that version of England a try instead
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This is written by a professor of urban geography who specialises in housing. Not trying to pile on this one guy but it makes me really want to dig in to the detail of how you can be a *professor* in a subject who says things like this
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Most of these jobs are about improving coordination, which is very hard but seems unchallenging from the outside. This generates mega resentment from intellectuals seething at the financial rewards on offer to those who succeed at it
"Bullshit jobs" seems like a good concept in theory but David Graeber's take on what they are is bizarre. Receptionists and administrative assistants are useful, so are corporate lawyers, and website designers.
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During the covid pandemic a lot of people were surprised by how difficult public health officials found it to speak clearly about their understanding of how the disease was transmitted, but I think this is basically the norm and seems to be happening again with monkeypox
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Runaway antinatalism: in an unhealthy population structure, older benefit claimants who want to maximally extract resources from working taxpayers constitute a bigger voting bloc, which drives even more anti-family policies, which further ages the demos
An absolute murder in the comments section, though.
I've noticed this so often - pensioners with only two policies:
1) Raise my pension, I can't survive in poverty
2) Let the children starve, if you're poor it's your fault
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@JgaltTweets
Well actually the judge was satisfied they weren't a threat to society, just two normal guys who beat a man unconscious for no reason like most people do on a night out. Can't wait to see what wonderful lives of public service they'll go on to lead
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The UK makes people poorer by restricting building, continental Europe pens in their labour markets, other places do weird capital controls. Was striking to visit Japan where building is easy and rent is cheap, but there are huge barriers to business expansion
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Same guy speaking in June: "It's clear that mask-wearing is absolutely fundamental to reducing contagiousness in the population, reducing spread, flattening that curve"
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Very curious why this style isn't used for advertising now- if these posters are nice enough that people buy them as art, surely they'd also be effective as adverts?
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So many articles "explaining" attitudes to coronavirus stuff via long-standing or immutable characteristics which just memoryhole that the original alignments were literally the opposite way around less than a football season ago
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UK public health officials saying masks didn't work and people shouldn't wear them was not a "noble lie" or clever strategy to preserve supplies for healthcare providers. They said they didn't work because they believed they didn't work
28 Jan 2020
As China makes facemasks mandatory in affected cities, UK NERVTAG advises:
- no evidence that facemasks reduce community transmission
- masks may add to fear and anxiety.
- emphasis on hand hygiene should continue.
Total deaths: 131
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I was expecting this to be bad but that APA person has knocked me for six. Just pathologising behaviour which deviates from Official Credentialed Norms, what if they do this all the time and we only can see it when the virus makes the changes so rapid that it's obvious??? Imagine
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Good summary here by
@maxdkozlov
- Monkeypox cases mostly linked to all-male sex parties, fetish festivals, saunas
- Key thing to watch for is larger numbers of female cases as that would indicate transmission beyond the initial network
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EA: many people live lives of suffering and die early. Our world is under threat from natural and manmade risks. Let’s use our resources to help as best we can
NGO thought leader writing about poverty:
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Most people I've met who work in planning have no idea that anyone thinks it raises house prices.
Not that they've heard the arguments and disagree, or they acknowledge the cost but think it's worth doing anyway for other reasons, they have literally never heard of this idea
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The basic bachelor’s degree is still a good deal. It has inefficiencies and many students find the experience bland and underwhelming rather than the horizon-expanding intellectual feast of teenage imagination, but it does enough for you to be worth the price.
Thread:
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I don't think a lot of people realise you can do this! But it's totally possible to increase the likelihood of something lucky happening to you
step 1. be the kind of person who can manufacture luck
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One benefit of learning “lifelong” sports like sailing, golf, shooting etc is they make socialising between generations much easier. A 27yo and a 57yo can take a boat out or play a round together and have a perspective-enhancing chat in a way that pickup basketball doesn’t permit
I really want more middle aged friends in my life but I have no idea where to meet people who aren't 27. all I know is twitter, pickup sports, video games, parenting toddlers, eat hot chip, and lie
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