Africa has a number of factors in its favor that make it a potential economic powerhouse. It has some of the largest natural resource reserves in the world, it has a huge population, it’s conveniently located on or near several important trade routes.

It’s also cursed with some pretty bad natural infrastructure. The rivers in Africa don’t provide good access between the center of the continent and the coasts.

China had about the same GDP a Sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990’s https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?end=1996&locations=CN-ZG&most_recent_value_desc=true&start=1960 It’s taken China 35 years to get from there to it’s current spot as 2nd largest economy in the world. And that was for an economy that was growing at nearly 2x the rate of the rest of the world for most of that period. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=CN-1W

That’s not to say that Africa can’t become an economic powerhouse but it will take a lot of work and time. It would take sustained investment and reinvestment in Africa over several decades.

Because the human brain doesn’t intuitively count the way we’re taught in school.

Our brains are very good at understanding 1, 2, sometimes 3 and, “many”. That’s the data we get from smart chips, young children and isolated pre-literate societies.

Counting bigger numbers requires abstract systems. Our brains can do that but it’s much harder and we don’t grasp it as well.

The practical offshot of this is that while it’s intuitively obvious that a small space like a garage will quickly fill up with toxic gasses, it’s far less intuitive that a “very big” outside can get saturated by a “pretty big number” of cars.

We make food “from scratch” on a regular basis.

We’ve found a few different sources for fats. I’ll focus on the pork-fat ones.

The most common source is to just collect fat any time we make pork things. The advantage is that it’s cheap and easy; just let it cool and add it to a jar in the fridge. The disadvantage is that it will have a lot of other flavors (especially salt).

Sometimes we just by processed lard. That’s basically the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s very pure and has no flavor besides the fat itself.

Often we’ll wet render our own fat. Traditionally that would be the trimmings off of other cuts. Unless you’re butchering a pig (or have bought into a fractional pig through something like a CSA) those bits usually aren’t available. Typically we’ll just buy cuts that are very high in fat. For pork, that would be pork belly. We’ll just buy an uncut slab and wet-render it. Trim any meat you want to cook with (belly is the part that bacon is made of) throw the rest in a pot of water an simmer it for a few hours. The fat layer that collects on top is almost pure lard.

We’ve also found that duck fat is a great substitute for lard. It has a similar smoke point to lard (slightly higher). It tastes different from lard but it’s also good enough that the flavor itself will improve meals. Duck breasts are about 50% fat if you buy them with skins. You can also buy duck fat on its own.

I’d broaden that to a whole host of “green” and “alternative energy” sectors.

All the panic about Chinese “overproduction” of EVs and similar technologies is just China going whole hog on those industries. It’s not an “overproduction” in the traditional sense, where a company produces more than the market will bear and has to sell excess inventory at a loss. China just produces all of this stuff cheaply and at a huge scale.

About 20 years ago the general perception was that EVs were a joke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HX5wsQVEA Now we have cost effective solar and wind, efficient battery storage, good and cheap EVs and drones, modern heat pumps etc.

I don’t even think all the tariffs will matter in the long run. China is currently adopting all that stuff at a breakneck pace. Their production capacity won’t just go away once they’ve saturated the domestic market and the growing number of countries that have trade agreements with China). At that point, Chinese manufacturers will have no choice but to start actually selling below cost, just so they can clear inventory.

And this has a snowball effect too. Energy is often the limiting factor in production. An abundance of cheap energy makes it cheaper to produce more cheap energy production.

Shitty leaders blame their people for their failures.

People call something a “manifesto” when they want to imply that it’s a long rambling text written by a crazy person.

This situation has me pondering 2 hypotheticals.

1. How long until people start posting the names of individuals perceived as traitors (eg the McSnitch, the journalists shilling for Thomson, the politicians leading the charge against Mangione, etc)?

2. Can he realistically be tried at all? A broad cross section of people are really supportive of Mangione. We’re in such a weird timeline that I could potentially imagine groups like Black Block and Proud Boys standing side-by-side on this one.

It’s Nature. One of the most respected science journals on the planet.

That’s a reasonable argument. It’s so reasonable that several researchers have tried to come up with better estimates and failed. The highest I could find was that 20% lifetimes rate. If you can find better data please share it. I’d love to see it.

Part of the point of the peer review process is to check for that. This kind of satay would be very hard to fake well enough to pass the scrutiny of a bunch of skeptical scientists. And if it passes that any scientist will be able to do the same. Being able to force an other scientist to retract a Nature paper would be a high prize for any academic.

I just looked this up and found two surprises.

1. Prison rape seems to be in the low single digit percentages. The highest estimates seem to be a 20% life time chance. That’s still way too high but also a far cry from “all”.
2. The abnormally large prison population in the US gives it the dubious honor of being the only country in the world where men are raped more than women.

He was charged and immediately released: https://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/nick-fuentes-battery-275931

Presumably is lawyer made it very clear that he is not to say a damn thing under any circumstances. I don’t know enough about him to guess if he’s smart enough to keep his gob shut for the duration of the trial.

Tell me you’re old without telling me you’re old :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpmGXeAtWUw

Couldn’t you say the same for the Republicans, or any party for that matter? ie, “Join them and if enough people like you join them they’ll change.”

Realistically, some new political operator isn’t going to get any relevant positions. And nobody with the relevant positions will listen to a new political operator.

That may work in theory but it’s basically saying to create a new Demcratic party from within.

What would joining consist of?

Register as Democrats? Vote whoever they tell you to vote for?

Yes. I really think that the translation part is one of the hardest.

As a brief aside, I want to note that this conversation is happening in one of the languages we’re discussing and that could influence any conclusion we come to. I’m also going to suggest that we ignore Gödel for now

There are many people who are good at math. There are even a lot of people who are reasonably good at grinding through the mechanics of math. That doesn’t solve any of the problems you described above.

Statistics are a great example of this. Early statistics classics are mostly about the mechanics; here’s how you calculate the mean, standard deviation, confidence intervals, etc. 2 types of students generally come out of that class; math students who will forget all of that because they’re going to learn the “real” versions (eg they go through a huge number of proofs that involve calculus and linear algebra), and students who will forget all of that because the whole thing sounds like gibberish.

We teach natural languages the same way but we go much farther. Students learn vocabulary and grammar rules but they’re also expected to learn how to use them correctly. We had students current events articles and ask them to analyze them. We ask students to practice many writing methods including fiction and expository writing.

When I talk to my own kids about statistics I never write any formulas. I ask questions like, “What do you think ‘mean’ means?”, “If I have a bunch of <example item> does ‘mean’ describe it well?”, “What happens if I add an <example item> with <huge outlier>? Do you still think it’s a good description?” “How would you describe it better?”

If I ever had to design an introductory statistics course it would contain very little “math”. Classes, homework, projects, and tests would consist of questions like; “Here’s some data and an interpretation, are they lying? Why or why not?” “Here’s a (simple) data scenario. Tell me what’s going on.” “Here’s some (simple) data. Produce a correct and faithful summary. Now produce a correct but misleading summary. Describe what you did and the effect.” “Here’s a conclusion. Provide sample data that most likely fits the conclusion.” “Change one word in the sentence, ‘Increase your chances by 80% means that there is now an 80% chance.’ to make it a true statement.”

What would “in” consist of?

Democrats had both houses and the Oval Office in 2021. The Democrats were as “in” as they can reasonably expect to get unless we want to go back to 2011 when the Democrats had all that and a supermajority.

What was stopping him from doing something now? Who forced him to send more arms to Israel?

And how is the Democrats ability to do the right thing inhibited in any way by people complaining about a CEO supporting genocide?

These arguments sound a lot like when my 10 year old tells me that they’ll stop watching video games and do their homework as soon as I stop nagging them. That’s nonsense. They do their homework when I take the laptop away and tell them they can’t have it back until the homework is done.

Republicans are faux angry. They clearly don’t really care about the deed at all. If anything they’re gleeful because they get to run around and call Biden a nepotistic liar.

Some Democrats are angry because Biden just handed the Republican a stinky turd that they’re going to throw in our face every time someone brings up any of their lies or nepotism.

Many Democrats don’t seem to care either, as long as Trump is worse.

In what way are the “Democrats and liberals” changing the situation from the inside?

Biden just approved another $680m arms package. That should be condemned, not celebrated. Acts that support this genocide should also be condemned, rather than celebrated.

Why not both?

I’ve always thought of math as a language and I talk to my kids about it that way too. Math is an other way to describe the world.

It’s very different from spoken languages and translating between the two needs to be learned and practiced.

Our math education doesn’t include enough word problems and it should be bi-directional. In addition to teaching students how to write equations based of sentences we should teach them how to describe what’s going on in an equation.