MoltenMan

Compared to 99.9% of people in history, it's a king's life, and even today $50k is a top decile income. Of course, the US is more expensive than most countries, so you can move it down a bit, but it's tough to argue that you're not in at least the top 25% of people living today at least.

No, I think the person you're responding to is just saying that they really just are not starving or having trouble getting access to food at all. It's difficult in the US to really not have access to nutritious food.

Another Goodhart's Law casualty...

But the Protestant work ethic is good! There are hard-working people who are still poor, but there are very few situations where you, or anyone else, will be better off being lazy instead of working. (Hard manual labor that harms you permanently in some way, like old coal miners, is probably the biggest exception.)

In the counterfactual, where these hard-working poor people are lazy instead, they aren't suddenly rich or even the same as they are now. They're almost certainly worse off.

I was raised with a strong work ethic. Do I believe that working hard is the only reason I am where I am now? No, of course not. But if I didn't work hard my life would be worse in every way imaginable! Regardless of how lucky or unlucky your life is, having a solid work ethic will always always always make you happier. Work is not inherently 'bad' in some way, and neither is having to work to live and to learn and to have a good life.

I'm ~95% certain that images are tokenized, just like regular text, and fed directly in; that's the 'multimodal' part of these models. Now how this tokenizing works I don't know, and there might be some level of preprocessing, but it's certainly not converting the image into text and feeding it in to a regular LLM.

I've responded to a few people on this but the comment I was responding to was literally about the last 6 years! The context of this entire thread is about MAGA / Trump! I agree that RFK is hurting and has been for a long time, but that is not what this argument is about!

Ok if you want to do this then sure there is an easy solution. I think there are other problems with this though (for example no way this is flying even with the majority of people who are not anti-vax).

I think we live in a different age man. Media nowadays is completely different. Example: I have literally never had cable tv in my house. I've probably watched cable TV around 10 times total, all in a hotel room growing up. My media is all online, uncontrolled and (relatively) decentralized. Contrast that with 60 years ago and hopefully you see the difference.

Also smoking smells and has other negative externalities, which doesn't hurt.

I agree. But to be clear the original comment / context is about MAGA / Trump. I think responding 'No, you're wrong! RFK is the reason' to a thread about Trump and then retreating to RFK's activities over the last 20 years is arguing in bad faith.

The entire reason I made my original comment is because it's important to recognize that this is not a Trump thing, and getting rid of Trump / MAGA will not suddenly convince people that vaccines are good.

Do you believe this? I think it might help a little, but so we're on the same page RFK has only been in charge for 2 years. Why wasn't the previous secretary of health doing this? The measles outbreaks may be relatively new but we've had the vaccination data to see it coming for over a decade.

My personal belief is that there a lot of people who believe stupid things out there (and it's all only amplified by the news and social media), and for anti vaxxers especially I don't think an authority figure saying 'You have to get the measles vaccine!' is going to help much, unfortunate as it is. :(

Perhaps I should've been clearer. And yes they aren't helping.

And yes, we should blame them for the things they do. T But the comment I was responding to was acting as if MAGA was the reason for measles outbreaks, which is false. I'm an incredibly strong believer in the truth. An example of why I think this is an important separation: imagine you tried to fix the measles outbreak and miraculously got every single American to hate Trump and got Trump out of office. The problem would still not be fixed! People would still be dying of measles! The effort would have been almost completely wasted!

Look at the source I linked! Only 20% of cases are under 5!

See my other comments; it is not possible for RFK to have had any effect on this outbreak. If everyone getting measles was 2 or under, it could be possible; they aren't.

The reason I bring up Canada is as counterevidence; if it was Trump or RFK'S fault, Canada should be doing just fine. They had twice the cases last year in 1/10 the population. The truth is this is a problem with people believing stupid things, and it's going to take a lot more than Trump going out of office to fix.

See my other responses. Obviously this is bad. But the current measles outbreak is a symptom of a problem that's been happening over the last 1 or 2 decades. It literally CANNOT be caused by this, neither in the US or Canada.

It's still not too late for anyone who is unvaccinated to get the vaccine! Hopefully the next administration undoes this change, but the really important part is managing to shrink the anti-vax movement (which, if you look at the data in my other comments, you can see has been a problem since before Trump).