naishoya

But, would you have done any one of those things had there been a scheduled safety class before going, and had all of those things been clearly presented and then tested for? I think probably not.

I have been in the position of holding pre- and post excursion knowledge and readiness assessment sessions, which contents and protocols were rigorously designed by Principle Investigators, with external audit and multi-year review. In one location there was over a hundred years of applied practice. (Back-county mule operations since 1904 with an enviable safety record and over twenty riders on every day where not cancelled due to adverse weather or public health risks)

My personal observations include covering very specific potential hazards for backcountry, open ocean, agriculture and industrial workplace risks. They also include direct and indirect observations in the domains of corporate, personal risk, and global threat assessment, up to and including prevention of and response to K&R by state and private actors.

So, yes, I cherry picked for the comical and obvious. That list is not comprehensive or statistically balanced whole set. I do admit to confirmation bias, I'm positive that was at the lead of this flow as " admittedly anecdotal observations." And you're right, that is not what Idiocracy was representing. That is still clear and we still do agree.

My only point is that my admittedly biased observations fail to find high net worth as a positive correlation with above average IQ. I also "posit" that although the high net worth shows recent increases in TFR is substantial in some places (the US and UK from your source), there is still a high rate observable in the bottom 25% of net worth populations as seen due to earlier time of first partition and a slightly higher number of offspring per mother, and that the difference in resultant IQ in the whole population due to these effects may be well within any statistical margin for error.

So, we still agree, this is not the mechanism either causing nor preventing an Idiocracy defined change in the outcomes for the US population. There appear to be other, less (epi)genetic, reasons for the demonstrable decline in outcomes for the median populations.

~ BTW, big fan of the work in alternative bit representations.

I'm sorry if it seemed like I was unimpressed with any one group over the others.

My statement was that I have been not overall impressed with ANY of the groups. None of the groups was more or less likely on average to not need rescue, resuscitation, or to be refused participation due to non-compliance.

My proxy for IQ is; don't eat the sticky purple berries, don't stand on the edge of the precipice, don't try to drive across the flooded wash, don't camp in the dry streambed, don't try to pet the baby buffalo, check your shoes before you stick your feet in them in the morning, put the fire all the way out - cold, wet, and mixed is out, don't swim away from your dive buddy, don't walk up on the mule from behind, wear a hat, bring extra socks, don't drink the water from the stream, cook the bear meat thoroughly, don't put your hands in dark holes; in the forest or in the reef, clip your toenails well before the long downhill hike, spend a few extra dollars on a pair of slip on ice crampons for your tennis shoes - even though the instructions were to bring two pairs of hiking boots - wet and dry. Pack light, wear a small bell to warn off the bears, pick up your garbage - if you brought it into the wilderness you must take it back out with you,... again, DON'T STAND ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF, I don't care how you are going to look in the selfie, and neither will anyone else if the phone and you fall 300 feet. And, no your emotional support min-pin-poo cannot go on the week long rafting trip with us.

Does this sound like I'm over-estimating anyone's baseline IQ? You wouldn't believe the raw stupid that happens all the time. It's just not demonstrably correlated with bank balance or jewelry selection.

> Net worth. It's a pretty good proxy.

TLDR; I have met quite a few very high net worth individuals, their spouses and offspring. Hundreds of them, actually. I have not been impressed overall with their intellectual capacity for learning important and lifesaving knowledge in preparation for life-changing natural survival conditions which are outside of their daily routine. The same has been true at the middle and lower income distributions under similar circumstances. I am neutral about the future IQ of the population of any of their descendants, poor or rich.. There are many other factors at play.

The long version:

That has not been my admittedly anecdotal experience among high, moderate, and average net work individuals and small to large congregations of those net worth groups in North, Central, South Americas, East Asia, the Pacific Islands, the UK and Northern Europe. I haven't found any specific factors resulting in concentration of above or below average IQ individuals within any of those groups. I have traveled much; been in direct leadership positions among high net worth individuals' on board of directors, and have been in direct contact with significant groups of low net worth populations in both labor and non-profit support roles. I do confess to not having conducted specific research in the IQ to net worth among those groups, so this is just an informed opinion.

So, I will yield on the sole point IFF net worth is assumed to be a strong proxy for high IQ; then we might be headed in a smarter direction in the portions of the general population resulting from those families. I do agree with the distinction that the proposed mechanism in the film Idiocracy is not what is occurring. It does however seem apparent that due to many different mechanisms we may be in for a significantly dumber future, and on that we also agree.

It may be that among the high net worth populations; there may be a factor within the high IQ subgroup that is aware of the complex difficulty for the planet due to excessive and wasteful overconsumption and the aggregate demand that additional population stresses the situation. That subgroup may be choosing to self deselect for reproduction, and that subgroup may be among the highest fraction of IQ. It doesn't appear that this aspect was in the study you referenced, nor in any of that study's sources' research. Did I miss that component?

Does that study show TFR for the highest net worth, or highest IQ?

I think it may be unclear that net worth and high education are a 1:1 proxy for IQ as many of the highest educated and highest earning individuals may be in that situation not because of raw IQ, but due to the other socioeconomic factors which lead to those conditions. Namely being born into high net worth households and being afforded extensive tutoring and supplemental education relative to their poorer peers. I accept the premise that highly educated households do correlate with high net worth, and the study's TFR findings relative to those points are interesting.

However, there is still a nonlinear relationship between high IQ and those factors, as well as between high IQ parents' offspring IQ levels. Not a few high net worth individuals choose mates based on factors distinct from having a similar or even a high IQ, if a strong correlation between genetic heritability and IQ is to be believed.

The study actually tracked high income with regards to increased TFR in the US and UK, while the correlation to high education was primarily in Sweden. This serves to weaken the connection between IQ and fertility as there are numerous high income situations which are specifically not correlated with high IQ or high education.

So, yes, having children is increasingly expensive especially in America, and wealthier people are more prolific. This does not appear, at least to my mind, to have direct bearing on observable trends in general population IQ in the short term, nor does it appear to be addressing future outcomes regarding the Idiocratic potential.

> I had a verbal agreement with my former manager

Yeah, these are worth exactly as much as they weigh in fractions of a short tonne.

Take this as a learning experience, and accept that al least for now, you may be in the position to afford your own Linux capable machine for personal use.

This may actually help you in the sometimes difficult task of maintaining a durable firewall between 'personal' and 'work' digital worlds. If your work machine is not even an OS you would use for personal projects, this can keep your personal productivity from creeping into the machine which is co-owned by work and their MDM vendor.

Later, when you have your own 'unicorn' idea, work won't have any claim on it being a product of employment, and the time tracking that comes with MDM can be your fortress of proof. All of your compensated time can be accounted for with the work done on the machine they own and none of your pet project will be in that time or equipment.

Also, if || when the (new) management approach reaches it's 'halt and catch fire' stage, you wont find your personal digital assets suddenly locked behind a user:pass that no longer function.

Ok, that makes some sense. It was the reform aspect of 'Spelling reform' that i missed. Having taught ESL to students where grammar and many awkward facets of English, i.e. read being pronounced 'reed' or 'red' dependent on the condition of non-past or past tense, i can see the utility of some disambiguation help. Most of my students came from the Japanese mother tongue, where spelling is both less and more involved, and indeed 'literacy' is a much more complicated concept.

The reading at "4th grade level" is at yet another level of difficulty in French if i understand correctly. That may be where some of English' complexity has an origin.

I routinely explain to students and the curious that English is less a "core language" than it is the gradual accretion of words from many languages; primarily French and Germanic during the centuries of iterative conquest of the British Isles and the intermingling of the conquerors and the conquered in the market place, with the inclusions of Latin, Greek, Norse, Celts/Gaelic and various other lexicons through various means. It makes for a rather simplistic explanation of a complicated issue, but serves to resolve the "why are none of the language rules actually followed, and sometimes there are more numerous exceptions than adherents" family of questions.

In any case, if this is what you have an intense passion to build, keep at it!

Designing equipment that will operate reliably at the conditions of this depth is arguably an order of magnitude harder than designing reliable systems that operate in orbit. The expense of lift out of earth's gravity well aside, the actual operating environment is space is clean, with low pressure differentials, lacking corrosion and bio-fouling.

An example of how difficult and complex this is can be readily observed in a 40 year long research grade power plant at NELHA near Kona, HI. The OTEC process uses warm surface seawater to evaporate a working fluid ( ammonia water mixture) using the vapor to drive an electric turbine, and then uses cold deep seawater from 2200ft (~671m) to drive the condenser loop and recirculate the working fluid. The significant difficulties are the massive heat exchangers required to make it work and all of the seawater facing systems face continual bio-fouling and corrosion problems.

They achieve a minimal efficiency and struggle to compete on cost with solar and wind. This is the state of the technology, when mechanical operations are just above sea level and the only real problems at depth are pipeline collapse due to over-accelerated flow and the aforementioned bio-fouling.

Moving those operations to a greater depth significantly changes the pressure. OTEC's pipe only has to deal with 2200 feet / 66.7 atmospheres (~980ppsi) while the wiring and enclosures of the 'lava thermal' rig only survived a few minutes of operation at 5000 feet / 151.5 atmospheres (~2227ppsi). It is illogical to expect for any durable, low cost, renewable power to be reliably operated under those conditions.

This also risks destabilizing poorly understood ecosystems with organisms whose lifespans typically exceed the span of time we have been studying them.

Where these activities occur in international waters the UN International Seafloor Authority requires multi-year environmental baseline studies. Prior to any non-research installation, requirements include biodiversity monitoring, chemical outputs and impacts. before any structural installations are authorized. Contractors are required to continually map biodiversity (microbes, unique gastropods, and specialized crabs) and to monitor chemical outputs in order to avoid permanently impacting the ecosystem's natural dynamics.

So, moving into 'Exclusive Economic Zone' water of a kingdom without rigorous international oversight is an indicator of how this company views the potential regulatory market.

The image of 'saving Tonga from diesel' is a nice greenwash, but if this was economically motivated and truly viable, then locations much closer to megawatt scale underserved growing markets with investment potential and scalar consumer demand, such as the Azores, New Zealand, or Izu Japan would be where this happens first.

So, nice toy research and fancy press publicity with the opportunity to get "It works" headlines and unlock the next Series A tranche is all I can see from here. Hard pass, full stop.

ok; I'll be that person:

enginnering <~ engineering conservastive <~ conservative

Normally, i just don't care about a person's spelling. In fact, in these days of LLM tokenized prose, a little random keyboard 'mahsup' can be endearing. However, proposing a spelling help product that was made with an LLM, and then either aren't using it or it doesn't work. Not a strong Show HN outing.

I like the semantic approach though. Using context to identify the words which are likely and checking those for correct spelling is novel, at least to my awareness. Perhaps look for options to 'de-Webster' the spelling as an user choice. The American version of English is not automatically the best in all cases, much like the Oxford comma rule is not always the right way to compose a long list of similar ideas within the same sentence.

Colourful and creative authors prefer to have freedom, to choose how they organise the spelling, prose, structure and composition of their verse.

That's not quite right.

While nearly half of all habitable land is used to some extent as agriculture, the total amount of land in active cultivation has actually been declining since the early 2000's and we currently abandon more farmland every year than we clear forest or convert to agriculture. Between 1992 and 2020, ~ 7% of all cropland was effectively 'abandoned' and much of the production capacity in the west is actually intentionally kept from being fully planted in order to control against overproduction of cereal crops which in the past has been justified by arguing that this control is necessary to prevent market crashes when distribution networks cannot absorb the full capacity of a harvest.

Globally, there are about a billion acres, 400ish million hectares, ~ about half the size of Australia, which sits unused according to FAO satellite and other observables datasets.

About half of the abandonment not due to cultivability at the simplest level, but rather that of transportation of the crops to market or of access to workforce (labor or equipment) to the land. Smaller, more distant crops without significant mechanization simply cannot compete at the prices possible through mechanization. With a lack of access to global niche markets and the higher prices for, say, premium organics, many successive generations of farming families have simply moved to town and left the land sitting, unused.

The other ~ half of abandoned land is because of degraded production capacity through mismanagement; either through over-application of petrochemical fertilizers instead of crop rotation, or through mechanized tilling without careful erosion management. Many farms have neither the time nor the resources (or in the case of large industrial operations the long-term financial foresight on the part of management) to engage in multi-year regenerative practices necessary to reestablish the soil mycostructure and probiotic ecosystems necessary to recover productivity.

However, if demand were to rise sufficiently and if production instead of distribution was the driving force behind food scarcity, we do indeed have arable land reserves which do not require further destruction of uncultivated wilderness to meet a growing demand.

There is actually an inverse relationship to land productivity at scale; the larger farms do extract more gross tonnage of product at lower costs of per-unit equipment and labor, but actually those operations significantly underproduce volumes of harvestable food if measured in 'per unit of land' instead of labor hours. Fields with multi-level, interconnected plant communities significantly overproduce in terms or total volume. This has been demonstrated in nearly every place on earth using very simple techniques that have varied names and different approaches to marketing, but are all very much the same thing: call it Fukuoka's "One Straw Revolution", Bill Mollison's "Permaculture", Historic Food Forests in Africa and the Decca in India, or in the Middle East "Oasis". In the Americas it still is "Three sisters" gardening. These techniques simply are not mechanized and delivering mass volumes of single commodity product into a global distribution network and that's where the difficulty and disconnect between global populations and available nutrition originates.

If there was a technological and market incentives to connect abundant and diverse harvests in rural communities with Bodegas, restaurants, and grocery store chains in the big cities without ten middle-men adding cost for the consumer without improving the product in the least, then half of the land abandonment issue could unwind and small farms could thrive, not by delivering bulk raw indistinguishable commodity to food manufacturing, but by delivering farm fresh produce to kitchens and fruit stalls.

If that were both low-cost for the consumer, and high earning for the farmer while having quality control and assured provenance then the conversation could center around making better use of even less total cropland and restoring wilderness to a near-native sustainable state.

But as it stands now, we're not short on crop land to human population ratio so much as short on effective distribution and incentives for responsible production.

/todays-soapbox

... this is kind of my area of peculiar skill and work. I've tried to steer multinational, multimillion Euro/dollar agriculture operations that produce significant volumes of global "organically produced" harvests in the direction of cooperating with rural and indigenous farming communities in conserving soil health to the benefit of all. That's been a mixed bag, so the forward momentum is with the local rice production in rural Yamagata. Same objectives, more cooperation and long term planning.

This used to surprise me, until i saw it heppened many times and it became the new normal. There has been, and continues to be a not insignificant grey market in devices manufactured and purported to be manufactured by various companies which are in fact not on the actual company books.

The consequences of global supply chains.

Anecdotal but, I knew an original designer and owner of a Cali. based manufacturer of very high end audio equipment; the kind that gets used for tier one studios and audio reproduction reference, who had his chassis designs replicated and manufactured by unlicensed vendors. Not directly competing in the audio market, but as a very recognizable shape for some with the implied quality and appearance. He tried to make even an initial contact with them, mostly to find out of they could become a new resource as he was not fully satisfied with his present chassis manufacturer, and these unlicensed lookalikes were actually very well built. (We actually used one for his home media Slimserver) But at the very first email, they completely dissolved the organizational structure and vanished like smoke, only to have the exact same grey market devices appear under another entity within a few months.

Have seen all manner of grey-market Dell, HP, Asus, Cisco, Brocade (Silkworm), Qualcom, Foxconn, Liftmaster, ... the list goes on. I believe the terms for this are, unauthorised production, white branding, or three shift production in the cases where component subcontractors actually engage in overproduction of same or very similar devices.

In regulated markets; not being proactive about these issues can become quite risky. It really has been "buyer beware" pretty much the whole time.

Mine weren't ever going to erupt, just continue pushing laterally and causing all my front teeth to continue to crowd and overlap and then some day get infected through the gum-line against the last molar, and that might be a severe infection a few inches away from my brain-stem ... hell of a way to die in 'Timbuktu'.

They were almost done stitching me up when I came up from general anesthesia... I carry the 'red hair/viking' genes and a medical history of those kinds of medicines being less effective. So coming fully awake inverted in the chair with a surgeon tying flyfishing style knots with squeaking silk lines in my head was bit abrupt for all of us. Good thing I wasn't too combative. The anesthesiologist pushed the plunger and sent me down for the next little bit, but I still get laughs about coming to after it was all over and instead of waiting for a while in recovery "for my head to clear", just heading out of the lobby and walking across the street to my Grandmother's house where It was planned I would recuperate for a couple of days.

it's what happens when there hasn't been regular 'twice a year' cleaning since before the dental hygenist was born. We had a laugh about that, she asked how long it had been since my last cleaning, and when i told her she laughed and said 'So, longer than I've been alive." So, it took about twice as long as the 'twice a year' variety.

50+, terrible at brushing and oral hygene in general. Actually lived in the jungle for years, almost like a caveman. 25+ years without a single dentist visit. Was in Thailand last spring, went to a dentistry shop in the mall as a walk-in, paid about 45 dollars for a deep cleaning and panoramic x-ray. Other than some startlingly crunky plaque in the rinse and spit cycles, zero cavities, zero need for intervention. It all comes down to the microbiome. I blame the complete lack of 'antiseptic' mouthwash and other interventions that skew the microbial populations, combined with just plain good luck.

I refuse to use antibiotic soaps either. I reserve the tools of sterility for the space in front of my laminar flow hood and the like when preparing live cultures for cheeses and brews. I lived where fluoridated water was a practice during my early years when my teeth had formed - as that's actually when the flouride has the most impact...once the teeth are built, there's little effect from consuming flouride on the enamel.

Later in late grade-school I lived in a place where fluoridated water had not happened, and so the school was doing a routine annual flouride mouth rinse-and-spit routine in the class. Was a 'conscientious objector' causing some chagrin for the teachers, they would pass out the little cup of chemical brew and start the timer, while i just stared at the paper cup and got threatened with having to write "I will ...." sentences as punishment. Even that didn't really have any impact on my actions. Adding another hashmark by my name on the blackboard as a tally of pages of meaningless repetitive sentences which I would never actually do or turn in. That had zero leverage against my test scores or passing any subject. So what if I couldn't go out to recess to sweat on a bare dirt playground with zero swings or other appeal. Fine by me.

But, by 3rd grade I already had my own two-stage steromicroscope and was acutely aware of the need for balanced microbiomes in all of life, learning about soil and aquatic microbiomes from my grandfather. So, very much not the normal kid.

All that aside, my gums could use more care, so I'm trying to be more diligent and brush daily with salt, baking soda and the tiniest bit of fennel and mint oil. Its showing some improvement.

Same here. Not polar, but another similar program. But when the dentist went to take them out they were practically sideways in the worst way. My dentist, who also happened to be my father's first cousin, took one look at the x-rays and referred me to a maxillo-facial surgeon. I was scheduled for general anesthetic and the Doc had to chisel them out.

Not having them out could have easily become a life threatening situation in a real short order. So, if i hadn't been removing them to comply with those rules, the teeth themselves would have enforced a removal at some unplanned time and at potentially life threatening inconvenience.

So, you <might> still have yours, but I certainly wouldn't still have mine.

So IIUC, the correct nexus is to only hire a defense lawyer, and only discuss past crimes, probably in a rhetorical context. Otherwise attorney|client privilege only extends to non-criminal actions. Ok.