A single day

https://youtu.be/FcUhJAEUqTw?list=PLlCrV9TCfzMZ2xwpTDu30mKrZiRxA_hJ7&t=1574

Gold is the scarce resource in Age of Empires II. Just like oil is the scarce resource in the real world. A stupid player will use up all their gold, trading their military units that cost a lot of gold for enemy units that don't cost gold, and won't have gold when they need it.

One villager dying in the early game, or one villager not being created due to an idle town center, can have a huge effect later on. If a player was completely idle with no working villagers or TC for the first 20 seconds of the game (or if they took 20 seconds longer to place a TC on a Nomad start), then it's exactly like they're 20 seconds behind for the whole game. If the end game state is to have 180 population, with 20 units being trained in 20 seconds, then the 20 seconds idle at the start of the game means 20 fewer units at the end game. If the player who was idle at the start has 40 military units, the player who was not idle will have 60 military units, and can expect to win a battle with (60^2-40^2)^0.5 = 45 units remaining.

Suppose someone shares this idea, and people use it. On the day before they share it, and also on the day they share it, 500 people die in group conflicts around the world. The day after they share it, 490 people die in conflicts. Five years after they share it, 20 people die in conflicts in one day. Does sharing it one day earlier save the lives of 10 people?

No, it saves the lives of 480 people. Stupid people might not realize this, but it's the correct answer, and enough people can see the correct answer that they would inform the stupid people and it becomes the group's evaluation of someone's actions. Anyone who cannot see that 480 people would be saved by sharing it one day earlier is stupid.

Same with other things, like suicides. If 2000 people commit suicide each day, and the suicide rate is halved from problems like unemployment being fixed, then sharing this idea one day earlier means 1000 fewer people die from suicide.

Cannot continue due to lack of a title

The most important thing: "doing nothing" is not the way to avoid looking stupid. I made a mistake in my last post: I did not realize when I chose the title that it could easily be seen as a reference to the implied coin flip in the lyrics of "Only My Railgun": "a parabola decides my fate", with "parabola", with the meaning "conic section", in Japanese is written as "released + object + line". Although Wikipedia says that the Japanese term came from Chinese, where the first character is "throw", not "release", it's reasonable that fripSide felt the modern spelling was more relevant than the archaic spelling would have been. The relevant meaning being "an object that doesn't control or influence its path during its flight"; an object dropped from a hand that is moving sideways still follows a parabola, even though it wasn't thrown.

Just as I can't control what people do as a result of me writing a post or an argument about this idea.

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/only-my-railgun-only-my-railgun.html-1

*I'm confident that most people who translate these lyrics use what is apparently the adverb form of "nante" なんて, which Wiktionary says has a falling pitch accent, when the meaning is actually the particle, which Wiktionary does not indicate has a falling pitch accent (consistent with the melody for those lyrics).

(That took 26 minutes to write and if I had said other things first, I very easily could have forgotten some of this.)

I did say, apparently on ask.fm since it's in the text file of things I said to Sherine, that "It's easy to not make any mistakes if you never do anything difficult", on 08 Oct 2013. Noting that this was one of many things I said to Sherine on that day, but this is the thing I remembered.

So, at least I didn't say "if you do nothing". Doing nothing can still be a mistake.

And one can do difficult things by doing a series of things that are not difficult.

I still don't think that Ellie thinks that Imane reads this site, and so I am still not checking Imane's Chirp Club account. I am also no longer checking Ellie's Chirp Club account, as I felt the risk was too great that it would cause me to write something when I should not. The motivation for writing something would be to help Ellie, which only makes sense if I think it's possible she reads this site.

So if I think it's possible she secretly reads this site, why don't I think it's possible that Ellie thinks that Imane secretly reads this site? Because it's apparent that what I think differs from what other people, including Ellie, thinks. I think that it makes sense for people to talk to me about this idea: that not doing so, and continuing to care about it, is a waste of time. The first public argument for this idea opened with a quote about the importance of time.

So if other people have reached a different conclusion than me about whether it makes sense to talk about this idea, I find it very reasonable that they could reach a different conclusion on what someone would do or would want to do, based on their observable behavior without any statements from them to clarify their intentions or values. (I generally find that it makes sense to trust what people say, like the character Nao does from the drama Liar Game: "Honesty is the most important thing." Where honesty in Japanese is (one of the several meanings here, probably "correct") + direct. A character combination that implies, why not take the most direct and straightest path to a goal?)

Bad practice to continue a thought that was in parentheses, but I just bookmarked [125k views, 24.5k subs, 28 Apr 2026]Why “Being Real” Doesn’t Work in Japan - YouTube without watching it. The comments are relevant to the topic of honesty and suggest that the 21-minute video is not just a waste of time or clickbait like many videos are (which would deter me from linking it).

Note quick way of summarizing it: "the truth is, I am unhappy" — reasonable when Japan is ... 30th out of 183 countries for suicide rate, lower than southern Korea and the United States (need to click on the All column to sort the list). If accurate, quite an improvement; in 2010, Japan was 6th out of 104 countries, with Belarus showing even more of an improvement than Japan since then. But anyway, we all know that when most people ask "how are you?", they are not expecting a real answer, like "I am unhappy." This is the tension between honesty and dishonesty. If society was such that people were happy, there might not be this obvious scenario in which many people are dishonest.

Not thinking is a type of 'doing nothing'. Someone can read something, not understand it, and not think about it enough to correct their lack of understanding. The longer I make this, the more difficult it becomes to understand.

I haven't solved the problem of the title of this post, so I'm just writing more. I thought about what German pilot Hanna Reitsch said in a letter before her death. Apparently (I had not remembered this much) it wasn't a public statement, but it was still something she wanted someone else to think. So, something about Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the Boston marathon bombing, which Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said was targeted at the US government or something and the people who died were collateral damage. Which makes sense if he thought people who worked for the US government knew about this idea but weren't sharing it, and does not make much sense otherwise. How often is a bomb that is deliberately detonated near people not intended to kill them?

—Why when I search for "ireland car bombing mistake" does it return results from 2 days ago? But anyway, 6th search result: Omagh bombing, not intended to kill anyone but killed 29 people because "police inadvertently moved people toward the bomb."

One person who died was Chinese; another person who died was young. I hesitate to say that Sherine, Yara, Autumn, and the person who had @fancyfenty were supporters of Dhozkhar aka Jahar, as might sound like they supported the bombing. (I also hesitate to say, "which they did not.") @fancyfenty answered a question about why she didn't say her name or post her photo by saying she didn't want to get killed.

When I said to Sherine, "It's easy to not make any mistakes if you never do anything difficult", someone reading this casually might just pass over it without thinking. It sounds true, and uncontroversial. So why did I say it? I think Sherine understood why at the time. Like, I had asked on 05 Jul 2013, on ask.fm probably,

After all if what you want is someone who is only interested in you and no one else, I don't think I was ever able to provide that

If you do care but you aren't going to tell people, then I guess you're just too stupid

Are you stupid?


Why didn't you just beat them up

I was going to ask why you didn't just kill them but I thought that might sound wrong


Are other people stupid?


Is bullying a joke? http://iam.yellingontheinternet.com/2013/03/29/bullying-is-such-a-joke-problems-with-the-rpg-kickstarter/

etc.

It was a criticism. Of everyone who does nothing, thinking that doing nothing is easy.

Coin flip

Just ran an experiment in my head and I think it's predictable enough to make a conclusion without actually running the experiment.

People want to be seen as good rather than evil. It's a bit of a tautology that being evil is bad. The only complication is that people sometimes prefer to be seen as evil by certain other people when they perceive that those people seeing them as evil leads to outcomes that are better for the world. This reaches an extreme when, as shown in fiction, someone tells another person to kill them.

Thanks to Bing's Copilot search, I was able to find a scene that I remembered reading about, from Iris II: New Generation (2013):

Yoo-gun's martial arts skills are too good and he ends up defeating Ray. With Yoo-gun holding a gun, Ray dares him to "take the shot" and Yoo-gun, filled with rage and fury, shoots him to death. 

(In my search, I checked TV Tropes pages like Please Kill Me If It Satisfies You. It lists several variants and this particular scenario does not quite seem to fit any of them; the show Iris doesn't seem to be listed on any of the variant pages as an example.)

The experiment is this: it's the blue and red buttons again. People are asked what they would do if everyone had to choose between two buttons, and one button would kill anyone who pressed it if less than half of all people pressed it, but they would be safe if at least half of people pressed it.

(Note that one can vary the question, like by increasing the percentage of people who need to press it for all of them to be safe, but the '50%' scenario is more relevant for real-world judgements of behavior: 'the majority is always morally correct'.)

There are two scenarios: one where the safe button is labeled "I am good" and the risky button is labeled "I am evil", and the opposite. People are asked which button they would press in both scenarios, with the order of these two questions randomly varied and they answer both questions before submitting their response.

Then, this data is used to simulate successive experiments. This way, there is no need for a condition of, "the test is run again and everyone forgets the first test and chooses as though they had not encountered the problem before".

People are randomly assigned to one of the two scenarios, i.e. one of their choices for which button to pick is selected with a 50% chance.

If the vast majority of people pick the risky button, then there is no simulated decrease in population between generations. (Again, note that real-life scenarios could require a higher threshold, like 80% of people selecting the button for anyone who selected it to survive.) If almost everyone picks the safe button, there is only a small decrease in population, and most people would not feel the scenario is interesting. So we say that typical results are very close to 50% of people pressing each button.

This is exponential decay: after 10 generations, if the outcomes remain around 50%, 0.1% of the population remains. After 100 generations, approximately 10^-30 of the original population remains (my calculator is being funny and rounding to 0 instead of 7.8886090522×10⁻³¹ of the population remains. If each person clones themself each generation, then it's not a problem, but it distracts from the point, so we just accept that we only have 10 generations.

There are, basically, two possibilities: the percentage of people who think, based on reading the buttons that they press, that they are evil increases, or the percentage who think they are good increases.

Any individual person could answer anything to the two questions: they could always choose the safe button, no matter what the buttons say, or they could always choose the risky button, or they might press the risky button more often than the safe button if the risky button says one of two things: either when it says "good", or when it says "evil".

The 'control' question is when the buttons have neutral, non-meaningful differences, differing only to the extent needed to indicate which button does what. (For example, positioned to the north and south, if people don't view north as evil and south as good.) We assume that with this control question, about 50% of people will choose the risky button; it is, in any case, less than 100% and more than 0%. So the question is, what is more likely to increase the percentage of people choosing the 'safe' button: labeling it as the 'good' button, or labeling it as the 'bad' button?

People want to do things that other people see as 'good'.

Possibility 1: a person who wants to do good things already sees the safe button as 'good' when it has neutral markings.

    - 1A: the safe button is marked as 'good'. They press it.

    - 1B: the safe button is marked as 'evil'. Do they still press it?

Possibility 2: a person who wants to do good things sees the safe button as 'evil' when it has neutral markings.

    - 2A: the safe button is marked as 'evil'. Do they press it?

    - 2B: the safe button is marked as 'good'. Do they press it?

Discussions around the blue and red buttons suggest that people see the safe button as 'evil'. This breaks the symmetry that would exist if we assumed that people saw labels 'good' and 'evil' with indifference.

If the safe button is labeled as 'good', people have an excuse to press it. If the risky button is labeled as 'good', it does not convince more people to press it, since they already saw it as good and pressed it.

Note that people who did not assume or think that the risky button was 'good' when it was labeled neutrally might be convinced to press it when it's labeled 'good', but this is not most people.

So in any given generation: the majority of those who see the risky button labeled as 'good' press the risky button. The majority of those who see the safe button labeled as 'good' press the safe button. When the risky button loses, the majority of the survivors are people who pressed a button labeled 'good'.

It also includes people who pressed the safe button when it was labeled 'evil'. But over time, what we expect is a survivorship bias towards people who pressed buttons labeled 'good', whether or not they thought what they were doing was good or not.

In other words, people who survived got there by doing what an external system told them was 'good'.

Note the paths of individual people: one person survived because they always choose the safe button, no matter what the labels say. Another person survived because they were lucky enough to get 10 scenarios where the safe button was labeled 'good', even though they always pick 'good'. A third person got five safe buttons labeled 'good' (5 coin flips = 3% chance), but in the sixth scenario, the safe button was labeled 'evil' and so they chose the risky button, labeled 'good'.

If the percentage of people who pick the risky button is always 49.9% due to bad luck, then no one who ever picked the risky button survives (including this third person). If it's usually 51%, with enough variation (from people who vary their choice based on the labeling being assigned a different label) that just 10% of generations are below 50%, then the survivorship bias towards people who have always picked the button labeled 'good' is much weaker, and it would take many more generations for most survivors to have always picked the 'good' button.

I'm unpublishing this post if Greta posts anything on Instagram without sharing this idea, disregarding any Stories that she posts that get deleted after 24 hours.

Originally published 27 Apr 2026, 14:18.

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Update 27 Apr 2026, 16:35

Some comments from people who watched a 19-minute video that I didn't watch:

all the credible research I’ve looked at indicates a 110-120 degree gape for fatalis and populator, which is quite a significant bump over the 90 you posit.

The interpretation offered here regarding a more limited gape angle fails to acknowledge that the temporomandibular joint of the living animal would not have been bone-on-bone articulation.

Asking the wrong questions

I'm treating Ellie as important because she is the only person to comment on this site in the last eight years. Even though she made two mistakes on Chirp Club in the last few days: repeating text while writing this, and making an unnecessary correction here.

Ellie retweeted this: https://nitter.net/zermatist/status/2048234942476238945

I tried asking perplexity.ai for an explanation. Didn't use it for a while because it was bugging out for me, and just freezing my browser with 100% CPU until the process was killed, but now it works again.

>which well-known question is Tim Urban's red and blue button poll related to?

Tim Urban’s red-and-blue button poll is a variation of the well-known prisoner’s dilemma: your best choice depends on what you think everyone else will do. [Chirp Club]

More broadly, it’s also related to a coordination game or collective action problem, where individual incentives conflict with the group outcome. [neogaf]

In other words, it didn't answer. (The NeoGAF thread has some interesting responses, with people explaining why they would pick a button even after reading replies from others who disagreed.)

While I was looking it up, my browser experienced the display bug that forces me to restart it, which I did after bookmarking open tabs. Maybe this means that someone thought I shouldn't write about this. I also thought I shouldn't write about this.

After I did a search for "Tim Urban's button dilemma" and started reading it, I thought it might be like the apple game in the Liar Game live-action film (that followed two seasons of TV episodes). That would have made it interesting. But it wasn't that.

Is the question still interesting? Not really. I'm still writing about it, but before that: Tim Urban is a person. People can refer to him in a post meant to reach a broad audience and not look crazy.

This is, basically, a comfort or convenience. One can imagine a world, like the author of Ender's Game did, where an anonymous person can have significant influence. This is still possible, to some degree, as long as the anonymous person appears to have a good reason for being anonymous: implying that they would be in danger if their identity was known.

I have no interest in saying that people are bad. So I cannot gain influence as someone who appears to be anonymous, even though I have said my name.

So, an anonymous person can't gain influence because being able to trust that someone has an actual reputation to risk if they act badly or stupidly is a minor convenience which people enjoy. Ellie retweeted a post that quoted https://nitter.net/DavidBozell/status/2048222765929357790, and it's like that: people want to be able to eat food and talk with other people, even though there is a war in Sudan etc. Being able to know the name of someone is like being able to eat in comfort without hearing any gunshots.

The other notable point is the broad audience that social media can reach. People have an incentive to share and talk about an interesting thing, because it changes opinions held of the people who find interesting things that other people have created. The 'replication' part of a natural environment. The button question is no different from the questions asked on sites like Reddit, but the potential to reach people is much greater, for a question that people care about.

In this case, it seems that people leveraged interest in the outcome of the poll to reach a broader audience: with the fictional, or 'role-playing' stake of whether half the world would die, and what people who wrote posts like the one in the screenshot (which I could not find by searching for the title; it might be something on Chirp Club that isn't visible except with a Chirp Club account) saw as a real-world outcome of interest in the form of one answer representing "selfishness" and the other representing "trust".

The hypothesis: people's choice of which button to press is based on a desire for themselves to live, and possibly on a desire for others to live as well.

There is, however, nothing in the question that tests this hypothesis. Something that would test it would be to make a second poll:

"Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing one of two buttons. The right one is labeled, "I am evil." The left one is labeled, "I am good." If more than 50% of people press the 'evil' button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the 'evil' button, only people who pressed the 'good' button survive. Which button would you press?"

The only thing that has changed is the appearance of the buttons. Is the appearance important for which button people would press?

Pages that I bookmarked before I had to restart my browser:

Instagram

jim iuorio (@jimiuorio): "There’s no dilemma here…you press the red button…if you are selfish you don’t care what others press….if you are compassionate you hope that everyone else presses the red button as well…either way you press red…" | nitter

jim iuorio (@jimiuorio): "This is truly fascinating…it’s 100% the right choice to pick red..jeopardizing your life is not statistically justified in this instance…when no logical person is in danger..what it shows is a pathological desire to be part of a group that’s saving the world…it’s a fantastic metaphor…" | nitter

Roko 🐉 (@RokoMijic): "We're doing the "Blender" game again There is a large blender. Everyone in the world has to decide whether to step into the blender. If at least 50% of the people do step into the blender, it will be unable to overcome their inertia to get started, and everyone survives. If less than 50% of the people step into the blender, then they all get blended up into paste and die. People who do not step into the blender suffer no adverse effects. Would you step into the blender? (Blue=step into the blender, Red= don't do that)" | nitter

Note that the colors red and blue are often associated in the US with the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively, and a poll found that voters for Democratic candidates were more likely to choose the blue button. This could be seen as evidence that some people are choosing based off the appearance of the buttons, forming the basis for my judgement that this is a bad question.

There was something I once said; it might have been a reply to something Laura aka Drunkenfairy said on Guildcafe (circa 2008), and comments weren't saved in the archives that were made when the blogs there were deleted. It was poorly worded at the time and I cannot make it better: "Thinking about thinking is only useful if it leads to a useful result." It could even have been in an email.

So: in the modified question I posed above, some people would still choose the 'evil' button even if they knew that 90% of the first 1000 people to press a button (as with the Blender variant) chose the 'good' button. The conclusion that one reaches from this, if one believes that what people say in an online poll with no consequences reflects what they would do in real life, is that some people are fine with dying. Which is the same conclusion one would reach from observing many other things in life, either directly or from e.g. reading about a battle in the Cimbrian War, and 300 females from the defeated side committing suicide rather than fall into captivity, etc.

Socrates taking poison rather than saying that the gods existed (the legal punishment for impiety being was sometimes death).

___

Update 26 Apr 2026, 03:43

To be honest, my second thought, after I saw it wasn't like the Liar Game problem, was probably about Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when the knights are asked what their favorite color is by the guardian of the bridge. Some people like blue.

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Update 26 Apr 2026, 03:57

I remind any readers that might exist of this post, incomplete though it may be.

(It was written in part for the female author of the Blogspot blog, Letters from an Unquiet Mind, which might have been deleted shortly thereafter — I am unsure of the exact date, it might have been deleted before that post — and which I don't think was ever archived by archive.org. I learned what I did, and read what I could at the time, through Google caches of pages from the site, which is a service that Google doesn't even provide anymore.)

To Imane, pt 68

I'm curious how many people know that Russia's president has a black belt in judo. Sometimes, articles will mention the fact in a way that suggests the writer thinks everyone knows it, but people often do not know things that other people expect them to know. If there was a like YouGov poll with 5k responses, how would the demographics look? Would the percentage of older people who know that he does be higher than the percentage of younger people? What percentage of people with a 4-year college degree know this?

I've mentioned this before:

I was fascinated by the technique of the basic foot sweep while walking, where one becomes airborne before noticing that the foot is not firmly placed on the ground.

About my recent post, Taxes. Trump posted something, I think, about Democrats in the US trying, unsuccessfully, to raise taxes. So if people (voters) think that lower taxes are good, and reward the Republican party for lowering taxes, why not lower them even more?

Recently read about the Cimbrian War. There is limited information about those times, as seen with the topic of the "Marian reforms", and also with how there is limited information on many of the major battles, with the date and sometimes even the location unknown.

I will just mention the Battle of Arausio, "the worst defeat in the history of ancient Rome", which I had never heard of before, to show that it was not all defeats for the opponents of Rome, who later became like Germany and France or something. I was going to say that the Roman victories are more interesting because we have more information about them, because Rome had better records, and I think this is true, but the exact date of the Battle of Aquae Sextiae, a Roman victory in which the Teutons and Ambrones had 100k~120k dead, is still unknown.

Compare this random article: 10 Deadliest Days on WWI’s Western Front

The article even says,

World War I happened just as the world was industrializing. This new technology allowed the nations involved to apply industrialization to the slaughter of their enemies. This, and the amount of soldiers packed together in the trenches, allowed for casualty numbers that had never been seen before. Historically the most soldiers killed in a single day, for most countries, were during these battles on WWI’s Western Front.

It says,

Deadliest day: August 22, 1914
27,000 KIA

(It also says, "It got so bad along the French lines that in 1917 there was a series of mutinies that were barely contained by the French military authorities.")

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population says Europe had a population of 13m in 1000 BCE, and 32 million in "year 0" (I know that the world uses a numbering system in which 0 does not appear when going from negative years to positive). Estimate 30 million in 102 BCE, and 100k people dying in one day was 0.33% of Europe's whole population. In 1914, Europe had 448m people, so 27k French people dying in one day (ignoring German losses) was 0.006%, or just 2% of the relative population loss from the Battle of Aquae Sextiae.

The Mémorial de Verdun says 163k French dead, 143k German dead. Wikipedia lists a bit lower losses, which could reflect dates and locations included in the total etc. (Also, I liked how in Edge of Tomorrow (2014), "Verdun" refers to a more recent battle against the Mimics, not the battle in WWI.) So even that total, of 306k dead, is just 0.07% of Europe's total population at the time, or 20% of the relative deaths in a single day in the Battle of Aquae Sextiae.

A point of interest with the Battle of Vercellae is the negotiations for where the battle would take place:

Eventually Marius chose the optimal location for the battle, an open plain (the Raudine Plain) near Vercellae, and then met with the Cimbri leader Boiorix to agree on the time and place of battle.

The point I want to make in mentioning these is the importance of leadership. A simple phrase shows it: "feigning retreat." Morale was very important because of the bad organization of the times, compared to now: a soldier who survived a battle had a reasonable chance of just escaping. A soldier in WWI had no chance of escaping the war. So if an army thought they would lose, their behavior changed from everyone trying to win, to many people trying to escape, which was bad for the group. A leader's job was often to prevent people who thought they were going to win from doing stupid things as a result and falling victim to tactical ruses.

But actual strategy also played a role. The description of the Battle of Aquae Sextiae suggests that the surprise attack by 3000 troops was important, even though it was 3000 attacking 100k.

Back to judo: the Democratic party in the US should announce that they are willing to support any decrease in taxes, as long as the Republican party is willing to take responsibility for the decrease and any effects it will have.

Day 5002 of people not doing what I want

"Is there any good person in the world whose reputation would not be instantly and totally destroyed if they were filmed passing by someone who was torturing an animal without doing anything about it?"

The reader can imagine that I posted this question on Ask Reddit, and it didn't get deleted by automod, and no one could name someone whose reputation would survive this. If it's bad for me to be saying anything, I don't want to act like I'm trying to hide the fact that I'm saying something.

There is no agreement about whether it's bad for someone not to share this idea, mainly because no one is sharing it, and people never define what the majority does as 'bad'. When I created a moral standard, even I didn't say that not sharing this idea is 'bad': I just said that benefiting from associating with someone who doesn't share it is 'bad'. But if people did talk about this idea and agree that sharing it is good, and not sharing it is bad, or even that supporting its use (with the objective of ending war and so on) is good and not supporting it is bad, then this question about someone torturing an animal has immediate relevance.

I don't like to go into more detail even in a question, regarding what "torturing" is supposed to mean. But it's precisely because people can imagine "torturing" to mean doing something worse to an animal than someone would be able to get away with doing in public to a human, that the question makes people understand that ignoring the situation is morally unacceptable. Humans can also be treated poorly: someone screaming at their child, who is looking at the ground and crying etc., but humans still find reasons to treat other humans poorly, because punishment can deter behaviors seen as bad or dangerous. But humans can also receive protection if they report bullying, while animals cannot identify a perpetrator except in Black Mirror episodes.

It's been two weeks so I don't have to feel bad about saying something because of Greta posting on Instagram. Greta posted a Story made from https://www.instagram.com/armeniaexplores/reel/DXeG5goCHWp/. About social media, the same account also posted https://www.instagram.com/armeniaexplores/reel/DXeKEUlCAP    x/ which is almost exactly the same except for the overlaid text, and it has just 11% of the Likes. I guess it shows, among other things, the importance of language: the videos both use mostly the same clips, with the same music, and no talking, but the significance changes completely because of a few words that only someone who knows English could read.

At 0:17, there is a short clip, less than one second, of a bunch of flags from many countries. And I thought, all of them have the same visual pattern. The US flag is different. If the US flag were to be shown in a group of other flags, the US flag would stand out visually. Maybe it's a non-trivial part of why people from the US consider themselves to be 'special'? Our flag visually invites comparison and conflict with other people, and if we don't attend events like this with other people due to not feeling similar, it just leads to more cultural separation as a positive feedback loop. (US states also have flags, which might be more similar visually to the flags of other nations, but most US state flags would not be recognized by people from other US states.)

Greta also posted a Story made from https://www.instagram.com/ajplus/reel/DXfYAQ3jJc5/. An unrelated video, also recently posted by ajplus: https://www.instagram.com/ajplus/reel/DXhQAMmDTQE/.

What would Japanese kids do if they had to take a detour to reach their school, with the most direct path being blocked by barbed wire? They would not protest in this way. Is it better to protest, than to not protest? Presumably people in the cultures who act a certain way think that acting that way is better.

Trump has this as his pinned tweet, from a day ago: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116455604892115486

It made me think of this post from https://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2003/08/ on 28 Aug 2003:

Listen to this little anecdote. One of my cousins works in a prominent engineering company in Baghdad- we’ll call the company H. This company is well-known for designing and building bridges all over Iraq. My cousin, a structural engineer, is a bridge freak. He spends hours talking about pillars and trusses and steel structures to anyone who’ll listen.

As May was drawing to a close, his manager told him that someone from the CPA wanted the company to estimate the building costs of replacing the New Diyala Bridge on the South East end of Baghdad. He got his team together, they went out and assessed the damage, decided it wasn’t too extensive, but it would be costly. They did the necessary tests and analyses (mumblings about soil composition and water depth, expansion joints and girders) and came up with a number they tentatively put forward- $300,000. This included new plans and designs, raw materials (quite cheap in Iraq), labor, contractors, travel expenses, etc.

Let’s pretend my cousin is a dolt. Let’s pretend he hasn’t been working with bridges for over 17 years. Let’s pretend he didn’t work on replacing at least 20 of the 133 bridges damaged during the first Gulf War. Let’s pretend he’s wrong and the cost of rebuilding this bridge is four times the number they estimated- let’s pretend it will actually cost $1,200,000. Let’s just use our imagination.

A week later, the New Diyala Bridge contract was given to an American company. This particular company estimated the cost of rebuilding the bridge would be around- brace yourselves- $50,000,000 !! 

My search for "site:riverbendblog.blogspot.com bridge cousin engineer" also turned up https://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/, where the first post, from 18 Jan 2006, lists damage from the war.

So I think it's great that Trump was able to save money with the Reflecting Pool, that was leaking 500k gallons of water per week before the first restoration in 2012.

People saying "just spend the $300 million on the pool", just like they said "just spend the $50 million to rebuild a bridge in Iraq": a few days ago, my younger relatives were watching videos that made them stupid and would make other people think my relatives are stupid. I could have forced them to stop, but I did not, despite my complaints about their poor reading ability. People being stupid, and therefore inefficient, creates more jobs, and therefore arguably a better outcome for society. I would prefer a society where being more efficient improves society — what this idea would do — but it is not the society we live in. Since watching the dumb videos made my relatives happier and was also better for society, I did not stop them.

___

Update 24 Apr 2026, 15:39

I thought of a poll, which someone with the ability to make polls (I can't at the moment, except on traditional message boards) should make after making other polls like the one that I suggested that Greta make but can't remember at this moment:

"If you act in a stupid way and avoid activities that make you smarter, the world will be better off but you will be worse off. Do you act in a stupid way?"

Day 5001 of people not doing what I want

A second serving, 275g, of turkey and rice soup. Its appearance, with a lot of broth, made me think of the scene from one of the films about Oliver Twist where he asks for more food.

I saw the film when I was young and don't remember much; "you've got to pick a pocket or two", a song with chanting of "Oliver", and that line. My siblings and I might have facetiously used the same words to ask for more food at mealtimes.

I'm sure that I did not notice when I was young how the female in the scene restrains the male from reprimanding Oliver before he approaches, and how the body language of the male when he takes Oliver to see the people with power over the orphanage shows that he wants the kids to be able to have more food.

Mentioned Spain in a recent post. This survey is not precisely about the same issue; it doesn't mention immigrants:

Would you rather get money from your parents or earn your own money?

but many of the young people in Spain who can't get jobs, presumably due to fierce competition for jobs (or for well-paying jobs, if they don't apply for jobs with low wages), do get money from their parents. If they don't ask for policy changes that create jobs, like Oliver asked for more food, their parents might think they are fine with just getting money for free. And the same at a global scale.

Delete

https://nitter.net/EllieAsksWhy/status/2047329305714401478 seahorse emoji, food pyramid, salt in diet. Dangers of deciding "this thing can't be trusted" without the ability to provide feedback to correct a situation that other people might misinterpret.

Day 5000 of people not doing what I want

My mum is watching a film which an AI query for "british film about a young girl who is abused and forced into prostitution" identifies as No Child of Mine (1997).

I identified the issue in the post, "A Message to No One", as "activities that are seen as unethical, like sex work and finance, being paid at a higher rate." I also mentioned it in this argument as "child abuse".

Finance being seen as unethical? Kate may or may not remember me; on her old Chirp Club account, which she apparently lost access to, she retweeted this status from Elon Musk:

u can’t sell houses u don’t own
u can’t sell cars u don’t own
but
u *can* sell stock u don’t own!?
this is bs – shorting is a scam
legal only for vestigial reasons

After I ran out of money when I was living outside and was about to stop, I said in an email to Mei and Kate that I would probably get a job in software development or finance. I did not. I also said that I would probably never contact them again. Whether this came to pass might be debatable; I sent more emails about the idea to everyone in my contacts that included both of them as recipients, but I have not sent another email to Kate since then (~September 2012) that was not also to everyone else in my contacts, or 50~100 people. I sent one or two to the email address I had for Mei, but they returned an error indicating the account had been closed. This was after Mei had apparently closed the other email account she had in late Dec 2011, possibly because I had accidentally sent an email to her other account after she replied to me for the first time since mid-2009.

So anyway. I definitely found some amusement in grouping finance with sex work. But if it's a problem that these activities receive higher pay, does that mean the price will go down and everyone will be able to afford it?

Some clarification: a high price is a problem because it encourages people to do it. If the 'price' is no higher than other activities, people have no special reason to do it, but the 'price' includes the risk of punishment. The reward for robbing a jewelry store is not high because the price is high, even if it's a crime that can be carried out using only a hammer. (That's a video I remember finding so funny that it was hard to continue watching due to laughter, when I first watched and downloaded it on 25 May 2012.)

Speaking your mind, why do you find them wrong?

There are times when I don't try to explain someone's actions, because they are acting stupid. Someone who tries to understand the story of this idea not being used might have difficulty understanding these parts of it.

For example: "Why economists are wrong". I said they only want to make the numbers go up. 'The numbers' is best interpreted in this case as GDP. If this idea reduces unemployment, why would it not raise GDP? Because I think the method for calculating GDP incorrectly takes into account higher qualities of goods, such that lower inequality would lead to a lower GDP, because people might purchase the same quantity of a high quality of a good but its price would go down.

When inequality only goes up, as it has in the US since ~1980, this error in the GDP calculation just means that measured GDP growth is a bit higher every year. Few people in the US would complain about that; people like to boast that the US has the highest nominal GDP, though it fell behind China in purchasing power parity GDP in 2014.

I don't think most economists would be aware of this error, if I am right that it exists (and it might be wrong). So if an economist did not think this would happen, then I was giving them more credit than they deserved, making them out to be smarter than they are.

If I did something stupid that had serious consequences, I would want other people to point it out. But I am in no danger of being seen as less smart than average, for anyone who knows something about me (a random person, like a police officer, might still make this mistake). Other people might consider themselves to have this risk, so they would not want people to point out stupid things that they do.

Pey has a memory of when she was playing original World of Warcraft on her older brother's account, ~20 years ago when she was like 12 years old, and she did something that made another player ask her, "are you stupid or something?" (I never shared the idea with Pey.)

Ellie retweeted this: https://nitter.net/FamedCelebrity/status/2046526221245382871

Links to Spain throws open its doors to undocumented migrants: Huge queues continue to form after socialist government granted residency to 500,000 people

(I use Firefox's Reader mode, the page icon on the right side of the URL bar, to avoid the signup banner, or equivalently prepending 'about:reader?url=' to the URL.)

From that article I also saw Louisiana dad executed his seven children and nephew in rage after wife discovered his disgusting betrayal, relatives say

The article say it's "one of the deadliest family massacres in American history", otherwise I wouldn't mention it. Timeline:

2012: Snow and Elkins, aged ~17, start a relationship. Youth unemployment at 16%, Unemployment Level/Job Openings: Total Nonfarm is around 3.3.

2013: Elkins, aged ~18, joins the National Guard as a Signal Support System Specialist and a Fire Support Specialist.

2015: Their relationship ends (aged ~20).

2016: Baby drama and legal conflicts over paternity (Snow and Elkins are ~21 years old).

~2019: Shaneiqua Pugh's first baby.

~2021: Christina Snow's third baby (Snow and Elkins are ~26 years old).

The timeline on the day of the deaths is a bit confused: did he Elkins kill his children, then go to the other property and shoot Snow, and then return to the first property to shoot Pugh?

Despite not knowing this, I conclude that Elkins killed his children because he was convinced by his wife's actions that he was a bad person, and he thought the world would be better off without anyone who was similar to him. He was killed by police, instead of killing himself, because he didn't want other people to think that this was his motivation, which a few more people might have thought if he had killed himself, although in both cases most people would just think that he was a bad person who wanted to cause harm to others.

Compare 2022 Nong Bua Lamphu massacre where most people who died were not related to the perpetrator: someone who criticized the way other people acted and wanted to harm them, by killing the ones they cared about most. 2024 Zhuhai car attack: "Police say he was upset about his divorce", which I interpret as being at least partly about his wife's actions. "Most of the victims were middle-aged or elderly people in exercise groups", and the fact is (look at people ignoring Covid-19) that people care less about old people dying than young people dying, and yet the the perpetrator chose to attack old people instead of young people at a school.

To summarize, Elkins: "I am bad."

Nong Bua Lamphu massacre: "Society is bad."

2024 Zhuhai car attack: "My wife is bad."

The solution to any problem could be said to be for people to not be bad. People might disagree with the 'blame' in the last two cases, but few would disagree that Elkins was bad. So, how to prevent someone like Elkins from being bad? Exercise for the reader.

 

First article, Spain's immigrants. Someone in the replies on Chirp Club mentions youth unemployment, but few people ever think of linking data. Without data, people can just say, "well maybe this person is wrong" and move on to the next tweet, 0.5 seconds later.

25% youth unemployment in 2025 is certainly much better than 55% in 2013. The latest figure for the US is 8.5%; recent peaks were 19.5% in Apr 2010 and the brief Covid-19 lockdown spike of 27.5% in 2020, which lasted a couple months. So for about 14 years, Spain had worse youth unemployment than the highest level the US reached during its lockdowns for the still-ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

So how can Spain's Prime Minister get away with the following?

Sanchez described the drive in a letter addressed to citizens published on Tuesday on X as not only an act of justice but also an economic necessity.

'Spain is ageing... Without more people working and contributing to the economy, our prosperity slows, and our public services suffer,' he wrote.

[...]

But with about 90 per cent of new jobs going to immigrants, income per person has barely grown in Spain.

Because applicants need to show a clean criminal record, so the government can claim that crime won't increase from the policy, and it's like having more slaves. The poor are harmed: people who compete with immigrants for jobs. The rich may seem to benefit, as they become richer while prices for many things do not increase.

Economists sometimes try to show that inequality causes harm to a society, with worse outcomes on many measured metrics. I won't bother to look any of that up. If you filter out crime, few negative outcomes remain.

The question then becomes, what kind of society do you want to have? It's no longer a simple matter of "everyone would prefer it this way." There are people who seem to want inequality, even if it comes with effects like "the majority of voters think that job creation is more important than dealing with climate change", and others who think that inequality is a bad outcome. It makes the future uncertain and subject to the influence of individual people who decide that one outcome is better. I don't want to say "take a side", because it implies that one thing, like inequality, is the only important topic: in reality, people may disagree on one thing, but agree on many other things, so no one is really on the opposite side from someone else.

Spain fertility rate: 1.12 births per woman (2023).

Countering misinformation

"You use the little boys' room. I use the large, strong, adult males' room."

1) Collect nationwide statistics on the profit each company makes per employee. 2) Require news stories that discuss the profitability of a company, such as whether it can afford to pay workers more, to report on how that company compares to similar companies on profit per employee. For example, "in the bottom 10% in profit per employee."

Rested Experience

Was thinking while I was sleeping about rested experience, the system in World of Warcraft on which this idea is based. For those who don't know, the story goes like this: the developers wanted to discourage people from playing too long. They added a penalty for killing a lot of mobs. People really disliked it. So the developers changed it from a penalty for killing a lot of mobs, to a bonus for killing smaller numbers of mobs, after reducing the base XP from mobs. According to developer descriptions of the change, it was the exact same system, but presented in a different way. (It would not be the exact same system if the original penalty was based off of time played, not number of mobs killed; I don't know if this was the case.)

In the system in WoW as it launched, rested experience is accrued by being in a safe area, an inn or a capital city, including while a character is offline. Going from normal (no bonus) to rested (bonus) from being in an inn is the same as going from tired (penalty) to normal (no penalty), so it's plausible the original mechanics could have been the same, other than the different baseline.

So why did players hate it so much? Because it was clearly an additional system; you didn't interact with it in your first moments in the game, just later on. If the system was removed, would players benefit? In the original system, players would benefit it it was removed; with the 'new' system, rephrased as a benefit with no actual gameplay changes, players perceived that they would be harmed if the system were removed.

What if this idea was described in the same way? "A bonus for lower amounts of work; all work after that is normal pay." This seems dishonest. Many businesses cannot afford to just pay everyone more; if they did, they would go out of business. Grocery stores are often said to have very thin profit margins, like 1%.

If you say, "work after X hours is paid at a reduced rate", then people feel like they're being discouraged from working. And that's the point. People should feel like they wouldn't want to work if they only get 0.7x the normal rate, just as they should feel like they don't want to work if they get 0x the normal rate (aka salary).

In Why overtime is bad, I described two ways of calculating someone's wage rate, to give people the choice of deciding which one is 'better'. Obviously, a business would prefer the calculation that gives the lower wage rate, while an employee would prefer the higher wage rate. This argument was not successful.

Instead, add a single line to the description: "Increase base wage rate so that total wages are unchanged." For anyone working less than 40 hours per week, it would take a decrease in the base wage rate for total wages to be unchanged: people who are bad at math might not realize this. But the objective, to avoid changing total wages, is easy to understand and clearly stated.

Is 'undertime' a stupid name for extra pay for early hours? I don't know. The system is also supposed to be something that can work off of hours worked per year for an employer (like seasonal agricultural workers), not just hours worked per week, and connecting it too strongly to the overtime system through its name might be bad.

The flaw with the original concept of 'tired XP' was that people saw that they were harmed by the existence of the system. Adding "Increase base wage rate so that total wages are unchanged" to the description avoids this perception, for this idea.

___

Update 20 Apr 2026, 11:13

Somehow I never realized this before: in World of Warcraft, it was not the exact same system, just presented in a different way. A new character does not start with any 'rested XP', which is when the experience bar at the bottom of the screen turns blue instead of purple and mobs give double XP. So the change from 'tired XP' to 'rested XP' made the early game harder (unless the experience required to level was also reduced, but that would also affect quest XP etc.). The change in baseline, of halving XP from mobs, was a real change in difficulty that made leveling with 'rested XP' twice as hard as leveling with 'tired XP' had been, and people still liked it.

Hungry ghost

A few hours ago, I wanted to make a post about this quote, which I recorded in a text file as follows:

戰爭無情，和平無價
War is ruthless; peace is priceless.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210613113511/https://www.ydn.com.tw/news/newsInsidePage?chapterID=1312831

via https://forum.skalman.nu/viewtopic.php?t=50050

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/新北八二三臺海戰役紀念碑

https://www.kinmen.gov.tw/News_Content2.aspx?n=98E3CA7358C89100&sms=BF7D6D478B935644&s=E28F9203506FEBAE

金門新聞(轉載金門日報)
戰爭無情和平無價

About the quote, and about the subject of the first article where I first saw it mentioned. Since the same quote is on a monument that doesn't mention the soldier in the first article, he was probably not the originator of the quote. It talks about him striving to teach his family to act in good ways; basically, to be nice.

Explorations of iterated prisoner's dilemmas show that the optimal strategy often depends on other existing strategies. A given strategy can be successful in one environment, causing it to increase in frequency, while failing in another. Being 'nice' is a strategy that can fail if everyone else is 'mean', partly because if too many people are mean, the cost of trying to keep track of or punish everyone who is mean is too hard. But there is also the consideration of people simply punishing anyone who deviates from what is thought of as the optimal strategy. Look at the discourse around males being nice towards females in the US: males who do this can be subjected to disparaging terms like "simp", or the somewhat less disparaging term "white knight". Wiktionary says,

3. (figurative, derogatory) Someone who unnecessarily defends someone else.

    1. (informal, derogatory, Internet) A man who defends a woman in debate etc. in an attempt to gain her favour.

    Synonyms: doormat, simp

Urban dictionary also has definitions but for some reason the upvotes and downvotes aren't showing up for me, so I don't know which one people think is the best. One entry:

1) A man who stands up for a womens right to be an absolute equal, but then steps up like a white knight to rescue her any time that equality becomes a burden.

2) A man who Promotes gender equality but practices special privilege for women.

Compare the female in China who bought a house paid for the down payment on a house with the money she got from selling the 20 iPhones that males sent her.

"I can't even find one boyfriend. She can actually find 20 boyfriends at the same time and even get them to buy her an iPhone 7. Just want to ask her to teach me such skills."

So anyway, I just mentioned it for that quote: "War is ruthless; peace is priceless". Note that the original Chinese uses 無, "not", for both parts: "without feelings", and "without price".

The US also treated people terribly during the war in Vietnam. A search for "site:wikipedia.org us vietnam war special forces operations that killed civilians" turns up Tiger Force ("investigations during the course of the war and decades afterwards revealed the unit had committed extensive war crimes against hundreds of Vietnamese civilians") and Phoenix Program. It also turns up Civilian Irregular Defense Group program. The article says (noting that the content in a Wikipedia article is subject to change, and it might sometimes be necessary to check an article's history for its content on the date it was referenced),

Furthermore, he felt that Green Berets members "viewed themselves as something separate and distinct from the rest of the military effort," describing them as "fugitives from responsibility" who "tended to be nonconformist, couldn't quite get along in a straight military system, and found a haven where their actions were not scrutinized too carefully, and where they came under only sporadic or intermittent observation from the regular chain of command."

which seems relevant to the film Apocalypse Now (1979). I'm not praising the film, and it doesn't seem to feature any Green Berets, but there are certainly characters in it that don't act like typical soldiers.

But I mentioned that last article just because I watched most of the film Gran Torino a couple weeks ago. It features Hmong people, with one of them saying that Hmong people are in the US because they helped the south and the US during the war, so they had to leave when they lost.

So: the US might not have done anything during the Iraq war and occupation that was as bad as what Israel has recently done, but it did during the Vietnam War. (Also, shooting at civilian cars that drove too close to military vehicles during Iraq's occupation was bad.) And the US also killed lots of people. As the saying goes.

Lots of people also died in Syrian prisons. Many of them starved to death, rather than being deliberately killed. Maybe the Syrian government simply could not afford to buy food for all of the prisoners during the fighting; Syria spent $2.2 billion on military in 2011, the year the civil war started (population was 23 million), while Israel spent $13 billion on military in the same year (population was 7.8 million, about the population of Wuhan Nanjing in China).

Why doesn't Israel kill people after torturing them, or let them starve? Because the purpose is not genocide. The guards who are mean to Palestinian prisoners are trying to make them think that their situation is bad; that they should not be happy when Gaza has a GDP of $161 per capita or $200 per capita ("a level associated with the poorest low-income countries, and a full 95 percent below the West Bank’s").

If people in Gaza were not happy, they would try harder to fix their situation. (Like, if they were less happy, they might share this idea if they learned of it.) Do people have children when they are not happy?

When people spread information about the treatment of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, they are trying to cause an improvement of those people's treatment. But are they trying to end war?

"War is ruthless; peace is priceless."

As always, I spent too long on parts of this post, like finding a reference for Syria's military spending. Started this post over two hours ago.

 

(The following is something I eventually wrote after waiting long enough, instead of just publishing the above.)

I think I also wanted to mention a video? If A Combat Veteran Was A 911 Dispatcher - YouTube

Basically, "shoot the intruder." About 13 years ago, my oldest brother (currently in prison) mentioned a book that I think was On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. After he mentioned the book, I read what was probably the Wikipedia article about it, and said that my response was based on this and that I didn't think the book was worth reading; he seemed to imply he disagreed with my dismissal of it. We discussed the topic as recently as five years ago, when he helped my mum with a drive to a new state (since I couldn't help, lacking a driver's license). I mentioned a battle on a Pacific island where Japanese soldiers came very close to US lines (probably Marines) and expressed skepticism towards the view that a soldier would not shoot someone charging at them with fixed bayonet. In fact, just a couple years ago, shortly before he went to prison, I questioned him on whether the Ukraine conflict had changed his views about the issue.

It seemed to me that his belief that most people would not be willing to kill each other without intense training that overrides human instinct or something was not based on evidence. For example, my oldest brother considers himself to be religious, unlike me. I think he believes that what is commonly called heaven is important. I think that belief in heaven is not based on evidence, and that it is not controversial to say that it is not based on evidence: that religions embrace the lack of evidence for various claims as a positive aspect of religion, rather than taking the position that the lack of what could be called scientific evidence for miracles is a flaw. And so I found it plausible that my oldest brother's views on people's willingness to kill could avoid a thorough and impartial examination of the evidence.

For example, I said regarding the first petition, in 2012, that this was a conversation about whether people were, by nature, good or evil. If people can be convinced to kill other people easily (the question of whether the four people in The Push were convinced to kill someone 'easily' aside), one might say that this would mean people are, by nature, evil. If my brother thought this, he might have thought that it would be more beneficial to anyone for them to think that most people would not kill another human without training to 'dehumanize' an enemy, even if this is false.

I might actually have the opposite position: as a way of making people believe in justice, i.e. punishment for deliberately defecting in a prisoner's dilemma, it's better for society if people think that other people are willing to kill someone when the circumstances call for it.

I tend to believe it's beneficial for an individual to believe things that are true, even though this is not always the case: if I didn't believe this idea would fix problems, I would not be poor right now. Basically, I view the question of whether people are good or evil to be unimportant. Other people think it's important. But, like, suppose that someone wanted to determine whether I was good or bad. Sherine said in 2013 that she wasn't sure if she wanted to throw me under a bus or save me from being thrown under a bus. If a person who wanted know whether I was good or bad has not yet concluded that I'm bad, it doesn't mean that I'm not bad: it could just mean that I am smart enough to act in a way that will appear good to other people, and that I am using like Stanislavski's system to act as a good person. (The 'broken mask' in 【GUMIオリジナル】 正義粉砕 【NfN】, but the concept also relates to the whole "are you happy if someone thinks you are?" question.)

I occasionally think about this: a stupid person who attempts to lie will often make mistakes. So even if you trust them at one point, eventually they will probably make a mistake, and at that point get punished. So trusting them might sort of seem fine. Or, a stupid person who tries to determine if other people are lying will often make mistakes in their conclusions, both false positives and false negatives: the cost of making this determination is higher than for a smart person to make the determination. Rather than looking for 'clues', it could be better to rely on reputation, including enforcing changes of reputation based on new evidence.

Also, I was thinking recently: "could a smart AI take over the world?" I recently saw in my bookmarks a video with a title that starts with "Google smokes Olympic mathletes", presumably a progression in the trend that has included "AI does better than 90% of people on college-level exams". But can a smart AI convince people that it's stupid? Can it both convince people that it's stupid and also have agency? Would people let a dumb AI have any power? Would they let a smart AI have any power? Smart people accomplishing things because they look dumb is apparently a thing; I linked a "Columbo solves the Death Note case" video last year, though I think my favorite was [95k views, 4.9k subs, 10 Dec 2025]Love Note: A Death Note Parody - Episode 1 - YouTube. If stupid people support people who have the best interests of stupid people in mind, how could a smart AI convince people that it has this goal, instead of the goal of helping smart people?

Back to the question of Violence. Underestimating other people's potential for violence can have obvious negative consequences. What about overestimating their potential for violence? In 2020, there was some kind of family event I went to. Maybe some relatives were in town, maybe for the death of my last grandparent. I remember asking my youngest sister, regarding Covid-19, whether the family gathering at a restaurant was worth a 0.001% chance of death (or something like that). Her response was, "I don't know."

Topic: sexually transmitted diseases. Many people seem to not care about them. Just like many people seem to not care about a small risk of death: jumping off cliffs into water, or getting into fights, or driving at a high speed on a road, or not following all safety procedures or doing sufficient calculations about loads when using heavy equipment. Note that joining the military when you could end up on a ship that is being targeted by 100 missiles is a calculated risk, in exchange for money or the promise of a protective benefit to people you care about.

So for some people, a 2% chance to die because you decided to wander around city streets at night (or visit a country where you might be kidnapped) is the same as a 1% chance: both are equally effective at deterring the activity. For other people, maybe the 1% chance is acceptable, but the 2% chance would not be, and so overestimating the potential for violence could avoid their death. Or maybe there is a systematic underestimation of the risk in specific situations, such that overestimating the potential that humans have for violence in general leads to a more accurate estimate of the risk of a particular situation, due to cancellation of errors. But systematic errors could just as easily lead to overestimation of risk in particular situations, leading to a compounded error of two overestimations.

There was that poll for teenagers on Reddit, Do you truly consider yourself to be a good person?, and I just remembered these videos, featuring the song Sweet Caroline:

Nick Davis - Jealous Boyfriend Crashes Party: A POV Story - TikTok (Tikvib) 2m likes, by @nickdavisfr

Brooke Monk - Like bruh I'm right here - TikTok (Tikvib) 959k likes, by @brookemonk_

POV: The Quiet Kid #TheManniiShow.com/series - YouTube 2.5m likes, by
@TheManniiShow

After someone with a knife tried to mug me while I was walking to my National Guard armory late at night, I never visited that area at night again. Since I never had any reason to visit it at night again, I'm not sure if I would have considered it an area with an unreasonably high risk of crime, and whether me overestimating the potential that humans have for crime would have stopped me from being outside at night the first time.

I did learn something from it: that someone would act in the way that they did, which included grabbing my backback as I ran from the public street towards the armory, meaning they entered onto the property of the armory. I interpreted it to mean that they did not consider the US military to be an institution that seemed to benefit them, or they would not have tried to rob someone who seemed to be in it. So I can say, "I learned something, so it was not a mistake." But I did also — I think shortly after I wrote the first post on this site and was trying to find somewhere to sleep — avoid someone in a public park who might have been trying to sell me drugs, as I was uncertain if they just wanted to rob me. There is a limit to how much I value new information, if it comes at a risk.

(4 hours 52 minutes to write)

Bad Apple

I am hereby announcing that as long as Greta's Instagram page suggests that there are problems in the world that she cares about that have not been fixed, then I will think that Greta is unhappy.

Also, my sometimes still juvenile sense of humor made me think while I was waking up, of asking for TTS: "Insert your CAC into this slot"

My dream involved being in the military, other soldiers throwing away a bunch of candy and me collecting it while thinking it was more than I could ever eat, passing by a couple female soldiers who were discussing obtaining one of many versions of a 'meme song' that was apparently everywhere, and my worries about whether my ID would be accepted at the cafeteria (dining facility) when it was expired. As I was passing the female soldiers while carrying a bunch of candy in my arms, I broke into a jog to save time, as I often do in real life when traveling short distances outside.

I derived considerable amusement from some of the military branches in this comedy skit saying "CAC", while others said "CAC card": [7.3m views, 25 Feb 2026]How gate guards in each branch check IDs. - YouTube

I have since then thought many more times than was necessary about how it was an example of government not caring about unfortunate interpretations. Just like how I noticed that Trump was following 69 people on Truth Social when I first checked his account.

Also, the word that I was trying to think of to describe the previous post's writings on taxes, was "abstruse".

Taxes

No taxes on overtime extra pay: overtime is the 'worker sacrifices when they work less' possibility in https://jobcreationplan.blogspot.com/2026/04/encouraging-people-to-work-less-in-way.html.

Criticizing people who want to raise taxes: maybe the conversation is wrong. Instead of saying the purpose of taxes is to avoid more borrowing, people could change to saying that the purpose of taxes is to destroy money that would cause inflation, by taking money from people as fairly as possible. Any conversation about taxes that avoids the topic of inflation is vulnerable to people criticizing the taxes because they don't connect the issues.

Why care about inflation at all? Any government that issues its own money could just eliminate all taxes and accept higher inflation each year. For example, the European Union could give the governments of the 21 countries of the Eurozone money each year so that they would not need to have any taxes. (I was not sure if any states of the EU did not use the Euro after the UK left, until I just looked it up. I am just using information that I learned in the process of writing that sentence.)

(One reason is the cost of making new currency. If there is 2500% inflation over the course of a century (25^(1/100)=1.033 increase per year or 3.3% inflation), so that a US quarter has the purchasing power that a penny once did, do we get rid of all coins smaller than a quarter and use quarters the way that pennies were once used? Quarters are physically much larger, and using a large coin instead of a small coin is a waste. But let's disregard this reason and say that everyone uses digital currency.)

The reason not to do this is the difficulty of determining how to fairly distribute printed money. The EU is a good example. Maybe some countries currently tax 50% of all private income, while others only tax 20%. (Search for "eu tax burden wiki list" gives Tax rates in Europe and List of countries by tax rates, which don't seem to give the overall tax rate. Best would probably be to just look at government spending as a percentage of all spending: Government expenditure, percent of GDP, List of countries by government budget#International_Monetary_Fund. Germany 49%, Norway 48%, France 57%, Ukraine 71%, Netherlands 44%, Bulgaria 37%, China 33%, southern Korea 23%, Thailand 23%, Indonesia 17%.)

So if one country taxes 60% of income (let's say $30k per person, so I don't have to type €), and another taxes 20% ($10k per person), is it fair to give one country $30k per person so they can reduce taxes to zero, while giving the second country just $10k per person?

You could say, "give every country the same money per person. They can still have taxes if they want, on top of that." Like how individual US states cannot go into debt ("Most U.S. states are required by law to balance their budgets. Vermont is the only state without a balanced-budget requirement. States cannot run fiscal deficits like the federal government. Raising debt typically requires legislative or voter approval."), so if they want to spend more, just printing money is not an option.

But this removes effort. With taxes, and no equal distribution by a money-printing bank: a country that manages to produce five times as much can afford to consume five times as much. If every country gets $100k of printed money per person per year, then a country that produces $50k in value per person per year can only consume 50% more than a country that produces $0 value per person per year.

Try to measure the value that people create, and award money based on that: countries have an incentive to lie. Make up some statistics and say that each person creates $1 million in value per year. Without taxes, rewards become disconnected from reality. With taxes, if $1 million of value is being measured, then $1 million is subject to tax.

To people who don't do much thinking, this may all seem somewhat abstract: we are not in a situation where there are no taxes. This is all about explaining why are aren't in that situation even after money stopped being supported by gold (allowing governments to print unlimited money), and why there is a need to destroy money with taxes even though everyone complains about taxes.

I just overheard a sound bite because I wasn't focused on writing, and someone was just saying that stopping commercial traffic is piracy. VENEZUELA OIL TANKERS MUCH? If Iran stopping oil tankers and possibly confiscating them is piracy, how is the US stopping oil tankers and possibly confiscating them not piracy? 

With something like this, it's important to realize that the contradiction is not noteworthy; it's just people being inconsistent and not thinking about all possibilities. Just like people who are not good at chess not seeing all the possibilities from a move and therefore not playing as good as a better player.

Ellie retweeted this: https://nitter.net/InnaVishik/status/2044537696576803056

There are plenty of people who studied computer science on their own and became good at it.

These pages look like they will change in the future, to update to newer years:

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm

https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/fastest-growing-occupations.htm

If the only job you can get is as a Home health and personal care aide (14% of net new jobs, or 3.4 times as much as the next largest category, Software developers), it doesn't matter if you spent three years learning differential calculus from online resources.

Why do people care what college someone went to? What skilled job is in a shortage in the US that does not have countless people from poorer countries who would want to come to the US to do that job?

CMV: Large-scale unemployment is not a knowledge problem that would be fixed by everyone being more educated.

In the linked tweet, Inna Vishik said, "the structure/accountability of a college environment is crucial for learning anything challenging". The existence of self-taught CS workers is a counter example. CS has historically been a rapidly changing field: there was a joke post I read a few years ago about all the new things someone would need to know in order to do a simple web-related development task. So it can be hard for colleges to keep their curriculum relevant, and so a degree becomes less valuable as an indicator of knowledge.

Whereas math does not change. The joke with physics is that Science Makes Progress Funeral by Funeral: it changes, but slowly. So a degree will definitely be relevant, and so it's easier for employers to make the decision to disregard applications that don't come from someone with a college degree.

For other difficult things, like learning a new language, plenty of people are successful without spending most of their time in formal education.

The quoted tweet, from Dmitrii Kovanikov, is implying that people who do not learn all the free knowledge are less capable. It is not a very useful observation; someone might, at best, use it to convince themselves that it's fine to ignore problems that affect stupid people, the poll that Greta probably did not create.

Another post that makes me look dumb

I said I intended not to say anything for two weeks, no matter what Greta posted on Instagram.

About five hours ago, I set my alarm for 12:00 my local time, with the intention of not going online until then, even though this would have meant a several-hour gap in which any Stories posted by Greta on Instagram would have been deleted before I saw them.

Despite what I said, I'm posting about the Story that Greta posted four hours ago, which I assume is from a video that is not yet showing up on Picuki and I'm too lazy to click the link to view Greta's profile on Instagram.

Greta mentions the report described here:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-antisemitism/

When I was 17 I think, I learned judo at my local community college. I think it counted as an actual class, in contrast to the karate that I learned at a local gym with my aunt until the gym changed the rules so that I would have required a gym membership to continue going. I stopped taking judo once school started, as I was too busy; I might have had my first job by then, as well as doing cross-country running after school and studying for seven Advanced Placement tests and the ten subjects of Academic Decathlon.

One thing that I remember had nothing to do with traditional judo lessons: it was practice with reacting to having a gun pointed at you at close range, which might sound unrealistic to any police officer who knows how fast someone can close 3~6 meters of distance. (Also.) We actually practiced with fake or toy guns, like pushing the front of the gun up while pushing down on the person's elbow.

Anyway, one memorable lesson that I'm sure I've mentioned before: pushing someone, in order to make them situate their feet along a line in the direction of force, so that they become weak in another direction. Just the general concept of controlling someone's reactions.

Why don't people feel a sense of danger at being called anti-Russian?

What about anti-Persian? Or anti-French?

I was thinking earlier about, basically, politics. Like,

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/04/trump-responds-critics-after-posting-christ-like-image/

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116407007495166895

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116408742801619405

The strategy basically is, "make someone look like they are worse than average". For example, worse than the average US president. If everyone always uses this strategy, then it should work about 50% of the time. And for some people, that is an acceptable success rate: high enough that they have no interest in looking for a better use of their time. It's actually sort of like gambling: people don't know if their efforts to make someone look worse than average will succeed in any particular situation, because they try the strategy in many cases where there's a significant chance of failure, and so they get interested in the result.

In contrast: stopping global warming has had a 0% success rate up until the current time, just like all efforts to avoid dying have historically ended in failure. 50% is great compared to that.

___

Update 15 Apr 2026, 21:00

So I just had a thought. When Kanye West got banned from Chirp Club for something related to Jewish people. Suppose that Greta posted the following on Chirp Club:

1) Kill all Muslims

If banned, success. If not banned:

2) Stab all Jewish people in the arm with a Covid vaccine

If not banned, escalate the statements to approach the statement in 1, for science.

This is a strategy that can only be used by someone who is comfortable with being seen by some people as dishonest. In general, I think it's a much less interesting thing to do than sharing the idea.

* Video by 心系小许 had 510k likes on 04 Sep 2025, only up to 511.4k now. Not actually sure if the song says "Kanye West". Would have linked a more energetic performance by ク无感 @96421348752 but it's deleted or hidden on Douyin.

Post that makes me look dumb

Was just having a dream in which there was a female who was probably Turkish. I infer that I knew this in the dream because I asked her if she knew who fancyfenty was. In real life this is a nickname for Rihanna, but in the dream, the person's response was like "that tells me everything I need to know" implying that she was the previous owner of the @fancyfenty Chirp Club account. Anyway, a bit later on in the dream I remembered when in 2013, this person said something to Sherine that mentioned that Sherine was Lebanese, and I think Sherine's response was like, "thanks for remembering what country I'm from."

If those were the words that Sherine used, then I was wrong in thinking that there was ambiguity in "what country Sherine is from". I had been thinking that when I said in 2013 that "if Sherine doesn't share the idea, it means she doesn't care about Lebanon", that it was possible that it wasn't "the country Sherine was from", which I think Sherine had said was one of the only two things she cared about. Since I wasn't sure if it was possible to say that the country Sherine was from, was actually the US or Canada.

But if this response from Sherine to @fancyfenty did use these words, then I was wrong, and I should have known in 2013 that this interpretation was not possible.

Some videos featuring songs by Rihanna:

20141110 雪克杯杯 欣欣 蚊子 笨笨 南港7-11[Shake Baby - We Found Love, Only Girl In The World]

01227 ( 6 _ 7 ) 蔡欣伈, 跩蚊, 派派笨笨 (小媗), 雪克杯杯開場秀 2014.11.10@南港區研究院路 7-11[Shake Baby - We Found Love]

01228 ( 7 _ 7 ) 蔡欣伈, 跩蚊, 派派笨笨 (小媗), 雪克杯杯開場秀 2014.11.10@南港區研究院路 7-11[Shake Baby - Only Girl in the World]

5374 ( 1 _ 7 ) 蔡欣伈, 跩蚊, 派派笨笨 (小媗), 雪克杯杯開場秀 2014.11.10@南港區研究院路 7-11[Shake Baby - We Found Love]

5375 ( 4 _ 7 ) 蔡欣伈, 跩蚊, 派派笨笨 (小媗), 雪克杯杯開場秀 2014.11.10@南港區研究院路 7-11[Shake Baby - Only Girl in the World]

No hidden message in the title

I don't know if the following statement is true, but I will assume that it's true until the evidence does not appear to support it:

If no famous person publicly shares the idea, it's because Sherine doesn't want or care if anyone shares it, even though Sherine's family is from Lebanon and Greta recently posted on Instagram about the damage to Lebanese agriculture.

I'm waiting for Greta to make the poll from the post, "I got distracted by lions".

Perceptions

Trump linked a news article: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116403452696175100

This was a trending story on the same site: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/04/hormuz-blockade-europe-mobilizing-against-u-s-not/

Neither the U.S. nor Israel is dependent on oil transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Around the globe, the U.S. is the primary enforcer of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), maintaining freedom of navigation for all countries. Trump’s request for Europe and other allies to support U.S. freedom-of-navigation patrols in the Strait of Hormuz was rejected.

Someone can actually write this. From Wikipedia:

As of October 2024, 169 sovereign states and the European Union are parties. The United States is among the states that have not ratified the treaty.

I was actually thinking several days ago, "Iran should conduct freedom of navigation patrols near the US." But I don't know if they have any large warships left. And if they did have one, the US would probably just sink it during the freedom of navigation patrol.

Bullet

 (cd '/media/misaki/Nao/storage/short/not sexy/'; find * -name "*journey*" -printf "%T@ a %8s  %Td %Tb %TY %TH:%TM  %p\n"|sort -n|cut -f 3- -d " " )

24534024  07 Aug 2025 16:32  武媚儿 @65464921155 via Vicky小辣椒, “沙漠之花”华莉丝•迪里的60年血泪逆袭！世界反割礼第一人。 #AI#华莉丝迪里 Life journey [douyin 7535029932062625059].mp4
18076650  07 Aug 2025 16:38  武媚儿 @65464921155 妈祖林默舍己救人的一生！#妈祖文化 #历史人物 #民间故事 #AI历史 #人物故事 Life journey [douyin 7519460644590193954].mp4
25148459  07 Aug 2025 16:39  武媚儿 @65464921155 抗倭名将，练兵有方，保家卫国，民族英雄垂青史，戚继光的一生#历史故事 #古人的智慧 #历史人物解说#人物故事 AI Life journey [douyin 7518415635631951144].mp4
21008008  07 Aug 2025 16:43  武媚儿 @65464921155 晚清脊梁 左宗棠的一生 #历史#AI#左宗棠#清朝 Life journey [douyin 7516380145176464680].mp4
20855797  07 Aug 2025 16:44  武媚儿 @65464921155 《从孤苦乞儿到冷血帝王，朱元璋的悲剧谁懂？》#历史人物解说#朱元璋#帝王 #明朝#草根 AI Life journey [douyin 7515797391547780386].mp4
24628018  07 Aug 2025 16:48  武媚儿 @65464921155 《秦良玉：从抗金到抗清，明朝最后的巾帼忠魂》#秦良玉 #历史 #明朝 #ai Life journey [douyin 7520445658902449460].mp4
17980766  07 Aug 2025 16:50  武媚儿 @65464921155 云南白药创始人 曲焕章传奇的一生#历史 #曲焕章#AI#云南白药#草药 Life journey [douyin 7523581314605272354].mp4
20928440  07 Aug 2025 17:16  武媚儿 @65464921155 晚清巨商胡雪岩，跌宕起伏的传奇人生#历史 #ai#胡雪岩 #清朝 Life journey [douyin 7522089443496316195].mp4
16737351  07 Aug 2025 17:17  武媚儿 @65464921155 18岁守寡被夺家产，只剩50两嫁妆的她，保住了吴家命脉！#周莹#清末#AI#人物故事#青年创作者成长计划 Life journey [douyin 7532478518232648994].mp4

A white, cat-shaped carrot: when the character Death in one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels looked at a cat in a smithy and saw the cat as it was at all points in its life simultaneously, including the future.

Remembering things that were never seen: a warlock floating in the air in the distance, lifting giant blocks and slabs of stone out of the ground to form a structure. From an Ethshar novel, by Lawrence Watt-Evans.

Edit: I still haven't read The Summer Palace (2008). The Ninth Talisman (2007) ended with the main characters in a desperate situation.

I got distracted by lions

Poll, that I didn't even write down in a notes file but am just typing directly here:

"Should people be concerned or upset if a situation seems to harm stupid people, like if they can't get jobs?"

Yes

I'm not sure

No

This is, basically, an indirect test for awareness of the hidden problem.

I would say the answer is yes, and yet I may have acted like other people would not answer yes.

It is not really fair to just state that "stupid people create problems". If you believe in evolution, two million years ago we were all only as smart as other monkeys. Everyone was stupid, and we became better; societies became more successful than other societies, and stupid people also played a big role in that success.

But because of the hidden problem, people gain more awareness of the potential for stupid people to cause outcomes that other people may regard as very harmful, even if they may not be willing to admit it; and so people can come to view stupid people as their enemies, which is not at all helped by stupid people using bad words and acting like other people are their enemies. But it's hard to blame them, because if it's a war, who can ever say who started the war?

(When I talked about Jewish people a few posts back, it made me think afterwards about apples and my animal name given to me by my oldest sister, which I'm not sure if I've mentioned on this site. I still think that it's about awareness of the hidden problem; not that "knowledge" is "knowledge of the hidden problem", but that degraded and unreliable signal accuracy can only affect cultures that have come to believe in knowledge, as useful information that can be communicated to others. A war can only exist if people know it exists, and this is early evidence.)

Anyway: it's better to avoid fighting. People don't like to admit to being stupid, and it's often considered an insult, but people who are stupid would prefer if other people saw them in a friendly way, rather than as an enemy. A lot of people don't want help or even sympathy, because people can use helping someone at one moment in time as an excuse not to help them in the future, but giving someone a job where they provide the same value as other workers is not providing them with special privileges. (Noting that people with physical disabilities like blindness also often want to find paid work. In my second job, as a dishwasher, there was a cook who sometimes had seizures that interrupted his work; he did not want to lose the job, but he did.)

To be honest I may have forgotten why I made this post, and before I try to remember, Knowledge: role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons often have two statistics related to thought. In D&D, they are Wisdom (sought by clerics, who gain their power from deities, and apparently also by psionicists) and Intelligence (sought by wizards, who gain their power from raw magical potential in the world). In World of Warcraft, they are Spirit and Intellect, which were apparently intended to have a similar RPG flavor, with the first sought by healers and the second sought by mages.

There was an explanation that I remember, of the difference: "Intelligence is knowing that it will rain. Wisdom is knowing you should get out of the rain." I don't know if that's a good or accurate explanation. I think that maybe wisdom could be better contrasted with knowledge, which is not the same as intelligence: the idea here being that signal accuracy becomes more important, and its effects including decreased fitness for intelligent individuals are more prominent, in larger communities, where everyone does not already know everyone else.

Wisdom is a word that is (at least in the culture that I know, having been born at a certain time, and not necessarily familiar with how the word was used 200 years ago) associated with old people. Old people being more wise does not necessarily mean they are more knowledgeable than someone who is 20~30 years old and like been picking herbs for 20 of those years. This is the knowledge distinction: knowledge is useful information that can be communicated, or maybe replicated. Wisdom, then, is maybe decisions that are reached, possibly from information that would not be seem 'useful' enough to be classified as knowledge: the memory that someone had a certain facial expression before or after certain events, from which could be inferred their emotional state and values, even if neither the exact expression nor the inferred information can be communicated to other people or written in a book as reliable information.

So in a sense, wisdom would have predated knowledge. A lion might be wise, or maybe people are just impressed by lions sleeping all day and conserving their movement. It would be much easier to conclude from a lion's behavior that he is wise, than that he has any knowledge beyond awareness of the things that an observer could also see (or hear, or smell).

Almost been an hour since I started writing this, so if I have forgotten its purpose, not entirely surprising. Now it has been an hour.

If you read this post, please tell me if this seems like a useful poll. Of course I don't expect anyone to respond, and if they did it would be a trap since they would be acknowledging awareness of this idea and creating a moral dilemma for themselves.