If Reddit ever disclosed how many “users” were bots, I’m quite confident it would be >80%. 95%+ of everything we see on the front page. Now consider who is running those bots, and why. What kind of opinions are they trying to shape?

Yeah but I’m pretty sure the relative wealth/affluence of the neighborhood you grew up in is significantly more strongly correlated with overall life outcomes

That is, surprisingly, incorrect. A meta-analysis by Strenze (2007) showed that the predictive power of IQ is slightly stronger than that of parental socio-economic status (SES) (Table 1). Specifically, IQ measured before age 19 outdoes parental SES in predicting future educational attainment, occupational status, and income after age 29 (see “best studies” on Table 1). In other words, if you want to predict an adolescent’s success in adulthood along a given metric of success (e.g., income, educational attainment, or occupational status), it is more useful to know that adolescent’s IQ than to know the success of their parents along that same metric. In the conclusion of the analysis, Strenze (page 416) argues that this would be unexpected if the predictive power of IQ could be attributed primarily to its association with parental SES:

Despite the modest conclusion, these results are important because they falsify a claim often made by the critics of the “testing movement”: that the positive relationship between intelligence and success is just the effect of parental SES or academic performance influencing them both (see Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Fischer et al., 1996; McClelland, 1973). If the correlation between intelligence and success was a mere byproduct of the causal effect of parental SES or academic performance, then parental SES and academic performance should have outcompeted intelligence as predictors of success; but this was clearly not so. These results confirm that intelligence is an independent causal force among the determinants of success; in other words, the fact that intelligent people are successful is not completely explainable by the fact that intelligent people have wealthy parents and are doing better at school.*

The meta-analysis does find that parental SES also correlates significantly with the future outcomes of the child. However, because youth IQ and parental SES are correlated, it is possible that some unspecified portion of the predictive power of youth IQ is due to its correlation with parental SES (or vice-versa). To get a more precise estimate of the effects of youth IQ (independent of parental SES), we need to estimate the predictive power of IQ after controlling for parental SES.

Success is undoubtedly multi-factorial. Who you know is important. So is parental educational achievement, access to nutritional food, an absence of violence in the home, IQ, etc.

Thanks for the study. I agree on all points. This is the challenge with sociological research: it is unethical to conduct controlled studies. We will never have controlled IQ research. The study suggests we continue to perform better quality primary research, and I fully agree. Until then, as per the data in the study, the correlative evidence remains compelling. At least as far as sociological research goes.

I tend to think this research is more compelling and useful at the macro level. We should bear in mind that the correlative coefficient between IQ and income is only between 0.2 and 0.4. There are many other factors which also impact outcomes.

IQ is highly correlated with life outcomes like income, life expectancy, employment, and crime. Maybe it doesn’t measure “intelligence,” but it measures something which appears to be very important for modern society. There are undoubtedly different forms of intelligence which are not measured by an IQ test.

It seems you weren’t the only one who didn’t like that. The show was cancelled after season 5. We see this again and again. The Rings of Power. Sex Education. She-Hulk. Willow. Velma. Doctor Who. Ms. Marvel. Batwoman. The Wheel of Time. Writers who don’t respect the source material, or think movies and shows are a soapbox instead of a medium for entertainment and creativity.

I agree. Undoubtedly someone is going to get very mad with your opinion and intentionally miss the point. Representation is fine. Shoehorning a specific minority into every plot line then beating the viewer over the head with the most juvenile and hamfisted messaging imaginable isn’t helping anyone. It just makes for bad content. We have many examples of women and minorities in movies and shows written well for decades. It’s only quite recently that writers appear to value representation and ideological messaging over the story, and I think for that they deserve criticism.

It’s also used as a deflection of criticism. “Oh you don’t like my show? Racist! Homophobe! Transphobe!” These accusations used to work quite effectively but they were so overused that people have kind of become numb to them now.

Trains are pretty safe but we’re currently experiencing a bike crime epidemic. Which I suppose is itself very Danish.

It’s the same in Denmark. You wouldn’t want to do this in certain parts of Aarhus or Copenhagen.

But how would I telegraph my desire to murder the Jews if I did that?

Avatar has so many plot holes you can fly a toruk through them.

Very soon protesting the use of LLMs is like going to be like protesting the advent of the television. There is no stopping it. We should endeavour to ensure it is used ethically rather than becoming puritanical about its use.

Lifting the minimum wage directly impacts the available income of the lowest income classes, who in turn spend most of their income on consumption, increasing domestic demand and thus also helping the economy.

Only around 3.7% of German workers earn minimum wage. Increasing their wages a little won’t move the needle on the economy. I generally support a healthy minimum wage, but Germany’s economic issues are systemic, and require much broader solutions. Making the cost of doing business even higher right now in Germany - which is what raising the minimum wage does - is antithetical to fostering weak economic growth. Industrial production in particular continues to decline, which is a big problem for Germany. Merkel’s strategy of going all-in on Russian natural gas turned out to be catastrophic. The cost of energy is just too high now for a raft of different sectors. I’m sure you’ve heard all of this before in economic analysis, but these are some of the primary issues and tactical solutions Germany should tackle.

1. Cheaper energy. This is strangling industries which employ millions and have been the backbone of the economy for decades. Germany needs to build nuclear capacity ASAP, or begin importing massive amounts of Russian natural gas, or begin burning a lot more coal. For environmental, economic, and ethical reasons, I support nuclear. Renewables are about 4x more expensive than nuclear after imputing costs like storage and grid architecture [1].

2. Germany needs to embrace efficiency at a cultural level. In 2023, 51 % of all point-of-sale transactions were made using banknotes and coins. I cite this not because I think cash is a perfect analogue for efficiency, but to underscore the distrust so many Germans have in technology. Most government departments still use fax machines. Germany’s internet infrastructure is just terrible. There is an astounding lack of digitisation across both the public and private sectors. This aversion to efficiency becomes an increasingly heavy anchor around the neck of the nation as the rest of the world embraces new technologies to build and serve more products and services, faster.

3. Germany needs a new strategic focus in the economy. Even with cheap energy, industrial production can and will be done cheaper in developing nations. Their car industry is clearly unable to pivot to EVs, and it’s going to completely miss automated driving. Using VW software is like going back to a Nokia flip phone. They need to figure out how to invest in and excel at services and software. This is almost impossible to mandate at a governmental level in a democratic nation. This one will be the toughest to turn around and for this reason, my long term prognosis for Germany is poor relative to many other European nations.

4. Restructuring Germany’s immigration system to block low and no skilled immigrants, and greatly simplify immigration for high skilled immigrants. Research by the ifo Institute concludes that the 2015 immigration wave has widened the implicit long-term debt burden, i.e., including future pensions, by almost 10 percent of GDP. According to this, every admitted refugee costs the budget around 225 thousand euros over the course of her or his entire life. [2] This problem is getting worse every year. Germany’s immigration system is very difficult to navigate, and can be quite hostile for legal, qualified migrants.

5. Compounding all of the above is a declining fertility rate. Few countries have solved this issue, meaning [highly skilled and qualified[ immigration is more important than ever. I don’t think we can rely on improving native fertility rates.

When an economy is performing as poorly as Germany, economic stimulus is required. This means lower taxes and increased government spending. QE is not possible for those using the Euro so it might mean accepting higher levels of debt. This is a distinctly un-German proposition. The current government has secured the right to increase national debt but only in the context of Russian aggression. Debt by itself is bad, but if used prudently to stimulate the economy in the right direction, can be useful. I sadly do not trust the German government to invest it wisely. It’s much more likely to go towards manufacturing mortar rounds, and to pay for ever increasing social services.

I’ll allow it. I like what they’re doing over there. No DRM. Download everything. Game preservation. I wish they had done a better job with Galaxy but it looks like Microsoft is about to do their own store aggregator now so maybe that’s moot.

Plexamp is mind blowingly good. Great UX. Perfect reliability. No discovery/ads up in your face. Just you listening to your music how you like it. Streaming is ROCK SOLID. Downloads work flawlessly. It just relies on proper metadata in Plex.

Dane here. While I love trains, they are a) more expensive than flying in almost every long distance scenario, and b) take much longer. We are trialling sleeping trains but reception is mixed and capacity limited. People don’t like to waste an extra 2-4 days of their vacation on travel. Especially if they’re paying more for that privilege. I should note that this isn’t an issue of imbalanced subsidies. The EU subsidises air travel (in many ways) to the tune of around €30–40 billion annually depending on what you include and what you consider to be a “subsidy.” Using similar criteria, rail is subsidised to the tune of €40–75 billion per year. So rail gets a lot more investment despite it serving 16% fewer travel kilometers per year in the EU than air travel.

The thing is, if even we can’t make it cheaper and faster despite our relatively high population densities and high rail subsidies, I fear the case is much harder still in the U.S. My personal position is that trains are excellent commuter alternatives, and should be liberally built and subsidised in all dense cities. For longer travel, there is no substitute for airoplanes.

Most crime is a direct result of poverty.

This is not correct. There is a correlation but no evidence of directionality. It could be that crime causes poverty, or that third correlates cause both. Sweden saw a massive rise in crime following the large migration of Middle Eastern refugees following the 2015 Syrian Refugee Crisis, and they decided to study it. Translation below:

https://bra.se/rapporter/arkiv/2023-03-01-socioekonomisk-bakgrund-och-brott

Most people who come from a socio-economically less favorable background do not commit more crime than people who come from a more favorable background, and it also happens that people from a more favorable background do commit crime. This means that even if there is a connection between socio-economic background and involvement in crime, that connection is weak. It is not possible to appreciably predict who will commit crimes based on knowledge of people’s socio-economic background.

Other risk factors have a stronger relationship with criminal behavior:

When compared with factors that research has identified as risk factors for crime, such as parenting competence, the presence of conflicts in the family, school problems or association with criminal peers, the research shows that these have a stronger connection with criminal behavior than socio-economic background factors. The same applies to risk factors linked to the individual himself, for example permissive attitudes or impulsivity.

They found that cultural factors were far more correlated with criminality than socioeconomic status. This is corroborated by the fact that white collar crime remains so prevalent. If poverty caused crime, white collar crime would be almost non-existent, but it is prolific. It turns out that some people are just greedy. Or mean. Or violent. Or selfish. Or don’t care about how their actions might harm others. Sociopaths in particular exhibit all of these antisocial behaviour. They are unable to feel genuine remorse for hurting others, and no amount of money you give to them will ever change that.

FYI you can definitely watch while your network is offline. You just net to tell it that you’re happy with that (it’s not activated by default for security reasons).

• In your Plex server settings, go to Network, enable “Show Advanced”.

• Near the bottom, find the textbox that says List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth

• In this field, enter the local IP address of any Plex client(s) you want to keep using if your internet (or the Plex cloud) is down.

• A example: 192.168.0.50

• Save the setting, done.

#Important thing to be aware of:

What this setting does is tell your local Plex server to simply give any Plex client that connects from that specific IP full admin access to your Plex server, ignoring any account restrictions. This means that if you have things in place to restrict access to some libraries (kids blocked from 18+ movies etc) those restrictions will have no effect. Also if you have the option set to allow file deletion, then any client from that IP could also delete items. And they could of course change any settings in your Plex server. So your kids can watch anything on your server, if you have a guest in your network and they browse to the Plex web interface, they can mess with things.

Because of that I would recommend to limit the amount of IP’s you enter in that field to the absolute bare minimum. For example, only whitelist the “main living room device” plus one device you to admin the server, such as a laptop.

If you want to whitelist multiple devices, this is a example:

192.168.0.50,192.168.0.77,192.168.0.80

If you want to whitelist a entire network, these would be examples:

192.168.0.0/24 (this means 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.0.255)

192.168.0.0/16 (this means 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255)

And of course those involved network devices should use static IPs in your home network.

Ditto. There is a crowd on Lemmy who seem to get angry whenever people are happy to pay for software and I do not understand it. Surely we want developers to be paid for their hard work? Don’t we want them to able to comfortably live?

It’s like they deliberately chose the most repulsive colour combinations possible. It’s so bad that it can’t have been a mistake. They took colour theory and then methodically did the exact opposite of it. Then they combined this with some of the ugliest character designs imaginable. I think the artists thought “ugly = unique and unique sells!” I can vomit a strawberry daiquiri onto a piece of paper and create a “unique” piece, but that doesn’t make it appealing and customers are certainly not going to buy it.

The most frustrating part of this for me was the overwhelming feedback before launch that they should have scrapped the designs and started again. Either they began focus testing FAR too late, or more likely, they ignored it. Either one was fatal. Then Marvel Rivals came along with attractive character designs (but arguably generic gameplay) and dominated in the market. Proving this had nothing to do with saturation. They just made a bad game and refuse to admit it.