throwawaycities (u/throwawaycities)

throwawaycities commented on America’s incarceration rate is in decline theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/paulpauper

treyd · 2 months ago

If you do the same comparison of the rates of leaded gasoline during childhood to adulthood crime rates across different countries which have different histories of leaded gasoline usage, you notice that the correlation persists. While of course correlation does not imply causation, it's a link that's fairly well-established in literature, it's not a spurious correlation, and we know that lead has concrete neurological effects, so it's plausible from a pharmacological basis.

throwawaycities · 2 months ago

Since 1970 testosterone has declined 1% per year and it’s well established higher testosterone is linked to impulsive and violent criminal behavior and in countries like the US crime rate is at a 50 year low correlating with this decline starting 1970.

There are many factors that correlate and potentially contribute to a reduction in incarceration rates.

There are estimated 1.8-1.9M incarcerated. Since 1980 to the present there are well over 1M violent crimes (rape, murder, aggregated assault, robbery) per year. Let’s look at another factor that might contribute to falling incarceration rates that tend to explain this discrepancy in incarceration vs total crimes…conviction rates:

Murder: ~57.4% in 1950 vs. ~27.2% in 2023—a ~2.1x difference.

Rape: ~17.3% in 1950 vs. ~2.3% in 2023—a ~7.5x difference.

Aggravated Assualt: ~19.7% in 1950 vs. ~15.9% in 2023—a ~1.2x difference.

The neurological effects of lead don’t tend to explain away falling police clearances nor convictions.

throwawaycities commented on America’s incarceration rate is in decline theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/paulpauper

ericmcer · 2 months ago

It is insane to just confidently assert that the only factor in the decrease in crime is Lead. Treating an insanely nuanced issue as an absolute doesn't make your argument more compelling, it is actually kind of baffling.

throwawaycities · 2 months ago

Why bother stopping at crime rates with that confidence?

The 1st recorded cases of fatty liver disease and T2D in children were in the 1980’s are have continued growing since - lead must have been protecting children’s health.

Testosterone has been on a sharp decline during this same time period - lead must promote healthy testosterone production.

Debt of all kinds, from the national debt, to household debt, to student loans debt has increased exponentially and consistently with lead removal - lead must promote financial literacy.

throwawaycities commented on Internet Artifacts neal.fun/internet-artifac... · Posted by u/mikerg87

latexr · 3 months ago

> A bunch of the early internet brands are being rebranded/relaunched

More like recycled to lend credence to dubious grifts and tangential services. Digg is all-in on AI; Napster is another paid music streaming service; Limewire is another file locker and an AI cryptocurrency¹; GeoCities I’m not aware of a revival.

> which is collectively is being branded as the nostalgic internet.

Nothing about that is nostalgic or remotely related to the old internet. The names are the same and some founders may have returned, but the values and technologies are entirely different.

¹ Whatever that even means in practice. Double-dip on a pile-on of grifts, can never have too many hyped technologies!

throwawaycities · 3 months ago

Besides GeoCities - the rest are being relaunched by SV VCs and PE groups.

Napster was acquired and relaunched in crypto a few years ago and just resold for $100M+ to a metaverse company immediately following a new raise at a $1B+ valuation.

So yeah it’s acquiring historic IP by VC/PE to resell to friends that are using someone else’s funds. Considering the .com boom and era of publicly traded big tech giving golden parachutes to friends (buying their companies and shutting them down) - it’s very nostalgic.

throwawaycities commented on Internet Artifacts neal.fun/internet-artifac... · Posted by u/mikerg87

dev-slash-zero · 3 months ago

I also would consider Digg to be the direct predecessor of Reddit. If I recall correctly it was more popular until possibly as late as 2010.

throwawaycities · 3 months ago

Digg is being relaunched - with Alexis on board.

A bunch of the early internet brands are being rebranded/relaunched which is collectively is being branded as the nostalgic internet.

Napster, Limewire, Digg, GeoCities…to name a few

throwawaycities commented on Internet Artifacts neal.fun/internet-artifac... · Posted by u/mikerg87

throwawaycities · 3 months ago

History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, internet lore passed out of all knowledge. Until, when chance came, the lore ensnared a new bearer.

throwawaycities commented on Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/Tomte

demarq · 4 months ago

The whole point of a judicial process is to make judgments on the merit of a case not personal prejudice.

What if someone comes to court wearing tattoos are they more guilty?

throwawaycities · 4 months ago

All courts have local rules or even standing orders governing filings and pleadings - from case styling formatting, font/size, spacing, max pages, ect… Federal district courts are not places to flaunt rules of the court or court orders.

Beyond that lawyers are governed by state bars and rules of professional conduct — as an example the Florida bar has taken action against an attorney that used to advertise himself as a “pitbull.”

Regarding tattoos courts have rules of decorum, which generally cover appropriate dress/attire in the courtroom. As far as tattoos, I’ve been to thousands of hearings and can give a single anecdote. It was a drug possession case and the defendant was allowed to transfer their case from circuit felony to drug court - basically allowing completion of drug classes while on kind of pretrial probation in exchange for either a nolle pros (dismissal) or withhold of adjudication. The drug court judge gave the defendant a hard time at this initial hearing over having a drug molecule tattooed on their neck - questioning if drug court was a good fit for someone the seemingly was pretty committed to drugs (based on the neck tat). The drug court judge can see a hundred or more defendants a day, they’ve seen it all and aren’t passing judgement, its just that their experience allows them to read people extremely well and they had legitimate concerns because getting in trouble in drug court can result in automatic conviction of the original charge + having to deal with any new charge.

A rule of thumb professionalism and decorum go a long way in court - this attorney could be decent, but as a potential client any lawyer using a gimmicky dragon in a suit in their paperwork should probably raise some red flags for you.

throwawaycities commented on Mathematicians uncover a new way to count prime numbers quantamagazine.org/mathem... · Posted by u/nsoonhui

ykonstant · 8 months ago

It is mesmerizing, but do note it was not a single mind that produced this insight. It was centuries of work. It involved, among many others:

1. Newton and the Bernoulli family developing the theory of infinite series and connecting them to discrete sequences,

2. Wallis developing the first notions of infinite products and demonstrating the first non-trivial convergence of such,

3. Euler solving the Basel problem and linking the zeta function to the prime numbers (giving a new proof of the infinitude of primes),

4. Gauss and Eisenstein further using Euler's ideas and their own unique algebraic insights to understand primes in arithmetic progressions, and finally

5. Riemann taking the zeta function, putting it in the complex plane, revealing the unifying theme connecting the previous discoveries and making his own fundamentally new discoveries with the explicit formula.

And of course the development only accelerated from that point on.

throwawaycities · 8 months ago

That’s exactly how I begin to put it into context and rationalize this kind of work - he was a mathematician so this the kind of thing he worked on, and he was also working on a body of maths and knowledge.

It’s much like physics and the great physics experiments throughout history for me, some of them I’d like to think I may have been able to develop, but others I just marvel at the ingeniousness of the experiments.

Realistically in a vacuum I doubt I’d have even identified/defined prime numbers.

throwawaycities commented on Mathematicians uncover a new way to count prime numbers quantamagazine.org/mathem... · Posted by u/nsoonhui

ubnvfft · 8 months ago

Yes, and yes.

Investigating primes is nearly as old as mathematics itself and its reasonable to assume other ideas where discovered in the hopes of applying them to various problems incorporating prime numbers.

From a practical, applied, perspective, “understanding” primes, that is making their “hidden” structure a known “truth”, would either confirm or deny the Riemann hypothesis wherein many other conjectures that assume the hypothesis to be true would also be “truely” known.

Or from TFA:

> …In the 19th century, research on these kinds of statements led to the development of much of modern number theory. In the 20th century, it helped inspire one of the most ambitious mathematical efforts to date, the Langlands program. And in the 21st, work on these sorts of primes has continued to yield new techniques and insights.

> …Their[the article’s sunbjects’] proof, which was posted online (opens a new tab) in October, doesn’t just sharpen mathematicians’ understanding of the primes. It also makes use of a set of tools from a very different area of mathematics, suggesting that those tools are far more powerful than mathematicians imagined, and potentially ripe for applications elsewhere.

throwawaycities · 8 months ago

The Riemann hypothesis makes me feel dumb - not just because I can’t solve it, no great shame in that - I genuinely get lost in amazement and wonderment by the mind that develops a function, graphs it, and gleams some insight into numbers.

Something about it I find humbling and makes me think about the archetype of mathematicians that lose their minds to numbers.

throwawaycities commented on Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency' theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/anigbrowl

ricardobeat · 8 months ago

And what's the purpose of putting jets in the air, that stall around 200km/h, to "intercept" stationary objects?

throwawaycities · 8 months ago

Protocol