SatanicNotMessianic

Try this:

Eivør - Trøllabundin

Also, “females” makes you sound like a Ferengi. It’s okay to say women, even when you’re using it as a sexist overgeneralization.

Elon is first and foremost a con man.

He gives them the old razzle dazzle, and even tech investors get so impressed with his confidence and his technobabble and his statements like “This is ready to ship today” that they’ve just lined up to give him money.

I think what’s happening now is that the blush is coming off the rose. Elon first got his money because he was involved as a founder in a company that he was fired from because of incompetence, but kept a large enough founder equity stake that he cashed out a billionaire. Then, because money was cheap and because you hit a tipping point where it’s easier to make money than lose money, he failed upwards.

Now reality is starting to catch up with him, and he’s in a panic. He’s psyched himself out enough that he’s turned pure Trump, doubling down and becoming more outrageous instead of taking his responsibility to his companies into account.

That makes a lot of sense. I worked with space systems for a while, and so I’m very conscious of technological conservatism and its critical role in aviation and space systems. Absolutely no pushback there.

I did not anticipate a binary/on-off system for weight detection. Even in legacy systems, that seems less than ideal, but I’ve been around enough that it shouldn’t surprise me. For that, though, I can see the need for more accurate readings and will concede that it might be cheaper to weigh every passenger than to upgrade a fleet given the certifications etc.

I do harbor a suspicion that things like wind loading, given enough readings and the additional meteorological data, could be corrected for more cheaply than deploying a passenger weighing system just based on what I know about data corrections, but I do have to admit that I was not taking that effect into account in my initial thinking. This was exactly the kind of pragmatic insight I was hoping to get, so thank you! Basically, the approach I would start with would be the same flight number/aircraft model with the airport wind speed or other weather data and see how it affects variability against a null model where you assume no effect. But when you combine that with janky or binary sensors (and I’ve only been to Finland when the weather was actually quite nice so I can’t speak to the variability in their data), and then I can see why this approach might be quite pragmatic.

Thank you! I learned something today.

In our research as experts in the study of people’s employment over time

On the one hand, I think that this would be a terrible job to get fired from. On the other hand, you would be able to write a ten page paper well supported by citations to explain the gaps in your resume.

I think that Toyota recently announced they sold a total of 14,000 (in the US, I’m assuming). They also announced that they were planning on continuing production on the same article, but I don’t know what this will do to their plans.

I absolutely do understand that, but thank you for the detailed explanation.

What I’m saying is this. I’m assuming (based on having flights make adjustments to seating at the gates and just thinking about how I’d design it if I were engineering an airplane) that each wheel/strut measures the weight placed on it while on the ground. This, to some level of accuracy (think back to sig figs from physics 101) gives you the average loading for a flight. You already have the loading for checked baggage (which are already weighed independently as the bags are checked), and I assume something similar is done with any additional cargo. So the total passenger weight (people plus carryons) would be total loading - checked bags - cargo. The passenger/carryon component is automatically an average over that particular flight, since it’s the total weight that you could then divide by the number of passengers. You get that metric for free, since the sensors and data collection is already in place to ensure flight safety and (I assume) required by federal regulations or something.

So you can say that Flight XY3094 that flies from Dallas to NYC at 9AM averages (I’m just making up a number here) 30k lbs of passenger weight. Because you already have the data, you can break that down to seasonal metrics (more weight in Dec and Jan, less in Jun and July eg), compare between flights on the same route but different days of the week or times of day, and so on. You can look at the variability for the data as a whole or within each collection (eg +/- 3000 lbs for winter flights). These are just the most simple examples I can come up with, but hopefully you get the idea. I could have a data scientist write this in such a way that it is constantly updating the stats daily, and be able to perform time series analysis to see whether they’re increasing as a trend over time, or whether the deviations are increasing. I could tie in the data with ad campaigns, to see if those act as a driver that give us a predictive model we could use to offset ad expenses and increased fuel costs versus ticket sales, and so on.

The only additional resolution you’d get from weighing individual passengers/carryon is per passenger variability data, which would not be useful unless they’re looking to build a model where they adjust ticket price by weight of the individual passengers. Remember, they already have the aggregate data. To get the aggregate data from the individual passenger data, they’d have to add them all together then divide by the number of passengers and so on. You could look at stats like the skew in the data (“What percentage of our passenger weight comes from really heavy passengers?”) but again, I don’t see that being useful unless they’re intending to redo their ticket pricing model.

Again, it’s not free. There are costs for collection (purchase and distribution and maintenance of equipment), personnel (“Sir, please stand on this platform. No, like this.” Etc), data collection (physical network and software to collect and transfer the data), analysis (including defining the metrics and writing the software to execute on it and make reports), and actioning the data (business types figuring out what to do with it). That’s easily several million dollars, now that I’m thinking about it step by step.

They have to have justified this - they’re expecting it to pay for itself. I just can’t think of anything unless, despite their denials, this is going to be used to create a legal argument to charge heavy passengers more money.

Yes. The basic method is listen and repeat with variations thrown in. You might be able to get the old FSI recordings for free, and I think there’s a commercial remastering or something like that available for sale. I got those out of curiosity at one point. Pimsleur is an updated version of the same approach with better structure, better voice actors, and in the most updated version available as an app/application.

I’m going off of memory here, but they’re a series of about 3-5 courses (the most popular languages go further) of 30 hour long sessions each, and I would do them while commuting. It would generally take me a few times to get through each course, but it’s really remarkable to think about how in the first course (and many after) what starts out sounding like a string of completely undifferentiated sounds turns into language. At some point some dial really starts to turn and you’ll have your first dream in Spanish or whatever. It’s pretty amazing.

Yes, it is my educated opinion that this person, for the reasons I outlined at a pretty high level, has mental illness.

No, I do not think that the other person’s statement was totally cool. I agree with you that it was insensitive and dismissive. I want to make it very clear that I’m not trying to invalidate the reaction that kind of comment inspires.

What I am saying is that we do not do the fields of medicine, mental health, or criminal justice reform any favors if we try to take the stance that mental illness has no role to play in these kinds of incidents.

Look, I’m a researcher. One of my primary areas of research is studying how susceptibility to contagious ideas like these cluster in social networks and how they’re exploited by the viral contagion between individuals as pushed by their peers and mass/social media. I can get all into sigmoid transfer functions from opinions to behavior and how they’re left-shifted by predispositions.

But my main, ethical point is that this is a medical problem, and we need to treat it like one. None of that casts aspersions or makes any assumptions whatsoever about the vast spectrum that constitutes what we broadly and often erroneously term “mental health.” It just means that people need psychological and medical interventions rather than life in prison or the electric chair.

Yup - you’re right. I kinda have the same hang ups with both, and it’s late, so I got them confused.

It’s been too long for me to remember off the top of my head, but this SPLC article on Tom Metzger and the White Aryan Resistance should give you a starting point and some terms to search for. The Hammerskins were one of the bigger gangs back then that had a presence in multiple states and I think in the UK. The ADL also has great records and studies on these groups and are a key resource for researchers.

It’s been a while since I saw it, but I believe the older guy in AHX was supposed to represent Metzger. They were very much alike.

No, it is a legitimate mental illness.

I will lay a bet that if we were to perform a neuroimaging exam of this man’s brain, we would find a hypertrophic amygdala (which is the physical part of the brain that detects and classifies fear and threat responses) heavily primed to kick off a reaction in the limbic system. It’s a hair trigger over which you don’t have conscious control at that point. I will also guarantee he has a hypotrophied prefrontal cortex, which is the slower to react but more evolutionarily advanced part of the brain that’s supposed to keep all that stuff in check by asking “Is that what’s really happening?” and “What will happen to me if I do this?” There’s also a very solid chance we’d find evidence traumatic brain injury, with is present in 50%+ of persons in jail for violent crime and about 10% in the general population. We could do a blood work up, a DNA test, a psychological history, and so on.

We’re talking about structural, chemical, genetic, and psychological determinants. I don’t know how to classify that other than mental illness requiring treatment. I’m going to use a non-preferred term in its colloquial sense, but if a person is psychotic, you’re not going to punish them back to mental health.

Not everyone with mental illness is violent - almost none are. But people with these conditions are indeed mentally ill - it is a medical, not a moral condition - and until we approach it like that, we’re not going to be able to begin to address it.

I do not believe that we have free will, but I think in extreme cases like this you don’t even need to go that far. You’re no more going to fix a person like this morally than you’re going to cure epilepsy with an exorcism.

That’s fair. I struggled to find the word, but it was (again, at the time) a counterculture movement on the fringes of a counterculture movement (the punk/hardcore scene in general). There was a time when I was pretty elbows deep in researching groups like WAR and the role of bands like Skrewdriver and gangs like the Hammerskins. I even interviewed some people. They were all very surreally open to talking - you can see that if you watch some documentaries from the time.

I really don’t want to get back into that though. It’s a dark hole, and it’s getting close enough to mainstream politics that it’s an entirely different phenomenon.

What I guess I was trying to say is that Fight Club spoke to more people, and might have helped convert them. AHX was only seen as an endorsement by people who didn’t need converting, and who were such a tiny fraction of the population that they didn’t pose a large scale threat (although they did beat the crap out of me on a couple of occasions).