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Racism in a nutshell

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Suppose the mood strikes you and you're looking for casual sex. You go to a club, and the club has two rooms. Each room has 100 people, who are on average similarly attractive. At the entrance, you are given this bit of information:In room #1, there are 99 healthy people, but also one with a sexually transmitted disease.In room #2, there are 90 healthy people, but also 10 with a sexually transmitted disease.You can visit room #1, or room #2, or both. As you prefer.Given the above information, tell me you're not going to restrict yourself to the people in room #1 only.This is racism.You could also visit room #2. There are 90 healthy people in there. Maybe your soulmate is there. But you won't.Now for a small tweak. Imagine, instead of each room with 100 people, the rooms are like this:In room #1, there are 900 people, and 9 of them have an STD.In room #2, there are still 100 people, and 10 of them have an STD.Now the decision is even clearer. Previously, if you avoided room…
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Facebook and Twitter interfering with the election

Wow, this is big. Facebook and Twitter are actively obstructing reporting that could influence the US presidential election. They are going so far as to suspend the accounts of the New York Post and the White House press secretary.Notice Twitter's policy "prohibiting publishing hacked materials". That sure sounds like a convenient policy that doesn't benefit anyone in particular!From the Washington Post:Facebook and Twitter took unusual steps Wednesday to limit readership of an article by the New York Post about alleged emails from Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son, one of the rare occasions they have sanctioned a traditional media outlet.The social media giants took that action before verifying the contents of the article, in which President Trump‘s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and his former top adviser Stephen K. Bannon claimed to have obtained and leaked a trove of private materials from Hunter Biden. The leaked documents suggested at one p…
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Sun angle, vitamin D and UVB

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In my previous post on this topic, I summarized the difficulty of maintaining adequate vitamin D levels, and how nearly everyone in Western civilization lacks enough. All of the risk groups for Covid-19 are people who are lower than most in vitamin D, and the average is already catastrophic. Some of the lowest vitamin D levels can be found in seniors, people with darker skin, and the obese. All of these correlate with a much higher rate of Covid-19 infections and complications.A commonly accepted idea is that the sun needs to be at least 50° above the horizon if you want to generate "any" vitamin D. If you do a quick search, Google will reinforce this. If the sun angle is lower, the UVB portion of ultraviolet light will "reflect" from the atmosphere, and no vitamin D for you!I've found this study by M. El-Nouby Adam, Effect of The Atmosphere on UVB Radiation Reaching the Earth's Surface: Dependence on Solar Zenith Angle, which suggests such popular guidance…
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The reality simulator

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(Image: George Redhawk) Summary of a dream I just had. The text below, that is. :)A friend takes you to a reality simulator so real, after you enter it you can't tell whether you're experiencing "real" reality or not, except for a few key details and tests which can tell you it's a simulation. Except, you're in college and the "friend" who is introducing you to the simulator enjoys practical jokes. He tweaks or makes up information about the safety details so they don't work in the simulation (making you think it's real until something impossible occurs), and so he can simulate it working in the "real" reality (making you think it's simulated). Then he proceeds to torture you / mind fuck you.He confuses you completely about what's real and not real, repeatedly getting you to "exit" from the simulation and think you're in the real world for a bit, only to reveal you're still inside. Maybe one of those was a …
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Vitamin D and Covid

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By now, we have several studies showing a strong correlation between vitamin D deficiency and the (a) Covid-19 infection rate, and (b) Covid-19 complications. Here's a study from Boston University and Quest Diagnostics. Here's one from the University of Chicago. Here's one from the University of Birmingham (UK). Sample finding: At the same time, we have skeptics like Leonid Schneider, who can't believe a major factor in Covid-19 could be something that simple. He ridicules vitamin D because it's associated with "natural cures", since Schneider despises placebos. He doesn't understand that placebo and nocebo are much more important than he imagines; that a major way chemotherapy works is as a more convincing placebo. (For people who don't believe simple cures work, medicine has to cost them.)If he's proven wrong, he'll find excuses. And if he did not, he will not be able to pay for the damage of these beliefs.Now, the reason so many are defi…
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And now for gratuitous political views about the election

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I saw someone today – ostensibly a non-US person – comment like this:For the sake of the rest of the planet you should be voting Biden. [...]I do hope you're not voting based on a single issue, it needs to be the whole picture.Obviously, I now must dispense my wisdom. 😄Unfortunately, "the whole picture" is something like this.Regardless of who wins:Covid will unfold the way it's unfolding. The US has had 7.6 million confirmed cases. That means tens of millions of actual infections. Community spread will continue until it arrives at a natural end. Any attempt to slow it more than is necessary for hospitals to function will delay arrival at the natural end.A "natural end" means the super-spreaders will get it and get over it. That's mostly young people who won't suffer much from it. The virus will continue to circulate, people will wear masks but hospitalizations and deaths will return to a previous average without forceful top-down measures. The eco…
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Summarizing Seth: The structure of the self

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This is part of a series of posts where I try to summarize the Seth Material.First post: Table of contentsPrevious post: Introduction Behold, my MS Paint skills. (I like simple tools 🙂)This diagram represents my current best understanding of the relationships between the elements of "ourselves".The spacious presentThe fundamental reality can be described as a spacious present. This does not have time or space as we imagine them. There is a concept of time, but it is psychological and much more flexible than we imagine.The spacious present can be thought of as ever expanding, but not how we think space expands. It expands like an idea: like inspiration becomes a sentence, a sentence becomes a paragraph, and a paragraph becomes a novel. There are no limits to this expansion, and the expansion is blazingly fast.EntityAn entity exists in the spacious present. It cannot exist in a physical universe. It explores different realities by spawning many personalities. These personaliti…
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