Kevin Drum finds a study saying the decline in young adult mental health is caused by a decline in the unsupervised play of children and wants to believe it, but sadly there is no real evidence.
Bursting bonsai sculptures by Patrick Bergsma, quite clever.
What to do with decommissioned coal-fired power plants? Well, some of them are in valuable waterfront locations where it is financially feasible to clean up the toxic mess and redevelop the sites: NY Times article, and web sites (first, second, third) for three very different ongoing redevelopment projects. Many others, however, are just getting closed up to moulder.
Strange physics: monopoles and vortex rings. Or you could try this attempt at an explanation for non-physicists, but I didn't find that it explained anything at all.
Fascinating map on X showing that in the recent Polish elections, Law and Justice won most of the area that was part of Russia before WW I, while the opposition won the areas that were then part of Prussia and Austria. (Warsaw is the big exception.)
Long post by Zvi on fertility decline. One way you know it has nothing to do with money is that women who win the lottery do not have more children.
Fascinating Bronze Age jewelry found in Swiss field.
For the curious, an article explaining what is in Cornelius Agirppa's De Occulta Philosophia (1533).
The sad story of Delonte West, former NBA player who once earned $6 million a year but went crazy, got addicted, and ended up panhandling on the street. His friends tried to help him – Mark Cuban, billionaire owner of one of his former teams, paid to send him to an expensive rehab center run by another former NBA player – but nothing has helped and now none of his old friends knows where he is. The next time somebody tells you it would be easy to fix our homelessness problem with a little more money, remember West, who has had access to resources far beyond what any government could possibly provide to all the sufferers.
Ukraine Links
Detailed thread on one set of Russian fortifications near Robotyne.
Detailed post from RUSI laying out the evidence that North Korea is now supplying Russia with massive quantities of munitions, likely in exchange for help with missile and other high-tech weapons systems with which North Korea can make even more trouble.
German blogger Tendar says Russia's offensive at Avdiivka is a catastrophic waste of resources undertaken for reasons of Russian politics, nothing to do with military strategy.
Short video of a Ukrainian robot laying mines on roads near Russian positions.
On October 19, Russia renewed the attack on Avdiivka, with more losses. (video, video with map) Pondering this offensive I feel lilke it must have been ordered by someone staring a map many miles from the front, because on a map Avdiivka looks vulnerable to encirclement. But the soldiers at the front know it has been intensely fortified since 2014, with miles of tunnels and deep underground bunkers, the artillery having preset firing solutions for every possible approach, etc.
Reliable Ukrainian bloggers say the Russian losses at Avdiivka on October 19 were their worst of the war. Ukrainian MOD says the Russians lost more than 50 tanks and 100 other armored vehicles and more than 1,000 men, likely an exaggeration, but still. People are making comparisons to Germany's Ardennes offensive in December 1944 (the Bulge, to Americans) in that Russia is throwing its available resources into a futile attack rather than saving them for defense. More video here.
Commenting on the Avdiivka assaults, Russian journalist Sladkov says these attacks are pointless until Russia can secure air supremacy and use it to wreck Ukrainian artillery; without that, attacks are just throwing men away. Since as Sladkov knows Russia cannot get air supremacy, this is like saying all attacks are pointless. Best line by a Russian commentator: "if you can't break through a wall with your head, use it to think instead."
The count of Russian officers killed in Ukraine, confirmed by funeral notices and the like, has reached 3,000.
Ukrainian reconnaissance units crossed the Dnipro east of Kherson and appear to have taken control of two villages and destroyed Russian trucks on an important road. Summary here from the ISW; X posts here and here.
In their first use of ATACMS missiles on October 17, Ukraine attacked two Russian helicopter bases; battle damage assessment by OSINT guys suggests that 9 helos were destroyed and 11 badly damaged, by far the biggest one day loss of Russian aircraft since WW II.
Andrew Perpetua runs down the dozens of Russian bomb, missile, and artillery attacks on Urkainian civilians in a single day. Somebody on X recently, apropos of the claimed Israeli attack on a hospital in Gaza (which probably didn't happen), said "Imagine how loud people would be screaming if Russia attacked a hospital in Ukraine." But Ukraine has already reported to UN war crimes investigators *707* Russian attacks on Ukrainian hospitals, including one on a maternity hospital in which 40 people were killed. The degree to which people who are not paying attention imagine they know what is going on somtimes simply baffles me.
Re: Polish elections map, you got it sightly wrong. It shows that partitions of Poland between Russia, Prussia and Austria are still visible (so it's nto about "pre-WW2). Another thing is that kingdom of Poland borders inside Russian partition are also visible (there is this small pro-KO region in the north-east; it's majority orthodox christian, both Poles and Belarussian).
ReplyDeleteThanks. Corrected.
ReplyDeleteKevin Drum finds a study saying the decline in young adult mental health is caused by a decline in the unsupervised play of children and wants to believe it, but sadly there is no real evidence.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, as I understand it there's a lot less smoking, drinking, injury, delinquency, teenage pregnancy, etc, among young adults than there used to be... I wonder if the evidence shows a link there.
The next time somebody tells you it would be easy to fix our homelessness problem with a little more money, remember West, who has had access to resources far beyond what any government could possibly provide to all the sufferers.
I think I'll instead remember that "Anecdote" is not the singular form of "Statistics". There will always be outliers, in any approach to any problem - but you don't dismiss a solution based on those outliers. "My great uncle smoked ten packs of cigarettes a day and he never got cancer and lived to 101!" is not a valid rebuttal to claims of the dangers of smoking, etc.
The degree to which people who are not paying attention imagine they know what is going on sometimes simply baffles me.
As the late great George Carlin once said: "Think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of 'em are stupider than that."
Of course, there are other possible explanations. To invoke Ol' George again: "Some people, they're not stupid - they're full of shit."
There are plenty of people on Twitter (and everywhere else) who knowingly and intentionally say false things and argue in bad faith, because they think they stand to profit in some way by doing so. You might call it "The Emperor's New Clothes Effect" - perfectly intelligent, sensible people who know without a doubt that the Emperor is nude, but who cynically, performatively, and self-servingly praise the incredible majesty of his supposed outfit, in the hopes of leveraging some benefit for themselves in doing so.
And then, of course, there's George's third type: "They're not stupid, they're not full of shit - they're fucking nuts." The Twitter commenter you refer to might not simply be ignorant and uninformed; they might not just be a Musk fanboy or a Trump bootlicker pushing the cynical agendas of their chosen masters; they might instead be a raving lunatic who is so far detached from all reality that they've heard the accounts of Russian attacks on civilians andsimply discounted them all as "part of The Conspiracy".
@G- what most people involved in fighting homelessness say is that they see two kinds of people, those who are in short-term trouble and can be helped (the median length of stay in a homeless shelter is one night), and those who have very serious problems and are very hard to help. Obviously there is a curve, but I think there are thousands of people in America whose problems with mental health and addiction are so severe it is hard to know where to even start helping. For many of them the best solution is probably that they pitch a tent in a forgotten bit of urban woodland where nobody goes and camp there until they die, because they seem incapable of managing any more complex sort of life. I am all for doing what we can to help the helpable but when it comes to the craziest I think our priority has to be protecting other people, and our cities, from their crazy acts.
ReplyDelete@John
ReplyDeleteExcept that's not remotely what you said.
You specifically brought up "fixing our homelessness problem" by spending money. When I point out that the example you gave against that notion is an outlier, you now are talking about the separate matter of what to do with the minority of homeless who are beyond help.
Perhaps you just phrased things poorly at the outset, and meant to focus specifically on those outliers alone all along - but the way you actually phrased it makes it feel like moving goalposts, unfortunately.
I brought up statistics, so let's actually look at some. A quick Googling suggests there is something like 582,000 homeless nationwide.
You brought up the distinction between short-term and long-term homelessness, so let's look somewhat at that: Google again suggests that there is something like 128,000 "homeless individuals with chronic patterns of homelessness". While significant, that's still only about 20% of homeless people.
If we take the extreme assumption that somehow all of those "chronically homeless" individuals are beyond help, that still leaves us with the ability to eliminate 80% of homelessness just by spending the added money to address the issue of short-term / non-chronic homelessness.
If we instead assume that "only" half of those chronically homeless individuals can be helped, then we can eliminate 90% of homelessness. But even that is likely a wildly wrong assumption, and we can probably assume something like 75% or more of the chronically homeless can be helped (albeit requiring a greater investment of money, time, resources, etc) - meaning we can probably eliminate 95% of the homelessness in this country if we just bother to devote ample resources to the task.
You said "The next time somebody tells you it would be easy to fix our homelessness problem with a little more money, remember West, who has had access to resources far beyond what any government could possibly provide to all the sufferers"...
... and my response is that if we can eliminate 80 - 95 % of homeless "with a little more money", then I fail to see how that isn't "easily fixing our homelessness problem". Sure - there will be a remainder percentage for whom it isn't enough - but let's worry about even further special considerations for them AFTER we've helped the lion's share of desperate people out of their terrible circumstance, hmm?