skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Mexico, a country caught between mafias in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: … …

    From the article:

    Homicides and much of the high-impact crime rate are declining, a reason for celebration after more than 15 years of almost uninterrupted increases. Yet at the same time, a shadow is spreading: the shadow of extortion, a crime practiced by mafias for which authorities seem to have no answer. Where once drug production and trafficking dominated as the main criminal enterprise, extortion schemes are now taking over and becoming increasingly sophisticated.

    …

    According to information obtained by EL PAÍS, the criminals were asking for two pesos for every kilo of lemons picked and an additional two pesos for every kilo sold, an amount Bravo was trying to lower. The guild leader was also trying to get the criminals to allow them to pick lemons more than three days a week, a recent imposition used to try to control the market price of the citrus fruit. It was in this context that the extortionists murdered Bravo. The criminals reportedly lured him to a town near Apatzingán, killed him, and took his body back to the municipality where his office was located.

    …

    More than a criminal group, Los Viagra are in fact a family clan, one that grew in the wake of North America’s preferred security strategy: tracking down kingpin or crime bosses. The plan assumes that beheading criminal structures reduces their capacity. In reality, what has happened over the years is that, in Mexican regions like Michoacán, a myriad of criminal groups have emerged — often fighting one another — and have turned the economic relations of the societies they inhabit into a source of income. Drug trafficking has thus become a secondary option. Extortion is simpler than moving drugs: it requires no large logistical networks and can easily be disguised as part of the frictions of the productive economy.

    That is what happens in Michoacán, as well as in other states, where multiple criminal groups coexist, none able to fully dominate the others. In Guerrero, for instance, different armed actors rooted in distinct municipalities and regions are fighting for control. In these battles, they tap into legal markets — such as poultry production and sales, transportation, or public works — to finance themselves.

    As Dr. Beatriz Magaloni, coauthor of Living in Fear: The Dynamics of Extortion in Mexico’s Drug War, explains: “When drug-trafficking organizations control their territories, they can behave like benign bandits and offer help to their neighbors. But as these groups violently compete for control of territory and smuggling routes, they turn on citizens to extort them and extract resources.”

    The solution does not appear simple, because over time crime has become interwoven with the economy, creating complex networks that are difficult to untangle.

    3 votes

  4. Comment on A lot at steak: US beef and cattle prices soar to record highs in ~food

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article, a month ago: ... ... That tariff was just repealed.

    From the article, a month ago:

    Ground beef prices hit a record high of $6.32 a pound in August, and beef prices were up 13.9% year-over-year according to the consumer price index, far outstripping overall inflation rise of 2.9%.

    Meanwhile, a culmination of years of low prices, rising costs to raise cattle, and years-long droughts that dried up grazing pasture caused cattle ranchers to slash their beef herds to the lowest level since 1951. As a result, CME Group live cattle futures prices recently rose to a high of $243.58 per hundredweight. (A hundredweight is equivalent to 100lbs.)

    There are several reasons for ranchers’ hesitancy, says David Anderson, livestock specialist at Texas A&M University. The last time cattle prices set a record in 2014, ranchers quickly bred more bovines, only to see prices collapse. Now he estimates cattle ranchers are making well-over $500 per head selling cattle and so far show little incentive to expand their herds.

    After several years of losing money, ranchers are grateful for the higher returns but many are gun shy to rebuild.

    ...

    Beef production has dipped further recently because the US closed the Mexican border to cattle imports to prevent the spread of New World screwworm, a species of flesh-eating fly larvae. With domestic supplies tight, it has a ripple effect on the national beef price, he says.

    ...

    Last year the US imported 16% of its beef needs, and tariffs will make your next burger more costly. Fifty percent of US beef consumption is ground beef, and Brazil is the biggest supplier of beef trimmings. The additional 50% tariff on Brazil imports means the total tax on those beef imports is 76.4%.

    That tariff was just repealed.

    So far there’s little sign of Americans eating less beef despite the high prices, but that’s the biggest worry, since beef prices have increased much more than pork or chicken. That’s what worries producers like Kenzy and Perez.

    6 votes

  6. Comment on Blue Origin reveals a super-heavy variant of its New Glenn rocket that is taller than a Saturn V in ~space

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: ... Nice to see competition for SpaceX.

    From the article:

    This super-heavy version of New Glenn will feature nine of the company’s rocket engines on the booster stage, and four on the upper stage. That’s up from seven and two, respectively, on the current version, which Blue Origin says will continue to fly alongside the super-heavy variant. Blue Origin is now referring to the two versions as New Glenn 9×4 and New Glenn 7×2.

    That added firepower will increase the New Glenn booster’s total thrust and allow it to carry “over 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit,” slightly below Starship’s current theoretical capacity of 100 metric tons. SpaceX is working on new versions of Starship that could double that figure.

    The larger New Glenn will feature a much larger fairing (the forward-facing shield that covers the rocket’s payload) to allow bigger payloads at the top of the rocket. The added capability will put Blue Origin in play for missions centered around “mega-constellations, lunar and deep space explorations, and national security imperatives such as Golden Dome.”

    ...

    The 7×2 version of New Glenn received some updates on Thursday as well. Its total thrust has increased, and it will now feature reusable fairings. Other smaller upgrades were made in order to reduce the turnaround time between launches, according to Blue Origin.

    Nice to see competition for SpaceX.

    6 votes

  8. Comment on California Forever clears first hurdle in Suisun City annexation in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    A City Is Broke. Can a Billionaire’s Urbanist Dream Offer It a Last Chance? https://archive.is/NPeGs ... ... ... ... ...

    A City Is Broke. Can a Billionaire’s Urbanist Dream Offer It a Last Chance?

    https://archive.is/NPeGs

    The point of the Suisun annexation is for each side to help the other solve a problem. California Forever’s problem is that it wants to build on unincorporated land in Solano County, which has a law forbidding the building of much of anything outside established cities. Suisun’s problem is that it is broke.

    If the idea is approved, Suisun would absorb California Forever’s land, turning the rural plot into a developable area — all while expanding Suisun’s footprint and securing a gusher of future tax revenue if and when anything ever gets built.

    ...

    In 2017 a mysterious company called Flannery Associates started amassing farmland in an eastern corner of Solano County. Flannery had no known business, shareholders or employees, yet in the space of a few years it spent about $950 million on about 70,000 acres, an area twice the size of San Francisco.

    Everyone knew it was a front, but couldn’t figure out for what. Chinese spies? A new Disneyland?

    The truth turned out to be even stranger: billionaires with plans to build an urbanist's fever dream from scratch.
    The company is run by a former Goldman Sachs trader named Jan Sramek, and his investors are a who’s who of Silicon Valley. They include Michael Moritz and Marc Andreessen, both venture capitalists; Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn; Laurene Powell-Jobs, the widow of the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs; and Patrick and John Collison, the sibling founders of the payments company Stripe.

    ...

    Assuming California Forever is like every other decades-long construction venture, the plans will change over time and many of the people talking about them today will be dead before it’s completed. So what the company is really asking locals for is their trust. And, as the fractious meetings show, this has yet to be fully earned.

    ...

    The most frequent point of contention is the company’s past deception: How can you trust a group that spent years suggesting to local officials that Flannery/California Forever was a passive buyer of farmland? There are also the company’s hardball tactics, such as suing a group of holdout farmers in a $510 million antitrust case.

    In the beginning, Mr. Sramek’s pitch was heavily centered on addressing California’s housing shortage, and it seemed that anytime he showed up at a meeting all anyone did was yell at him. Today, however, while California Forever still wants to build housing, its emphasis has shifted toward developing a local factory sector, and the reaction has gone from almost entirely negative to more mixed.

    There are still a lot of shouters like Mr. Russo. But the company has become a local power player with Solano offices and Solano employees. Both California Forever and Suisun City have signed agreements to use local trade unions on future work, hence the contingent of cement masons and sheet metal workers who showed up to the recent meeting in hats bearing the names of their locals.

    ...

    A longstanding question in Solano County is whether Suisun is capable of being city at all. The town is perennially strapped and sits next to the larger city of Fairfield (population: about 120,000). A half-century ago there were discussions about combining the two neighbors, and in the decades since Suisun officials have argued again and again that they are just one project away from financial stability.

    ...

    Suisun is merely exploring the idea, with California Forever paying for the various consultant reports and environmental studies that have to be completed before the proposal can be voted on. The final approval would come from the Local Agency Formation Commission, the body that decides the borders of cities in Solano County.

    6 votes

  9. Comment on The final line in Los Angeles's holy trinity of future rail: Vermont corridor in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Thanks! This is helpful.

    Thanks! This is helpful.

    1 vote

  10. Comment on A new era of intelligence with Gemini 3 in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Things are rather different in the US. Small investors can avoid capital gains using retirement accounts. Also, capital gains can often be deferred by not selling, assuming you have good...

    Things are rather different in the US. Small investors can avoid capital gains using retirement accounts. Also, capital gains can often be deferred by not selling, assuming you have good investments. Also, small investors likely only pay 15% if they do sell (assuming they have other income from still working). I would be against making taxes easier to avoid in the US.

    2 votes

  11. Comment on A new era of intelligence with Gemini 3 in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    In that case, I don’t see it as much different than other government projects? If they’re paid by the government, then the government is investing quite a lot of money into building a railroad....

    In that case, I don’t see it as much different than other government projects? If they’re paid by the government, then the government is investing quite a lot of money into building a railroad. Someone has to manage that project.

    In California, voters approved a referendum to build high-speed rail. They didn’t write the referendum, though, and they’ve had no formal input since then.

    Similarly, they sometimes approve referendums for transportation measures, though these are often funding for a wide variety of projects all over the state.

    Maybe highways would be a better example since they’re usually free to use, other than bridges.

    This is very little like the Amish building a barn.

    1 vote

  12. Comment on How investors 10x each dollar, before they even invest in ~finance

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Presumably for pitching a charity (like that climate fund you were talking about, unless I’m misunderstanding), there are different lists. I think at that point you’re not just an investor...

    Presumably for pitching a charity (like that climate fund you were talking about, unless I’m misunderstanding), there are different lists.

    I think at that point you’re not just an investor anymore, though? Fundraising is not investing; it’s a job that takes different skills.

    You seem a bit surprised at how “very easy” fundraising is if you’re the right person with the right skills. But I think that would be sort of like me saying that getting a job at Google wasn’t that hard? It was just ordinary interviewing, but that’s discounting what I learned about software engineering before that. For many people, it would be impossible.

    1 vote

  13. Comment on A new era of intelligence with Gemini 3 in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    In ChatGPT’s preferences, you can set which personality you want. I have it set to “robot.”

    In ChatGPT’s preferences, you can set which personality you want. I have it set to “robot.”

    3 votes

  14. Comment on A new era of intelligence with Gemini 3 in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Suppose a railroad takes years to build. The workers aren’t paid for all that time. It might be a lot harder to recruit workers who can work for free for years, rather than helping their neighbor...

    Suppose a railroad takes years to build. The workers aren’t paid for all that time. It might be a lot harder to recruit workers who can work for free for years, rather than helping their neighbor for a day?

    A worker’s share in the future railroad is worth money, but only if it’s formalized and transferable. This share might be sold to others who can better afford to wait. So that’s reinventing private investment.

    2 votes

  15. Comment on A new era of intelligence with Gemini 3 in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yes, but where does the wealth come from? If you want to build an apartment building, a railroad line, a factory, or a data center, someone has to pay for it. There is no revenue until it's built....

    Yes, but where does the wealth come from?

    If you want to build an apartment building, a railroad line, a factory, or a data center, someone has to pay for it. There is no revenue until it's built. That's investment.

    If the idea is that the government funds all the investments, that's different from there being no investments at all. It would be more accurately described as there being no private investment.

    7 votes

  16. Comment on Some people can't see mental images. The consequences are profound. in ~health.mental

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Do you draw diagrams when doing geometric problems? Have you used CAD tools?

    Do you draw diagrams when doing geometric problems? Have you used CAD tools?

    1 vote

  17. Comment on How investors 10x each dollar, before they even invest in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I'm wondering how someone would go about raising large amounts of money from a private bank or from family offices. I wouldn't know who to call and I wouldn't expect them to listen to a stranger...

    I'm wondering how someone would go about raising large amounts of money from a private bank or from family offices. I wouldn't know who to call and I wouldn't expect them to listen to a stranger asking for money for a charity.

    I suppose it's like selling anything, but I'm not in sales. Do they get these sort of sales calls a lot?

    4 votes

  18. Comment on How investors 10x each dollar, before they even invest in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yes, that's useful. I'll continue there.

    Yes, that's useful. I'll continue there.

    1 vote

  19. Comment on Some people can't see mental images. The consequences are profound. in ~health.mental

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: ... ... ...

    From the article:

    An article about Zeman’s second paper appeared in the New York Times, and, after that, e-mails poured in. Around seventeen thousand people contacted him. Most were congenital aphantasics, and most not only lacked visual imagery; they could not mentally call up sounds, either, or touch, or the sensation of movement. Many had difficulty recognizing faces. Many said that they had a family member who was aphantasic, too. Most said that they saw images in dreams. Zeman recruited colleagues to work with him, and together they tried to reply to every correspondent.

    Some people who wrote had once had imagery but lost it. About half of these had lost it as a consequence of physical injury—stroke, meningitis, head trauma, suffocation. The other half attributed their loss to a psychiatric cause—depersonalization syndrome, depression. A few told him that they thought they’d suppressed their capacity to visualize because traumatic memories had made imagery intolerable. [...]

    ...

    Zeman also received messages from people who appeared to have the opposite of aphantasia: they told him that their mental pictures were graphic and inescapable. There was evidently a spectrum of mental imagery, with aphantasia on one end and extraordinarily vivid imagery on the other and most people’s experience somewhere in between. Zeman figured that the vivid extreme needed a name as well; he dubbed it hyperphantasia. It seemed that two or three per cent of people were aphantasic and somewhat more were hyperphantasic.

    Many of his correspondents, he learned, had discovered their condition very recently, after reading about it or hearing it described on the radio. Their whole lives, they had heard people talk about picturing, and imagining, and counting sheep, and visualizing beaches, and seeing in the mind’s eye, and assumed that all those idioms were only metaphors or colorful hyperbole. It was amazing how profoundly people could misunderstand one another, and assume that others didn’t mean what they were saying—how minds could wrest sense out of things that made no sense.

    Some said that they had a tantalizing feeling that images were somewhere in their minds, only just out of reach, like a word on the tip of their tongue. This sounded right to Zeman—the images must be stored in some way, since aphantasics were able to recognize things. In fact, it seemed that most aphantasics weren’t hampered in their everyday functioning. They had good memories for facts and tasks. But many of them said that they remembered very little about their own lives.

    ...

    Isabel, like Parfit, remembered very little about her life. She kept boxes of souvenirs—ticket stubs, programs—but unless she looked at these things, or a friend reminded her, she didn’t recall most of the places she’d visited or things she’d done. She imagined that this could be a problem in a relationship, if you didn’t remember what you’d done together and the other person got upset and accused you of not caring, though fortunately she’d never been with someone like that. When she went out with friends who were full of stories, she’d worry that she wasn’t entertaining enough [...]

    ...

    In talking to a friend of hers, an aphantasic painter who was one of Zeman’s research subjects, Clare had realized that she was the opposite—hyperphantasic. Her imagery was extraordinarily vivid. There was always so much going on inside her head, her mind skittering and careening about, that it was difficult to focus on what or who was actually in front of her. There were so many pictures and flashes of memory, and glimpses of things she thought were memory but wasn’t sure, and scenarios real and imaginary, and schemes and speculations and notions and plans, a relentless flood of images and ideas continuously coursing through her mind. It was hard to get to sleep.

    At one point, in an effort to slow the flood, she tried meditation. She went on a ten-day silent retreat, but she disliked it so much—too many rules, getting up far too early—that she rebelled. While sitting in a room with no pictures or stimulation of any kind, supposedly meditating, she decided to watch the first Harry Potter movie in her head. She wasn’t able to recall all two hours of it, but watching what she remembered lasted for forty-five minutes. Then she did the same with the other seven films.

    She tried not to expose herself to ugly or violent images because she knew they would stick in her mind for years. But even without a picture, if she even heard about violence her mind would produce one. Once, reading about someone undergoing surgery without anesthetic, she imagined it so graphically that she fainted. [...]

    24 votes