One of my in-laws bought a house in the suburbs. She kept her low-wage job downtown, despite pay being average for her vocation, and she could easily get a job closer to her new home.
So now she has a long commute, and decided to get a petrol car.
Despite knowing very well that petrol is taxed heavily and electricity is cheap here in Norway, petrol cars have significantly higher road tax and congestion charge than EVs here. The distance she needs to commute is well within what even a first-gen Leaf could do during winter, so she had plenty of EV options.
She also knew the job had no parking for employees, so she has to park at a public parking facility, which downtown costs a fortune.
Basic math skills shows that between the petrol, the road tax and congestion charge and the parking, that car is costing her half her daily paycheck each time she goes to work.
Didn't take long after she got the car till she started complaining she was "broke each month".
I'd say if someone can't do calculus based statistics then a lot of high earning career paths (ex: machine learning, data science, actuary, quant) are not available to them.
That doesn't mean you won't be rich. It's just some of the lowest hanging fruit are not an option.
Yah, failure to understand statistics is a big risk financially.
I remember a rich man interviewed on TV who said he got his start making money in high school by running gambling games. He understood statistics while the other kids did not, and although the game was fair, he cleaned up regularly.
Take a walk through a Vegas casino, and you'll see legions of people who do not understand statistics and pay a heavy price for that.
> you'll see legions of people who do not understand statistics and pay a heavy price for that.
At the risk of stating the obvious, and not adding to the conversation, I think we all know that people putting their life savings into slot machines aren't doing so because they don't understand expected value. They may or may not understand that they are going to lose all their money, but they are gambling because they are addicted/have some kind of mental health problem. Knowledge of statistics doesn't really affect things for problem gambling.
As for those putting modest amounts of money into gambling, most of them will tell you that card games/etc. are fun, and are therefore worth it.
Many of these people claim to have a "system" which will enable them to win. I've talked with some of them. None of them I've spoken to had money. Coincidence?
Watch people at the slots. Do they look like they're having fun? Not to me.
Personally, I've gambled a few times. Lost money. I don't like losing money, it is not entertaining to me in the slightest.
Tell me about people who play the lottery, picking their "lucky numbers". It's sad.
> Many of these people claim to have a "system" which will enable them to win. I've talked with some of them. None of them I've spoken to had money. Coincidence?
The original thread was about how statistics education will not cause people of gambling. Of course people almost always lose money gambling, except for very rare exceptions, but that doesn't really have anything to do with my point that people spending meaningful amounts of money on gambling are addicted. Addicts aren't going to just tell you that they gamble, because they are addicted(maybe some will but not in general).
> Personally, I've gambled a few times. Lost money. I don't like losing money, it is not entertaining to me in the slightest.
Some people could probably say the same thing about video games, but nobody disputes that some people enjoy video games.
Many people lack the numeracy to understand basic ideas about money and finance, which directly results in them getting scammed by banks, brokerages, credit card companies, and various hucksters.
And yet mathematics has been a mandatory topic in public schools for at least a century if not longer.
We also don't teach car repair, or hunting, or sewing, or cooking much anymore either, not because we don't need those things but because those high-friction tasks have been highly optimized to the point of being background noise.
Meta-adaptations and “kink-shaming” about math … I don’t know if I walked into some parody of the Silicon Valley show or if this is some kind of weird AI bot, either way I guess this is the shape of things to come …
I think I am making an obvious point that normal people understand. A lot of people have trouble understanding the concept of spending less or significantly less than they earn. This is another it seems like HN has changed a lot. The idea what I’m saying is controversial is pretty hilarious and sad at the same time.
What's controversial about that is that's simply not possible for low wage earners. I'd hazard a guess that it doesn't affect high wage readers here, but if you're making minimum wage in a HCOL area, not buying big screen TVs and not buying luxury cars and shoes isn't enough to make ends meet if you also want to save anything for retirement.
That or everyone else is an idiot, but I've found that mindset is only good for feeling smug about yourself and underestimating people,
so let's assume it's not that and try to find something else.
10 hour work weeks are 520 work hours in a year. Even if you get paid $100 per hour, you’d have to heavily rely on govt benefits to support your family. (Avg. non subsidized health insurance costs for a family of 4 are $24000/year)
Doesn’t really then apply to anyone and everyone. Not like I can abandon my child or an ailing parent anytime I want. (Which is my point)
Besides, not marrying and having kids can be a choice that’s relatively easy. But cutting ties with your parents especially when they need you can be a difficult one.
In the UK, an industry body annually publishes estimates of retirement income needs. USD$52k is GBP£41k which is about enough for a “comfortable” retirement for a single and a “moderate level” retirement for a couple. We have good free healthcare of course.
Many people who “FIRE” in their 40s and 50s have targets that allow drawdowns much smaller than this.
When you hit 67, you’ll also receive USD$15k pa state pension, provided you worked for 35 years, even if you continue to work.
If you’re still a “family of 4”, it’ll take a bit more.
When you are fit you have a lower probability of events leading to trauma because you have better balance, reaction time, and strength when needed.
You can see this from the inverse too: as you age all of those factors (muscle strength, reaction time) diminish, as do other issues (osteoporosis) so falls become both more frequent and more serious.
Yes, you can be hit by a car at any age, and some fitness enthusiasts engage in activities that can lead to sudden injury (e.g. skiing). But in general, the OP is correct.
If you don't engage in high risk activities, you are almost certainly not going to break your leg. It's common knowledge that the young healthy folks who don't go adrenaline-chasing are subsidizing healthcare for everyone else. If you fit into that group, you're getting fleeced by everyone else your insurance company underwrites.
Personally, I've been on Medi-Cal for years. I've never taken a cent from it, nor have I paid a cent into it (not counting the taxes I pay). It's great. I feel bad for all the folks that haven't figured it out yet.
This reminds me of recently going to a hospital and there was a guy, probably around 20 years old, who had broken leg casted from heel to thigh. He has his friend cruising him around on just the back wheels of his wheel chair, running at full speed in circles on the minimal area there was. It's really a wonder how this kid broke his leg to begin with. The mysteries of life.
Something extremely interesting is looking at life expectancy in the past. I assume you, like most people, think people probably just tended to start dropping dead around 40, if not earlier. In reality, people tended to live comparably long to modern times, if they made it to adulthood. It's just that infant mortality was way higher. If one guy dies in childbirth, and another dies at 80 - you have a life expectancy of 40.
You can find evidence for this in numerous ways. For instance studies looking at classical Greeks 'of renown', found a median life expectancy was 70, and average life expectancy was 71.3. [1] Even in the Bible one finds numbers that match up basically exactly, 'Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.' You can also find things like the minimum age for Roman Consuls being 42 years, and so on endlessly.
And all of this was in an era when there were no vaccines, no knowledge of germs or how disease spread, and when cutting edge medical science had to do with balancing the 4 humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) with some sort of an elemental association of air/water/fire/earth with each. Eating well and exercising can indeed take you extremely far, because it damn sure wasn't their healthcare doing it. That said modern medicine has basically been a miracle worker for childhood survival, but once you make it to adulthood - your body is strong enough, or can be made strong enough, to get you most of the way to your expiration date.
> people probably just tended to start dropping dead around 40, if not earlier. In reality, people tended to live comparably long to modern times, if they made it to adulthood
That’s not really true, though. As recently as ~1900 the likelihood of dying in your 20s or 30s was many times higher than now. Various infectious diseases were a huge risk at any age (even if the old/young severely disproportionately affected). Tuberculosis alone was a huge and killed massive amounts of young people every year, just consider how many artists, writers etc. died from it in the 20s/30s/40s and how it was a constant theme in fiction throughout the 1800s. Other currently easily treatable illnesses, malnutrition and/or dietary deficiencies resulted in a significant reduction in QoL even if they didn’t kill directly.
> For instance studies looking at classical Greeks 'of renown', found a median life expectancy was 70, and average life expectancy was 71.3
That’s mainly survivorship bias. Also I don’t think it’s actually true at all..
There were a few geographic pockets were average life expectancy if you survived childhood was close to that due to favorable climatic conditions, low population densities and abundance of resources/land (e.g. colonial New England) but for most of the population even in the most developed European societies that wasn’t the case.
Absolutely agreed on the dietary and other issues, and I think that largely ties into this point well. It wasn't survivorship bias because nearly all of the Ancient Greeks we know of would still have gone down in history whether they had died at 40 or at 80. But there is one major bias. Nearly all were upper class with ready access to the base necessities for a healthy life - clean food, clean water, basic sanitation (toilets/baths), and the ability to avoid the impacts of war.
I think you'll find that if you choose nearly to any comparable sample with similar access, near to regardless of the time era, you will again find life expectancy comparable to modern times. For instance here it is for the ten most famous Founding Fathers (data from GPT for convenience, so hallucinations are possible, but it matches up with my knowledge as well) :
---
George Washington 67 Acute epiglottitis
Thomas Jefferson 83 Natural causes (suspected kidney disease)
John Adams 90 Natural causes
Benjamin Franklin 84 Pleurisy
James Madison 85 Congestive heart failure
Alexander Hamilton 47 Gunshot wound (duel)
John Jay 83 Stroke
James Monroe 73 Heart failure and tuberculosis
Samuel Adams 81 Tremor, possible Parkinson's disease
Patrick Henry 63 Stomach cancer
---
The average age at death, excluding Alexander Hamilton, was 78.8, for people born from ~1700 to 1750! But yeah, like you mentioned - a major issue with is the masses at large were living in crowded unsanitary conditions while and eating/drinking unclean food, often while working dangerous jobs. So I think biasing our sample to the upper class of times past is quite beneficial because now a days even the poor have relatively widespread access to these 'luxuries', so we are more able to compare just life with and without modern medicine/knowledge.
Umm...have you had a broken leg? Sure, it needs to be immobilized (set and put in a cast). But after that you're body does all of the work, which requires proper nutrition. And then after that you need a great deal of exercise to rebuild muscle and relearn neural musculature control.
But more to the point, a well trained body will hardly ever get into a state where it needs medical attention. Most broken bones are due to poor muscle control and lack of strength later in life (think hip fractures). This can be mitigated by strength training that involves similar dynamic movements.
As someone who is not there, but who has been there four times and run build lead for my camp...
Rain is not unheard of. It's probably pretty muddy and less fun than it normally would be.
Nobody is starving or dying of dehydration, and there is no danger of that. Most camps (and many people) have a huge surplus of supplies. Last time I was there, I drove out with a few dozen cans of sparkling water that I just didn't get to hand out.
There are PLENTY of supplies.
The worst thing that could happen is that somebody has a medical emergency and are unable to be evacuated until Monday/Tuesday. That's a real concern, but there are plenty of platforms that can land a helicopter if that's necessary.
This isn't the catastrophe calling for FEMA involvement that the article makes it sound like. :rolleyes:
If you're there, shelter in place, and listen to people who are more experienced. This helps the medics.
Typically many medical issues are straightforward to triage and treat with field kits. Then the medics ask the person's friends to drive the person to Reno for more in-depth care.
Examples in my experience are twisted ankles, broken arms, alcohol sickness, dehydration, cardiac events, infections, lost prescriptions, overdoses, electrocutions, eye scratches, falls from heights, power tool slips, cold exposure, and of course burns.
This year, it turns out the timing of the rain makes for new kinds of challenges for the medics, because they're unable to use many of the transport vehicles that are akin to golf carts. And the medics are currently unable to refer people to Reno.
In a city of 70K+ people who planned for 5 days on average, now stuck for 3 more days because of the rain, estimate 50%+ more medical issues. And no way currently to drive to Reno.
In parallel, some generators will run out of gas supplies, some portas and bathrooms will run out of supplies and servicing, some heaters will run out of propane, etc. This combination tends to make people uneasy and somewhat irrational.
This is why shelter in place is important: it helps reduce accidents and injuries, and helps people to feel calm and think clearly. Help the medics and volunteers by staying put, being more careful than usual, and helping people as you can.
The advice to conserve supplies, and keep warm, is not because the whole city is likely to run out or freeze-- it's because medics want to minimize people wandering around the city seeking supplies, and want to keep people in good physical health and good mental health.
When I wrote counterpoint, I meant to your opening "Folks, the article is breathless and ridiculous" and closing ":rolleyes:" because those sound (to me) like shallow dismissals. And felt (to me) like you were downplaying safety measures.
I'll delete my counterpoint word. My comment focuses on safety measures.
I don't understand your point? The article sounds reasonable:
"If you are in BRC, conserve food and water, shelter in a warm space,” warned festival organizers according to the Reno Gazette Journal. The news site reported that 73,000 people (a larger population than the city of Santa Cruz) are currently at the festival."
Which sounds like a reasonable reminder to not dump your water jugs and toss your remaining food in trash bags when you're packing up your camp because you may be there a few days longer than expected.
I also thought your point is to disregard safety measures. Perhaps because your original comment says that the article is ridiculous; and the article, sensationalized or not, advises to “conserve food and water, shelter in a warm space”.
But I didn't say that. You just made that assumption.
Just because the article is ridiculous does not mean I disagree with every single thing in there. I just think it's ridiculous, particularly in tone.
And also, I stand behind saying there's plenty of food and water. So, by all means "conserve food and water" if you want to, but saying that people "need" to is overstating the reality.
I think you're both attacking this problem from similar places. Panicking is a good way to get people to disregard safety measures. Shelter in place is important and one way to help it work is to reassure people that there are enough supplies.
From what I gathered, you're both saying that the correct situation is to stay in place because there are enough supplies? The key is to reinforce that idea and downplay the risk as long as everyone listens. If the roads are muddy and miserable remember that the more experienced participants prepared for this. Staying with them, sheltering in place is your best bet. If you try to leave and not follow safety protocols and the experienced participants you're likely to get yourself into trouble.
While you two are arguing it seems to be on the angle of approach and not the outcome. At least that's what it seems like to me who honestly has no idea what's going on and only barely read the article.
Sure hope so! You know what can change that though? More mud.
No one is asking to fly in the military here or something. People are observing: “oh, that seems like a risky situation that could go very south very quickly.”
One advantage of everything being deep intractable mud - mud is soft! So less chance of compound fractures from a fall at least.
Though vehicle recovery is going to be epic. And that is a good way to break/kill people if not done very carefully.
I’ve seen (very expensive) vehicles end up completely destroyed and abandoned when someone wandered a bit too far out into a surprisingly wet/soft lakebed (around Ballarat/Trona - I can still see it
on Google Maps, and it got stuck well over 20 years ago!), so I imagine we’ll have plenty of stories of drama to snack on popcorn over when this is all said and done.
Nope. As noted in the paper, they are rare except for in severe trauma without prompt attention.
Otherwise us humans would have a MUCH lower survival rate than we already do out in the wild.
Or as the paper notes “The etiology may be traumatic or, rarely, nontraumatic.”
Non-compound fractures can still cause serious issues if complicated somehow, or even long term loss of function of course if they aren’t set correctly, among other less than ideal chronic issues, which should be done ASAP.
But it’s not like someone is likely to die (or even suffer serious long term issues) from an uncomplicated ulnar fracture if they don’t get to the ER within a few days, for instance.
The amount of water I’m seeing come down in the Truckee area right now sure is epic though, so no question they are in for a ride!
nope. there is no prompt attention in the current situation
as noted in the paper incidence of fat embolism approaches 30%
many undiagnosed incidence are discovered post mortem.
you are attempting to minimize a dangerous situation.
===========
>> EPIDEMIOLOGY
The incidence of FES ranges from < 1 to 29% in different studies. It varies considerably according to the cause. The actual incidence of FES is not known, as mild cases often go unnoticed.
Bulger et al.,[3] in their retrospective study, reported an incidence of < 1%, while Fabian et al. in their prospective study, reported an incidence of 11–29%.[4] Surprisingly, the incidence was 0.9% when only clinical criteria were used to diagnose FES, whereas with the aid of postmortem examination the incidence was as high as 20%.[2] <<
2. Georgopoulos D, Bouros D. Fat embolism syndrome clinical examination is still the preferable diagnostic method. Chest. 2003;123:982–3.
3. Bulger EM, Smith DG, Maier RV, Jurkovich GJ. Fat embolism syndrome: A 10 years review. Arch Surg. 1997;132:435–9.
Your own refs point out it is usually not a problem, and there are very low occurancy rates. The situations it’s a problem, it’s obvious that there was a severe break.
The folks seeing higher rates are seeing them because their samples are coming from data sets with specific trauma backgrounds. Which is not surprising. If you look at postmortem results for people who died with broken bones, those folks all had severe issues! They died.
Probably none of them caused by getting their arm slammed in a car door, for example. Most likely caused by long falls off ladders, or car accidents, or industrial accidents, or getting beaten to death, or shot, or any number of traumatic events.
If you look at a dataset of all broken bones (which will be difficult to do frankly, as 90% of them won’t even show up in a database as they’ll be handled in an outpatient setting), the numbers will look wildly different.
In this situation if it was serious they’d just get medivac’d then. Which is not going to be difficult in this situation. If someone gets hit/run over with a vehicle, or hit by machinery, or has a giant pile of lumber collapse on them, or whatever, it’s not like anyone is going to tell them ‘oops, nothing we can do!’.
It’s mud. It makes walking and driving difficult. It isn’t going to make it hard for a helicopter with a decent pilot, especially with a helpful ground team. Reno has a very good medical center (several, actually).
I live about 2 hrs south of BM quite near the route that all the burners take to get to BM. It's rainy, has been for the last two days. But this is Nevada. It'll dry up and be like it never happened in no time.
I live in Utah and have spent a lot of time on and around dry like beds. They do not “dry up quickly”. A quarter inch under the crust is likely going to be mud for weeks or months. Some vehicles might be fine but heavy ones are in deep $&@! until they are recovered. Just my uninformed opinion.
Dry lake beds/playas tend to work differently. The caliche/clay tends to crust over and keep the fun, nasty goo around just under the surface for a lot longer than anyone expects. If someone goes out onto it, they can break through into stuff that doesn’t support any weight.
Kind of like if it was thin ice, but it’s actually (mildly) caustic mud.
That said, never tested this on that specific playa. It’s also usually somewhat location dependent even within a specific lakebed.
Don’t be surprised though if it takes months (next year? If there are followup storms) for some of these vehicles to be extracted.
The only thing breathless seems to be your response to the article. It seems like a pretty straightforward laying out of the facts along with official recommendations and statements.
The article seems to be reporting the facts in a fairly reasonable manner. We have friends who are there and they told us this exact same information: They've been told to conserve, no porta-potty cleaning is coming anytime soon, they may not make it out until Wednesday.
The article doesn't even say they are running out of supplies, other than the organizers have told people to conserve.
Burning man is in the Black Rock Desert. The Black Rock Desert is an endorheic basin. There are no outflows. The lake bed itself is 1,000 sq miles. The drainage that drains into the lake bed is 11,600 sq miles.
An inch of rain isn't a big deal, but when you concentrate it 11:1 it becomes very serious very quickly.
Desert ground is hard and mostly impervious. That 1" of rain will mostly run off from the surrounding area into the now not so dry lakebed. There's a dry lakebed not far from me a little smaller than up there and an inch of rain can easily lead to a foot of standing water if the rain happens over a widespread area in the watershed of that lakebed. I hope they packed stilts!
While I don't disagree with you at all, the majority of burners are probably not well supplied build leads for their own camps.
I went last year and while I was very well supplied and had a large RV with my own solar-powered refrigerator, I met up with friends that were not as wealthy and probably fit the typical profile for burners. They stayed in a tent, were at a camp with a centralized power source with a somewhat strict rationing system. They typically planned out their day such that most meals involved free food prepared using ingredients procured from a service that required driving into the campgrounds to make deliveries every day to many different camps. Many burners depend on water that is also delivered by water trucks that to perform water deliveries that were ordered and scheduled weeks before the event. You may be neglecting that not everybody is well-supplied and could barely afford the ticket and transportation.
Which is why the “radical self-reliance” thing is so ironic/sad in this situation. Most people aren’t there for that, despite the warnings that RSR is part of the deal, the fact is that anyone who’s particularly interested in that kind of experience is already solo backpacking or something this weekend.
Damn... I am man enough to concede that you just Uno-Reversed my argument. You even had the sense not to introduce new thoughts that I could potentially attack out of spitefulness. Extra points, even, because the fact that I didn't think of it first undermines the fact that I attended it last year since I obviously didn't read the principles. I'm more impressed than insulted, btw.
This is the last 2 days of Burning Man. How on earth would there be plenty of supplies left at this point? I bet most supplies were used up intending to leave tomorrow. If they are stuck there for several days they actually could run out of supplies. This is a weirdly arrogant statement to make.
Burning man has peaked. This year there were tons of people trying to sell their ticket at discount. Some friends were giving away tickets. I don't think we will see the same demand again. Which is good - 70k people is more than enough.
Next year, just watch craigslist or fb marketplace a month beforehand.
Or maybe people's ability to attend is simply a function of the economy, which is currently in high interest rate territory. The cost to attend is the equivalent of a trip to Europe for a week or a month, depending on how you roll. With things how they are, people simply can't take the time off work or afford to go.
You'll have about 250k people at Glastonbury, but there is alot to do at Glastonbury having been a few times, so 70k sounds rather cosy, which seems so unusual for the US which normally does things bigger and better.
Going to Burning Man is something on my bucket list, which is why your comment surprised me, how can you say its peaked?
80% of the time when someone says an event peaked it’s because they’ve aged out of the event or the event evolved in a way that wasn’t to their liking.
You should totally go if you get a chance, but to be clear Burning Man is not a music festival a la Glasto. It’s much more of an art festival than anything else, and it’s really spectacular.
Also just ignore the lore around anti-capitalism, eco friendly yada yada. It’s a really sick party for super rich people and the artists they patronize.
It is possible to have the opinion that burning man is great and also that it has hit the upper bound of popularity.
This year was different - it was super easy to get tickets, often at steep discount. I don't see why next year will be different, especially with horror stories getting off the playa this year.
This is a good thing! If you want to go, now you can.
That’s usually not what people mean when they say an event peaked. The “peak” is always well below the highest-attendance, because it clearly was already uncool when attendance hit its max.
It is because Burning Man is not Glastonbury. If it hadn't peaked in popularity before this it sure has now.
That really doesn't mean anything as far as the quality of the experience. It might even be better subjectively with less people. If it is something you really want to experience then go sooner rather than later though. I really loved BM when I was younger but I have aged out and it is pretty much the last thing I would want to do now. This mud just hammers that point home for me.
You should find a camp to join that can help coordinate tickets. (Whether Directed Group Sale or just having the network for overflow tickets.) Unless you’re prepared to spend $$$ and suffer through figuring out a lot to truly DIY it, it’ll be a much better experience to be part of a camp that knows what it is doing anyway.
70k ppl consume a vast quantity of food and water every hour. Once stuff runs out things get dicey very fast. Yes another week would almost surely lead to that eventuality - but when is the tipping point exactly? Hard to know.
Food ppl can manage without for a couple of days, but water is a different matter. Many camps may be relying on regular top ups of their water cube, and camp mates may not bring reserves because of the camp provided water. If water cannot get into BRC then you have a simple maths problem - water on playa / ppl on playa = time.
In France, media told us underground water reserves were overflowing after hyping drought for 6 months (tip: if you don’t cherry-pick the stats, there is no more drought than every year). So they argued that drought causes the overflowing of phreatic reserves. Later during the summer we had heavy rains. Now everyone jokes that we have heavy rains due to drought.
Seriously I hope the media will stop preaching in one direction. Today they try to demonstrate GW, but miserably fail at it, since they’re commenting weather and not climate. They’re doing more damage than they solve.
You're exactly right. Making an objective claim that everything is relative is a performative contradiction...which is why the relativists are wrong. The objectivists are also wrong.
The truth is somewhere in the middle...which is why nobody has won the argument yet.
I've taken a look at only a small portion of all the things which he's posted on his site. So I can't vouch for everything there, giving all the content of the site a wholehearted endorsement or not.
From what I saw, yes, it seemed quite solid, and doesn't misrepresent Theravada views.
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