Talking about the California fires the other day reminded me of another story from that state I heard a few years ago. It, too, took place in Northern California, where some environmentalists were putting together a plan to try to eliminate Eucalyptus in the area. Now, Eucalyptus, native to Australia, is invasive in California. It gets everywhere, displacing native flora and replacing it with obnoxious forests of pure Eucalyptus. It’s a hazard, too - Eucalyptus both catches fire easily and burns - thanks to the oils in its wood and bark - with a singular intensity. Its toxic leaves provide no food for anything that isn’t a koala bear (which California lacks), and it is a “trap” for birds: they build nests in Eucalyptus boughs, but as soon as a storm comes the weak wood of the tree gives way, and the nest is soon on the forest floor, smashing the eggs or killing the chicks inside.
Anyway, for these perfectly understandable reasons, environmentalists were trying to eliminate Eucalyptus from this particular region of NorCal. Now, Eucalyptus does have its defenders. It must be admitted that it is a handsome tree, willowy in youth and tall and noble in age. There are even some deluded souls who like the, to me, sickly smell it exudes. So the environmentalists held some town meetings to gather support for their plan. The response they got was…unexpected. People were shocked at their claim that Eucalyptus wasn’t “native”. “It’s been here for over 100 years!” they said - Americans thinking that a long time, you see. “You wouldn’t try to eliminate non-native people, would you?” “You’re a bunch of plant racists!” Yes, “plant racists”. I believe that, eventually, they even worked themselves up to the point of throwing around the epithet “plant nazi”. And meant it!
Obviously, the environmentalists were shocked by all this. Like most non-me environmentalists, they were good liberals, and were completely unused to this kind of rhetoric being deployed against them. I don’t really remember how the story ended, or even if there was any real conclusion to it. But, just…“plant nazis”.
I am going to California this weekend for Mike and Alicorn’s wedding.
I am on research leave from my job starting Friday. I worked extra hard so I could get the research leave, and promised them extra extra research so they would leave me alone. My plan was that since I can do my research work (mostly literature search and proposal writing) equally well in California, I would be able to spend more than just the weekend there and catch up with friends and family.
Today my boss tells me I can’t do that. There’s apparently a rule that the government will only pay the hospital extra money for training residents when those residents are “within pager range” of the hospital - that is, close enough that they could theoretically answer a page if they got one.
So I have to do my research from my house in Michigan, instead of a house in California, even though it is just combing the Internet for literature reviews. So that I can answer a page if I get one. Which I won’t, because I am on research leave with no clinical responsibilities.
So I am flying back Sunday night/Monday morning, so I can be in my house in Michigan and not come into hospital.
I may have been slightly sarcastic with my boss about this. “What time do I have to be back from California on Monday?” I asked. “Do I have to not come into hospital at eight o ‘clock sharp? Or can I take a slightly later flight, and not come in at ten or eleven? What if I don’t come to hospital for night shift? Would that work?”
My boss, to his credit, agreed I was allowed to not come to hospital for the night shift, which means I can fly back Monday morning so I can be in Michigan Monday night in time to not come into the hospital. But night shift starts at six PM, and I had better be sitting in my house doing whatever I feel like at that time, or else.
And now I’m back. I spent the whole night at the airport and didn’t get any sleep because the PA system shouted loud reminders that terrorism was bad every fifteen minutes on the dot which were beyond the ability of my earplugs and earmuffs to block out.
Then took the 6 AM flight home and spent the whole day thinking of all of the amazing and adorable people who are still in the Bay continuing to celebrate and have a great time together while I’m stuck on research leave in my house :(
It is times like this that I take solace in the old folk song:
I’m not even angry I’m being so sincere right now …
- but look at me still talking When there’s Science to do! When I look out there It makes me glad I’m not you. I’ve experiments to run There is research to be done On the people who are still alive.
I am going to California this weekend for Mike and Alicorn’s wedding.
I am on research leave from my job starting Friday. I worked extra hard so I could get the research leave, and promised them extra extra research so they would leave me alone. My plan was that since I can do my research work (mostly literature search and proposal writing) equally well in California, I would be able to spend more than just the weekend there and catch up with friends and family.
Today my boss tells me I can’t do that. There’s apparently a rule that the government will only pay the hospital extra money for training residents when those residents are “within pager range” of the hospital - that is, close enough that they could theoretically answer a page if they got one.
So I have to do my research from my house in Michigan, instead of a house in California, even though it is just combing the Internet for literature reviews. So that I can answer a page if I get one. Which I won’t, because I am on research leave with no clinical responsibilities.
So I am flying back Sunday night/Monday morning, so I can be in my house in Michigan and not come into hospital.
I may have been slightly sarcastic with my boss about this. “What time do I have to be back from California on Monday?” I asked. “Do I have to not come into hospital at eight o ‘clock sharp? Or can I take a slightly later flight, and not come in at ten or eleven? What if I don’t come to hospital for night shift? Would that work?”
My boss, to his credit, agreed I was allowed to not come to hospital for the night shift, which means I can fly back Monday morning so I can be in Michigan Monday night in time to not come into the hospital. But night shift starts at six PM, and I had better be sitting in my house doing whatever I feel like at that time, or else.
water is growing more and more scarce in california because nestle is fucking bottling all of it and selling it. they are on a native american reservation which means they dont have to involve in the emergency water procedures that everyone else in california has to follow. nestle is literally creating these shortages and no one is doing anything to stop them. not only are they doing this to california, but also places where poverty is a major issue and they barely have water to begin with, they are doing this so that it doesnt seem as if they are adding to the problem and its the areas own problems (because they have had shortages beforehand) . now. why is it california has one of the largest fucking bottling plants, and people are ignoring that maybe the plant has something to do with it??? everything to do with it. KILL NESTLE KILLNESTLE
to push home how bad the water shortage is in cali there are literally towns where there’s no water. none at all. towns literally twenty minutes away from me and the taps are dry. no water at all. people bought bottled water to use for their toilets and to wash dishes, etc. it’s been bad. the drought has really hurt us. and nestle is fucking us over even more. fuck nestle honestly.
Oh my fucking god tumblr no, Nestle is not creating a fucking water shortage, seriously how much water do you think they’re bottling?
80% of the water usage in California is agricultural. The rest is mostly urban. I seriously doubt “water being bottled by Nestle” makes a tenth of a percent.
So I calculated this out, and for Nestle to be using a significant amount of California’s water (let’s say greater than 10% of the total) they would need to be producing at a least ten trillion bottles a year. That would mean every single man, woman, and child in America would have to be drinking ninety bottles of Nestle water a day, every day for a year. And that would still only put them at 10%.
This is a travel blog and I have OCD, so I wanted to start it at the start of the travel, but I am sufficiently confused about how many layers of travel I am undergoing that I just went for my birth. But I also don’t like to skip huge pieces of time, especially whole layers of traveling. So to give you an idea and get to recent times quickly, a non-exhaustive selection of things that happened in the intervening time.
After being born half way through a world trip, I took half of a world trip with my parents, to Tasmania. I am told some minor royalty tried to buy me in Europe, but failed.
(A very hazy mural of me with my brother on the front of a Chinese restaurant in Tasmania from Google Maps. I’m not totally sure why, though the building was an ice cream shop belonging to my family at the time it was muraled.)
My mother bought a restaurant in a ghost town. I lived in a movie prop ‘house’, there were bats in my bunk bed, I missed so much school that I thought for years that ‘roll call’ was a thing from fiction or in America (I now think it actually happened every morning in my classroom). I abruptly ceased coping with life for several years after being read a horrifying book at school. I was so scared of e.g. the deadly snakes that I would use something like Bayes Theorem to work out e.g. how likely I was to die if there was blood on my leg. A snake killed my dog, and my other dog chased a babysitter with a live snake in its mouth, so the inside view on snake safety genuinely looked bad.
(My childhood home apparently featured in this movie. I have not got around to watching it. I am not sure if it is the one in the picture.)
We moved to town and I looked after my three younger brothers in a house that was about as tidy as you would expect if it were inhabited by three boys in a state of constant war brought up and accompanied by their older sister who also had little actual upbringing to speak of, and a rapidly developing appreciation for ‘tragedy of the commons’. I decided I should give all of my money to the very poor overseas forever, minus anything really necessary to live. I insisted on cycling or walking everywhere, and was very confused about why everyone else in the world continued driving, given that they seemed to fairly universally agree that it was bad.
A memorial to my grandfather on the waterfront in Devonport, for providing the world with a lot of opiates. Picture from here.
At school I accidentally joined a wannabe-wiccan-cult, intentionally joined anti-forestry activism, was surprisingly good at academic contests once I went to school enough to know that e.g. decimal points are a common convention, and not a code that you are meant to logically deduce the meaning of from context as part of the problem. I can’t remember whether or not I used to dress in a Viking helmet and flowery blue cape on days that were not assigned for that. I moved to a tent in my family’s (fenced) front garden, and then left home.
(Tasmania is pretty, and relatively safe from global catastrophic risks, but it is not my favorite place to live. Photo by JJ Harrison.)
(A six foot man on one of the biggest trees to be felled in the Styx Valley. I used to know a lot of arguments and statistics about why this shouldn’t happen.)
I went to university at ANU in Canberra. I figured I would henceforth know an entirely new set of people, so I changed my name to Katja and cut off my hair and decided to make a go of being gregarious. I hadn’t really tried talking to people at school before, so it was not super smooth, but to my delight I relatively quickly mastered causing other people to hang out in my room.
(At university I definitely wore a viking helmet when it wasn’t required—here with my friend Victoria—but that sort of thing is basically required at university. I also wore nothing but shoes and rode my bike up and down the center of campus, which was probably not required at all, especially since I was sober and alone. It felt required though, because on the one hand it seemed like the kind of thing you just can’t do, yet on the other hand I couldn’t see any good causal reason that it would be that bad, so I thought I should really do it and find out what happens if you do things that you just can’t do. What happens is that you do them, like usual things.)
I went to America on holiday, then on a really long holiday, then as a student in Pittsburgh, then as a temporary worker. While studying in Pittsburgh, I went to Berkeley on holiday and then on more holidays and more holidays and took leave from my PhD program and haven’t been back or talked to my advisor about whether I will in a while, so it seems safe to say that I moved to Berkeley at some point. Then while living in Berkeley I visited S near Detroit for a week, and then a longer week, and then stopped buying return tickets, and got around to going home less and less often.. until now I think I just went on a holiday to Berkeley. And I am probably about to move there. Moving to Berkeley was amazing the first time, so I hope if I move there twice without moving away my life will be really very good.
(According to Wikipedia, the city of Westland where I am was so named in order to avoid a nearby city annexing this shopping mall, which is called Westland for some reason. Photo by PeRshGo.)
It seems kabbalistically appropriate that your grandfather is memorialized by the Poppy Memorial.
So somebody today was writing about the Kim Davis thing, and tried to link it to Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet military official whose radar malfunctioned and told him America was launching nukes against Russia. Even though his orders were to nuke America as soon as the surveillance systems told him American nukes were incoming, he practiced civil disobedience and refused to press the button, pretty much saving the world. The point was that people shouldn’t just do their job according to the rules they signed up for, they should try to think about whether their job is right or wrong.
But today I was reading something that actually got me a lot more upset. Some warlord in Afghanistan is keeping a child as a sex slave. An American soldier there caught him and told him he had to stop. American high command said that we needed the support of that particular warlord and we can’t enforce American customs on the Afghans, and the soldier still tried to make the warlord stop. So the soldier was fired for disobeying orders.
And part of me understands where the American commanders could be coming from. If we tried to enforce American moral values on the Afghans, we would have to become explicit unrepentant colonizers, the Afghans would rebel even more than they are already, and our attempt to nation-build would fail even worse than it’s failing right now and the whole country would devolve into civil war. I can certainly see the American military command making cold-blooded calculations and saying “It’s not worth destroying our mission in Afghanistan and alienating one of our only allies just for the sake of one kid.”
But then, this is the same American military command that prosecuted the Nazi lower-downs in Nuremberg under the theory that “we were just following orders” isn’t an acceptable excuse. If America loses some war, and the victors find that this soldier deliberately looked the other way when a warlord was keeping a child sex slave, and the soldier says “Well, I was just following orders”, is there any way that court isn’t going to convict him just as swiftly as real Nuremberg convicted the real Nazis?
And if you argue “Well, the Germans should have known that Hitler’s orders weren’t for the greater good, but this soldier should know that American high command’s orders are for the greater good” then we’re forcing every grunt in every army in the world to make complicated utilitarian calculations on the fly and blaming them if they mess up. In RM Hare’s terminology, you’re demanding every man be an archangel. But no one can be an archangel all of the time and a lot of people can’t be archangels any of the time, so what do you do?
I don’t dare judge anyone in these positions. Except Stanislav Petrov, I guess. He pretty clearly did the right thing. Good work, Stanislav.
I wonder about the possibility of culture-war Judo, repurposing themes and imagery like “This is AMERICA, and you’ve got a GOD-GIVEN RIGHT to transition or remove your limbs or call yourself a dragon as you see fit!”
With the right cadence and keywords, how easily can you win over a hostile crowd?
This is AMERICA, and if you don’t respect my GOD-GIVEN RIGHT to have my gender be BALD EAGLE WITH GUNS INSTEAD OF WINGS then you can just GO RIGHT BACK TO RUSSIA, COMRADE.
Anonymous asked:
I suspect Epic acts more like a high-tech software company than other EMRs, though I can't be certain. I also suspect that rationalists are more likely to realize that the same amount of money goes much further in Wisconsin (for precisely the reason that one would prefer to live in California), and are more willing to make the trade-off.
If I ever start using Epic, I’m going to be disappointed if I don’t get little alerts saying “Your patient isn’t doing too well, have you considered telling them about cryonics?”
I am going to California this weekend for Mike and Alicorn’s wedding.
I am on research leave from my job starting Friday. I worked extra hard so I could get the research leave, and promised them extra extra research so they would leave me alone. My plan was that since I can do my research work (mostly literature search and proposal writing) equally well in California, I would be able to spend more than just the weekend there and catch up with friends and family.
Today my boss tells me I can’t do that. There’s apparently a rule that the government will only pay the hospital extra money for training residents when those residents are “within pager range” of the hospital - that is, close enough that they could theoretically answer a page if they got one.
So I have to do my research from my house in Michigan, instead of a house in California, even though it is just combing the Internet for literature reviews. So that I can answer a page if I get one. Which I won’t, because I am on research leave with no clinical responsibilities.
So I am flying back Sunday night/Monday morning, so I can be in my house in Michigan and not come into hospital.
I may have been slightly sarcastic with my boss about this. “What time do I have to be back from California on Monday?” I asked. “Do I have to not come into hospital at eight o ‘clock sharp? Or can I take a slightly later flight, and not come in at ten or eleven? What if I don’t come to hospital for night shift? Would that work?”
My boss, to his credit, agreed I was allowed to not come to hospital for the night shift, which means I can fly back Monday morning so I can be in Michigan Monday night in time to not come into the hospital. But night shift starts at six PM, and I had better be sitting in my house doing whatever I feel like at that time, or else.
You seem to have found an awesome community for yourself where you have met a ton of awesome and loyal friends and romantic partners (I'm basing this impression on your "Going from California..." and "Polyamory is boring" posts). Do you have any generalizable advice for others for finding such communities, beyond "join the rationalist community"? (I'm pretty sure I wouldn't fit in for a lot of good reasons in the rationalist community) Or did it "just happen"?
Just happened. I don’t think trying to find a community works very well. Pursue the things you’re interested in, and hopefully one of them will accrete a community around it.
(at a lecture on the Oedipus complex)
Lecturer: Oedipus was a character from Greek mythology. He was the son of Laius and…uh…um…
this Freddie deBoer thing (the bit about mini-Hollywoods specifically, combined with context from his previous output) is just the latest in a series of rumbles suggesting that the most important effect of Chapo Trap House is that it’s serving as the seed for NYC young media mutual-promotion cliques alternative to the reigning ones that grew out of Mid-2000s Salon/Gawker Media/feminist blogs and have been responsible for so much of the cancer in our culture since they started assuming editorships a few years ago
