It's a moonshot in that it has a very tiny likelihood of attracting alien intelligence that is such a game changer that it brings an unfathomable amount of wealth to our planet.
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You just mixed being strong with being fat.
Strong people can look fat. Powerlifters, strongmen, shot putters, football linemen, and other athletes where really high strength are important tend to carry a lot of body fat, too.
Fat doesn't mean strong, but very strong very often means "fat" looking.
There's definitely something to this popular neighborhoods theory.
As an anecdote from my dense urban area, there's a stretch of a few residential blocks that have become the most popular spot within walking distance of my home, and it's largely due to the trick or treating "geography" of the area: horizontal density of lots of participating homes per block, wide sidewalks, single lane roads with lots of stop signs and crosswalks (inconvenient for through traffic).
The blocks with major stroads get avoided for pedestrian safety reasons, and the blocks with big apartment buildings or commercial storefronts get avoided because there's not a lot of trick or treating available.
So it creates hot spots, which feed back onto themselves as the residents of those hot blocks lean more heavily into decorations and candy and costumes the next year.
And what I'm describing is kinda a micro sized distribution of this phenomenon, where the hotspots are only maybe a 2x2 grid of city blocks, next to completely dead zones of 2x2 city blocks. I imagine in a suburban area that clustering effect can intensify, especially if everyone is driving.
Like the Key & Peele sketch where they're in a party that don't stop and can't escape, even through suicide.
It's even funny the way the parent comment described it: a girl town right next to the normal town.
It's more of a BYO protein meal kit, with shelf stable seasoning+carb in a box, where you're expected to add your own protein.
Canned green beans are great. I don't care how many fancy meals I eat, there's always gonna be a place for that nostalgic flavor.
And canned corn is basically my preferred method of adding corn to soups.
You can release some of the stuck on flavors from silicone by heating it in the oven to 250°F/120°C for 20-30 minutes.
It's a very high confidence in the statistical significance, but a relatively low effect (in that the difference between eating cured meats every day and eating no cured meats ever has roughly a 1% chance of making a difference in cancer incidence).
Basically, about 4% of people who never eat cured meats get cancer in the GI tract (from throat to stomach to colorectal) at some point in their lifetimes, whereas people who eat cured meats every day get cancer in the GI tract about 5% of the time. On the one hand, that's like a 20% increase in cancer risk, but on the other hand, that makes a difference to only about 1% of the population.
First things first: it's obvious we agree on more than we disagree on, and this is just quibbling about details when we're on the same page on the big picture stuff. I agree that giving directly is the best way to bypass the very real problem of the giver misidentifying the recipient's highest priority needs. But I'm pointing out that at this particular moment, the balance may need to shift towards more efficiently meeting needs at large scale.
It look me less than 30 minutes to hand out $400 with $20 to a car to those in line at the food bank.
You see what I mean, though, right? You're talking about the effort required to find a charity but your strategy of giving directly already starts from leveraging a charity you've already found.
Many food banks around the country are turning people away after running out of food. In that kind of context, I think $100 to the food bank likely does more good than $100 directly to individuals.
So if we're talking about balance, I'm currently putting almost all my charitable giving towards those organizations and rarely handing out cash, and it's generally only to the needy people I'm already familiar with in my neighborhood. My ratio is very skewed at this point in time but I believe I'm maximizing the benefit from my giving.
This is in no way condoning the practice, only describing why it happens, but a lot of dudes actually derive some kind of pleasure or satisfaction at knowing they've made someone else uncomfortable. That motivation generally steers them towards in-person interactions.
Identification of cost-effective strategies requires time and energy (and likely transportation requirement) from both donors and service recipients.
If I have $500 to donate, giving 25 people $20 each is gonna take a bunch of overhead in the searching and matching. Plus the logistics of actually being in the same place at the same time to hand over cash.
Make it $5000 and the logistics become impractical. The economies of scale don't just extend to the service being provided, but also to the identification of the needy person who can benefit from that charity.
Your statement also assumes that there exists locally a cost-effective charity that serves every need of life of those in need.
The beauty of the food bank is that it knocks out an expense for almost anyone who uses it, leaving them more cash to buy a tank of gas or school supplies or medication. Everyone needs food. Someone who needs more money for gas can get that if their grocery bill is reduced by $20. Money is fungible, so addressing the most fundamental needs ends up solving that problem of double coincidence that you're alluding to.
I'm not saying this approach is perfect. And I'm generally in favor of giving directly, especially for governmental transfers. But there is still a huge role to be played by nonprofit organizations, especially in meeting the foundational needs like food, water, shelter, and medical care.
I can't know their needs better than they do.
You're right, but that's just one of several factors at play. An individual is generally better positioned to identify and prioritize their own needs and wants. But they needs to be counterbalanced with the comparative advantage that another might have in being able to satisfy those needs/wants more efficiently.
The food example is just the best example of the economies of scale. A soup kitchen may have utensils and equipment that the individual does not have, such that they can accomplish far more and meet far more need than giving directly does.
Other nonprofits may provide shelter, warmth, clothing, etc. in a more efficient manner than what the individual could accomplish.
Ideally, the efficiency can come in the form of providing something that the person would've bought, at a cost that is much lower than what the person would have had to pay, that frees up the rest of that person's finite remaining money to be steered towards their own identified priorities. In that way, it's still more efficient to give to cost-effective charities because meeting that need can still result in more cash in that needy person's pocket.
Also, I would ultimately prefer my donations to go directly to the people that need it without administrative overhead shaving off percentages.
If a food bank can buy rice at $1/lb and its overhead costs are 10%, while grocery stores sell rice at $1.20/lb, donating to a food bank gets more rice to those in need than donating to the individuals.
Or a charity that provides hot food (meals on wheels, homeless shelters) can definitely turn $100 into a lot more ready-to-eat hot food than giving $100 directly to a person, because those organizations can leverage economies of scale in cooking large batches of food.
The fact is, the larger food nonprofits can effectively feed people for cheaper than individuals can achieve on their own. Much of it comes from scale, and some of it comes from being able to manage supply chains to intercept what would be waste from distributors, retailers, etc.
Look at the video of her running, posted on September 29. A video posted on September 27 also shows short clips of her standing or walking or sitting with knees bent, showing that her femurs and tibias are proportional length. There's a video called rapture prep posted on September 22 that includes a thumbnail that is a side shot with her knees bent, showing the ratio of femur to tibia.
I think it's a normal proportioned short person whose camera angles tend to lengthen her upper body and shorten her lower body. And maybe a preference for high waisted pants that may trick the eye into thinking the hip hinge is higher than it is.
She's just short. And this image is taken from pretty close, so that little changes in distance to camera make a big difference in apparent length.
A typical smartphone camera's default "1x" zoom tends to be a pretty wide lens with a short focal length. So you stand up close to your subject when taking pictures or video.
And people's faces tend to look better when shot from at least eye level, especially with wide lenses from up close.
So if you imagine a 1.5 meter tall person photographed from 1.5 meters away, at height level, standing straight, the top 1/3 will take up about 18.435° of visual angle. The middle 1/3 will be 15.255°. And the bottom 1/3 will be 11.31°. So just like that, 0.5 meters can look 60% longer on the top portion of a subject than the exact same length, 0.5 meters, on the bottom of a subject.
As a result, there's a warped perspective where the things that are higher on a person's body or torso look longer, and things that are lower are further away and therefore smaller.
Bend the knees slightly and the difference becomes even more skewed.
We don't notice these things with our eyeballs because our visual cortex corrects for these things with a three dimensional model of the world around us, but still photos don't go through that same processing when perceived, so sometimes perspective plays tricks on perceived size/distance.
For a quick demonstration, pull out your phone and take a selfie from above your head, looking up at the camera. How small do your feet look, and does that match the real world appearance as you perceive them in real life?
Smart quotes are the default in certain interfaces (most notably the iPhone), so they're not really a reliable indicator or bot-ness.
if I just wanted to get railed (and I had no standards) it would take me less than two minutes to set that up.
I actually wonder what the conversion rate would be for people who send DMs like that. I imagine a big chunk of them are like dogs chasing cars, and wouldn't know what to do it the car just stopped in the road.
I'm thinking a significant percentage wouldn't follow through if the conversation turned to an invite to meet in person.
It's not traditional leverage but the recent deals being announced where the AI companies are raising money from Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Google, AMD, Oracle, etc. and paying it back in stock or purchase commitments have a certain circular bootstrappy notion to them. The formulas for the valuations rely on feedback loops that are less stable and might create runaway feedback conditions at the slightest hiccup.
In any highly capital intensive business, you always run the risk that the thing you build is worth less than the cost it took to build it. And when that happens, collapses can happen pretty quickly, as everyone invested in these companies rushes towards the offramp.
I can think of a few catalysts that could trigger that initial realization that the thing made isn't actually worth the cost to build it:
But once a hiccup happens, something built on so many self-reinforcing loops is less resilient against the unknown, the chaos of the real world.