Republicans grew up in a world where they can do anything - voter suppression, gerrymandering, steal a presidency or a supreme court seat and nothing happens. Well some women get hit once and never come back.
Exercise is good, everyone knows. The problem is advising people to exercise doesn't work and doesn't scale. Gyms are for people who have plenty of intrinsic motivation and money and time.
To improve physical activity at the population scale and over a lifetime, it literally has to be built into the design of the cities, so people get enough exercise while walking to work or grabbing groceries.
We lack basic education in fitness, really, we do! They don't teach it in schools, but really just walking your 8-10k steps a day + simple own-weight exercises at home do wonders! Gym is fine for those who like it and can afford it (time, money), but by far not the only solution. We need to educate ourselves better. Plus, better cities, I am with you on that one.
Education is not the problem. People know sugar is bad, people know cigarettes are bad, people know alcohol is bad, still millions use these substances every day.
What works best is to find some form of exercise that you really enjoy. I will get up at 5 in the morning, skip diner, skip appointments when i get a change to exercise, just because i enjoy it so much.
In addition, what also helps is to ensure normal activities require excercise. I will walk to the shop every day for groceries, walk the dog every day, cycle into town, best if you can cycle to work.
No, listen to what OP said. People know that exercise is good. Everything else is standing in the way.
The solution to everything is not education. That’s just what people who have been filtered through the system with good grades and a high education think. Their good habits are more correlated with their income than with their informedness.
It's a tough sell after decades of propaganda. According to the CDC, over 75% of Americans are seriously out of shape[1], and 40% are obese[2]. They typically spend an hour a day commuting by car, which robs them of an easy opportunity to get a little exercise (and which is also physically dangerous in an immediate sense and a form of long-term psychological torture as evidenced by driving behavior at rush hour).
There are a ton of ways to exercise that are fun, people just fail to see that. Hiking (free), rucking (only requires a backpack), climbing/bouldering (free outside, money in a gym), sports (free minus ball cost), kayaking, canoeing, walking your dog, etc.
I have found stair walking a good, zero-cost, easily accessible and fast-to-execute means of exercise in urban areas. You can also scale-up/scale-down intensity and duration to your heart's content.
You don't even need to reinvent a walkable city, just look at any medieval historical town that is say ~500 years old, almost untouched, and has restricted traffic today (possibly with no public transport whatsoever). These towns are a pure joy to live in, they are walkable with no other options, quiet, pleasant and overall healthy to live in in all respects.
We keep rediscovering that we're happier and more fulfilled when we live in ways that are more like how we've been living for most of the last million years. Also we are disgusted by our ancestors and look down upon them.
Yeah, during covid and little bit after I was in amazing shape because I was able to go on nice long bike rides a few times a week. It got me thinking what would our society feel like if everyone was able to exercise?
I'm all for walkable/bikeable cities, but that doesn't solve the intrinsic motivation problem either.
I live in an area that has a lot of walkable and bikeable things nearby. There are a lot of people who drive anyway. Some because they're older, others because they have kids, others because they have busy schedules, and some are just lazy.
So while I'm in favor of better city layout, I don't think this would be a magic solution.
> Gyms are for people who have plenty of intrinsic motivation and money and time.
There are a lot of ways to work out without a gym. You can go for a walk or run around your neighborhood or even do a lot of workout programs at home. There are many easy workout systems that don't even take a lot of time and are easy to get started if you're not in shape.
> I live in an area that has a lot of walkable and bikeable things nearby. There are a lot of people who drive anyway.
The less warm and fuzzy part of this urban-design approach is that it can't just be about making things easier to walk to, it also has to be about making them harder to drive to. For instance, by making parking limited and/or expensive. People tend not to like that idea, although I think there's a good likelihood they'd actually be happy with it if not for the meta-awareness of having "lost" parking.
People don't like that idea because it's highly exclusionary.
It only sounds good to younger people who don't have any disabilities, kids, grandparents who want to come along, or any number of other valid reasons to walk.
It's also highly indicative of the weather where you're from. Forcing people to bike and walk everywhere sounds a lot better if you're in a moderate climate where bad weather means you need to pack a light jacket and wait for the light rain to stop. Move somewhere with harsh winters and the moralizing about people driving places stops making sense quickly.
What you've just said is a common refrain, if you haven't already seen it please take a look at these two videos that attempt to address part of what you're saying. I found them very interesting when I came across them years ago and it changed my view of what's possible or even good!
So Canadians bike less in winter than some Finns (not all, as the author of the video himself mentions that Oulu stands out among Finnish cities in this regard) yet those Finns make only 12% of winter trips by bike. That means the vast majority of winter trips they make (88%) are not by bike. In a small town, which is 12x6 miles judging by google maps yet has 590 miles of bike paths. If anything this proves cycling in winter is not an option for the vast majority of population.
And yes, the Dutch have their bike paths and bike without helmets, we all know that. The secret is the lack of elevation and living in crumped cities: on average a Dutch person bikes 3km per day [1].
> People don't like that idea because it's highly exclusionary.
I disagree with you here- you have it backwards. It's cars that are exclusionary. Kids can't be around car traffic unsupervised, because car traffic is very dangerous. Old people become fat and frail only because they're robbed of exercise by a car-centric lifestyle. Blind people can't drive. Kids can't drive. Old people can't drive. By shaping cities around cars we doom the vast majority for the sake of a very small number of people, and many of them would probably be healthier and safer getting a little exercise and enjoying the excellent public transport that results from shifting a massive budget for car infrastructure to public transport.
This might sound reasonable, but it's a solved problem in Europe. They have plenty of old/disabled people and harsh winters there too. Many parts are de-emphasizing cars.
I think you're confusing a walkable city with a nonwalkable city in which people are forced to walk anyway. As other commenters mentioned, in many ways making a city more walkable benefits the groups you describe.
When I was in SF, the coworkers who drove in were those who lived outside of the city who were trying to save money and raise family. Buying a home in the city is impossible for these people (and me). Mostly less prestigious jobs, like cleaners, technicians, office managers. Not the App guys making 300k living in the Marina.
It's often an unintended tax on the poor.
IDK maybe there's some middle ground where we beef up public transport while beefing up parking at stations.
That's a problem of not building enough walkable areas relative to how many people want to live in walkable areas, leading to them being expensive because of many people competing for scarce resources.
Car-centric infrastructure is incredibly expensive, so there's no inherent reason for walkable areas to be more expensive.
Absolutely true. I lost a belt notch when I visited Japan for two weeks and walked everywhere. That being said redesigning cities is hard. It's a lot easier to meet people where they are: in front of the TV. Kettlebells, dumbbells, resistance bands, treadmills, and bike trainers are all great for doing whilst one marathons the latest season of "Real Housewives of Transylvania" or "Star Trek Impulsivity" or whatever.
Affordability is a real question as a lot of this gear is costly for the average consumer - I wonder whether a government health stipend would help with this.
It's not that hard, it's just time-consuming. Takes ~30 years. Roads/buildings/etc break down eventually, you just need to incrementally design for the better new version instead of rebuilding the older version. Plenty of those European countries are doing it.
> If you build a walkable/bikeable city, you raise the exercise floor for everyone.
That requires intrinsic motivation for people to want to leave their house. I'm not kidding, if jobs are going to go away we're all gonna become super fat. Thank god for Ozempic I guess.
How does that change anything? Walk to the shops and buy a donut and you'll still be at a net negative. Most people who are overweight are eating far to much and a bit of walking each day isnt going to beat their diet. The reason people recommend gyms and good diets is because its very time efficient. 45mins in the gym beats out hours of light walking.
I would love to learn why some people can self-motivate to exercise while others would need coercive interventions. Such as to build cities in a way that some exercise is inevitable.
Or put differently: is there really nothing that can be done to shift people into being self-motivated?
I think you have the coercion direction reversed. If there was a choice - if people could easily walk places - they probably wouldn’t buy expensive cars.
RTO is also a factor for some... when I was working full remote I had the time and energy to attend an HIIT class 4 days a week. I was in the best shape of my life.
Since starting a position that requires me in the office for 3 or more days a week, I no longer have the energy (or schedule) to attend since I spend ~120-160m in traffic. Between that and the lack of proximity to my own kitchen affecting my dietary choices, I've gained almost 40lbs in 2 years.
All of this is of course avoidable with self-discipline, but self-discipline wanes as you get more exhausted from your day.
where you can get a job dictates what city you live near, how much you are paid determines how close you can live to that city, and how much distance you want to keep from your neighbors sets the density you can stand.
Moving to a smaller city changes your job, which changes how much you are paid, which changes how close you can live to the city, and your neighbors may still suck. It's likely that you'll end up in the same soul-sucking commute life that you just left.
99.9% of exercise can be done outside of a gym. Walk, hike, run, cycle, swim, ski, paddle, play soccer, basketball, skate, play tennis, hockey, archery... The idea that exercise equals paying a subscription is so American.
Article didn't explain why tech doesn't work in education. It's biological. We evolved to learn from and interact with other humans, preferably the same group over a long time, so we really get to understand/mirror/like/support each other. Anyone who has tried Duolingo gets this. Drop me in China with Chinese friends and I'll learn 100x faster.
> Article didn't explain why tech doesn't work in education. It's biological. We evolved to learn from and interact with other humans, preferably the same group over a long time
All of this is so far from anything evolution would have selected for that we can pick our favorite argument: 'well humans are unique in our tool use, so we should be encouraging kids to learn new tools instead of explicit teaching (like montessori)' or 'well humans never learned to read until about 100 years ago and computers can read for us so don't teach this new-fangled reading stuff'
It's not a helpful frame. The language thing is totally distinct—that really is an innate human thing among children. So again we can't make useful evolution-based claims about adult language education.
I'm not sure anybody disputes that immersive language learning is the best path to picking up a language. It just isn't very practical for most people.
Even bird watching. I try these apps and nothing sticks. Books ok. But I go for a hour walk with experts talking and I can remember the entire scene of the bird, what it was perched on, its sound, its name, its appearance, its behavior.
Second, this is a good thing. It is a success not a failure. I mean it's bad for the investors but China has decided people having affordable housing is more important than the investors. The investors aren't being bailed out.
Why is this a good thing? Because the only way we can correct Western housing markets at this point is by doing what China has already done. That is, crashing the housing market. And that is political suicide so we are where we are and it's not going to get better anytime soon.
How is “speculation leads to crashing” mean that China is over their speculation phase? It took Japan a decade after their bubble to pop for them to completely detach from property speculation. China is basically Japan 2.0+ in this regard. Hopefully it lands at a Japanese equilibrium where property is priced more sanely, but they are definitely not there yet. My family owns a villa in a tier 88 (at least it has a HSR station and an airport now) so I have skin in this game.
Do you think the housing market can crash on its own?
Here is my crazy theory: After only one year of the second Trump admin, the US now seems to have damaged one of its greatest assets: namely attracting the cream of the crop. One second order effect of this is now we are entering population decline. If it becomes terminal, who is going to take out a 30 years mortgage on the overpriced houses? As boomers die off, we might see a collapse. There might be a scenario where a future Trump like character fumbles the bailout(or refuses to do it) and the housing market finally is allowed to burst.
Half right. I’d use Singapore or Vienna as the ideal housing model instead. China started off using housing as a financial instrument. People were pouring their life savings into 2nd and 3rd apartments because the stock market was unreliable & capital controls prevented investing abroad. Prices skyrocketed. Now the bubble has burst, and the state is desperately trying to pivot to the Singapore/Vienna model, where local governments buy and own unsold inventory. It’s not going so well.
Of course none of this matters to the US or to this thread. Half this country won’t even wear a simple mask to save their neighbors lives. Forget about coordinating public housing.
> None of the Arab Spring revolutions have gone well
None of the Arab-Spring populations had democratic rule since, arguably, Carthage. Iran is different [1].
More importantly, Iran was recently a secular society. It has memory of education and freedom. Many Arab countries have been fundamentalist for their entire modern eras.
(To be clear, every first democracy arose from the ashes of a string of fallen autocrats. I'm arguing for Iran being different from Egypt, Tunisia or Gaza.)
Iran had a parliament until they wanted Iran to control its own oil, whence the US and UK overthrew Mossadegh. They had ayatollah Borujerdi wreck the democracy. Also Kashani who helped oust Mossadegh, and then later supported Khomeini.
The US recently worked to oust the secular leader of Syria to replace him with an ISIS leader. Actually al-Sharaa was on the US wanted terrorist list, only removed three months ago. Many such stories.
No Iran had a parliamant until it was overthrown in a socialist revolution. Then the ayatollahs started killing people, taking power. The KGB, of course, was also involved, on the side of the ayatollahs, like all socialists (the socialist international supported Khomeini personally). I kind of agree that the CIA is not always on the right side, but in Iran, is it so hard to say that at the very least the CIA was a lot better than the alternative?
Hell, the ayatollahs even gave communist housing a shot. They failed, just like they failed at everything, but they gave it a shot.
So you can ask the direct question: just like Venezuela was way better off with oil extraction before Chavez/Maduro ... and also in Iran you can easily say the situation was better before ... so is oil extraction and participating in the global economy not a lot better, at least for anyone actually living there?
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> Democracy wont survive in iran until the govt want their oil to be depleted by western war hungry demons
Yet somehow Brazil, Mexico, India and hosts of other non-European-origin-majority resource-rich democracies exist.
That said, maybe the limiting factor on democracy is agency. If a culture blames outside forces for all of its woes, there is nothing it can–within that worldview–do to self improve. So it won't. If, on the other hand, it separates the factors it can control from those it can't (and nobody can control all of the factors, that's just reality), it has a hope.
This is a super-interesting point of view. Thank You!
May I ask what source(s) of information and knowledge have made it possible for you to develop such a very clear conception of the complexities of the technologic, economic, politic, social, and cultural aspects of the question?
According to the book "A Convergence of Civilizations" from Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd [1], the Iran revolution actually happened at the end of the 70s. And indeed, the political situation is not stable yet. The authors argue in the book that historically, it can take from 30 to more than 100 years before a country gets a stable democracy after a revolution.
Notably, the book was written before the Arab Spring revolutions, and yet, it predicted them rather accurately. The main thesis of the book is that a revolution arises when most of the men and most of the women in a country can read.
maybe the fact that Persians != Arabs will improve their odds. Recent uprisings had more luck (i.e. Bangladesh), even if it’s too early to fully assess their success
Bangladesh hasn't become a "democracy" in any manner. Remember that a whole host of leaders were arrested, and the most popular political party banned from participating in the recent elections! You can claim that if they were popular there wouldn't have been any "revolutions" when they were ruling. But note that this is a country that has struggled with violence throughout its history, has seen many military coups, and struggled to be a democracy. If they weren't popular, why were these so-called revolutionaries so hell-bent in not allowing them to participate in the "first free and fair" elections organised by them? You don't become a democracy by deliberately excluding a political party that was instrumental in the founding of Bangladesh, and is supported by half the country - that's how you weaken your country's unity and lay the grounds for a civil war.
Right and we could allow that government to continue to murder tens of thousands of it’s innocent civilians, build proxy armies that are larger than all the armies of Europe to kill all the Jews, to murder all of their minorities and anyone that remotely scares them while they build nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that they could use to murder Americans in the east coast, I mean they so scream “Death to America!” at all of their pro Islamic regime rallies …
Or was that not what you meant?
Right, a clearer way of saying this, as you do, is the West imposed crippling sanctions just prior to all of this, as Trump sends aircraft carriers to the Gulf.
> a clearer way of saying this, as you do, is the West imposed crippling sanctions
The world doesn't revolve around the West. Nobody in America caused the IRGC to engineer a water crisis. Nobody asked for them to murder students in an internet-connected age, like the single thing you do not do if you want to calm things down.
Sanctions have made Iranians poorer. But so has their gerontocratic theocracy pursuing autarky and misguided nuclear ambitions at any cost. Khamenei can't hold open elections because he knows he'd lose.
So why don't we apply the same reasoning to the other authoritarian theocracies in the region that are just as oppressive? This whole idea that Iran is somehow uniquely bad just stinks to high heaven, and we have caused the people of iran to suffer for decades for it. I don't think Iran is the uniquely evil state between the two of us. (Not that the US is the cause of all evil, of course, but we certainly have caused many orders of magnitude more harm to the iranian people...)
> why don't we apply the same reasoning to the other authoritarian theocracies in the region that are just as oppressive?
They're either our allies, aren't pursuing nuclear weapons and/or aren't actively destabilising everything in their vicinity.
America calling for regime change in the Middle East is fraught, and I'm honestly not yet on board with direct action (though that's about as influential as what shade the moon is tonight). But Iran is "uniquely bad." It's also uniquely imperialistic in the region, up there with to Israel.
> It's also uniquely imperialistic in the region, up there with to Israel.
Iran hasn't had a direct conflicr with anyone but Iraq and Israel in the last fifty years, last I checked, and the conflict with Israel was in response to unproved aggression.
If you're talking proxy wars, how are Iran's proxies any worse than UAE's, or Turkey's, or the Saudi's? And Israel has certainly been orders of magnitude more destabilizing.
Hiding behind proxies doesn't absolve the Iranian regime of culpability for their aggression. Hezbollah alone fired tens of thousands of Iranian rockets at Israel just in 2023-24. There's no mystery about who provided the weapons or for what purpose. Calling any Israeli action against Iran "unprov[ok]ed" is absurd.
Fancy. Much more likely they just ruin their own environment and die. It has happened many times before, since the Great Oxygenation Event 2.4B years ago.
That’s true of every criminal org. Enforcers are usually a small percentage of the population, because they are fundamentally businesses. Violence is "expensive" in terms of heat from law enforcement, lost revenue, lower internal stability, etc.
You don’t need to defend it with weak arguments. If you feel like you do, that is a bigger issue, maybe talk to your local therapist or priest.
If it's so easy to do custom silicon for any model (they say only 2 months), why didn't they demo one of the newer DeepSeek models instead? Using a 2-year model is so bad. I'm not buying it.
Why so negative lol. The speed and very reduced power use of this thing are nothing to be sneezed at. I mean, hardware accelerated LLMs are a huge step forward. But yeah, this is a proof of concept, basically. I wouldn't be surprised if the size factor and the power use go down even more, and that we'll start seeing stuff like this in all kinds of hardware. It's an enabler.
You don't know. You just have marketing materials, not independent analysis. Maybe it actually takes 2 years to design and manufacture the hardware, so anything that comes out will be badly out of date. Wouldn't be the first time someone lied. A good demo backed by millions of dollars should not allow such doubts.
Did you not see the chatbot they posted online (https://chatjimmy.ai/)? That thing is near instantaneous, it's all the proof you need that this is real.
And if the hardware is real and functional, as you can independently verify by chatting with that thing, how much more effort would it be to etch more recent models?
The real question is of course: what about LARGER models? I'm assuming you can apply some of the existing LLM inference parallelization techniques and split the workload over multiple cards. Some of the 32B models are plenty powerful.
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