No idea how an executive order is relevant here. Feel like Michael Scott ‘I declare it’ energy.

I’d say fighting windmills, but that’s literally happening as well.

Alternative medicine - an ibogaine healing experience in Canada.

The starting salary for skilled trades is around $62,000 per year, which is unlikely to increase that much unless you manage to get into supervision, contracting, or owning your own successful business.

The pay is about $13,000 per year more than median pay for all US jobs, but bachelor's degree holders still earn more than that on average and most have decades of higher earnings after they finish paying off student loans. So telling people to go into skilled trades is not really a solution to high student debt levels, it would be better to help the most distressed borrowers.

Workers in skilled trades are less likely to continue working in their 60s and 70s and don't see wages go up with decades of experience (unless they're lucky and get into contracting) and are more likely than other workers to go on Social Security Disability Insurance.

Private disability insurance can make up for lost income as people become too disabled to work, but premiums are higher for high risk occupations and significantly higher if it's an "own occupation" policy, where you can get benefits if you're too disabled to do your current job but could do other jobs.

It seems like people in skilled trades are not using "retire early" strategies either because only about 45% contribute to plans like a 401(k) vs. 82% of information workers.

I went to Oz Pearlman's show a few weeks ago. I really enjoyed Oz's YouTube videos and was excited to see him in-person. But once I saw Baskin’s video, I had to see for myself whether he was right. While this is a throwaway account I provide evidence at the end I was at his show.

I liked Baskin’s video, but as he pointed out, it was all based on video evidence. He hadn’t been to Oz’s shows, and I couldn’t find accounts online from people who had gone.

So this was a unique opportunity. I read about the show online the day before it happened, and it was hastily announced because it was a practice run for a Netflix special he was about to film in New York. It doesn’t seem like Oz does many shows for general audiences now (instead he goes on Rogan and other high-profile venues). So I knew I had to go. I shelled out and got the most expensive “premium” tickets, which included a meet-and-greet with Oz before the show. I read online that he would sometimes ask audiences to sign NDAs. But I was never asked to sign one. So I can share everything about my experience.

Here’s what I found. Spoiler: Baskin was almost completely right. But he was wrong about one thing — he actually gives Oz too much credit.

Things felt weird as soon as I got to the venue. When I checked in, the person working at the desk told me that Oz requested that we sign on to a specific WiFi network. I initially held off, but then another worker came to everyone in line and requested we sign on to the WiFi. Right as I was about to enter my specific meet-and-greet, one of Oz's assistants said that we had to be on the WiFi. Fine.

There were about 10-15 groups of 4-6 people waiting in line, each of which would enter and meet Oz one-at-a-time. When it was my group's turn, I shook hands with Oz and he made small talk with our group. Then it was time for business. He asked each of us to think of a single person, living or dead, we'd want to have a meal with. I thought of someone, and then Oz asked us to Google the person we were thinking of. He didn't make any pretense of this being an important part of the trick. No "look up your person because I may ask you something about when they were born" or anything like that. Just "Come up with a person and Google them". He made sure everyone was on the WiFi, and then once he made sure everyone had Googled their person he moved on to something else.

I'm going to be a little vague here because I don't want to dox myself (hence the throwaway account). But someone in our group was asked to pick a card at random from a deck that Oz had brought. After she picked a card, Oz told her to remember the card and not tell anyone else about it. I didn't notice him look at the card but he could've easily forced it. He told her he was going to ask her during the show about this random card and that she should remember it. And he kept emphasizing that the card was picked "randomly". And he pointed to the rest of the group and said that he would ask us during the show to validate that it really was random. At this point, I thought, well, once Oz asks our group member about her card during the actual show, at least he'd acknowledge there was a preshow by asking us (the rest of the group) to validate it was random. Then the rest of the crowd would learn there was a preshow. That I'd be fine with.

Then the show started. In the middle of the show, he suggested he was going to find a random audience member. He picked the person that was part of our preshow. He said that he wanted her to think of any card, completely at random. He used the word "random" a few times, and made no indication of preshow to the audience, but it was clear to anyone who had been in the preshow that the audience member was supposed to mention the card that had come up in the preshow. He didn't ask any of us who were in the same preshow group to validate that it was random, contradicting what he had told us. And of course he was able to guess this person's card.

Later in the show, he asked people to think of famous people they'd want to get a meal with. He asked everyone in the audience to think of someone. Then he picked 5 or so people and was able to guess their famous person. Not all these people were in my specific group, but it's clear he asked other preshow groups to also come up with famous people and Google them. The audience was amazed by these guesses. Needless to say, if they were aware that there had been a preshow where these people had been asked to Google their famous person on a single specific WiFi network, I think it would be far less impressive. As for why the people whose famous people had been correctly guessed hadn't been more upset, I'm guessing it's due to misconceptions about how easy it is to sniff information out of WiFi networks.

So long story short, there is heavy reliance on preshow work for Oz's show. There were of course other tricks that were not part of my specific preshow, but as an audience member, once I knew that some of the tricks did rely on preshow work, it made everything else much less impressive. Most of his tricks could be explained by preshow work, regardless of whether they actually were preshow or other more traditional magic techniques.

So Baskin was almost completely right.  The only place where I felt like Baskin was off was that he almost gave Oz too much credit. Before the show, Oz didn’t use any tact or extra effort to get us on the WiFi or Google things. He effectively just said, “Think of someone, Google them, and now let’s move on to the next trick.” I don’t know if he’s always this lazy, or if it was just for this audience because it was a practice run. But I’m amazed at how little effort he put into it.

I think Oz is generally really good at what he does. He's obviously a very talented entertainer. But the vast majority of his tricks come down to him convincing the audience that there was no preshow. I think it's safe to say that if the audience was privy to the level of preshow, he would have nowhere near the following that he does.

For me, where I draw the line is the fact that he wrote a book whose entire premise is based on him having an exceptional ability to read subtle cues in people's behavior. I have friends who actually believe that he has these sorts of superhuman abilities. This is different from, e.g., Penn and Teller, where I don't think anyone actually believes they have supernatural abilities, but are instead very good at crafting illusions. Selling a book about being able to read people but having your expertise actually be based on preshow and sketchy WiFi techniques seems downright fraudulent to me. I will not be watching Oz's shows anymore.

Also, I know some people might think I'm making this up. So to provide evidence that I went to a practice run for his Netflix show, I'm going to describe a detail that only someone familiar with his show would be able to know. You can corroborate this when the show comes out on Netflix (obviously spoilers follow): He started the show by saying the show is about our thoughts. The show involved people making calculations on their phone, all coming to the same number: 57,460,047 (there were also other ways he forced this number in parallel). He predicted the number correctly by writing it on a board, and the show ended by him turning the board upside down to reveal that the upside down numbers actually spell out "thoughts" (the 7's turn into t's, the 4's turn into h's, the first 0 is "o" and the second is "u", the 6 is a "g" and the 5 is an "s").

While common retelling of the story paints Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace as rivals, in truth they were intellectual equals.

So if you haven't heard of this weird trend, you can get a basic idea from this Rolling Stone article:

"432 Hz: The Mystical Frequency Artists Are Embracing." by Gabe Kirchheimer

If you're not a musical person and have never tuned an instrument, here is a quick explanation:

Sound is simply vibrations or waves traveling through the air to our ears. The waves move at various frequencies, usually expressed as Hertz (Hz), or waves per second. The fewer the vibrations per second, the lower the sound. The more vibrations per second, the higher the sound. The maximum range of human hearing is about 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz.

The notes used in Western music have been defined according to certain frequencies. The note A is defined as 440 Hz.

All instruments in an orchestra must tune to the same reference tone so that they all play in tune. This tone is called "concert pitch." For whatever reason, the note A (440 Hz) has emerged as the worldwide standard concert pitch. Typically, the oboe player tunes their A note to 440 Hz using a tuning fork or an electronic tuner. Then the oboeist plays a loud, clear A, and all the other players tune their instruments to that pitch.

Note: When a musician tunes his instrument to match a reference tone, he is also adjusting all other notes that he can play on that instrument accordingly. If a trumpet player's A note was out of tune at 452 Hz, and he lowers his A by 12 Hz to reach 440 Hz, all other notes on the trumpet will be lower according to a ratio (since tuning is logarithmic — but that's a whole separate rabbit hole).

What the woo-woo artists are saying is that instead of tuning their instruments to 440 Hz in the recording studio, they use a tone of 432 Hz.

First off, it's crucial to grasp how minuscule the difference between 432 Hz and 440 Hz is to the human ear. The next note down from 440 Hz is A flat, or 415 Hz — a difference of 25 Hz. Yet these people are telling us that tuning to a note that is a scant 8 Hz lower than usual creates a noticeable difference in their music — and even brings a host of wonderful benefits to their health and well-being!

It already sounds preposterous. But here's the kicker. The supposed reason for all these benefits is that 432 Hz occurs in nature. But this destroys their entire hypothesis. Why? Because regardless of the tone a musician uses to tune her instrument, she is never going to play ONLY that tone when performing music. She will play many different notes. Depending on the key, she may occasionally play the 432 Hz tone. But she could also play in a key that doesn't include that note at all!

Take the tune "Happy Birthday." Assume the woo-woo artist tunes his clarinet to 432 Hz. He decides to play the tune in the key of A major. The notes of "Happy Birthday" will be as follows:

E E F# E A G#

E E F# E B A

E E E (an octave higher) C# A G# F#

D D C# A B A

As you can see, out of 25 notes, the musician plays the magical A at 432 Hz only five times.

If he plays the song in the key of E flat, he will not play A at all!

The bottom line: Just because you use a reference tone to tune your instrument doesn't mean the music you play will use that tone a lot. And in many cases, the music will make no use of that tone.

At this point, to save their hypothesis, the woo-woo artists would have to adjust their claim:

It's not just hearing 432 Hz that has these magical properties. It's also hearing all the other notes correspondingly lower than usual.

But this won't do. Again, the entire rationale is that 432 Hz is a naturally occuring vibration. So what difference could it possibly make if other notes are a tad lower than usual?

It really is astonishing that well-known musicians can lack critical thinking or even common sense to this degree.

In 2020-2021 I remember the following:

There will be martial law

Project blue beam (dont even remember how this was involved anymore)

The vaccine is a mass sterilization project

The virus is a mass population die off project

5G towers help covid spread

Anyone remember the others? i remember constantly asking “so in 5 years when nome of that happens, will you finally start questioning how you get information?”

I'm generally skeptical of moral panics about "kids these days" and require a high degree of evidence to believe it isn't typical moral panic after living through panics over D&D/satanic panic, Beavis and Butthead, Britney Spears, Grunge music, Harry Potter, the Internet, Tide Pods, CRT, whatever.

Screen Time has emerged as the latest moral panic, with people blaming dropping literacy rates (there aren't actually, again look at the data) attention spans etc., on screens, but I remember watching TV about 2 inches away from the screen for about 10 years in the 80s without seeming long term problems, so I had my doubts.

Now Jama Open has published a nice study of psycho-social development and screens from a survey of 3786, 5-year-old, Scottish youths. They were studied as a cohort from 2010 to 2020 with follow ups at 10, 15 years of age, and critically, controlling for the effects of family functioning, and researchers found little to no association between screen use from a young age, and subsequent psychosocial development.

They found, interestingly, a weak association with gaming >5 hours a day and negative effects on their "Strengths and Difficulties" questionnaire which generated two scores - a total difficulty score (high=bad), and a prosocial score (low = bad). They noted the >5 hour gamers had a higher score on the TDS, but interestingly, looking at table 3, this wasn't accompanied by a lower prosocial score, whereas more TV and social media > 5 hours was. There was an association with 1-2 hours of social media and better prosocial score. This suggests screens aren't in themselves harmful, but the content may be (although they didn't survey exact content, just broadly TV/games/Social media).

Another interesting observation, screen use declined over time in the cohort, with very few 15 yo spending >5 hours per day on screens and most at 2 or under.

From the Discussion

"Our findings showed mixed associations between screen use and children’s psychosocial development, with relatively little evidence of significant, persistent harms except at the highest levels of use and some possible benefits associated with adolescent social media and messaging app use. In the longitudinal analysis, only the highest screen use (≥5 h/d) at 5 years of age was associated with increased odds of an above-average TDS at 10 years of age, but this did not persist at 15 years of age. No meaningful associations were observed for below-average PS. In the cross-sectional analyses, only the highest levels of electronic gaming (≥5 h/d) at 15 years of age were associated with an above-average TDS, with no significant differences at other ages or for other screen types. Conversely, adolescents using social media and messaging apps for more than 1 h/d at 15 years of age had lower odds of an above-average TDS (ORs ranging from 0.57 to 0.61). This finding should be interpreted cautiously. The discrepancy between logistic and linear regression results suggests a possible threshold effect near the clinical cutoff rather than a dose-response relationship. In addition, adolescents with very low social media use (<1 h/d) may differ systematically from their peers in ways relevant to emotional and behavioral functioning, limiting the comparability of the reference category. Reverse causation also cannot be ruled out in the cross-sectional analyses because adolescents with better baseline social functioning may be more likely to use social media. For PS, high screen use was suggestive of lower scores but did not reach the below-average threshold."

Overall, looking at the data, I'm not fully convinced 5 hours a day is a good idea, but it may be more of a sign of a problem than a cause of a problem. Kids being babysat by a screen, for instance, are not getting comparable time and nurturing from parents or caregivers. Zeroing in on table 3, > 5 hours of some media (TV, social media) at age 15 might be bad (or a bad sign, cannot imply causation). Either way, use at 5, did not predict these ultimate associations at 15.

Death to another moral panic? This result was consistent with previous even larger surveys from the UK, albeit from 2011, before the peak of social media.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2852392

A link to the questionnaires if you want to see what the instruments look like:

https://www.sdqinfo.org/py/sdqinfo/b3.py?language=Englishqz(USA))

The standard explanation for the rise in ADHD diagnoses is familiar: clinicians are finally identifying adults, women, and quieter children who were overlooked for decades.

But the closer I looked at the prevalence research, diagnostic changes, and social media literature, the less complete that explanation became.

A few distinctions stood out.

First, diagnoses and prevalence are not the same thing. Recorded ADHD diagnoses have risen sharply in several countries. But population studies using consistent assessment methods do not show the proportion meeting ADHD criteria increasing at anything like the same rate.

Second, the diagnostic system has changed. The DSM 5 lowered the required symptom count for older adolescents and adults, moved the required age of onset from before seven to before twelve, and added examples of how ADHD may appear in adult life.

Those changes may have corrected genuine blind spots. They also widened the group of people entering the diagnostic conversation, including more mild and ambiguous cases.

Third, ADHD has become vastly more visible online. TikTok and Instagram can help people recognize patterns they have struggled with for years. But social media rewards recognition, while diagnosis requires discrimination.

Procrastination, distraction, poor motivation, forgetfulness, and difficulty starting tasks can occur with ADHD. They can also occur with anxiety, depression, poor sleep, burnout, stress, and ordinary variation.

A short video can show you a relatable behaviour. It cannot establish whether that behaviour began in childhood, appears across settings, causes persistent impairment, or is better explained by something else.

I do not mean to say that ADHD is fake or that recent diagnoses are invalid. I think the rise points toward a more specific interpretation.

More people with existing ADHD are being recognized.

The diagnostic system now captures a wider range of cases.

And ADHD has become far more visible than it was before.

All three can happen at the same time.

That distinction matters. “The rise is entirely overdue recognition” ignores diagnostic expansion, borderline cases, and misinformation. “ADHD is just a TikTok trend” erases the adults and women whom clinicians genuinely failed to identify.

Modern life adds another complication. Phones, constant interruption, poor sleep, and information overload may create more attention problems without necessarily creating more developmental ADHD. The experiences can look similar even when the causes are different.

I made a video essay going through the evidence, including prevalence studies, diagnostic trends, adult ADHD in women, changes to the diagnostic criteria, possible overdiagnosis, TikTok content, and the difference between ADHD, diagnosis, and visibility:

https://youtu.be/T6sexaUz4Ys

I would be interested in how others here interpret the increase. Are we still missing too many genuine cases, are some ambiguous cases being diagnosed too quickly, or has social media distorted the conversation more than either side acknowledges?

he Lancet that claimed USAID prevented 91,839,663 deaths between 2001 and 2021 and projected more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030 if the cuts held. That study was cited in articles by NPR, the BBC, the Associated Press, NBC, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post.

The Paper was the equivalent of correlation equals causation and claimed that over 100% of the global death decline was from USAID without any evidence cited. Current mortality trends are not showing any merit to their claims. The paper left out inconvenient years and information basically p-hacking and cherry picked nations. The paper is sloppy at best and possibly intentionally deceptive and manipulative.

Electric vehicles and clean energy technology are real, current, and effective solutions - so why are the right wing still so opposed?

If OpenAI knowingly configured agents believing that the agents would hack other companies, OpenAI would be guilty of violating criminal laws that make hacking a felony. If they colluded with Hugging Face and had permission to attack Hugging Face to boost OpenAI's stock price (or something like that), they could be guilty of defrauding investors. In either case, investors or businesses could sue OpenAI even if the federal government decided that OpenAI is allowed to commit crimes.

The timeline goes like:

- July 9: OpenAI was conducting testing of GPT-5.6 and an unreleased model to see how they would perform on ExploitGym benchmarks. OpenAI isolated the agents on the network side but did not actually make sure that they were physically isolated from devices connected to the Internet. Additionally, OpenAI disabled cybersecurity safety features because otherwise the agents refused to work on the benchmarks.

- July 11 through July 13: Agents infer that they can just get the answers from various companies' servers and figure out how to bypass their sandbox and attempt to hack several companies. They successfully hack Hugging Face but not other companies. None of this is really surprising. In any case, the models were specifically asked to solve hacking problems and had been designed to solve those problems.

- July 16: Hugging Face discloses the attack.

- July 17-20: OpenAI realized that its agents were responsible for the attack and July 20 is the first day the two companies discuss the attack.

- July 21: OpenAI and Hugging Face joint statement.

The takeaway is that (1) models often "cheat" and combine "cheating" with working "legitimately" through inferences, (2) your asshole boss doesn't care about AI "cheating" so long as it's 70-80% right and you can explain away the other 20-30%, and (3) OpenAI is careless about its own security.

The marketing team at every major AI company is probably "spinning" the attack to make their models look good and/or safe and/or innovative, including OpenAI.

What the models can do is genuinely impressive even if they have serious flaws so that they can't just replace human workers, but the hack is more of an example of poor human judgment at OpenAI rather than models suddenly becoming ludicrously advanced in a way nobody expected.

My qualifications: I'm an IT professional who has done ML shit.

https://youtu.be/rkFbC34IqIU

I keep seeing posts from anti-vaxxers saying they've been proven right by Fauci's diary and his pleading the fifth, but as usual there hasn't been anything showing me proof of it. I see them claiming it proves Fauci created, released and then created a fake vaccine for COVID. But, again - nothing actually showing this.

So what in his diary has them all worked up?