Leszek Karlik

Leszek Karlik

  • Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
    Journal of the American Medical Association - Internal Medicine: However, this is an estimation of the number of rape-related pregnancies which have occurred in states with near-total abortion bans, but not a number of rape-related forced births which have occurred...
  • Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
    "I'd argue Shinzo Abe was the most politically significant assassination since Lincoln, and unlike that one it shifted things in a positive direction" The most politically significant assassination of the last 100 years was the Spanish Space Program, that is,...
  • Commented on Worldcon in the news
    The first Pyrkon in Poznań was indeed a "small regional con" of about 500 people, held in a primary school in Poznań, as many small cons in Poland were apt to be (with the sports hall usually given over to...
  • Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
    Killer robots are great, but the politics behind sending those killer robots to Ukraine nowadays is beyond moronic (a HIMARS rocket is a killer robot, after all, so are FPV drones with shaped charge warheads). Massive deliveries of advanced weapons...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Season of Skulls
    My guess is that they would be essentially uncorrelated above 'comfortably off'. They're not, at least not in the US. The correlation between wealth and average lifespan is pretty linear, with a sharp drop-off for the porest people. See this...
  • Commented on I should blog more, but ...
    It should be noted though that Europe is still more prone to drinking than the US, and the top 20 of heavily drinking countries in the world contains 16 European countries and only 4 other (Seychelles, Nigeria, Russia and Gabon)....
  • Commented on I should blog more, but ...
    Actually, prohibition did indeed work out to reduce alcohol consumption in the US. Yes, there was a rebound after some time, but it rebounded to about 60-70% of pre-Prohibition levels. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w3675/w3675.pdf It would be unbelievable to us nowadays how permanently...
  • Commented on I should blog more, but ...
    Banning the sale of cigarettes would be great if it was intended to protect the health of the population (after all, it doesn't ban making your own cigarettes, anybody can still grow their own tobacco, dry it and make some...
  • Commented on A fistful of tropes
    Far-future optimistic climate-fiction? That one seems difficult to pull of plausibly. :-)...
  • Commented on Summer webcomics
    Ah damn it, SFP is still on hiatus. :-)...
  • Commented on Summer webcomics
    Something*Positive (even longer running that QC), Questionable Content, Oglaf, XKCD and Existential Comics. (Oh, and I see that Book Eight of Strong Female Protagonist is now on, great)...
  • Commented on Pass or Fail
    Generation War (a German version of Band of Brothers) I watched this youtube fragment you've linked and I have very strong ambivalent feelings about this, I mean a TV show with Wehrmacht protagonists at the Eastern Front is an ethical...
  • Commented on Pass or Fail
    Bechdel Test is not intended for the assessment of individual films or books or whatever, its main use is to demonstrate the bias present in "films as such" or "books as such". You can have a very good book with...
  • Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
    "I've never bought any plant burgers but this makes me wonder whether (given the much lower digestibility, etc. of plant proteins) standard food labeling for such products shows both the make-up of the plant nutrients as well as the dietary...
  • Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
    As far as assertions of the form "it takes however-much money to have X" mean anything at all to begin with, we do actually have a tolerably close approach to an accurate answer, in the form of the "money wot...
  • Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
    "IIRC, the argument was applied to ALL of the ongoing pomp & circumstance and ceremony around the royal family; not just ONE ceremony. The coronation is a once-in-a-lifetime event and may cost a bit more than the contemporaneous tourist revenue...
  • Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
    "Looking on from the outside, I think that "£50M party and national holiday" may be a net money maker for the U.K. economy ... just from the U.S. tourist spending it generates." I've seen this argument many times but never...
  • Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
    This. And also, billionaires are effectively another form of aristocracy: unelected cunts who used mechanisms beyond democratic control to seize significant decision-making capacity on a global scale. Both hereditary monarchies and oligarchs are moral and policy failures on a massive...
  • Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
    In technical translation specialised machine learning engines have been used as part of workflow for a few years already, and they are quite good. Not good enough to be used without human supervision, just like driver assistance in state of...
  • Commented on New guest blogger: qntm
    I've read about Lena in this blog's comment section, I've started reading it and had to immediately finish, great piece of work. Very nice to have a guest blogger of this calibre :-)...
  • Commented on Decision Fatigue
    "there is a school of thought that worries that young girls who would previously have ended up identifying as gay are being encouraged to transition instead" Yeah, I think this school of thought is called "transphobia". For example, a recent...
  • Commented on Strong and Stable!
    "I suspect they'd get the wind mills spinning (hoping there would be wind) once things warmed up a bit and use that power to get other needed things going." I really doubt that. Wind turbines are not used for primary...
  • Commented on Upcoming blog outage
    "And don't forget that various people have tried pinning inflation on the cost of paying for all those more-expensive workers, which I think may be partially right." This time not really, labour unit costs are responsible for under 8% of...
  • Commented on I can't even
    "That's actually a strong argument against democracy. Democracies are fundamentally incapable of multi-decade, let alone multi-generation, projects which will not bear fruit until long after the initiators are dead or retired." Democracies really aren't. They're more of plebiscite oligarchies, where...
  • Commented on I can't even
    "I want to know why Germany (and other countries on that side of the pond) say that burning pellets from our trees is "green"?" Because they needed baseload that was "renewable" for areas that could not have hydro in order...
  • Commented on London Bridge
    "In which case there will be a stage where human population is still in the billions, but they have little or no food.* " That's extremely unlikely. We can feed ourselves with much less area than we do now,...
  • Commented on London Bridge
    In theory: yes, in practice no. The only place that has only ever been practiced is military settings (Camp Century, McMurdo) and in northern parts of USSR. As far as I have been able to find out, it is no...
  • Commented on London Bridge
    "Have they form for such an act?" The queen's grandfather, George V was given an overdose of morphine and cocaine so that the news of his death would be in the morning edition of the Times, not in the more...
  • Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
    OK, this is very interesting: it seems that UA artilllery has created themselves a distributed targeting platform that makes their artillery a much harder nut to crack for Russian counterfire (because Russian counterfire doctrine assumes the enemy is firing entire...
  • Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
    "Just ask the poor bastard of a neurosurgeon who is on-call at the nearest emergency hospital how much more time they've spent with their family since the helmet laws came in." This is an excellent example of a base rate...
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