Of course the NHS has an incentive to lower costs, it's in their interest for doctors to prescribe the most cost effective treatment as patients rarely stop coming back as a result of ineffective treatment. Does this mean that objectively good preventative treatment (like physio) and quality of life elective surgery get pushed to the back of the triage queue, and that individual needs are occasionally failed? Absolutely, and in these cases where the NHS falls short there's always the option of going private, which just highlights that healthcare is always political.
In a purely private healthcare system (which doesn't exist in the developed world) the politics are firstly whether you can pay and secondly how much you can pay. No point offering free dieting and lifestyle advice when risky weight loss surgery (which has a notoriously low success rate) offers instant success, got a bad back or knee? Try out this risk free* (*not actually risk free) surgery! It wasn't that long ago in the US that getting cancer without health insurance was a death sentence, and that again is a political choice, one that the US government reneged on.
>That's literally impossible. Answer me 2 things that will tell me if it's the lowest slavery in the world.
>1. What is the criminal conviction rate in Japan?
>2. Is there penal labour in Japan?
If I'm reading this argument correctly, it's that because Japan has a high (>99%) conviction rate and uses mandatory penal labour, Japan, therefore, has a modern slavery problem.
There's a few issues with this, the generally accepted consensus for Japan's high conviction rate is that it can be explained almost entirely by the fact that Japan's prosecutors are underemployed and overworked and this is something that can be trivially seen, e.g., while the 42% of US felony arrests result in prosecution the figure in Japan is only 17%, or while the US prosecutes 75% arrested for murder Japan only tries 43%. The implication is that the conviction rate is a result of prosecutors being incredibly selective of which cases they bring to trial, only selecting cases with strong evidence of wrongdoing with a high likelihood of a guilty plea in exchange for a more lenient sentence, rather than any nefarious corruption or underhanded tactics like wrongful confessions.
The second issue is that if the high conviction rate is a result of a need or desire for prison labour then it would also be visible in the incarceration rate, however this is not the case. Japan has one of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. To emphasise just how few people Japan actually jails, let's look at some other countries countries. Incarceration rates are per 100k population: US: 639, England and Wales: 130, China: 122, Spain: 122, South Korea: 105, Canada: 104, France: 93, Hong Kong: 90, Italy: 89, Germany: 69, Japan: 38. Japan has half the prison population that the UK does while having twice the population, if they are jailing people with the intention of using them for slave labour they are doing a terrible job at it.
The only conclusion that can be drawn here is that the conviction rate is irrelevant to the discussion, and while it's still entirely possible to argue that Japan has an unintentional modern slavery problem as a result of prison labour it seems less of an argument against Japan specifically and more of an issue with prison labour in general. But if the problem is with Japan specifically, just how big of a problem is it? Using the globalslaveryindex[0] mentioned in a parent comment we can take a ham fisted approach and simply assume that all Japanese prisoners are slaves, add the Japanese prison population (around 50k) to the estimated number of modern slaves, and, well, Japan still has an incredibly low number of modern slaves, lower than the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and South Korea despite being roughly twice the population of any of these countries, and a quarter of the number of modern slaves that the US has despite being half the population. While I don't agree with prison labour I also don't think it's modern slavery, but even assuming that it is it's incredibly hard to come to a conclusion where Japan looks worse than any other comparable country.
The paradox itself is that if the universe is both infinite and eternal then we shouldn't have a dark sky. This is 'trivially' solved by demonstrating that either of those conditions aren't true. The article opts to use the explanation given by Edgar Allan Poe to demonstrate this, which is that the universe has a finite age and the speed of light is finite so there's only a finite amount of observable universe, which gives us a universe which was darker in the past and one that will only get brighter in the future as more of the universe becomes observable. This has some problems of course and the model Poe would have been working with would have been one of a cyclic universe of eternal growth and decay. This leads us to the Big Bang theory.
>> The redshift hypothesised in the Big Bang model [...]
>Doesn't sound to me like it's more than a hypothesis, but I could be wrong.
The way the Big Bang theory resolves the paradox is similar to that of how Poe resolved it, with a finite cap on the age of the universe there's only a finite amount of observable universe, and similar to Poe's explanation it presents a problem in that a younger universe would have been immensely bright. However this new issue is resolved through the explanation of the expansion of space which can be observed through the redshift of distant galaxies.
As we do observe a dark sky we know the hypothesis that led to the paradox can't be true, namely that the universe is both infinite and eternal, so the question is less about why we have a dark sky and more about what possible alternate hypotheses resolve the paradox. While the Big Bang theory is just a theory it's important to remember that proof is reserved for maths, a theory is a hypothesis backed up by observational data. General relativity led to the hypothesis of an expanding universe and this was something that was later observed from redshift measurements and from it we derive the Hubble–Lemaître law, that galaxies are moving away from earth with speeds proportional to their distance, in some cases faster than the speed of light, this alone fully resolves the paradox and crucially the Big Bang theory is not incompatible with this observation.
>The paradox itself is that if the universe is both infinite and eternal then we shouldn't have a dark sky
I've never really felt like I understood the paradox, since the way people explain it, it sounds to me like they're just denying the idea that an infinite sum can have a finite value.
Like, why couldn't the brightness of the sky in an infinite universe be any value at all, depending on the density?
The argument against an infinite universe that makes sense to me is that it would collapse on itself. But as a thought experiment, the stars could be massless and/or fixed in place.
I mean, it's not like some abstract denial of convergent sums. You can work out the sum yourself, it doesn't converge. The density doesn't matter if it's consistent through the universe (which is one of the possible outs, but our universe is indeed consistent on the very large scale). The article explains it pretty well, and it's not hard to formalize:
> To show this, we divide the universe into a series of concentric shells, 1 light year thick. A certain number of stars will be in the shell 1,000,000,000 to 1,000,000,001 light years away. If the universe is homogeneous at a large scale, then there would be four times as many stars in a second shell, which is between 2,000,000,000 and 2,000,000,001 light years away. However, the second shell is twice as far away, so each star in it would appear one quarter as bright as the stars in the first shell. Thus the total light received from the second shell is the same as the total light received from the first shell.
The argument that the universe would collapse in on itself is made using similar math (gravity decreasing with the square of the distance is by no accident the same as brightness) so if you buy one you sorta have to buy the other. Of course, the universe probably is infinite and isn't collapsing in on itself, but that's because of dark energy (OK yes, there are all sorts of universes that obey relativity, and some of them are infinite and not collapsing, but if we live in one of those no one's found the solution that fits our observations. The dominant thinking was that the universe would eventually collapse until we discovered it's actually expanding).
The struts of the secondary mirror cause diffraction spikes on all 18 segments which combine to give the final pattern seen, the horizontal spikes are caused specifically by the top strut in particular. This video mostly covers how JWST was focused but from 01:15-04:00 it has an excellent of how the pattern is formed.
The term 'transmission line theory' (or even 'transmission' for that matter) doesn't appear to have been mentioned in the video at all[0], and this is a complaint that was also raised by Dave Jones[1] in his critique of sorts. The video is fundamentally about transmission line problems and the term is mentioned both in the description and the word document containing further analysis, but its omission does lend some credibility to the complaints in the parent comments that the video style is intentionally pedantic (it is a pure physics vs practical electrical engineering take after all) and presented as a controversy which comes off as a bit shallow as a result.
If one were to put on a tinfoil hat it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to imagine that the plan was to have a follow up video to settle the controversy with the gist of the video being about transmission line theory and concluding with a practical demonstration of the effect.
[0] I don't have the time to carefully watch a 15 minute video to verify this, and demonstrating a lack of evidence seems difficult, but the subtitles for the video can easily be downloaded with youtube-dl and then grepped or opened with a regular text editor. Note that these subtitles are manually written and not auto-generated by youtube, and while it's possible there's some differences in the script and what is said it seems unlikely.
The way gun suppressors work in movies and TV is complete fiction, in real life suppressors can attenuate gun shots by maybe 15-35 dB SPL at best. 140 dB SPL is the threshold at which sound causes pain, 120 dB SPL is the threshold that risks instantaneous noise-induced hearing loss, and most rifles and handguns using standard ammunition are in the 140-170 dB SPL range. Even with a suppressor the volume a typical gun produces is enough to be painful and to cause permanent hearing loss if no additional hearing protection is used. In the typical best case scenario using an extremely underpowered subsonic .22LR round with a suppressor a gun shot will still be in the 120 dB SPL range, and for reference, hunting even small muntjac deer with a .22LR would be considered inhumane and in many parts of the world (including many American states) it is illegal to do so. It is a round intended to shoot rodents and birds.
I realise this comment is a nitpick but it's something that needs to be brought up any time suppressors are brought up. The only relevance suppressors have on the gun control argument is that their use and sale means that gun operators have less risk of suffering from hearing loss (especially when shooting indoors in a range) and people living near shooting ranges are less likely to complain about noise, i.e., there's no public safety argument here, it's purely ideological, and that's fine if it's what you're going for but it's not a compelling argument or one that holds up to scrutiny. As a point of comparison, there's very little controversy over suppressors in Europe and typically no additional regulations are placed on their ownership beyond the regulations necessary to own the guns that they're used with.
No, you can get literal Hollywood quiet with suppressors. If you’ve never gotten to experience that, sorry I guess haha.
A Kel-Tec CP33 or Ruger MKIV with various forms of attached suppressors or integrated suppressors shooting CCI subsonic .22 is Hollywood quiet. Less noise than a BB gun.
There are various other calibers that can get pretty damn close to as quiet as those as well.
For your traditional military calibers across the globe - yes, they’re still pretty damn loud suppressed. I think .50 bmg or Lapua suppressed is still as loud as 7.62x39 unsuppressed.
But to say you can’t get Hollywood quiet is simply incorrect, and there’s still a factor of louder calibers pitch being changed to something that a person not in the immediate vicinity could confuse as construction instead of gunfire.
As much as I personally enjoy suppressors… I do have issue with the fact anybody can get their hands on one next day. Just work for a gun range in any mid sized town for two weeks and your honest thoughts about just about literally anybody being able to obtain a firearm will likely change. People are fucking dumb man.
Having seen videos of a suppressed MP-5, they make a rapid clicking noise on full auto. It’s still loud by my estimation but it doesn’t sound like a gun.
What you're hearing is camera attenuation. They are still very loud, they just won't outright blow your ears out. It might not sound like a gun if you don't know what a suppressor sounds like, but you will still be able to hear it unless the noise of the environment is hearing-damaging loud. Just about the only things that are Hollywood-quiet are subsonic suppressed .22s and .45s, but the former is incredibly anemic and the latter is not cheap.
You should be able to easily find on YouTube/Reddit or other parts of the internet- actual decibel testing.
For the CP33, with some of the higher quality suppressors, the action of the gun is actually louder than the fired munitions. I haven’t checked on things in a bit, but people were trying to work on the action to reduce noise created by it.
It’s essentially slightly louder than a handheld staple gun irl (there’s videos of this comparison on YouTube) - and I’ve saw somewhat reputably claimed, but not actually demonstrated - there are now some integral aftermarket barrels for the Ruger MKIV that are quieter than the CP33.
As you’ve stated though - these rounds definitely don’t have much power behind them and will do practically nothing to anything that isn’t human flesh like. They can quite literally bounce off of an obese person or get caught in a modest cold weather coat.
There's a good reason why criminals don't carry lockpicks around and that's because they're regulated, in much of the world mere possession of them outside of your residence is a criminal offence and even in places where you can carry them legally they not only show prior intent, their use in criminal activities carries a charge just like breaking and entering. I'd also argue that being stuck picking a stubborn lock for 2-3 minutes is significantly more suspicion arousing than the literal seconds it takes to break a window but that's neither here nor there.
On the rationality of having locks when criminals can very easily break a window, the old saying that locks keep honest people out rings true. Locks do serve a purpose even if they do very little to slow criminals down. To bring the analogy full circle fingerprint readers always seemed like windows to me in how easy they are to bypass, luckily they're more of a luxury than a necessity. :-)
This post is maybe a little off topic, but the view of linguistic relativism and specifically of Whorf (Sapir–Whorf hypothesis - linguistic relativism), as well as many 19th and 20th century philosophers, was that the Ancient Greeks must have viewed the world differently to us, or to put it bluntly, that all ancient peoples must have been colour blind. This then extends to the modern day, do Russian speakers view the world differently because of the separation of light and dark blue, are English (and most other language speakers) blind to the colour голубой as it's grouped together with 'blue'?
When the significance of синий and голубой have been studied an effect is seen, Russians are faster at differentiating between these shades of blue. When it's put this way and framed positively it's absolutely an alluring idea and one used to sell language books, learn Russian to literally see the world differently, but is it significant? Russians are about 125ms faster at differentiating between shades of light and dark blue because having a separate word to group them into does confer some advantage, but importantly English speakers are still just as capable of distinguishing those shades. This is also true even for languages that lack distinction between other colours, a particular language not having a separation between say blue and green doesn't mean that speakers of that language are any less capable of seeing a distinction between blue and green even if they refer to those two colours using just one word.
Another example of the issues of applying such findings to a world view would be Mandarin which represents the month before as 'above' and the next month as 'below', and studies do show that Mandarin speakers are faster at determining whether March comes before April after having been shown a picture with some verticality. When looking at these results through a Whorfian lens it'd be easy to make the claim that Mandarin speakers view time as vertically. More studies were done, Mandarin speakers were once again faster at guessing up was previous (compared to down for previous) by 170ms. Seems conclusive and further evidence that Mandarin speakers may view time as being vertical, however, the same study found that mandarin speakers were 230ms faster at guessing left as previous (compared to right for previous) and they were faster at doing this than they were doing it vertically. Also noteworthy was that they found English speakers were 300ms faster at guessing left for previous than compared to right, and in both cases of vertical/horizontal guessing English speakers were faster than Mandarin speakers (although English speakers preferred bottom as previous to top as previous).
This is where the issues of linguistic relativism pop up and why today it's generally heavily criticised and no longer considered valid by linguists, when applied to colours or time it appears relatively harmless but it's not always framed positively and that has been the case for as long as the theory existed. An example of a harmful application of it would be to look at the many African languages that use the same word for meat and animal, are they incapable of telling a difference between them? In English it's often pointed out that the term beef comes from the French aristocracy where the term cow comes from the Anglo-Saxon speaking peasant/serf class, which of these two would have been more acquainted with raising and slaughtering the animals and would they have been unable to make the differentiation? We absolutely know today that even despite lacking terms for certain colours people are still able to differentiate between them, to know this after having studied it and then say that the Ancient Greeks must have been colour blind seems absurd.
>So then what does it mean for languages who split blue into two colors?
Personally? It's really neat and being able to differentiate those shades faster is an interesting consequence of that, I just can't view it through a Whorfian lens. I'm also somewhat envious of the differentiation after having been told numerous times as a child that while teal/turquoise are blue they're not really 'blue'.
Very good points on linguistic relativity. I'd also be interested in if any of the studies have been replicated or not. One of the big proponents of linguistic relativity is Lera Boroditsky, author of the famed 'bridge gender study' (that was never actually published!). However, someone tried to replicate that study and they found no statistically meaningful results. I'd be very interested in seeing it for other 'weak linguistic relativity' studies. I'd also be interested to see the debate between language and culture. Is it the culture noticing something that causes the language to develop that way, and influences things? In my view, that's more likely the source of any differences, though I'm still not sure they actually exist.
I can't take credit for the arguments made, they mostly come form the excellent book 'The Language Hoax' by John McWhorter, I should have referenced this in the original comment but it's a bit too late to edit it. In the book he takes a very hard stance against linguistic relativism and demonstrates the harm the theory can have when applied by certain people to certain languages or peoples, he even goes as far as to caution about the recent trend for weak relativism. There's also a 45 minute talk he did on the book as well (0).
One example in the book would be the Pirahã who famously don't have words for numbers, they can describe 1 'that', 2 'pair', a few, and many, but not much else. It wouldn't be hard to imagine the harm that would be caused by taking a Whorfian approach would have on such a tribe. In this subchapter he does make the point that it's culture that drives the linguistics, and the subtitle of which is pretty pertinent, 'Tribe without Paper or Pencils Mysteriously Weak at Portraiture'.
Lera Boroditsky is a good mention as well, she authored both of the mentioned studies on Mandarin. The first was 'Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time' (2001) (1). Other researchers have tried to replicate this study (2) and were unable to do so, although they note that all documented examples of linguistic relativity can't be dismissed just from one flawed study, and explicitly note that the effect of the mechanisms is unknown and that the issue is with the claim that language is the mechanism. Boroditsky followed up with 'Do English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently?' (2010) (3). It still seems to be an active area of research and I don't think we'll get a conclusive answer any time soon.
Modern Russians can differentiate between much more bluish colors, such as "sea wave", turquose, etc. I think it's the same with any people exposed to modern paints and hues so the effect is bound to be less important.
But they are not considered as separate spectral colors, whereas light blue is. So Russians have 7 colors in the rainbow.
I don't think that learning Russian will help your color perception in adult age and without being exposed to light blue paints, pyramid disks, toys, etc.
In fact, I'm not sure it will persist as much in the next generation of Russian children whose toys are usually made for world wide audience and don't set the light blue color out of myriad of hues.
Interesting point. I learned Russian as an adult for work -- and my colleagues always told me that Russians see the difference between the two blues the same way that we as English speakers see the difference between "pink" and "red". Pink is technically light red, but there is immense cultural significance invested in making the distinction.
Yep. Modern Russian children will have easier time telling pink from red than light blue from blue since they share the common material culture with the rest of world, but otherwise you are spot on.
Pink is another little color which appeared a short time ago and permanently extended our palette.
It's not that languages develop a word for blue last, but that there's usually a specific order in which terms for colour enter languages. It's roughly as follows: all languages have words for white/black, if they have 3 terms for colour the third will always be red. After that it's green and/or yellow. Only then do you get blue or blue-and-green. This can also be seen in the writings of Homer where honey is described as green, and hair is described as... blue, that is, the same term was used to describe the sea as well as corn flours (i.e., a dark colour). It's with Empidocles that we see the classification of colour the Ancient Greeks would have used: light, dark, red, and yellow.
After blue/blue-and-green the order breaks down a bit, but new colour terms obviously come into use after blue. In English for instance the terms for pink, orange, and brown all came long after blue. Coincidentally brown is usually one of the last colours to get its own term, and in English before the term brown was used to refer to a colour it referred to dark or dusk.
What might be missed is that black and blue are not necessarily differentiated. I know that, at least among Indian languages specifically Sanskrit, black and blue aren't as differentiated as they are today. A dark color/black was seen as dark blue.
I would imagine the dyes were referred to by the materials used to create them, cochineal for a red dye, woad for a blue/indigo dye, etc. The etymology of purple does come from a shellfish or a fish and purple dye did historically come from a sea snail but the name for that particular dye likely didn't come from the same root as purple.
Pink and orange are not basic color words. They're the names of physical objects co-opted as a general color. It's the same for all the cultures that don't have a word for blue. Their users just refer to blue as the "color of the sky" or the "color of bird X". Same as English using the "color of this citrus".
When looking at nutrient rich vegetables serving size has to be considered, it's going to be difficult to eat 100g nuts or of parsley in a meal for instance. This is less of an issue with things like potatoes or bulky leafy greens like kale but is still something to keep in mind. Another thing to consider is overlap between what types of nutrients you're getting, it's sensible to say that diets should be balanced but when you're talking about fruit/vegetables it's a necessity as they're often not good for broad nutrients or mineral content.
In terms of nutritional value let's start with 100g of cooked kale, you're getting vitamin a/c/k and some manganese but not much else. Broccoli has vitamin a/c/k/folate. Bell peppers vitamin a/c/k/b6. Potatoes vitamin c/b6, potassium/manganese. Tomatoes vitamin a/c. Avocados have vitamin c/e/k/b6/folate/pantothenic acid and some potassium. Olives have iron and copper.
At this point a pattern is emerging, significant amounts of vitamins a/c/k, some folate, some b vitamins if you're lucky, and mineral wise it's mostly manganese and potassium. Spinach and mushrooms are much more interesting, with spinach having vitamins a/e/k/riboflavin/b6/folate, calcium/iron/magnesium/potassium/manganese. White mushrooms have vitamin riboflavin/niacin/pantothenic acid, iron/potassium/copper/selenium.
It should be noted that these are all 100g servings (cooked where appropriate) which might not be ideal. So while kale is indeed incredibly rich in vitamins a and k (1021% of your daily value in just 100g of kale!) it's really, really not useful to you if you're already eating even just reasonable amounts of vegetables, as leafy greens especially usually contain lots of vitamins a/c/k. Something that is lacking in most of these is minerals in any significant quantity, nuts in general do a lot better with a 100g serving of most types of nuts providing 15-85%~ of your DV in minerals, but it shouldn't need to be explained that eating 500 kcal of nuts to get close to your DV in minerals isn't ideal.
When compared to meat or animal products liver would be the gold standard, with 100g of beef liver containing significant amounts of vitamin a and all of the b vitamins as well as folate, along with large quantities of iron/phosphorus/zinc/copper/selenium along with some manganese and potassium. With just 100g of liver and 100g of kale you're going to get roughly >85% of your DV vitamin and mineral needs with the exception of vitamins d/e and magnesium/potassium. Other cuts of meat (beef/chicken/pork) or animal products aren't quite as good but you'll still be getting decent amounts of b vitamins (sans folate) and iron/phosphorus/zinc/selenium and calcium from cheese specifically. With fish/seafood it depends on the type but sardines are a particularly good example providing lots of vitamin d/niacin/b12 and reasonable amounts of calcium/iron/phosphorus/potassium/copper/manganese/selnium.
This comment is all over the place so to try to conclude and put it more succinctly, the common deficiencies that vegetarians face (vitamins d/b12, calcium, iron, zinc, omega-3) shouldn't be dismissed so easily especially when trying to make the point that meat contains 'minimal' nutritional value. Even nutrients that are commonly used to fortify foods (calcium, iron, thiamine, niacin, folate, vitamin d, iodine) are all readily found in meat/animal products with the exception of folate (it's abundant in liver but common in vegetables).
In a purely private healthcare system (which doesn't exist in the developed world) the politics are firstly whether you can pay and secondly how much you can pay. No point offering free dieting and lifestyle advice when risky weight loss surgery (which has a notoriously low success rate) offers instant success, got a bad back or knee? Try out this risk free* (*not actually risk free) surgery! It wasn't that long ago in the US that getting cancer without health insurance was a death sentence, and that again is a political choice, one that the US government reneged on.