the concept of clocks fucks me up sometimes

so ok suppose you want to know what time it is and you have some physical phenomenon that takes a predictable amount of time so you say "ok right now it is [time] and every X repetitions of this phenomenon is Y units of time, so we just count how many times it happens from now and we know what time it is"

which is great except like. all measurements have some error. we don't know with infinite precision how the amount of time the phenomenon takes compares to other indicators of time, like the sun. and for most things, that fact that measurement error exists doesn't matter, right. I don't need to know what time it is to the millisecond. I mostly don't even really need to know it to the second. (minute though, yeah, i need to know what minute it is).

but. but! time is cyclical. or at least our external referents for it, like the rotation of the earth on its axis, are cyclical. if i have a thing that measures seconds with an error of 0.1%, it'll be off by a second after every thousand, which is like twenty minutes (~17). and it'll be off by a minute after 60 times that, which is like two thirds of a day (around 17 hours). And it'll be off by an hour after 60 times that, which is ~40 days. no clock i ever owned was off by an hour after a month, so they must've had better precision than that. you need better than millisecond precision to have a clock that's worth anything

back in the 18th century getting accurate clocks on ships was a big problem, because you can use a precise clock to find your longitude when far from shore (basically if you have a clock set to GMT and you can see what the sun is doing in the sky, you can find your timezone, so to speak, which is also how far east or west you are. it's more complicated than that but this is already a parenthetical inside a digression). but the most precise clocks they had were pendulum clocks that didn't work great on ships. anyway some guy made a lot of money building a clock that was precise enough even on a ship that it'd work for that purpose and if wikipedia is to be believed it'd lose less than five seconds after ten weeks, which is a precision better than one part in a million. with fucking 18th century technology! and i don't know how precise the clocks that weren't built to go on ships were, apparently better. what the fuck.

and it's been like 300 years since that and now we have atomic clocks and whatever but like. i still get angry at my microwave clock because it tends to drift forward a few minutes over months. my microwave! a device built entirely for warming food, that does not need to measure times more precisely than to the second (i can't set cooking times in milliseconds, i've tried), but it can still keep track of minutes after weeks. that 's not good enough to use as a marine chronomoter but it's a microwave.

but time is cyclical, and tiny imprecisions accumulate day after day, and sometimes i glance at my microwave when i walk by it making my morning coffee and it tells me i should be sitting down at my computer and logging in to a video meeting but actually it's fine, the microwave runs fast, i have five minutes to make coffee.

clocks are fucked up and my microwave should not be trying to be one. it's ok to just be a microwave. my phone tells me what time it is instead, and it's connected to the internet to do that because if it's off by a few seconds OTP authentication doesn't work.

Does anyone have access to the full text of this paper (and would be willing to send me a copy)? I've seen the claim "homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the United States" around in The Discourse, for which this seems to be the origin, and I have some doubts I'd rather check out

In particular, the abstract says "There were 3.62 homicides per 100,000 live births among females who were pregnant or within 1 year postpartum, 16% higher than homicide prevalence among nonpregnant and nonpostpartum females of reproductive age (3.12 deaths/100,000 population, P<.05)", where one figure is per live births and the other per population, which stands out as an odd choice for two numbers you intend to compare. I'm also curious to what extent this is an effect of disaggregating non-homicide causes of death (e.g. compare this chart from the CDC, where homicide is the third or fifth cause of death for the given age range and "unintentional injury" is the leading one, by a pretty significant factor; it seems to me that it'd require separating "unintentional injury" into several smaller factors for the math to work out)

one day later, the winner of april fools 2022 is definitely tumblr. because crabs.

honourable mention to Factorio's Non-Fungible Blueprints, though

as a follow-up to this conversation though, here's my broader opinion on The Batman:

This Batman is, to some fundamental extent, a pathetic figure. He cannot get past his childhood trauma and responds to it by punching people, something that for the most part accomplishes nothing. He is not, even, that impressive at punching people.

Batman's cleverness and investigative skills help him occasionally get a riddle before the police do, but this is meaningless because this doesn't ever let him stay ahead of the Riddler; his plan goes off exactly as he wanted it to, and whatever few details failed were not because Batman outwitted him. They don't help him find Selina's girlfriend before she dies, either. His tools and gadgets and skills don't let him disarm a bomb right in front of him. His punching ability will let him occasionally scare a criminal, but when faced with the Riddler's followers he's outnumbered and loses.

Alfred tries to remind him of his family's legacy, and what does he do about that? He insists his family legacy is him punching people. Because it's easy and cathartic in the moment. If the world's greatest detective had tried to figure out why his family's actual legacy was not helping the city, he might've used his investigative skills, supercomputers, and privileged access to his family's records to find the same things the Riddler did and shortcircuited the plot. But he didn't.

Batman's comparative advantage is not his punching people skills. He may be good at it, but ultimately he's a guy dressed like a bat and wearing body armor; this is not the kind of story where amazing martial arts skills let him effortless beat up an army of mooks, and in any case the problems he want to solve won't obediently line up to all be beaten.

What can Batman accomplish, then? We are shown criminals running in terror from shadows, but this is not enough; we are also told crime hasn't gone down in Gotham since he started batmanning about. But it hints at what he does do, in the end: symbolism. Inspire hope. Lead people in an effort to recover from catastrophe, when they are hurt and scared.

Batman can do something if he lets go of the idea that he personally can punch problems until they stop moving and instead try to use his greater leverage to move people and change systems. Will he do so? idk. There's gonna be sequels to this and I rather expect he'll spend a significant portion of their runtime ineffectually punching people. But maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

John Oliver has a recent episode talking about ticket sales to live concerts and why they cost so much. Because he's John Oliver and that's approximately his job, he directs a fair amount of criticism towards large corporations, in this case Ticketmaster, but does spread it around a bit to scalpers and sometimes even the artists themselves; he accuses Justin Bieber of in one occasion "scalping his own tickets" (i.e. selling a reserved ticket on the secondary market) and describes it as "doesn't feel great, does it?".

Tickets to live performances are a fundamentally scarce item; you can only fit so many people in one place. The way we usually allocate scarce things in a market economy is, y'know, money. If the demand is higher then the price goes up. If you sell tickets for $20 and someone is willing to pay $50, then some people will race to buy as many $20 tickets as they can and sell them for $50 for a neat profit.

That money going to the scalper seems kind of unfair when they haven't added any value, but if you don't want it to go to them, and you don't want it to go to Ticketmaster, and you aren't really happy when it goes to the artist either... who should get it?

One answer would be "the concertgoers"; instead of allocating tickets by who can pay the most you sell them at some price you have decided is fair and choose by I guess lottery or something who gets the opportunity to pay for them, and presumably tie them to identity in some reliable way that will definitely not get bypassed one way or another.

Here's the thing: suppose you have won the ticket lottery and someone comes up to you and says "hey, I did not get in, can I buy your ticket?" and quotes you some amount and you decide you'd rather have the money than go see the concert. In that case, the prohibition on reselling is not doing you a favour, because you'd rather have money than the ticket. It's not doing the person offering to buy from you a favour, because they'd rather have the ticket than the money. It's not doing the artist a favour, they get the same money either way. It's not making anyone else not involved in the transaction a favour, they are unaffected by it. As far as I can tell, everyone is worse off than if you did allow resales; but then you're in the scalper situation where a lot of the money for the ticket goes to people who added no value and were just lucky to be able to buy a scarce good for less than it was worth.

There's a sense where "everyone pays the 'fair price' and who gets to see the concert is decided at random", in comparison to "everyone pays however much they're willing to and who gets to see it is decided by who is willing to pay more", is a transfer of value from rich people to poor people; if you can't afford to pay as much, then the lottery improves your chances. But it's also a transfer of value from people who care more to people who care less: If tickets cost less, more people would buy them, for all the usual reasons people are more willing to buy cheaper things. Some of them would be people who can't otherwise afford them, but some of them would be people who can afford them but value them less. Since it's random, some of them would get in, which seems inefficient; surely you want to give those scarce seats to the people who value them more.

My intuition is, basically, that I want that money going to the artist and the venue; they're the ones who are providing value, and, besides, the more profitable concerts are you'd expect the more of them an artist makes (maybe not? maybe the kind of artist that sells out concert venues quickly is already making as many concerts as they can and them being more profitable wouldn't change it). I can see the appeal of the lottery in terms of "would be nice if people who want to but don't have a lot of money could have some chance of seeing concerts", but it seems difficult to justify; might be better if you have limited lotteries where only a fraction of tickets are sold cheaply to lucky winners and the rest are priced by however much people are willing to pay. In some ideal sense you'd want to assign them to people who want them the most but there's no obvious way to measure that that isn't gameable somehow.

I get the impression most people complaining about it aren't actually advocating for lotteries, though; they want cheaper tickets so they can go to the concert, and the lottery doesn't improve their chances of that. There's still only N seats, so only N people will go. But there really isn't a solution that gives you cheap enough tickets for everyone who wants to go beyond having more concerts.

(open to hearing what other people think is intuitively "fairer", here)

There's this post I keep seeing around tumblr which is, like, "good ideas for laws the French have". Which just lists a bunch of laws (or things claimed to be laws, i have not bothered to fact check that they're real. it's not really the point). And they're things like mandating minimum BMI for models or giving preschoolers four-course lunches.

and i'm weirded out by it, because my default assumption is that you should not be able to tell if a law is a good idea from a couple sentences on a tumblr post? there are occasional exceptions to that rule, but like.

1) The one-sentence summary of FOSTA/SESTA probably sounds really nice, if you've never heard of them before and you don't have a trained instinct for what "fighting [bad thing] on the internet" usually implies.

2.a) The world is complicated and everything trades off against everything else. The money you're spending on giving four-course lunches to pre-schoolers is money you're not spending on any other thing you might want to spend money on, and so you should not ask just "is pre-schoolers having four-course lunches good for them?" (no idea if it is, i've met pre-schoolers and they can be kinda picky about food, this might be upsetting to them) but also "is it better than whatever the money would've been spent on otherwise?". I mean, sometimes the answer is "well, otherwise the money would've been spent on drone strikes on middle eastern countries", because it can both be true that the world is complicated and also that the government has terrible priorities; the marginal government dollar is not spent on maximally effective interventions. nevertheless it's a consideration.

2.b) The world is complicated and everything depends on implementation details. Do you know what's the exact right BMI cutoff to pick in a law that correctly discourages eating disorders without unfairly penalising people who just happen to have a low BMI? Are you sure that what will happen after introducing a BMI cutoff will be that people get fewer eating disorders and not that you've taken people with a health problem and fired them from their jobs? Or people just lie about it? or find some creative way to game it? Or, or, or... like, i have no idea if this will happen or not. Maybe they have cleverly thought of those problems and created safeguards around them; the point is you don't know that from the one-sentence summary of the law. It is much easier to say "I wish fewer people had eating disorders" than it is to craft a law that successfully reduces them and also doesn't make something else worse.

3) I had a three, but I ended up adding so many caveats that I thought it'd detract from the rest of the post to leave it in. So instead we just have 1, 2.a, and 2.b.