bene vixit, qui bene latuit
Ix
Joined July 2009
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I mean, if what you're saying is that 59% of them *can* be
Well
BREAKING: More than 4 in 10 names flagged as possible noncitizen voters in California cannot be found on voter rolls, according to a legal filing. apnews.com/article/californi…
Drew retweeted
When a neo-Nazi managed to get himself on the Republican ticket in Illinois’s 3rd Congressional District despite GOP legal efforts to stop him, the entire party; local and national, told people to write in a candidite or vote for the Democrat.
Democrats, on the other hand, are perfectly fine with a virulent antisemite with personal connections to Islamic extemists and are attacking anyone who dares break ranks with him.
You're a shitbag, Piers. Go to hell.
Drew retweeted
Lots of people fell for this despite it being obvious horseshit. This study has too many serious issues and it disagrees with the trial and genetic data, both of which show no risk.
Notice how the supposed risk is a doubling for all dementia types: Alzheimer's, vascular dementia, and "other". If statins actually do something, this is not what we'd expect. In fact, they're protective for vascular dementia, so we know this is due to some bias like that statin users see doctors more often.
This study's sampling or coding is also wildly implausible. 93% of the cases are "other dementias" - not Alzheimer's or vascular. An Alzheimer's rate of 1-2 per 10k is not plausible for a cohort this old. And we know it's down to recording because changing the cut-off date changes the non-user rate from 30.7 to 3.4 - 9x for nothing?
The design is also simply not a valid one for any sort of meaningful inference. In a proper active comparator, new-user design, you follow people from the point treatment starts. But here, their comparison group is people who never used statins, and are thus disproportionately likely to never interact with the healthcare system.
The study is also severely underadjusted. There are no controls for education or income, nor for anything bad habit-related like alcohol consumption or smoking. And the age adjustment? Bins for age, where statin users are older within the bins.
The sample reads as wildly unrepresentative - or the authors messed up badly - because users averaged 7.9 years of follow-up, but most people stop within a year, so they must not have defined discontinuation in a way that triggered the censoring rule the authors claimed to use.
The CoQ10 mechanism claim is complete nonsense. It's actually arithmetically impossible. If COQ7 levels are 0.1 SDs lower and an SD lower COQ7 doubles dementia risk, that shifts dementia odds by ~1%, not an amount that can explain risk doubling. The paper's 8.2% mediated figure is the share of an even smaller effect in a different sub-cohort that measured statin use at enrollment (i.e., it didn't track new users) and whose total effect *was never reported*. This just proves the authors can slice up the data to get very different results!
The authors also show that they're just not very bright when they claim COQ7 matters and LDL doesn't. The LDL effect is larger, it's just imprecise, so it's not significant. Plus, it's not significantly different from the COQ7 effect estimate. And the authors coincidentally ignored that the LDL estimate was significant in the mediation model - it seems they pick and choose which results to discuss!
The reviewers really should've noted that this paper is just an example of ascertainment bias, poorly-described. But they were incompetent, too. You can tell this definitively because a 5x rate ratio difference between cohorts didn't pop out to any of them as a reason to say 'Hey, these cohorts don't actually agree.'
Over twice the risk of dementia associated with statin use. They also found a dose-response relationship.
"Statin use was associated with significantly increased dementia risk in both cohorts (discovery: adjusted HR 2.22; replication: adjusted HR 2.54)."
frontiersin.org/journals/pha…
Counterpoint: evil exists and where it can be extirpated, it ought to be
There is a duty to emancipate slaves
The Federation is a dream in the mind of Q
The first series you are pretty much just dealing with naval officers, so the question of duty and discipline are answered. But as the series explores more and more civilian life the question becomes more and more important. From where did the broad civilian life derive their sense of duty, their sense of self-purpose?
Why did the Picards get a sprawling vineyard in France? How did the siskos get a prime location for their restaurant in new Orleans? Who gets the top of the skyscrapers?
What motivates people who have food and shelter and security, plus access to any entertainment they could ever want?
The usually answers have been dissolved. They aren’t religious, or even nationalists, or really any ists. They don’t have money, there’s no economic incentives at play. They often say that humanity has evolved past this, but what would the course of that evolution even look like? It seems to be “if everyone would just.” Which is the silliest argument.
Okay but Americans spend at least a third of their lives farming their own taxation
Why should this particular outrage animate resentment
This is what the beginning of the surveillance state looks like in America
Americans in Connecticut received a bill for additional taxes on their car because cameras spotted it in a different city
A private company called Municipal Tax Service (MTS) is hired by cities to drive around and use automatic license plate readers on cars parked in different cities
It then makes connections if that car lives in that area and sends the owner a bill for new taxes on that vehicle for being in the city
The owner of this vehicle says she doesn’t live in that city, provided proof and says her car was only in a different city because her kid drives there for school
MTS didn’t care and said that the proof didn’t matter and they had to pay it. They appealed to the city, the city said they had to deal with MTS
But here’s the problem, MTS gets paid 38% commission on tax revenue they recover + $50 per vehicle billed to the owner. They made $9 million in commission in just one year from sending people additional tax bills
So this company has no incentive to ever help you and just deny you, which they did
Only after the mainstream media got involved would the city drop this one new tax bill which was false to begin with
In America we now literally have private companies driving around scamming our license plates to tax us more money
This is insanity and it needs to end
The intelligent, sober minded and conscientious patient is a cliche at the heart of so many sentimental movies that I sometimes wonder if people realize that it's totally fake and in the real world illness is almost all old people dying and young people being suicidal
The intelligent, sober-minded, and conscientious criminal is a cliché at the heart of so many fun movies that I sometimes wonder if people realize it’s totally fake and in the real world crime is almost all dumb guys with poor impulse control.
boxd.it/h6zc7X
Genuine, knowing evil
Economist (and Nobel laureate) Paul Krugman: “Control of Starlink must, one way or another, be taken away from Elon Musk. It’s a matter of national security: we cannot let private individuals make foreign and defense policy, and it would be totally irresponsible to leave a crucial military asset in the hands of a racist, authoritarian conspiracy theorist.”
paulkrugman.substack.com/p/i…
Drew retweeted
the thing about Internet companies is, they mostly adopted revenue models that weren't "the user willingly pays us money for our service"
and, in the limit, that means that their interests are opposed to the users' interests
Why are some gamers proud of Steams monopoly on PC gaming?
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Steam has ~70-75% of PC digital game sales and is called a de facto monopoly by many developers, but rivals like Epic, GOG, and Microsoft Store exist and sell freely. No court has found an illegal monopoly; price-parity lawsuits are ongoing.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(se…
techspot.com/news/110133-su…
That's okay though, because by the time any of this really starts to bite he'll be president
Drew retweeted
Becerra recently reiterated this commitment to ignoring the explicit will of CA voters and continuing Newsom’s reign of autocracy
California voters have expressly affirmed the death penalty on ballot measures not once but twice—even voting to speed it up
Leftist “democracy”
ALT Newsom does it again with death row reprieve https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/03/gavin-newsom-death-row-reprieve/
Governor Newsom’s death penalty moratorium represented an important step toward a more just criminal justice system.
As Governor, I will extend California’s moratorium on executions and continue moving our state away from a costly, flawed system that disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities and too often gets it wrong.
amp.sacbee.com/news/californ…
It did not invent morality
It invented the geometry *you accept* as morality
There's tension between the Eugenics Wars and the Bell Riots, as the one ostensibly takes place *before the former*
But in order for the story to make historical sense, the Bell Riots need to antedate Khan
Capitalism today already has "replicators" for food and clothing, which are basically free, and the only thing we see typically replicated in the show.
What is actually expensive are services, like healthcare, and positional goods, like housing in desirable areas. This is what burdens developed welfare states today.
The thing about Star Trek is they never really deal with the concept of bums and helpless dependents, who would overwhelm their system.
We never see the Federation devoting 1/6th of its workforce to "home health aides". The fictional hospitals are full of normal people with sympathetic diseases and injuries, not a high-needs underclass. And there is no cohort of discontented youth engaging in crime for status and thrills.
There's a heroic liberal belief that material abundance will solve all behavioral problems. This was once common. But today, I don't even see people arguing this anymore. If you ask leftists today what they think "the future" should look like it's probably a society that is permanently deferential to its lowest elements rather than eliminating them through social and scientific progress.
If it can be governed by rules it is not an intelligence
ANTHROPIC IS CRACKING DOWN ON VIDEO GAME REWRITES 🚨
Claude Code picked up a new rule around Oct 27, sent from Anthropic’s servers under a flag called "tengu_heron_brook". There’s no setting to turn it off.
The full rule: “Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user’s own designs and assets. Don’t build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original.”
Is this the end of game rewrites, modding and everything in between?
$350k to get a PhD to paper over being an imbecile, sounds like you got a pretty sweet deal
My student loans were taken out based on generous income based repayment plans with monthly payments of around $500.
Now thanks to Trump killing off the SAVE plan for no reason but he hated Biden it will be ballooning to $1400 a month and will end up at 4Xs the loan amounts.
How do I sue for breech of contract??
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Contrary to the post, loans predate SAVE (created 2023; PhD 2015) & were under prior IDR plans at lower income then. SAVE vacated by Mar 2026 court order after litigation/settlement, not Trump alone.
studentaid.gov/courtactions
studentaid.gov/articles/save/
socialsciences.uoregon.edu/political-scie…
Screenshot shows new RAP payments.
Drew retweeted
Bill Gates’s former scientific advisor and employee of seven years, Eliezer Masliah, was recently discovered to have fabricated hundreds of Alzheimers papers.
He was on the board of the Gates Foundation’s Alzheimer’s advisory group.
