I’m not making a value judgement. I’m explaining why New York City’s murder rate is so much higher than London’s. It’s because NYC has a population of white and Asian people who are as safe as Europeans and another, de facto segregated population of black and Hispanic people who are much less safe.

I presume that a big part of the reason why things are the way they are is that society places a higher value on white people’s lives, but I’m not doing that here. Explaining isn’t the same as justifying.

Source

Source

Black and Hispanic people make up 52% of the city’s population but 88% of the murder victims. The murder rate of the white and Asian population works out to approximately 8.4 per million, so the average European tourist is not in much danger here.

It’s rather unlikely to pass and probably unconstitutional if it did. This is all for show.

New York’s murder rate (and the overall murder rate in the USA) is shaped by a history of race relations which is quite different from London’s. A white person in New York is much less likely (and conversely a black or Hispanic person is much more likely) to be murdered than the overall murder rate for the city might lead someone to think.

Only 7 murders? The population of London was apparently about 400,000 back then so that’s less than half the murder rate of present-day New York City (which is considered a relatively safe city). I don’t think that can be right…

1632 London: 7 / 400,000 = 17.5 murders per million people

2023 New York: 312 / 8,258,000 = 37.8 murders per million people

I like my women with armor plating.

14 legs

I’m a leg man but that’s going too far!

So it’s not just me? Sometimes my body decides that I must constantly keep my face pointed down and to the side for a few days, and these muscles are the enforcers.

They periodically run out of integers so they have to reuse old ones.

I never thought about Mesozoic fauna having external ears. Birds don’t, so presumably their dinosaur ancestors didn’t. But maybe pterosaurs did? (Would we be able to tell by looking for muscle attachment points on their skulls?)

He’s got a point… I didn’t spend this long in school in order to treat people who know less than I do without contempt.

The current era of excess is unprecedented in the history of the world. For most of human history, starvation was a serious threat and hungry people would go anywhere where there was food that wasn’t already claimed by someone stronger than them.

(The people in very cold climates would fight to defend their resources too! Ultimately there was no unclaimed land that people could survive in, except shortly after major catastrophes.)

What if what I consider to be the most plausible and persuasive expression of an idea is not the one that most believers in that idea would express or even be aware of? For example, if I read the work of an economist who presents strong evidence that Trump’s tariffs would benefit the American economy, have I actually engaged with the beliefs of most Trump supporters or Trump himself?

I recently came back from visiting my old boss. I stayed at his house for a week. (He lives on the coast in Florida; it’s great!) I’ve known him and his family for over ten years, and I consider them my dear friends.

But I still introduce him as the guy who fired me :)

(He objects, because he’s actually the guy who laid me off.)

I know it’s supposed to have molasses in it and in principle I don’t object to molasses, but when I say “strong” I mean that there was way too much molasses for my taste.

It isn’t great, IMO. The one I got was very dense and had a strong molasses flavor.

When I was at a small company that worked with radioactive material, we had to register and secure all radiation sources, even the extremely weak ones that anyone can order online with no restrictions. Before the state inspector came, we deliberately left one of those weak sources out where it wasn’t supposed to be so that the inspector would find something wrong, tell us to fix it, and leave feeling like she did her job. It would be the smallest possible violation and it wouldn’t actually get us in trouble. We did that because we figured that if there was nothing obviously wrong, the inspector would look for problems a lot more carefully.

(Nuclear physicists are rather more nonchalant about radiation than the average person is, for obvious reasons. By nuclear physicist standards, we didn’t actually have any dangerous sources at all. Thus we felt like we weren’t doing anything morally wrong, but I suppose that the average person might have disagreed.)

I don’t see why I would be in any more danger than a native-born American citizen.

1. I don’t expect anything catastrophic to happen so suddenly that I won’t have time to flee.

2. Everyone I know is here, including people who depend on me.

3. I don’t want to learn another language.

4. I feel a lot less connected to the USA than I did before, but I don’t feel more connected to any other country than I do to the USA. The one my family and I came from is a huge mess and I certainly don’t want to return to it.

I’m taking the idea of leaving the country much more seriously than I had before, but it still seems unlikely.

Breakthroughs in robotics and artificial intelligence, just like what the rest of us are waiting for.