There’s a difference between pumping the brakes and throwing a grenade into the fuel tank. A large scale economic collapse would be devastating. The world economy is so interdependent now that even minor disruptions cause problems.
I’m all for pumping the brakes, but we either need to stop gracefully, or have an alternative to jump to.
In our current economic model, any deflation creates a perverse incentive to not spend. It is extremely bad for the economy, and all of us reliant on it. The rich are one of the few groups that come out ahead (relatively).
Like it or not, we are all stuck on that merry go round. Until we find a graceful way off, it’s in no-one’s interest to jam it up.
Gender affirming care, for minors, is about 2 things.
Helping them figure out what is actually going on.
Stopping difficult or irreversible changes.
The first is exactly what you want. It’s helping the children figure out exactly what they feel. It might also involve changing outward appearance (clothing etc) to see how it feels. Basically get their head straight with what they really want and feel.
The second is mostly puberty blockers. Puberty makes irreversible changes to the body. Blocking it doesn’t do any harm. It’s been used for decades to help with other conditions. When the blockers are removed, puberty proceeds normally. If the patient truly wants to transition, then an artificial puberty can be induced. This is far safer and more effective than surgery to fix things later.
No one is chopping up children.
That’s also just the electrical portion of our mind. There are whole levels of chemical, and chemical potentials at work. Neurones will fire differently depending on the chemical soup around them. Most of our moods are chemically based. E.g. adrenaline and testosterone making us more aggressive.
Our mind also extends out of our heads. Organ transplant recipricants have noted personality changes. Food preferences being the most prevailant.
The neurons only deal with ‘fast’ thinking. ‘slow’ thinking is far more complex and distributed.
0.5% is so tiny that it disappears into the noise. It’s a 1 in 200 difference. In theory, it would make a difference. In practice, you won’t be able to measure it. Other confounding factors would bury it.
The difference is about 0.5%. A mass weighing 100kg at the north pole would only weigh 99.5kg at the equator. Most of the difference is the centerfugal force of the earth’s rotation.
I’ve not checked the numbers, but apparently it’s detectable in Olympic sports. More height records get broken at equatorial latitudes that higher ones.
Ultimately, physics follows the maths, everything else is interpretation to comprehend what the maths is telling us.
In relativity, gravity is a smooth, continuous distortion of spacetime. In QM, gravity is just another force, mediated by the graviton. Both theories are consistent with the known maths. The fact that they don’t agree shows the large hole we have in the maths.
In short, we don’t know what gravity is. Then again, we don’t know what most things are, once we did deep enough. We just have maths, with interpretations that let our monkey brains make sense of them.
My favourite example ample of this is the “dark sucker theory”. Envision a universe where light producing objects don’t produce light, but suck up dark. We can make the model work for our universe. The reason we don’t use it is due to it being harder to work with than the light emitter model. Another one is the rabit hole of what relativity says about the existence of light (hint light doesn’t exist, from light’s point of view).
The big bang wasn’t an explosion in space, but OF spacetime. Anything that might have existed before would have been fundamentally different, and completely destroyed in the event.
The forces, to be a useful modelling tool, need a medium to interact with matter. E.g. an equivalent of charge would always be zero, if matter didn’t have the ability to have charge. At that point, it effectively doesn’t exist.
Interestingly, the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces are also aspects of the same force. They unify at high enough energy levels. They only appear different. The exception is gravity. It doesn’t fit the mould. Basically we don’t currently have 4 forces, but only 2. Scientists suspect it’s actually only 1, but can’t yet unify gravity into a theory of everything via a theory of quantum gravity.
I think it’s more the fact that the Russians likely wouldn’t be selling their “good” nukes. They would be selling the old, run-down ones. They would be a large chance they wouldn’t detonate properly.
There’s also a lot of debate on how well the rest of Russia’s nuclear arsenal has been maintained. It’s highly specialist work that can’t easily be verified by non-specialists. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of Russian nukes were already non-viable due to corruption affecting maintenance.
The problem is that, in this situation, no decision IS a decision.
Up until puberty, boys and girls are quite similar. It’s puberty that causes the lifelong changes. We already know that delaying puberty doesn’t cause long-term issues. Puberty blockers are used to treat or help with other conditions. By blocking puberty, you are buying time. Time for the child to mature. Time for phycologists to assess. Time to practice the role before locking it in permanently. Time to grow, learn, and make the very decision you are talking about.
What we need is clean, efficient treatment paths for acute depression. Barriers to treatment are the worst thing possible.
We need to work on attacking root causes, not just throw some drugs at the person and call it a day.
We need to help teach depressed people HOW to start pulling themselves out, not just to try harder.
Once the patient is stable, we need to NOT just wash our hands of them, treatment wise. This is the time that spending mental effort will lead to far bigger gains.
It’s the difference between telling someone with broken legs to “walk it off” vs emergency treatment, casts for 6+ weeks, and then physiotherapy where “walk it off” becomes walk on it to rebuild your strength.
The “just try harder” mentality got me into the mess Ive been in. It burnt me out, and it took me decades to even realise how bad I actually was, and years more to even start getting the help I actually needed. Even now, I have to fight for it. 1 slip up, and I’m set back months or years in the process. It’s like putting the hospital A&E department on the 5th floor, with no lifts, and expecting people to walk up if they really want treatment.
All of those points are things that depression actively disrupts. It’s akin to asking an American, living hand to mouth, to just pay out of pocket. It’s not a case of not going on an extra holiday. It’s a case of not making rent payments to do it.
Depression can leave you without enough mental resources to even maintain basic functionality. An upfront cost, for a payout potential years down the line, is simply more than many can afford.
The worst part is that you are correct. However, it’s the same correctness as telling someone about to lose their house to “just make more money”. Technically correct, but useless and callous in practice.
To be fair, my research is decades old at this point.
Some slight ramdom paper reading, back in my uni days. Though I’ve ran across it via other sources over the years since. Unfortunately I don’t have any links to hand though.
It might better be described as people put numbers into categories. Most people have a 10-20 category. 19.99 fits. 20.00 gets bumped up to the next box. It’s a sub/semi conscious thing. If we use our higher thought process, we can deal with the numbers. That takes effort however, by default, we chunk. The price just abuses a common rollover point most people share.
It’s a subconscious thing. It’s how our brain is wired. It’s a bit like advertising. Most people don’t like ads. However, when confronted my 2 similar products, we will go with the familiar one. The source of that familiarity is irrelevant, ads make it familiar, just the same as using it, or a recommendation.
It’s possible to override both of these effects, but that requires a level of conscious effort. I can almost guarantee you’ve been caught by both at different times. You just didn’t notice (since noticing would allow you to correct).
Basically, $19.99 is in the category “under $20”. $20.00 is in “over $20”. Without conscious correction, you act on this.
It was originally to force the cashier to open the till.
Say an item was $20. If the customer paid with a $20 note, then the cashier could, intheory, pocket it, without it showing up on the rocords. If it was $19.99 they needed to open the till to get a cent out. This meant it was recorded, and so the till wouldn’t balance.
Most people round down. Their brain locks on to the 1 of 19.99, and approximates it to 10.00. We need to actively counter this to see it as 20.00. It’s a skill most people don’t apply all the time, and a number can’t even do.
Once you can do it reliably, it’s mind-boggling that others can’t, but it’s still a learnt skill, that needs to be applied.
I view it like an over-revved car. Some parts can handle the strain fine, others are over stressed. Depending what aspect you look at, you will get different results.
As the pressure rises, things will start to fail. Some will not cause additional issues, but others will cascade. Predicting when a cascade failure will happen is difficult, however.
So how do you see deflation going then? Particularly deflation of the defacto reference currency for most of the world?
As far as I can tell, it would make the disruption of covid look like a minor market blip. And that’s without looking into how the various chain reactions would play off and amplify each other on the global stage.