Just in time for your Christmas shopping list!
It seems obvious today that people are operating on different principles for defining good and evil. Some people seem to believe that it’s virtuous to massacre Palestinian children, strangle homeless people on the subway, murder healthcare CEOs (or deprive people of health care), and oppress trans people. All those things would put you on my naughty list! What are the rules for ethics and morality anyway? Are there any?
One of the perks of my position is that every two years I get a shiny new computer. I got my new one installed this morning.
That’s my usual work station. I’ve got a Wild M3 on the left, a nice Leica next to it, then this laptop with dual monitors spilling out the front because there is a mercury arc lamp hidden behind it, and then a giant black box with a Raspberry PI we use for behavioral observations. This isn’t going to work. It’s nice to have all the tools in one place, but I guess the PI black box is going to have to be relocated.
Or I’m going to have to take over another lab! Nah, compact and accessible is the way to go.
This is a female Latrodectus mactans.
This is a male Latrodectus mactans.
I brought them together this morning. The female is plump and mature. The male has large, engorged palps. This is what they look like together.
They did not mate today, although the male spent a lot of time scurrying around and tentatively plucking at the web. At least she didn’t eat him. I put a video of the anxious, fruitless male on my Patreon.
I left them to honeymoon overnight. I’ll check on them tomorrow.
I guess I need to inform my family that I don’t want them to surprise me with a shiny new car in the driveway for Christmas — you know, like those commercials where a grinning husband surprises his oblivious wife, who apparently makes no contribution to family economic decisions, with a monster SUV, which always has a bright red bow on top. I think those commercials are clear evidence that some huge purchases are not made rationally, but as status symbols or weird nuptial gifts.
Anyway, I don’t want a new car now or any time in the foreseeable future, and I definitely don’t want a “popular” vehicle, the kind of monster machine that everyone seems to be buying and driving on the roads around me. There’s an ongoing idiotic trend that can only end when everyone is driving a tank.
Like a disease, car bloat is spreading. The United States is patient zero: 4 out of 5 new cars in the U.S. are now SUVs or pickups, a sharp increase from a few decades ago. Now, oversized cars are becoming almost as common in Berlin and Beijing as they are in Baltimore. SUVs alone comprised nearly half of car sales worldwide in 2023, up from 20 percent 15 years ago. The global ascent of giant cars is an ominous trend for climate change, as well as for road safety in the rich and developing worlds alike.
I use the term “car bloat” to describe the confluence of two trends that have transformed the U.S. automotive market. First, SUVs and pickups have supplanted standard sedans and station wagons, both of which the Big Three carmakers no longer offer to American consumers. Second, existing car models have steadily expanded in weight and size. The bestselling F-150 pickup, for instance, added 800 pounds, 7 inches of height, and 15 inches of length between 1991 and 2023.
Two reasons are given for this annoying and dangerous trend: consumers want high status cars, and manufacturers want to sell high profit machines.
Some of this growth is due to shifting customer demand, particularly in countries like China, where SUVs are “perceived as symbols of wealth and status.” But consumer preferences explain only part of the story.
“Automakers have a fair bit of culpability,” said Colin McKerracher, an Oslo-based analyst at BloombergNEF who focuses on the transport sector. “They’ve spent much of the last decade advertising bigger cars, and that’s because they make significantly higher profit margins on their SUVs and pickups than they do on sedans. They’ve told a story—‘Oh, this is what customers are asking us to build’—but it’s quite a coincidence that the models customers want make a higher margin.”
Yeah, people make bad decisions and corporations make evil ones. But how to end it? I think there’s one answer: regulation and taxation. Deflate the status seeking by making it clear that buying a giant car is stupid — we can see that already with the cybertruck, which is an object of mockery when they show up on the road (but people still buy them, because people are not rational) — and taxation can reduce the incentives to buy one.
After being caught flat-footed, some European governments are now moving to restrain car bloat through taxation. Norway and France, for instance, impose vehicle purchase charges that scale with weight and emissions, adding the equivalent of thousands of dollars to the price of an oversized car. These fees can have a major impact: In Norway, a 2023 rule applying weight-based fees to the biggest electric cars caused sales of the Hongqi, a gargantuan Chinese SUV, to collapse.
McKerracher applauds such moves. “Fuel economy rules are really, really important,” he said. “You need governments to regulate average fuel economy and push automakers, because they won’t improve on their own.” (Note to Americans: Project 2025, the de facto playbook of the Trump administration, calls for relaxing fuel economy rules that President Joe Biden has strengthened.)
Of course the Republicans will wreck everything, because they’re idiots. The article also mentions that the US is scaling emission standards to the size of the truck, making bloated cars easier to meet the standards.
Also, let’s kill those car commercials that make big fast cars look sexy and adventurous, just like we banned cigarette commercials. Not that that can happen with the incoming administration.
I just finished a flurry of contract signing — my mother’s house is thiiiis close to being sold. We have a final hurdle of getting the lender’s approval, but my agent says there’s only like a 10% chance that they might have an objection. I’ll be surprised if all the dotted lines are signed by the new year, but otherwise, everything is imminent.
Also, this is Seattle.
Someone hacked the traffic signs. Keep it up, you weird radicals!
I’m almost finished. A lot of papers have been graded, and all that’s left now is an online final exam for my intro bio course, which has a deadline of 1:00 tomorrow. Now I wait for those finals to be submitted, and then…a few hours of grading, and all is complete.
Also tomorrow I have some end-of-term stuff to wrap up. I’m getting a new computer in the lab, I have to meet a few students who I’ll be working with next semester, I have to do some maintenance on the fly lines we’ll be working with in genetics next term, and then the aforementioned final grading…then I guess I’ll slack off for a day.
Oh, and maybe some spider breeding.
A doctor explains how he feels about the killing of a CEO. I agree with him — you can simultaneously believe that killing is bad and that a corporation and its executives are bad. You can have two bad things at once!
All these right-wingers fainting at the thought of the Left not joining them on the fainting couch fail to recognize that the last thing we want is swarms of armed vigilantes shooting anyone they don’t like — we’re not modern Robespierrists. What we’d prefer is a responsible government that checked the excesses of corporate capitalism without bloodshed…it’s just that it doesn’t look like that’s what we’ll ever get.
I’m going to be a bit contrarian. Years ago, one phenomenon that was horribly popular among skeptics was the identification and labeling of logical fallacies — it sill is, as far as I know. There’d be a debate, and after the goofball had made his arguments, our side would triumphantly list his Official Fallacies, preferably in Latin, and declare victory. Here’s an example of thorough detailing with nice graphical fillips to give you a feeling of satisfaction as you tear your opponent apart.
I’m not arguing that these aren’t fallacies — they definitely are, and they do invalidate an argument. As a tactic, though, is this effective? You might as well be peppering your opponent with colorful stickers while propping up your ego and reputation with language that comes out of a first year logic course. It all does nothing. I’ve witnessed creationists gushing out a blizzard of logical fallacies — they’re creationists, after all, and they’re defending very silly ideas — emerging unfazed and undefeated, and the audience is never persuaded to abandon their beliefs. They’re right, don’t you know, since God or their incestuous circle of fellow conspiracy theorists agree with them, so who cares if the college boy knows a bunch of fancy words. Anyone who disagrees with us is a Fake Expert with Nefarious Intent and so can be disregarded. Also, the only Latin fallacy they know is ad hominem, and they’re pretty sure that it means strongly disagreeing with me so anyone who thinks the earth is round or that it’s billions of years old or that the climate is changing are guilty of a logical fallacy, too.
It might be satisfying to have a scorecard and tally up errors, but this isn’t a baseball game and there are no referees to award you with victory. These lists of fallacies isolate you from the audience and short-circuit any attempt to make a well-meaning exploration of the deeper reasoning behind bad ideas.
Finally, a Christmas carol I can appreciate.
The table to the right is a list of the bottom 10 nations for IQ, as reported by Richard Lynn in 2002. Should we really believe that the people of Ghana have an average IQ of 58? It’s a ridiculous claim. It’s not possible to assess an entire nation in that way, it implies that most people there lack the brains to tie their shoes, and further, he argues that the entire population of the continent of Africa were cretins. Does that sound credible to anyone? Well, maybe to hardcore racists who somehow let that shoddy work pass peer review and get published in the journal Intelligence.
I do notice that Lynn revisited that work in 2010, and suddenly Ghana’s average IQ score shot up to 71. Remarkable progress for 8 years. Shouldn’t that alone have called the hereditarian premise into question?
Well, finally, a major publisher is proposing to re-evaluate all of Richard Lynn’s work, which is something. The publisher is Elsevier, so I don’t expect much from them, though.
A leading academic publisher is reviewing its decision to publish research papers by the late British professor Richard Lynn, an influential figure in the discredited field of “race science” who argued western civilisation was threatened by genetically inferior ethnic groups.
Elsevier provides access to more than 100 papers by Lynn, including several iterations of his “national IQ” dataset, which purports to show wide variations in IQ between different countries but which has been criticised by mainstream scientists for serious flaws in its methodology.
The database, a cornerstone of scientific racism ideology that was first published in 2002, is being used in online propaganda by a new generation of well-funded “race science” activists, whose activities were uncovered in a recent investigation by the Guardian and the anti-racism group Hope Not Hate.
Yeah, it’s about time…although his flaws and fallacies have been well known for decades.
Critics say Lynn relied upon samples that were unrepresentative or too small to be meaningful. According to Sear, Angola’s national IQ was based on 19 people from a malaria study, while the Eritrean average IQ was derived from tests of children in orphanages.
The 2010 iteration of the dataset asserted an average national IQ of 60 for Malawi, 64 for Mozambique and 69 for Nigeria – all below the typical threshold for intellectual disability. “It is wholly implausible that an entire world region should, on average, be on the verge of intellectual impairment,” wrote Sear in a critique of the 2019 edition.
That semi-secretive “race science” organization is the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF) (racists have been busy ruining the reputation of a perfectly good word, diversity, by tying it to fundamentally anti-diversity goals), which is led by the odious Emil Kirkegaard and was, at least formerly, funded by a Seattle tech bro named Andrew Cornu. It’s nothing but good times for these hateful wackaloons, thanks to a recent election, and who have been capitalizing on the unwarranted academic reputation of their hero, Lynn.
Trump, who has promised mass deportations should he win a second term as US president, told an interviewer last month: “We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” In June Steve Sailer, credited with rebranding scientific racism as “human biodiversity”, was given a platform by the former Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson on his podcast.
They are now labeling mass deportations as “re-migration.”
It’s about time his work was publicly repudiated. In fact, it’s about time his corpse was dug up and kicked into the nearest sewage ditch, although that’s pointless now — it should have been done while he was still alive (he died in 2023).
