The NGDVs aren't Sprinter vans, they're purpose made mail delivery vehicles, with ergonomics and cargo space setup for that, which makes a massive difference for the drivers, especially when it comes to repetitive motion injuries, which is a huge cost for USPS.
Amazon went away from commercial vans to purpose made vehicles built by Rivian for many of the same reasons and they've been widely praised by the drivers.
The Rivian vans are commercially available.[1] Like the NGDV, they have a side door and an 80 inch interior height so that nobody has to stoop while in the cargo bay.
If you follow the link in your link, you'll see that while new Postal Service trucks are $60,000, the Rivian vans START a $83,000†, and it's simply not possible for the driver of one of those vans to reach a mailbox from inside the vehicle, which is how vast majority of what the new Postal Services will be used.
Paying a 40% premium for less capability? That doesn't sound smart.
I was just saying that the vehicle is commercially available, not that it was a better option for the US Postal Service. But $83,000 is the retail price. Anyone buying in bulk will get them for significantly cheaper. The $60k for the NGDV is the discounted price for a bulk buy of 50,000, and it's for a mix of ICE and EVs. The ICE vehicles are significantly cheaper to manufacture, so the EV price is probably close to the Rivian's bulk price, and the Rivian has significantly greater capabilities.
According to you, some random tech bro CEO who hasn't delivered hundreds of letters a day for decades and is just looking at cost and going "hey, this isn't the cheapest option, it must be one of those darn government projects meant to subsidize those annoying poor people!"
The problem is that intellectual productivity is generally not possible to measure directly, so you instead end up with indirect measurements that assume a Gaussian distribution.
IQ is famously Gaussian distributed... mainly because it's defined that way, not because human "intelligence" (good luck defining that) is Gaussian.
If you look at board game Elo ratings (poor test for intelligence but we'll ignore that), they do not follow a Gaussian distribution, even though Elo assumes a Gaussian distribution for game outcomes (but not the population).
So that's good evidence that aptitude/skill in intellectual subjects isn't Gaussian (but it's also not Pareto iirc).
All polygenic traits would be Gaussian by default under the simplest assumptions.
E.g. if there are N loci, and each locus has X alleles, and some of those alleles increase the trait more than others, the trait will ultimately present in a Gaussian distribution.
i.e. if there are lots of genes that affect IQ, IQ will be a Gaussian curve across population.
The missing assumptions are that the number of genes is large, independently distributed (i.e. no correlations among different genes), and identically distributed. And the whopper: that nurture has no impact.
You can weaken some of those assumptions, but there are strong correlations amongst various genes, and between genes and nurture. And, one "nurture" variable is overwhelmingly correlated to many others: wealth.
Unpacking wealth a little, for the sake of a counterexample: one can consider it to be the sum of a huge number of random variables. If the central limit theorem applied to any sum of random variables, it should be Gaussian, right? Nope, it's much closer to a Pareto distribution.
In summary: the conclusion of the central limit theorem is very appealing to apply everywhere. But like any theorem, you need to pay close attention to the preconditions before you make that leap.
"Number of genes is large" is what I said, that's not a missing assumption, I said that explicitly.
The nurture/nature relationship to IQ has been well-studied for many decades. There are easy and obvious ways to figure this out by looking at identical twins raised in different homes, adopted children and how much they resemble their birth parents vs adopted parents, etc. Idealists always like to drag out nurture effects on IQ like it's some kind of mystery when it's a well-studied and well-solved empirical question.
It easily includes nature impact for the same reasons: an incredible amount of nuture items are both Gaussian distributed and the population sampled is large.
Wealth being distributed as Pareto would imply its effects on nuture are not Pareto since the effects of wealth are not proportional to wealth. At best there’s diminishing returns. Having 100x the wealth won’t give 100x intelligence, 100x the lifespan, etc. And once you realize this, it’s not far till the math yields another Gaussian.
Elo ratings for active players are close to Gaussian, but not quite, they show a very clear asymmetry, especially for OTB old school Elo (compared to online Glicko-2).
The active players restriction is a big one and one I didn't assume I in my original statement.
> so you instead end up with indirect measurements that assume a Gaussian distribution.
100%. I was going to write something similar.
> If you look at board game Elo ratings (poor test for intelligence but we'll ignore that), they do not follow a Gaussian distribution, even though Elo assumes a Gaussian distribution for game outcomes (but not the population). So that's good evidence that aptitude/skill in intellectual subjects isn't Gaussian (but it's also not Pareto iirc).
Interesting, yeah, Elo is quite interesting. And one can view hiring in a company as something like selecting people for Elo above a certain score, but with some type of error distribution on top of that, probably Gaussian error. So what does a one sided Elo distribution look like with gaussian error in picking people above that Elo limit?
It's basically a Gaussian with a very long right tail.
Big caveat here is that these are the ratings of weekly active players.
If we instead include casual players, I suspect we'd have something resembling a pareto distribution.
The big caveat is that it's trivial to measure the AIC, BIC and other quality of fit measurements for a distribution. If you think it's so and so distribution, go for it. In my experience in this specific case of chess rankings and in the broader case of test scores, skew-normal and log-normal have worse fits than plain Guassian.
I have no idea why you would believe increasing the population would make this Gaussian distribution look Pareto, when the exact opposite is true - increasing populations make things look more Gaussian - in all natural circumstances.
I was conjecturing that the distribution would be closer to Pareto for everyone (including people who've never learned how to play chess), hence why I said that "active players" is a big caveat.
> increasing populations make things look more Gaussian - in all natural circumstances.
This is just not the case, there's plenty of "natural circumstances" where populations have non-Gaussian distributions.
Perhaps you meant a specific type of population, like chess ratings?
I'd be interested in seeing what you find there, but all I've found shows significantly distorted tails (not to mention a skew from 1500).
> Good question - do the bad players play less because they are bad, or are they bad because they play less?
Both for sure. If you don't practice you will never rise much about bad. But if you are bad and not progressing you won't play much because it isn't rewarding to lose.
One needs to almost figure out those with low ELO ratings, what is their history compared to the number of games played and see if they were following an expected ELO progression.
I wonder if you can estimate with any accuracy where a player will eventually plateau given just a small-ish sampling of their first games. Basically estimate the trajectory based on how they start and progress. This would be interesting. Given how studied Chess is, I expect this is already done to some extent somewhere.
I agree it was always about resources, that's why it's long been Russian policy to forcibly occupy the iron and coal rich Donbass, starting in tsarist times, continuing during soviet times and reaching its culmination now.
The US didn't have to stage no coup, the Ukrainian people knew very well that Russia would never respect Ukraine's territorial integrity, as they have been proving almost continously for over a century now.
> Computationally it's trivial to detect illegal moves
You're strictly correct, but the rules for chess are infamously hard to implement (as anyone who's tried to write a chess program will know), leading to minor bugs in a lot of chess programs.
If you move beyond legal positions into who wins when one side flags, the rules state that the other side should be awarded a victory if checkmate was possible with any legal sequence of moves.
This is so hard to check that no chess program tries to implement it, instead using simpler rules to achieve a very similar but slightly more conservative result.
That link was new too me, thanks! However: I wrote some chess-program myself (nothing big, hobby level) and I would not call it hard to implement. Just harder than what someone might assume initially. But in the end, it is one of the simpler simulations/algorithms I did. It is just the state of the board, the state of the game (how many turns, castle rights, past positions for the repetition rule, ...) and picking one rule set if one really wants to be exact.
(thinking about which rule set is correct would not be meaningful in my opinion - chess is a social construct, with only parts of it being well defined. I would not bother about the rest, at least not when implementing it)
By the way: I read "Computationally it's trivial" as more along the lines of "it has been done before, it is efficient to compute, one just has to do it" versus "this is new territory, one needs to come up with how to wire up the LLM output with an SMT solver, and we do not even know if/how it will work."
> You're strictly correct, but the rules for chess are infamously hard to implement
Come on. Yeah they're not trivial but they've been done numerous times. There's been chess programs for almost as long as there have been computers. Checking legal moves is a _solved problem_.
Detecting valid medical advice is not. The two are not even remotely comparable.
Putin went to Mongolia, which is a signatory to the Rome statute establishing the ICC, without being arrested.
President Orbán of Hungary also extended an open invitation to Netanyahu despite the ICC arrest warrant, but he isnt' exactly known for being a stickler for the rule of law.
So when someone says "trust the science!" they mean "define your null hypothesis, design an experiment to test it, run said experiment, analyze the data for statistical significance and submit for peer review"?
I think when someone say something you are confused or have doubts about what they mean, then you ask them what they mean. This sentence can be used to mean many things (including mocking up scientists ot trolling). So please next time you see or hear someone says that please ask them that.
If I would use it personally I will probably use it to mean trust the evidence based knowledge that the scientific community is using.
> If I would use it personally I will probably use it to mean trust the evidence based knowledge that the scientific community is using.
Where can one find this knowledge? Are you suggesting regular folk go out and review the literature themselves (most of which is paywalled)?
And even if they did and were able to understand the contents, they'd still lack the required context to weigh contradicting results, dismiss old studies now known to be wrong, etc etc.
And that's why "trust the science" ends up being an appeal to authority.
I'm not saying I have a better alternative than the scientific method, I'm just pointing out that the "scientific consensus" isn't some magical spark that is immediately obvious when one reads the literature, it's something that evolves over many decades of research, conferences, etc.
And that's assuming there is a consensus for a given topic at a given time.
And I'm not even going to get into why reasonably questioning the scientific consensus is a good thing (otherwise it stops being science).
No, I think they all agreed not to waste the association's money on vanity long distance calls.
As the article pointed out at the end, it's very likely this special conference call was only possible due to special sponsorship from a big donor or telephone companies.
> The present direction seems to be the US is "de-risking" from Taiwan by moving chip production to the US, so if China does invade they aren't caught in a bind.
This idea that the US is protecting Taiwan for its semiconductor prowess (aka the "silicon shield") is a very confusing idea to me as it ignores the period from the 40's to the 90's when Taiwan had no semiconductor manufacturing that wasn't being done as well or better elsewhere, yet the US was a ardent supporter, to the point of almost entirely shunning the People's Republic of China over it.
It's a smart sounding idea (especially if you don't know your 20th century Chinese history) but the facts just don't back it up.
China didn't have ICBM capability until like 1980. There was much less risk declaring Taiwan support until then, and after that China feigned liberalization just enough to not be seen as a threat.
I am reasonably familiar with it, you're missing mentioning why the US defended Taiwan initially. The US stopped any formal defense of Taiwan in 1980, not to the 1990s. During the period it did have a defense treaty it was within the context of creating an anti communist bulwark, and such defence treaties (even with highly suspect partners) was the bread and butter of geopolitics in the Cold War. It was not because of some deep love of Taiwan or democracy, in fact Taiwan would only become a democracy after the defense treaty was terminated. And "ardent supporter" is a very tricky term, the US signed a declaration for the One China policy, which is completely against the idea of Taiwan as a separate nation(although at the time the KMT and people largely did not view Taiwan as an separate nation).
The silicon shield is undoubtedly a significant part of the calculus around Taiwan, especially wrt direct military intervention. Successive administrations have clearly shown their emphasis on maintaining access to key strategic resources (the Middle East and oil).
What One China policy did the US sign? China has a One China Principal which some countries uphold, but the US is not one of them. Our _policy_ is to acknowledge China’s position but does not endorse or challenge it. Chinese diplomats are eternally trying to conflate the two, saying even the US admits there is but one China, and thus supports China’s position on the Taiwan question, but that is not true.
As for the silicon shield, yes it’s probably a major factor, but not close to the only factor. If PRC realizes its claims over Taiwan and the South China Sea, the entire region, including many US allies, will be under Chinese hegemony. It would spell the end of the current economic order. Japan, Philippines, basically all of East and Southeast Asia would then be trading within China’s new backyard.
If one gets into the weeds of the whole messy thing, the Shanghai Communique acknowledges the position of both sides (Taiwan and China) that there is one China, the 1982 Joint Communique acknowledged the Chinese position and said the US had no intention of pursuing a "two Chinas" or "one China and Taiwan" policy. And of course there's a non stop stream of such political speak, which is a red herring for the whole issue. Beyond minor changes to wordings, the main things the US did that screwed over Taiwan:
1) Revoking the mutual defense treaty which legally bound the US to defend Taiwan, replacing it with a more vague law where military intervention was not clear.
2) Recognizing the PRC as the legitimate representative of China.
To align your claims slightly, Taiwan also claims the same section of the SCS (actually it claims a slightly larger part), so strictly speaking it is what happens if the "Chinese claims" are realised (Taiwan and China work jointly to support their claims, ironically enough). In real terms the economic effects of China with respect to the SCS are greatly exaggerated for a number of reasons. First being that shipping can be routed through Indonesia. It is not a chokepoint, it just happens to be the shortest route. Second, blockades have little to do with recognising swaths of ocean as territory. These are enforced by navies, and most blockades in history have not happened within the blockaders' own waters (for obvious reasons). It is no easier for China to blockade trade in the region if it claims the SCS. And third, of all the major economic powers, China has historically been the least likely to enact economic warfare like blockades or sanctions. There is also a fourth aspect where in the current political environment, the globalised, trade based economic order is the least popular in the US and assorted European states, not China (who in fact desperately needs trade).
The politics of the US are very different from the 40's to 90's. Good luck explaining to the American public why a bunch of their kids need to go die defending the Taiwanese in 2024 unless you can base it in some cold hard economic reality.
The reason we supported them back in the 20th century is because the Red Scare was the big boogeyman of the time and we needed military bases and friendlies in that part of the world.
China was a commie state like the USSR countries back then. I don't see how the west could have treated one as the idiologocal archenemy and nemesis and not extent the same animosity to the other.
Back when? China, despite being a "commie state" (still is btw) split up with USSR by 1969 then struck a deal with Nixon to partner up with the US to become a manufacturing hub for the States.
The NGDVs aren't Sprinter vans, they're purpose made mail delivery vehicles, with ergonomics and cargo space setup for that, which makes a massive difference for the drivers, especially when it comes to repetitive motion injuries, which is a huge cost for USPS.
Amazon went away from commercial vans to purpose made vehicles built by Rivian for many of the same reasons and they've been widely praised by the drivers.
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