Justin's Miscellaneous Posts

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I started using Apple Fitness+ exercise videos about 10 weeks ago. After trying different ones, I decided I liked the strength videos the most, so I have been doing those regularly.

I have gotten noticeably a bit stronger in just my day to day living (which is the point - the videos are focused on “functional strength” and not on building big muscles per se). I have noticed that things like bending down, stepping over things, or picking up objects seem easier than they used to.

I also do other stuff, like a bit of jogging or cycling (or occasionally using a SkiErg though I’ve had some issues with that and elbow pain), but the Fitness+ videos are the “main” thing that I do very regularly.

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spoilery sept 14 apple event comments (focused on stuff of particular interest to me):

upgrades to ipad and ipad mini seem nice. regular ipad seems like a great value. ipad mini is more premium, which i thought was interesting. I think I’m more of an ipad pro guy (have a 2017 pro) but they both look nice.

watchOS 8 supports ebikes better re: calorie counting. that’s cool.

new series 7 watch looks nice. bigger display size. i think i’m due for upgrade (have series 4, use watch a lot).

they’re adding guided meditations to fitness+. They already had mindful cooldowns, which seems fine, but guided meditations kinda seems like it should be in a separate app to me - like I’m not sure it quite fits with fitness. whatever tho, i’ll try it, i’m already a fitness+ subscriber!

they’re doing group workouts in fitness+ so you can do group workouts with your bros. kinda cool.

new regular iphone has sensor-shift image stabilization stuff that was pro-tier on previous gen. pretty cool.

the cinematic mode video thing on new iphone is cool. i like that they give you more manual control as an option too. it sounds like you can change the focus even after the capture of the video.

main benefit of iphone pro vs regular seems to be ProMotion (higher refresh rate), higher brightness, better camera system (which can do macro photography), and bigger screen if you want to go with pro max. leaning towards regular iphone 13.

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from “The Obstacle Is the Way” by Ryan Holiday:

Edison once explained that in inventing, “the first step is an intuition—and comes with a burst— then difficulties arise.” What set Edison apart from other inventors is tolerance for these difficulties, and the steady dedication with which he applied himself toward solving them.

In other words: It’s supposed to be hard. Your first attempts aren’t going to work. It’s goings [sic] to take a lot out of you—but energy is an asset we can always find more of. It’s a renewable resource. Stop looking for an epiphany, and start looking for weak points. Stop looking for angels, and start looking for angles. There are options. Settle in for the long haul and then try each and every possibility, and you’ll get there.

(bold added)

I think that social dynamics stuff can play a role in giving people an unrealistic sense of how much effort is involved in achieving some goal.[1] People heavily downplay the amount of effort that they make. This creates a misleading impression of the amount of effort typically involved. Then if something is hard for someone (i.e. takes a lot of effort), they feel like maybe it’s not for them, that they are too dumb or untalented, or whatever. So under this hypothesis, social dynamics serves as a civilization-wide drag on people accomplishing stuff by misleading and discouraging people trying to accomplish something.

  1. I think Elliot has talked about this, though I don’t have a specific citation - just trying to indicate that I don’t think this is my original idea ↩︎

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Safari 15 may be bad. I haven’t updated yet, thankfully.

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A moderate Senate Democrat is very worried about current govt spending

I thought some of the language he used was notably strong, especially for a Dem (“brutal fiscal reality”, “fiscal insanity”, “vengefully tax for the sake of wishful spending”)

I think it’s good that some Dems are being reasonable about trying to bring spending under some control. I think it’s a sign of how bad things are that even some Dems are super concerned

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China to censor video games heavily according to traditional values/gender roles type ideas

They seem to want to use the state to try to encourage a society of like, Tough Guys (another example). I wonder how long they’ll keep it up and how many people they’ll hurt doing that.

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not bad!

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New David Horowitz book out

Just started it. So far it seems like a good recap of facts related to BLM, riots in 2020, etc.

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nice video by Apple.

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new Apple Watch pre-orders soon

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Neat new feature for AirPods Pro

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Quote Investigator runs down a quote attributed to Churchill (who people love to attribute things to)

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/14/keep-going/

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People are super touchy about criticism/corrections. Example:

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VDH gives an example of govt interference in the market (specifically, the raisin market) in his new book The Dying Citizen.

In the 1980s and 1990s, I farmed Thompson seedless grapes that were dried into raisins, the fifth generation of my family to have done so on a small 120-acre farm where I still live. When prices crashed during the national recession of 1983, many raisin farmers contemplated not delivering their near worthless crops to packers to be sold. The contracted prices that growers were to receive remained far below the costs of production. Some of us instead planned on stemming and washing our own raisins and, in desperation, selling them directly to farmers’ markets and local bakers and small stores—as if our typical-size small farm could ever sell its annual crop of four hundred thousand pounds locally.10

Yet the government quickly warned us that to do so was illegal—indeed, it was a federal felony. Bankrupt raisin farmers rediscovered that although they owned their ground and the vines on it, produced the grapes, dried them into raisins, stored them on their property, and lost money in the process, they still did not own their crop—or at least not completely.

The federal government in effect owns the nation’s annual raisin crop before it is even harvested. Under the auspices of the fossilized, Depression-era Raisin Administrative Committee—created formally and overseen by the US Department of Agriculture in 1947, authorized and operating under the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937—the government each year decides what percentage of farmers’ raisin crops can be sold within the United States. The US government then confiscates the rest of the year’s tonnage once it is delivered to packers. Sometimes the set-asides comprise up to 50 to 75 percent of the year’s crop. It is still a crime to keep one’s own harvested raisins on the farm without apprising the federal government. And further, it is a criminal act not to deliver to a federally authorized raisin packer any percentage of one’s crop designated as a reserve tonnage portion.11

Delivered raisins determined to be reserve tonnage are set aside at packers’ lots. They are kept off the domestic market and then eventually sold for below-production costs or given away, mostly abroad, as an annual “reserve pool” of raisins. That way the government controls the size of the domestic market and thus the pricing—all paternalistically in the supposed interest of the raisin growers themselves. So under such a marketing order, only raisins delivered to certified packers can be sold domestically once the government determines the percentage of such allowable “free tonnage” saleable within the United States.

Some years in the past, some of the reserve raisin tonnage—occasionally the majority of the crop—was, on the decision of bureaucrats, given away to domestic school lunch programs. It was also sold by administrative edict as animal feed or discounted at below-market prices overseas to create supposed new markets. The net result was often that farmers were forced to hand over much of their crops to the federal government without compensation to cover their costs of production. Again, those who refused or attempted to sell their own raisins without federal set-asides were fined or prosecuted. Again, elected congressional officials could serve as the people’s auditors to investigate, audit, and punish overreaching bureaucrats. In fact, a mere 535 elected senators and representatives can hardly become acquainted with, much less even read, some 175,496 pages of the Federal Register or monitor 2.7 million employees—without the enlistment of more bureaucrats to monitor bureaucrats.12

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The great macOS app Keyboard Maestro lets you search and replace the system keyboard with regular expressions. Pretty nifty

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People still need security, even if the government won’t provide it like it’s supposed to.

SF govt has plenty of money to pay for more cops. They’re explicitly choosing not to.

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This is sort of a tangent to this thread but I wanted to keep that discussion cleaner so I’m posting it here:

Atlas Shrugged quote:

“Francisco, what’s the most depraved type of human being?”
“The man without a purpose.”

Note that Francisco’s answer isn’t “a serial killer” or something like that (even though they would count as depraved and be someone who causes serious harm). Note also that one could lack a purpose and not harm others (someone who smokes marijuana all day could be harmless while lacking a purpose).

Having a purpose is about having something positive one wants to achieve in the world, not having the absence of a negative. You could reframe having a purpose as “absence of purposelessness” but I think that would miss the point. If your purpose is e.g. writing a novel, that’s a positive thing you want to create and bring into being. That’s your goal. Saying that you don’t want to not create a novel is just confusing.

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Atlas Shrugged, bold added, text may not be fully accurate:

“If you search your code for guidance, for an answer to the question: ‘What is the good?’.—the only answer you will find is ‘The good of others.’ The good is whatever others wish, whatever you feel they feel they wish, or whatever you feel they ought to feel. ‘The good of others’ is a magic formula that transforms anything into gold, a formula to be recited as a guarantee of moral glory and as a fumigator for any action, even the slaughter of a continent. Your standard of virtue is not an object, not an act, not a principle, but an intention. You need no proof, no reasons, no success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others -all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the ’.non-good for me…‘.

“Your code—which boasts that it upholds eternal, absolute, objective moral values and scorns the conditional, the relative and the subjective -your code hands out, as its version of the absolute, the following rule of moral conduct: If you wish it, it’s evil; if others wish it, it’s good; if the motive of your action is your welfare, don’t do it; if the motive is the welfare of others, then anything goes.

“As this double-jointed, double-standard morality splits you in half, so it splits mankind into two enemy camps: one is you, the other is all the rest of humanity. You are the only outcast who has no right to wish or live. You are the only servant, the rest are the masters, you are the only giver, the rest are the takers, you are the eternal debtor, the rest are the creditors never to be paid off. You must not question their right to your sacrifice, or the nature of their wishes and their needs: their right is conferred upon them by a negative, by the fact that they are ‘non-you.’

I’m trying to make sure I understand this passage clearly.

Re: bold part, I could be wrong about this (I’m arguing with Rand about a writing matter related to logic, after all!), but I think the appropriate negation there would be something more like “the good for non-me”. The point Rand is making is that altruism makes trying to achieve the good of others the primary thing. So you want to try to seek the good of others instead of yourself. I think that fits with my wording better. She also talks about “non-you” in the last quoted sentence, which also fits my thinking (I came up with my reading of bolded part before looking that far in the quote).

I recognize that the idea of sacrifice is very much connected with altruism, and Rand also brings that idea up within the quoted material. So one interpretation I considered is maybe the part I bolded is talking about sacrifice specifically. Rand defines sacrifice as “the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue.” “The Ethics of Emergencies,”
The Virtue of Selfishness, 44. So altruism does place moral value on people giving up their values, which could maybe be thought of as the “non-good for me”. That doesn’t seem like a great reading though, cuz the paragraph the bolded part appears in seems pretty focused on the idea of altruism being about serving the good of others.

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You could have written e.g.:

As Rand mentions, sacrifice is connected with altruism.

I don’t think you’re willing to regularly practice writing and try to improve your writing autopilots, but I don’t know why. I think it’s important.

re your main point, Rand clarifies what she means elsewhere in the same paragraph as well as nearby. She’s trying to explain the same issue many ways. I don’t think they all need to be complete.

PS your quoting is screwed up right at the key part, which you could have glanced at and edited. The problems include an ellipsis that I don’t know if you added on purpose incorrectly or it somehow got there by itself.

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I disagree with your rewrite and think that it is incompatible with my purpose. I agree that the writing could be improved, however. I was trying to anticipate a possible objection by saying I was aware of a relationship between ideas that was relevant (so that reader would know that the issue wasn’t ignorance of that connection or a failure to consider it at all). Given that, if I were going to rewrite it, I’d try something like: “I know that sacrifice and altruism are connected. Rand mentions this above too.”

You are right about me not being willing. I will try to give the matter some thought but don’t want to discuss it more at the moment.

Yeah. I checked and the error is in multiple formats of the electronic version of AS I was looking at. Still, it’s clearly erroneous and I should have checked another source or something.