Fuck Indiana

Indiana is going to be the first state to defund Planned  Parenthood. For this, fuck Indiana. I've never been so ashamed of my state. Yeah, Indiana is a conservative state, but this is just bloody stupid. This not only fails to achieve any benefit, but is actively detrimental, both economically and socially.

The intent of this bill is presumably to decrease abortions. Of course, abortions by Planned Parenthood aren't funded by the government. So the whole thing seems kind pointless to start with. But worse than that is that this will actually increase abortions. One of the things that PP does is provide access to contraception and information about avoiding unwanted pregnancies. Removing those things isn't going to make people stop having sex, it's just going to have them have less safe sex, which will result in more unwanted pregnancies. And if someone doesn't want to carry a pregnancy to term, they'll be willing to go further out of their way to get an abortion, so the lack of PP won't make a big difference.

Ok, so this bill will actively do the opposite of its intention. Great. What other stupidity will result from this?

This will eliminate jobs. PP employs people. With reduced funds, it won't be able to employ as many, so people will be laid off, increasing unemployment.

This will prevent access to medical services that people need. PP provides all sorts of wonderful medical services like pap smears, testing for and treating STDs, and cancer screenings. PP is the only place poor people can really get these services since there aren't enough OB/GYNs and clinics that accept Medicaid to handle it all.

And this in turn will increase medical costs since it's cheaper to treat things earlier than later. And most of that cost will be borne by the taxpayers.

Really, this is just sickening. Fuck Indiana.

Big Government

Something conservatives like to whine about is that the government is too big and needs to be made smaller.

Personally, I don't really care about how big the government is, not as a terminal value. The government should be as big as it needs to be to do the things it needs to do. It should be big enough to defend its citizens from invading countries. It should be big enough to protect its citizens from criminals. It should be big enough to provide a minimum standard of living to all its citizens. Etc.

It doesn't matter if it's small or big as long as it does those things. It strikes me as quite odd that there are people who do treat the size of the government as a terminal value. That necessary government services should be reduced or eliminated just so the government would be smaller. Although, it seems very few proponents of smaller government support cutting funding to the military...

Libertopia: My Solution to Libertarians

Libertarians claim that everything would be better if government got out the business of, well, government. If everything were privatized and government were non-existent, people would just get along, and no one would ever try to take advantage of others unfairly.

I propose we test this hypothesis. We should set aside an area of land where absolutely no laws will be enforced. Maybe somewhere in Alaska, or perhaps eastern Africa. If what the libertarians say is true, it should become a utopian wonderland full of rainbows and unicorns. As more people want to go there the area can be expanded as necessary.

On the other hand, if it turns into a poor, violent hellhole, well...

Taxes are not Theft

In fact, without taxes, theft doesn't really have a meaning.

The thing is, property is not an objective reality. There is no empirical test you can perform that will determine if an object belongs to someone, and to who. Property is a social convention.

You only own something to the extent that you control it. You have it, and someone else doesn't. But someone bigger and stronger than you can take your stuff, and there's nothing you can do about it. Even if you're the biggest strongest person there is, a group of people can overpower you.

One of government's functions is to protect property rights. If you own something, someone bigger than you isn't allowed to just take it from you. And if they try, well, government is the biggest one around. And government needs taxes to operate. You need funds to pay for the police who will stop people from stealing.

Without taxes, the enforcement of property rights collapses, and property ceases to exist. And you can't have theft without property.

Beyond even that, taxes pay for roads and other infrastructure, which you're in debt to, even if you don't use it directly. Even if you don't own a car, you still get a benefit out of roads, because grocery stores you shop at are supplied via roads. Even if you have never needed medical care in your life, public medical care benefits you by herd immunity. The list goes on.

Wanting to get these benefits without paying for them is closer to stealing than taxes are.

There is Evidence for God

Something many atheists claim is that there is no evidence for god or religion. Not one single bit of evidence at all. But that's not true. It's frequently talked about as if it were an all or nothing kind of thing. As if all the evidence points one way or the other. But, it's possible for there to be evidence for something that's false.

There is evidence for god. It's weak evidence, and clearly overwhelmed by the evidence against, but it's still there. It's not nothing.

The biggest piece of evidence I can think of is that the vast majority of people believe in god. And this is not argumentum ad populum, but rather a probabilistic, Bayesian point of view. Which is more likely? The probability that so many people would believe in god given that god exists, or the probability that so many people would believe in god given that god doesn't exist? I think people are more likely to believe in something true rather than something false, especially if it interacts with them personally. Of course, people are willing to believe all sorts of crazy shit, so it's not much more likely. Which is why it's very weak evidence.

Identity and Intuition

If you were to be perfectly duplicated in every respect, would the duplicate be you?

Intuitively, the answer is no. I'm me, and the duplicate is the duplicate. But intuition is not perfect. Our intuition is a shortcut rule-of-thumb for life on the savannah. In a radically different environment, or different circumstances, intuition is not a helpful guide at all, and can easily lead you astray.

Consider, for instance, relativity. If you see one person running at six miles an hour in one direction, and another person running at six miles an hour in the other direction, what speed will the first see the second one going? Intuitively, and correctly, twelve miles an hour. But what if you see one spaceship moving at 2.9x10^8 meters per second, and another moving the same speed in the opposite direction? Will the one spaceship see the other moving at 5.8x10^8 m/s? No, it will see it moving at 2.999x10^8 m/s. Because velocity addition is not really u+v as we intuit, but rather (u+v)/(1+uv/c^2). It's just that at low speeds, the speeds we evolved with, the difference is imperceptible.

And similarly, we never evolved in an environment where people were perfectly duplicated. Our intuition isn't equipped to deal with that situation. So to answer that question, we can't rely on our intuition. We need something more than that.

Cribbage

Cribbage is a fun card game. In it, you're dealt six cards, and you have to discard two. Afterwards, a starter card is drawn. The four cards you're left with and the starter card determine how many points your hand has. (There's of course more to the game than just that, but that's what's relevant.)

The scoring works like this:
His nobs - If you have a jack of the same suit as the starter card, that's 1 point. (If that starter card is a jack, that's something different and gets counted at a different time.)
Flush - If your hand has all cards the same suit, that's 4 points. If the starter card is the same suit too, that's another 1. After this, there's no difference between the starter card and the ones in your hand.
Pairs - For each pair you have, you get two points. Note that cards can be counted multiple times, so if you have a 4H, 4D, 4S, that's three pairs (4H, 4D), (4H, 4S) and (4D, 4S) for 6 points.
Straights - If you have three or more cards in a row (like 3, 4, 5) you get as many points as the straight is long. Personally, this seems somewhat inconsistent, since a straight of four is also two straights of three, which would get you 6 points instead of 4.
Fifteens - For each sum of fifteen you can make, you get 2 points. All face cards count as ten. Cards can again be counted multiple times, so if you have two tens, and two fives, that's four fifteens for 8 points.

Anyway, I was curious as to what the average hand value would be if you always discarded so as to give your hand as many points as possible (which you don't actually always want to do, because of other parts of the game, but oh well). So I made a program which goes through all 20,358,520 possible hands of six you can be dealt, and finds the best two to discard, taking into account the different possible starters cards.

All told, it ended up running for about 18 days. But it did finish. And here are the results.

The average hand value is 8.29 points.

The most frequently discarded rank is king at 11.56% of all discards.
After that is queen at 9.85%
8 at 9.30%
7 at 8.85%
Ace at 8.78%
9 at 8.37%
2 at 8.27%
10 at 8.02%
3 at 6.72%
6 at 6.55%
Jack at 6.14%
4 at 5.39%
5 at 2.17%