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And China has just about as many of those capitalism problems as we do.

Do you really think China has all of the same capitalism problems?

China doesn’t have:

• a rampant and actively ignored homeless problem
• widespread food insecurity, including among children
• a disgustingly large and widening wealth gap, with the government bribery that comes with it
• inaccessible or unaffordable healthcare for a large portion of its population, especially those most needing of it
• reversal of child labor laws and increasing promotion of its use
• destruction of the education system and villifying those seeking to escape generational poverty
• a massive and increasing renting population (compared to those with outright ownership), spending an increasingly large fraction of their constantly decreasing wages on housing
• an incarceration rate nearly five times average developed nations driven largely by for-profit prisons and slave labor performed by the imprisoned

Does China have problems related to capitalism’s influence? Of course. Does it have as many, or do they permeate it so deeply and thoroughly? Of course not.

Honestly it looks like it got bought and has been used by someone else? The domain has been registered with the current owner since 2022-05-07, and if you look at the Wayback Machine for 2022-05-12 it says it’s up for sale. It looks like the domain used to be used for the Center, for example this snapshot from 2016. Even back in March 2023 the site wasn’t showing porn but was not being used by the Center.

It’s literally just a charlatan scam, like homeopathy, tarot card readings, psychics and mediums, etc. The people who perform that are some of the lowest of the low: they admit that people who come to them are at a bad point in their life and very in need of help, and they prey on that because it’s an opportunity for quick money. Vulnerable people who don’t question your bullshit, that’s an easy mark.

(Edit: tarot, not taro)

It could be a genuine mistake by the original writer, but I expect a textbook to have higher proofreading standards. Especially if this is a grade-school textbook (it looks like one), where you can’t reasonably expect the student to reference other sources to verify the contents, then I would expect the textbook publisher to put a lot more effort in to catching this sort of thing. And I don’t mean someone reading over it for typos, I mean someone who knows the field the book is written about, who can proofread for accuracy not just grammar. Genuine mistake or not, this is completely inexcusable.

No

Thank you for taking the time to make a nuanced argument. I’m particularly happy with how much effort you went to source your statements and then synthesize them into a useful conclusion that I hadn’t considered before. It is always nice to see a comment like yours that proves that people do read articles (and not just headlines)! I wish we could all contribute as much as you do.

I have an idea about why they’d come to a weird conclusion like that:

A “hot” topic like that might have outsized participation. That is, a single post about the topic may have a huge number of comments compared to an every day post. They don’t have methodology to differentiate between a rare-but-popular topic and an “every day” topic.

Just another example of how their poor methodology allows poor conclusions.

ArXiv doesn’t filter anything afaik (or maybe they have policy against really egregious stuff). If you take a peek at their mathematics section, any nutjob who think he’s solved the collatz conjecture can export their microsoft word ramblings to PDF and publish it on ArXiv.

ArXiv does have value because journals overcharge authors for publishing, overcharge other researches for access to journals, hold strict opinions on what they will or will not publish or censor, among other complains. ArXiv levels the playing field a bit by being basically fancy PDF file hosting. Not every valuable piece of thought comes from a “prestigous university”, and restricting access to knowledge is overall a bad thing.

I suspect that the way they came to that conclusion was: any post mentioning one of those groups, that also had a negative sentiment rating, meant that sentiment was directed at that group. Which is horribly dishonest. What’s more likely is someone to be angry (which registers as negative sentiment) about those groups being mistreated or what have you. By the naive approach they seem to have taken, that’s indistinguishable from being mad at that group.

Also, the methodology they describe, and the conclusions they come to don’t align. They don’t describe any methodology by which they could determine that the identities are being attacked. It would be like if they concluded some cause-and-effect relationship but their methodology had absolutely no way of establishing a causal relationship in the data.

For $500k USD, you can get the low quality ArXiv article; for free, you can have this high quality teardown of said article.

Thank you for the amount of effort this took to put together. I’ve done only a quick skim but I’m going to give it a full read. Some stuff that definitely stood out to me is: the horseshoe theory nonsense; and the “rude words mean evil person” nonsense. Use of charged words or negative sentiment don’t make you bad or wrong; arguably, negative sentiment is the only rational response to a lot of the topics at hand.

Muons are naturally generated by cosmic ray protons colliding with atmospheric molecules and creating pions, which then rapidly decay to muons and muon neutrinos.

So in theory they could exist anywhere in the universe somewhat close to a star, if the relevant particles in our atmosphere are around that star? That’s what I meant about the density distribution: are they spherically distributed around (all) stars, or are they only present in very specific situations?

These themselves then decay into a bunch of other things.

I thought they had a small selection of possible decay products. Not particularly relevant to me at the moment, though.

As you say, with a mean lifetime of 2.2 nanoseconds, they shouldn’t be able to hit the surface of the Earth, but because at relativistic speeds time dilation occurs from our frame of reference (or, equivalently, in the muon’s inertial frame, it sees the distance it has to travel be radically shortened via length contraction), they do end up hitting the earth.

I mistyped the mean lifetime, it’s actually 2.2 microseconds. That’s three orders of magnitude different, but from a (non-relativistic) view it would still only travel about 66 centimeters. I’m missing too much information to try to solve the length contraction equation (I don’t know its length, or its velocity) for the observed length. I’m curious here because they’re able to travel on the order of roughly 50 meters into the Earth, and from what I can find they disappear there due to absorption from the many atoms they pass through on that path. So that leads me to a question: If there is not relatively dense earth to get in the way and attenuate the muon, such as if it were produced by a gas cloud beside a star, how far would it realistically be able to travel? Since the muons on Earth “die” from absorption rather than lasting long enough to decay via weak force, they would, in open space, surely be able to travel far enough without enough collisions such that they do end up “dying” by decay.

Thanks for the reply, I am curious here about something that I don’t have enough knowledge to answer for myself.