This doesn’t paint the entire picture. Suicide rates peaked in 1990 and then declined to its lowest point in 2007 from there the rates started rising again.
Like all metrics, they fluctuate over time. But they've remained pretty for decades stable at around 10 per 100k per year. The recent rise doesn't really coincide with social media adoption. By 2008, >80% of teens were using social media. If social media adoption was driving the increase in suicides, we would have started to see a rise in suicides around the early 2000s, reaching it's peak around 2008. But that adoption of social media by teens was coupled with a decrease in suicides. The more recent rise in teen suicides occurred during a period of largely flat teen social media adoption (because nearly 100% of them were already on social media by the end of the 2000s).
This idea of teen suicide painting a clear picture about the impact of social media just isn't borne out by the data. And lastly, people ought to remember that teens have the lowest rate of suicide among any age cohort.
> If social media adoption was driving the increase in suicides, we would have started to see a rise in suicides around the early 2000s, reaching it's peak around 2008.
I think there is a logical fallacy here. Social media has not remained stable since 2008. For one thing, 2008 social media used the chronological timeline. For another, it didn't show "recommended" (or sponsored) content in your feed. There was no TikTok. Facebook was relatively new and MySpace was not even really feed-based as I recall.
Right - but these were also not "hard cut" dates. They are a couple simple examples of the evolution of social media that continued (and continues) to occur.
The platforms continue to optimize for engagement (i.e. addiction.)
Sure, but tutoring involves learning and improving the skills at hand. Meritocracy doesn't mean equal opportunity, it means candidates are evaluated equally without regard to superficial characteristics like appearance. A meritocratic test will award higher scores to test takers that can read and analyze passages faster and solve math problems more reliability. Whether those test takers possess that ability innately, or built up that ability through loads of studying doesn't alter the fact that it's a meritocratic test.
Of course candidates that study more have an advantage. But that doesn't make it non-meritocratic. That'd be like saying a marathon isn't meritocratic because some people spend more time training.
Sure, but tutoring involves learning and improving the skills at hand. Meritocracy doesn't mean equal opportunity, it means candidates are evaluated equally without regard to superficial characteristics like appearance.
Of course candidates that study more have an advantage. But that doesn't make it non-meritocratic. That'd be like saying a marathon isn't meritocratic because some people spend more time training and conditioning.
Is it legal to carry firearms concealed in Northern Ireland? It's not the presence of guns in a guns safe that makes policing more dangerous, it's the fact the a sizeable chunk of the American public is actively carrying firearms.
Yes, at least for personal protection weapons. And, obviously, the unlicensed users (ie. members of dissident gangs) won't care whether it's legal or not.
PPW holders will be people who have had specific, verifiable threats made against their lives - so will often be people with links to violence, terrorism, or criminality. And, obviously, the unlicensed users are criminals by definition.
So, on balance, the average weapons owner in NI is probably more dangerous than the equivalent in the US. I do agree that it's hard to make anything more than a very general comparison between the two very different situations, however.
Google tells me 2,700 in Northern Ireland have authorization to carry firearms privately.
By comparison in my county in Washington state, there are 114,000 active concealed firearm permit holders out of a population of 2.3 million. And this is a liberal, fairly urbanized region.
We're talking ~50x the rate of people carrying firearms legally. Of course data on criminals carrying weapons is not so transparent, but it's suffice to say that American police are much more regularly encountering people with firearms.
This isn't sealioning, this is a directly relevant point: The grandparent comment says that giving Palantir access to data is a risk.
But the parent comment points out that software companies often don't see all the data that their software is used to analyze. Microsoft does not see your tax return just because the IRS uses Excel.
This is the same problem with cost-plus contracts in the military. In theory, capping profit is meant to reduce profiteering. But in practice, if your profit is fixed at 6% of the cost to built a jet fighter then you're incentivized to make that jet fighter as expensive as possible. The way to maximize profit under a cost-plus regime is to maximize the cost.
I will piggy back off of your comment because I was going to say a very similar thing. In my state, electric utilities are guaranteed a rate of return on investment of approximately 12%, if I remember correctly. And so there's a lot of incentive for build out and maintenance that's high in total dollar amount and high in volume of work done. In some ways it's the system working as designed but the "cap" can incentivize erroneous build out, as you noted in the jet fighter example.
Absolutely not. The way to spend as much money as possible is to do intentionally inefficient repairs (e.g. last minute/reactive). The providers gain from grid unreliability since by causing problems, they get to justify spending money to "fix" them.
There's not necessarily a difference because they overlap on the venn diagram. The returns to the shareholders go up the more you build out, the benefits and performance face diminishing returns. Different utilities around the country get different scores for reliability and infrastructure integrity, because a dollar spent by one utility on one grid doesn't necessarily have the same impact as a dollar spent by another.
It's about threading the needle between a well funded grid, and an over engineered grid. There's a point where diminishing returns makes investment greater than that threshold wasteful relative to opportunity cost of spending that tax money on different public services.
Depends on if the investments were in the right stuff or not. Overbuilt sounds great, so long as it’s overbuilt in capacity and reliability.
If those were malinvestments instead it’s simply throwing money away for not even a theoretical “someday” return. Plenty of ways to look busy while spending massive amounts of capital.
Generally agreed in principle though. Investment in the grid is pathetic almost everywhere in the US and has been for generations.
You know what? It's all on the public record, and if someone wants to defend these guys or challenge my opinion they can do better than asking for sources of well reported behaviour.
How am I supposed to prove a negative here? Post a transcript of every statement Thiel and Karp have ever made?
You're the one making an assertion about Palantir. Apparently whatever you're referring to is well reported, but not quite well reported enough for you to actually point out the statements you're referring to.
If I was to say "Musk is an asshole just look at what he did at the presidential inauguration in 2025" and you said "you'd make a better point by giving a source for that ominous reference", I would think you were acting in bad faith because of how widely reported Musk's nazi salutes were at the time, and I would feel completely fair in saying "go and find out for yourself, you have all of the necessary information to do so."
I would actually think that you were in a position to defend that person but weren't ready to express that yet. So here we are with Thiel and Karp where 5 minutes of using Google or something would bring up various reports of Karp's recent conference statements. And I could have done that myself originally but "source?" is quite an irksome reply to deal with.
In your example with Musk, you actually gave a concrete reference: doing a Nazi salute. You've yet to do even that with Thiel and Karp.
> 5 minutes of using Google or something would bring up various reports of Karp's recent conference statements
And for the third time, you couldn't even be bothered to actually share those statements.
This is the first result from googling "Alex Karp Conference":
> “And so these disruptions are gonna disrupt every aspect of our society. And to make this work, we have to come to an agreement of what it is we’re going to do with the technology; how are we gonna explain to people who are likely gonna have less good, and less interesting jobs.”
What does this demonstrate about Karp's beliefs, besides the fact that he thinks AI is going to disrupt large parts of society? That's a pretty normal belief, is it not?
Perhaps you can't actually find quotes to match your rhetoric, and that's why you repeatedly fail to actually share any statements from Karp and Thiel.
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