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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Everyone is talking about dominant and recessive genes, so I just want to clarify a couple things.

    The way your body directly uses genes is as a blueprint to construct proteins. Your cells are always producing proteins from the genes in all your chromosomes. It has complex ways of regulating how much of each it produces, but your body doesn’t care what chromosome it’s coming from. Once an embryo is fertilized, there’s really no distinction between “mom” chromosomes or “dad” chromosomes, as far as the embryo and its protein machinery are concerned.

    “Dominant” and “recessive” characterization is about how those proteins affect your body at the macro scale, not whether your body actually uses the gene and produces its proteins – it always does that. For example, brown hair is a dominant trait, and blonde is recessive. But this is because producing any amount of brown pigment will make your hair brown, regardless of what other pigments you’re making, simply because it’s darker. Literally the same as combining blonde and brown paint. It has nothing to do with whether the genes are actually being expressed – the brown hair gene doesn’t stop the blonde hair gene from making its pigments.







  • 100% on the “lots of missing 'how’s” point. You skipped the “ban lobbying” one, which is probably the second biggest “how” after the gerrymandering.

    Lobbying is not some official policy or process. Senators don’t have “lobbying hours.” Lobbying is basically just “being at lunches and parties that politicians are at.” Unless you’re proposing Congress not be allowed to go out in public and live as secluded monks, I don’t see how you “abolish” it…


  • The corporate bureaucracy is as much a product of the overall system, and just as much a slave to its incentives, as you or I. Though granted, the level of self-awareness of their role in the system is on average pretty low. With few exceptions, there is nobody at the wheel of problems like these. Worrying about whose fault it is is usually a waste of time.


  • It’s wildly under-taught. It explains like half of all problems in the world. Education: “teaching to the test.” Economics: optimizing GDP at the expense of non-material well-being. Maximizing shareholder value by selling out employees and enshittifying your product. Software: “data-driven decision making” optimizing short -term gains over long-term because they are more measurable. That’s just off the top of my head.