BorgHunter

Where in the US do you live? I've lived in Florida and Chicago and every supermarket sells 100% grape juice. Costco too. Welch's and Kedem are the two big brands. There's also grape-flavored "100% juice" that's primarily apple and pear juice with grape flavoring, but the actual grape juice is on the shelf next to it.

Normally? Zero. LGA has a curfew from midnight to six AM, April 5-December 31.

In practice? It depends. Delays have a tendency to cascade in the air travel system and the Port Authority can curtail or cancel the curfew at their discretion. How frequently do exceptions to normal ops have to happen for it to be unreasonable to use "normal ops traffic" as a justification for scheduling a single controller? Ultimately, controllers have to control the traffic that they get, not the traffic that they want/expect to get, and a system that is overly optimized becomes brittle and unable to deal with exceptions to the norm.

It depends, obviously, but when installed by governments, "cost reduction" almost always takes into account labor to replace faulty lamps, which is especially relevant when there are thousands of the things out there. So governments (for the most part--there are exceptions) avoid the cheapest ones, correctly identifying them as a false economy. The cheap ones are most likely to be found in private parking lots, because parking lot owners are generally only responsible for a handful of lamps and it's a pretty minor part of their business, so they're not going to put much thought into it.

It depends strongly on implementation. LEDs can produce white light at any color temperature and CRIs ranging from terrible to great. Quality LEDs are quite nice indeed (when they're not turning purple).

Most LED streetlights replaced sodium vapor lights, though, which produce the sickliest, most horrible orange color known to humanity. Just about any LED is an improvement over those.

No, I'm objecting to what I view as a quite extreme reductionism. If the way you interpret events like the protests in LA is first to classify all people as "Democrat", "Republican", and "Other", you greatly impoverish your view of things.

Democrats? Democrats??? Like Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom are out there burning cars. Come on, man. These things are done by impulsive opportunists, not as some kind of political strategy. They happen during sports celebrations, regularly, all over the world.

The alternative minimum tax is certainly not the default for most people; you have to make quite a lot for that to be relevant. Do you mean the standard deduction?

I think things like Halstead complexity or cyclomatic complexity are more heuristic than law. To read code, the most important thing to me is the abstractions that are built, and how effectively they bury irrelevant complexities and convey important concepts.

As an example, I recently refactored some Java code that was calling a service that returned a list of Things, but it was paged: You might have to make multiple calls to the service to get all the Things back. The original code used a while loop to build a list, and later in the same function did some business logic on the Things. My refactoring actually made things more complex: I created a class called a Spliterator that iterated through each page, and when it was exhausted, called the service again to get the next one. The upside was, this allowed me to simply put the Things in a Stream<Thing> and, crucially, buried the paged nature of the request one level deeper. My reasoning is that separating an implementation detail (the request being paged) from the business logic makes the code easier to read, even if static code analysis would rate the code as slightly more complex. Also, the code that handles the pages is fairly robust and probably doesn't need to be the focus of developer attention very often, if ever, while the code that handles the business logic is much more likely to need changes from time to time.

As programmers, we have to deal with a very long chain of abstractions, from CPU instructions to network calls to high-falutin' language concepts all the way up to whatever business logic we're trying to implement. Along the way, we build our own abstractions. We have to take care that the abstractions we build benefit our future selves. Complexity measures can help measure this, but we have to remember that these measures are subordinate to the actual goal of code, which is communicating a complex series of rules and instructions to two very different audiences: The compiler/interpreter/VM/whatever, and our fellow programmers (often, our future selves who have forgotten half of the details about this code). We have to build high-quality abstractions to meet the needs of those two audiences, but static code analysis is only part of the puzzle.

Fluoride has two major differences that would complicate such a study: First, fluoride is a natural component of lots of drinking water (often at levels far higher than artificial fluoridation creates), while lead contamination in drinking water is rare and usually human-caused. Second, lead is known to be bad for one's health in any amount, while fluoride is only known to cause IQ drops above a certain dose.

You might find this meta-analysis interesting: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... Part of that conclusion (note that water fluoridation in the US is recommended to a level of 0.7 mg/L):

> This systematic review and meta-analysis found inverse associations and a dose-response association between fluoride measurements in urine and drinking water and children’s IQ across the large multicountry epidemiological literature. There were limited data and uncertainty in the dose-response association between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ when fluoride exposure was estimated by drinking water alone at concentrations less than 1.5 mg/L.

> I would agree that the hierarchy thing is broadly correct, and many use this definition, but I find it unsatisfactory, as it does not move me in any way. "Yeah hierarchy is so cool man" said no one ever.

And yet, the two quotes you put forth as "psychologically correct" both use hierarchies as assumed priors. In the first, a hierarchy between "the well-turned-out and beautiful" and everyone else, and in the second, a hierarchy between "ugly deformed freaks" and "normal [people]". Do you feel that these are useful distinctions to make when setting public policy?

> Taking left-wing ideology at face value is a mistake

Taking any ideology at face value is a mistake. Words are cheap; it's easy to say one thing and do another, especially when political parties control entire media ecosystems due to the consolidation of media companies that the root comment of this thread was discussing. Is the Chinese Communist Party communist in any meaningful sense? Does it serve to weaken or reinforce hierarchies? Does it seek to empower its constituents, or consolidate power for the benefit of the few?

> How do you "make money more diffuse"?

There are tons of ways to do this, some better, some worse, and I think it's out of scope to go through them all. We do at least have a direct measurement of this one, though, called the Gini coefficient.

Broadly, left-wing politics favors making money and power more diffuse and is suspicious of hierarchy, right-wing politics favors making money and power more concentrated and embraces hierarchy. Politics is, of course, messy and not everything fits neatly into this framework (and people have idiosyncratic opinions sometimes), but that's how I view it in broad strokes. What about you?

It seems to me that your main mistake here is assuming that parties like the US Democratic Party, the UK Labour Party, the Canadian Liberal Party, etc. are left-wing. They aren't. They've been practicing "Third Way" politics for decades now, and there's very little left-wing about their proposals. IMO this is the source of a lot of public discontent with these parties: They don't offer a true alternative, just a diet version of the same policies that largely harm the public.

> Was Bill Clinton "right wing" because of his free trade politics (eg NAFTA)?

Yes! This is the point. Who benefited from Clinton's economic policies? It certainly wasn't the employees of the companies who offshored production because they were incentivized to by NAFTA. By capitulating to the right on economic issues and trying to differentiate only on the basis of social issues, the Democratic Party ceded its strongest argument: That turbo-capitalist (as you put it) economic policy only benefits corporations and the wealthy, and harms labor and the country as a whole. Democrats as a party cannot credibly make that argument anymore, because they're fully complicit. A few politicians carry lonely torches for actual left-wing politics (e.g. Bernie Sanders), but for the most part, there's close to zero power behind left wing ideas today.

Isn't that the whole point? SimCity and all its sequels and imitators present a very simplified set of tools and mechanics. Those tools and mechanics are more than the sum of their parts: They entertain, they teach, they advance a political opinion (Jeff Braun has been explicit about this[0]) and yes, they simulate, albeit very simplistically. The intersection of those things and the tradeoffs that are required in all simulations (which all reside on a spectrum of toy to faithful representation) are interesting. IMO it's (ironically) too simplistic to say that SimCity is a mere game and thus unworthy of thinking more deeply about, and I suggest that you're taking that "world in a machine" marketing phrase a bit too literally.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-10-02-vw-391-st...

Modern heat pumps can work in very cold weather, but they're much less efficient, which is reflected in their COP numbers. In my house in Chicago, we have a hybrid system--the heat pump works down to 20F or so, and we have a natural gas furnace for colder times. Natural gas is very cheap here, so this is the most cost-effective solution at the moment. I'm very eager to electrify and remove my dependence on natural gas, but I think it will be at least a few more years unless there's some breakthrough in cold-weather heat pump efficiency, or an enduring spike in natural gas prices--last time I did the math, the breakeven point for electrification here is around a COP of 4, which no heat pump can do at typical Chicago winter temperatures.

If I were building a brand new house, I probably would do it 100% electric. But most people here already have natural gas furnaces, and when they reach end-of-life they're usually replaced with another natural gas furnace. Hybrid systems like mine are catching on, but it will be a while before 100% electric is commonplace here.

Heat pumps are much more common in warm areas than cold ones, because the difference between an A/C and a heat pump is really just the ability to reverse the refrigerant flow, and they're very efficient at heating in mildly cold weather. I grew up in Florida, and pretty much every house there had a heat pump even thirty years ago, with electric resistive heating that kicks in when ambient temperatures drop below 40F or so. Where heat pumps don't work so well is when ambient temperatures are very cold, which is why adoption in northern states has been much slower.

EDIT: My grandparents' house had a thermostat that looked like this: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/uqsAAOSwTVlbyNN9/s-l1200.jpg They would call very cold (for Florida) weather "blue light weather", because the blue "aux heat" light would turn on on their thermostat, indicating that the system had switched from the heat pump to the resistive heat strips.

Here is the SAFO issued by the FAA: https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/SAFO737900ER.pdf

Reuters says there are 411 737-900ER planes that have plugs instead of exits: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/details-b...

> The benefits of the current system are enormous, incomprehensibly enormous.

Sure. What are the drawbacks? Where are the opportunities for improvement?

Also, you provided a list of things we enjoy today that you're presumably attributing to capitalism. But clean water and roads are usually provided by governments, and electricity and garbage collection (in the US) are generally in a weird liminal space where it's usually corporations but they're heavily regulated (and there's usually some political corruption at the interface between the corporations and the regulators). Our modern food distribution system is a marvel, but it depends on the exploitation of a poorly paid underclass of often undocumented migrant workers to do much of the farm labor. And video games are nice, although some corporations are trying to turn video games into weird casinos (see: lootboxes).

Claiming that the status quo is great and critics are being merely self-interested is deliberately turning a blind eye to the many drawbacks, flaws, and areas that can be improved with the current system. "We have clean water now; DO YOU HATE CLEAN WATER?!" is a disingenuous, bad faith argument. It's the "We should improve society somewhat" comic.

Whether it was perfect or not, there are only a few words/phrases that allow an aircraft to cross the hold short bars at an airport with an active control tower. "Cross", "line up and wait", and "cleared for takeoff" are pretty much it. Runway incursions are very dangerous, as this incident shows, and pilots must be very sure they have clearance before entering a runway. If anything is ambiguous in an instruction, pilots are trained to ask ATC for confirmation before proceeding.

It's also possible that there was more ATC communication that was not recorded. LiveATC comes from feeds provided by volunteers, whose receivers may be some distance from the airport and which may not receive signals 100% reliably. The investigators will have access to the official recordings made by JCAB (the Japanese aviation authorities).

Conversely, I've worked on backend, data processing-type applications for most of my career, much of it in Java but some (especially recently) in Python, and the GIL is a huge limiting factor for writing efficient, readable Python code. I've had to write very annoying Python code using the multiprocessing library to get around the GIL, and ultimately it works, but it's ugly and clunky and overall just a pain. And remember, I've written a lot of Java code, so I have a high tolerance for pain! But the JVM's concurrency abstractions are actually kind of a joy to use, even if Java the language isn't. Python is the opposite, so if they can shed the GIL and make multithreading viable in Python without forking new processes, that would be a huge win.

> With a handful of exceptions, single-engine prop planes are only certified to run on 100-octane leaded gasoline.

This was true up until last year, when G100UL was approved as a drop-in replacement for 100LL. It does require a STC and the associated paperwork, but this is apparently pro forma and quite cheap, and doesn't require any modification to the aircraft apart from some placards. The problem, of course, is that G100UL isn't really available anywhere yet, while 100LL is still ubiquitous.

The problem is, reading the methodology can only give you a negative signal or a null signal. If the methodology looks good, that still doesn't speak to the correctness of the study's conclusion, for exactly this reason:

> Frankly, I'd expect industry to simply discard studies that don't support their product (null or negative result) and publish the studies that do promote their products.

There could have been a hundred attempts at this study before, all with a negative result, and none of them got published because they didn't have the result industry wanted. We simply don't know. But theoretically, this is something peer review should be able to fix: Researchers without industry support should be able to get the same results if they run the same methodology. Until then, being skeptical of the result seen, even if the methodology is sound, is completely reasonable.

Is zoning regulation as a concept really the root cause, though? Houston famously has no zoning code and is fairly lax with land use generally (although it isn't completely the Wild West), and it isn't very dense. It seems like zoning could even be a key part of the solution, being a tool that could be used to mandate that new construction be more dense around mass transit hubs, for instance. There are lots of anti-density zoning regulations that should be reformed, it's true, but throwing the whole thing out seems like overkill to me.

But I said to keep population equal. Take two million people, and put a million in a city as dense as Manhattan (74,780.7/sq mi), and the other million in a city as dense as Jacksonville, Florida (1,270.73/sq mi). So New Manhattan would be 13 square miles, and New Jacksonville would be 787 square miles. It seems obvious to me that most things in New Manhattan would be more efficient and cheaper. You'd need fewer police officers to have the same patrol density. You'd have a couple larger fire stations instead of numerous smaller ones. You'd have far less utility and road infrastructure to maintain. Everyone would spend less time traveling places, because everything's so close together, and fewer people would feel like they had to purchase a personal vehicle, which means fewer and smaller parking lots to pave. You have to make other tradeoffs for this bonus, of course, and many find those tradeoffs unacceptable, which is fine. But it seems like efficiency is density's greatest strength, to me.

What gets more expensive with increasing density? Seems like most things are cheaper with more density, because (compared to less density but equal population) there's less area that needs to be covered by roads, water mains, fire stations, transit service, etc.

There are tons of social media websites out there that would exclude and demonize me. But I don't visit them, and I don't waste my energy complaining about them. Why would I? It isn't healthy to obsess over people who would exclude and demonize you. It is, in fact, itself a "toxic pattern", as you put it. I don't want to expend my finite mental resources worrying about, I dunno, Truth Social or Stormfront or other such places. It isn't some grand injustice that they exist and exclude different people and points of view, it's just how the decentralized nature of the WWW (and people, generally) works.

But what is "The Left"? People arguing about politics on Mastodon? "Instrument(s) of control in the service of the few," seriously? What control do such people even have, outside of a Mastodon instance that people can just...not use? It's such grandiose language for such a petty complaint.

If you want to talk about instruments of control in the service of the few, how about we talk about the forces that keep healthcare expensive and poorly distributed in the U.S.? Or are working to ban books and art performances in Florida (and elsewhere)? How about the instruments of control that have been invading Ukraine for over a year? These seem much more tangible and consequential than moderation decisions on a website no one has to use. Perspective is very important, lest we fall into the false equivalency trap.

The instruments of control are distributed in a very lopsided manner, to my eyes. "The Left is CONTROLLING PEOPLE on Mastodon" doesn't really cut it. If you don't the policies of one instance, join a different one. Or make your own, and you can make your own policies. You can decide what level of control you want on the social media you choose to interact with. And if some instances have rules you don't like? My advice would be, ignore those instances and don't worry about their rules. They only affect you if you allow them to.

"Intentionally campy and satirical" and "chillingly predictive" are not mutually exclusive. The movie Idiocracy has probably become the canonical example in that space.

In any case, speculative fiction is usually more about the present than it is about the future. The original Star Trek, for instance, dealt quite a bit with the racial politics of the 1960s, even though it was set in the 2260s. The hypercapitalism in Snow Crash (and other cyberpunk works around that time) reflected the trend of American society in the 1980s and 90s. It was less "telling lies" and more logical extrapolation of the existing trend, which hasn't really been arrested since, either.

> The invention of cryptocurrencies (specifically Bitcoin at least) is not to replace banks, but to replace the way transactions happens.

This is a wonderful hypothetical in much the same way as spherical cows, but in the real world today, crypto is treated as a (quite volatile) speculative asset, not a way to transact everyday business. The world does desperately need fast payment processing that doesn't involve companies like Visa or MasterCard skimming off the top every time to enrich themselves and dictating one-sided terms to others (hello, OnlyFans), but I'm not seeing any evidence that crypto is poised to handle that. It's too risky. And the compatibility layer with legacy currency is too unwieldy: Every time you convert to regular currency you generate a taxable event, which is fine if you treat crypto as akin to a stock, but it'll make tax time hell if you're buying groceries and lattes and gas with it. It's not impossible to pass laws to make the best-case for crypto happen, but that would require a lot of political will that I just don't see happening; too many people benefit from the current system.

If there's a cryptocurrency that solves those problems, please let me know, I'd be interested to hear about it. But the current players all just seem like speculative bubbles for wealthy techbros to play around with. Many of which are driving electricity consumption for mining, which has, shall we say, some environmental downsides.

> I wouldn't be that surprised to hear that Chicago was unable to clear snow from a 100-year snow event because the funds were mismanaged or something similar. That sounds entirely within character.

Former Mayor Michael Bilandic famously lost reelection in 1979 after botching snow removal following the large blizzard of that same year. Ever since, snow removal has been one of the city government's core competencies; even the quite intense Groundhog Day blizzard of 2011 was well-handled, though it managed to shut down LSD for a bit. There's plenty of mismanagement and corruption in city government to go around (the police department is famously corrupt and incompetent and shows no signs of turning that around), but snow removal is one thing that can generally be counted on here.

This is a trick more than one automaker does in the interests of creating a "green" (or "eco") trim, and usually they do it by speccing tires that are all-in on prioritizing fuel efficiency, sometimes with a higher recommended tire pressure too. The tradeoff is that they sacrifice some traction, and either have to go with smaller wheels (big wheels = luxury = $$$, for some reason--Toyota does this with the Camry Hybrid, putting 16" steelies on the cheap LE trim but 18" or 19" alloys on the others) to keep the same ride quality, or just accept a stiffer ride.

It's worth noting, though, that as fuel efficiency goes up each increment in mpg is less valuable, so 6-7 mpg on a car that already gets 50 mpg is not as useful as 6-7 mpg on a car that gets 20 mpg. This is because the thing you're trying to minimize (fuel burned) is in the denominator of the measure. Countries that measure fuel economy in L/100km don't have this problem. Engineering Explained does a good job of showing how the math works out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLQmwOX6Xds