ErikVandeWater

Serious question: Do the police know how to ticket a robotaxi?

One can read a ruling and see how many hoops the justices jumped through to get to a particular decision.

Let me lead by saying I'm a pro choice person, and hope federal legislation is passed protecting abortion in all 50 states:

Roe V. Wade is a good example. The justices didn't find any mention of "abortion", any description of abortion, or any medical procedure whatsoever in the constitution, or any mention of "trimesters". Yet they found by using a combination of no less than 5 amendments, that it in fact was protected, and then the supreme court decided exactly how long into a pregnancy abortion could be banned. They probably had consistent logic in what they said technically, but it strained credulity too much to believe they actually thought the constitution, in the text as it was written, protected a right to abortion.

Would you agree the sword cuts both ways with regards to the statement:

> I don't believe people on this site are too stupid to realize that, I believe they prefer not to, because they support the outcomes these rulings enact.

The biggest friction point for me was being required to verify my ID to create an account for most crypto services. If I can't be anonymous with crypto, I see no reason to go through the hassle of adding a new payment method to my wallet.

The fact that it is so difficult to avoid disclosing my personal information tells me just about everyone getting into crypto right now is a speculator.

The IRS can already calculate your taxes for you. In other countries you just have to confirm what the revenue department calculates as your liability and hit "submit". You have to do the calculations yourself because TurboTax et al., and accountants lobbied so taxes are complicated and must be completed by the filer (or their accountant).

Serious question: Have climate scientists previously been able to accurately predict climate changes decades away on a regional basis?

Actually I have.

Except in this case we have the light bulb already in nuclear reactors.

It's like if Edison threw out the first light bulb that worked because it felt hot to the touch.

> Asking your friend first would have been the move

How did you know I didn't ask a friend first? And second, if my friend agreed these are good questions, then I get to ask an expert? Or do I have to ask more friends? How many unknowledgeable people do I have to ask before I get to ask someone knowledgeable to get an answer?

> Not quite, I'm offended by people assuming they know the correct answer about something and making baseless assertions.

Thirdly, who are you to say any of my assertions are baseless? You don't know if any of my other experience is relevant enough to form a meaningful base on which to pose a question.

I ask about efficiency because I'm interested in whether more money is a good investment.

I don't really care if the government or private contractors are doing the work. In either case, if the work being done is extremely inefficient, I'm less likely to vote for a candidate that wants more money to spend on roads.

Were you offended by my comment? I'm asking someone familiar with the industry exactly because I don't know the answers.

How efficient would you say the government is when it is in fact doing the work?

I find myself frustrated when it seems there are more workers than necessary, when potholes aren't at least filled with a stopgap filler so it doesn't suck to drive/bike on (doesn't seem that hard to do, even if it doesn't fix the road long-term), or when there are many simultaneous projects where you could be working on one site 24/7 to get it done so you have fewer impediments to traffic. (I understand paying for a night shift is more expensive, but the man-hours lost in traffic due to extra projects that take longer seem absurd).

What should be done is change laws around class action lawsuits so lawyers representing the public are incentivized to get higher payouts instead of settling early and taking a huge cut. That would solve a lot more problems without requiring an expanded role for a regulatory agency that is subject to regulatory capture.

It seems best if every household and business got a set quantity of water for free based on their realistic (or typical) need for water, and beyond that water would be priced much more expensively based on how much water is actually available.

Shutting down hydroelectric power is really wasteful since they already are incurring the negative environmental effect of the dam, but without the benefit of getting clean energy.

Because of this article I visited GiveWell for the first time. I was surprised that their top charities didn't include one that provides contraception. I would presume the highest bang for the buck in attacking poverty would be allowing poor couples to decide not to take on the financial burden of a child. I wonder if it's for political reasons (pro-life donors), or if it's because contraception is expensive.

Somewhat off topic - Did you draw that car yourself, or did you copy it from somewhere? It's great!

> Right now we're going to be facing even more severly droughts due to climate change that will very likely impact far more people far more severely.

There isn't evidence that global warming is causing more droughts in California. Just because the globe overall is warmer and experiences more droughts, doesn't mean every part of it is warmer and experiences more droughts.

Global warming could actually be causing the opposite, and there would be even more severe droughts if less CO2 had been emitted by humans.

As someone who took driver's ed, it's odd how many people are using their brakes on the highway in good traffic just so they can stay in the danger zone where they have no time to react if the car ahead of them stops suddenly (even if they're in the right lane and not actually trying to go fast). Out of pure greed you'd think people would realize they're burning their gas and brakes for no reason.

I'll add that on the highway, you can scan way further ahead than you're used to. You should be able to maintain focus far ahead and use your peripheral vision to keep between the lines on turns. It's not the easiest thing to do, but it's very easy to practice.

I wonder if in predominantly black countries, darkening the skin tones of white applicants would be considered beautifying.

It's funny how this thread is making fun of people for not taking climate change seriously when the thing that "can't be unseen" is a chart with no title and no error bars that cuts off ~9 years before the video was published.

Criticism for Apple is proportional to the effort the company makes to appear greener, faster, smarter, more diverse, etc. than its competitors. It's arguably a direct response to the company's marketing, regardless of whether that marketing creates many fanboys that believe it.

Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisugly/comments/tiihwr/correcte...

Probably almost no fanboys remember this deceptive chart that suggests the M1 is equally powerful as the highest end discrete GPU, while still using 200 Watts less power. But Apple haters like me do.

BTW I'm open to hating on other companies in the same industry, like Google for providing bad service with Google Fi and their smartphone line.

> On top of that, most doctors only have a very narrow understanding of the human body and don't know when to refer you to some other doctor they will be better equipped to help you.

Are we talking about doctors, not nurse practitioners? It's hard to understand how a doctor with 4 years of medical school and 3-7 years of residency would have a "very narrow understanding" of the human body.

Also, my experience has been that I have always been referred to a specialist when there was any uncertainty about diagnosis or treatment. My trouble has come from them not following up when an RX is denied by insurance, and making it difficult to schedule a doctor's appointment due to not being able to transfer my previous information.

I wonder how they come up with the number for how much to spend. It doesn't seem like there's much thought put into it if it comes out to a perfectly round number, equal to Georgetown's. You'd think they'd have ample experts in ethics and other disciplines to debate and find a formula considering the time enslaved and conditions of enslavement.

Tangential: I don't believe college teaches critical thinking, because many students would be quitting college once they realized they were receiving a horrible deal (no evidence completing the degree would increase chances of getting the job).

People say college (esp. liberal arts) teaches critical thinking, but in my experience, succeeding in liberal arts classes is about going to office hours and figuring out what the professor wants to hear in your essay.

Related: My friend - smartest I've ever known - wasn't a great writer, but got a perfect score on the SAT writing section by memorizing the SAT word list and making an absolutely incomprehensible essay where almost every word was a bastardized thesaurus word for what word should have been used (and many just didn't make sense at all). Undoubtedly, it was a bad essay. But simply because they couldn't read it and it sounded smart, they awarded him the perfect score.

I suppose prosecutorial discretion is the only solution. Biased/unreliable as it may be.

On the technology side, I'm thinking of two bluetooth (or similar) enabled wrist bands. One for the kid and one for the mom/dad. When the device loses connection to the other, the parent's band beeps and must be manually silenced. The kid's band could be connected with the car via bluetooth so the only time the alarm can be activated is when the kid's wrist band has been connected with the car in the last 10ish minutes (adjustable). Though if I were a parent I'd be worried about losing a kid in general too.

I would say that .5 is more like .75 - still gotta go through traffic to get to work, and people are still in a place they (apparently) rather not be. Eliminating the day entirely is still quite valuable compared to leaving it as-is.

One nuance to this is that the "bid" is much more than just the number of dollars to be exchanged. It's credit quality, cash offer/not, and subjective things ("I want to sell my house to a family with kids, not a real estate developer")

So even if someone is told which bid is currently in the lead, the subjective elements may mean out-bidding that offer would not put them in a winning position.

Not to say eliminating blind bidding wouldn't be a good idea.

You'd have to be really damn sure that Twitter is worth more than what Musk is paying.

It's hard to see how an owner of Twitter stock could rationally reject an offer with a guaranteed +38% return. For any serious investor, even if they believe Twitter is worth twice what it is now, they must have several other stocks they believe are also worth twice what they are now. And if Elon bought all of them out at +38% returns, that would be a tremendous year investing.

> Finally Russia has, in my opinion, waged a fairly successful social media campaign to muddy the waters. Those videos of Ukrainians discriminating against people or color were signal boosted everywhere on Twitter. Same with the Azov Batallion which some people believe are the entire Ukrainian army. You also have people bringing up Yemen, Syria, Palestine, etc to emphasize the “white-supremacist” support of Ukraine receiving overwhelming attention.

On the other side of things, on Reddit, nothing unfavorable about Ukraine is getting attention. You don't see any posts about Russia gaining territory, or Zelensky censoring media outlets favorable to opposition parties.

And nowhere on reddit or in the media do I see a discussion of the pros and cons of a Ukrainian surrender. It's really hard to see how Ukraine will successfully fend off a country 10x its size. (If someone has an answer as to why that might be realistic, I'm open to hear it).

> For reasons that aren't entirely clear, the MSM literally promotes every US war and foreign intervention no matter the cost or predictable disastrous consequences.

It's almost like the CIA and NSA might use their unregulated surveillance to get leverage over the media.

Big social media companies, just like all other companies, desire regulations that solidify their market share and make it more difficult to create a new competitor. What generally happens in the US is a new regulation is drafted that theoretically achieves some good end, but whose true purpose is to make it more difficult for competitors to enter the space. That's why companies pay lobbyists.