Goladus

More importantly, embedded in your claim is the assumption that comparing two different states with multiple order-of-magnitude differences in size and complexity should be accepted without question. Imagine deploying a solution for a class of 32 students in two weeks. Now imagine you have to do that for an entire university community of 8,000 people including all faculty, staff, and administration. You must account for on-campus and off-campus students; part-time, full-time, and remote employees; labor-oriented staff who do never use computers at work, multiple languages, bureaucratic restrictions to account for, politicking within different departments, and so on. Here's the kicker: you still have the same two weeks you had for the classroom project.

It's an absurd comparison that should never be made without clear disclaimers, caveats and careful specificity about the point.

There were programs aimed at individuals, though, such as ERAP for rent payment relief.

Heart-breaking stories aside, it would have taken far more time and money to roll out a new government bureaucracy merely to duplicate a vetting service banks already provide.

Yes. The goal was to put money into the economy to help absorb the shock caused by short-term COVID restrictions that would otherwise have caused businesses to fail permanently. The point was to allow more businesses to "weather the storm" than otherwise. You can argue about the extent to which businesses should invest in "pandemic insurance" (however you want to define that), but the government does have an interest in stability and preventing a vicious cycle leading to economic collapse.

The obvious point was to leverage the resources already available at banks to vet loan applicants and to reduce the total number of applicants in the first place. It's not perfect, but it's a reasonably good idea given the urgency. Sometimes it's reasonable to accept that some people are going to get away with cheating the system. Do the best you can and move on.

Can you imagine how much MORE it would have cost and how much more money would have gone to waste, had the government just said up-front that it was free money for businesses? How much would it have cost the government to arrange for approving applicant businesses? Was it even feasible given the desired timeline?

From what I see, the hate and revulsion is brought out primarily by confirmation bias due to (a) subjective reporting on his behavior and language and (b) gaps in factual knowledge.

I assume there are people who are legitimately repulsed by his behavior, but I never see people actually explain themselves clearly. They always engage in question-begging and other fallacies and misdirection, as you are now. You state that Trump's behavior is reprehensible, but do not allow that position to be challenged and provide no argument at all in support of your statement.

If you don't know how to apply discipline and empirical methods to have a discussion in a detached and productive manner, then yes you are going to have a very hard time with conversations with people who don't share your biases. And if you can just downvote, censor, and otherwise dismiss/marginalize/deplatform the person challenging your bias, you will never learn the truth.

If Google search and Facebook were to disappear tomorrow, my life would barely change at all (it might even improve). Contrast Google and Facebook with: packet-switched networks, the internet, cellular and wireless networks, sattelites, DNS. These things disappear and your life changes dramatically.

So in terms of market, yes, you can get some good ROI for research, but you're not getting flying cars (or various other technologies with such intrinsic potential to be life-changing) without a LOT of effort.

NIH budget for example increased from $32 billion in 2016[1] to $41.68 billion in 2020. Trump has proposed a 6% cut for the 2021 NIH budget but that is not finalized yet.[2]

NSF budget increased 2.5% from 2019 to 2020, to $8.3 billion. [3]

NOAA +4%. [4]

DoD Science and Tech: +1%. [5]

[1] https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/fiscal...

[2] https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/trump-proposes-si...

[3] https://www.aip.org/fyi/2020/final-fy20-appropriations-natio...

[4] https://www.aip.org/fyi/2020/final-fy20-appropriations-natio...

[5] https://www.aip.org/fyi/2020/final-fy20-appropriations-dod-s...

They aren't, though. Google's search is no longer the undisputed best by any fair and comprehensive assessment.

Here's a recent search I actually made:

https://i.imgur.com/9A4ORwo.png

Google's page might be better-looking and have more sophisticated features than DuckDuckGo, but in terms of the quality of the service I am trying to use? Google is unquestionably inferior to DDG.

Fun fact, on my android device, Google has ZERO results visible at first. I have to scroll past an ad to get to the results. (Often, there are multiple ads that must be scrolled past to get to the content).

Maybe only dinosaurs like me actually use web search to search for web pages rather than to have a guided AI-driven experience, but that's the product I'm looking for. DDG delivers that, Google does not.

This is all outside the greater issue of the web in general and searched-web especially becoming massively clogged with low-quality, overly ad-laden content. If anyone remembers the state of the web when Google first came onto the scene, the problems were similar. Most advertising was obnoxious, intrusive, and costly in an era when bandwidth was scarce. Google came on the scene offering (a) the best search product and (b) discreet, polite, often relevant ads that didn't trigger all sane people to install ad-blockers.

The difference is that in 2000, the internet ad market was tiny compared to today. The audiences were different, also.

The idea of using CO2 emissions control as a form of social control doesn't sound crazy at all to me. Without knowing anything else, I'd assume it was a valid concern at least worth discussing, and I'd assume that anyone unwilling to at discuss it reasonably is probably a malicious and dishonest person with selfish motives who should not be trusted.

Yes, if practiced as intended, which there is no guarantee.

Did Italy do that?

Perhaps not as quickly as they should have. The rest of the world is learning from Italy's experience (they should have been paying closer attention to China, but that's another story)

Another thing to realize is that these numbers you are seeing are WITH CONTROLS. Sure, "only" 3,000 Chinese have died. Maybe it's more than that, it's hard to trust Chinese numbers. But even at 2x or 3x, that's far cry from the millions it could have been, had China not both imposed extreme controls to limit the spread of the disease AND allocated emergency resources to healthcare.

Some models show realistic scenarios where 5 million Americans die within a year, if the virus is allowed to spread at its maximum rate.

That all depends on the content of the papers. Protein folding is immensely complex.

An actual progress probably would be something like : effective cure for a disease found.

This is such a silly way to frame things. Often the reason you don't know a cure for a disease is because you aren't even really sure what causes the, or even if the disease has just one cause. You might imagine we're waiting for a "Cure for Autism" but what if we eventually discover that there are 20 different conditions that might manifest as autism and each one needs a separate treatment? Do you have the patience for that or will you just throw your hands in the air and complain about no progress?

There has been lots of progress in therapies and treatments for diseases, much of it hampered by the fact that protein interaction and biological pathways are so complex and there's so much we don't understand. So before we can "find a cure" we need to understand how the systems work. For example, in 2009 a drug called Cetuximab was approved to treat colorectal cancer, but ONLY in patients without a specific genetic mutation (KRAS) that renders the drug ineffective. That knowledge comes from understanding cancer genomics which requires a lot of statistics and computational analysis.

I'm not saying FAH is a dramatic world-changing part of this progress but it's clear that there is a LOT we don't know and finding cures for many diseases is going to take a lot of incremental progress that doesn't yield anything obvious immediately.

1. Death from complications takes some time. You won't really know the real numbers until enough time has passed for the serious cases to resolve one way or the other.

2. Treatment makes a difference. Odds of death increase dramatically when treatment is not available.

> 67 deaths out of nearly 8,000 cases

> 1,016 deaths and identified more than 15,000

> Surely the testing is a huge factor.

No, you can not be sure at all, especially since it is well-known that hospitals have limited capacity to treat pneumonia (ventilators and doctors trained to use them). Get sick when hospital has no capacity to treat you, and you're more likely to die. Death rate will increase very rapidly when rates of infection pass a certain point.

Testing is important, yes, but the real important part is slowing the transmission rate to a manageable level.

> If you could quickly and accurately test everyone in the country today we would know how to isolate and the whole thing would be over very soon.

Only if you can do it more-or-less completely. Otherwise, you're actually prolonging the problem. The reason we want to slow the transmission of the virus is to keep life-threatening cases at a reasonably low rate.

The post you responded to specifically used Java as an example, though. Clojure specifically is clearly targeted as an alternative to writing raw Java. A number of other languages rushed in to compete for that space, and while Scala and Kotlin seem to be more popular than Clojure, I have to admit the only JVM app I actually rely on now, uses Clojure.

Puppetdb, specifically. Puppet is a ruby project, but the database component is written in Clojure. I dislike Puppet for many reasons (syntax, coupling, architecture), but not because of its database backend.

For what it's worth, I am a system administrator (or DevOps engineer or infrastructure architect or whatever the trendy name is now). I've written several non-trivial automation tools where I had the option to use pretty much any language I wanted. The startup time and overall awkwardness of deploying the JVM for scripting was the undeniable deal-breaker. (I used Python instead).

> For boring code, which is the reality for many developers, they just want a clear best practice to get the stuff done.

More likely they just need a solution with the least-necessary added complexity or observable downsides, and that rules out the bulky JVM with its slow start-up time and the fact that Java has been under the jurisdiction of Mordor since 2010.

It can still feel that way, though, especially if you have any intersection of cutting-edge software or hardcore engineering with corporate bureaucracy. It's really a question of roles-in-context not holistic identity. If you have corporate managers and project people spending a lot of time in meetings talking about the "ABC initiative" to each other without a single one of them even having taken the time to walk through a basic "Hello World" tutorial for the ABC itself, you are dealing with "non-technical" people.

For what it's worth, this was Adsense back in the 2000s. At a time where banner ads were characterized by obnoxious "smack the monkey" flash games, Google's ads were clean, fast-loading, and un-obtrusive. They looked different enough from normal text to be clearly recognizable as an ad, but otherwise plain and tasteful.

However the sad truth is that, to some extent, bothering people is the desired goal of advertisers. Their goal is to get the attention of a customer and if they annoy some others in the process, it doesn't matter because the one customer they did get is worth it.

Stack Overflow's content is good because:

1. The site design is high-quality.

2. The users are high-quality, and early on received a lot of positive encouragement to ask good questions and provide good answers.

The site does not need much moderation, possibly apart from cleaning spam, harassment, other blatant violations of site policy, or possibly duplicate questions (mods should have the decency to actually read and understand similar questions before closing as dupes). The idea that closing stuff like "A vs B" comparison questions improves the site is just hogwash. The reason "A v B" comparisons on SO don't devolve into fact-free opinionated bloviating on SO is because (a) the site is so rigorously designed to encourage quality posts and (b) early on they attracted a large and serious userbase devoted to making high-quality contribution. Mods have nothing to do with it.

It used to be that I was just contemptuous of mainstream news and annoyed by bias. Apart from basic critical reasoning skills, back in 1998 I took a course on mass communication and learned a whole host of dirty tricks they use, and it's just gotten worse sense then. Now it's gotten to the point where it's maddening to see brazen deceptions promoted by mainstream sites, and just absolutely sickening and not a little bit terrifying to see this huge push toward "authoritative" news sources by the likes of YouTube and Facebook.

So, given that there's so little I can do to stop the onslaught of deceptive, grossly misleading propaganda, I try to ignore it for the sake of my own emotional health. (That includes Hacker News, which I rarely visit anymore)

Your attempts at refutation are all general and fail to address the critical equation.

For what it's worth, getting the Republicans out is almost certainly what this stunt is about. Maybe not consciously, but the groundwork of propaganda that led to villainization of ICE is certainly oriented around combating Trump and his policies, not actually disbanding ICE. Something like this is a way to help supporters feel engaged, passionate, and committed to the left's immigration policies (or at least attacking the right's), so that they will be more likely to vote and vote favorably in the next election.

Breaking up a contract like this won't directly accomplish any other realistic political goals.

When they have good enough reason to believe that breaking up the contract will achieve a positive end that is worth the violation of freedom of association and precedence for using coercive, destructive and potentially illegal methods.

In this case, I don't think any of the activists can really articulate the goal they think would be reasonably achieved, beyond having a vague personal feeling of satisfaction for making ICE's job harder and punishing their employer for doing something they didn't like. In fact, it seems to me as if temporarily crippling ICE's software development workflow is not likely to improve the situation on the ground for migrants at all.