WesternWind

the best determinant, statistically, is what zip code you grew up in.

A lower power study can still lend weight to a good meta analysis.

The offering of public services would only be pretextual if it wasn't a genuine offer, right? So I'm not sure I'm understanding your argument.

Also public services are inherently shared services. The delay time and tax payer expense to individuals to have public employees to remove the dead bodies and broken windshields of folks who didn't wear seatbelts on the freeway is an imposition on the shared enjoyment of the freeway and on tax payer income.

Likewise even assuming every injury were treatable, every person getting their thumb reattached or whatever because of a preventable injury means a doctor's time isn't available to treat other injuries that couldn't be prevented. uninsured individuals with these injuries also increase the cost of insurance (one of multiple reasons why our medical costs in the US are higher per capita). Nor is every injury treatable to that extent.

Bet setting that aside, if you really want the freedom to cut off your own fingers accidentally, I bet all the dangerous tablesaws that currently exist will become available at garage sales or whatever very cheaply, so the frugal consumer still wins.

Arguably gives a whole new meaning to five finger discount.

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think you are parsing that correctly according to legal canons of construction. Generally all language in a law must be considered relevant, and or implies a disjunctive list. Finally permissive language like such as grant discretion.

https://www.law.uh.edu/faculty/adjunct/dstevenson/2018Spring...

So the language says "...in accordance with widely accepted standards, such as..." and lists stuff like A+ and WISE certs. The per the OEM standards is probably best undrstood as modifying the or another certification, so I think the language you are referring to is allowing an additional certification that the OEM considers valid.

It's unclear whether that means it counts as a widely accepted standard, or is allowed even if it's not a widely accepted standard, but pretty sure it's understood as modifying the last antecedent, rather than the clause as a whole in a way that eliminates the widely accepted standard portion..

It would require ignoring the widely accepted standard language and several other departures from the canons of construction to reasonably have the interpretation you use.

The language could be cleaner like they could use either and two sub clauses, but it doesn't need to be.

"Possesses a valid and unexpired certification that demonstrates that the person has the technical capabilities and competence necessary to safely, securely and reliably repair consumer electronic equipment in accordance with widely accepted standards, such as a Wireless Industry Service Excellence Certification, an A+ certification from the Computing Technology Industry Association, a National Appliance Service Technician Certification or another certification that an original equipment manufacturer accepts as evidence that the person can perform safe, secure and reliable repairs to consumer electronic equipment that the original equipment manufacturer makes or sells."

Yeah there's some silly shit that I'm sick of states paying for.

Mandatory drug testing almost always costs more then it saves.

My friend works for a medical device manufacturer helping prepare for FDA inspections and related quality control measures and as I recall, and this was a couple years ago, he said that the FDA is fairly stringent but could be more so, and he wishes they'd fine for higher amounts, because if getting fined for a mistake was a bigger financial hit, companies would be better incentivized to avoid mistakes that the FDA currently catches and has them correct.

Actually helping people who have become homeless is like two steps away from what it should be, of course. One step in the right directly would be more homelessness prevention (there's some, but not nearly enough). Two steps would be systemic changes so housing was more easily affordable.

That said, I had dinner tonight with a formerly unhoused person here in SF, who is now living her life successfully because of that help, has an apartment, is paying bills, etc.

So while you think it fails to achieve anything of note, I think the problem would be a heck of a lot worse without it.

No, they are a tech company, they produce software for their main product.

Like a lot of companies, tech and not, they use their power and resources to keep their position.

The difference is that their actual competitor is the government. But that's also a big part of why private healthcare is way too expensive in the US, for worse results than other places.

I think the issue is that they could have taken steps to lower their rate, but didn't. There are steps even privacy-conscious companies can take.

Like it doesn't even have to be E2E messaging, they could check the birthday of people, train an LLM to differentiate appropriate vs inappropriate comments on children's Instagram posts, and use that to help surface problematic comments. They could bring up a popup asking any child to report the conversation which would be triggered by client-side javascript based on a hashed word list of words commonly used by groomers. They could warn the kids whenever they upload images to share directly in DMs rather than publicly on their insta or fb.

In a perfect world, the rate of grooming would be zero, but at Meta's scale, just creating even a little more friction that makes it harder to groom kids should be seen as worthwhile.

Well you can always do IT style tech work for a non-tech company. You will still easily solve 90% of their problems because it's configuring gmail or adding a form to a Wordpress site or getting a printer to work.

Thanks. Honestly, all I do is check emails once or twice a day and maybe respond to a DM if there's an emergency, but it's nice to be appreciated.

Weather Ballons can't go beyond the atmosphere because they utilize the differential in density between the atmosphere outside the balloon and the gas inside.

It's not going to disappear, instead people who work to build a reputation, media celebrities but also scientists and researchers and reporters and politicians will have their reputation and image appropriated and used by others without their consent, for speech, for pornography, for propaganda, etc.

That's not to say that celebrity isn't a form of inequality or some perfect meritocracy, but your face and voice being used by others isn't inherently democratizing, but instead advantages bad actors.

Can the car detect screams of pain? Because I as a driver can.

Basically it looks like the center of the vine is hollow and inverted, and the programming decides which side to feed more or less to to make it turn, and then air is added to create stability.

If you can imagine bunching up a longer sock to put it on, it's a little like that.

The Paxlovid.com website is from the for profit company Pfizer, which makes Paxlovid, so yes, they'll list every kind of disability that could conceivably be a reason to take paxlovid and make them money.

But yeah ADHD can count as a disability, in some people. That's based not what you have, but if what you have substantially limits at least one major life activity.

I'm not personally in love with the idea of smart glasses that don't have a display of some sort.

Prior to getting into tech, I had an internship at the NY State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) where I did work helping people developing assessment tools for schizophrenic prodromes (people before they develop schizophrenia), as they were working on a predictive assessment questionaire.

Basically they were looking for risk factors but also to predict who might actually develop the disease imminently among those at risk, because if you monitor folks at risk, folks who might have subclinical symptoms, and can know who is going to have a psychotic break, you can manage and control it and have much better outcomes.

The largest predictive factor of folks who were at increased risk of developing schizophrenia is if they have a family history of it as I recall. Stress, in a variety of forms, is also a big factor.

However the reason I write is because I remember that late fall and winter conception of the individual has been shown to create a small but statistically significant increase in the likelihood of developing the disease. It's unclear exactly why, but one theory is that increased risk of viral infection for the mother during certain stages of pregnancy may be a factor.

Teasing apart these sort of facotrs, even to the extent possible often requires complex multivariate analysis of general and clinical populations and either time based or retrospective analysis of risk factors. Even then the mechanisms are fairly opaque.

Covid infection may lead to increased understanding of psychotic and subpsychotic disorders, but it's more likely to simply complicate any analysis; just teasing apart the actual effects of the disease and the stress that results from the social changes necessary to contain it, in terms of development of mental illness, may not be fully possible.

It's not like he's poor or anything.

It's always interesting when folks tell me that some form of discrimination based on categorical prejudice isn't that bad, or that they haven't seen it themselves.

Personally I think the amount of discrimination should be zero, and that any level of categorical discrimination any person experiences is unacceptable. And that's not even getting into the systemic effects from past discrimination on family wealth.

Seems like it ignores people traveling with others (like children and disabled folks) who need assistance.

loans basically, I think?A deposits $100 you loan $97 of it to B who deposits that in their account. But A still has their $100.

The same people who hate and politicize abortion also usually hate and politicize contraceptives. I don't know if that had an impact in the choice to seek approval or not, but I wouldn't be surprised.

If it looks like Trump might win the electoral college and the Dems might lose Congress, it might not be the worst thing to have stocked up on.

The username thing makes sense for discord, in that few people can remember the number that comes after it.

I snagged a four letter username that was my username without the number so I'm happy about that.

I mean that's a possible motivation for some folks, but not everyone.

I know that when I've taken on unpaid positions of responsibility (not as a reddit mod but within my hobbyist community), it's because I cared about the organization and the people in it, and getting things right.

A friend was joking that LLMs explain star trek's obsession with the 20th and 21st century.

Yeah most of the stuff that is ostensibly the purpose of classic non compete agreements is well handled by NDAs and explicit agreements not to poach clients/workers, if I understand things? It's still okay to block the use of secret information or professional contacts from your former company.

From a free market perspective, it's burdensome to make someone with experience in a sector stop working in that sector, even if that's what their career is about.

Then they could provide it for a year, or six months, or one month.

twitter currently makes it's money from advertising served on content users generate, creating barriers around programmatically serving that content reduces the value of the platform for advertisers.

twitter is, I guess, looking to switch to a subscription based model, but paid subscription models make the most sense when the content is exclusive in some sense, and create barriers for entry, especially for folks from outside the wealthier nations.

Hasn't work from home been shown to improve worker efficiency and happiness too?

If folks where actually skeptical of the paper, you would think they would provide some evidence to back up their thought process, based on experiences from academia, or a study of crowd movement in relation to race that shows contrary evidence to the paper itself, instead of saying they can imagine the possibility of bias.

I mean I can picture an evil cabal of racists who purposefully show up in discussions like this to purposefully sow fear, uncertainty and doubt. Is that the level of HN discourse?

The ability to imagine something isn't evidence of it's existence, nor is it healthy skepticism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skepticism