WhompingWindows

Not sure why you've been downvoted, Trump's main distinguishing policy areas were immigration and trade. He played heavily into the "they're stealing our jobs" motif which has been extremely common in US history, going back to immigration waves of the 1800's.

You're saying you just wet the shirt and use a room temperature iron on it?

Must be nice to be extremely wealthy and the greatest ever at a game you've always loved. Unlimited money to fly your kids around to wherever you are "working", huge flexibility of schedule when you're not playing the game, huge relief of stress by doing what you love.

The basic insight, that happiness comes from family, is a truism at this point.

"Who even cares?" It takes empathy-blinders to not see this. Think of all the people whose livelihoods were incredibly damaged by Coronavirus: the children whose parents died alone in an ICU and no one was allowed to see them; the young fathers who couldn't be with their wife as she gives birth; the millions who lost jobs; the thousands upon thousands of businesses and cultural events ended.

This is a material worsening of society and our economy, that's why people care. Do you even care about the happiness and health of fellow humans?

I believe the premise is that close contact with nature may lead to species-hopping viruses transmitting to us. Combine that with bats like to live on human structures, double whammy. Bats are highly social and create breeding-grounds for tons of pathogens.

The virus is in animal hosts already, so it probably won't be eradicated. Even if it wasn't in animals, there are countries with principles of freedom where some 10-30% won't listen to a lockdown. It's unlikely those countries will all change their foundational cultural principles. I don't think technology is the only factor, think of looseness and tightness of cultural behavior, think of self-regard vs regard for others. These things matter, it's not all about grocery delivery and Zoom meetings. Especially for the meat-packers who make the groceries in factories, and the healthcare workers who need to go in to the physical clinic, etc.

Thousands of COVID cases is a small bit of danger, but there are many other things to worry about, and some pockets of the world are already "over" worrying about COVID. People mostly irrationally respond to fear and panic, I doubt whether we can accurately predict what the future mindset will be on various threats.

"tagging people's homes like they're lepers or something and building concentration camps for the forced relocation of the sick"

Are you sure you want to compare the current policy to building concentration camps?

"I've never heard a good argument against injecting heroin. The arguments that I hear are against overdose, shared needles leading to infectious disease, and destitution and poverty; which are all non-sequiturs."

You've completely removed all the main "negatives" of prostitution, saying those aren't "real arguments."

While it's possible that heroin injection and prostitution may be done in a safe and clean way, the reality is extremely far from that in both cases.

Could this be a case of correlation =/= causation? If we consider independently when batteries may be low, and when prices may be high, it's possible those overlap. For instance, at the end of the day on Friday or Saturday, after being out late at night, the battery is more likely to be low; similarly, Uber prices are probably higher on weekend late-nights with higher demand.

This early retirement post got me to save a LOT more money for my future, while friends were out vacationing or even worse, buying very expensive gizmos. I have one friend who lives in a crappy apartment absolutely filled with "top of the line" gizmos, that amount of money could've had him retiring one year earlier.

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...

Can rationality exist outside of our minds? Is it just another mental heuristic?

In meditation, a common teaching is to examine an object for a long period, really just stare at it and allow your mind to focus on it fully. I see a coffee mug, it has a handle and writing on it, it's off-white and has little coffee stains. This descriptive mind goes a mile-a-minute normally, but eventually you can break through that and realize, this is just a collection of atoms, this is something reflecting photons and pushing back electrically against my skins' atoms. Even deeper, it's just part of the environment, all the things I can notice, like everything else we care about.

Such exercises can help reveal the nature of mind. There are many layers of this onion, and many separate onions vying for our attention at once. Rationality relies upon peeling back these superficial layers of the thought onion to get towards "the truth." That means peeling back biases, emotions, hunches, instincts, and all the little mental heuristics that are nice "shortcuts" for a biologically limited thinker.

But outside our minds, how is there any rationality left? It feels like another program or heuristic we use to make decisions to help us survive and reproduce.

I may be wrong, but "Mind Virii" could be using the genitive or possessive form of Virus, like "Mind of a Virus" or "Virus's Mind".

Japan is not an apt demographic corollary for the USA. The census recently came out and found that the number of Asian and Hispanic residents of the USA has increased (~20-30%) hugely since 10 years ago. These are younger populations with higher birth-rates than "White" people, whose percentile share of the US is heading downwards.

Japan, on the other hand, is xenophobic and has discouraged immigration very heavily. Combine that xenophobia with historical matters: sneak-attacking an industrial powerhouse in 1941 in of the most ill-advised, terrible wars, losing repute by massacring hundreds of thousands of civilians. Meanwhile thousands upon thousands of their own best young men and civilians were killed by the vastly superior man-power and industrial might of the US. Japan was hobbled by WW2 and has never fully recovered, consider the greatest catastrophes of their history were only 80 years ago still, namely losing a generation of youth, their cities being fire-bombed, their savings being depleted for phony war bonds, and being the only country to ever be nuked. Japan is simply not a good demographic comparator for the USA.

There's always been propagandistic journalism, since colonial times there were multiple newspapers and pamphlets with highly biased information. The question is, do we throw up our hands and say education is politicized, we can't do anything? Or do we try our best to teach news literacy, knowing like English or History class, it'll be infused with the personal views of the teacher.

In my view, you see 20-30% of Americans won't take the vaccine that is patently obviously far better than catching COVID. This is a massive self-inflicted wound due to the misinformation and disinformation of bad actors, charlatans, and Russian agents.

Even with a non-objective teacher, we NEED to give space for debate and discussion on news sources, otherwise we will continue to allow our "freedom" to consume garbage content to overpower our education to process that content. I'm all for freedom of speech, but we should pair that with robust education on information diets, biases, logical fallacies, lying, etc. The fact that still, 60% are educated on vaccines and trust doctors, that is a hopeful sign, that in future generations we can banish this ridiculous anti-expertise narrative rampant on the political extremes.

What should the companies then do about their huge campuses with all of the fine amenities? Maybe they could make little work-hotels and employees could stay for retreats and such?

And if it doesn't get fixed by sheer manpower? Within 10 years, you've 1024X'd the budget.

Where are you coming up with this number: >50% of electrical generation of the entire world from top 5% of power plants -- ?? I went to the link and to the linked article, I didn't see anything about >50% generation, or even what is the actual Wh produced by these plants?

Kind of insane the article and the linked discussion don't include HOW MUCH POWER these places make. I've been reading through those two and I can't find that simple fact.

Wow, can you theorize why they would build it that way?

Objectively, a lot of the consumption of modern Western life is unnecessary. We don't have to drive out to dinner, there's edible food at home. We could skip those bucket-list vacation trips, purchasing new items instead of making-do with old, we could live in more modest housing for our income levels.

It's kind of trippy to imagine what the large-scale effects would be. If everyone cut their consumption by 1/3, our economy would contract a lot, but long-term it'd be healthier, right? Less waste, more efficiency, less environmental degradation overall, though I'll admit we need new technology to replace old dirty technology in energy. Overall, it's a very interesting subset of Westerners, the FIRE group.

The Japanese car companies have done pretty poorly in the 2010's in supporting the energy transition. Toyota has been extremely slow to adapt after the Prius, which makes sense because of their ridiculously large volume of sales of basic, gas-efficient passenger vehicles.

I give Toyota big props for the Prius, which was the original Green Vehicle 15-20 years ago, and still is a HUGE player in the efficiency space. IIRC, The number one vehicle trade-in for TSLA has been Priuses. Was there even a car before the Prius that used regenerative braking? In many ways, Prius "primed" the market for greener vehicles.

And yet, Toyota had no great BEV follow-up. In a high-tech educated country like Japan, an island nation with extremely large amounts of coastline, I'd assume Toyota and Honda would wise up to climate change earlier.

That sounds nice in theory, but it'll be years until it could pass through actual legislative channels in the US federal government. Neither side wants it, the GOP hates new taxes and loves fossil fuel companies; the Dems hate anything that looks regressive, which a gas tax would at first before the pay-back checks come (if it's a neutral scheme, who's to say how the carbon tax would be used).

Companies pay you for your output. The notion that they own your attention from 9-5 is ludicrous, right? Even in the office, we won't harass our employees if they close their eyes and meditate or they practice pen-spinning or reciting digits of pi, provided they're getting their job done.

And yet if they're at home, and they want to take breaks to improve their quality of living, this is suddenly a massive trust issue? In the past, commuting, we forced them to take two huge anti-breaks just so we can stare at them and so they can chit-chat with others? I just never agreed with the butts-in-the-cubicle-chair and the value of water-cooler gab.

Mmm, very good points. I used R for quite a few high-level statistical analyses, I found it handy for munging data and .rmds are nice for organizing a systematic set of chunks to make the code logical. Sometimes I ran into speed issues, which is when I would reach for data.table, which is quite a huge speed boost for some of R's slowest issues.

I had to learn the basics of STATA for a modeling project, because the other researcher knew STATA (these network effects of collaborators knowing different things). Turns out fixed-effects multivariate logistic regression modeling is WAY faster in STATA than R, to the point where our infra just couldn't complete the R code in any reasonable timeframe so STATA was just the better pick.

My main gripe is especially in healthcare, so many workers are trained in something in their 20's, then use that for decades. There are thousands out there still using SAS every day, for instance, because it's what they and their collaborators know. I suppose Julia and Python will grow in healthcare over time, SAS should in theory go down in usage...who knows!

As an R user, my issue with Julia: what niche is it filling? R is established in statistics and data analysis, Python is established in general-purpose and data analysis and ML, so why should someone learn Julia?

The "main advantage" of Julia being faster than R seems irrelevant to me, R is plenty fast enough for my one-off statistical analyses. Further, I can't justify spending my attention on learning yet another language for analyzing data, given I already learned SAS, SPSS, R, STATA, Excel, and Python.

You might be able to go to those users who do like it, add features they want in DLCs and such. Could be a fun endeavor for a side-gig over time.

It's pretty wild to think Belgium/Netherlands/France were connected to Great Britain via a huge swath of land. This means all the cultures intermixed for many generations moving back and forth. It's no wonder we have Stonehenge and all of the ancient cultures in Britain if there was an actual land-bridge to that area!

I wonder if places like Ireland or more of the Scandanavian Islands would've been accessible as well? This doesn't even account for all the other places in the globe that humans may have moved around differently, like in China or India there may be other ancient differences too.

I go to a breakfast shop a lot, they lost around 1/2 of their staff permanently due to COVID, It majorly jostled the restaurant sector around here. I asked the owner, "Well, why'd they leave?". He claims "They're getting more on unemployment than if they worked."

Well, why is that the case? Don't you provide them with enough to live on? If they're getting $500 a week from unemployment, that would mean you're paying people less than $24k to work for you, without healthcare or retirement benefits, might I add.

He later stated if minimum wage was $15 an hour, he'd have to raise his prices and lose some staff who aren't efficiently employed time-wise. He stated this like it was a huge negative, but to me, he should pay great employees a great wage to work hard, not have extra employees all of whom are paid poorly to stand around a bit on the downtimes. And anyway, as a customer, I'd happily pay $10 instead of $5 for breakfast, if I had the option to support the employees properly.

$5 vs $10 for us in technology? Many of us make $30 hour, or FAR more, so these $5 differences are much smaller to us than to restaurant workers.

What is a higher priority: astronomers' imaging or rural internet access?

Consider the time period and the historical context. It's modern times, Cold War is occurring, and WW1 and WW2 left scars across Western Europe and caused major changes in the art world, including being a boon to abstraction and fragmenting styles into many eclectic directions.

Chemistry has DRASTICALLY altered painting from the Renaissance to the World War era. New pigments have been constantly highlighted and displayed in artwork. Finally, an insanely blue blue has been invented, bluer than any other blue paint in the past.

The artist highlighted above attempts to showcase the new technology in its purest form. Though, despite this strive for purity of blue, the application is inherently uneven. If you look into the painted canvas up close, you will see imperfections and patterns in "just a wall". It's also a statement, it may cause reactions and cause viewers to question the boundary between art and not-art.

It's not my cup of tea compared to masterworks of Van Gogh or Homer or any of the legendary painters, but art goes through many phases and is used to express many different ideas. What I do think is bonkers is that modern artists (who are well-connected) may be paid millions of dollars for these works, which to me don't showcase skill and talent, but which reward creative ideation and concepts.