WhompingWindows

One counter-stance would be: authenticity of any communication is an unsolved problem. Lying, bias, cheating, misconstrual, forgery, libel, etc. are all problems that go back hundreds of years, societal rules can simply be broken for selfish reasons.

The Internet has given all speech a larger platform and more reach, which means that both authentic and inauthentic voices are amplified. Maybe the inauthentic voices gain a comparative advantage to non-Internet worlds, since they gain more attention via outrage or exaggeration. Does the fault lie on social media, content websites, or users?

So do we modify the Internet, or do we attempt to modify ourselves, or both?

Starting comments with "lol ok" isn't in keeping with HN guidelines, by the way.

Some things cycle, and some things trend. Look up the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and tell us: is that cycling or is it trending upwards? Look up the temperature in the past 100 years and tell us: is that cycling or trending upwards?

Judging based on your "lol ok", you may not be here to advance the dialogue.

Why not use the ever decreasing costs of space flight to lift blocks or reflectors into our planetary L1 point? We wouldn't have to affect our own atmosphere to do this, though it may cost more to get a sufficiently sized object into orbit.

While I agree that race has been discussed a lot in the past few years, especially on places like NPR or Sam Harris's podcast or in politics, the reality is: poor people are often minorities, and poor people have to do more of their own car repairs than rich people. In general, if laws are related to socioeconomic status, they are also related to race indirectly.

How about 999 subscriptions to Penthouse in exchange for 1 subscription to Private Eye?

"the tiniest creatures God in his wisdom put upon this earth"

The writing is nice but flawed. Since War of the Worlds, we have advanced tremendously and no longer need intelligent design or creation myths to explain microorganisms.

Reproducible, testable science demonstrates that in the primordial oceans, self-replicating molecules which were slightly better at self-replicating produced globules of matter capable of inheritance. Small mutations over millions of years led to the tiniest organisms, not "creatures", and most microorganisms don't even interact with higher life forms. It's only after epochs of time that complex mammals arose, breathing air, and these mammalian hosts then did provide the harbor for pathogens we know today.

You haven't mentioned social behavioral change in your speculation about the decimated 2020-2021 flu season. I'd wager that has a very large part in why the flu hasn't spread: everyone is socially distanced, remote, masked, extra hygienic, and extra aware of illness.

Irish musician here, missing regular sessions at Patrick's Pub in Providence, RI. Smithwicks' Ale for the players, random audience members singing Irish songs in Irish and English, we are all missing the community, especially since our outdoor jams ended 5 months ago.

Sadly, many careers now have such gate-keeping tasks, or "hoop jumping":

Medicine/MCAT, Law/LSAT, PhD/GREs, Undergrad/SAT, and for all of the above you need a high GPA, which is not a good measure because it's localized to the school and is not weighted for class difficulty.

My own story: I was pre-med at a deflationary school, I did very well on the MCAT, but my GPA was below average, so I got 0 interviews on 11 apps (thousands down the drain and years of effort too), and decided research was a better field for me than medicine.

Yeah, this practice about people posting ridiculous things, "I did all of leetcode in a month with only a case of red bull and a palette of ramen". Give me a break. These types of sensational headlines are OUTLIERS, they are not useful to average people or beginners, in fact they engender imposter syndrome. The fact is, anyone who is on leetcode for 5 years and got a CS degree and worked for 18 months as a coder, is going to be decent with computers and could at LEAST do IT or support, if not work as an entry-level coder at a variety of firms.

Honestly, it sounds like you bought into the 1337code culture too fully. It's a practice website for certain types of questions, it's not teaching you how to provide business value to companies. You can practice your technical skills and do mock interviews, but if that's all your doing, it won't make your resume look better and it won't make your soft-skills and industry-knowledge better. Future employers want to see evidence you did the job before, which means it's tough to bust into the career path, but also means if you CAN bust in and hang in there, you'll have a good career path in future.

Consider the following alternative scenario: instead of leetcode, what if you focused all of your efforts on finding ANY programming job? You've obviously been practicing coding for a long time, even if you're not a 10X hardcore engineer, you can still find orgs who need help with their code.

So, IMO, you may as well keep sending out coding job apps. You may not score a FAANG position, but you may make a decent living in your chosen profession. Sure, you may not get to use cutting edge methods or innovative libraries, but you'll help others with your coding ability, for instance, consider all the mom and pop websites out there that look terrible and perform terribly. Those sites are an opportunity for you or for me, less talented and gifted people, to provide value where the rock stars wouldn't deign to work.

Hmm, I think your stance is a tad defeatist in this specific instance. The article's main contention is without the Sunflower sea stars, the urchins have no eager predation, and therefore can decimate any kelp nearby. I believe it's possible to have modern luxuries without making sea stars extinct, but the scale and diversity and degree to which we use those luxuries will determine how much damage we do. There's also the possibility a specific pollutant is harming the sea stars, which was the case with birds' eggs and pesticides in the past.

Actually, the richest members of society typically work longer hours. While that may not be true for their family and hangers-on, if your own personal goal is to have a lot of friends, being a millionaire is not the path, since CEO's and CFO's and the like spend a LOT more time than average workers on their profession.

I'm not sure that'd be a solid strategy. You have to scan your ID to get into the store. So just to raid for a 10L of milk, you'd have to then break and enter, not just steal the milk. The store is probably riddled with cameras and, with the low population density, there's not a great chance you can get away with breaking and entering, much less stealing.

I heard on a genetics podcast recently that your weight is 70% genetically determined. Every family carries in its genome the similar ingredients for weight: how much do you eat, what foods do you like, how efficient is your body at gathering and storing energy, how much do you naturally like exercise, etc. That 30% is obviously important and most people could make huge gains there, simply by eating less.

Your premise that strict punishment leads to impacts on crime in the 1st world is not supported by just picking Japan and the USA as your only evidence.

Issue one, do criminals actually know the penalties for their crimes? Deterrence relies upon criminals knowing facts of the law, when evidence suggests crime is impulsive and done by those who lack education and opportunity. The economy is hurt and crimes are on the rise in the US; I'm surmising criminals are not vastly less aware of laws than a year ago.

Issue two, even if criminals knew the penalties, deterrence would rely upon them to weigh and measure the consequences and not commit crimes. How does deterrence work when criminals believe themselves to be lucky and not susceptible to being caught? How does deterrence work when desperation, poverty, and a culture of crime leads young men to view punishment with a shrug or disdain?

Issue three, the biggest in my view, We've seen rises in violent crime in the US in the past year -- has deterrence gone down? Have laws changed towards less severe punishment? Or, have socioeconomic conditions changed?

Issue four, Japan is a highly insular island nation with an ancient culture and quite a unique cultural attitude. They have extremely low littering and crime, their populace is extremely "tight" in its conformation to laws and regulations such as masking, quaranting, etc. So I wouldn't say they are a good example of an average nation.

Come again, $100/hour is the "lower end of mid-end"? The median wage is around $25 in the USA, the minimum wage averages around $10...

"The grid hasn't progressed much since the Red Scare" -- that's a vast overstatement. The amount of changes in the last 60+ years since McCarthy's day has been tremendous.

We've seen numerous technological advancements like solar, wind, gas, which provide new electrons from new distributed locales. We've seen new transmission projects, not as many as ideal admittedly. There have been new pipelines and new drilling technologies, enabling natural gas peakers while we work out renewable storage.

We've also seen a decarbonization of the dirtiest coal and oil plants -- do you consider huge public health wins "not much progress"?. Even further, batteries, demand response, weatherization, LEDs, and many nascent technologies are all doing their part now to head towards an unthinkable scenario in 1960: a carbon neutral grid by 2050. To entirely revamp your energy system in 100 years is astounding.

I'd recommend checking out Greentech Media and the Energy Gang podcast, you'll hear the latest in energy since the Red Scare.

Your post reads oddly anti-renewables. You can't genuinely discuss energy and renewables in 2021 without mentioning battery storage -- so many procurements now are packaged solar/batteries. No one suggests pure wind/solar, but rather batteries as a 3-4 day short-term storage system. Yes, long term storage is needed, that is an acknowledged sticking point that many companies are looking at. There is in fact evidence that solar is beneficial to some ecosystems it's installed in, and it certainly adds value to homeowner's houses too. But with batteries, you unlock the next level for renewables.

With these batteries in hand, you don't need new base-load nuclear power, it's much slower and harder to build, in terms of regulatory and complexity issues, and it's going to cost you a lot more -- see the debacle in South Carolina and their wasted money on a failed nuclear plant. The only place really building new nuclear is China, but why would the US when electricity demand growth is largely flat in recent years and only smaller bits of incremental additions are needed to replace retiring or dirtier plants? Where do you see nuclear fitting in, which design to be used, and how will it be funded?

Compared to solar/wind/batteries, there's simply nothing as cost-effective at stopping climate change.

Your point eludes the fact we're all caught in this system, not just teenagers. Parents have few choices, they have certain budget for a house and that dictates which district they're in. Meanwhile, they're struggling and working hard and education is a pivotal means of upward mobility, so they feel it's extremely important to their child's future.

US Teachers are grossly underpaid and have to deal with tremendous amounts of training already...and stress. Consider in many of our schools, you have one teacher to 20 or 25 students, many of whom have undiagnosed learning disabilities, developmental problems, social issues, familial problems, hunger, mental health issues...teachers are already working insanely hard for low pay. I worked exclusively in struggling schools and I had kids with cousins shot dead, kids who literally jumped onto the table and screamed how myself and other teachers were racists, it's insane what teachers have to handle.

So no, We can't lay everything at the feet of current parents and teachers, there's a lot of policy, politics, and history in the educational field that no current teacher or parent had anything to do with. They're struggling and vying for success just as they see the children suffering.

It's not unheard of, but it's pretty rare in the history of government finance. I believe this occurred in the French Revolution, wherein the monarchy's finances were in tatters. Ministers of finance took out multiple loans to keep up revenue and hide the clusterfuck of debts, but eventually something had to give...the French simply didn't pay a lot of their debts back due to national emergency and revolutionary upheaval (which came before/during/after this financial move).

How the French govt got so indebted was partially exorbitant spending (like helping the US in its revolutionary war vs Britain), but also that they taxed their nobility at 0%. They couldn't change the laws because of a labyrinthine legal system and a power structure packed with 0% paying nobles. This is an extreme version of what we have today, where many rich people avoid taxes and pay effectively lower rates than poor people.

How much were your tools and how long have you trained and learned? And the sweat equity...I'm a woodworker too and it's incredibly faster to buy anything that to build it oneself.

There is absolutely cooking news, musical news, science news, etc. Which newspaper are you looking at?

Heading to NYT, I see: weather, biden, covid, trump, capital riot, zoom teaching, auto industry batteries, The Rock, prosecco, fashion advice, etc.

heading to NPR: weather, history, dinosaurs, mardi gras parades, pelosi, movies, parler app, obituary, romance, history

Yeah, I don't know if sports is really that "unique". The news is basically anything one of these websites puts up to capture attention and clicks and show ads. Sports is at a lull right now in USA, but it captures attention well, so people like to report on it.

You think it's a superpower that an animal with an extremely sensitive nose can smell that a biological organism is emitting smells of decay and death? Keep in mind, death is a process and these are advanced dementia patients, they DO have a smell as I have volunteered in the building and met many of the patients (before COVID). This is not new to science, there are human individuals world-wide who can smell diseases, for instance the Scottish woman who a physician proved could smell Parkinson's on testing her sniffing of numerous T-shirts. Biological processes can emit smells, it's really not a superpower.

By the way, in medicine, you don't need to do a randomized controlled trial to be considered a "real study". Do you think the study that found out that HIV was killing gay men in San Fransisco, a case-series study without any trial or randomization, was not a "real study"? Case series and observations are valid real studies, though not gold standards for establishing broad truths.

If you get 20 Oscars and 20 normal cats, feel free to do the RCT, or you can take a moment and do some simple Googling before going full-on skpetic on a situation you don't know anything about.

Thank you for working for our climate -- best of luck!

It seems you're after a more efficient method of collecting CO2, not a long-term storage method for CO2. I think the messaging may get muddled, people may believe you're attempting to lower atmospheric CO2, not just save some energy in CO2 production. To that end, how much CO2 would you actually be "preventing" from this action, and how does it compare to the top-ranked solutions needed on drawdown.org? When it comes to climate, I want the MOST EFFECTIVE solutions, and I don't know if this is low-hanging fruit relative to refrigeration management, diet, transportation, installing renewables, etc.

You claim this "thread" leads to all reason and truth being invalid, which is overreaching, to put it plainly. How do you reckon that all mathematics, the periodic table of elements, the planetary bodies in our solar system, are suddenly invalidated because humans weren't deciding to study them, but were merely following natural behavioral patterns? If we don't have free will, does that invalidate all aliens' civilizations study of universal laws too?

In my view, humans are curious creatures whose natural inclination to study their surroundings led them to discover scientific truths, which exist on a higher plane than our mere thought. Combine this with societal support of scientific activity, and we have a burst of discovery of truth and reason which was hitherto un-revealed to us. Our "free will" and "decision" has nothing to do with 2+2=4 or that Mars is red due to rusty iron, these are simply factual scientific observations which have stood the test of time in science: no theories have invalidated them.

So, our free will is not necessary for the physical laws of the universe to exist. They existed before us and will exist after us. So where do we lose all reason and truth by being merely curious, as opposed to having a homunculous man in our heads telling us what to do at each moment?

Look into meditation practice if you still believe in the switchboard operator pulling all the strings in your mind. I challenge you to find free will in yourself, find something you're actually genuinely choosing. Can you explain why free will allows the random thoughts that crop up in your mind constantly? Those random thoughts dictate our behaviors, the actions of humans; but where are they from? They're random nervous firings that our physical body, physical tongue, physical fingers, are all acting upon, there is no "switchboard operator" choosing anything at any time.

I'll provide some definitions, from Oxford:

individual: "single; separate"; "of or for a particular person"; "a single human being as distinct from a group, class, or family"

free will: "the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion"

From these definitions, we must question whether a single human, Homo Sapiens, can possibly act at their own discretion, without fate or necessity as the cause.

The history of studying free-will is extremely lengthy, everything non-biological that can be said has likely been said. We've been blessed by modern science to have a lot more understanding of organisms and neurology, so we know the "inner workings" better than Descartes or Locke or any of the old Christian theorists.

There is no "you" or "self", that's the illusion. The "self" which exercises "free will", that's just another psychologically constructed phenomenon, just like thoughts and ideas and images. If "you" choose to move your hand, it's really just the environment, your senses, and your brain dictating that movement, your sense of self is there as a feeling. Meditation reveals that this is not necessary, this sense of self can be dispelled if you simply investigate it with focused attention.

The above example is not a good one, it's a bit of a straw man actually. The better one is this: pick a film and think of it in your mind...which did you select? Monsters Inc? Animal House? There is no "you" selecting these films, its just your memory module skimming through films you've heard of and seen, then some "preference" circuit is acting to decide which film to "pick" for this exercise.

Sounds good, may want to tweak the parameters. $500 is a lot to get skin in the game for a small seller, $10 seems good, but then a month is probably not long enough. I buy a lot of tools and machines and gadgets, those are probably best reviewed after 1-2 years of use.

Why does anyone need any product or service? Some things are essential like medical care to ensure survival, shelter, calories, water, etc. But by and large, we are in the habit of eating and using certain unnecessary items, there is no "need" for any specific food or a private jet or a gas-intensive car. A bit of Stoicism in every human would lead to a lot of useful curbing of expensive habits.