65 karma · joined April 1, 2017
Corruption is overwhelmingly an easy scapegoat you can gesture towards and have people agree with you without much effort. If we think there's something that is corruption that isn't covered by the legal code we can agree on what that is and push for it in the legal system. If we think our executives aren't enforcing our legal code we are the ones who elect them. If the problem is that no one cares enough to make the "right" decisions then whining about elites isn't going to do anything.
Like most people I haven't looked into any of this much before the last year so I'm far from knowledgeable here but:
.5 is a surprising number without any additional explanation because it suggests you think this is about as likely as a zoonotic origin (or at least not specifically the result of an accident). Does that probably extend to other viral outbreaks or is it specific to something? My baseline probability would be significantly lower (although non zero because I'm not denying the possibility; the article makes the case that lab safety is a concern worldwide) based on my, admittedly limited, understanding of past outbreaks. Is it the case that you think about as many viral outbreaks were due to lab accidents as not? or maybe this is more specific to coronaviruses or this specific virus? I'm curious how you'd model this, even if informal.
If most of the discussion on an idea is about how people dismiss it or how any evidence is being covered up the idea might not be that strong.
On top of arbitrarily pushing the system in directions, you yourself note that you hide the actual context of the code when you split it up. It might make you feel better in the moment but I don't think it's the right response to feel emboldened by making decisions with less context. Premature abstraction is at the heart of a lot of bad design and complexity.
With even primitive dev tools you can get a lot of the benefits (grouping, naming) with comments and braces. More could definitely be done on this front but dev tool progress is sadly pretty slow. Going this route you can have organization while not throwing away the all-important context of what the code is actually meant to accomplish.
Foreign policy is hard and I don't pretend to know the best way to do it but I think given recent history we have to be more careful about how we try to influence developing nations so that we actually have the effect we want. This might include doing things that could seem unpalatable in the short term.
the approach of "forcing" a foreign country to take on social/political beliefs seems like a very difficult task when the local culture doesn't already support them implicitly. The worst example of this in recent history is probably our(US) interactions in the middle east that in many ways have backfired and made the situation worse by creating economic uncertainty and power vacuums.
I think generally more liberal values become more attractive as economic prosperity. if this is true it seems like a simpler/more effective foreign policy strategy to create economic opportunity for citizens of the foreign country and simply tie an example of the liberal values we want to spread to those opportunities. Then pushes for these sorts of changes would have a much stronger local, and thus more aware of the local situation, base of support.
If the views really are superior it should be easy to derive them independently given examples as your lower level concerns become less of a problem. And if they come to those positions in a more independent way the likelihood that they'll last is much higher.
For beziers you might explicitly evaluate them at time t if you're doing animation of implicitly evaluate them at position x,y if you're rendering them.
Too obvious.