bzbarsky

Yes, the definition of "fact" in "findings of fact" is "there is a factual answer, but we do not know what it is, so we have to guess".

Yes, it might be better if jurors were all acquainted with Bayesian reasoning and it would definitely be better if things like expert testimony and so forth came with confidence estimates.

And yes, "beyond a reasonable doubt" is pretty qualitative.

My point was that if you are expecting your jurors to have a deep understanding of the law, you are definitely doing it wrong.

One principled solution would be to apply the rule to everyone you interact with.

In practice that's likely quite difficult.

Why was the jury required to understand the law? That's not a reasonable expectation for random people off the street.

In the US, juries typically decide questions of _fact_ that are not already agreed upon by both parties (i.e. are in dispute). Judges handle questions of law.

If the XHR is same-origin then you control that text anyway, so know what it is (and there is no OPTIONS anything going on), and if it's cross-origin then the text results are not exposed by default (unless the server jumps through the other CORS hoops to expose them). The OPTIONS bits are not relevant to this part.

No, that sentence looks correct: if you treat bitcoin transaction fees as revenue, then you compare to Visa's revenue, which was $24.1B.

I've heard that as a story about Westminster, which makes me suspect the whole thing is an urban legend...

The thing XHR added was:

1) POST.

2) Of arbitrary content.

3) With an arbitrary Content-Type header.

You don't get an OPTIONS for the sort of XHR request that you could do with an <img> tag (always GET). You don't get an OPTIONS for the sort of XHR request that you could do with a <form> tag (GET or POST). You only get OPTIONS if one of the following is true:

* Your request method is not GET/HEAD/POST

* You set a header value for a header other than Accept, Accept-Language, Content-Language, or Content-Type.

* You set Content-Type to a value other than "application/x-www-form-urlencoded", "multipart/form-data", or "text/plain".

* You have upload listeners on the XHR upload.

* You use ReadableStream in the request.

Position-dependent code can be copied in _physical_ memory as long as the _virtual_ addresses (which is what you observe) don't change.

So yes, the mechanism you posit exists, and its the virtual memory manager.

The FDA has approved 13 test kits for at-home use with a self-collected sample, according to https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-covid-19-and...

Germany has approved a much larger number of test kits for use, per https://antigentest.bfarm.de/ords/f?p=110:100:4793921863454:::::. It was >50 as of August 2021 according to https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/08/te..., including from American companies that the FDA has not approved.

I suspect that the supply-restriction effects of the approval situation go a long way toward explaining the pricing differences...

In a lot of social circles, the word "diverse" has undergone significant semantic narrowing. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/language-race-sem... is a decent discussion of the phenomenon.

It does mean the word means totally different things to different people. That may make it a good or bad word to use in a mission statement, depending on your goals.

> The us doesn't have centralized land registries.

Like any statement about the US, "it's complicated".

For example, in Massachusetts there are two types of real estate: recorded and registered. See https://www.deeds.com/articles/understanding-the-difference-... for a quick rundown.

In some cases, the property that goes with a single house will actually be made up of two bits of land, one of which is recorded and one of which is registered. In other cases it's all recorded or all registered.

Now this is not a nationwide centralized registry, it is a state-wide registry within Massachusetts, and my understanding is that the sort of litigation you could get for recorded land does not happen for registered land, because transfer of registered land is already a Land Court decision.

Key quote from the above link's description of registered land:

    As the current state of title is sequentially updated
    by the registration of future transactions, it embodies
    a certificate of title that not only evidences title,
    but in fact guarantees title and is subject only to the
    exceptions provided by statute and matters of federal law.

The very fact-check you link to says:

> industry experts said that some owner-operators sought work elsewhere. Some fleets, too, chose to stop doing business with owner-operators in California.

where "stop doing business" is a link to an article about people doing just that.

And the "exemption" you mention is a temporary injunction that may be lifted at any time, which is not conducive to a stable business relationship.

I'm not sure what you mean by "those people", but the actual cutoff where you start having problems with people being extremely bored comes well before you hit one in a million; it's closer to one in a thousand, in my experience.

Which means that the NYC public schools (the subject of this conversation, recall) have ~1000 kids like that right now.

Now their various "gifted" programs do take more kids than that; the bar for such things is often at the 95th percentile, not the 99.9th.

How do you feel about calling William Jefferson Clinton "Bill Clinton"?

That is, was "Johnny" something his friends called him, or what he called himself in general when introducing himself to people? I'm getting the impression it was more the latter.

A lot of public schools in MA did just that. Our school district had two cohorts, one of which was in school Mon, Tue, Thurs, Fri one week, the other the next week, alternating. Fully remote Wednesdays, ostensibly to do cleaning/sanitizing. Parents could also opt for their kids to be fully remote, and some kids (e.g. those whose parents were teachers, not necessarily in our district) were in school full-time, except Wednesdays.

It was definitely much better than remote-only.

Context: have been doing remote software work for 13-18 years (depending on whether you want to count part-time work). Had kids in fully remote school spring 2020, hybrid for most of 2020-2021 school year, fully back to school since spring 2021.

Remote work as a junior is _very_ hard, for most people. Even worse as an intern.

Remotely mentoring a junior is likewise pretty hard: you have to build in more structure than you would if you're sitting next to each other, and it requires more remote-awareness discipline on the part of the junior, which they may not have yet. Remotely mentoring an intern is pretty impossible in most cases. Taking on interns is something I have not really done, because it would not be fair to them...

For learning, remote learning in kindergarten with the tools we had last year is an absolute shit-show (starting with the fact that the kids can't read yet, so even communicating what they should be doing to them can be quite difficult). Not even the most self-motivated kids can make a lot of progress in that environment. And the kindergarten teachers I talked to completely hated it. They had to invest a lot more time than usual, for worse outcomes than usual. Of course these were teachers who cared about doing their job. :)

Remote learning in late middle to high school (think 13+) still has obvious challenges (science labs? access to equipment? a quiet space for the student to work at home?), but it's a lot closer to viable than kindergarten. The most self-motivated kids can do OK. Everyone else does somewhat worse than they do in-person, not least because they are sitting there at a device with endless temptation even more at their fingertips than in class in terms of social media and whatnot. Doing all the homework electronically can be a PITA compared to writing on paper (e.g. for geometry), but that may not be an inherent feature of remote learning.

In between, it's a gradient from the complete insanity of K to the sorta-maybe-viable-if-we-have-to of high school. Basically, remote stuff requires a lot more maturity and self-discipline, both for school and work...

I love working remote for various reasons, but there are plenty of times I wish I could just hop into the same room as some of my co-workers and sort things out on a big shared blackboard; the tech for this is just not there yet in practice. I would never claim that remote work is always best, or for everyone.

So maybe it's just selection bias, in terms of what you see on HN? Takes a lot longer to type something like the above than "remote work is the best"...

"Centering yourself at the expense of the many others who contributed to the production and distribution of the book. Many of whom are PoC, you racist pig."

Seriously, intelligent people who want to find fault with something can usually do it, given a flexible-enough fault-finding toolset. Which we have.

> and that you should be doing only stuff you enjoy

This seems like quite the assumption.

My baseline assumption for a functional relationship would be that the partner that has the least time to help with housework would try to pick up the parts of it that the other partner least enjoys.

On the one hand, yes of course the economy is all about specialization and then exchanging the fruits of specialized production between people. This last can happen via money, or barter, or a dictator (benevolent or not) confiscating everything and redistributing it, or some mix of the above, and maybe other methods.

One of the hard problems here is what to specialize in and to what extent. This is a hard problem to solve even in a static economy, and even harder if circumstances keep changing...

The "standoff" description seems to assume a static economy. If circumstances change, maybe we as a society need a grocer for only 4 hours a day but could use an extra half-shift truck driver. But how to discover that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_Stat... sort on third column. A bunch of places in the US have city/county taxes that bring the sales tax above 10% even though the state tax is not.

Just for places I've been in the somewhat recent past, Seattle and Chicago both had 10%+ rates.

That conflates VAT rates and sales tax rates. The two tax structures are very different, and a comparable VAT has a higher nominal rate than a sales tax, because the taxable amount is typically smaller.

I looked up this law, fwiw: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/pennst01.asp . The actual provision is that non-residents of Pennsylvania could not keep slaves in the state for longer than 6 months. Unless those non-residents were "members of congress, foreign ministers [or] consuls".

The rules were considerably more complicated for Pennsylvania residents; the law basically grandfathered in existing slaves owned by Pennsylvanians and provided for a decades-long slow abolition as the children of existing slaves reached the age of 28.

It's interesting that the law exempted members of congress (and representatives of other countries, possibly for similar reasons) but not the president.

I really wouldn't assume those are mutually exclusive, based on my experience with survesy, but I agree that 20% is likely smaller than the actual number here. And 14% is an absolute lower bound which assumes that no one checked both "charge and pay off" and "pay cash", which is clearly an unrealistic assumption.

Even 14% is much higher than I would wish for answers to this sort of question, of course.

Anyway, if I had to read the tea leaves I would guess the "real" number is somewhere in the ~30% range based on EF5A and EF5B (EF5B was only asked if the respondent answered they would pay all bills in full for EF5A). That is, 22% of the respondents are having trouble paying existing bills in full (though what that means is another complex question, I bet) and another 11% (14% of 78%) would have trouble doing it if they had an unexpected $400 expense. That gets us to 33%; some of those might be able to recover from the $400 expense over the course of a month or three by temporarily running a small credit card balance and then paying it off, but it's not going to be too many I expect.

Which is pretty horrible. Not 47% horrible, but horrible.

Well, they might still be people in a position to significantly affect the quality of the slave' lives. Which should not be conflated with "slave owner".

So to be clear, there were two separate sets of slaves involved:

1) The ones owned by George Washington himself. He did not free these while alive; he did have a will that said that once Martha died they were free. That is, he did not free them until he (1) made use of their labor himself and (2) ensured that what he viewed as his financial obligations to Martha upon his death were satisfied. Obviously this is not a hard-line abolitionist stance, and I do wonder what he would have done if he had living children when he died. As it was, he just had living step-grandchildren (kids of Martha's son from her previous marriage; the son had died earlier and George and Martha had raised his kids).

2) The ones owned by the Custis estate. Those could not be freed unilaterally by either George or Martha. They were inherited by the above-mentioned step-grandchildren when Martha died.

What would happen for people in set 2 if they were in Philadelphia for more than a year is a legal question I don't have an answer for... The most plausible way to reconcile the various legal bits I can think of is that they would be free but then Martha (or George? family property law in 1700s Virginia is not my strong suit) would owe restitution to the Custis estate for the lost value or something like that?

> they would probably start by freeing their own slaves.

Depends on the meaning of "own". Quoting from https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/martha...

> After George and Martha Washington married in 1759, she took many of these people with her to Mount Vernon. As property of the Custis estate, they could not legally be freed or sold, and were inherited by the Custis heirs upon Martha Washington’s death.

In this case, Martha Washington owned the rights to the labor of the people involved until she died, but did not own the people themselves; the Custis estate did.

(Now what she would have done if she did own them outright is a separate issue, of course. Nothing suggests she would have freed them.)

The legal structures for RSUs are pretty clear, and they are counted as ordinary income when they vest.

The particular shares involved _could_ have used a different legal structure, but that's not my understanding based on the articles I've seen about this.

But even in your hypothetical it would not all be capital gains. It would be ordinary income for the value of the shares at the point of the grant, and capital gains for the appreciation since then.

> 47% of Americans cannot meet a $400 emergency expense.

As I pointed out above, this does not seem to be a correct interpretation of the actual survey data involved.

> You deny their poverty?

Yes, given that the claim is based on a misrepresentation (or, more charitably, misunderstanding) of the actual survey data.

I do not deny that there are plenty of people in the US who are in terrible financial shape and really would be thrown for a loop by a $400 expense. They do not make up 47% of the survey population.

The other interesting question that I do not have an answer to is whether the survey sampled individuals or households, and hence how to translate the survey percentages to population (of non-dependent adults?) percentages.

That "47% can't sustain an unexpected $400 expense" conclusion does not follow from the actual survey data involved, as far as I can tell. See https://www.cato.org/blog/it-true-40-americans-cant-handle-4... for some details (yes, you may not trust the source), or the actual response data at https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2018-appendix-b-... questions EF3, EF5B, EF6B if you want to do your own analysis. The only way to get numbers in the range "47%" out of that data is to add up _all_ the choices other than "put it on my credit card, which I pay off in full" and "just pay cash" in the EF3 responses. But that's an odd thing to do, given that respondents were instructed to select all the methods they would use, not just one method.

> we need to be recycling only aluminum and cardboard

And glass?