caethan

Harris significantly outspent Trump, particularly in key swing states.

Part of the reason why in particular English & French settlers saw the local Indians as incapable of building the things they saw is because by the time they were settling these areas, the local Indians were massively depopulated and really weren't capable of it anymore. This isn't the case in the Spanish settlement regions because the Spanish got there so much earlier and actually saw the complex societies in their heyday. Bernal Diaz exploring and conquering Mexico in 1521 was not dismissive of the locals' construction abilities! Mexico did depopulate - it didn't reach the same population as it had in the early 1500s until the mid-20th century - but the plagues didn't hit until the Spanish saw what was there.

Relevant article from patio11 on how to fix this problem if you have it: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-r...

The context is more like this: we regularly have internal brainstorming sessions when we run up an interesting or tricky problem, to come up with ideas on how to solve it.

So in the context of an interview, I'm trying to treat the interviewee like a colleague who I'm coming to with a problem I'm having, so we can come up with a solution together. That often involves drawing things out on a whiteboard: not code, but more diagrams to describe the problem. Then we come up with ideas on how to do it, under various constraints that I share.

Usually I have in my pocket 2-3 different approaches that we tried when we did it ourselves, and I'm looking for: can you understand the tradeoffs between these different approaches, do you understand how they work, and are you capable of implementing them to test and cross-compare them?

Scientific computing. We write software to do domain-specific scientific analysis on customers' machines. So we have a diverse set of needs of the specific analyses to do: sometimes we just use algorithms out in the open literature, sometimes we have to develop them ourselves. We've also had substantial work in devops, because we have to release software packages that not-very-savvy academic users can deploy and run on their own wildly-varying machines.

It's interesting work.

Interviewees are encouraged to use Google, code on a laptop rather than on a whiteboard, etc. Sadly, I only get an hour to interview people rather than a week. But I have had people complain about "completely unrealistic problems unrelated to the real work" when the problem is something I literally had to solve 3 months ago.

It's the other way around: the "green = new" is derived from the usage of green timber, where newly cut timber is literally green.

I've heard bitching about some of the interview questions our team asks before, but here's the thing: each of those questions is about a problem our team actually had to solve before, reformulated into an interview-style question. Yes, we've had to use Hamming distances, worry about the scaling (N log N vs N^2) of particular solutions, use error-correcting codes, interesting data structures and all of that. Is that most of the job? No, we do a lot of more boring stuff too, but the algorithms and data structures are definitely a part of it. I don't want someone who can only glue pieces together, developing novel tools to solve the problem is important too.

Compare to needle cases, which were similar womens' tools. Most of them were wooden or bone, but rich women would get fancy ones made of bronze, and pretty commonly be buried with them.

It was found in a woman's grave goods: https://sci-hub.st/10.1007/s00283-013-9403-7

Sewing, spinning, weaving, and knitting tools are fairly common grave goods to find in women's graves: spindle whorls, needle cases, bone beaters, etc. As far as wood vs. bronze, almost certainly survivorship bias. The only wooden objects that survive that long are those that have fallen in bogs, where the anoxic environment prevents rot. Normal wooden grave goods will have rotted away by now.

Plenty of people foresaw it. California spent ~$200m on building up a stockpile of PPE and other medical supplies back in 2006, before Brown cut funding for the program in 2011.

I think we're at the point where public mandates are doing more harm than good. I am disappointed that there are so many people pushing back against simple approval of an effective vaccine because they are worried about an unnecessary mandate being imposed.

Because the largest risk anyone has found with the Pfizer vaccine is of myocarditis in teenage boys.

The risks of Covid to children is, as you say, extremely low. The risk of the Pfizer vaccine to children is even lower.

Right now those "individuals with an underlying complex disability" are not allowed to get vaccinated because the vaccine has not been approved for young children, even with an emergency use authorization.

I think the parents of children with disabilities that make Covid more potentially dangerous for them ought to be allowed to vaccinate their child. Do you disagree?

Here you go, Bernal Diaz del Castillo's account of the conquest of Mexico, written as a soldier in Cortez' company: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32474/32474-h/32474-h.htm

More than 90% collapse in Mexico from 1520 to 1580, mostly from three epidemics. Starting from ~22m, 8m (37%) dead from a 1520 smallpox epidemic, 12-15m dead (~80%) from a 1545 cocolitzli epidemic, and another ~2m dead (~50%) from a 1576 cotolitzli epidemic. Mexican population didn't recover to its previous highs until the 20th century.

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

There's one, at Fort Pitt during the French and Indian war, as documented by multiple letters, as described in your link.

There is exactly one documented case of deliberate attempts to spread smallpox among the Indians, from the British during the French & Indian war.

https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smal...

California regulatory requirements basically shut down drivers owning their own trucks: the cheap old diesel trucks aren't in compliance anymore. So there's a lot of scummy leasing arrangements for the newer more expensive trucks.

But lots of stocks have their spread limited by the subpenny rule, in which case additional HFT in that market is completely socially useless.

But the spread in many-to-most stocks is limited by the sub-penny rule (SEC rules, as of 2005, say you can't have a spread < $0.01) rather than by the supply of market makers in that stock. Extra competition in those markets is negative-sum.

The Amish do not simply reject all technology past a particular date. Instead, they collectively decide on whether their community will use any particular new technology, based on whether they believe it will best serve the needs of the community.

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/09/02/21...

It's really strange seeing the anti-suburban attitudes right after we got a lesson in why relying on communal urban amenities doesn't always work.

We moved to a nice town in walking distance of several parks and small shopping districts in winter 2019. Six months later the shops were all shut or closed for good, and the parks had caution tape all over the playground equipment. They took the swings off the swingsets so the kids couldn't play.

Scott has OCD. Search for "obsessive compulsive disorder" here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/11/going-loopy/

Brain drain from developing to developed countries is far from a clear win. Here's some good links talking about the effect of emigration of Kenyan health care workers (mostly to the UK and the US) on Kenya: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1538589/ https://assets.aspeninstitute.org/content/uploads/files/cont...

Half of Kenyan-trained doctors live and work outside of Kenya. That represents a multi-million dollar direct cost just in the governmental and societal resources used to train those doctors, and a much larger cost to society of the limited health care infrastructure thanks to a loss of so many workers.

Here's the framework that I've found useful for thinking about this in my own life. There's three ways to spend your time: work, rest, and leisure.

Work is all the things you need to do to live your life. This includes your job, errands, housework, etc. Things that you can't give up because they're a necessary part of your life.

Rest is all the things you need to do to be able to do your work. Sleep, food, exercise, and yes, TV & video games for relaxing can fit in here too.

Leisure is everything else - what you do with the time you've got left after working and resting.

The real question for you is: are you playing video games to rest, or for leisure? If they're restful for you, then I don't see the problem. You've got a busy job, a thesis, and n SO that you're all keeping up with. Everyone needs some downtime, so if you're feeling rested and relaxed afterwards, then great. Keep them as a part of your downtime routine. The one thing you may want to think about here is if video games are the best way to rest for <i>you</i>. If you're playing shooters and getting frustrated and angry, that's probably not as effective at relaxing as, say, building a castle with redstone circuitry in Minecraft. Or even cooking a tasty meal or going for a walk.

If you're filling your leisure time with them, then I'd think about it a little harder. Is there anything else you'd prefer to be doing with that leisure time? Leisure time is what you get to use to change yourself - to learn things, to exercise, to make yourself into who you want. So spend it wisely.

And seriously, cut out the commute. I suspect part of the problem may be that you really need all that rest time with video games but resent that you need it. Work from home, change your work hours so you're not commuting during rush hour, find a different job, whatever.

Except that as far as the article describes, the students aren't being charged with a crime, the brokers are (and are pretty unambiguously guilty of it). The students are just losing their visas.

The problem is with the consistent hand-waving between economically efficient - on average we've got more wealth - and we all have more wealth.

Suppose my neighbor has a plot of land that he's not really using - it's mostly idle, he's just got a little garden on it. I know that if I get it, I could produce much more wealth - maybe I'm a skilled farmer and I could grow high-value crops on it. It would be more economically efficient for me to own the farm. We'd produce more wealth collectively that way. But there are several ways to get to that more efficient state: 1) I could buy the land from my neighbor for a fair price. He gets the money from the land, which is worth more than he made from his garden. I get the land and produce lots of wealth, minus the money I paid my neighbor. We're both better off, huzzah! 2) I could steal the land from my neighbor. He's worse off - he no longer has his garden at all. I'm much better off - I get the land and I don't have to pay for it anymore!

Economically efficient moves by definition mean that there's enough wealth to compensate everyone who loses. A lot of the anger about globalization is people being pissed because they're losing - their job or their benefits or whatever - and the folks who are winning respond by telling them that it's economically efficient so they'll just have to suck it up. It's one thing to say "Hey, change is inevitable, but at least we're all getting wealthier!". It's another thing to say "Hey, change is inevitable, and we're getting way more than you're losing!"