codexjourneys

Agree on the educational impact likely turning out as an utter disaster in the long term. I wish it were more measurable, but the article rightly points out it's hard to quantify effects (lower future income, etc.) that haven't fully materialized yet.

Most salient conclusion for me from the article is that "go early, go hard" like New Zealand is probably the best way to avoid what most countries ended up with: lots of half-effective measures for extended periods of time with bad second-order effects like learning loss, small-business closures, and mental-health declines. After a tough, short lockdown that actually worked, NZ had 18 months of "pandemic essentially doesn't exist" life while the rest of the world was struggling.

But letting those measures go on too long becomes counterproductive; China's zero-Covid rigidity is the most obvious example, but lots of measures dragged on past the point of utility or never made sense (like curfews - as if Covid wears a watch).

Yes, we need to take massive action now with what we have, while also developing future tech like better transport for solar energy. Pushing for further delays based on “future tech will save us someday” isn’t anything I support. It’s disheartening but unsurprising that some factions are framing it as either/or instead of both/and.

Interesting background about Lomborg, thank you!

The problem is threefold. We need: 1. ventilators 2. PPE 3. healthcare personnel (respiratory therapists). In the short term we should train existing doctors, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners in respiratory therapy ASAP. But without PPE they put themselves at risk, and without ventilators the patient may die anyway.

We need all three, and there's a worldwide shortage. That is the bottleneck.

Cool, thanks! I think it's a little different from Kickstarter since with per-creation, supporters are still charged for every creation even if they may not like some of those creations. Whereas if I fund a Kickstarter for a board game, I'm choosing that specific project/creation.

There's also the Internet factor.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of people who started startups would have started bands instead. The music scene was where creativity happened. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg would have started a band.

Starting in the mid/late 1990s, creativity's frontier shifted to the Internet as it grew exponentially, and the music industry started changing as a result of massive free distribution. I think many bands were never started because the people who would have formed them were making web pages and startups instead.

Was discussing this with a friend, why Patreon seems so much more difficult than Kickstarter. Kickstarter has as its premise, "Make this cool thing happen." It's a specific product (usually) with a specific outcome, and contributors may feel invested in achieving that outcome.

Patreon has as its premise, "Support this artist" (in many cases). It's more abstract, not tied to a particular product necessarily, and contributors may feel more like they're donating to someone's rent money rather than bringing a product into reality.

What do you think? Would there be some way for Patreon to tie donations more directly to product creation, or would that undermine the people who are using Patreon?

Okay, I figured there must be some provision for movers but was unwilling to assume - so the old province would cover me if I had some incident in the new province (car accident, heart attack, mega food poisoning, whatever)...

What happens to you if you move and then get in a terrible accident? Does your former province cover you during this in-between residency establishment phase? Do you need to move back to your old province (or be moved back) before the waiting period expires? Or are you completely SOL?

The worst part is that for 20 years (until about 10-15 years ago), anyone stating that maybe saturated fat wasn't so bad was demonized and called anti-science. There seemed to be very little opportunity for reasoned discussion or actual comparison of results in the wild. Demonization of the opposing viewpoint, instead of reasoned discussion and further inquiry, IS the definition of anti-science.

This is definitely a consequence of charging ridiculous tuition prices. £9,000 is not much compared with US tuition prices, either. Students have become customers, and I think it's absolutely driving grade inflation. If I were paying $30,000+ per year for tuition, I also would feel like a customer. It's a natural reaction and a highly negative outcome for academia, where rigor and curiosity should be main drivers instead of A's-for-pays.

Anecdata from a professor I know: Students' parents also feel like customers, because they are often the ones paying the tuition. So they call the university and complain if their child gets a sub-par grade, citing the cost of tuition. Bad incentives all round.

MOOCs as they evolve will be part of the answer and probably could replace large lectures in a pre-college period before students get on campus. Maybe college should be shorter (2-3 years) and focus on small-group seminars that build on what students learned on their own via MOOCs. It could help lower costs to more reasonable levels. Of course universities will fight this tooth and nail because loss of revenue.

I also loved the Mathematical Thinking course, it was the first MOOC I completed and still one of my favorites!

Along these lines, here's an interesting quote about Steve Jobs' focus from a documentary photographer who had access to NeXT:

"...it seems to me that, in general terms for Steve, he was so passionate about the goal and trying to invent something impossible that everyone had to be on this mission to Mars, and if you weren’t on the mission you didn’t need to be here. It was really a focused approach, so it wasn’t about me or you or hard feelings or anyone. It was about the thing and making the thing better."

Read more at: http://nextshark.com/doug-menuez-who-spent-3-years-with-stev...

If they lay off the right people, it's more likely good people would want to go work there. Those good people would be able to make more progress with less unnecessary pushback from people experiencing cognitive dissonance, and the layoffs would slow and ultimately hiring (of more good people) could pick up.

McKinsey isn't going to get them there. That's a move of a dying company. Marissa Mayer needs to do this herself. If she doesn't know who the right people are to keep versus release, that's a bad sign.

Not so sure about this. My understanding is that Steve Jobs would walk around the company and personally fire anyone he believed wasn't doing a valuable job. (EDIT: He didn't hire McKinsey to do this.) He wanted true believers who were adding value ONLY. Not sure that has happened at Yahoo!.

Second, Steve Jobs focused the company around one or two important initiatives at a time. That was probably his greatest value add. He had a phenomenal sense for which projects were the right initiatives. The original Bondi Blue iMac came out pretty quickly after his return -- not quite a year after Steve had been named interim CEO. That's FAST.

Yahoo! needs to be streamlined (remove poisonous/slack elements), focused (one or two key projects ONLY, kill the others) and fast (release the key projects in 2016). They also need to pick the RIGHT projects. To do this, like another commenter said, they need to remember why they love the Internet. Otherwise they're dead.

Watercress is about $2.49 to $2.99 for a bag with four servings in it. That's not prohibitive. A real problem is it's hard to find watercress, and anecdotally I see it more in upscale stores than in regular supermarkets in poor areas.

I suspect the answer has to do with the microbiome and its cumulative response over decades to antibiotics and tiny changes introduced in food (shifts in cooking oils, dairy product additives, even animal feed that then indirectly impacts our own microbiome when we eat meat or eggs or dairy, etc.). The problem is that studies on the microbiome tend to be limited and recent. Long-term studies are especially lacking. What we do have indicates the microbiome may be vital to not just digestion but also our immune system function, emotional well-being and weight.

Probiotics might be helpful here, but in no way are we close to an exact science on the microbiome.

Hypothesis: People will lie on internal surveys more often if they feel either nothing will be done or an honest response could be used against them. I wouldn't put too much stock in the results of those surveys.

Anecdotal support for hypothesis: Have been told firsthand by several people that they lie on these types of surveys and don't think results are truly anonymous.

I'd love to see a broad study of this across companies, conducted by a third-party organization with no affiliation to any company studied.

In general, I'd estimate anything below 4 (on a 1-to-5 scale) on those surveys could indicate a problem. What if "3/neutral" really means, "This actually sucks but I'm not willing to tell you that because I don't trust you"?

I doubt there are many internal surveys showing "tons of unhappy people" unless employees a.) have no fear of company reprisal, for whatever reason; or b.) have entirely given up on the company and are in open rebellion.

It probably also depends on who your manager is - often the biggest determinant of the work environment. A great manager will defend you from corporate b.s., bureaucracy and politics without you even knowing they are doing it.

Let’s be clear: You’re telling me that because I don’t simply accept the results of a clearly biased study at face value, I am biased.

You’re right: I already said my default position is suspicion when dealing with companies that have lied profusely in the past.

I’m going to sign off and stop thinking about why you are pushing your point in multiple places in this thread. Maybe I’ll cook some steak in a stainless steel pan. Subversive, I know :-)

All three authors work for DuPont. What do you expect they will find?

"FRANKLIN D. GRIFFITHa, SUSAN S. STEPHENSa & FIGEN O. TAYFUNa"

"Author affiliations" Footnote a: "a Haskell Laboratory for Toxicology and Industrial Medicine, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Wilmington, Delaware 19898"

Feel free to use Teflon if you like it. I don't like it and don't trust DuPont in general. I'll cook with high-smoke-point oils using cookware I prefer, and take my chances.

I've tried both and like the result from stainless steel and Corningware better. Granted, I was using older-style pans made a decade or so ago. YMMV, though the Teflon is not healthy for high-heat cooking. I avoid it, why bother?

Yes, precursors are toxic. But it's also easy to overheat a Teflon pan when preparing to fry something up, and it's not healthy:

"Use low or medium heat with Teflon skillets and pans. When Teflon-coated cookware is overheated, the cookware releases fumes that may cause flu-like symptoms in humans." http://homeguides.sfgate.com/dangers-scratched-teflon-cookwa...

I prefer other types of cookware, for myself.

Teflon has been known to be toxic for years. I'm not sure why "default trust" is a good position when dealing with companies like DuPont and Monsanto that have been caught lying to the public before. "Default suspicion" seems like the more cautious and logical approach here.

It's been more than a decade since I cooked with Teflon. I use glass, stainless steel, cast iron, or ceramic/enamel (love that old original Corningware from eBay!).

Much like eating real food, it's not hard to switch and the result tastes better.

Extra virgin olive oil isn't good to cook with at high temperatures. I like to put it on food after it's cooked, such as drizzling it over pasta or salad. Light olive oil has a higher smoke point, I think.

I usually cook with sesame oil, ghee (clarified butter), and butter. Sometimes coconut oil too.

The problem is that you aren't considering second-order effects.

Is it better for Greece to give up the euro and return to the drachma? Quite possibly. Iceland successfully rebooted its economy after the financial crisis (with a lot of pain involved) because it was not tied to the euro. Of course, that required a huge amount of willpower and effort (which Greece has not shown yet).

Is it better for the EU and the rest of the world for Greece to give up the euro and return to the drachma? Probably not. Why? Because it sets a precedent for giving up the euro and/or leaving the EU.

Greece is a relatively small country, and the upheaval resulting from its financial recalibration could be fairly manageable.

If Spain or Italy tries to go down the same road, it is a different story. Take a look:

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-15748696

Italy owes France a LOT of money. France owes the UK a lot of money. The UK owes the US and Germany a lot of money.

Greece, as you can see, is a drop in the bucket. It's the precedent that's important.

I've seen this claim several times in connection with different studies. I believe the hugest benefits apply to organisms that eat a restricted number of calories for all or most of their lifespan.

And it's probably not only the number of calories, but also the quality of food that matters. Nutrient-dense, low-calorie diets could be worth a try, but how long could you stick with them?

Giant page of research: http://qualitycounts.com/fpcalorie.html

Although I can't speak to learning two spoken languages simultaneously, learning a language similar to one I already knew (I knew Spanish, tried to learn Italian) was insanely difficult, because my brain couldn't distinguish them enough. It would get in a loop of searching for Italian words and running into Spanish words and then mixing them up.

On the other hand, learning German after already knowing Spanish was much easier -- and it was much easier to see the similarities and differences between the languages, because my brain would find the Spanish phrase while searching for the German one, and vice versa, but wouldn't get stuck in a loop about it.

It's quite possibly a waste if they were not refrigerated along the path from manufacturer to storage facility to store. iHerb ships refrigerated for good probiotics. Not sure about specific strains; I use Garden of Life Raw Probiotics, since they seem to have a good mix of different types and the manufacturer really makes an effort to keep them refrigerated.

I've noticed a decline in memorization capability in my 30s too, and it sometimes takes a little while to remember small details like what I just ate. It's offset by an increase in my ability to make connections between different topics and ideas.

On balance, I'd choose the connection-making brain over the raw-power brain.