dabbledash

What’s missing? People in their 40s and 50s have a lower basal metabolic rate.

I think it would be a meaningful statement if 90% of advice about saving was some variation of “how to save money without making a budget!”

People seem to desperately want some trick to losing weight that isn’t “eat less food.” It won’t be forthcoming. You can’t trick your body into losing weight. We are adapted to scarcity, but food is not scarce.

Exactly. “Benefits the few” is just a negative / populist spin on “protects minorities.”

Privacy benefits the few, openness benefits the masses = openness allows the masses to ferret out and punish deviance.

The idea is that treatment also has risks and false positives are an issue.

If you gave a mammogram to every 20 year old woman, you would end up doing a large number of unnecessary biopsies and you’d find almost no real cancer. In the end, you’d lose more people than you would save.

Or that’s the idea. I’m no expert in this but it makes sense to me conceptually.

I’m against treating adults like children, but I’m ok with treating children like children.

But it’s not a call for coercion.

People can’t be trusted to make decisions for themselves because cigarettes / alcohol / social media / sugar / pornography is addictive. And since their bad choices have negative consequences on third parties because of health care costs / bad politics / family breakdown, we should get to tell them what to do.

I haven’t read the article yet, so i’m going to bet now that there is no direct link in the article to the text of any bill they’re characterizing this way.

If i’m wrong, i’ll donate $10 to NPR.

ETA: unsurprisingly, my money was safe. But at least they linked to the Juneteenth bill. That’s rare enough. I think it should be considered a bare minimum in modern reporting to link to the original sources.

This is like saying “it’s just metadata, what could it reveal.”

As for heart rate and temperature, having this info over time can show:

When were you sleeping, active, potentially emotional?

When did a woman ovulate? Is she pregnant now? Did she have a miscarriage? Or maybe an abortion?

I think the only move is to answer it honestly. It isn’t even a trick really; it gets to the heart of the matter.

Yes.

I said it about the Patriot Act and I say it about this.

The only thing that keeps them from harming you is your power relative to them. Handing them more power only increases the probability that they will abuse what powers they do have.

I thought the election of Trump would disabuse people of this idea that it’s smart to hand more and more power to central authorities. But at this point I think it’s hopeless. People just want the state to be Daddy, and assume or hope that its power will always be wielded by people they like against people they don’t.

If there’s a way to make it impossible for the government to use facial recognition to monitor people other than legally banning them doing so, it’s hard to imagine it.

The problem is that constant surveillance of people makes exerting power over them trivial.

I think it’s one thing for a person who is struggling with depression to think that life as a member of the elite in the richest country ever is too much to bear.

It’s something else for The Atlantic to publish that view as if it is non-pathological. It seems to me the Atlantic thinks this is a view a large percentage of its well heeled readership is going to sympathize with.

I think there’s this disconnect where proponents of EVs are too focused on what people should want rather than what they do want. It’s pretty clear from people’s purchasing habits that many if not most are not trying to maximize efficiency when they buy a car. I think the person below who said people are paying for “optionality” when they buy a car is absolutely right. I don’t want to have to rent a car to go on trips, or rent a truck to go to Lowe’s, and I don’t care what someone else thinks I need. That said, I think electrics are very obviously the future and have big advantages. I’m excited about the lightning, and expect that range, etc are just going to keep getting better.

I wonder if most families with an electric car have a second car with an ICE.

I can see having one car that’s really only good for local driving, but if I were considering whether to go all electric “this car can handle 90% of what your old car could do” doesn’t sound like a great pitch.

Hopefully the HOA can’t just leverage unlimited power by voting to give itself that power.

Why do people keep including this Jones and Okun list in things if they want to be taken seriously?

Saying that “individualism” and “worship of the written word” are white seems pretty fucking racist to regular people.

But if you assume the main thing special about this year was the virus and strategies aimed at mitigating it, you can still compare overall outcomes between jurisdictions. If tight lockdowns decrease COVID deaths but increase other deaths enough to compensate then they didn’t achieve anything. It would be valuable to know the exact breakdown but you don’t have to.

That’s why overall excess deaths are a better measure. You really can’t game them.

Are pipelines something we invented after the internet? Have we lost the knowledge we used to support infrastructure before the 90s?

Usually when I say that I can’t do something I mean it’s not within my power to do it.

The author pits private charity against government redistribution and criticizes the effective altruism movement for focusing on the former and distracting from the latter.

But it seems like there’s some question begging going on. Global poverty has dropped a lot over the last 50 years, and I don’t think it was because of private charity or government transfers. I could be wrong though. I just would like to have seen this point defended more instead of just asserted.

Definitely a good read though. Thanks for sharing.

Do they compare it against wine with the ethanol removed?

It really feels like we’re experiencing a rebirth of puritanism.

Yes, alcohol is worse for your health than no alcohol. That’s almost certainly true even for “moderate” drinkers. People do it for pleasure. A “case against alcohol” that doesn’t address this very real benefit is unlikely to have any impact, except with people who have decided that pleasure itself is suspect at best.

>> “ Maybe somebody out there truly thinks Green Eggs & Ham shouldn't be stocked because it glorifies exploiting animals for their meat and eggs.”

Maybe we’ll get there. In my lifetime censors have been mostly concerned with childrens’ books with supernatural themes and more recently lgbt stories. I’d guess that’s still where most of the library “book banning” is focused.

This specific thread is about public libraries. I definitely don’t want public librarians to see their job as an avenue for expressing their views.

But for the rest of it, I get what you’re saying. I definitely want to live in a world where there are Christian booksellers selling their curated collections, and left wing revolutionary bookstores selling theirs. That only adds to diversity of expression. On the other hand, if I started to see large numbers of previously neutral purveyors of books saying they wouldn’t carry anything that offends the church I’d criticize that. I don’t want to live under a new puritanism, even if everybody forwarding it is entirely within their rights to do so.

So, the librarians in these cases are so averse to controversial material that they remove it without even being asked?

Do you think they won’t be pulled from libraries?

I’m looking forward to Banned Book Week this year. It’s always interesting to see what small percentage of people are serious about their principles.