di456

> At least this firmly puts to rest the myth that taxes are somehow proportional to the government services you use.

You are confusing "service fees" with taxes. There are various tax regimes. Very few of them are proportional to the services you use.

Prior to the 2016 US election I heard with complete denial that the presidency is a reflection of the sum of our culture.

I was wrong.

This makes me wonder, what if there's actually a narcissism crisis disguised as a mental health crisis?

> So we are probably just one of the first.

We don't really have any way to know that. Considering that there may be as many stars in the sky as grains of sand on Earth, there are many many unknowns.

For another example we don't know for sure if our universe is the only one and it's entirely possible that everything that could ever happen plays out in real time across and infinite number of universes. We don't have any way to physically measure that possibility yet. We only have mathematical theories.

Similar to how Copernicus proposed the heliocentric model, maybe our universe is not even the center of existence?

It is humbling to imagine.

> Russian corruption doesn't generally touch Western governments - the atmosphere is too hostile to it.

Some recent parts of the government welcome the corruption.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-citizens-and-russian-intel...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/us/politics/election-inte...

40mg is a huge dose, no?

I know someone who's had success stopping an in-progress visual migraine with low dose psilocybin.

They tried it based on some published research. Here's one such study. https://n.neurology.org/content/66/12/1920

The base proportion to the height.

Two bricks wide has a 2x wider base.

With python I'd decompose that one-liner into several variables for readability. That probably ends up using more memory than it would otherwise but I generally don't work on systems where that matters much.

Scala was really nice for this syntax when I used it for Spark.

> Apple isn't even a person

Legally, that pile of paperwork gives the Apple corporation some rights of a person. Obviously it is not a living, breathing person in the biological sense. But it is treated as one from a legal perspective.

Should it be? That's a different question. Changing that would probably upend contract law.

IANAL

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

I'll second this too. As a former manager told me, figure out how to scale yourself. Making the end to end development lifestyle easy for peers and partner teams is one way to do that. It could just as easily be called platform or systems engineering with a touch of DevOps.

It's like UX for data people. How to make a cohesive experience among the various tools, scripts, services that people use day-to-day so they can use and maintain datasets efficiently.

Sounds like you are on the right track.

A non-technical benefit is there won't be so much context to keep in your head when triaging data issues in the future.

A database table is very similar to the separation of concerns problem of core software engineering. A table really just is an abstraction for storing and fetching various data points.

Finding the right balance is part art and part science.

It is important, but when the shift to cheap compute and storage hit an inflection point it became possible to build out wide tables that combine the characteristics of facts and dimensions, and real data modeling took a back seat. That possibility led to bias toward moving quickly with less emphasis on making the data model sustainable.

I'm seeing the pendulum start to swing the other way, where the complexity of these scrappy and loosely structured data models is hampering the ability to innovate, and even slowing down the business. The models are often inflexible and hard to maintain with hidden bugs and gotchas.

Just don't tie yourself together by rope while on mountains. One goes down, everyone goes down.

Deep Survival is a great read. I picked that up from it.

Human infants will die without physical touch. We are social creatures by our DNA.

The worst punishment in older times was banishment. It was usually a death sentence.

No, that's crypto. And some parts of AI.

I use an unscientific rule of thumb that 10-100x scaling is about the most to plan for except for exceptional cases. Anything beyond that ends up with overcomplicated bloat for a "tomorrow" problem.

Being able to handle spikes and iterate quickly is probably more important.

Or with enough laws, every law can be applied selectively

Some business area pivots could be into user analytics or marketing analytics. Product management even.

Data engineering could be another path to explore.

I'd view your sister-in-law's certification course as more of a first step than an end. It could open doors but still have to stay relevant with broader skills.

Sadly, citing off topic ChatGTP woes and reducing Americans to a broad generalization is not a sign of intelligence either.

“We are confident that, once we show what the fossil fuel companies knew about global warming and when, and what they did to deny, delay and deceive the public, the jury will not let the fossil fuel companies get away with their reckless misconduct.”

Shop during non-business hours?

I've found that I can shop during business hours fine. And if not during business hours I can shop for what I need in the evenings before stores close. It comes down to time management.

For example, yesterday I took an hour break for lunch and ran a couple errands while I was out. No big deal.

> Not sure what the point is there.

> it's Amazon and its ilk that allow people to be at home all the time, not out running errands.

I was addressing that line

I've started enjoying in-person shopping more lately. It's a way to get out of my WFH bubble and feel that I can get in and out of the stores in about the same time as shopping online with Amazon.

I'd argue that Amazon is benefiting from more people working remotely and is not as much enabling people to be home more. Even without online shopping I'd still prefer remote work.

I am grateful for a remote job. Sometimes being at home for too long I get stir crazy and if I plan my day well I can schedule in time for breaks and walks and feel better. If I had a 45+ minute commute each way again I'd be stir crazy in traffic. No thanks.

The hardest part for me is balancing slack and video conferences. Slack can be useful but it's hard to have more nuanced conversations and make complex decisions. Those really need conversation to make them effective.

A friend recently mentioned that they are on a forced return to office 3 days a week and they spend most of their day on calls with people in other cities and countries. If I had a job I was mildly disinterested in and was forced to commute for no reason, that would nudge me to quietly apply for other jobs. Any company claiming to be climate friendly and forcing people to commute is hypocritical (cough cough Amazon).

If someone wants to be in an office, then accommodate them. Then for everyone else shift the office space budget to the travel budget. Done.

I got the joke but don't see the humor because it perpetuates outdated thinking about the war on drugs.

There's a lot of good science and research coming back around for psychedelics and it'd be a shame for that to get politicized again like it did in the 60's and 70's. It took a long time to undo the harm from that era and it's still somewhat fragile. Basically all research was halted and 50 years of progress was lost because of politics.

An opinion piece written by someone at a NY company doesn't mean everyone in NY shares their opinion. Tribalism is the real problem you are describing.

They have the sum of the same cognitive biases of the input.

It's the classic copy-of-a-copy problem. It's lossy. And not a hallucination any more than any other human spouting off irrelevant or non-factual words.

No surprise. Scale vertically first, then horizontally

The tl;dr is that a lot of addiction comes from unresolved trauma. Drugs, particularly opioids, give the sensation of returning to the mother's womb. They are comforting in the moment but it passes quickly and never quite get back to the satisfaction of that first high.

> And prohibiting drugs is one way of trying to do that.

The war on drugs had tried and failed for decades. All it's done is enrich the cartels, fill prisons with minorities, create an oxycodone epidemic, flood the streets with cheap and deadly fentanyl, and countless other problems.

While the same government "protecting" citizens from harm is corrupt the point of the CIA becomeing drug traffickers on the side [1], making the problem even worse like throwing petrol on a fire.

[1] https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/big-whit...

Prohibition has nothing to do with prevention.