The surgeon general also said that Trump — an obese, sedentary senior — is healthier than him. He doesn’t seem terribly concerned with credibility.
4,857 karma · joined January 13, 2017
When it's a forced situation it's not something people love.
Random anecdote: I was involved with an office move once where we (a relatively small org) were choosing how to layout the new office. One individual was a fervent advocate that we needed a hip, cool open office for all that wonderful synergy, etc. So in the new space we made a hip, open space, and then classic cubicles, and everyone put in private requests where they wanted to be.
100% of the people chose cubicles. The person I mentioned chose probably the farthest away, most private cubicle.
It's not a particularly unique situation, but it's just another example that people are often full of shit. When we're imposing on other people some ideas can sound better, especially if they're trendy.
As to productivity, the majority of jobs are bullshit jobs. Reddit, HN, Slashdot in the old days have their heyday during the "work" day in the respective zones. If people achieved 5% productivity they would be more productive than they normally are in many cases.
What people are complaining about is that previously these companies did buy backs. Boeing did buybacks (when they were profitable, though they cancelled them when the 737 MAX disaster began). The airlines did buybacks. Etc.
People are complaining that if these companies all sat on enormous war chests they wouldn't need help now. But that has never happened and will never happen like that because it would be ludicrously inefficient for the market at large.
A company can issue new shares and raise money when they need it.
A company can buyback shares when they have extra money they can't efficiently use (see: AAPL, MSFT, GOOG).
There is absolutely nothing nefarious about this mechanism, and if tax treatments vary blame the government (don't hate the playa, etc).
Buybacks are only a problem when cash-poor companies do buybacks. Either they're depleting a small contingency reserve, or they're even utilizing debt to do it.
Only they do. The Bionic chips are ridiculously performant, and are bound to have a much wider range with even moderate cooling.
The Bionic chips aren't cheating to a win. They win GeekBench, and virtually any other cross-platform activity that you can throw at them. As I mentioned in another post, my iPhone 11 absolutely lays waste to my laptop with an i7-7700HQ processor at the JetStream 2 benchmark. Now this is a JavaScript benchmark that runs on completely different software stacks / OS / etc (my i7 running Windows 10, Chrome 80, etc), but it is layers and layers of dependencies on the performance of the platform. And my big beefy i7 is beaten by a tiny little mobile processor. It is quite remarkable.
It's a blazingly fast little processor. We would probably have seen them use them in other hardware sooner if Apple wasn't always suspicious that Intel was sandbagging in some way and was ready to wow the industry.
Yes. Of course there are going to be edge conditions where one or the other are going to shine particularly well, but overall the performance is going to be close, if not giving a nod to the Apple device.
This is the reason there have been wide expectations that Apple would move their desktop/laptop platforms to their own chips, and if rumors are true that will be next year. In a situation where their own chips had credible heat dissipation and wouldn't be subject to thermal throttling, it would be very impressive. I mean it's already spectacularly impressive, but it would be quite dominant with real cooling.
Apple needs to be careful, though, explaining their patience. There has always been the potential that Intel comes out with a game changer.
Of course in such discussions everyone is going to discount whatever benchmarks are used. Yet we've seen this in benchmark after benchmark, at generalists tasks that annihilate any trick instruction. Out of curiosity I just ran JetStream 2 -- it yields a 81.6 score on my i7 laptop, and 153 on my iPhone 11. The iPhone with incredibly poor heat dissipation.
The ARM / x86 / x86_64 / CISC / RISC things are all abstract higher level notions now and aren't the reason. Apple's team has just proven astonishingly good at designing chips. Which quite honestly I thought would turn out otherwise, and Apple would end up begging the industry for whatever the new hotness was.
Not everyone should work from home. A lot of people don't like it. A lot of people need the in face connections. Working from home has lots of downsides that have been covered on here and everywhere many, many hundreds/thousands of times.
But a lot of people don't need to go into an office, at least not every working hour of every day. A lot of positions don't. A lot of people thrive fully working from home, some working part time from home and other times in the office, or a cafe, or whatever.
But how these discussions always go is the no-work-from-home crowd effectively saying that no one should work from home because they personally don't enjoy it.
People can be deeply illogical when it comes to personal protection. I did a summer stint during college with a factory, assembling some part of an air conditioner system for cars. This was done with huge, incredibly loud machines. Fiberglass. Etc.
The company offered ear plugs, eye protection and masks. No one used them. There was a 0% utilization rate. It was bizarre. I did, however, and earned snarky comments, critical suggestions, and lots of sideways glances. People really seemed to feel that my concern for myself made the threats more real.
I'd like to say that when I left everyone had followed the path I blazed, but it was the same as it always was. People still sabotaged their own health and hearing to avoid looking "paranoid".
"Of course we know it works for them"
How does this anti-logic make any sense? Do you think the masks have a sensor that turns off the "works" bit if it's on the face of a medical professional or not?
This is bit like demanding to see research that gravity has an impact on alpacas. We know fundamentally how gravity has an effect on mass, so it follows. Just as we know the fundamental filtering ability, and contagion spread limiting, of masks, including even surgical masks. We know that the CDC is telling health workers that don't have masks to even use a bandana wrap, as not only does it stop face contact it has some limited utility in stopping the tiny droplets of liquid that are one of SARS-CoV-2's vectors.
Right. No one has ever studied contagions among the community at large and the effect of masks. When you hear people say there is no evidence, this is what they are referring.
"is not thought to be any more protective than not wearing one"
This is taking that claim too far, and is seldom what they're saying. Or rather never what they are saying.
Early on there were PDAs that discouraged masks because a) there is a weird social effect in much of the West where people get panicky, and somehow view someone else wearing a mask as increasing the odds, or at least the reality, that they instead will get sick, b) to discourage personal buyers competing with medical buyers, c) because the odds of coming into contact with a SARS-CoV-2 carrier was very low, whereas it's high to very high for medical professionals.
We need to discard with that bullshit. We know with overwhelming evidence that masks work -- that's why medical professionals wear them -- and even the lowly surgical mask has the same effectiveness blocking pathogens in as they do out, especially aerosol pathogens like this one.
And of course we know that people can be spreading this without symptoms, so it would be a massive win just for that.
As supplies normalize and manufacturers ramp up, we're quickly going to be at a place where most in the West will be wearing a mask of some fashion, and it will be officially encouraged. This whole weird anti-mask paranoia will have cost lives.
Masks aren't a panacea, of course, They should be properly worn and rotated. Add that they increase the effort the lungs have to exert, especially N95 masks, so in a unfortunate irony people with compromised lungs -- the most vulnerable to COVID-19 -- have the most difficulty using masks.
I'll be more vigilant in getting it in the future.
There are so many axis (axes) on which we can improve.
Rethink doors with pull handles and common surfaces in trafficked areas (Union Station in Toronto has these all over the place. Hundreds of thousands of people and you're pulling common surfaces constantly).
People wearing masks when they aren't feeling well or even if just that they're a bit worried, without it being a social wrong. Despite the social pressure on masks, I have noticed a huge uptick in people wearing masks here in Ontario.
People staying home when they're sick. People having appropriate behavior when they are (even with a "cold").
And most contentious, we as a people just don't need to travel nearly as much. Aside from the environmental cost, many Western countries are particularly susceptible to these outbreaks because everyone is travelling everywhere constantly. For that meeting that could as easily have been an email. Etc.
Rational readers click back and move on. You end up just preaching to the choir.
This particular complaint is paradoxical because Apple birthed web apps, and has done more than anyone to make them a reality. Unfortunately they remain a very rare beast -- extraordinarily rare -- and are dwarfed by the privacy concerns of people using iOS just to browse. So the team dealt with that. Seems a fairly obvious pros and cons analysis.
Maybe they'll add an exception for installed to desktop webapps.
There is a difference, or at least there conceptually was, between posting your life story and all of your thoughts on your central LinkedIn profile, versus having two dozen different "blogs" of sorts over the years, Steam accounts, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, usenet groups that come and go and we think of as ethereal. When you see all of that stuff pulled together it could be deeply unsettling.
Of course that was foolish -- eventually networking, storage, and computation would allow for everything to be ingested, and facial identification would greatly assist in pulling it together -- but it seemed dystopian at the time.
I didn't say that, but okay.
In the widespread expectation of personal freedoms, however, it's harder to implement draconian controls without evidence it's clearly needed and of obvious benefits. Autocratic societies will always have the advantage in such situations because you can stomp the boot down at a moment's notice with little resistance.
It's also easier when your country is a homogeny with extremely few immigrants, extremely few travelers, etc. For a country like Canada or the United States to do what Taiwan could do, with literally millions to tens of millions of citizens returning from overseas, is logistically in a different universe.
And let's be clear that those situations are rare. "But it's just like Compaq because..." -- whatever that stupid noise was. Yeah, I'd rather be "Compaq" in that stupid analogy 99.9% of the time.
Taiwan was relatively recently an autocracy. It still can resort to its historical behavior overnight. In the West the sort of actions that Taiwan took absent an emergency are politically unpalatable.
This is a political/ideological reality. Comparing that with empires that have lost their way is intellectually devoid of any basis and just seems incredibly lazy.
From a purely functional perspective it's worth noting that much of the West has a much closer intertwining with China than Taiwan does. This seems counter-intuitive -- China is right beside it, after all -- but multiples more Chinese nationals live in Canada than Taiwan. There were magnitudes more flights between the US and China (purely from a flight # perspective, and certainly much larger from a passenger perspective) than between China and Taiwan. That Taiwan has been somewhat spared thus far is partly explained by this reality.
Masks protect the wearer. This is blatantly obvious and scientific reality. Messages to the contrary are absolute propaganda (for instance a common line is "there is no evidence to show protection for civilians"[1] --- because there has never been a study for that case. Yet it's a specious, absurd claim because we know the masks are protective).
Yes, masks are in short supply. This doesn't make misinformation acceptable (including the absurd, anti-reality claim that unless you're perfectly trained and certified perfectly fitted it is "pointless", which is just ridiculous noise). People already touch their face hundreds to thousands of times a day, so the other fear mongering "you'll adjust it" is another bit of nonsensical noise.
As supplies ramp up and we have to return to some semblance of normal society, masks will not only be seen prevalently, they'll be encouraged as one mechanism of controlling spread. And at the time it'll be interesting how all of the propagandists change their tune.
[1] Excluding the evidence in front of our eyes where countries where mask use is prevalent are seeing little spread.
People who need it for medical conditions are finding it impossible to find. Not sure how large the production is.
Any treatment that is found to actually be effective in real studies is pretty clearly going to be nationalized, recreated by countries around the globe, and mass produced overnight.
A number of zero-medical-experience personalities have become mini-celebrities with their boosting of it. For those who saw the movie "Contagion", their behavior is shockingly similar to the Jude Law character and its boosting of Forsythia. Some of these people are active on HN, and it's amazing how often absolute trash science is heralded like it's some suppressed truth.
A few days back Trump was retweeting one such huckster. A guy who has repeatedly tried to recreate his own Wikipedia page (to be deleted again for non-notability). Who has a pretty standard hustler-and-exploiter bio. Now he's claiming that he's at the forefront of "working with companies" to get this magical treatment to the streets. It is deplorable.
I mean...it seems likely that some of the boosters who have been astroturfing it do actually have a stake.
(literally a story about how a light personnel carrier became a pseudo-MBT)
Though 0.5% is 2 order of magnitude less than 50%. Not to mention that the plague had a mortality rate between 1 - 15%...
This is incredible. Not only do you start with an "upper bound" less than one-half the accepted value, you then toss in a "3-4 order of magnitude" reduction, which is so fantastically impossible that there has clearly been zero actual thought. Just rhetoric. Elon Musk, is that you?
Actual medial professionals are seeing that even tiny spread in a community the healthcare system becomes absolutely overwhelmed. Hence all of the emergency declarations. The Internet intelligentsia would like us all to believe that millions are walking around with it, and the fact that you can trace individual branches and the horrifying results is just a remarkable coincidence happening throughout the globe.
No, this isn't the plague. At the same time anyone who seriously compares this virus to the cold has started in a completely broken, intellectually dishonest and dangerous place. Add that to the silly claims about death rates...
As to investment opportunities, this is an incredibly lazy, zero-value observation -- yes, in the future the market will grow. Nobody thinks otherwise. But right now the market has lost some 35% off a frothy, already-in-danger high, and ahead of us are heroic government responses and a lot of economic disruption. But yeah, at some point it's going to hit bottom, and if someone is willing to churn on limited returns for a while it'll eventually pay off. You could say that in every downturn throughout history.
Gun deaths, drunk driving, terrorism, opioid deaths, suicides -- just compare them to the natural death rate and call it a day. I mean, those ones all pale compared to COVID-19, so apparently they're complete non-issues.
What is the false comfort is people's belief that noting this ensures their own safety. My comment was that underlying conditions afflict the vast majority of us, yet people are taking the news as if it means these people all had stage 4 cancer or something and were already on death's door.
Elevated blood pressure, childhood asthma, obesity, diabetes
High blood pressure alone captures 1/3rd of the public, and it qualifies as a underlying condition. 1/2 of the public has "cardiovascular disease". It goes on and on.
It just seems like at this point people are just trying to comfort themselves. A 51 year old gentleman near me passed very quickly from COVID-19 and the report claimed he had a pre-existing condition. Later the wife was interviewed and she described him as completely healthy...but he had bronchitis when he was a child.
To be necessarily negative, this sort of product has appeared countless times. It fills a need that people just don't have. I have four kids, a wife, a dog, a skinny pig and a bearded dragon. I can internalize shopping lists, as does my wife. It is incredibly rare that we even send reminders to each other of things. The idea of creating and managing an inventory system is just a complete non-starter.