finite_jest

Not in the sense that they are being removed from the school libraries, but that might happen in the future. There are other instances of books being removed from libraries, or removed from the required reading lists, but this isn't one of them.

Link to the inquiry: https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/965725d7f01b8a25...

EDIT: I learned of one instance of books already being "temporarily" removed by a school board [1] triggered by this inquiry.

[1]: https://www.granburyisd.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&Dom...

They are not removed from school shelves. This is not even a proposal for them to be removed from school shelves. The title is misleading. Please see my other comment above.

Some State Rep has inquired about these, so is true that it's plausible that some of the books in the list may be targeted in the future, but that hasn't happened yet.

This is kinda misleading, and the title is very editorialized. I think the link should be changed to the original Texas Tribune article which provides some context: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/10/26/texas-school-books-r...

This is a list of books which a member of Texas House of Representatives (Matt Krause) has inquired about from the Texas Education Agency (supposedly at least in part with respect to Texas's version of the "no critical race theory in schools" laws).

This is just pure speculation, but maybe it's because of same reason the Nigerian scammer emails have fishy wording and poor spelling. [1] It works as some kind of a filter, the scammers don't want to waste time on anyone but the most credulous targets.

Similarly, maybe some shady LinkedIn recruiters are looking for people who don't ask many questions. Or maybe they want to filter for people who aren't so "shameless" to expect the salary to be openly discussed for a job. /s

[1]: https://archive.ph/20200531034340/https://www.businessinside...

I took the liberty of changing the original title a little bit. IMO, the original was slightly ambiguous and clickbaity: "Schools Drop 'To Kill A Mockingbird' From Reading List After Race Complaint"

Sure, that's one solution and an interesting suggestion. In this particular case, however, we can also cheer for Spotify and JRE.

I think Spotify is doing the right thing in this particular case (though probably not because of some principled commitment to free expression, but merely for the sake of the bottom-line).

:-) Yet again, I'm not sure why having rights should stop there, we also have a right to criticize him for what we might think is paternalistic or censorious behaviour.

> that there's a lot of them,

I kinda made the opposite of the that claim in my comment :-) I think a lot of people see the norms "virtue signallers" want to impose as Draconian. I don't think a guy having controversial guests on his podcasts is something many people find intolerable.

I think it is more virtuous to send honest signals than to be a hypocrite.

Also, "virtue" in these cases usually just means conforming to social pressure and the norms of particularly vociferous factions of society.

Even if you happen to agree with those norms (which are seen as Draconian by many), the sanctimonious holier-than-thou attitude probably won't help the cause in the long run.

That's not really a fruitful line of argument. The natural continuation is that, of course, we are also free to criticize someone for trying to shut others up.

Censorship has many forms, and is not exclusive to the government. Corporate censorship [1] in response to social pressure seems to be the dominant one in our era.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_censorship

> This feels analogous to leaving a laptop unattended in the back seat of a parked car and blaming the government for not stopping it from being stolen.

Many of us do want to leave in a society were you can indeed leave your laptop unattended on the back seat of your car. I don't think that's unreasonable at all.

Archived version (the link currently gives a 404 error): https://archive.is/FYtiV

Obviously no one should be harassed at their workplace. However, the wokeness here is manifested in the $130 million the California jury has awarded. Even the infamously excessive "hot coffee lawsuit" [1] looks unimpressive compared to this.

I'm sure many of us would already be retired if we could claim even a fraction of that for every time we are treated poorly.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaura...

Not with the same PRRAR sequence of amino acids, right?

Not many of us are strict utilitarians. Also, people generally don't like being lied to, and I think this kind of pandering will accelerate the erosion of trust in institutions.

On pharma, they are obviously a business, and profits are of course a major consideration. I'm sure many people who work in pharma have other incentives too (like making world a healthier place, as you suggested). However, that certainly doesn't mean the correct framing is to see pharma companies as entirely altruistic.

I think I found the article you are referring to. [1] I don't think that's a good example of misinformation. Here's a recent report by Reuters on the same topic. [2]

I agree that The Telegraph is not the most reliable source of the news [3], but that doesn't make anything they report on automatically false.

[1]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...

[2]: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

[3]: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-telegraph/

I think you are being a tad too generous here. That wasn't the explicit messaging. Public health officials and experts did in fact lie and palter in that case. Part of the messaging was explicitly "masks are not effective in preventing general public from catching COIVD" [1] You could reasonably see it as a "noble lie", however.

The whole thing is also complicated by the fact that science on surgical masks etc. wasn't (and isn't) that clear. During the 2009 H1N1 flu, CDC also recommended against face masks for ordinary people. See this SSC article for more on that. [2]

[1] e.g. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-cdc-says-americans-don...

[2]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-t... (Scott, like you, is also sometimes a bit too generous :-))

TBH, I think "Trust the science" is often used as a euphemism for "Trust authority", which isn't always good advice.

Also, the science itself doesn't really work as advertised. There is this book titled "Betrayers of Truth" [1] which I reluctantly recommend on that. The authors are sometimes a bit too harsh (e.g. about Millikan), but I think they have a point overall.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayers_of_the_Truth

> Is that the actual word for word text of the redacted email or is that just the congressional staffer's summary of a longer paragraph that refutes the point they are trying to make?

I think your suspicion is correct, there are omissions in the "unredacted" version too. They kinda do allude to this by saying "excerpts of those transcriptions are reproduced below", which I had not noticed. Probably all the dot dot dots denote omission.

The omissions might be malicious, or merely because of privacy reasons. But either way, I think there isn't much new substantive content in what they have released.

> I guess it probably isn't classified in that case, but then begs the question why it didn't pass FOIA

The exemptions to FOIA are a bit broader than that, and the exemptions are often abused. The redacted version has a "code" after each redaction which is supposedly the reason for it. You can find the meaning of the codes here [1]. I think the all the ones in the released PDF have one of these two codes:

(b)(5) Inter-agency or intra-agency memorandums or letters that would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency.

(b)(6) Personnel and medical files and similar files, the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.

[1]: https://www.fbi.gov/services/information-management/foipa/fo...

The emails are actually unredacted [1], and the fact that they are released by the opposition party shouldn't be surprising. I'm not sure they tell us anything new though. We already knew that they were scientists who had this suspicion in the early days of the pandemic (some publicly stated that, e.g. David Baltimore [2]).

[1]: See the note in the beginning of Appendix I: https://republicans-oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2...

[2]: LA Times: A Nobel laureate backs off from claiming a ‘smoking gun’ for the COVID-19 lab-leak theory https://archive.fo/F440c

That is extremely paternalistic. I think this is a good example of how the often dismissed "slippery slope" argument had a point.

Results from the abstract:

"Twenty-five seroprevalence surveys representing 14 countries were included. Across all countries, the median IFR in community-dwelling elderly and elderly overall was 2.9% (range 0.2%-6.9%) and 4.9% (range 0.2%-16.8%) without accounting for seroreversion (2.4% and 4.0%, respectively, accounting for 5% monthly seroreversion). Multiple sensitivity analyses yielded similar results. IFR was higher with larger proportions of people >85 years. Younger age strata had low IFR values (median 0.0013%, 0.0088%, 0.021%, 0.042%, 0.14%, and 0.65%, at 0-19, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, and 60-69 years even without accounting for seroreversion)."

The full original title was "Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in community-dwelling populations with emphasis on the elderly: An overview" which I had to shorten because of the 80 characters limit.

Good point. I upvoted your comment, and I wish I could edit my comment to add this. It seems that I can't edit the comment anymore though.

PS: The 9to5mac article has an update which indicates that the blocking is _not_ exclusive to users who have "filtering and blocking features enabled".

I think you should avoid T-Mobile if you can. Not just as a matter of principle, but also pragmatism. They have an extremely crude SMS censorship/anti-spam system [1] which even blocks links to lichess.org, the popular online chess website.

They have poor security practices like storing passwords in plaintext [2], and they had a large data breach (probably about 100M customers affected) last year. [3]

A̶n̶d̶ ̶n̶o̶w̶,̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶m̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶r̶o̶w̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶t̶o̶c̶o̶l̶ ̶b̶l̶o̶c̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶o̶o̶.̶

PS: This isn't protocol blocking at the packet/port level, so I may have used "protocol blocking" a bit inappropriately. Apparently Apple allows the carriers to prevent people from enabling iCloud Private Relay, and T-Mobile is doing that. Apple is probably doing so due to the pressure by the carriers. In August, four carriers (Vodafone, Telefonica, Orange and T-Mobile ) signed a letter urging the European Commission to stop Apple from providing Private Relay. (According to a report by The Telegraph: https://archive.fo/BRUS4#selection-915.74-925.194) This, of course, still quite preposterous.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29744347

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776347

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28192423 (The first comment by @jonathanmayer has a list of other recent T-Mobile security incidents)

That was interesting. Surveys are not that reliable though, and the outcome depends on how the question is being asked.

I found this 2020 survey by Pew Research which I think paints a more realistic picture [1]. It has a larger sample size [2], and IMO it asks a more objective/specific question.

Among "Conservative Republicans", 59% responded that they support expanding nuclear power plants, in contrast with 35% of "Liberal Democrats". Interestingly, for "Mod/lib Republicans", that number is also below 50%.

You might have a point though. My personal observation is that there has been a slight shift among the progressives, but not as much as the graph by ecoAmerica suggests.

[1]: https://archive.is/2iEHj#selection-1253.0-1253.154

[2]: I think the sample size is 10,957.

I think that is probably a "folk quote", the attribution to Feynman is also inaccurate AFAIK. He said something similar though:

> Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, “Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.” Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But he came back a few days later to say, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don’t really understand it.”

– Feynman’s Lost Lecture by David and Judith Goodstein

Not really. It is certainly an issue which progressives put more weight on. And there is a disagreement on the solutions too: progressives are generally apprehensive about nuclear. [1]

You can personally attack me with any one of the "certain" labels in the arsenal. But you can also choose to argue in good faith.

[1]: e.g. https://www.greenamerica.org/fight-dirty-energy/amazon-build...

> Zeno Power is developing small-scale nuclear power systems to provide clean and resilient power in austere environments.

Also, not everyone has to frame and align every single one of their actions in accordance with the "progressive" view.

It is possible that the meaning of the sizes changed, but that would probably go in the direction of making the shift larger. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_sizing

Although I agree that the US healthcare system is far from ideal, I don't think that's a logically consistent argument. In the case of vaccination, similar trade-offs exist with nationalized healthcare, and the government would make health decisions for everyone. [1] Moving to another country is harder than finding a new employer.

[1]: e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29758361