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I think you're focusing a little too much on that one example, but let me engage with you on this regardless. Even after a person has taken all those risks and they are sunk costs, the activity itself is still enjoyable, interesting, etc., even though it entails minimal marginal or excess risk. Similarly, hugging your kids is an enjoyable thing to do, and not at all risky. Having kids is risky, but once you have them, hugging them is risk free and still fun.

I also don't really find these things to be all that risky above the baseline. They certainly don't pose much risk of physical harm. To your point, they do pose some risk of psychological or financial harm, but the same can be said of the choice to not have a child or not take out a mortgage. There are plenty of happy childless people, but also a not inconsiderable number that wish they could have had children and regret that they did not. Same can be said for people who rented rather than bought. Either way, the choice is risky, and you can't opt out of the choice.

The same cannot be said for climbing a steep rock wall or riding a motorcycle. These choices impose excess risk above and beyond the baseline that comes from living in a material world. It was my understanding that this excess risk is what you were referring to when you claimed that enjoyment requires risk. If that's not what you meant, then I apologize, but I'm also not sure what you are actually trying to convey, since this article is mostly about excess risk.

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I can't reply to you, so I'm editing this comment instead.

> I disagree with your characterization of physical risk as being 'excess risk'

Ah, it is understandable for you to disagree, considering that is not what I meant. :) Excess risk is risk you take above and beyond a baseline required for a particular context. If I need to get from the bottom of a tower to the top, the risk imposed by taking the elevator might be considered the baseline risk. Suppose I decide to scale the exterior surface instead. To the extent that activity is riskier than the baseline, that is excess risk.

This does not only apply to physical situations. Social, economic, etc. risk can also be analyzed in terms of excess risk. For example, you earlier mentioned the decision to marry or not. There is social risk in either choice. Probably, which choice is riskier depends on your own psychological makeup and your social context. But there are probably choices that are absolutely riskier in your given society. For example, in most modern societies, entering into multiple social marriages at the same time would impose excess social risk. For more see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_difference

Doing art (or anything else) as a profession certainly has those risks, but art as an activity in general does not have any significant excess risks associated with it. (I would not consider "getting engulfed" as an excess risk since that can happen with anything.)

You may be right that there is some truth to what the top poster said. I did not mean to imply I thought it was absolutely and categorically untrue. I just think it's broadly untrue. "Things that are unrisky are unfun" is a not a generally true statement, for most people. It could certainly be true for some people. But, I suspect most people who say such things are rationalizing their choice of activity, exactly as the linked article suggests.

I would guess that if you broke it down, being in space is quite safe, but getting to space is extremely dangerous. This matches intuition, since in the former case you are just floating in freefall, but in the latter case you are seated atop a metal tube filled with explosive chemicals travelling at absurd speeds through an atmosphere.

Not to get too into the weeds, but depending on the stretch of road (frequency of onramps, and also the style), I might be one step to the left of the rightmost lane. Being in the leftward lanes isn't really an option at the speed limit, since I'd be blocking traffic, which has risks of its own.

Hrm, I don't really agree. There are a lot of very interesting things that are not very risky. Most productive activities are not very risky (art, woodworking, home improvement, etc.), and are very interesting to some of us. Sex is another example of something a lot of people like which carries little risk of harm.

I don't think there is good evidence beyond anecdata that the retired die early or that trust fund kids are depressed.

An important and oft-ignored aspect of participating in certain activities! Even this doesn't capture everything. I am also very concerned about the possibility of being maimed by my chosen activities.

For example, open water swimming seems pretty dangerous, but the outcomes are (I would suppose) pretty binary. At the end you're either alive or you're drowned. I suppose that, rarely, someone almost drowns and is left partly brain damaged. But I think most of the time it's on or it's off. Motorcycling, on the other hand, probably maims far more people than it kills. So that makes it relatively more dangerous per hour!

But then you have to adjust by your risk factors. I am an extremely cautious driver. I stay in the right lane, I follow the speed limit, I try to avoid merging, and I check my mirrors. I do these things because, although I have spent a lot of time behind the wheel, I don't trust my fallible human perception and reflexes to take on riskier habits. I suspect, just based on the frequency with which I get into collisions compared to other people I know, that I'm safer than average. If I brought my driving attitude to motorcycling, it seems reasonable to believe that I'd be at much lower risk than the typical, weaving-in-and-out-of-traffic sport-bike rider. But how much so? Nobody has done any study that will help me guess. So, for now, I avoid it, and find fun in things that are less likely to leave me paralyzed.

Anyway, just some things that bumble through my head when I think about activity risk.

Barcelona is mainstream, sure. That is an objective fact. But the person I responded to seemed to imply that the Vox article was making some sort of normative judgment about Barcelona. I don't think that any such judgment actually exists in the article.

I don't think that viewpoint (that Barcelona is played out and too mainstream) is at all the message of this Vox article. If anything, the article is a criticism of that viewpoint.

Just more evidence that everyone parents differently. My friends hardly hear about the good stuff that my kids do. I want to talk about the grime and the shit and the speech delays and the temper tantrums. That's the stuff I feel like I need to get off my chest, when I'm afraid for their future.

> They aren't the literal product that Google sells to advertisers, the data is.

Google does not sell data. They sell attention, like all advertising companies. They make a lot of money because 1. they have a lot of attention to sell and 2. they do a better job than most advertisers at finding the particular bits of attention that will be most valuable to the buyers. The data is part of what allows them to do that, or so the story goes.

Also, although I agree with your conclusion, I think you've been slightly misled as to what matters in the antitrust investigation. It is not the colloquial understanding of the word "consumer" that matters, it's the legal one. I'm under the impression that, as it happens, the legal one here comports with the colloquial one. I.e., what matters is the impact of Google's policies and practices on individual private citizens and residents. The impact on other businesses does not matter except inasmuch as such impact transitively harms private consumers.

It sounds great to have to go in to the branch office to conduct banking business that can't be handled on the website?

I wonder how the policy discussions looked when considering the impact on poor parents who have to be at work. Maybe the thinking was that the start time of 7:30-8AM was already too late to save these folks, so 8:30AM would not make them much worse off? Or maybe there are fewer people in these circumstances than I fear?

I took the sentences as being not necessarily literal sentences. I thought it was smart that he left the words vague. Maybe they weren't even really words? In the same spirit as the basilisks from "BLIT" and "Different Kinds of Darkness".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)

In a database product I'm familiar with, the prepared statements are cached according to their content and those cached objects are shared between connections. Only if they fall out of the cache do they have to be re-parsed. I had assumed that's how all databases worked.

I'm somewhat surprised at the mechanism you're describing, but now I read the documentation it does seem to be the case. I wonder if a small piece of middle-ware might be sufficient to replicate the behavior I'm describing on a connection pool, and whether that would be desirable.

Even with that, the SQL would be parsed once per connection? So, the costs should be de minimis, unless the benchmark were short indeed?

That's really surprising if true, considering the SQL should only need to be parsed once.

    SELECT foo FROM Table WHERE key = @mykey;

Then you bind the parameter to whatever you're interested in.

I always found the library system in Lightroom to be painful only because of how slow it is. It's hard to imagine enough features to make up for a UI that routinely takes >1s to render images onto the page.

If we're positing users clever enough to modify the client, then such users could also just modify the client to scramble all CP images so that they would not be detectable via fingerprinting and can only be descrambled by a patched client.

People sending CP through whatsapp/FBM are not clever. If they were clever, they wouldn't be doing that. The justice department is not primarily interested in catching clever criminals, at least not via this particular mechanism.

In the US, damages in a lawsuit are not always determined by direct, measurable economic costs. Sometimes damages are punitive, to discourage future malfeasance. Sometimes they are contractual. Sometimes they reflect pain and suffering, or risks whose true value is hard to measure.

> Again, I'm willing to be told differently

I guess my point is that you're not going to be told differently, because that information is proprietary. It is not YouTube's habit to go around letting all the curious people know the details of its financials or the inner workings of its decision-making apparatus. You would not expect to be told all the factors that weigh into the feature's development, nor how it's turning out. So the fact that nobody has informed you or publicly announced that demonetization's goals are being achieved is the expected outcome, whether or it is performing as desired.

The only solid evidence you or I have access to is that they are still doing it. That at least strongly suggests that it has some significant benefits from YouTube's perspective, considering all the downsides you so rightly point out.

I wonder how that would work. Suppose the UK generates a unicorn with a billion pounds of profit per year. Suppose that unicorn employs 10k employees. Presumably, everyone gets an equal stake in the employee share. So each employee is entitled to

    1B pounds * 1/10 * 1/10000 = 10k pounds

of profit. For folks earning the minimum wage at the company, that would be huge, since that profit sharing effectively increases the wage floor. For everyone else, I imagine the company would just pay reduced wages on the order of the amount of profit sharing, since it would not need to pay more to attract the requisite talent.

Of course, that's only if the company offers a dividend. I wonder how buybacks are modeled in this case? Since the employee share isn't marketable, the employee doesn't derive any immediate benefit from a buy-back. I guess you'd have to increase the employee share beyond the 10% limit at that point. In theory, the company could over time buy back all the non-employee shares, then it would be employee-owned in its entirety. And if the company offers more shares? Do the employees get diluted? I guess not. That seems weird too.

> As far as I know, they introduced a bunch of changes that crippled the income of their creators and their speech, without any monetary return for doing so.

Are you in a position to know about that, though? I mean, would you expect to be made aware of whether these changes were financially efficient to YouTube? Or are you just presuming they are not?

The state can change the bylaws. Or at least make the bylaws unenforceable within state boundaries, which has the same effect. I believe that is what California has done here.

For another example, suppose there were some chemical company organization that had a bylaw like, "You cannot print information about carcinogenic ingredients in your products." But then California passes prop 65. The bylaws are now moot -- if you have to choose whether to comply with bylaws or state law, you either have to take your ball and go home, or the bylaws have to change.

A single psychology paper showing a certain result is some evidence, but it's not much. Replication crisis and all that. With that said, it does make some intuitive sense to me (not that that counts as evidence either!). It may be that the pressure to change is relieved somewhat simply by announcing plans to do so.

Does anyone know the extent to which this is happening faster or slower than the background increase of medical care costs? I know that historically medical care costs have been outpacing inflation. So it's not altogether surprising that, in an unsubsidized environment, the costs to the end-user of that care would also increase, by roughly the same amount.

Worth noting that despite us not leaving the union, Trump is apparently getting what he wants. The union basically capitulated to his demands. At least that is my reading.

To be clear, I'm not saying one way or another whether this is a good thing. It's just, I felt the title somewhat implied that the USG had given up on its intentions. Whereas actually what happened was the opposite. I meant only to point this out for others who might be likewise confused.

AIUI, the damages are not punitive. They are meant to cover the actual harms associated with Yahoo's negligence. Unless you've actually had your identity stolen due to the breach, your losses are capped at whatever action you had to take to counteract risks added by the breach. That is, the cost of acquiring credit monitoring services.

My statement is intended to be an isomorph of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21026594 with a different emphasis. I'm sorry you found it confusing, but it is absolutely responsive, and I resent your accusation that it isn't. If you want to be helpful in the future, you could explain what about it you find confusing, and maybe the person you're responding to could clarify whatever point was previously unclear.

It would mean that a lower fraction of the heating effect we're observing is from CO2. However, if we've correctly estimated the impact of CO2, then that just means that there will be more absolute heating than we had otherwise predicted.

According to the fine article, twice in three days.