jaco6

The service was intentionally left unnamed to avoid driving traffic to it.

Tech employees don’t engage constructively with tech criticism because of self interest.

It’s the modern hatred of hierarchy at work. People today so desperately want to believe in equality that they deny the plain and simple truth of intellectual hierarchy.

The problem is actually worse in the world of work than in school. Even workplaces like Amazon warehouses would greatly benefit from IQ testing of new hires, with fast track promotions for those in upper percentiles. It doesn’t happen because of beliefs about racial and social equality. Dumb people end up running places out of nothing more than inertia and fear of acknowledging excellence.

The article is about alphabets. There was writing prior to alphabets, but it was done in hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and characters. Alphabets are easier to learn and therefore more widely used.

An advantage of a pure EV over a hybrid is that you don’t have the maintenance liability of the combustion engine, cooling system, and transmission.

The list of deadliest cars is a mixture of compact cars and sports cars. Compact cars are less safe because they get obliterated in collisions with bigger vehicles. Sports cars are unsafe because drivers tend to drive them at high speeds and attempt dangerous cornering maneuvers, eg driving the Pacific Coastal Highway at high speeds.

Teslas are faster than many sports cars, but in the case of the Model Y and Model X lack the preferred low profile of a true sports car. In the case of the Model S, the acceleration is so great that it is frankly surprising it doesn’t rank higher. I wonder how many new Model S owners have gotten themselves killed within a few days of owning the car?

I myself purchased a Model 3 last year and drove it quite foolishly for the first few months I had it. The acceleration was so amazing to me coming from a Honda Accord that it was hard to resist the temptation to weave and corner like a mad man. Model S would have been even worse. The Model S also has a long body like a full size sedan, not ideal for sports performance either, compared to the Model 3’s short length, more comparable to a Corrola or Toyota BRZ.

So I suspect that speculations about “Tesla drivers being morons” and “distracted by the screen” (almost all new cars have shiny screens!) are nonsense.

Another frequent remark is that Teslas’ high weight is a disadvantage. This is not as straightforward as they assume, because weight actually has benefits for traction. Light cars are much more likely to lose grip and slide around. On the other hand, a heavy car with worn out tires or brakes is much more difficult to stop than a light car with worn out tires or brakes. So weight is probably a wash.

But I do agree with some commenters that the autonomous features, and particular misuse of those features, are probably a contributor to these statistics as well. If you’re new to them you assume they are safer than they really are. With more experience you realize you still need to be watching the road the whole time.

New York City is the greatest concentration of wealth on the planet. The continuation of theatre there should come as no surprise.

I am speaking of the cultural shift in entertainment, from a variety of local live options on most days of the week to just television in most places across the country.

I should also emphasize that the persistence of community theatres that mostly recycle the classics (endless Shakespeare, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and The Crucible) is not a substitute for actual thriving local entertainment, but a shadow and a memory of what once was.

This is a technology problem. Media technology (radio, recordings, television, and movies) has essentially killed live performance of all kind compared to what it was once like. Bars and hotels that used to rely on gig musicians can now play a Spotify playlist over the speakers. Repertory theatres once existed in every small and medium sized city in the country, each supporting several actors earning salaries sufficient to raise a family—all wiped out by television.

It would have once been unthinkable for even a small city of <=100,000 people to lack multiple live entertainment options 7 days a week. No more—we’re all at home, watching our particular chosen thing, listening to our particular chosen album, playing our own chosen game.

Some will claim this has been an advancement. “How lame,” they say, “it must have been to have to go to the Local Entertainment Venue and just listen to whatever act was on that night. Nowadays I can listen to Acid Techno Super Hop, my particular chosen favorite, as much as I want.” But the losses in communal behavior have been significant. Most critical is the disappearance of dance. Dance is a fundamental human behavior, stretching back to Paleolithic times. It is nowhere to be seen in many cities today, because no one has any occasion to do it except weddings, at which it is very common now to stand around awkwardly after the bride and groom have fumbled through some rehearsed step.

What makes you say that? California had a problem with attracting homeless drifters as far back as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Why did all those homeless former farmers from Oklahoma and Arkansas trek all the way to California? Why not stop in, oh, say, Arizona, or scamper on down to cozy South Texas?

The chaos of California is not the outcome of some mysterious Yankee vs Scots-Irish cultural battle. It’s simply the weather. Bums and drug addicts from all over the country descend upon California because they can comfortably sleep rough and sit around outside all day because it’s not humid, extreme temperatures are rare, and much of the year is rainless. That’s it. Sometimes people look too deeply for answers to social phenomena when geography is the answer.

By the way, geography also explains the culture of the Scots-Irish. This area was the natural limit of Rome’s ability to settle because it was the beginning of open moors that were much harder to control by central authority, so they gave up and built Hadrian’s and Antonine’s walls. It makes sense that once the state finally became strong enough to assert a hold over these areas (shortly after the development of the printing press), they fled to Ireland and then America to continue to enjoy their anarchic lifestyle.

Consumer software industry

I agree, it’s also irresponsible to name something that reminds many people of alcohol. I think they were trying to invoke the idea of the moonlight as reflecting the sun’s light, just as their software reflects the speech of the user.

I think “Artemis” or “Luna” would work better.

I’m just as curious as to why some people are so willing to take numerous medications, while others go to any lengths to avoid them. Some people are happy to be on an SSRI, sleeping pill, statin, low dose aspirin, and a few others, and aren’t bothered by this. Other people seem instinctively revolted by prescription drugs, seeing toxins pushed by evil corporations. Is it a trust issue?

I personally detest and avoid all medicines other than antibiotics and vaccines. Pharmaceuticals have a long track record of harboring “side effects” that only become apparent years later.

In general, why are we surprised that the chronic use of any substance has negative effects? Humans evolved for thousands of years eating food and drinking water. Regularly consuming anything else is an abberration and self-experiment.

The problem with American healthcare is the attempt to compromise between healthcare as a universally available public utility and healthcare as a commodity on the private market. (Arguably this is a legacy of pre-modern healthcare, where hospitals were operated by charities run by nuns and funded by aristocrats and royal families, hence all the “Saint” names in hospitals nowadays).

There’s a variety of weird examples of this mixed system:

>Poor people use ERs for every day healthcare, usually they get away with paying nothing, no insurance

>Working people with insurance pay more to enable this access for the destitute (or criminal) portion of the population

>Old people are sort of entitled to free healthcare. They get medicare, but if they want everything, they have to pay for “supplements.”

>Young people pay for the old people’s healthcare twice, on their payroll taxes and in the form of higher premiums. A 25 year old male should absolutely not have a $300/mo health premium. But he does, because his premium is paying for other’s care.

This is a system pretending to be private, but it’s actually just inefficiently public. It would be more efficient to pay for it using taxes, both income and sales taxes, rather than letting some groups—the poor and the elderly—off the hook arbitrarily.

Alternatively, abolish health insurance altogether—a notoriously inefficient and exploitative industry that does not suit the classic purpose of insurance (boat accidents and fires)—and see what happens. This is obviously a rather unpalatable option due to the chaos that would ensue, but it’s probably the best option.

There is no such thing as capitalism. “The first countries to get rid of recurrent famine” were those that began using the steam engine and field enclosure. These are not “capitalism”, they are “capital”, in tge jargon of the economist Marx, or, in modern parlance, technology. All of the parts of the world that are not starving are not starving due to their adoption of a variety of technologies, both mechanical and bureaucratic: fertilizer, machine tractors, and centralized governance using telephone lines and now internet. When people claim “capitalism” ended starvation, they ignore places like China and Russia which also ended famine despite adopting state ownership of farms. There was indeed famine during the transition period, but Russia ended famine by the 50s and China ended famine by the 70s, long before many “capitalist” countries in the 3rd world. That’s because the world isn’t about the phony field of “economics,” it’s about technology. Likewise, the other advancements of society that are claimed to be associated with “capitalism”—the end of smallpox and other old high-casualty diseases, the development of reliable air and trans-oceanic transport, instant global communications: all are due to the efforts of scientists working in labs mostly funded by governments and wealthy patrons, not “capitalism.” Capitalist enterprises almost never take major innovative risks. Even the latest glorious advancement that will doubtless be claimed by “capitalism,” Wikipedia-scraping chat bots, was developed by a non-profit.

Everything is about technology—stop letting economists drag you into stupid, poorly formed debates using undefined terms like “capitalism.”

My uninformed suspicion is that this is not a language or a script but a timekeeping or calendar system of some kind.

Can anyone identify and enumerate the "tests for genius" that Ramsey passed?

Edit: Found them. They are Samuelson's own criteria:

1. Test of Time: Samuelson suggested that the work of a genius economist should stand the test of time, remaining relevant and influential long after its initial publication.

2. Transcendence of Paradigms: Genius economists should be able to transcend prevailing paradigms and make significant contributions that reshape the field of economics.

3. Originality and Creativity: Samuelson emphasized the importance of originality and creativity in the work of genius economists, highlighting their ability to generate novel ideas and insights.

4. Broad Influence: Genius economists should have a broad influence beyond their own specialized areas of research, impacting the broader discipline of economics.

5. Impact on Policy: Samuelson suggested that the work of genius economists should have practical implications and influence policy-making decisions.

6. Pedagogical Impact: Genius economists should also have a significant impact on economic education, shaping the way economics is taught and understood by future generations of students.

It is an investment. You build brand loyalty by selling a safe device. Train kids to only use your OS. Then when they're 18 hopefully they stick with your OS.

Furthermore, OS makers could lobby for additional age gates. I.e. a child phone for ages 15 and under, a teenager phone for ages 16-17, an adult phone for 21.

Safe content header is a relatively weak solution. Strongest solution is either Microsoft or Apple stepping up to develop a child designed device from the ground up. It would have access to a limited walled garden of the Internet. The device itself is marketed specifically to children and has no advertising allowed on it. It also incorporates health guidelines and screen time limits, etc. that cannot be changed by the device owner or user, only by Apple/Microsoft. It is essentially a fascist phone. Admittedly, this would make an adult, unlocked smart phone a hot item on the youth black market, but hopefully most kids will be too lazy to save up the money needed to buy a black market unlocked phone before they're ready to watch porn and be inundated with endless advertising and doomscrolls.

Apologies, my above remark was a bit unclear. When I said "will OS developers see it the same way" what I meant was whether OS developers will lobby against this law or be in favor.

You're right. Safe content header is a relatively weak solution. Strongest solution is either Microsoft or Apple stepping up to develop a child designed device from the ground up. It would have access to a limited walled garden of the Internet. The device itself is marketed specifically to children and has no advertising allowed on it. It also incorporates health guidelines and screen time limits, etc. that cannot be changed by the device owner or user, only by Apple/Microsoft. It is essentially a fascist phone. Admittedly, this would make an adult, unlocked smart phone a hot item on the youth black market, but hopefully most kids will be too lazy to save up the money needed to buy a black market unlocked phone before they're ready to watch porn and be inundated with endless advertising and doomscrolls.

This solution is the lowest cost solution and I am in favor. Will OS developers (because their market power is obviously more relevant here than the viewpoint of web developers) see it the same way?