jeherr

That's likely due to the Voting Rights act which requires what they call majority-minority districts. It prohibits redistricting to disempower racial minorities. It's another complication in the whole gerrymandering debate that makes it a lot harder to solve, because it requires districts that will look gerrymandered in a lot of cases.

What if you're not wanting less black people in your life because they are black, but because black people in general are more likely to be Democrats?

No financial incentive to do so. Nobody is organizing to boycott over bigotry towards majority groups, and news media won't cover it. There's very little upside for corporations to censor them. On the flip side bigotry towards minority groups will get tons of media coverage and potentially some significant boycotts if they do nothing about it.

Absolutely. Protein folding has been worked on by a large part of the scientific community for a long time and they're not going to look at a breakthrough like that and just ignore it. Pharma companies will be putting significant resources towards this research as well.

Here is an open source implementation of AlphaFold from an academic at Columbia.

https://github.com/aqlaboratory/openfold

I've never even heard of Tudum before, so I guess I'm not surprised that it didn't last very long.

I definitely recognize this process (and have heard the term euphemism treadmill from McWhorter the other commenter pointed out) but since when has "disabled" been used as a slur? I'm sure it's happened, but I'm not sure I've ever heard of someone using disabled in a derogatory manner like you would hear "retarded" commonly used now.

This doesn't prove that we haven't taken steps backwards in terms of what is allowed as civil discourse in recent years. You're correct that many things were once completely unallowed by virtue of repercussions, which we now see as within the overton window. We've worked towards getting better though and we shouldn't throw that away. What people today are reacting to is that it feels like we are less free to speak our minds, at least on some topics, than we were just a few decades ago. Just because it used to be worse long before that doesn't mean it isn't a problem worth dealing with now. Racism also used to be much worse than it is today, but that's not an excuse for the amount of racism that still exists either.

If we're talking about the limit on the global supply only lasting us about 100 years, then it's irrelevant that it costs more now because the point is fissile material still exists and is a viable source for more energy beyond what the OPs projection was.

We don't currently refine "spent" nuclear reactor fuel, in the US at least, which still contains significant amount of fissile material. When the fuel is "spent" we really just mean that the amount of fissile material is too low to sustain the nuclear reaction needed to collect energy. We would get more energy out of our uranium if we did, but instead we just let it become waste. Russia is very good about refining their uranium for nuclear power. We don't do it in the US for nuclear proliferation reasons. I'm less certain about the rest of the world on this though.

It could, but like another user pointed out the last file modification time isn't necessarily going to stay chronological forever, so something that understands the order in which documents are put in is immutable unless I explicitly rearrange them would be good. Easy text searching through multiple file types to help narrow down a search faster, automated encryption and cloud storage backup, syncing between multiple devices. All the usual nice stuff you would expect for an app like this.

It could watch certain directories on your computer or in cloud storage and create a queue to suggest adding new documents that appear there in the same order of their appearance, that way you never forget to add an important document and they still get put in chronologically even if you haven't checked the queue in months. It could make different "vaults" you could use to separate documents by person, or separate work and personal life. Vaults could have long-term upkeep rules to keep them from getting bloated, like maybe you delete everything that's 10 years or older.

Basically if it can help me even if I have sloppy organization and take a ton of the pain out of it for me, I'd definitely be willing to pay a bit to try an app like that. Can't say for sure that I would stick with it, but it's a reoccurring problem for me as I have documents across multiple devices, cloud services, emails accounts, and thumb drives that I just can't make myself organize or create and maintain a system to do it for me.

I've really been getting into organization just by chronology lately. I don't separate notes by topic anymore, I just write all notes chronologically with dates to break up days. This way I can always flip back through the pages around the time I was working on something to find what notes I took.

I wonder if there are any digital document organizers like this. Something you just drag and drop important digital documents you want to keep track of and it automatically adds date and time information so you can browse through them in the order they've been added.

To add a little perspective, before Covid some 40%ish number of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck.

Some people always seem to be in a rush to forget the humanity in people they disagree with so they can justify letting them die in ways they would consider murder if the tables were turned. It’s like they think they’ve found a loophole to behaving morally or ethically that they think society won’t judge them for.

Do Amazon employees underline every instance of the word Amazon with that orange arrow from their logo, even on whiteboards?

You could say the same about investing, and yet a ton of people still don't do that.

Wind and solar face the problem that you can't just start generating power as needed when you're running low. It's good to have a hedge against that scenario which itself does not produce much carbon, because people die when power outages happen. It's just the safe bet to include nuclear power for now until we can be more certain of our ability to generate enough power to scale with growing populations.

Why would we risk not having the infrastructure to be flexible in case of uncertainties? Can we say for certain that weather patterns will not change in a way that affects wind and solar in the future? It just seems like we shouldn't just dive in head first without an alternative.

Everything increasing in prices are mostly needs rather than wants too. Not that you don't need any of those thing decreasing in prices, but increasing is housing, healthcare, and education. Those are pretty fundamental needs.

> How to deal when the solid waste are stick on the toilet surface?

Truly a place to learn the best secrets to make your life better.

It’s the same argument Republicans use against the welfare state. Some people will abuse it so we just as well scrap the whole thing.

> The reality of the long-term value of the research should be enough.

We have to decide how to apportion research funds from a limited pool. One project's gain is another project's loss. We also have to take into account that we don't know if the research is too far ahead of it's time or not. If the underlying technology just isn't there yet, we could be spinning our wheels on progress because other fields need to catch up. That money could be used for nuclear fission research instead, which it's looking more and more like we're going to need to fund in the near future.

That isn't a sufficient reason not to scrutinize the process by which this research is conducted if the origin of the virus is from the lab. It matters if this virus was of natural origin or was leaked from research going on at the lab, altered or not. It should inform us better on safety for researchers, or caution us about avoiding contact with certain animals and help us learn more about how viruses jump from one species to another. There is valuable information to be discovered in the investigation of the origins of this pandemic. It's only rational to be interested in that if we want to be better prepared to prevent future pandemics.

In regards to the panel being too restrictive or permissive, I think you have to look at the possible motivations for why. If you have a drug candidate that seems safe and effective, what possible motivation could the panel have for rejecting it? The pharma company gets their drug to market, patients get new and better drugs. The incentives are aligned so the issue with being too restrictive is a debate about how risky we should be approving new drugs.

On the other hand for a drug that’s safe but maybe not effective, there’s a lot of money to be made off of people willing to do anything to prolong their time with their loved ones who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Aside from that, the FDA can hurt it’s reputation by approving drugs that just don’t work too frequently and be accused of being in the pockets of the pharma companies. There’s a stronger possibility of corruption affecting the decision, and whether that corruption is real or perceived doesn’t matter much for public trust.

I had a coworker who got really sick around the same time. He had the PCR test done and it came back negative. There was definitely a bad flu going around at the same time as covid was popping up in the US.

> And it wasn’t optimally transmissible among humans for the better part of last year. Rather, new, more efficient variants have evolved around the world. To name one example, the highly transmissible variant of SARS-CoV-2 first reported in India (B.1.617.2, or Delta) has mutations in the nucleotides encoding its furin cleavage site that appear to make the virus better at infecting cells.

My (very limited) understanding is that when a virus jumps species it is usually pretty “unoptimized” for the new host species and spends a bit of time evolving into something more fit for survival in the new host, and that this is a bit different than a single mutation way down the line during the pandemic increasing transmissibility. Maybe to be more succinct, the pro-lab leak argument isn’t that it was perfectly optimized for transmissibility in humans, but that it was already highly optimized, which is unusual.

Wouldn’t we have likely seen signs of this virus long before we did in the case of a natural origin, before it became so efficient at transmission among humans? Isn’t this what happened with the first SARS virus?

It’s not “think of the children,” it’s “think of the lawsuits.”

Ongoing behavior of the original founder?

Baby carrots are cut from bigger ugly looking carrots is another example.

Fred sounds like he may have ADHD. I'm Fred and I have ADHD. Now I'm not an expert so it's not necessarily true. ADHD comes in a spectrum of severity, and plenty of ADHD symptoms are just things normal people have trouble with too.

That said people with ADHD tend to have trouble with delayed gratification. Helping your coworkers has immediate benefits when they are grateful for your help, even though long-term it may make things worse. We also tend to have a lot of social anxiety and care a lot what other people think about us (rejection sensitive dysphoria). For these reasons, I believe people with ADHD have learned to be very helpful to those immediately around us, even to a fault.

Fred still has to get his work done though. Have some empathy for him because you don't know what he may be dealing with compared to you, but it's not an excuse.

I thought I read a blog post detailing a link to the OGUsername discord.

Influenza is a family of related viruses. COVID-19 is actually the disease caused by the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is the actual virus, and it is only a single virus in the family of coronaviruses. Other coronaviruses include SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and a host of others which just cause a subset of the common cold.

This should be compared more to something like the H1N1 outbreak, which was a single influenza virus that was particularly deadly for some subset of people. That was just one type of influenza.