jodrellblank

> "whether the state should have a role in controlling what private individuals share amongst one another."

The state has a century long history of answering that in the positive; under the Criminal Law Act 1977 a person agreeing with another person to do a crime is guilty of conspiracy to commit that crime[1]; section 5 talks about "the offence of conspiracy at common law" which it replaces, including when it does/doesn't apply to "conduct which tends to corrupt public morals or outrages public decency".Further back, the Offenses Against The Person act of 1861 says that encouraging, soliciting, or proposing to any person to murder another person is a misdemanour punishable by imprisonment for life[2].

AFAIK the UK doesn't ban the classic film The Towering Inferno which is about people dying in a burning tower block. The Titanic has no remaining survivors to be offended where the video here was <2 years after the Grenfell Tower fire, and your joke about the Titanic isn't mocking the dying, it's mocking the builder's hubris. So it's more about the "outraging public decency" part.

Even the most free-speechy places have arguments about what free speech is acceptable (classic example: yelling 'FIRE!' in a crowded theatre) and have ideas about free speech, with consequences.

I would rather the UK government had put that effort into earlier holding the tower management company to fixing the problems reported by the fire brigade and the Grenfell Action Group in the years before the fire, and knocking the Council for trying it silence that group for repeatedly reporting fire problems, and of course for the excellent business decisions to save money by using flammable cladding.

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1977/45/section/1

[2] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/24-25/100/section/...

What is this country coming to when you can't post a social media video laughing at families from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, and Syria, burning to death while saying "all the little ninjas getting it"?

It's political correctness gone mad.

> "By 2017, Grenfell Tower housed a remarkably diverse community. Up to 600 people lived in the building’s 120 flats, representing a rich tapestry of nationalities, ethnicities, and generations. Residents hailed from countries including the UK, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, and Syria, among others." - https://grenfell.soton.ac.uk/week-1-who-lived-in-the-tower/

> "The Grenfell Tower fire inquiry "must not ignore" the impact of race and poverty on the disaster, a lawyer representing survivors has said. .. The inquiry returned this week after a four-month break due to coronavirus. "The Grenfell fire did not happen in a vacuum," said Mr Thomas in his opening statement. "A majority of the Grenfell residents who died were people of colour."""" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53320082

Indeed, but they neither explain nor cite what they mean for it to be "highly regulated" or how/why that means toxicity is largely impossible.

If you take "the cleavage of provitamin A carotenoids" and Ctrl+F for 'cleavage' or 'carotene' in that paper, the only other mentions are this:

> "An acute elevation of retinoids other than retinyl esters—eg, retinoic acid—occurs after the ingestion of a large amount of vitamin A, possibly because the intestinal absorptive capacity is overwhelmed, which leads to the oxidation of retinol to retinoic acid by the intestinal enterocytes (30) and to the rapid formation of retinoic acid from retinol in certain cells (5). Whereas retinoic acid can be produced from excentric cleavage of β-carotene in humans (31), it is generally considered a minor contributor to circulating concentrations, at least in normal, healthy persons."

That is, they only seem to be talking about excentric cleavage and not central cleavage. My limited understanding is that beta-carotene is roughly two retinoic acid molecules chained together, and cleaving them in half is what makes two retinoic acid molecules, and that non-central-cleaving would be different. See skeletal formula on right for these two pages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%92-Carotene

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinoic_acid

(You can also wonder if beta carotene can produce 90% of circulating vitamin A in developing countries, whether getting lots of beta carotene in developed countries can raise the base level in the body, which then leads to easier overdose from preformed vitamin A)

I have read somewhere that losing a limb naturally (e.g. tearing, biting) stretches and closes up blood vessels in a way that cutting with a scalpel doesn't, and that natural limb loss has less bleeding than surgery/stabbing/Hollywood suggests.

I have no idea of the truth of this, but there are anecdotes of farmers losing limbs and walking back to their tractors, driving back to the farm, then driving themselves to hospital, and the like.

I'm past the comment edit window, but incidentally these two Harvard pages[1,2] say that:

- the recommended daily vitamin C is 90mcg for men and 75 for women, the upper limit is 2000mcg. That's a safety margin of 22x, and exceeding the upper limit may cause diarrhoea and gastrointestinal distress.

- the recommended vitamin A is 900mcg for men and 700 for women, and the upper limit is 3000mcg. That's a safety margin of 3.3x, and even that upper limit has "some evidence that this much preformed vitamin A might increase the risk of bone loss, hip fracture, or some birth defects".

- "Sometimes people take cod liver oil for vitamin D but may not be aware it is also very high in vitamin A, beyond the RDA at 192%"

That is, even without any alternative views on it, it's much easier to go above the safe levels, easier to do accidentally, and the risks are more serious.

[1] https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/vitamin-a/

[2] https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/vitamin-c/

Your Wikipedia page references a paper in footnote 21 which says:

> "In developing nations, however, 70–90% of vitamin A is obtained from provitamin A carotenoids in plant foods"

and

> "Whereas retinoic acid can be produced from excentric cleavage of β-carotene in humans (31), it is generally considered a minor contributor to circulating concentrations, at least in normal, healthy persons"

Google tells me that "Two pathways have been suggested for the conversion of carotenoids to vitamin A in mammals, central cleavage and excentric cleavage".

Carotene conversion cannot both be "a minor contributor" to body levels of Vitamin A and also the main way billions of people get Vitamin A. So my guess is the Wikipedia page has mistakenly taken 'excentric cleavage' to be the only conversion method. Still, ignoring carotenes entirely, the referenced paper also says:

> "observational studies suggest that more than 75% of people may be routinely ingesting more than the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for vitamin A"

Vitamin A is in eggs, dairy (butter, milk, cream), in meat fats like pork and grain-fed beef, in salmon, in liver, in cod liver oil. Vitamin-A precursors (carotenes) get converted into Vitamin A in the body, they are in red and orangey fruits and vegetables such as carrot, tomato, chili, chili-powder spice, bell pepper, sweet potato, apricot, mango, butternut squash, grapefruit, watermelon, papaya, passion fruit, cantaloupe, pumpkin, also in dark greens like kale, collard greens, spinach.

Carotenoids are used as a natural food colouring, beta-carotene is E160a, e.g. I've seen it in Red Leicester cheese, yellow custard powder, red jelly, in glace cherries. American law requires vitamin A fortification in reduced-fat dairy. Companies optionally fortify it in things like wheat flour, or breakfast cereal. Retinoids are in beauty and moisturising skin creams and sun tan lotions, and sometimes used as extreme acne medication.

Things that have been promoted for "good health" for decades, such that someone who wants to avoid it needs to deliberately choose an awkward diet of non-colourful foods like potato, rice, onion, parsnip, coconut, apple, pear, cucumber, zucchini, black beans, white beans, lean meats or carefully chosen meat fats, breads made from un-fortified flour, avoiding many restaurant, take-away, or processed foods and "eat the rainbow" variety of fruit and veg.

Grant Genereux has proposed that overflowing the liver's ability to store and process Vitamin A / retinoids leads to them circulating in the blood, that they can enter cells bypassing the normal methods, can cause damage which makes cells denature and burst, which triggers an immune system response to try and find an attacker, which gets misdiagnosed as the immune system causing the damage. And has proposed this as a mechanism which explains some of the 25 - 50 million Americans having unexplained auto-immune diseases.

Proposing that retinoic acid builds up inside body cells over years and decades even whan taken ordinary 'safe' levels, not enough to trigger hypervitaminosis A or acute symptoms but chronically accumulating until the body has so much of it stored that cell damages releases retinoids into the bloodstream which enter nearby cells, denature some of them, releasing their stored retinoids, causing a domino effect which we know as an auto-immune flare-up. And that it's a matter of luck where the concentration is higher whether that makes a skin rash or a kidney or joint or thyroid inflammation, or just generally high "inflammation".

It's an interesting hypothesis with a lot of specific testable claims and specific proposed mechanisms, mixed with quite a lot of conspiracy theorising and less-testable claims.

You should make use of Cunningham's Law[1]. Instead of posting an "Ask HN" asking if it's impossible to disable, post a "Show HN" claiming that it is impossible to disable.

Then people will flock to tell you how it can be disabled by XYZ.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

Or a different way around, Asimov's The Machine That Won The War, 1961: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/machine-that-won-the-w...

Now take away the chore of 'focusing on riding'. Genetically or chemically calm the horse so it does not get flustered or moody. Metabolically tweak the horse so it does not get tired or thirsty. Robotically till and smooth the ground so there is nothing to trip over. Notify everyone in the vicinity where the horse is going, so there are no obstacles to avoid. When you can't crash or fall off if you try, when it doesn't matter if you're focusing or not. Maybe dynamically adjust that so you know the AI overlord is pampering you to keep the difficulty 'just right' and this is not a real challenge it's elaborate wireheading.

Your point 2 is where my onion metaphor comes in. When you fix a problem you improve a thing. When you fix all the problems you have taken all the life away from living. Maybe that works for what to do today - Ostrich head in the sand and solve problems - within our lifetimes, or even several lifetimes, but if AGI really does spawn and solve all problems immediately the head has to come back up. If AGI never spawns, we might still effectively solve all human-scale problems with the assistance of sub-human AI and brute-force within a surprisingly short time.

And if they liked optimizing transport, but now the box is self-driving and the logistics are planned by machine? The farm is automated and humans get in the way. The vet is a robot. Also any other suggestion you have is automated - AI is now better at everything. Nobody needs or wants anything the human can do. AI is a more fun friend, a better singer, a more engaging teacher or entertainer, a better movie creator, a better cook, etc. All that's left is Postel's "Amusing Ourselves to Death", from cradle to grave nothing the human does matters or can matter. Then what?

Perfomatively going through the hollowed-out motions of human life like a toddler playing with a plastic kitchen, wishing the ghosts of meaning and fulfillment would come back into them? Enjoy!

In the analogy where a “world ending nuclear bomb” “did already go off” and someone could cover it up and nobody noticed, in what sense is it a “world ending” nuclear bomb?

If we strip away all the layers of onion, we are not left with a Platonic ideal onion, we're left with nothing. Removing every chore, task, craft, friction from life does not leave an ideal perfect life, it leaves nothing. Some people are feeling closer to that nothing than others.

A human who liked caring for horses, feeding them, brushing them, comforting them during thunderstorms, blanketing them in cold weather, riding them through the fields, tolerated mucking out the stables, is not just biding their time until someone invents the city bus so they can free up all of that timewasting labour and sit in a box turning a wheel left and right for the rest of their days, and then the self-driving taxi, so they can finally "be free". You can say that they can still care for horses today, but if mansions don't need stables and horses, if deliveries don't use horses, then it's no longer a tangled up job, life, part of a community, way of earning money, way to get some respect, feel useful, it's just standing in a field stroking an animal.

Although Peter Norvig thought they should https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096922

Ahh, I am just looking at 1Kg consumer/household bags, maybe commercial huge bags are different.

> "at best, the protein can sometimes be inferred from the nutritional information."

I looked at some recently in the UK and the nutritional information is always per 100g and says e.g. 11.5g protein. Is there something wrong with that meaning 11.5% without any inference, or are continental European nutritional information boxes presented differently?

Why are you saying that you love Hitler[1]?

(that isn't what you said? what's your point?)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

And a Futurama moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxu7z7hfVns

That is not "Microsoft goals", that is "one employee's LinkedIn comment of his personal goal".

> "public transportation operates at a loss almost universally."

So do highways! Nobody makes a profit from a $50,000 crossing or a $250,000 4-way traffic light intersection, or a $1M road resurfacing, or a $100M bypass, or a $1Bn highway on-ramp and rebuilding. (Except when officials grift the public money to their mates' construction companies).

It really is a problem with capitalist comments that the only things which are acceptable are things which make a profit - except for their personal cars which should be taxpayer subsidised.

Why does "supporting a bus line" mean the bus needs to make enough revenue from riders to pay for it but the area can have roads, traffic lights, roadsigns, etc. subsidised by the taxpayer without needing to make a profit from vehicle drivers paying for it? The deck is stacked by moto-normativity in favour of cars.

Highway 401 in Ontario is the largest highway in North America, up to 18 lanes wide. It moves 500,000 cars per day; fewer than a single subway line.

The incredible cost of building and maintaining it, the cost of 500,000 cars and fuelling them, the enormous land use, the environmental cost of the concrete, the idea that you could have a pleasant place to live or work near it... but we can't have trains which move more people, less pollutingly, less dangerously, in less space, are nicer to be around, and overall costs less, because it isn't profitable? As if Highway 401 is profitable?

The streets of the future are an unbroken conveyor belt of fast moving death machines; existing outside of a car or building will become illegal by lobbying "to keep people safe".

(2) I didn't think that, it was an example. I didn't want to pick a technology as an example and have my comment be dragged off into whether my pick was good or bad so I tried to pick something away from tech. As in "be the change you want to see in the world", if you want less FORTRAN enthusiasm, counter it, if you want more FORTRAN, add to it. It's easy to see that a site overrun with racism looks like a place that approve of racism, it's much harder to see that a site with 0.001% more FORTRAN content affects anything - that's what the voting comparison was about.

(3) I wasn't really meaning trolling, I was meaning your "someone is wrong on the internet" about some topic you are interested in / care about.

(5) I thought we were all on the "amusing ourselves to death, wireheading, Brave New World, hedonism is bad" train.

National Safety Council says passenger vehicles are 0.46 per 100M miles, trains are 0.01 and busses 0.009.

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...

And the original AirPort Express in 2004 had a headphone jack! Well, a speaker socket. And it showed up on your mac laptop so you could play music to it wirelessly with iTunes.

Utterly brilliant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPort_Express

Best phone since 1996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Communicator

A whole market of 1990s/2000s folding devices in similar categories, clamshells, PDAs, microPCs, palmtops, subnotebooks, handheld PCs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handheld_PC

I think you're missing the point. Predictable outcomes are desirable, but they aren't addictive or gambling. People quickly get used to opening the faucet and seeing water come out and stop doing it, whereas people scroll TikTok or channel surf for hours at a time.

In what way was amazing no-traffic "a reward"? What system was rewarding you for what change in behaviour?

> "Everything is variable reward. Is everything gambling?"

well, no. If you work overtime and get paid overtime, you are not gambling and that is not a variable reward.

Humans engage more with rewards that are intermittent and variable. Like Futurama's scene from 'The Scary Door' where the character says "A casino where I'm winning, I must be in heaven! A casino where I always win, that's boring, I must really be IN HELL!". A constant predictable reward is boring, less engaging. So if you know you get no overtime, but sometimes your boss rewards you with $5 coffee voucher, sometimes a free pizza dinner, sometimes double-time pay for the time worked or a half-day off, now you might be gambling 1hr overtime for an intermittent variable reward.

> "Drive to work, traffic might be good or might be bad."

Good traffic is not a "reward" for driving to work(!) and you have to drive to work regardless so you are not risking anything [you might be risking your life, but you are not making a choice which can reward you with good traffic]. You might say that going a different route is a choice and a gamble which could reward you with good traffic, but traffic engineering does not work that way because if there was a consistently low-traffic route, everyone else would take that route until it was no faster than any other route. Traffic will generally be the predictable and similar every day, plus 'arriving at work early' is not much of a reward.

Don't worry, Reddit/Facebook/Gmail et al. still transmit that draft reply to their servers, store it against your profile, and train on it. Probably.

You can, but this is public and maybe you should post. If "you are what you repeatedly do" then we all collectively are what we all do.

If we each stop arguing with racists because we're each tired of it, then what we are is a society that lets racism go unopposed, a site with racist comments proliferating, a site where racists gather because they are able to be themselves, a site where future readers and AI training is learning that racism is popular, common, normal, and acceptable because everyone is accepting it.

It's a bit like democratic voting, your vote doesn't matter and cannot change things, but it's important that you vote because all of our votes do matter and can change things.

It's a bit like the quote "Dear Board, I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. Sincerely yours, Groucho Marx.", I am upset and offended every time someone calls out my dumbass comments, but horrified at all the countless times nobody does. Why would I want to waste my time on a site with such low standards that it lets me comment? I'm exhalted and encouraged everytime someone upvotes or engages with my low effort quips[1] but thrown into a chasm of despair that HN users let that pass unopposed. When nobody engages with comments I spent literal hours on[2] I curl up into a ball and die, but also dream of it being a feather in my cap with dang that I'm posting a substantial comment and that will be its own reward. I identify with nobody more closely than Colonel Cathcart, and I will be delighted if someone engages with my Catch 22 reference, but aghast that such a nontechnical reference gets engagment; distraught if nobody engages but delighted that perhaps HN standards are being held higher.

If not you, whom?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49478355

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49586378 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491182