juanjmanfredi

Particle physicists working on collider experiments were among the first people that needed to deal with large quantities of digitally stored data. As a result, advances in the particle and nuclear physics have fed advances in computing, and vice versa [0]. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, the largest particle physics and accelerator laboratory in the world [1]. Another example more relevant to this post is when a few physicists developed a CouchDB-based solution to handle the large amounts of data generated by their RHIC and CERN experiments. They spun that out into Cloudant, which was one of the pioneers for DBaaS [2].

[0] https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-coevolution-of-...

[1] https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudant

That first scenario you portray is economic growth. Any city in the country would be thrilled to have to deal with the "problem" of being too attractive to both businesses and people.

Do you expect that contracts with Palantir will be under any scrutiny? Do you really think Peter Thiel would have supported this administration if that was at all a risk?

Lots of Americans think the government needs to be more efficient. Very few Americans think the way to do that is closing national parks, cutting veteran healthcare, and firing the nuclear security workforce. It is easy to be pro spending reform but still be unhappy with DOGE's body of work thus far.

This attitude is like demanding that an overweight man amputate his arm.

Agreed on that. My disagreement is with the statement that everything that was once referred to as high energy physics is "not looking so good". Nuclear physics in particular does not feel stuck in the way I've heard some high energy physicists talk about their field.

What are you considering "high energy physics"? "1/3-1/2 of Nobel Prizes in the 20th century" is a significant overestimation unless you are including topics not traditionally included in high energy physics. For example, there were many Nobel prizes in nuclear physics, which shares various parallels with high energy physics in terms of historical origins, experimental techniques, and theoretical foundations. But nuclear physics is in a very exciting era of experimental and theoretical developments, so your "not looking so good" description does not apply.

You said it yourself in your original comment: small and sustainable changes are the way to go. I agree that much of the cultural discourse around dieting is harmful. The promise of every diet commercial is that if you eat in this special way for three months you'll be the picture of health and then there is no need to worry about what you put into your body. This is not only a bad plan for being healthy, but it also heaps additional shame on a person when they are unsurprisingly unable to maintain the significant lifestyle changes required by the diet.

The bottom line for me is that both 1) CICO is the dominant consideration in weight loss and 2) small and sustainable changes made over time are far healthier in the long run than an instantaneous and significant change. Of course, point (2) applies much more broadly to any health or lifestyle goal.

I admit I'm distrustful of such a dramatic title. The central message from the originally posted article is that losing weight is mostly a matter of maintaining a caloric deficit. This is has been understood for some time now. What is the "new research" that is so important, in this case?

Inflation metrics show that the economy post 2008 was in fact under stimulated, which is why the recovery from the financial crisis was so slow. The recent COVID-related stimuli are what went too far.

Putnam ascribes ~25% of the drop in social capital over the past 70ish years to television's rise, but not because of fragmentation of visions of reality as you suggest. Rather, it is due to TV soaking up time that might be used to build community and social cohesion. See below for an example quote and corresponding link that goes into more detail.

"Even though there are only 24 hours in everyone's day, most forms of social and media participation are positively correlated. People who listen to lots of classical music are more likely, not less likely, than others to attend Cubs games. Television is the principal exception to this generalization--the only leisure activity that seems to inhibit participation outside the home. TV watching comes at the expense of nearly every social activity outside the home, especially social gatherings and informal conversations. TV viewers are homebodies."

https://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/DETOC/assoc/putnmtv4.html

I agree with your first two paragraphs.

To the extent that our present time is at all unique, I subscribe to Robert Putnam's thesis that much of what we see today can be explained by the drop in social capital in American life over the past several decades. Less socialization means less trust in other Americans or in the government, fewer norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness, and increased polarization. There are various reasons for this, television being a prominent example. Surprisingly, it seems as though these trends were firmly in place well before the internet or 24 hour news came along.

I'm not sure I understand. Could you point me to a resource that goes into more detail?

For what it's worth, nuclear energy kills fewer people per kilowatt hour than any other energy source, including solar and wind. This is as of 2012.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

Anybody who has a credit card, mortgage, or retirement account needs to have a high-school level understanding of math.

Microwaving cooks food by applying enough power to heat it up to a higher temperature. Moskowitz is explicit that his claim is not about raising temperature, but rather some other mechanism related to bodily signals that is not fully understood.

I suggest signing up for James Clear's newsletter: https://jamesclear.com/newsletter

He is the author of Atomic Habits, which is a reasonably short guide to mastering habit formation. His free newsletter delivers a high amount of wisdom per word, and reading the book is not necessary to get value from it. Normally I can read the newsletter in about 30 seconds, and then can spend as long as I want thinking about the content.

I share frustration with many of the issues that the author discusses. But I disagree completely with his thesis. I am profoundly optimistic about our future.

The individual liberties provided by the Constitution empower each of us to speak our minds, share ideas, and start/join movements. We have the power to elect our representatives, and have an independent judiciary to push back against corruption. The average quality of life here is higher than in almost any other place on Earth, and no other country can compare to ours in terms of diversity of thought, culture, and ethnicity.

Look, I understand that there are real, serious problems with our institutions and our economy. The beautiful thing about the United States though is that our political system allows for solutions to be discussed, proposed, and adopted. The biggest threats I see to the United States are not unique to us: climate change, nuclear nonproliferation, and global unrest/poverty.

This research group has claimed previous discoveries of different bosons before [0]. They have never succeeded in reproducing a result. The scientific community is right to be skeptical. If there is real physics there, then follow up experiments should be able to reproduce the effect.

[0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-boson-claim-faces-scrutin...

I share your skepticism. Waste-to-energy plants produce ash, and I can't imagine people will enjoy skiing in polluted air.

If anyone knows where to find more technical details about how this plant works, and what makes it "the greenest power plant in the world", I would be curious to take a look.

I think your point would be much better communicated if you provided citations for your claims. As it stands now, your comment comes across as condescending.

Yeah I think you are right. But that populist support is not guaranteed forever, and I wonder what happens then.

I agree with your first point. My anecdotal experience of talking to people from China is that there is a very real sense of nationalism that results in deference to the government. The idea is that under this regime the economy has grown strong, and everybody has jobs and food. That is worth the silencing of dissent in a country where mass starvation exists in very recent history. But how long does that last? At some point the people no longer agree with the censors, but the censors likely don't step aside and relinquish power. And to be clear the point at which this happens is probably not losing access to the NBA, but it does exist, and this NBA situation is an interesting barometer.

As I said in a different comment, Alex Jones is not that relevant to this discussion unless somebody can show that the United States government had a role in the deplatforming.

Twitter, Facebook, and any other entity that deplatformed Alex Jones are private companies and can deplatform whoever they want. In fact that is part of their freedom of speech. This is different from government-enforced silencing of speech, which is what is happening in China right now.

I feel no cognitive dissonance, but maybe you can explain more why I should.

I'm curious as to what happens if the NBA does in fact get banned from China. I've always wondered whether, as the Chinese economy grows and living standards rise, individuals would ever feel more entitled to individual rights. Of course maybe this is just a western bias.

If the NBA was blocked, would passionate Chinese NBA fans (of which there are many) fall in line? Or not?