kangnkodos

The slippery slope argument is that first VISA is going after white supremacists. Next they will be refusing to work with any Republican fund raising efforts. It's a dubious argument, but even it were true that this is the direction that VISA is taking, where would this lead?

I don't think VISA will choose to walk away from major customers in the future. More likely, they will continue to turn away the most extreme customers who are also very small.

But if VISA did go down this road, it would open up an opportunity for a new Repulican-oriented credit card company. Or more likely, Republicans would turn more and more to their competitors, such as American Express.

I don't think there are enough threads on HN saying that vegans are right, and evil egg-eating vegetarians are wrong. Therefore, I have concluded that HN is a den of evil egg eaters. I just don't feel safe reading opinions of people who have their moral compass compromised in this way.

So I think I too am done with HN.

So does this mean a space elevator is out?

I'd like to see this with two axes. One is killings, the other is per capita income.

I think the US would be off in a corner, all by itself.

polystain

Have you looked at this four part article? I haven't read it yet.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexamined/2019/08/a-respon...

Haha. You are much better at psychology than I am. You are so right that logical arguments just make people cling to their old beliefs harder.

But then...

What is the purpose of the book? Is it just to give scientifically oriented people a playbook of arguments to use against anti-evolutionary bible thumpers when debating school curriculum? I'll accept that.

I dunno.

In the one Dawkins book I read, the mathematical part definitely gets addressed. It may change your mind about the mathematical part.

I once read elsewhere that almost all the specific details Darwin came up with have been overturned by other scientists. But the new scientific results prove evolution and natural selection even harder.

My own personal speculation is that there may be many simple proteins that have some type of use or another. I would be interested in reading about how they came up with that 10^77 number. Sounds high to me.

On the other hand, I've read scientists make comments similar to your comments. Not in papers, but in casual interviews. Some agree with you and say that even given the current theories, there just wasn't quite enough time on earth to create life from non-life.

It's not an accepted scientific theory at all. More like a crackpot idea that will probably never be proved or disproved. But take a look at the panspermia theory. Small seeds of some kind move from planet to planet. Maybe one landed on earth long ago? It's a crazy idea. But it does address the issues you brought up.

Darwin's book stayed very clearly away from any talk about religion.

Years later religious arguments against Darwin popped up.

Dawkins' book addresses these religious arguments head on.

The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

The book is written to convince the reader that evolution is valid.

But to me, the shocking thing was to really understand the religious argument for the first time, and understand why evolution challenges that world view.

In a nutshell, there is a web of related arguments which support the belief that God exists. One of them is that the eye is so complicated, that it must have been designed from the beginning by an intelligent being. Therefore God exists.

But Darwin showed that many small random changes plus natural selection are sufficient to explain the eye's complexity.

Why was this shocking at the time?

Just imagine you are walking around with a vague gut feeling that God must exist every time you see a beautiful bird or a flower. You figure that something intelligent must have designed that beatiful, complex living thing. You see another complex wonder of nature, and feeling gets stronger. Perhaps it becomes the main reason that you believe that God must exist.

Then one day, wham! Darwin releases his book, and it becomes clear that there is a valid scientific explanation for the complexity of that flower which does not require a supernatural designer.

Instantly your whole world view collapses. There's nothing in the science that says that God does not exist. Science only says that other explanations are sufficient. And yet, just that is enough to collapse that entire line of thinking. There are still other arguments for the existence of God. But the one you felt most strongly is gone.

Reading the book gave me a detailed understanding of that religious line of reasoning, and what it might feel like to lose it. It gives me some understanding of why people, even today, have a desire to reject the scientific idea of evolution.

The headline is very misleading. The author says that web searches by people thinking of moving out of San Francisco are up.

That's very different than actually leaving.

I've often thought of making a web site with two voting mechanisms. Here's a million dollar idea you can have for free.

The two voting buttons on every post are:

Agree vs. Disagree

Important vs. Not important

Disagree/Important means that even though I disagree with this comment, it makes an important point, and I recommend others should read it.

Agree/Unimportant means that even though I agree with this comment, it doesn't add anything significant to the conversation, and you can safely skip reading it.

Any web site with only one voting mechanism will surely have different people with different opinions on what that one voting mechanism means.

Investing in your primary residence should have a small return, but much less than investing in the market.

So from a purely dollars and cents point of view it makes the most sense to live with your parents forever, or find the smallest apartment in the worst neighborhood with the worst commute and the most roommates. But that doesn't make sense. So what does make sense?

Look at the opportunity cost of your house. What is your expected small return if you buy a large house vs. your larger return if you get a small apartment and invest the rest in the market? Remember to include all the cost of owning, taxes, maintenance, etc.

That difference, the opportunity cost, is what the decision to buy a house will cost you.

My opinion is that you should still go ahead and buy the house, knowing the opportunity cost. What are you working so hard for? A nice sized house, a car, vacations, money for retirement.

Don't buy a home so expensive that you can't save for retirement that you want or the vacation you want. Banks will let you borrow enough money to get yourself into this situation. It's up to you to figure out your whole financial picture, and buy a house that fits your income.

So go ahead and spend your money on those things, as long as they're in balance with each other. A balance that's right for you. Some people really want to retire early. Some people really want a large house. Each person has a different balance that's right for them.

But on computers, you get things such as

console.log(0.1 + 0.2)

// 0.30000000000000004

A mathematician might say that this shows that you do not really have accurate floating point values and arithmetic in your computer, but instead something close to it.

Warhol was shot in 1968. Some say that this event was the cause of switching his life from productive creativity to relative stagnation.

The review notes that almost the whole book details his life before 1968. But the review does not mention the attempted murder at all.

I wonder what the book's take on this event is?

I think there are two axes to consider.

Is it possible to have reasoned debate? Yes.

Is the community a bubble? Are some topics and ideas which are immediately shut down? Yes.

It's possible that you have to have some of the second in order to get some of the first.

I feel very bad that this couple was falsely accused of sexual harassment under Title IX.

I'm sure almost all claims of sexual harassment under Title IX are valid, but as this article shows, not all are. I think the number of false accusations are extremely small, but not zero.

The article also shows the limited options of the people who are accused. In this case, the accuser made a few critical mistakes which allowed the innocent to be exonerated. If it weren't for those few pieces of evidence, the professional careers of both would have been over, with no recourse for appeal.

This article shows that Title IX, although written with good intentions, is tilted too far in favor of the accuser. Unfortunately, it does not allow the accused to defend themselves adequately.

This is pure speculation without one spec of proof:

My guess is that the regional government covered up the problem. But once the national disease authorities learned of the issue, they did the right thing because of their experience with diseases over the last decade.

I can't see the whole article. It might have some information which supports or refutes my guess.

---

Edit. From the full article: "on January 3, the National Health Commission, China’s top medical authority, issued its own gagging orders"

I would also like to see the following features:

- Enter the number of respirators in a country.

- Enter two fatality rates, with and without respirators.

Also, I don't understand why the peak number of hospitalizations would be so sensitive to the initial number of infections. That doesn't look right to me.

I hear what you're saying. The steps we have already taken are good.

Here is why I don't think they are enough.

1) Isolation is not uniform across the country. Some people are working from home. Others aren't. Some schools are closed. Some aren't. Some trips are cancelled. Some planes are still flying with some people. There are still large areas of the country where it's spreading with little or no isolation. The cases there will grow, and walk across state borders.

2) It's not enough, yet. We have some isolation in some spots. But there's not yet even one single spot with measures as drastic as are needed to stop this.

Italy has had stricter measures than the US in place for a little while, and the number of new people seeking hospital care per day is still growing.

The places which have successfully turned this thing around have put measures in place much more drastic than the US, and on a consistent national basis.

---

I guess we disagree about the US being more isolated than Italy or not. I think Italy has more isolation in place. Please let me know in what ways things here are more isolated than Italy.

Taking the exponential growth into account, we're somewhere around 11 days behind Italy. Unless something drastic changes in the next few days, whatever Italy is going through now, is what we will be going through in only 11 days.

See the chart in this article for details on the 11 day difference. https://www.econlib.org/the-answer-one-week/

It's the end of summer in Brazil, and they have 151 cases. Unfortunately, that makes me think summer is not going to stop this one.

At the current exponential rate of worldwide growth, by the end of June, we will be in one of these two scenarios:

1) Almost everyone in the world who is susceptible has it, or had it.

2) We implemented a way to slow down the global growth rate, or it slowed down by itself.

One way or another, we will know in a just a few months.

If you want to check the math, skip to about 3:20 on this video from 3Blue1Brown, Exponential growth and epidemics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg

Yes. It's like if you're on a ship and you see an iceberg in the distance. If you shout iceberg, and change the direction just a little, no crisis. Without that small change, big problem.

People were talking about Y2K years ahead of time. Lots of changes to code were made. A few little bugs slipped through, but not many, and everyone knew how to fix them. No crisis. Without the many code changes, big problem.

So if both parties are being relieved of their obligations, does that mean students get their money back for tuition, room and board?

If you sign up for in person instructions, and then are told they are switching you to a YouTube video, you should be offered a choice to continue on the new terms or to terminate the agreement.

If you are asked to leave your housing for part of the semester, you should be compensated for relocation expenses.

If lightning struck one small campus dorm, the student would expect the university to immediately provide alternative housing or pay for a reasonable alternative and moving expenses. The same should hold if the whole campus was closed.

... after I turned on translate, and clicked on "Accept" (Akzeptieren).

"...if you started..."

That's a big if. I haven't done the math yet, but I'll bet that the outside rim of at least one of the gears would have to be started moving faster than the speed of light. I'm not sure how you would do that.

The gear just before the first gear at light speed would have the outside rim moving at about 100th of the speed of light. It would take quite a bit of energy to do that.

(Others have pointed out that at speeds well before the speed of light, some of the gears would melt. I'm ignoring that.)

In Boston, people call this type of of problem a "wicked bad problem".

I feel like a beginner a lot of the time.

There are several competing forces at play.

On the one hand, JavaScript is changing every year. CSS releases new features such as grid. New releases of frameworks such as Vue and Svelte are released. React launches hooks. The list goes on and on. You read the headlines about all of the new stuff, but you may not actually use the new stuff in a real project.

On the other hand, the client needs features yesterday, and there's a need to deliver new features as fast as possible with the functionality you know inside and out.

You keep using the small core of functionality you know over and over again for years. You know a small number of things very well, but you know nothing about many things you read about. There's a whole world of things that experts know that you have never used.

Maybe a lot depends on your environment? If you're at a shop with 100 developers, a few developers might spend a lot of time playing with new stuff, and teaching it to others. In a small shop, your results may vary. Not every shop has that new junkie who jumps on the newest thing, evaluates it as appropriate for this shop or not, and efficiently teaches the new stuff to others.

I try to use and learn new things, but it's time consuming. So even though I am learning new stuff all the time, I often feel closer to the beginner side than the expert side.

The default is to make the donuts every day with the tools you have. It takes effort to learn new things and use them in a real project.

I'm happy to answer any questions.

When you go to the grocery store, allow a few extra minutes, take them out of the cart and have them help you.

I need three apples. Thanks, that's one. How many more do we need? Now we have three. One Two Three.

It gets you talking with your child more. It gives them confidence that they are contributing to a real task. Kids love to be useful. It's up to you to pick and choose those tasks in the supermarket, and everywhere else where they will be successful. Be patient, step back, and let them do as much as they can.