marchenko

This case stretches the theory of manslaughter to a point where it impinges on free speech. Not every evil act is an illegal act, and it is dangerous to over-extend legal theory to retroactively condemn a specific act.

>I admit. I am an introvert and I have by and large welcomed with open arms every advance in technology that has allowed me to deal less with other people.<

I used to feel the same way, until I realized that as an introvert, I am especially reliant upon the regular stream of casual, serendipitous encounters that punctuate everyday life for social and emotional well-being. Because I do not seek out contact, these small bursts of socialization are important to balance my mood and keep me grounded. I first noticed this during long periods in a non-native-language environment, where I realized that landing a good joke with a cashier was better for my equilibrium than any social media success metric.

Giorgio Moroder did it first.

The prescience:wordcount ratio in that article is incredible. If I may ask the OP: how did it come to your attention?

>No natural law requires the repetition of magical formulas, and no natural law forbids homosexuality or eating pork<

One might consider the natural law to be selection on relative fitness: reinforcing connections to allies, producing descendants, and avoiding premature death via trichinosis, for example. Societies which encourage these behaviours (or which strictly regulate who may specialize in genetic v memetic reproduction, and how) may gain an advantage over their competitors to propagate genes and memes. The glib treatment of religion in this piece, and other short pieces by this author,ellides a lot of interesting discussion about the intersection of social and 'natural' law, and its precriptivist v descriptivist components.

I'm not convinced by the description of the inducible teenage otaku. Over the medium term, some will feel compelled to perform activities that garner attention and praise from potential mating partners. Over the long term, the otaku are likely to be overtaken by persons who more strongly feel such a compulsion, and who gain mating opportunities as a result. The scenario he proposes requires widespread buy-in by both genders to avoid a selective differential (in the absence of a huge disruption to our current reproductive arrangements).

>Right now HIV infections are basically a minor nuisance, provided you're taking the appropriate medication

The cost of treating an HIV+ person in the US is roughly $400K over the course of their expected lifetime. This is more than a nuisance sum. HIV treatment can also significantly affect quality of life.It is not yet time to become blase.

I think what gives Threads extra psychological heft is the fact that it opens with a very long sequence of everyday life pre-bomb, which grounds the film in reality. Because the cause of the disaster is unknown, it is easier to shrug off "The Road" as an alternate universe. The events in "The Road" are more awful, but less immediate. Now that I think about it, that grounding also enhances the "Wizard of Oz", in a different way.

Just being reminded that this film exists has put me in a bleak mood. It makes "The Road" look like "The Wizard of Oz".

The US has double the per capita emissions of the EU on a cumulative basis since 1970, but Australia and Canada have similar per capita emissions over this period. Canada, especially is accelerating its CO2 extraction relative to the size of its economy and population.

In a globalized system, where these extractive activities are global commodities, it seems to make sense to index emissions/extraction against economy size. Otherwise you get the unhelpful result that Bahrain and Qatar are the source of the problem (in a material sense they are, but not in a useful sense). This [1] list of emissions by GDP is a nice start, and it seems that Canada and Australia, the other two members of the wealthy New World Anglosphere, are neighbors to the US on this metric.

Is there a good way of accounting for national economy specialization when assessing contribution to the emissions problem? China looks very inefficient according to this metric, but much of the world is essentially outsourcing its emissions to China. Is it useful to compare China to a country whose GDP is based largely on financial services? Which nations give the best bang for the buck in dirty industry (my suspicion is that Germany does well here)?

1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_...

Modern agriculture is part of the carbon economy, especially since the Green Revolution. Inorganic fertilizers are produced using coal and natural gas, and nitrogen-enriched fertilizers emit nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas. These inputs were previously mostly sequestered.

>Those universities/firms that didn't have Jewish quotas and discrimination got a good boost in performance over those who had quotas and discrimination.

I'm sympathetic to this point, but this particular example assumes that the discriminating entity is focusing solely on performance. Harvard and Yale maintained and increased their social cachet over non-discriminating entities like MIT and Cornell by instituting Jewish quotas. Future donors from the majority demographic were willing to pay for "culture fit". This supposedly irrational strategy worked so well that it has been reprised and copied by other institutions against other demos. Inefficiency can be remarkably persistent if it enjoys the status of a social norm and satisfies other values.

For federated learning to truly reduce incumbent advantage, won't newcomers still have to develop a platform attractive enough to entice device users to download their model and consent to data inspection? Or is the idea that Google or another large provider will be the point of entry for various algorithms to connect to the datastream, as a sort of cloud service? How many models can co-exist on one device?

Your comment could also be taken as an argument for being a late-adopter of commercial genetic testing services:

1. The AUC (predictive power)for most traits is currently very weak

2. The genetic privacy protection landscape is currently quite volatile

Taken together this puts the consumer in the situation of having data that is of middling utility for them personally, but is of great potential utility for the testing company and insurers. A small increase over the average population susceptibility for trait X is often non-actionable for you personally, but over several traits might be sufficient to shift you into a different insurance risk class. If you have privacy concerns and are interested in your risk profile for certain traits, look into whether a kit is available for those traits alone. You may wish to combine different kits from different providers to interrogate multiple regions (a more expensive strategy for the privacy-sensitive). There are a few companies that will put together a bespoke panel. At present, it may be prudent to take a hacker approach to genetic testing. https://isogg.org/wiki/List_of_DNA_testing_companies

If you have concerns about a specific trait in your family history, I would suggest speaking to a genetic counselor. Many genetic conditions are influenced by a suite of relatively rare mutations not commonly included in commercial kits. A geneticist can tell you if this condition localizes to a specific chromosomal region or set of regions and sequence those target regions in depth for a better estimate of your risk profile. Perhaps more importantly, they can tell you if it is worthwhile to do so. Some conditions are too complex to reduce to effective testing, or result from poorly-characterized private mutations, but may have associated non-genetic biomarkers that your physician can monitor if you bring the problem to his attention. If your father's condition was well characterized and you have access to his history, you can do preliminary research on SNPedia (SNPedia lists whether a SNP of interest is included in the 23andMe kit), or do a PubMed search on "genetic risk factors" /"targeted next-generation sequencing" $condition to get a sense of the state of the art.

There's a big difference between leaving your DNA on a cup and storing it in an easily-queried database. To collect your DNA from a cup , an interested party has to have an a priori interest in you specifically. To get it from a database (or databank, if 23 and Me is retaining physical samples, as their terms indicate they might), the interested party just has to have an a posteriori interest in "people's DNA", and hoover yours (and by probabilistic inference, your relatives') up along with everyone else's.

In the US, the protections against insurance companies using your genetic data against you are about as deeply entrenched as the protections against letting ISPs sell your internet history, and subject to much more intensive lobbying. Other countries have no protections at all - Canada's current bill is strongly opposed by the Trudeau government. Remember, even though most of these genetic risk scores are incredibly weak predictors, it is only necessary for insurers to believe they improve their actuarial models slightly to have a huge effect on differential insurance costs.

Well said. Genetic data is by nature personally identifiable, and genomic disaggregation techniques can be expected to improve. Data troves like 23 and Me are an attractive target for DNA dragnets - at present, their SNP data is not CODIS-compatible (although it is theoretically possible that the SNAP data could be queried against a physical sample assayed for the same SNPs), but the physical samples are very valuable and customers should inspect their sample retention terms very closely.

"Diapers" is just a synecdoche for parenting equipment: diapers, wipes, books, snacks for older kids, extra changes of clothing, etc.

Car seats will be a bigger problem: they are unwieldy, legally mandated, and require careful installation to be effective. Unlike diapers, even the small boosters used for older children can't fit in a shoulder bag.

A young couple expecting to have children in the next few years might balk at these inconveniences, and that could depress adoption of the 'mobility' model. You have to keep prospective purchasers in mind, who are evaluating their needs over the use-life of a car.

True and succinctly stated.

Scipy, numpy, pandas. And it is easy to think in Python.

The signalling competition of higher education is turning into a Red Queen race.

Similarly,I always wonder what will happen to pleasure drivers and motorcyclists under a self-driving regime. Will human operators be confined to tracks by regulations or unaffordable insurance rates?

That might work as long as none of your relatives use the service and submit their real details.

At my last McDo visit, in Switzerland, most of the ordering was through kiosks and the staff was repurposed toward table service. The restaurant was especially clean and friendly, and there seemed to be a lot of staff. So there is hope for complementarity.

The other problem is that it is impossible to contract to give solely _your own_ genetic information: your DNA necessarily informs on your relatives in a predictable, probabilistic manner. Should they be informed that a third party can reasonably infer salient features of their genome? Should they have to consent?

Talented Actors and salespeople are often able to capture what they call "local star power" : situational periods of top status based on charisma or relevant skill. But local status is usually fleeting compared to global status, which is generally determined by some combination of power and attractiveness to potential mates. It doesn't matter if you crown yourself King of the Middle Kingdom if you have no desirable courtiers orbiting your throne. So there are many different nested and intertwined status hierarchies (athletic, scientific, creative, etc), but not nearly enough to accommodate most status-seekers. Intentional communities - often religious - are one of the few examples that subvert external status criteria successfully over significant periods.

Gathered/trapped (female contributed) foods provided approximately 50% of average caloric intake in most forager societies outside of the Arctic. And there are a lot of interesting social rules about the sharing of hunted meat (highly desirable but less reliable). Men do have to be willing to put skin in the game and contribute in some significant (sometimes risky) way to be considered an acceptable mate, though.

Iceland has low rates of marriage, but is fairly conventional about monogamy. Iceland also has roughly as many residents as Tulsa, OK - a population just large enough to avoid inbreeding depression.

The focal males of the article didn't vote, but their worried family and friends did.

It depends on what the point of a haircut is. For many demographics, the actual haircut is not the primary component of the regular salon experience.

If Uber and AirBnb were to claim taxis and hotels as their competitors, would that invite more scrutiny as to why they escape the regulatory burdens of their primary competitors/comparatives?