mariodiana

Even if we imagine MMT working perfectly — whatever that means — it represents a stealthy redistributing of wealth. The idea behind it is for the government to acquire and then redistribute goods and services from those in the private sector who would otherwise command that wealth, and do something else with it: in other words, give these goods and services to others.

And no one is going to notice this? The people who are used to enjoying some quantity of goods and services are not going to notice that they now enjoy less, because someone else is enjoying them?

Or, is this somehow supposed to "stimulate" the economy, so that more goods and services are actually produced, because of the extra money?

This is alchemy. Production comes before consumption.

Michelangelo never married. What about the others?

There was a study done, years and years ago, that I remember reading about that suggested men are most productive, creatively — at the cutting edge in demanding fields — before they start families. The suggestion was that the demands of marriage and family life interfere with creativity. Put another way, the lone genius stops being one when he's no longer lone.

Price controls are economically destructive. They cause shortages. Were you alive in the 1970's? Lines going for several blocks? Even and odd days? Price controls are a bad idea.

tl;dr moral of the story: But I never again promised a customer that I could do something beyond my full control.

I guess specie in a home vault — or buried in an undisclosed location — is the only safe haven.

I'm skeptical that the government has learned the wrong lesson. What it should have learned is that rioting needs to be put down — no ifs, ands, or buts. But, apparently, rioting is okay. The state isn't interested in that, so much as it is in setting up a Big Brother infrastructure.

I say this as someone who fully recognizes that a legitimate protest will sometimes attract hotheads. A protest can get out of control. It can turn violent. And then, opportunists may decide to take advantage of the breakdown of law and order and indulge in the impulse to loot. I don't like it, but I recognize this as somewhere within the bounds, or just over the bounds, of normal. What I have a problem with is the following.

When people go home from their riot, have a bite to eat, nap, maybe watch a little TV, and then decide to go out the next night and do it again — and this happens day after day, with the government doing nothing to restore law and order — that is not normal. That's a broken government.

Government's first job is maintaining law and order. That doesn't require pervasive, high tech surveillance. Maintaining law and order in the face of a days-long insurrection is a solved problem.

Our government is broken. This "shadowy surveillance" is not an accident, or an honest mistake.

This is valid criticism. Apple's taste isn't what it used to be.

That site saved my bookmarks when Delicious went bonkers, and I much prefer it anyway — well worth the small price.

If you can remove the SIM, do that. If not, you could try wrapping the phone in two or three layers of aluminum foil, separating each layer by plastic wrap. YMMV.

This story points out few things. First, this is a failure of parenting. He should have demanded his kids surrender their devices every evening. Did he not want the "conflict"? Dads had more backbone, when I was growing up.

Second, I think there should be licensed use available for low power jammers -- say, one that ranged only so far as the perimeter of a high school classroom. If that's not possible, then perhaps schools need to be refitted with chickenwire in the walls, like the old plaster walls of years ago.

I think long-time users of Apple's various platforms will notice, especially. I bought my first Performa back in 1996. That old OS -- especially up against Windows 95/2000/XP apps -- conditioned people to be UI snobs. If I download an app from the App Store, and something rubs me the wrong way within the first few seconds, I will almost always ditch it. I want a native experience, and I don't think I'm alone.

I'm going from memory, and I can't remember how many years ago I saw this on television, but I thought it had something to do with a genetic mutation that likely gained a foothold in the Western European population sometime around the plague of the Middle Ages. If I remember correctly, if a person carried one copy of the gene, they could get infected with HIV, but it wouldn't develop into AIDS. If a person carried two copies, they would not even get infected with HIV.

Anybody remember hearing something like this?

Violence, or the threat of violence, against a civilian population with the intended aim of effecting political change is the actual definition of terrorism, special or not.

You're correct. A statue such as this one is difficult to interpret correctly unless you're actually standing before the statue, right where the viewer is supposed to be standing. A photo taken from a different angle skews the interpretation.

When we look at the photo, the American and African natives have a downcast glance, as if they're subservient. However, the statue was originally placed on high. The photo loses that. From the proper viewing angle, the two natives are meeting the gaze of the viewer. That conveys a completely different message.

They are on foot to make it clear that they are acting as guides, which wouldn't be clear if they were on horseback. Roosevelt is elevated on horseback because Roosevelt is the focus of the work. There is nothing wrong with that.

Roosevelt's gaze goes off to the horizon to convey the fact that he's the explorer here. There is nothing wrong with that.

The controversy is due to woke, self-righteousness, and anti-Western nihilism. If such sentiment is allowed to continue to metastasize, it will destroy civilization. Decent people need to push back.

> One is left wondering how well he understood the needs of the developers who would be using the Swift language and library, though he says others on the Swift team had experience writing apps.

Maybe a couple of years ago I read someone commenting on the /r/ObjectiveC subreddit that his problem with Swift was that it was pretty clearly not written by someone who was an application developer, and who had the needs of an application developer at heart. Rather, the language was written by a compiler guy, and for the compiler. It's interesting to see another opinion more or less in line with that one.

I was an iOS developer for 5 years. I've since bailed. I'll still do it as a hobby, and wish I could get back into it; but Swift just rubs me the wrong way. I never quite understood the antipathy some people have towards Objective-C. Is it the brackets? Boo-hoo.

The virus behind Marek's disease in chickens got much more severe because of the leaky vaccine used on chickens.

Here's some introductory material:

  https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-makes-virus-dangerous

  https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/leaky-vaccines-enhance-spread-of-deadlier-chicken-viruses

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haRMKsI-jKY

And here are a couple of papers:

  https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002198

  https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002236

Thanks. The horrible thing is I came here to say that sometimes I find a project that I did a year or two ago and end up feeling shallow and dumb.

Isn't it fair to say that this is the way human nature works? I'm sure her having "led a protest movement" via a Twitter crusade was gratifying, but not to the extent that depositing a sizable check would be. "Justice" doesn't have quite the same feel as cash on hand. And she got hers.

My gut reaction to general lockdowns, early on in this pandemic, was that they were driven more by an inviolable ethic of egalitarianism than by a rational assessment of risk, especially since the most dangerous comorbities seemed to correlate with demographics that, historically or presently, suffer from prejudice.

The article talks about "the values and ­structures and injustices," but I think what's really behind the author's sentiment is, to put it in Judeo-Christian terms, man being driven from the Garden of Eden. I say this because, as the author notes, "demonic possession" has been around for a long time. Call it what you will, but it's found across cultures and across time. I think what he's talking about is fundamentally human.

In the past, and to put things in more secular terms, I've made two jokes on the subject. The first is: Evolution operates as if the work is being done by government contractors chosen because they've put in the lowest bid. The second is: Our brains are wired like the lights in a Christmas tree.

So, imagine Christmas tree lights being strung up by government contractors!

What I'm getting at is that we don't have the "luxury" of the animals, who simply go about their lives more or less moment by moment, dealing with the immediate. We're self-aware, socially aware, and most importantly temporally aware. Because of these things, we have conquered the world. The downside is that's all work done by the lowest bid has allowed for. Our brains work according to spec — and nothing more. Now and then, some of us simply crack from the strain. That's the bug.

What I'm saying is that to think hysteria — or, again, whatever you want to call it — isn't real is simple hubris. All of human history makes mention of it.

The bottom line is that the domain here is under the umbrella of the social sciences. The phenomena the models describe is historical, and how closely they will match what happens from that point on relies on social stability. In the grand scheme of things, social stability is ephemeral. It isn't rocket science.

I'm not making a joke. Newton published his models in the late 17th century. The models hold no better or worse today than they did then. If you had rockets in 1687, they would work the same way then that they do now. But, social science is nothing like hard science. I worry on some fundamental level, even people who will claim that they "of course" know this in fact forget this. There is hubris here.

> It "was written on punch cards. It was put into a minicomputer and assembled, and the output was paper-taped. Then we proceeded to debug it."

Relying on the luxury of continuous, near-instant type-checking and so forth, I read this and want to hang my head in shame.

Which is what makes what happened with Marek's disease so interesting.

I actually think what happened is that Jobs was on his way out of the room, having heard enough and happy to let his subordinates work out any possible deal, and took umbrage that a "small fry" would detain him with trying to fix a ballpark figure on the spot.

Moral evaluation of his action I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Jobs's notorious "Fuck Michael Dell" comment, to his employees, captures what you're saying, for me. A person is free to think what he or she likes of the man, but unlike most CEO's, he wan't mealy-mouthed.

The article is too polite to tell the story of how Jobs really used Michael Dell's "sell the company" remark to motivate the troops:

https://lilly.tumblr.com/post/11230723028/steve-jobs

Maybe a healthy 25-year-old who has already recovered from COVID-19, who has been tested for antibodies and still shows a significant level of them, shouldn't get the vaccine, given analysis of the individual's benefit to risk ratio.

I'm the OP here, and the doctor with the YouTube channel I referred to was asking questions like the above. And after raising the issue adds, "I encourage you to speak with your doctor."

Those were essentially recruitment videos for enemies we were literally at war with. If we are literally at war with individuals skeptical of the COVID-19 vaccines, we should say so.

Every one of the people you describe had time to consider the information they got and to look for more information to confirm or contradict. Again, that is nothing like sitting in a crowded theater and hearing someone shout, "Fire!"

The analogy simply does not hold.

The tradeoff is always the benefit of getting vaccinated weighed against the potential harm of side-effects. The only strong claim made on behalf of the efficacy of the vaccines is that they will greatly reduce the vaccinated individual's chance of hospitalization and death. Those chances vary due to a number of factors, age and obesity being just two of the most important. An otherwise fit and healthy individual in his or her twenties or thirties already has a low chance of being hospitalized or dying. But, for the sake of argument, let's agree that the benefit outweighs the risk.

That benefit to risk ratio changes if that same young, fit, and healthy individual has already been infected with COVID-19. So, now what's the tradeoff? My original point is that in the current environment, there are some people who would rather not only that this not be discussed; some would rather that discussion—and perhaps even research into the question—be shut down.

Let's not pretend we're being governed by scientists. We're being governed by bureaucrats. No matter their credentials, the function of a bureaucrat is gaining compliance and expanding his or her department. That's what's behind calls for censorship.