mike_h

Covid is turning out to be a disease of culture. The same virus hit the East and the West. The East got through it, the West is on its knees.

It's not an unsolvable human nature problem. Look at just about any country in East Asia.

It's not just Taiwan, it's all of East Asia. At this point it's beyond irresponsible for people to keep comparing the US's handling to other Western nations – EA showed how it's done (in both democratic and autocratic societies), but we have some weird cultural blind spot that makes us not want to see.

This is one really important counterpoint. The internet made it more economical.

Another is that in days before the internet, the technology for small numbers of people to cause mass violence did not exist.

How many Chinese have you had intimate conversations with about this?

Google was an active collaborator with the state, on not just intelligence gathering but on soft-power influence-pushing (according to that article).

Maybe they have lost some influence in the current administration (maybe not), but Facebook has by all appearances been eager to take their place.

The US government can’t be seen openly wielding large internet companies for its interests. But any modern state needs to. And so it does it within the paradigm of the West: public denial, private understandings.

The difference between China/Wechat and US/FB/Google is one is out in the open, and the other is covered by a fig leaf.

It’s not just that. Now the Trump administration has control of the world’s best propaganda tool. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/technology/oracle-tiktok-...

He says he’s talking about the written language on signs.

I wouldn’t consider NYT approval a great validation metric. Their reporting on Xinjiang in particular really made it sound to me like someone has an axe to grind and they know they’re preaching to a choir over here. There was one massive “Xinjiang expose” they published a couple years ago that hung on allegations by a few individuals who the reporters claimed were putting their lives at risk by talking, but who the reporters nonetheless identified by name and face.

Amazon needs to pause all USPS usage in the weeks leading up to the election, and we need to organize to eliminate all but essential load on them ourselves.

Yes. And the harder problem (if this weren’t hard enough) is getting the ballots delivered to voters in the first place.

This is a critical threat to democracy given the circumstances of the upcoming election.

Nobody would miss the pockets on top for a place to hang your hands? I depend on this to take some load off my spine sometimes. And I feel like pocketing away my hands is like a “mute button” on a certain amount of proprioception when I need to really do some thinking or relaxing.

Love everything else about this btw.

If you’re curious about CO2, there are a number of home CO2 monitors available these days. It was really enlightening to me to see the levels rise well above optimal within just a few hours of sleeping with the room sealed.

Just don’t call them from the Yelp app:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjwebw/yelp-is-sneakily-r...

This is a red herring issue. The problem isn’t that Chinese won’t sell the US masks. It’s that the US is trying to buy too many too late. We could have spent the past decade stockpiling them.

American protectionism is actually part of what created this problem: it was only this week that the Chinese KN95 standard was approved for use by the FDA.

Hey thanks, these are great ideas and inspiration!

Any interesting outsider / trainer experiences?

Here’s a lab writeup comparing a few models from about a year ago:

https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/are-cheap-particle-count...

Depending on which part of the Middle East you’re in, you may need a PM10 (dust) monitor. The devices here just do PM2.5 (smog).

Keep in mind that one good thing about air pollution is it’s relatively straightforward to mitigate once you’re aware of the problem. PM2.5 filters can be had for relatively cheap (see Smart Air), and you can wear a mask when you’re out on bad days. Unless you’re really lucky, his peers in Bangkok probably won’t make him feel great about wearing a mask, but just having clean air at home will help a lot. Then maybe you can talk the school into filters, plus policies about athletics on bad days. I’d be surprised if they don’t have these already.

Dockless bikes are $1 per 30 mins... having one 20 feet from you vs two blocks is a qualitative difference. And zoom out on that map – the GoBikes only cover one small part of the city.

I think it’s bigger than that. There’s a massive FUD meme around dockless technology: the only time it’s in the news is to show the random landfills a few of them end up in, ignoring the 99% that have made millions of lives easier. Dockless bikeshare went from 0 to 200 million riders in just two years, in a country where everybody already owned a bike. This is a technology that makes cities more accessible in a way you can’t imagine til you experience it. But people point to a few left out of place and tell us it’s going to kill our grannies.

SF made an exclusive deal with Ford GoBike, the expensive docked bikes that are never nearby when you need them. That pre-emptively barred these companies from launching their dockless bikes in SF, and so the scooters are the workaround. And as someone else points out, scooters are scary on the street, so now we have a sidewalk problem. This is 100% the city’s fault for saddling us with old bikeshare technology.

Have you seen piles of them on the street yourself? I never have, in Beijing, Shanghai, or Xiamen. People are 99% considerate; the 1% who aren’t make for better photos. The frictionless utility of dockless has brought so much ease and joy to these cities that any marginal, occasional mess appears far outweighed to me, and anyone I’ve ever talked to.

Landlords have no way of knowing which dog is going to be the one that costs them thousands of dollars in damage and/or headaches, so they have to charge extra for all of them, same way insurance underwriting works.

You opted in to that price class, and that luxury of having a pet. When you lie that your dogs are service animals, you make life harder for people whose survival depends on it.

It also doesn't prevent people from using VPNs: the apps are just a convenient interface, Apple hasn't removed the ability to manually add your own.

More importantly, China is planning to block VPN at the protocol level starting in February. Apple can't do anything about that, and if all the other reasons against taking a stand here didn't make sense on their own, consider how silly it'd be to take a stand for a technology that's about to stop working anyway.

Am I missing the part where they explain how they tried really hard to make Airbnb aware of this, before publishing a method to cause physical harm to 1.2M people?

The numbers around domestic violence are staggering:

http://ncadv.org/learn-more/statistics

It's also a notorious blind spot for law enforcement – even when restraining orders are issued, they're nearly unenforceable, and once the aggressor is in your house you're a sitting duck.

Ambient audio-UI devices could be the biggest technological break ever in monitoring for the presence and emotional state of the subject of a restraining order. It's not obvious like a security camera or alarm system, and opt-in to a monitoring app would be invisible.

Spoiler alert?

Please someone confirm this isn't true...