I'm not at all down on New Zealand. I love it here and always have. I think you've misunderstood my humor. I consider myself a New Zealander. It was self-deprecating.
1,045 karma · joined November 30, 2016
Cowardly is too strong for what I meant to say and I take it back. I meant it in an 'avoiding fighting' sort of way, choosing to not stand up and fight for one's rights, or choosing to give in so as to avoid confrontation, and in direct contrast to Americans seeming to fight over everything to the bitter end, with laywers, wars, refusals to comply, etc. Now that I read the definition, it was far too negatively connotated.
I was in favor of one hard lockdown and strict border controls, and that is mostly what happened. I was not in favor of shutting down butchers, bakers, and green grocers because that just crowded everybody into supermarkets making social distancing difficult and creating long lines at supermarkets. It also crushed several businesses into bankruptcy unnecessarily, caused lots of food to go to waste, and propped up the already-too-powerful supermarket conglomerates.
NZ had extreme advantages: an island nation with easy to control borders, a large lead time to prepare, a low population density, a unified jurisdiction, no constitutional restrictions on the government's power, first world medical infrastructure, a timid compliant population that overwhelmingly just does as they are told and doesn't makes a fuss, high social cohesion, double helpings of common sense. Cowardly risk-averse and boring people that will never amount to much more than a hill of beans by American standards, but happy nonetheless [this sentence was meant as tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating humor, sorry if anyone was offended or took it seriously].
The US does not have the options NZ had. The federal government does not have jurisdiction to enforce a national lockdown, and even local lockdowns are being ruled as unconstitutional. And if you can't do one coordinated severe lockdown to squash it completely and then strictly close your borders requiring two week quarantines for anyone coming in... then I say don't bother with lockdowns at all. Oh, and stop blaming everything on your president.
I was involved in formal verification at UC Davis back in 1993, and I'm sure it started before that. And yet we still can't do it effectively all these years later. The language lab was using HOL (higher order logic), us security geeks were using BAN (Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic). BAN logic turned out to have problems and GNY logic was supposed to fix those, but it had problems too... all those logics were failing us in edge cases that we could hardly conceive of. No matter how precise things were specified, no matter how rigorous things were, there were always edge cases that could be pried open to present practical attacks. What I eventually took away from it is that even the smartest humans aren't actually smart enough.
Rogaway was one of the smartest people I ever met. The fact that OCB2, proven secure, had a gaping hole discovered in 2018 doesn't leave me much hope that we'll ever have proveably secure anything.
Anthrax outbreaks have occurred all around the world. Just because it occurred in Siberia and there is evidence that it survives being frozen for long periods of time doesn't mean the risk of some super threat from permafrost is of any exceptional significance.
It seems however that people like to be frightened and to have something to panic about, especially Americans, and your newspapers and magazines cater to this by cherry picking data that can be twisted to tell a scary story.
Nov 7 - News media called a winner (this is not an official act)
Dec 8 - Deadline for resolving election disputes
Dec 14 - Electoral college casts votes
Dec 23 - Deadline for receipt of electoral college votes
Jan 6 - Congress counts the electoral college votes
Jan 20 - Inauguration Day
I believe that stupidity is and has always been widespread and in normal times the more intelligent ideas have the widest subscription, even among the stupid. But when leaders fail to [be open, be objective, act in good faith, stick to the truth], then even the stupid can detect that they are being played and they rebel and seek alternative facts. So my theory is that leaders are currently gaming the populous rather than leading them, and that this is so obvious to everybody that trust in leadership and institutions has gone out the window.
Scott Adams has recently asserted that about 90% of what we are being told is not true. I'm don't concur with Scott on that figure, but clearly even smart people have lost trust in leaders/institutions. When the news refuses to report on 25% of newsworthy stories because they either make Trump look good or Biden look bad... when the news claims it's perfectly safe to protest BLM issues in the streets during a coronavirus pandemic... when even judges are clearly acting in bad faith (Julian Assange extradition case, Michael Flynn case)... when the Supreme Court becomes (or is perceived as becoming) the arm of a political party rather than an objective trustable institution, then the populous loses faith in the leaders/rules/institutions and we get widespread rioting, violence, a hell of a lot of stupid ideas, and perhaps hopefully some positive changed buried within all that somewhere.
Given the vast amount of conversations he records and releases, it doesn't seem suprising in the least that he would make a mistake here and there.
(Oregon, arsonist, forest fire) https://thepostmillennial.com/arsonist-arrested-after-using-...
I haven't found the trifecta of ('Oregon', 'Left-wing activists', 'forest fires'). But I wouldn't have written an article making a claim that it definitely didn't happen. "falsely claimed" and "debunked" are unjustified claims themselves.
We are living in a strange time where many people think they know more than they do.
But given that Patreon was clearly and obviously a man-in-the-middle of the relationship and had policies which could be violated and which would terminate the relationship, and all parties knew this up front, then it is also clear to me that Patreon can freely choose to stop being a man-in-the-middle, and as such I don't think the tortious interference claim makes sense in this case.
Still it is hard to fathom a worldwide sustained decline. Some cultural and/or language group won't go along.
Apparently this is "high end science journalism". Kai Kupferschmidt tweets this "Some people in the US actually seem to think that rising #covid19 cases won’t lead to rising deaths eventually. It’s like they are watching lightning flash across the sky thinking the thunder won‘t come crashing."
Cases don't measure infections, they measure measured infections. Ramping up testing will ramp up cases even if infections do not ramp up. There is a credible theory that more cases are due to more testing, not due to more infections, and if that is true, the death rate will not follow. I don't personally accept that theory, but it's disingenuous and not "high end science journalism" when you fail to actually address the alternate theory.
We hear about listening to the science when it comes to COVID-19 and climate change. I totally agree. Why not also listen to the science when it comes to police shootings? And about whether George Floyd protesters further spread the virus or magically spookily didn't? We hear about criticism of the CDC, and I concur. Why not also admit the WHO made a long series of dangerous misstatements to such a degree that it's gotten hard to believe they were just accidents?
IMHO the right-wing is leading the way in conspiracy theories and downright dangerous viewpoints. On this we agree. But the left-wing legacy media has its fair share of fake news as well, especially in continually to mischaracterize statements made by Trump, and in framing the narrative in extremely unhelpful ways. Why not report actual death statistics regarding race relations? Why is it never news when a black police officer shoots a white person? Our brains make inferences based on frequency of events, but the events we are bombarded with are biased in a way to lead us to wrong politically-motivated conclusions, time and time again.
I'd like to think I'm in the middle. At the very least, I try to heap criticism on everybody. I'd like to see reasonable people to converge in the middle, en masse, and break America out of this dangerous partisan death spiral. This author is clearly reasonable, and on the right track, but seems to still be too much living in the main left-wing bubble and/or too afraid to criticize the left.
The CO2 from methane breakdown was sourced from the atmosphere in the first place. And it goes back into the atmosphere. It's part of the permanent surface-atmosphere CO2 cycle.
Atmospheric CO2 -> Grass -> Ruminant animal -> Methane -> Atmospheric CO2
Fossil fuels, OTOH, bring up CO2 from deep in the earth where it has been sequestered for eons.
If we ate less meat and turned the pasture into woodland, we could sequester quite a lot of CO2 on the order of 50 years or so. Longer if we buried the wood. And I'm not against that.
But it seems silly to me to focus on these minor hacks to surface cycles for temporary gains when the clear long-term problem is fossil fuel. We need to keep focusing on fossil fuel.
We have an ambitious goal of getting down to 1 trillion (or even 250 million) tonnes of CO2e per year by 2050 because of how bad things will get if we don't.
As game theory (and the tragedy of the commons) would suggest, there will be cheaters. But those cheaters are not overwhelming the overall downward trend.
Fossil-fuel production actually emits more methane than meat production does (but meat production is number two and a very big slice). So by cutting down on fossil fuels you will have a bigger impact on solving the methane problem than going vegetarian, and you'll also be solving the longer term CO2 problem. But every bit counts. Vegetarianism (or near-vegetarianism) is quite healthy too.
If we stopped meat production entirely right now, in a few decades we'd be back at ancient levels and the temperature would drop accordingly. But if you are worried about a climate apocalypse that our children and grandchildren are going to have to deal with, going vegetarian now is going to have little impact on that problem. CO2 is still the bigger and more long-term problem.
Location: New Zealand
Remote: Yes
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Technologies: rust, postgres, linux, git, html/css/webassembly, PHP, Vulkan API
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Email: mike@mikedilger.com
Passionate about rust (6 years experience). Maintain more than a dozen open-sourced rust libraries w/ more than 1 million aggregate downloads. 22 years unix/linux system administration. 10 years computer security focused experience. 9 years involved in web development. US citizen / New Zealand permanent resident. MSCS UC Davis 1995.
You can also correct for the sampling rate bias by looking at the number of cases per 100,000 tests (or similar). Does anyone have a link tracking that? EDIT: percentage positive tests: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states