What are the frameworks used in scientific endeavours? Given that scaling is not an issue, something like Rails for science seems like it could potentially return many $(B/M)illions of dollars for humanity.
264 karma · joined August 24, 2018
It's just a really weird year all around.
Some possibile outcomes:
Imagine a page with only foreign results. Plenty of news entities cover Australian news, and a result like this: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=victoria+australia+covid could very easily nix the news box, and any and all Australian news results and content.
Google could take the attitude that all Australian news sites that require payment have a robots.txt with:
Disallow: /
I can't imagine any law that both demands Google crawl sites AND demands payment for it will survive being contested in the courts. You can't both compel and enforce - it is one or tother, and if it costs Google to crawl your site, why should Google crawl your site?
I can see a news site, like The Guardian, agreeing to give Google their news for free, and getting all the SERP links as a consequence. I can imagine Google doing deals with all manner of sites for nothing, where the value of 100% of News traffic from Google is likely millions.
I have no idea what the proposal of the ACCC is (and I'm Australian) but this seems a really weird case, where the unintended consequences could be almost anything, and the likely outcome is more likely to be bad for Australian sites than beneficial.
If only it were older systems!
I get data from a variety of undocumented sources, and I started logging what I actually receive next to the normalised data, e.g. I either put raw JSON into the database next to the actual data it contains, or I put all downloaded data into a git repo and update the repo after every query.
Why raw JSON? I've had data come back as JSON that did not validate like not escaping quotes, blank fields that were missing a value e.g. {"dog": , "cat": "yes"}, just plain wrong data (a number field that was "no number at present"). Putting it into the DB lets me fix the errors and reprocess.
With non-JSON, I've had a raft of other errors/problems, and I find git works well here to show what changed and caused the errors.
When dealing with anyone else's data, not just validating but also logging in a structured way that makes discovering errors easier is vital.
Society is varied across county, city, state and country lines, and we are in our infancy in understanding what policies work, when, where and why. Combine that with no overt expected outcome, i.e. do we expect this policy to have an absolute outcome (assert(absolute_wealth > X)) or if we want a comparative outcome (assert(relative_income > 0.77)), and we end up with arguments about spending that are judged by rhetoric rather than success or failure on what should be a knowable scale.
Being more overt in how society judges government spending, especially when the goal is a social good, gives us the best shot at spending more on effective interventions, and less on ineffective ones. I think it also helps mitigate the circus nature of politics, where politicians gain kudos simply for with their spending decisions, and are rarely held accountable to actual outcomes. Like TDD, it would by no means be a panacea, but it would be a step in the right direction.
While it true that a policy can be fantastic for society, but exacerbate inequalities (i.e. get better at extracted value from smart people), or be terrible for society but reduce inequality (just make sure everyone has nothing and job done), if we at least tested the policy along some overt lines, and threw out the very worst policies, I can't imagine social spending would have worse outcomes, if only until the loopholes are worked out.
Another scenario is someone does what you suggest after finding a real vulnerability, to waste the teams time while they exploit the real vulnerability.
When we all look back in 5 years, then 10, then 15, there will be different "obvious" conclusions drawn. Right now, anyone who sides with any action as correct should have a confidence level that is extremely small.
The more varied the responses, the more we learn as a species, and I am glad that not everywhere assumes they are NYC or Lombardy, and acts in varying ways so that in 5, 10, and 15 years the coming studies have different data points of comparison.
It absolutely can, let me count the ways:
1. You are never, ever on a bad site - no matter how good Google et al are, bad things happen. If avoiding that matters, NY Times is a smart move.
2. You don't pay for the AdTech - everyone know who the NY Times readers are - is spending 40%-60% to overcome the problems of mass advertising better than splitting the difference with NY Times?
3. AdFraud - NY Times can charge rates and using methods that are more fraud resistant (e.g. get rid of CPM).
"We are the NY Times. If you want to advertise on our site you have to pay a premium."
"But we want to target ..."
"We are the NY Times. We have half a billion ARR. Take it or leave it."
That used to be how ads worked, and I think it is a better model - for both sides in many cases.
Found where I got it from: https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/seattle-is-getting-an-obj... I'm not American so no idea if this is accurate or not.
The first two points from MR:
> – The numbers of hours worked by low-wage workers fell by 3.5 million hours per quarter. This was reflected both in thousands of job losses and reductions in hours worked by those who retained their jobs.
> – The losses were so dramatic that this increase “reduced income paid to low-wage employees of single-location Seattle businesses by roughly $120 million on an annual basis.”
This partisanship seems crazy to me, especially given that the bureaucratic system seems plain broken. Not broken based on Republican or Democratic ideology, just plain broken.
I'm not American, and it doesn't seem like in my country Australia these supply issues have been as bad, despite almost all of our supply coming from China.
Oh, and you want citations, sorry, my bad:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HLrm0pqBN_5bdyysOeoOBX4p... - 30 some citations on masks.
Given we know there are people with COVID-19 who are asymptomatic, any "Healthy people have no use for a mask" can simultaneously be true, and be practically irrelevant, as any definition of "healthy people" is necessarily impossible to prove. You simply can not know you are free of Corona Virus, short of having recovered from the virus.
If the standard was EVERYONE wears a mask, asymptomatic people would be a non-issue. Any advice contrary to the 100% mask usage argument has to explain how we deal with asymptomatic people. Short of testing everyone all the time, what would that even be?
TL;DR In a world with asymptomatic COVID-19 people, a 100% mask policy seems the sane default position.
I'm also pretty sure that is the case in almost all countries, where welfare is all money spent on, well, looking after people in some way?
Part of the problem is that some welfare is not about the money, but the support. UBI is less likely to help someone with mental issues than someone who hates working at 7/11 while studying. Generalised, UBI likely helps those who have an impermanent problem over those that have longer term issues.
Society likely would still need welfare services for those people who struggle with the multiple travails of existence.
Personally, I'm less interested in UBI in the first world, where welfare is pretty good already and the negative affects are unknown and complicated. I'm more interested in what affect it would have on the third world, where the downsides - disincentives to work etc - seem far less of an issue. https://www.givedirectly.org/ubi-study/ is a good example.
Look at the historical data: all red and yellow for Jakarta, almost all green for Sydney, with the last two months an exception.
Climate change is going to have little to no impact on Sydney now or in the next 50-60 years.
That is truly inspiring, I really like it.
Australia is a MASSIVE country, that is largely uninhabitable by humans. It is estimated that 75% of the species on the continent are undiscovered: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-07/75-per-cent-of-specie...
Large scale solar is likely to cause problems for large numbers of native species. YMMV in how important you find that, but to me personally it is a huge issue.
The only possible way is if the alternative is massively funded by debt, and the "cost" is based on historically low interest rates and a repayment timeframe in the decades.
Even then, given the ongoing cost of nuclear is relatively small, how is it possible that the capital expenditure of solar + natural gas is cheaper than the running cots of nuclear? Can someone show me that maths?
IMHO, ubiquity, especially when traveling, will ultimately be the winning move.
# No money changes hands, so safer for drivers.
# No payment is made in the vehicle, so faster exit times.
# Uber records all trips, so easier to work out costs to expense.
# Uber uses any credit card, so your boss can pay for your ride without the need for separate expensing.
# Driver and passenger are tracked, so there it is easy to find who did what. There are a lot of rape charges and cases against Cabbies.
# Rating - I've been in a LOT of awful, awful cabs.
# Drivers can work 1 hour and make some money. Try that with any other job.
That's the missing piece of all this. The Saudis may legitimately be in the market for turning $15B into $10B, and being happy.
Oil is under a LOT of pressure, and while it won't go away anytime soon, the Saudis need to put their money somewhere. They likely already have a diversified portfolio of other stocks, they have after all made billions for almost a half century, and risking a smallish percentage of their wealth (there's a terrifying thought) is likely a smart move, even if they lose big, by anyone else's standards.
As a political strategy it is also probably sane. Vision Fund is likely good for the Saudi's reputation, as investment in innovation over, say, real estate in London or SF is less politically charged.
The Saudi's likely get a lot of this investment.
Given that lots of other things have changed in society, if this gap has stayed the same as an average or median on the whole, that is speaking to something deeper. So what, exactly?
Thomas Sowell makes the point that average ages vary by race: https://www.tsowell.com/spracecu.html and there must be other factors, like where races live. Asians being based in San Francisco pre Silicon Valley's boom has surely had a positive affect on their collective income and wealth.
I really wish there was a clear cut answer, but there self evidently isn't one, unless we believe that every change in society in the last 50 years was made for cynical reasons. So there must be all sorts of answers in the data, sliced properly, that could lead us to a more equitable future.