padobson

I try to recognize when I'm consuming too much short text, like your comment, and then I'll go an pick up a book instead.

I'll let myself drift on the web a bit more when I'm between books, but when I start to get interested in a particular subject, I go looking for a book on it instead of the (usually) much lower quality online discussion.

This includes both fiction and non-fiction. I just finished a Del Rey Star Wars book - much more enjoyable than viewing another Prequel Meme.

The linked Nature paper in the third tweet [0] may demonstrate why a reservoir animal is more likely than the virus being artificially engineered, but damned if I can understand the reasoning in it. Maybe someone with a biology background or just plain smarter than me can explain it better.

In any case, my original point still stands, without exculpatory evidence for the Wuhan lab or the discovery of a reservoir animal, the lab leak theory should not be dismissed and any attempt to do so is just politics.

[0]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

We should continue to search for the reservoir animal and continue to pressure China to provide blood tests from researchers at the Wuhan lab. Without either exculpatory evidence for the Wuhan lab or clear evidence that it was a reservoir animal, the Wuhan lab leak theory should not be dismissed

Fauci was still saying [1] a reservoir animal was the most likely cause of the jump to humans a few days ago, despite having contrary evidence before almost anyone else.

I don't know why he isn't qualifying that more, but it's hard to see how it's not politics.

[0]https://twitter.com/JamesCTobias/status/1399811395043004418/...

[1]https://youtu.be/ilt_NcaIIRk?t=143

As a sample, he was a socialist who also wrote this:

It cannot be said too often – at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough – that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of.

[0] https://maudestavern.com/2008/10/09/george-orwell-review/ (Not sure where to find the original, but I've read it several times, and this looks like a faithful copy)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom

When I drink coffee, I hit peak alertness/performance in 10-15 minutes, but then I'm crashing by early afternoon, sometimes even before that.

So the window in which I'm most alert and highest performing seems to shift when I drink coffee, rather than widen, say, 7:00am-1:00pm with coffee, for a 6 hour windows, compared to 9:00am-6:00pm without it, for a 9 hour window, but it's not open until later in the day.

Yes, if I was going to introduce a non-Christian to prayer, that's pretty much how I'd describe it. There definite similarities, but with clear differences that make it more like a dialogue.

I'll look into Anthony De Mello, thanks for the heads up.

When I discovered that wasn't normal for everyone, even people I go to church with, I was pretty surprised.

When I started meditating a few years back, I took to it like a duck in water. I had no problem doing 20-30 minutes right away.

But I don't get the same thing out of it that I do out of prayer. Meditation is like local maintenance - a reboot or a defrag. Prayer is more like a software update, connecting back to the home server for bug fixes and feature upgrades.

It's the feeling of being connected to something greater than yourself that seems to be the key difference.

I used to do this with coffee, but I found the caffeine was actually shifting my energy window forward, even shortening it. Now I'll do calisthenics and spend a few minutes outside, taking deep breaths, if I need to wakeup before I sit down.

The amount of time varies, depending on what's going on in my life. I may spend more time journaling, note taking, reading, or just staring out the window and chewing on the thought. I have sessions that last fifteen minutes and others that last three hours.

Does anyone know about how this legislation worked out? Did it really get more people telephone access?

I'm skeptical of any praise toward the New Deal, because it's almost universally praised by just about everyone, but then you dig into it and you find out that agencies like the NRA[0] were so bad that even their proponents had to admit they were a failure, and the "successful" programs that lasted, like Social Security, pale in comparison to more modern programs like Australia's Super.

I don't hate the idea of the government delivering internet, but more like they deliver water or electricity, at the municipal level, rather than some set of national, overarching subsidies and regulations that will probably create perverse incentives all over this very large country.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Recovery_Administrati....

Vonnegut had to convince at least two gatekeepers: his own agent and the editor at Colliers.

I spent a large chunk of time a few years back looking into the questions OP is asking, and the ultimate truth I came to is this: whether you're self publishing or going the traditional route, you're going to need some established gatekeepers to support you if you're going to make it.

In 1949, those gatekeepers were traditional publishers. In 2021, we still have traditional publishers, but we also have content curation algorithms, social media influencers, podcast hosts, and platforms like Substack and Patreon. If you can get any of them to put resources into promoting you, you'll have a real opportunity of making it - that is, if what you're offering is any good.

If you can't or don't want to get the attention of those gatekeepers, it doesn't matter how good your content is, no one will ever find you.

No? Newton? Pascal? Lemaitre? Wheeler?

However, we have to weigh the residual risks against the risk of death from Covid

But then this made me wonder if there was a paragraph I missed:

Vaccination is a moral obligation

I think it's a mistake to think the weighing process you endorse in the first quote will land everyone with the moral obligation you endorse in the second.

I feel like this entire discussion can be summed up in four sentences: "Feel like you're not making enough? Find another company that will pay you more. No one will pay you more? Keep adding skills until they do."

Everything else is just window dressing for the negotiating table.

Citadel says you were right to ask these questions:

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i9SnRzR8AM1...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-29/reddit...

This is what I was thinking the whole time. Rome was surrounded by peer competitors, and OP says their most effective use of elephants was against non-peer competitors like Spain or Gaul.

So why would competitors continue to use elephants? Not because Roma was susceptible, but because THEIR boarder competitors were susceptible.

Elephants were not worth it to defeat well-trained troops, but were more than worth it to defeat smaller, less disciplined armies/militias.

My guess is that Rome's peers were often using elephants to keep smaller competitors in check, and only used them against Rome because they happen to have them anyway.

That said, I think articles like this contribute to science illiteracy and innumeracy.

A layman could easily come to the conclusion that the baby box caused the drop in infant mortality after reading this article, but infant mortality has been dropping everywhere over the the same time period, regardless of policy.[0]

While the article does briefly mention the Finnish government's broader support for new families, like the free health checks early in pregnancy that is actually incentivized by the box, it doesn't include the overarching worldwide, postwar technological and economic trends that have been driving infant mortality down everywhere.

The whole piece reads like a very literal endorsement of the nanny state, rather than a celebration of human flourishing that it could have been if written in the proper context of broader trends.

Edit: Almost all the replies (and I suspect the downvotes) to my comment are making my point. I wasn't disparaging the box or Finnland's broader policies to combat infant mortality. I'm disparaging the article's failure to paint Finnland's progress in the context of a wider trend of lowering infant mortality AND Finnland's broader efforts to do so. That failure leads to overly simplistic conclusions that contribute to scientific illiteracy and innumeracy, exactly like the conclusions below.

Does anyone believe Finnland could provide these services without the broader technological and economic progress?

[0]https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality

There's no "threat of tribalism". We're living in tribalism. This piece could only be effective in another climate.

Ham-fisted, on-the-nose, bluntness is the only way to get your message across to a political audience in 2019.

And then you become, you know, 12 years old, a teenager, and you gravitate toward Han Solo, who seems like a bad person, but ultimately he is good. And when you're kind of going through adolescence, you sort of like the idea of being perceived as a dangerous individual, even though you still sort of identify as being good.

"But when you really become adult, you're no longer looking at characters — fictional or unfictional — as aspirational. You kind of are the person you are. And now when you look at characters, you kind of want to see things in them that help you understand yourself. So I feel, as an adult, the character you care about the most is Darth Vader. The maturation process seems to move a person toward relating to and understanding villainous personalities.

-Chuck Klosterman

https://www.npr.org/2013/07/09/200141185/chuck-klosterman-on...

I don't think this can be overstated. If you don't enjoy the interview process, you probably don't want to work there.

At the same time, interviewing is often the only way you can find out if a company is really serious about hiring. In my experience, most companies with organized HR have certain positions that they are "always hiring". Which isn't really true, they just want to have the light on in case a rock star happens to be looking for a job.

I've been on a bunch of interviews where it was clear neither the company or hiring manager was enthusiastic about finding someone to fill a position, but that HR was pressuring them to keep the light on.

I don't need to argue that the environment and endangered species have value. They clearly do. I'm arguing that activists should act more like entrepreneurs and find a way to use market forces to extract that value - in this case, protecting species and their environments.

I've thrown out hypothetical examples, but I'm not an environmental activist, I don't pretend to understand the market. But I know the market is there, because this thread is dedicated to discussing the market opportunity.

You organize the farmers to boycott.

If you can raise $1mm from various environmental activist communities to lobby congress, you could just as easily raise the same million and organize a boycott that directly targets the revenue source of the bad actor.

No legislation will stop species extermination if information about the extermination is unattainable. If it's not available to activists and competitors, it's not available to regulators.

If the information is attainable, then the aforementioned activists and competing companies are both incentivized, morally and financially, to find it.

People like animals. I'd certainly be willing to buy Coke rather than Pepsi if I thought it was going to save an owl or a possum or something. I also don't think Coke would be above putting an owl on some of their packaging to remind people that buying Coke will save owls.

I'd much prefer this approach to legislation.

Or retirement calculator: https://www.daveramsey.com/smartvestor/investment-calculator

What's a good way for an consultant engineer to pick up a law firm as a client? What kind of open source community is there for legal software?

If personal flight starts as a luxury good to pay for research and development, as those innovations become widely known the price should come down to make it accessible to everyone.

[0]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/this-map-shows-how-mu...