shadowprofile77

> Over the last three decades, news organizations have traded in their neutrality and integrity for political and "narrative" influence.

Have you ever actually read examples of newspapers and news reporting from the earlier parts of the 20th century? The dishonest, mendacious bias in favor of any media source's ideological preference was extreme to a degree that even today isn't readily visible. Certain media empires were absolutely ruled by their owners and even major papers like the New York Times were often loaded in slant towards certain ideological narratives. Just to name one example: Read about Walter Duranty. Things were even more vicious in the 19th century.... I have no idea where this notion of once fair, objective news sources comes from but it's certainly not rooted in the practical reality (referring in all of this to U.S media and politics, regarding other countries things get more ambiguous and complciated probably).

If you're an otherwise healthy individual,eating cold food or being moderately cold have no clinical relevance to internal body temperature or how often you get sick from viruses. You're passing off an old grandmother's myth as a medical observation.

1.The main reason land armies are no longer relevant to superpower conflicts is due to the nuclear peace. This is hopefully a long term situation but if the genie of normalizing nuclear weapons use comes out of the bottle, or if a method of using nukes that are "optimized" for manageable long term damage is developed, I can nearly guarantee you that large powers will again start having conflicts more often. If this happens, big armies will definitely become important again. Smart warfare, drones, guided weapons and all sorts of shiny systems for technologically sophisticated killing are fine as far as they go (especially for small localized police actions) but only large military forces and equipment ultimately allow any one major country to seriously fight another major country.

2. Also, as a quick note to the comment above yours, China is an economic and possibly to some extent resource threat to Russia, but the obvious target of simply overtaking a huge chunk of Russian territory through Siberia (which in purely conventional military terms I think China could easily pull off) wouldn't happen, because Russia despite all its modern systemic weaknesses, crumbling demographics and terrible military administration still has the single largest nuclear arsenal on Earth, which takes us back to point one above.

3. China is a strong power with a vast population that dwarfs that of the U.S and an economy that's getting very close to rivalling it in both sophistication and raw wealth production, but it's also strangely isolated in its power. The U.S on the other hand has strong affinities with much of western and central Europe, several other asian nations with large populations and also a much better relationship with the second most populous country on Earth, right next door to China. Russia would never readily take China's side in a global conflict even if it dislikes the western hegemony and all of these things combined along with others leave china in a state of extreme vulnerability if we were to start talking about a real, serious multinational conflict between it and the U.S.

China's biggest strength is the economic dependence it has created in so much of the world, especially for manufacturing, but if a war were to break out between it and the west, this would in any case become a moot point, removing the one major incentive that any other country not directly next to it would have for trying to stay on China's good side.

>As for police state tactics, I don’t think they’d be considered if people were just smart and took precautions. They’re on the table because too many people insist on refusing to do simple things.

What an absurdly twisted bit of authoritarian reasoning. The very point of a free society is that you should be able to refuse certain things without being forced into them for the act of refusing.

Is there a non-paywalled version of this anywhere, or a way of finding it. Really, it's tiresome to see constant posting of content that most others can't even read.

Feel free to post a link to one concrete case of mass migration due to human climate change from temperatures or rising sea levels. Not ambiguous cases like the hurricane in your link but actual relatively demonstrable cases of direct temperature rises or sea level rises from climate change caused by humans. So far, a lot of frantic hand waving and heady speculation aside, I know of none.

Let's summarize some basic realities quickly to give a picture of why lockdown was largely a farce as anything but a short-term harm reduction measure. For those of you here (I assume a slight majority at least) who live in bubbles of white collar work conditions that can easily be done remotely from within highly developed countries with fairly developed social support infrastructure and the means to amp it up for extended periods of time: The vast majority of the rest of the world is not like your bubble. Despite massive improvements in human standards of living during the last several decades, the majority of the world population in the majority of the world's countries lives in such a way that their absolutely essential daily economic needs can only be serviced by daily close interaction with dozens or hundreds of other people in urban situations. For the developing world this is a nearly universal need and even for the developed world, huge parts of the population have to do the same thing and there's simply no way for them to avoid it. Covid will spread among them no matter what kind of extreme measures a small privileged subset of the population smugly pushes for, and from there it will by one means or another filter its way upwards even to those who can indeed isolate without major immediate economic problems. So, unless a small fraction of the world that can entirely work remotely is somehow capable of completely cutting itself away from contact with the rest of the world of people who emphatically can't do this same thing, the pandemic will run its contagious course regardless of the measures taken haphazardly in one jurisdiction or another. This applies at both the global macro scale and the local scale, and unless you want to advocate an absurdly unrealistic level of social atomization continuing indefinitely with complete disregard for very real, very serious economic consequences, it's something that simply won't happen.

It would be morally questionable, but it should definitely be their right to do exactly such a thing if that's their particular bias. It would be factual too, though with an extremely biased construction, which should itself also be their right.

To give a much more politically correct example of the very same thing, the media harps enormously on most cases of whites committing violence against black individuals. To do so is generally basically factual but the degree to which it is done without giving context can create an enormous slant to a more contextually nuanced situation.

I think it's worth stating here pretty pointedly that despite what some comments below speculate about the killer's supposed low intelligence based on grammatical and spelling errors in the text of his messages, I very much doubt that anyone without a fairly strong level of cognitive capacity could have or even would have created such fairly complex ciphers (and without the aid of more widespread computing or knowledge of crypto as is the case today).

Truly, where do you keep pulling the most alarmist numbers you think you can plausibly get away with from? COVID IFR at 0.5% with exceptional treatment? No, none of the wider more recent data backs this up, and please, don't just take my word for it. The CDC's more recent overview results don't at all back up your claim even though they do state that IFR can vary by region due to demographic and other factors. https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/112420_covidupdate.html

Well, just for starters, millions of people haven't died of the virus. At last count, the death toll so far is just over 1.5 million. A terrible number, to be sure, but if you claim to not be engaging in hyperbole or misstatement of facts, it would be good to back that by not making your very first statement completely non-factual.

When you dump the bowl of candies into your backpack, there are no more candies left for anyone else. On the other hand, when you scrape, all the original data and its underlying use case remain just as they are. You simply having scraped took nothing away from anyone.

Could you, you know, simply link to the Deepmind blog post you make such excited reference to? I'm honestly curious to read it.

And I can't imagine this applying to smaller (but possibly scalable) one-person businesses. Many of those are started and even become remarkably profitable by people working on them with relatively part-time effort. Right here on HN, across several occasional posts asking readers to name their small business success stories, there are many examples. Not the same as startups like this one, sure but not so different as to justify the absurd gut wrenching she describes in this post.

I know of many people who have started business (either startups or more classical business models) without working anywhere near as dramatically hard as this woman describes what she did. Since her product niche and product both sound like pretty decent areas for entry and business, what I don't understand is why she had to work so damn hard. Is there a missing part to the narrative or is this just a case of someone exaggerating hustle porn so they can sell a good story about passion and "pouring heart and soul" into something?

Since your explanation of the technical details here is by far the most robust I've seen in this thread, I ask you, as a layman on this subject, if you'd be willing to briefly mention what distinguishes the plausible mechanics or feasibility of the bubble described from “Introducing Physical Warp Drives” (in the link) and the warp bubble using negative energy as originally described by Miguel Alcubierre?

I truly don't understand why everybody keeps referencing the Mick West debunking video of this UFO footage. I actually corresponded on the guy about inconsistencies in his own debunking claims and he gave no satisfactory justification for his extremely superficial arguments, which essentially focus on his own perceptions of inconsistencies in the footage itself and simply disregard weeks of repeated sightings, radar tracking and up-close eye-witness encounters between trained, professional pilots and the objects themselves in the air. These are pilots who on at least a couple of these occasions observed the objects from fairly close range, in broad daylight and had their observations at least partially confirmed at the same time by also professional operators of sophisticated tracking systems (radar etc) onboard the Navy's ships. In the case of the Nimitz "tic-tac" UFO events from late 2014 this happened especially, during weeks leading up to the brief video that was finally captured. Mick West simply disregards all of this and in an email I wrote to him even claims that the weeks of incidents previous to the video being captured were "separate" events from the video because they didn't concretely, confirmably show the same thing.... What? An absurd conclusion.

Debunking with a critical eye is good and necessary but sometimes one gets the feeling that certain internet debunkers feel a need to debunk at all costs because that's their label, even if their own "rational" interpretations make leaps of logic much worse than simply admitting that something inexplicable was observed.

I think you misunderstood my previous comment. I don't at all question that the Black Death ended serfdom, or at least weakened it severely after so many dead. As I stated, I was questioning the application of this same chain of events and logic to the 1918 pandemic, for the population proportion reasons I already mentioned above.

I think this is questionable logic, the last statement I mean. The Black Death killed nearly half the total population of Europe across all age groups (in some regions and whole cities, it even wiped out 70% or more of their inhabitants. That level of life destruction creates an immense, definitive shortage of labor for the urgent needs of a devastated society. The 1918 pandemic killed tens of millions, but proportionally, this was a comparatively miniscule fraction of the world population and of the working population in the industrialized world of 1919 onward. Certainly not enough to heavily affect labor supply or cause massive changes in how working populations relate to their employers

And exactly what made said struggle so overpoweringly morally correct in every possible way that you can qualify it as a pure struggle for human dignity that can't be subjected to any valid criticism? Or claim that nobody has a morally sound right to stay out of it or claim it's too tinged with politics? Pray tell.

Because the past is obdurate.

It's very possible, likely even, that enormous areas of physics still have plenty of room for major discoveries and subsequent applications to new discoveries. Furthermore, tying even increments of these major possible discoveries to the existing field of knowledge and application would by itself lead to a great deal of new exploration. But what if we haven't advanced much in several decades because we now suffer from or soon will suffer from the Dog Problem?

Basically: no matter how hard you try, you couldn't teach a dog how to perform engine mechanics (or any number of other higher cognition things), simply because its cranial biology isn't up to the task of fundamentally understanding such things. I have a sneaking (layman's) fear that we might be close to our own version of the same thing in certain fields.

It would be nice to argue that AI augmentation of human-led scientific advancement will help us along considerably, but it still seems deeply hand wavy to say that. Sure, computers help enormously with vast amounts of technical number crunching, and enable the practical application of physics (among other fields) in ways that we could never achieve without them, but fundamental, self-directed discovery is still way beyond the scope of any AI I know of or foresee for the near future.

My problem was more with QCD and indeed had to reach for Google to see that (I think) it's quantum chromodynamics, but thanks for that one as well.

>The advertising industry is nearly a trillion dollar industry -- if a large amount of that value is going to the consumer why hasn't there been massive innovation in selling to it directly to the consumer?

But a hefty part of that value does come from selling it to the consumer, as long as he or she is interested. Advertising, and especially online advertising have both "democratized" greatly as the ad industry has grown over recent decades, and smaller business, so many of them belonging to consumers in other contexts, use this same consumer data to try benefitting their own bottom line.

Your statement about authoritarian tendencies is interesting. While I don't doubt that leaders like Trump or Duterte have them, it's a tricky situation to base such a label on their intentions or words alone. The vast majority of political leaders work towards the maximization of their own power regardless of their speaking style or underlying government type (Trump's overtly bellicose manner vs. say, Obama's much more diplomatically toned engagement with the public, other government branches and media). Either way though, I ask that you or anyone name how someone like Trump actually exercises(d) executive power very differently from a leader like Obama:

Both engaged in many of the same drives towards furthering their own personal political agendas during their respective administrations and while Trump says many things more baldly, and certainly lies much more flippantly, I fail to see how either his executive decisions or administrative pushes were or are in any notable way actually more authoritarian than those of Obama.

Just because one leader speaks more blandly than another doesn't mean that their fundamental governing power is much different, or that the more bellicose sounding figure is somehow an authoritarian if he or she is still fully constrained by the rest of a democratic government apparatus.

Furthermore, many if not most of the tendencies towards much broader presidential authority that Trump currently enjoys were established by a whole history of executive expansion which came before his term, and some of those started under much less visibly aggressive presidents. Focusing on what the orange man says more than on the deeper dynamics behind his office seems to me like more an exercise in ideological labeling than sound analysis of what authoritarian leadership means.

Compared to Photoshop or Lightroom levels of quality editing, it's a bit weak and seems to modify contrast too much when loading images, but I love using it for quick edits of my own photos. Nice, light application and since it's free, hardly can expect some of the deeper quality I've gotten from paid platforms.

It possibly is, agreed, but as with all complex subjects that involve many different people who suffer through their own personal problems, in many cases, overlabeling people as too quick to prescribe drugs or seek them can also be a dangerous and highly politicized norm.

I strongly suggest reading this post for an alternative perspective on how damaging over-politicization of doctor-patient relationships can be in either direction.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/16/against-against-pseudo...

His criticism is valid. A bit ideologically baited maybe but please, a simple statement of hard-to-negate ideas is what it amounts to. Who pushed for the removal of these books? Conservative Trump supporters? Nazis? Jehovah's Witnesses? No. It was people who would very probably self identify as social justice progressives with a leftward lean, and this sort of behavior is a notable part of a persistent trend that many different but in many ways similar cases bear out; namely, missing many forests because of their trees, by pushing for absurd things....... like banning "To Kill a Mockingbird" because it contains racially charged themes. despite it's very obviously anti-racist central message. Curious conversation does not and should not rule out plainly spoken criticisms of obvious stupidities, so long as it doesn't degenerate into the irrational.

Exactly what I've done so many times! Good to know it works just fine in other contexts.

Of course, but were you frequently asked why you were taking photos? In your case, what explanation would you give? Wonderful shots by the way, and thank you for your reply.