sky-kedge0749

We can probably feed everyone given expected population growth through 2050 with a lot of work, unless there is some huge disaster: https://www.wri.org/insights/how-sustainably-feed-10-billion.... Item 4 talks about encouraging people to voluntarily lower fertility rates and items 14-15 are about fishing.

But we'll have to treat the entire planet as a tool for our use and that's sad, putting it mildly. The ocean used to be brimming with life and now we treat it like a food factory and a road for our ships and talk about dead zones and garbage islands. There's no humane way back but we can mourn what we've lost.

People don't talk about world population because population growth is mainly happening in the developing world where environmental damage is small per capita compared to the developed world, particularly the U.S. The environmental benefits of not having kids in the developed world are however commonly discussed, for example https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-....

There's also a long history of people using environmental concerns related to overpopulation as cover for racism or other bigotry, so bringing up world population without qualification can feel, unfairly or not, like a racist dog whistle people are reluctant to engage with.

"Asylum seeker" is a specific term, for example see this UN glossary: https://www.unhcr.org/449267670.pdf. In particular it's not about huddled masses, it's about people escaping violent situations and active persecution. Putting "asylum seeker" in scare quotes and conflating it with general immigration is a right-wing thing to do. If you don't want people to mistake you for a right-wing partisan then consider just saying "immigration" of whatever type you mean.

From https://beautyschoolprograms.com/cosmetology-licensing-requi... you can see that some states have licenses available with lower requirements. Two examples from the link:

* Idaho has "Barber – Barber-stylist 1800 hours; Barber (no chemicals) 900 hours"

* Wyoming has "Barber – 1250 hours with chemical services, 1000 without chemical services"

Maybe 900 or 1000 hours still seems like a lot to you, I don't know. Given the politics of these states it's unlikely their governments are being strong-armed by labor cartels or over-regulating on general principle.

I never said a good job, I said a minimally correct job. You can't evaluate whether someone can trim around the ears safely if their haircut is so bad they don't trim around the ears at all. I'm not sure how else to say it.

I'm not trying to convince you that a hairdresser needs 1500 hours of training to give a buzz cut.

I'm not trying to convince you that your barber needs to be able to do every possible hair procedure to give you a buzz cut. We could have barbers who are only licensed to do buzz cuts. We don't have them though because no one wants them to exist, not the barbers, schools, salons, public or government. Consider that being a barber who only gives buzz cuts is like being a programmer who only writes web-scraping scripts on freelance sites. They could exist though, theoretically.

If you can't give a haircut then you can't give a safe haircut.

Specific example: most people expect a basic haircut for a man to trim around the ears. If I never trim around the ears then maybe I'm being safe, but you can't say I give a safe haircut because I'm not even giving a haircut as most people expect it. In particular I'm avoiding one of the most dangerous parts. You need to watch me trim around the ears in a minimally correct way to make sure I know how to do it safely.

Every state has similar requirements: https://beautyschoolprograms.com/cosmetology-licensing-requi.... Anyway no one is going to die or go to the ER from lice or getting their ears nicked or a mild chemical burn. We still don't want that to happen.

A lot of the training is hands-on. It's a trade school. You're not spending a entire month studying the theory of scissors, you're spending a lot of that time working on many customers under supervision. Even a simple haircut for a man might take a professional 20 minutes. A more complex cut can take longer. A student can take twice as long as a professional. It all takes time. It's a lot of work. I don't know what you can cut out without reducing quality. The fact that all states have converged on similar requirements supports that.

To check that someone can give a haircut safely you have to check that they can give a haircut at all, which means the haircut needs to be at some minimal level of quality.

You still need some licensing to ensure people understand the basics, like hygiene, since everyone has an interest in making sure hairdressers won't spread lice or accidentally cut their customers with dirty tools.

Most of the money in hairdressing is in the complicated stuff. People do this because they want to make a career of it. Maybe you're imagining some kind of two week training program which outputs someone who does nothing but run a clipper over people's heads all day for $5 each. The economics and incentives for that don't make sense to me. People who want ultra cheap cuts will probably just buy their own clippers anyway.

A lot of barber/cosmetologist training is hands-on with customers while an instructor watches.

Also keep in mind that a lot of work on hair can be complicated using dangerous chemicals. If you're a guy who just gets a trim or buzz cut every month you may not appreciate this. A relaxer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxer appointment can take a couple hours and cost well over $100 not including tip even at a run-of-the-mill place. The chemicals can burn skin, or damage hair that took years to grow. Now consider hairdressers need to learn this, and colorizing, and a ton of other things, for many different hair types. This all takes time.

The idea that barber/cosmetologist training is some kind of cartel situation is absurd. They make around $20-30/hour.

You might like to consider Noam Chomsky's take on the Financial Times in https://www.ft.com/content/bcdefd38-3beb-3506-b24c-82285ac87... from 2013:

> [T]he business press has a different incentive to get the facts right, Chomsky says, which is why the FT is his regular read. “Those who Adam Smith called ‘the masters of the universe’ have to understand the universe. They have to have a tolerably realistic understanding of the world that they are managing and controlling. That’s true of political elites as well, but the business world particularly. Also, the business press essentially trust their audience. They don’t have to impose propagandistic illusions to keep the rabble under control.”

> Advocating for higher wages to fight inflation is non-sensical. It just exacerbates inflation and requires even further wage gains to keep even.

By exacerbate I suppose you're imagining a cycle where higher wages result in higher prices which result in higher wages and so on. However wages are just another price in the market and it's not clear why the cycle needs to be broken after all prices have gone up except wages. We don't need to let workers end up holding the bag yet again.

In practice in the U.S. the early part of a PhD program can be very similar to a master's. It's relatively common for people who leave PhD programs to walk away with a master's degree they didn't intend to get. It's called "mastering out."

It looks like Ubuntu Core lets you disable automatic updates for snaps: https://ubuntu.com/core/docs/refresh-control.

Farming as a necessity didn't happen until late prehistory and early history. Before that people hunted, fished or foraged for their daily food. They had nothing worth stealing or killing for or that couldn't be rebuilt quickly after an earthquake or other disaster. In the worst case they could just move a few miles away. Dying from a drought wiping out your crops or from being attacked by raiders from the mountains or from a warlord or pharaoh that claimed to rule over you didn't happen until later. Even then your own life was still simple to understand: being a farmer or shepherd or what have you.

I don't mean to say this was all perfect, but instead that when we talk about the stress of modern jobs, we should go beyond saying no one likes deadlines or bosses, because the real problem is the, for some people literally daily, uncertainty.

There is plenty of meat available that is almost cruelty-free. A factory farmed broiler chicken lives its entire 60,480 minutes (six weeks) in agony, while a hunted deer or pastured cow might only suffer a few minutes, and for the deer you might be saving it from an even worse fate. Maybe you are already buying meat that way.

I'm sorry that I compared what you feel to be a religious necessity to eat meat to torturing a cat. That was disrespectful. Discussions on eating meat should be less all-or-nothing. For example there is a tremendous amount of food wasted in the U.S., including animal products: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22890292/food-waste-meat-.... Reducing food waste is something I think everyone can support.

I'm vegetarian and not vegan partly because the full purity and ingredient checking and all that is not good for my mental health. So maybe I understand where you are coming from, sort of, in a secular way.

That said I think it's important to remember that eating meat is not about you or me, it's about the animals we are (not) eating. The animal doesn't care about our reasons. If you imprisoned a cat and some days you tortured it and some days you left it alone, the cat would not care why. It could not even understand why and causing it pain for one's own spiritual growth seems, respectfully, prideful to me. There is no ethical middle path between sometimes torturing a cat and sometimes not. Probably if you told your priest about an imprisoned cat you were sometimes torturing he would tell you to release it immediately.

Do you really need 200g protein at 2500 calories? Those numbers seem off to me, 200g protein is what a big guy trying to gain a lot of muscle might eat to make absolutely sure he's getting enough, but 2500 calories is what a big guy would eat to maintain or even lose weight. Everyone is different, but you might need either less protein or more calories than you think you do.

If 200/2500 really is the goal then I'm not sure you can do it without meat, or at least without lots of protein powder supplements. The highest protein/calorie ratio for normal food I can think of is from soy milk or lentils, which are both roughly the same at around 1g/protein per 11-13 calories, and you'd have to eat those exclusively.

I'm skeptical of evolutionary psychology in general but if we think about prehistory a lot of work was doing stuff that had deadlines but you could easily understand what needed to be done. You have to go out and collect a bunch of nuts and berries, and there's a deadline because you'll starve if you don't get the food, but you know the food is out there and it's just a matter of getting it. Your ancestors have lived off food from this land for thousands of years, you know you will too. Similarly for simple crafting, you need to make the clothing or the clay pot but there's no barrier to doing it, you just have to do it. In these cases you could also have a boss, that is, some person with authority directing and judging you, but it's someone you know and someone whose role you will inevitably fill.

I think the key difference in the modern world is that success is not guaranteed, for reasons that may be well out of your control, and failure is scary with unknown consequences. We can imagine a world with pretty much the same jobs and the same work, but with more security removing the intense stress people feel.

Zero unemployment causes wages to go up fast as employers must constantly outbid each other for workers. This is bad in a theoretically efficient market because each employer is already running at maximum efficiency and every job is necessary, so there's no slack in the system. In the real world with super high executive pay, massive inefficiency, and massive employment of exploited, underpaid immigrant labor, it's less of a problem.

As the article and your quote say, the issue is "comparatively." Other apps are doing checks:

> According to a Meta spokesperson, WhatsApp has implemented numerous features to proactively detect and prevent the spread of child exploitation material, including limiting how many people can be shared on a viral image at one time and using photo-matching technology on rules-violation reports submitted to the company by users and non-encrypted photos found in profile or group avatars. Meta says it also uses machine learning to scan usernames and group descriptions for a potential sign of child exploitation material.

But Wickr is not checking as thoroughly as it could:

> Shehan noted one report to NCMEC’s tip line from a Wickr user as an example of what goes unchecked on the platform, in which he said a user flagged a Wickr account that was named “BabyAbuse,” which used a profile photo of an infant being sexually assaulted.

We can definitely criticize Wickr for not implementing industry best practices for something as important as this.

You should have the freedom to reject trivial, opinionated PR comments with a simple "no thanks," no explanation needed. Your team should err on the site of supporting the PR as originally written. If you reject a ton of comments then the situation should resolve itself somehow, either she'll stop making them, or it will take you minimal time to move past them, or she'll complain to management and you can all discuss the situation together.

Don't take it personally, don't make it about her personally or about her feelings of security or her competency or whether she's a PITA, definitely don't intentionally leave test bugs in your code.

What business sense do you have in mind? Thunderbird is funded by donations and governed by volunteers. Even if this were some kind of money grab, who's grabbing what money?

Walking in heat and humidity is unpleasant but the climate and population are what they are so you work with what you have.

I can't speak for all environmentalists but I'd like people to live pleasantly wherever they like if they can do so sustainably. Probably most Dhaka residents, like most people anywhere, would prefer to stay in their home city and country if possible, just improved. In any case giving everyone in the world a Texas-sized house and pool is not on the table no matter what until we invent personal fusion generators and matter replicators.

Having climate-controlled walkways or more comfortable transit options specifically for people with kids should be available in every city, "impoverished" or "third world" or not. The world certainly has the resources for it.

> I think we'll see in our lifetimes see prices start to escalate rapidly due to the fundamentals baked in.

I agree. One of the big risks to future political stability and, honestly, avoiding violent conflict is that these price increases won't just be rapid but immediate. People could adjust if the price of gas went up $1/gallon every year for ten years. If the government keeps the price artificially low all that time and is then forced to raise it $10 all at once, that would be very difficult.

You could ride an electric scooter between two climate controlled garages for ten minutes or a couple miles without getting disgusting. In many U.S. urban areas the garages and scooters already exist, it's "just" a matter of setting aside dedicated lanes and popularizing it.

Would people in Dhaka prefer cars or just a better walking and public transit experience? Are cars even conceivable with a population density of 76,080 per square mile? If cars are impossible in such a city then it doesn't matter whether they're impoverished or not.

I recently commented about synthetic jet fuel in another thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31704829:

> A problem with biofuel is scaling it up, see: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7498153. According to that article the U.S. would need to devote "an area bigger than Texas and California and Pennsylvania combined" to crops specifically for its own jet biofuel needs. That's just for flying, not for food or fuel for ground transportation or anything else.

Also that article says that from 2009-2013 a $100 million effort was made to figure out how to get sufficient synthetic fuel from algae but they eventually gave up and went back to the drawing board.

This is a good point, thanks for making it.

I thought of "Folsom Prison Blues" by Johnny Cash as a counterexample since in that song the victim is a man, but then thought of "Cocaine Blues" by Cash which has a female victim. "Cocaine Blues" is mainly about drug use with the man killing his cheating wife treated as a minor detail.

I thought Cash wrote the song and so it wouldn't count as a murder ballad if we say murder ballads have to be folk songs, however it turns out Cash just did a famous cover of the song written by T. J. "Red" Arnall and recorded by Arnall probably in 1947 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine_Blues, which was in turn based on an American folk song "Little Sadie" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Sadie. So "Cocaine Blues" is a murder ballad in the classic sense, as well as an example of centering the man as you say.

Interview with a VIM Enthusiast 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n1dtmzqnCU

"You don't really need a career once you know Vim. Vim is your career now. What's a career anyway?"