teorema

But even if it grows linearly in transactions, that depends on transaction growth which might not be linear... and that's still independent of what's tolerable for a typical user.

I was going to post something related, which was when I tried bitcoin for purchases, the whole thing involved way too much faff and was too slow for everyday use. Maybe for some purchases but not for everything I might do online. I guess if you had an account in bitcoin but then you're back to banks etc which might defeat the purpose slightly.

This is part of a body of research pointing to the same things in different areas. Scientific and industrial progress is heterogeneous, incremental, and relentless. It's more like hordes of searchers noticing the same things simultaneously than lone geniuses in solitary labs.

One thing I wonder is how this might have changed or not over time. It seems important to know not just for historical understanding, but also to anticipate possible changes in the current regime.

"None of the bat viruses isolated in Laos harbors a so-called furin cleavage site in the spike that facilitates cell entry. It’s a feature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that has led some scientists to theorize that it was created in a laboratory."

On the other hand, critics of natural talent explanations often point out that too is tautological: someone is talented if they're successful and vice versa. Clearly there aren't proteins for violin bow control, so something happens in between.

I might fall in that category. The problem is I've been turned off in a big way by stories of unethical practices at the NY Times in preventing people from cancelling subscriptions. Combine that with what people are pointing out about affiliate links, and the whole thing starts to seem suspicious.

Whatever happened to the idea that boosters would be tailored to currently circulating virus variants, ala flu vaccines? Somewhere along the way the policy discussion shifted and I don't know why.

I'm becoming increasingly infuriated with the FDA and CDC.

In general it makes sense to me to have a legal contract framework for defining stakeholders more broadly than shareholders. What those stakeholders are seems specific to the needs of those involved. Seems like a useful mechanism; not sure what the downsides are at an abstract level.

The models aren't political. That is true. But the models do not exist without humans generating them and interpreting them.

The idea that science is somehow apolitical is dangerous. It's no more true than the idea that journalism is apolitical.

You can try to take more of a metaperspective with both, but to assume politics doesn't enter into the endeavors is dishonest. In many ways the position that science is apolitical is itself political.

Ugh... in one of the these threads on HN someone said a manufacturer was doing that, or at least openly speculating about it, offering a low tech model. I think it was in France but my memory is fuzzy.

Not really a great time for anyone really, at least from the vantage point you're referring to.

There's definitely a rural poor but the lack of social and physical infrastructure puts a baseline on what's survivable as you get more rural. I don't know they flock there as much as they can't leave.

Probably too more opportunities, which means more opportunities to go sour.

Yeah I saw that. I guess my point is it's a dangerous path to go down, using access to care that has a public health benefit as a punishment to some. It just ends up hurting everyone in the end.

I wish everyone would get vaccinated. But they're not, and there's breakthrough cases (this has happened to multiple people I know personally).

I guess I see this in the opposite way as intended: why should an adult who's been vaccinated be punished in trying to get tested, as a side effect of trying to punish someone who hasn't?

This virus is a moving target. The test doesn't just benefit the person tested.

The problem, at least speaking as a US citizen, is that children cannot be vaccinated and are subject to testing requirements if they become ill. Also, even the vaccinated are having breakthrough cases and if not, are afraid of them or are being required to get tested again.

I see this exempts children but makes the mistake of tying specific vaccination decisions to the public health benefit of having free testing. It's abusing a public health tool as a cudgel, a pattern I'm seeing in various places.

If this happened in the US, it would just lead to undocumented spreading and delays in care, worsening outcomes.

Im worried with things like this, and similar missteps by the US government, we're heading back to March 2020.

I'm surprised there wasn't more discussion of environmental and industrial change. Some of the examples are closer to pure fantasy, but I suspect there were larger, and more larger, specimens of animals in the sea, 150 years ago than today. Probably greater diversity as well. I know this is true in the areas I'm familiar with, that imagining wild areas 200 years ago is somewhat difficult because there's so many things you wouldn't even imagine because your frame of reference is distorted. Trees were much much larger and more abundant, and there were a lot more, and much larger fish and molluscs, than is the case today. It seems that squid and oarfish might provide similar examples.

I also wonder about the role humans played in that people were probably smaller on average, in smaller boats etc. The same squid is going to be more of a threat if everyone is smaller, on what today would be considered a smaller boat, and those are the limits of the human world.

... or you incentivize the wait by decreasing cost.

Sometimes I feel like these discussions about EVs are strangely divorced from most people's lives. We will likely make our next purchase an EV purchase, and I think the cost of waiting on long trips probably has to be considered against other annoyances of ICEs, but the economics of this are a major reason more people don't switch to EVs. Even the cheapest ones still cant compete against the ICE market as a whole, especially when you consider the used vehicles that will be in circulation for some time.

Adding costs will just make it more difficult for people to afford anything.

If people want EVs to take off, they need to incentivize purchasing them, not tax the ubiquitous alternative. If the carbon costs are real, manifest it in decreased costs for the alternative. Otherwise it's all theory.

I'd love to see more examples of this, both with Heaven's Gate and other films. Some films have the right idea and filmed material, but were edited suboptimally. It's also informative to see how a director like Soderbergh approaches this; it seems commonly accepted in music, so why not film?

What's really depressing to me is the struggles of the student and lecturer involved, intimated at but never really a focus in their own right:

https://www.statesman.com/news/20170314/herman-35-years-late...

This theme stretches elsewhere in the pandemic discourse. There's an interview appearing alongside this article, where they discuss the failures of the FDA in approving the vaccine for children and booster shots.

The FDA's comments suggest they're approaching, say, the boosters from the standpoint of managing perceived need rather than safety. This shouldn't be their role. If I want to purchase a delta booster from Pfizer and it's safe and there's a reasonable argument for its efficacy, why shouldn't I? To help manage public perception that the initial dosages aren't effective?

My perception is this weird authoritarianism cuts both ways, against the antivaxxers as well as the provaxxers. The common thread is the failures of authority itself. So much is being revealed in this time about the castles made of sand; why the underlying problems don't get even more attention is beyond me.

This sort of thing is one of the more disturbing things to me about COVID-19, and why I wish there was a less exclusive focus on death in talking about the pandemic. Clearly that's important but there's these hugely significant problems not captured by focusing solely on death.

Call me skeptical too. The essay concludes by highlighting a meta-analysis the author considers comprehensive, and the best that can be said is that insect population decline isn't as bad as was previously reported, only a "3 to 6 fold decline". Pyrrhic rhetorical victory it seems.

Also the author makes a big point of variability in declines across species, as if it's ok to wipe out some classes of insects if others increase. The message I got is that insects like butterflies are vanishing, but crop pests like locusts are increasing. Am I supposed to be reassured by these types of arguments?

I appreciate good skepticism for the sake of rigorous thinking but this essay maybe had the opposite of its intended effect on me.

There's so many ethical problems constantly overshadowing the Olympics that it's hard for me to enjoy watching them. I have some excitement for the athletes but no longer make a point of watching them. It's a shame because it's a good idea, but there's a lot if changes that need to happened; coverage is just the tip of the iceberg.

Lets say we're talking about VCs and shareholders. Shouldn't the public enjoy the same expectations? Especially when we're just talking about a zero percent payback?

I think there's a legitimate argument taxes exist for this sort of thing, but (1) taxes arguably are avoided in various ways to the point it's a currently broken system, and (2) this is a rare case where the government has a clear case for a specific amount of money owed by a specific company — why not keep it simple?

If the grants aren't worth paying back at zero percent, the corporation shouldn't be taking them.

The question isn't whether a good employer-employee relationship is possible. the question is whether a horrible employee-employer relationship, one that has significant butterfly effects, is possible. More pertinently, the question is whether it's possible for someone to be in such complex circumstances that finding a good employer, or even job opportunity, is possible for that person.

The incel community isn't the right comparison maybe? A more apt comparison might be domestic abuse worldwide.

Sometimes I'm amazed at the assumptions being made here and elsewhere that what applies to one person's life applies at large. It's not just survivorship bias, it's some kind of egocentrism (in a perceptual sense) bias.

You yourself say you consider yourself lucky. Do you really? What about the unlucky ones?

It's easy to say "well for two decades it's worked out for me and hundreds of neighbors" forgetting that there's many more decades in a life, and billions of people.

There was a very good article about this a few years ago, after this Slate piece (this Slate piece was referenced). It was titled something like "Since when did caramelizing onions come to mean browning?" I wish I could find it.

Same general issue, although they documented this shift in meaning of "caramelized onions" and how it affects dishes. I remember it well because if how long it took to do and how different carmelized onions are from browned sauteed onions.

To be fair to the grandparent poster, who was downvoted, in the decentralized networking community there are protocols designed to be robust to different hardware setups, like over wifi or other ad hoc systems. Depending on tor from that perspective might be seen as restrictive.

Yes, here you have Briar bumping up against the inability to run any fully decentralized mobile communication software on iOS. Seems like a serious limitation on the part of iOS at this point given trends towards decentralization in general.

You'd be wise to be careful with stinky tofu, at least in many places.

The safest methods simply marinate tofu in fermented amaranth; the tofu itself isn't aged. But there's many approaches to it with and without questionable safety practices. I'm not sure comparisons to blue cheese or koji-fermented products are appropriate.

https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2019/stinky-tofu-in-shaoxing/

I'm probably in the minority with this, but I think all licensing laws should be abolished. Even with cases like the one you describe, other mechanisms could be used to handle the problem and those individuals likely at are risk for doing things on their own anyway.

I'd say if someone took IV bleach and it caused harm, the appropriate response isn't license revocation, it's a civil or criminal lawsuit.

The past year is full of examples of the dangers of regulating speech by government in the name of medical safety. The FDA decision on the antibody treatment for Alzheimer's provides a converse example, of how expertise can be foolish.

FWIW, .biz always has seemed unprofessional-sounding to me. Why that was ever created with the intent of being a legitimate domain is beyond me. It cast a shadow over the whole process of creating those new domains at that time, almost as if ICANN was in on all the shadyness from the beginning. It was as if the WHO or UN started adopting warez terminology — you'd start questioning whether they were what you thought they were.

I love eink devices but got turned off by the first couple of generations because they always underdelivered with PDF display, which seemed like a central use case to me. I should be able to open a random graphics-heavy PDF and have it display perfectly (ignoring color) and in a reasonable amount of time for an eink device to be worth it to me.

This has made me want to revisit them but I don't think I'd want to purchase one without being able to stress test in person.