teorema

I stopped using Yelp long ago due to their business practices. This is a different issue but simply reinforces the decision.

I have to read the paper thoroughly but I've come to the opinion that multiple solutions aren't in of themselves a problem if they are incorporated into inferences. A lot of Bayesian inference can be thought of as involving solution spaces, for instance, where you're assigning a probability to each solution.

Not disagreeing with you, just wondering out loud if it could be revisited with other methods.

Sometimes others start burning the bridges whether you want it or not.

Fascinating story.

I think the issue is the splicing flankers and recombinant mutation occurring naturally in that particular place.

Of course that says little about SARS-CoV-2 relative to all the other viruses we don't know about, either sitting in a Chinese government lab, or in a bat cave somewhere.

I guess I don't find the argument "we can't figure out how to reconstruct SARS-COV-2 from known viruses" very convincing on either side.

In one of these recent articles (the Wade piece?) they explain it's not the presence of a furin cleavage site, it's this particular furin cleavage site pattern including its flanking regions. There's discussion about the existence of furin cleavage sites in other coronaviruses, but also explanation for why it's unusual in SARS-CoV-2.

I admittedly don't really understand this in depth but it has seemed to me that there's a need for some general purpose decentralized signature or authentication mechanism. I can see NFTs functioning in that kind of way although I'm not sure the current implementations are the best ones nor has the hype bubble necessarily been focused on best use cases. I wouldn't be surprised if NFTs evolved into something far more mundane, a historical footnote on the way to something else.

Interestingly, I tried to track down something more scholarly because I think you're asking a fair question. I couldn't actually find anything.

This was the closest I could find:

https://janes.scholasticahq.com/article/2238.pdf

It doesn't really answer your question although it does point to a genre of Sumerian humor involving sexual disgust. Some of the lines are vaguely similar to the one in the article.

I grew up with single sex changing rooms being the norm pre internet, and hated it. It had nothing to do with homosexuality or internet, and everything to do with bullying and human's worst instincts.

I was healthy and normal and straight and it still affected me.

The only thing worse than dealing with bullying or the typical relational aggression in social groups is dealing with it when you're literally completely physically exposed.

I hate it and was happy with the trend toward privacy. Society isn't compassionate enough to deal with nudity.

Speaking as someone involved in the US research university system, there's something deeply concerning about this piece.

It's a bit like an article circa 2006 about the awesome strength of the US stock market.

I can't be entirely sure what was meant but my sense from talking to people in this area is that statements like that are being made very literally. As in, if you do not sleep at all one night, its not like you can sleep an extra 8 hours the next day and be totally restored. The recovery process might involve a couple of days of sleeping an extra 3 hours, just for example.

I get the sense exercise and injury are good analogies. If you overexercise, cutting back by the amount you overdid it is too oversimplified; if you stop exercising for a month, you cant just expect to need or suffice with a month's worth later.

Some of it yes, some of it no.

I suspect the author and I diverge politically in important ways, and think the piece would have been stronger if it had avoided certain topics. However, I think its main argument is solid and succinct.

The problem with limits on free speech is that a certain proportion of what's critical will seem taboo, malformed, or false to the majority until it doesn't. I think this is true regardless of the right vs left leaning nature of those involved.

Also:

What if your pharmacist could do most of the practical things that matter to you about your medication, rather than requiring prescriber permission?

What if you could do X by going to a psychologist or optometrist, or some other profession that doesn't currently exist, instead of going to an MD or PA or LPN?

What if you could just buy certain things directly without a middleman?

US healthcare is over regulated in general (in many areas, even as it's arguably underregulated in others).

Does anyone know of any general literature on this administratively top-heavy structure? It shows up in higher education as well, and I'm sure in other places too. I'm curious about patterns across domains and links to economic issues. Seems too coincidental that this type of structure is emerging in two of the most economically controversial areas of society.

A $.10 pill that the person has been taking for years and is maybe even safer than many things sitting on the shelves of the hardware or grocery store.

It's not doctor pay, it's economic repurcussions of monopolies. It's also not just limiting the numbers of physicians, it's locking out alternate providers of care and other models.

Right now US healthcare is very hierarchical, with physicians at the top, nurses close by. Other professions and services are subsidiary to them. You don't get to choose a provider based on skillset per se, you are forced to abide by this hierarchy.

That's the real economic cost, the restrictions in provider and service choice.

Near me it's that, but half posts looking for owners of "lost" cats and wildlife, and sudden events, like "why is the major road shut down at the moment?"

I get the local newspaper analogy but am not sure it's quite right, at least where I am. Here it's more like a Facebook group for a specific location.

Federated systems always seemed to me to be a good match for the type of geographically localized communities Nextdoor us targeting.

It's a complex topic, and I sympathize with what you're saying but I think it's less a case of giving up and more of the US trying to benefit off of China's increasing dominance, combined with genuine laissez faire philosophy. I think that's changing now a bit but it's hard to say where it's going, especially in going from Trump to Biden.

This LA Times article notes that the video was taken in the morning: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-02-01/myanma...

This stated communication blackouts lasted from 3 to 1115 am, with one journalist reporting a loss of service at 4am: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55893736.

The coup didn't happen instantaneously at a given time, so it seems reasonable to say the video was recorded during the coup. At the same time, it's not really clear what specific activities the vehicles were on route to.

I can't speak for her but my guess is she'd say at some point, even if debeers started it, its not about debeers anymore. Or she'd say something like why do we value the art we do? Isn't it all socially shaped? At what point does it become personal? If she wants a diamond because that's what she had in mind, and what her parents and grandparents had, and she likes the color and brilliance, what the hell does debeers have to do with it? Couldn't people still want white diamonds even if you could dig them up in your backyard?

It's not really bullshit to want something but wrestle with the ethics of it, or to balance different options. Like I said, she probably would have went with a repurposed stone or none if we exhausted other options.

Moissonite for her was this thing she had never heard of, something that didn't have meaning outside of a substitute for something else. It was untested. Heck, my guess is if she lost her stone she'd probably be fine getting a moissonite stone as a replacement now just because it's been settling in her head for years and years now.

In the end this is just me inferring how she feels. From my standpoint, I just wanted to do what she'd be satisfied with... which is another angle on the issue.

Just to add later: she did like the color and brilliance of moissonite. I remember her worrying about the hardness and not having an intuitive sense of how durable it was. I think if someone had been able to say "this has the same hardness as diamond" scientifically speaking she would have been ok? I have no idea. It was a strange gem to her and she was just as skeptical of it as she was about claims of any given diamond's provenance, ethics wise.

We heard of them before we were engaged, and really considered them strongly. In the end my wife decided she just wanted a diamond because otherwise it always would be on the back of her mind.

I mention this because my wife is extremely unassuming, and socially and environmentally conscious, and she still couldn't shake the diamond thing. She was 100 percent aware of this and it bothered her but in the end decided it mattered to her nevertheless. We ended up getting a small polar bear diamond: the metalwork (by a local metal artist) is really more what you'd notice about her ring.

I'm still not sure what it was, nor is she. If I had to guess now it's that for her, once you decide to have a gem, it's all the same issues at some level, so why not use the one that has personal meaning for you, whatever that is, for whatever reason? We looked into synthetics, but at the time they weren't actually available. I think if there weren't other options she might have went with a repurposed stone? Maybe no stone?

Moissonite is a great option, one I wish were more used. We learned about it from the metalsmith who made our rings, and I noticed recently she had stopped actively promoting them.

I think to see a shift from diamonds, these types of conversations just need to happen repeatedly more than everyone thinks. The idea needs to be suggested when people are very young that different symbolic expressions of marriage are fine, and that what's important is whatever is meaningful to the members of the couple. By the time people are adults the schemas might already be indelibly fixed.

But then again who knows what marriage and commitment will be like for my daughter. I don't envy the young in certain ways.

I feel increasingly lonely in wanting some kind of common carrier status social media platform. If not Twitter then a decentralized open source one.

What's funny to me — and I mean this sincerely, not as a troll — almost all the examples of good writing in Gatsby in this thread and the target article seem overwrought to me. If you'd present them to me out of context, I'd think they were examples of comically bad writing.

I'm sort of neutral about The Great Gatsby. It's not my favorite but I think it's become a popular testament to its era. Because that era in many ways is the dawning of our own, it has special relevance.

I can't remember names offhand, but there are economics research papers arguing that reward competitions are better economically than patents etc. I think some of them appeared in PNAS for example.

I think one big unspoken assumption in a lot of this discussion is that claims to something like the Dems actually rigging and stealing the election would reasonably lead to physical resistance. For instance, if the Dems actually were stealing the election, many people would probably sympathize with the rioters. The assumption is that this isn't true, but it's something that does warrant physical resistance, therefore claims to it at a certain level are the same as incitement to violence. There's also the implicit assumption that the president needs to exercise special care because of his power.

Like a lot of these sorts of things, the issues are complex, and I think a lot could come to light in coming days that might change perspective on exactly what Trump did and didn't do. But I think some care is needed in being explicit about what's being claimed. I think political biases are bleeding into claims of violence-inciting speech more than people realize. I personally don't think claiming election fraud is impeachable, even if it is followed by events such as happened at the capitol, but I do think, say, coercion of a public official might be, as would willfully neglecting to institute expected security protocols at an event known to be high risk.

Did she tweet anything more than Pelosi being removed from the chambers? If so you could see it as trying to tell the mob to basically back off because they wouldn't find her.

The other tweet (about 1776) is more concerning but it's a different issue.

You let them go to the bathroom but in such a way they're not together, and not allow students to return to items after the responses are submitted. You also don't allow them to leave until they have submitted a response to all presented items up to that point. Present items one at a time, require a response to one before presenting the next, and don't allow returns to previously presented and responded-to items.

If you wanted to be really thorough you'd timestamp everything and maybe offer different versions of the test to different students.

This is the very sort of thing that led to the creation of common carrier status, with the tradeoffs involved. It seems to me to be the solution with ISPs and net neutrality, and there probably should be something similar with sites like Twitter (which is probably the point of Section 230).

I personally feel like moderation has gone way too far with social media, even though I'm far from politically conservative and definitely not a supporter of Trump. I think sites should lose some protected status if they start moderating excessively, as an incentive to moderate even less. Conversely, I think they should be granted a degree of immunity if they do.

The problem IMHO is the attempt to regulate speech on the topic (or any topic really). It just illustrates the problems with it.

I'm a little concerned about the appeal to authority element to this all...