thrwy_918

> No one has had their engineer title taken away for being a crook, as far as I know

This seems an absurd claim, unless you're going to get very pedantic about some distinction between "engineer title" and "legal right to function as an engineer".

> https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/engineer-s-licence-revoked-after...

This is one example found after just a few seconds of searching, but it is absolutely commonplace to have your engineering license revoked for carrying out criminal activity.

> In those jurisdiction where it's a protected title, it just implies that you have some mix of STEM topics in your degree.

This seems a bizarre claim too. In jurisdictions where membership of a professional licensing body is necessary in order to refer to oneself as an engineer and practice as an engineer, it is absolutely not the case that all you need is the right "mix of STEM topics in your degree". It means you have a certain degree, have completed a set amount of work experience, have completed a professional certification exam and then maintain that license, which may require meeting other requirements periodically. And yes, "not being a crook" is certainly one of those requirements, and being involved in major criminal activity, especially criminal activity related to your professional practice, is absolutely grounds for having your license and certification as an engineer revoked.

> However, with an extensive email chain explaining the story was written as the ending of Minecraft, even going into detail about how it was to be displayed in game, an agreed upon offer (if a bit vague), and then an exchange of funds - with no immediate attempt to return said funds. I'm no lawyer, but that sounds a lot like a legally binding agreement.

It sounds like an awful, muddy mess that would take a great deal of time and money to litigate if the author decided to take that path. Without an explicit contract, even determining which court (and which nation) has jurisdiction for this kind of international transaction sounds like a nightmare.

I agree that in most jurisdictions I have any familiarity with, some kind of contract likely exists for usage of the text, but that is a fundamentally different question from ownership of the text. And I imagine that the text has subsequently been used by Mojang and Microsoft for other purposes, which may or may not be found to be covered by the original agreement.

In short, it's exactly the kind of ambiguity that big corporations hate when it comes to intellectual property.

>Mandatory helmet laws do not prevent people from riding bikes. Just like mandatory seat belt laws did not prevent anyone from driving cars!

This is an absurd comparison.

Mandatory helmet wearing makes bike-sharing programs almost completely unworkable. In my city, I see more people riding bikes from bike sharing programs than I do riding privately owned bikes.

Perhaps regular people, many of whom don't drink much wine, prefer simple, unchallenging flavors that can often be found in cheap wine. Theres nothing wrong with this, but I don't think it necessarily means that wine "quality" doesn't exist.

> I have felt that it really is the best way to create a fair market clearing price for all participants

Fans don't want a market clearing price. Artists will also say they don't want a market clearing price, and some (most?) of them are being honest when saying that. They want a price that allows a large number of their long-term fans to be able to attend their concerts, and that price will be well below a market clearing price.

For a massive artist like Swift, with huge demand and limited supply for tour dates, a market clearing price would mean only people with high levels of disposable income would be able to go to the shows. Many of those people would only be casual Swift fans. So the die-hard fan who has listened to every album a hundred times but has a low paying job can't go, but people who have never listened to an album but earn a lot of money can.

In other industries, that kind of market dynamic isn't a problem. People will accept that only very rich people can afford supercars, even if they aren't necessarily car enthusiasts, whereas lots of die-hard car enthusiasts can't will never be able to afford a supercar.

But music is its own thing, for reasons I don't entirely understand. Perhaps it's because, more than other industries, successful artists owe so much of their success to a loyal following of fans, and they want to preserve that relationship over short-term profit maximization. Or perhaps it's because many people just feel that music is an inherent part of the human experience, and shouldn't be subject to the same raw market forces that prevail in other industries. I'm not someone who goes to see a lot of live music, this is just behavior I've observed in others.

Artists and fans want some kind of system that allows long-term fans to attend shows at "fair" prices. In this context, "fair" is not determined by the market, but by some kind of intuitive and emotional sense of how much a concert ticket "should" cost. I can't say what the price is, but I can say that if the market-clearing price for Swift's latest tour turned out to be $600, the fans wouldn't say "OK, fair enough, I can't afford it but I will accept the outcome as utility maximizing for the greatest number of market participants." They would say something closer to "this is total bullshit"

The partisan tone of this article is very grating and makes it hard to take it seriously. It is full of brash, opinionated statements which are not backed up by the actual study [1] the article is based on.

I have to conclude that it's being upvoted here because people enjoy eating red meat and want to continue to do so, not because it has any particular merit on its own terms.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01968-z

> The great thing about Bitcoin is that it’s whatever the holder wants it to be, and nothing they don’t want it to be

If someone bought Bitcoin a year ago and wanted it to be a store of value, it is certainly not "whatever the holder wants it to be" for that person

> Recall that the vaccine is not FDA approved for children (only adults), it only has an emergency use authorization for children

Falling while skiing is not FDA approved. A woodcutting axe applied to the hand is not FDA approved. Drinking bleach is not FDA approved. And yet, health insurance will cover medical complications arising from any of these actions.

> The ACA covered none of it or a very small portion

The ACA is not an insurance plan, so I assume you are using "ACA" as shorthand for "ACA-compliant insurance coverage".

It is simply not plausible that an ACA-compliant plan would wholesale "not cover" a hospital stay for myocarditis, absent extremely niche and bizarre circumstances.

Given that you don't seem very familiar with the specifics, I have to assume that your information is either missing some very important details, or incorrect.

> Obamacare, which was forced upon us and costs us $2,400 PER MONTH, did not cover it

Can you expand on this please? I find it extremely hard to understand how an ACA-compliant health care plan could "not cover" a hospital stay for myocarditis. Unless you're on a high-deductible plan and the entire stay was less than your deductible?

"stablecoins" are not decentralized. If you're going to trust a central issuing and custodial authority for a coin, do you even need crypto technology in the first place?

>The second one is only confusing because you're trying to find a cause and effect between 2 events that simply happened to happen at the same time

The author uses "because", which in context clearly indicates to me a cause and effect relationship.

Even overlooking that, "impecunious operation of the bank could cause the value of the mortgages to be impaired" is not addressed by your explanation. You explain how external factors could reduce the value of the mortgages.

I find this uncharacteristically hard to understand.

In the stock brokerage example, we're told:

>They might allow you 2:1 leverage when you buy stock: your $1,000 buys 20 shares now.

But then a couple of paragraphs later:

>But you now owe $1,000 to your brokerage, and are 1:1 levered

My brokerage offers 2:1 leverage, which results in me being 1:1 levered? I think I understand what patrick is saying here but I also find it hard to follow

On the other hand:

>One is that, because people can ask for money from their checking accounts at any time, impecunious operation of the bank could cause the value of the mortgages to be impaired just a tiny little bit at a time when people need most of the money in their checking accounts.

I've read this four or five times and I don't understand the chain of cause-and-effect here at all. Why does "people can ask for money from their checking accounts at any time" mean that "impecunious operation of the bank could cause the value of the mortgages to be impaired just a tiny little bit at a time when people need most of the money in their checking accounts"?

Anecdotally it is much, much, much easier to get a $400k tech job in the US than a $300k tech job in the UK, so this isn't really a fair comparison

when I moved from a tech job in the UK to a tech job in the US, my salary more than doubled

>It is true that generative ai technology is often trained on human artists' work. But how is that different from human artists taking inspiration/learning and adapting the style of other human artists?

It's different in the same way that making a copy of a book by hand, where it might take weeks or months to make a single copy, is different than making a copy with a printing press in a few minutes. It was the technological development of the latter process which lead to the concept of copyright being created in the first place.

There is a fundamental difference between a human being taking years to acquire artistic skill, then using that artistic skill to create individual works inspired by other artists, vs. using a generative AI system to "learn" a particular artist's style in a minutes or hours, then create infinite iterations of that style nearly instantly.

There's a tendency for people in tech to search out broad, overarching, universal principles that can be applied to all behavior. But sometimes, simply being able to do something tens of thousands of times faster or tens of thousands of times more cheaply is enough of a difference to require new rules, new moral frameworks, new modes of thinking.

"The computer is just doing what a human could do" simply isn't a compelling enough argument, any more than "the printing press is just doing what a scribe could do" would be.

It seems very strange to use the existing rules of copyright as a defense of the use of this new technology.

The concept of copyright was created in response to the development of the printing press. It was a reaction to a disruptive technology. It was possible to laboriously copy written works before the printing press existed, but the new technology made it incomparably cheaper and faster to do so, and societies reacted by creating new protections for content creators.

We are now at the threshold of a new disruptive technology that is likely to bring about profound economic changes in the arts. It makes no sense to me to take the old rules and try to use them to justify this disruptive technology, when the old rules were initially created in response to a different disruptive technology.

It seems uncontroversial that this new generative technology is built on the backs of human artists. It only functions by drawing from their works. Is it so unconceivable that we might need a totally new set of protections for those human artists?

I agree with you, but I also had instructors who demanded the same thing: essays as arguments, drawing on evidence and analysis to back up a thesis.

An essay that is simply a description of the source material, or a listing of pros and cons with no actual thesis, is a totally different endeavor, and one that has much less value as method of instruction or assessment.

There are hundreds of thousands of households in SF. Of course adding a thousand new houses is not going to drastically reduce house prices. That doesn't disprove that it's a supply-side problem. It demonstrates the size of the supply-side problem.

I agree that your definition would be more intuitive, but I think that ship has sailed. It seems to be almost universally used to mean "performing the required duties of your role, and no more"

I think it's an indication of a totally dysfunctional work culture that "not doing extra" can be synonymous with "not working at all"

The fact that the author claims to have given "200% of [their] energy" to their job "throughout their career" is, to me, depressing rather than admirable

> For religions originating in the desert where meat spoils quickly, it makes sense to ban those kinds of meat more prone to transmiting deseases if mishandled

Is pork any more prone to spoilage, or spoilage-related health risks, than other meats?

My understanding is that the health risks from pork relate mainly to the transmission of disease and parasites in undercooked pork, not spoilage.

Beans and legumes are some of the healthiest foods you can eat, being high in both fiber and a range of beneficial phytonutrients. There is no high-quality evidence that lectins in properly prepared beans cause any health problems.

>A musical performance is copyrightable

A recording of a musical performance is copyrightable. But I believe the copyright would belong to whoever made the recording, not the performing musicians (assuming the work being performed is public domain, like Beethoven)

> Choreography instructions are also likely uncopyrightable, but the performances of one would be.

As far as I know, this is almost exactly wrong. Choreography instructions may be copyrightable. A performance of a dance is not subject to copyright, but a video recording of that performance may be.

> To qualify for registration, a choreographic work or pantomime must be fixed in a tangible medium of expression [1]

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ52.pdf

Perhaps the word "sprint" translates primarily to "short distance" in your mind, but I suspect if that's the case you are unusual in that regard, and most people think of the defining characteristic of "sprint" as "moving fast", not "short distance". To suggest that the choice of that word does not imply a sense of urgency and moving quickly seems, to me, totally implausible on its face.

> And no, developers are not expected to be "in a sprint more or less at all times"

Again, perhaps this is your experience. In my experience, in every company I've worked for that uses sprints, the end of one sprint is separated from the start of the next by, at best, a few hours, and often less than that. Planning meetings generally take place during sprints.

And to point out that sprints may be separated by a weekend seems, at best, totally irrelevant, as in my working life, weekends are not part of working time. "You are in a constant sprint at work, but hey, you get to rest at the weekend" is not a compelling proposition to me.

The author is using the word a bit differently, but the fact that "sprint" has been normalized as a unit of work for software development, and developers are expected to be in a "sprint" more or less at all times, has always been a source of the deepest absurdity to me.

A "sprint" is, almost by definition, a pace that's sustainable only for short periods. The fact that developers are expected to perform sprint after sprint endlessly, to view "sprint" as the default baseline pace, seems a ludicrous abuse of language.

> nobody I know with starlink has gotten better than 100 down. That is not really broadband

AFAIK the minimum speed for "broadband" is 25 down.

I am a highly online person living in a large city with many choices of ISP at many different speeds, and I still only have a 110mbps connection. It seems strange to me to suggest that speed is universally inadequate, though I can understand why large households may need higher bandwidth.

>sold off to developers to "fill in" with profitable (but in my reckoning totally unneeded) housing

I have no idea what "unneeded" housing is. Are these units sitting empty?

YoY house price growth in the UK is running at around 10%. I am not aware of a glut of "unneeded" housing.

>Visibiome has OTC and rx-only probiotics products

It's worth pointing out that the actual biotic payload is exactly the same between the two products, only the dosage is different.

In other words, taking two packets of the regular unflavored powder should deliver the same payload as one packet of the rx-only "extra-strength" powder.

I suspect the only reason the higher strength product exists, and is rx-only, is so that it can be covered by health insurance for some people.

It's really fucked up that so much discussion revolves around the more peripheral issues (the evidence from American Airlines, getting access to a lawyer, why bail wasn't set, whether or not it's appropriate for a judge to give legal advice to an accused person, etc) and not around the central issue. It's like everyone just accepts it's OK that being held in jail for a relatively short amount of time is a traumatizing experience.

People held in jail are wards of the state. It is utterly unacceptable that people being held in jail have to fear for their physical safety. It is utterly unacceptable that people being held in jail have to fear sexual assault. It is utterly unacceptable that jails do not take appropriate precautions around communicable diseases. It is utterly unacceptable that people being held in jail are treated disrespectfully by jail staff.

People being held in jail pending a hearing have been convicted of no crime. Jails should be safe and comfortable. Jail staff should be held to the highest standard.

>In the world of smart contracts code is indeed law, but that doesn't change the fact that in the real world law is law

I think some confusion arises because that "smart contracts" only make sense if code really is law, in the sense that any transaction executed by the contract -- even unexpected, surprising transactions -- is considered to be fully consented to by all parties interacting with the contract.

I agree that that's a terrible idea - bugs can always exist, and having no recourse when millions of dollars are lost due to a coding error is a huge and unreasonable risk.

But otherwise -- if, ultimately, courts can force "smart contract" transactions to be unwound if they are found to be exploitative, unintended or otherwise invalid -- then what's the point of having smart contracts in the first place? What's the value proposition? Why not just use regular contracts?

>In these scenarios (0.15g and 0.3g) about 90% they estimate comes from salt.

I know nothing about anything, but could salt be heat-treated to burn off plastic?