torpidor

I think the real answer to your question is politics. Helicopter money is a political question in a way that QE is not. The question of what social programs we have, and what they cost, who gets them, etc., has been a major issue already in the 2020 election, and people are already drawing parallels between cutting checks in this crisis and a UBI for example.

The Fed can do this at all right now because we created a body of subject-matter experts and deputized them to pull the trigger without having to check with anyone. This is a rare thing in a democratic government, and is possible mostly because we have given them boring powers that only wonky people bother to even read what they are. Even then, a few people read what they are and complain about them, so even that is a bit perilous.

If you wanted the Fed or a Fed-like mobilization for the helicopter money you first need to make the process of getting $1000 boring, or wonky, or at least politically uncontroversial so that people accept an unelected body of bureaucrats outside the government process doing it unilaterally in the middle of the night without telling the rest of the government. I would not rule out those conditions being the case at the end of this crisis, but they aren't the case at the beginning.

But the way we solve political problems (or, more recently, the way we don't solve them) is through Congress, which is an inherently slower approach.

Similarly, I'm not a confirmed case but I've been isolation since Friday just out of general precaution, and I developed a mild chest tightness while here. I was sure it wasn't covid because I didn't have a fever, but just a few hours ago I checked again and I have a borderline one (99.4). Then my girlfriend got an email that someone tested positive from the same floor in her office.

I don't qualify for a test and my doctor said don't bother coming in with my current symptoms and risk profile. Still waiting to hear back about whether my girlfriend qualifies, who has a closer connection to a case and an underlying health condition.

Last weekend we were very nearly at a small conference. We had zero symptoms. Even now I'm not sure if I have covid, a cold, or if I'm just stressing myself into seeing something that isn't there.

I would be a lot more stressed if I had gone to that conference, and given people there whatever it is I have.

VLC was removed because a VLC developer (copyrightholder) asked them to. Specifically, they alleged apple did not have the rights to distribute VLC unless they also allowed users to modify / recompile the software.

There is a way for end users to modify their software now, but I don’t know if it would satisfy that developer. VLC relicensed to make clear they don’t require distributors to do this.

The average traffic speed in Sydney is 55kph, so a 45 minute drive covers a distance of 25 miles. Taking the IRS standard deduction for gas and depreciation, you pay about $1 in operational costs for every $1 you spend in tolls.

I understand that you would rather pay x than 2x, but this is not “cultural freedom”, it is haggling over a price. But the fact that we ignore the $1 in wear on the drive belt because that won’t be a problem for three years, but we are annoyed about $1 to use a road right now, says a lot about human psychology.

Given climate change, and that sitting in traffic is not very nice, it seems a superior system to me to leverage psychology to bill at the point of use rather than squirreling the costs away in oil changes and in the fine print of financing paperwork and in making pedestrians walk longer between places through parking lots. It may be the case that transit is impractical for this route but the only real way to determine that is to have a functioning price mechanism. I mean it is probably faster to visit your family by helicopter, and helicopters do exist so there is a usecase for them. But we have the good sense to charge about what they cost.

I think you don’t understand the point of view of diversity advocates. (I don’t mean this negatively, it’s often difficult to understand people who have very different perspectives)

> I have not observed anyone ever trying to intentionally underpay female or minority candidates

Most bad things that happen in our world are not intentional. Car accidents kill millions each year.

One idea you may want to consider is that salaries are often set based on what someone earned previously. Therefore one bad actor can roll through 10 or more later positions without anyone acting intentionally.

> there are lots of non-minority male nerds who spend ridiculous amounts of time... to the point that they have no social lives and may never have a family

An alternative way to parse these same facts is that white men are more likely to be in an economic condition where it is possible to spend time on non-income-generating activities. For that matter I think at least some men believe a social or family life is not something they could have achieved. In any case I think it is harder to disentangle choices from cultural forces than you think.

> I’d also like to see research that controls for things like... how many hours do they work on average?

I’d like to see research that explains why working more hours is good for society. Buried in your questions are assumptions like “equal pay is fine as long as it doesn’t change the system too much” but the diversifist assumption is “lack of equal pay is a code smell for underlying problems in the system.”

> we can’t say it’s a result of discrimination unless we’ve controlled for all the actual variables

I think here you are projecting your values onto another position. (Intentional) discrimination is the problem that would annoy you, and so therefore diversity advocates should do research to establish a problem you would care about. From the perspective of incorporating you as a political constituency I don’t think you’re wrong.

However, the actual pro-diversity position is something like “I’m annoyed that our society values traits common to X group and not traits common to Y or Z.” As a person in X group this argument is statistically unlikely to impress you, but it is harder to tease out if this is because you intentionally dislike Y (“intentional discrimination”), if there is something important we will lose if we start to prefer more Y traits (perhaps a traditional conservative type position) or if it is just hard to envision a society different than the actual one we live in.

Narcissism is more of a spectrum of behavior than a bistable formalism, but it is mostly characterized by feeling superior in general (not only in J2EE) and that superiority not based on actually being better. Keep in mind that most deluded people do not recognize their delusion so the latter is less useful as a self-diagnostic criteria.

Here's an example, my city has a water-related emergency and so the water system is temporarily broken. Local coffee shops have closed because it's too difficult to access suitable water. Meanwhile I am drinking coffee right now, and feeling quite smug that as a rank amateur I can do what Those Who Had One Job cannot. I frequently have this experience where I feel like I can do things better than other people. This is a giant red flag for narcissism.

If you dig into it though, I can make coffee because I have a weeks worth of supplies on hand because I had a rough childhood and certain things stay with you. I have two ISPs in case one goes down (and actually chose where I live for that reason), I have at least four modes of transit to get most places, I just chronically overplan for everything in life all the time. So when something goes wrong I will have two or three solutions ready to go while a normal person is trying to stop panicking.

That is a symptom of something, namely my generalized anxiety of having to rely on other people. But whereas a narcissist will berate a new cashier for not knowing how the POS system works, I surreptitiously memorized the right buttons from the last time I was here, help them get through the transaction as quickly as possible and say that I used to work here so they don't feel too bad.

Color is overrated in a world where most are colorblind. Red means danger or stop because you have seen a lot of stop signs. In a world of colorblind people, stop sign colors are chosen by the colorblind, based on something like "is this a cheap metal" rather than design language (which no longer exists for color). Instead we would use reflectivity or something to indicate danger. As to whether or not the varying-colored stop signs leads to a statistically significant number of color-sighted people blowing through them it is hard to say, but does seem a legitimate safety concern.

And this is the situation in music; keys are chosen based on the technical details of the musician rather than a design language. Meanwhile, we do have a design language based on relative pitch (e.g. a 5/7 chord "leads" to the tonic). Of course you can see that the same way you can see a purple stop sign, but you may lack some of the pattern-matching intuition of your peers.

As a musician with relative pitch and the child of a musician with perfect pitch, I have watched them get puzzled a lot navigating a design language that is very obvious to me. Perhaps you are a better musician than they are, or perhaps you avoid areas where the design language dominates. Either way, I would not trade places with you, unless the rest of society did also.

I was also puzzled by this earlier in my career. If tech is so hot why is it hard to get hired? I will now share the answer I spent years looking for with you, perhaps it will help.

There’s an enormous shortage of software developers. What there is not though, is an enormous shortage of software developer applicants. By this I mean people who heard programming was good money, went two weeks to rockstar coding ninja boot camp react JS and are now applying to job postings that say “lead engineer”.

So you are a hiring manager trying to find a team lead for your next project, you put out a job ad and you get 500 resumes for folks who can’t code their way out of a CS1 exam. In reality you need to reject all of them. But you can’t reject all of them, because if we could implement a hiring manager with a mail rule what would we need hiring managers for?

So instead we set up some convoluted method to reject nearly all of them that is not obviously equivalent to a mail rule. Phone screens, coding tests, five rounds of interviews so if in a desperate moment we do hire this idiot at least four other people at the company signed off on it.

Somewhere in this stack of resumes there will be exactly 0.3 people who can code their way out of a CS1 exam. However they will have things to do besides engage a kafkaseque hiring process, like, I don’t know, writing software for a living. Once they realize this they will not participate in the process, self-fulfilling the prophesy that no good candidates are ever in the pile.

Meanwhile in another part of town, someone is leaning on the existing engineers until they cough up a name of an (un)happily employeed lead engineer who can be poached from his dysfunctional organization to work for ours, which is not-at-all-dysfunctional, stop-talking-Jim-don’t-spook-him. Depending on the size of the organization that person will be hired either openly skipping whatever bizarre paper-pusher hiring process is nominally in place, or in some cases “HR makes us do this but it’s just a formality”.

The moral of this story is, if you want to be hired, a) ignore pretty much anything that purports to be hiring process for programmers, b) befriend engineers who will cough up your name under pressure.

> You are confusing the type of the variable with the type of the object/value contained in the variable.

I’m not “confusing” them; I’m prioritizing the former over the latter, whereas you are prioritizing the latter over the former. This is the classic strong/weak typing debate.

If you want a language in which the dynamic type overrides the static type, there are several (including Swift if you are explicit about the override, and sometimes even if you are not explicit).

> A static type system is there to ensure that the type of the variable matches the type in its contents

A strong type system is there to apply strict type rules. one of Swift’s type rules is that Greeter.greet() calls that function or an override, not an unrelated function that could only be inferred at runtime.

> That means that greeter and greeter1 are just two references to the exact same underlying object

They are two references that differ in type. It is a feature in Swift (and any strongly-typed language) that references are typed and when types differ, behaviors can differ. I understand you disagree with this design principle but it is an inherent property of strong type systems that have reference semantics.

> two distinct value type instances

“Nope.” There isn’t any such thing as a “value type instance” since instances are a semantic of reference types.

> objects shouldn’t be different depending on how you look at them

The “difference” here is only in the types, so this statement is equivalent to “references shouldn’t be different depending on their type.” This statement implies that types should be useless

> What an object is, which is roughly equivalent to its observed behavior, should never depend on how it is declared.

This is actually a statement that strong typing should not exist. A "declaration" (really a type declaration) indicates the type, and if observed behavior cannot depend on the types there is not much point to types. Or stated positively: in a strongly typed language, the types are part of 'what an object is'.

Or, stated by example:

    let a: Int = 3
    let b: Float = 3
    print(a/2) //prints 1
    print(b/2) //prints 1.5

Both a and b are "the same" value, insofar as they are `==` and they model the same underlying mathematical concept. But behavior varies because they differ in type.

OP's snippet actually works quite a lot differently than the way you may expect; LazyGreeter.greet() and Greeter.greet() are two completely independent functions that share the same name. Name resolution is a complex topic in any language, but in Swift if you wanted to override another function you would say `override`, in which case the compiler will complain there is nothing you can override in `BaseGreeter` at which point you will understand the whole mistake.

There is actually no way to "pick" LazyGreeter's implementation of the unrelated function (as perhaps you expect). The only function we can call on a Greeter is Greeter.greet (or its overloads, and there are none). So if Greeter.greet did not exist, we would not get LazyGreeter.greet() but rather a type error.

I do think a case can be made that we need a similar `implements` keyword like `override` to check that we are implementing a protocol requirement.

If you read the study, they find the gap is fully explained by two factors: 1) men drive faster 2) men work more hours, and therefore learn the platform faster.

If their conclusion is accurate, I am puzzled as to what solution can be proposed. Should we lower speed limits or cut mens’ hours?

What you're missing is that bikes, and especially ebikes, are far more viable for transport than most Americans think. In Copenhagen for example bikes are actually the primary mode of transport, outnumbering cars on the roads. Bikes are literally the fastest way to get around in many places.

There are a number of reasons it doesn't work well in the States, but broadly it boils down to a) fitness levels, and b) cultural values, that is, spending on car infrastructure helps American car manufacturers, American dealerships, and American car owners, whereas diverting money to bike infrastructure benefits liberal hippies or something.

ebikes directly address the fitness problem, and there are various technical reasons why they have not been viable until now, mostly boiling down to an improved Li-Ion supply chain. That said, a good ebike is still very expensive, and the ridesharing model works here for the same reason that people spend $15 to take a Lyft downtown instead of buying a $25k sedan they own.

The infrastructure problem is harder, but perversely, these services may be able to crack that one too. Uber/Lyft are quite famously adept at strongarming local governments and just in general the political system is more responsive to moneyed interests than hobbyists. Were bicycling to go from liberal hippie pasttime to Real American Business™ that may resolve the political will to improve the infrastructure. Now adding a bikelane is supporting American innovation and jobs (somebody has to charge those bikes) rather than diverting resources from them.

> but all the past evidence points strongly towards a combination of "this researcher is incompetent" and "these statistical methods are useless".

Your arguments seem to be based in unfamiliarity with the paper. Bem is an extremely well-regarded researcher in social psychology, he has hundreds of papers, several of which are seminal in the field and boast thousands of citations (this paper in particular has a citation score of 700+). Moreover this is a meta-analysis, not his own study.

While there has been some chatter about the statistical methods in those 700 citations, the fact is the methods are a lot better than the average social psychology paper (and this paper has attracted extraordinary scrutiny for the obvious reason). So if there is a problem in the paper (and of course there must be) there is a much larger problem in the standard practices in the field.

> pay-to-play journal like F1000Research

The original paper was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vd-Z7x...) but their website is down

> every single time somebody purported to have evidence for ESP, it turned that the typically tiny effect was a flaw in the experimental design, be that due to fraud or incompetence.

This is incorrect for the simple reason that it is much easier to make claims than it is to investigate them, and therefore, not all claims can be investigated. Perhaps you meant to say that of the proper subset of things we investigated turned out to be methodologically flawed, but then we have situations like the present paper, which somehow got through peer review. Of course we can continue to poke at it until we find what is wrong since we "know" it "has to to be there", but if science only produces the correct answer when we make it match the answer in the back of the textbook, it doesn't seem a good method for finding anything out.

argument from relevant authority. A professor of "science and society" at an accredited university would be a relevant authority for the topic of the scientific method and its impact on society...

Although you present it as ridiculous, whether or not 2+2=4 is actually a serious topic among mathematicians. The search term you are looking for is "alternative axiomatic set theories". The alternatives may or may not be useful, but a lot of math we use today was not originally useful and it's a good thing people worked on it.

I understand that you are concerned about a general distrust of science that stands in the way of human progress. I am too. But this distrust is only partly caused by "those with an agenda". The other part is that science is sometimes oversold by zealous adherents. Then, when the results are more moderate, people feel lied to and they grow distrust. Being more critical about science, far from being the problem, is actually the solution to the problem you are concerned about.

Elsewhere in the thread the question of eugenics etc have been raised. And I understand you know they are psuedo-science etc., but without you personally labeling all the pseudoscientists how is someone supposed to tell the difference? (And if there's an oracle who can tell us what is true or false we can just use that, we don't need science.)

A more modern example might be this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26834996. tl;dr it is a quite well-designed, peer-reviewed meta-analysis published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology from a credible researcher who concludes that precognition exists (which is ESP, basically). Now obviously that is bullshit, but A) isn't it a little backwards to say something is obviously bullshit when it has strong evidence behind it, B) if obvious bullshit can make it through the scientific process what does that say about the usefulness of that process?

The scientific method as it is practiced is deeply flawed. It is operated by fallible humans, funded (or not) to advance an agenda, and so on. At various times it has been the scientific view that the sun revolves around the earth, that electricity exists in two fluids, that flies are spontaneously generated from rotting meat, and on and on. Modern times are actually the golden era for scientific acceptance and its influence on human lives, and yet it is those same scientific discoveries – the combustion engine, atomic bomb, antibiotics and mass communication technology – that threaten our civilization.

Being critical of the scientific method is not only important, it is necessary. The temptation throughout human history is to find some "holy grail" that will lift humanity beyond its current vantage point. Once upon a time this was actually a holy grail, but in modern times science – perhaps due to its effectiveness – has often captured this slot in human psychology. But a grail science is not; it's a human system with human triumphs and human weaknesses and the sooner we get a realistic picture of that, the better for learning how to use it to achieve our objectives effectively.